Most Replayed Moment: Fear Is A Skill You Can Train! Lessons From The World's Greatest Climber

0:00 Uh Your kids came to you you have two girls right? Yeah. If they came to you and said dad like Give me advice on what I should aim at in life. What you I wouldn't I wouldn't give an advice. I'd be like you do you. You find the thing you love to do, go hard, you know, basically like

0:16 Learn some skills, get good at something, like what do you like to do? I mean, that's kinda the thing for me, especially with climbing, is like if someone had told me like you're gonna train climbing for the rest of your life. I'm like, Oh, that sounds like kind of a grind, you know,'cause I mean it is it is hard work. You're like hiking uphill with a heavy backpack and it's cold and it's windy. It's like it's basically physically uncomfortable. I mean, being a professional rock climber means that you're physically uncomfortable. All the time, but like like often, you know, like it's you know, it's hard. Yeah. But if you're doing it because you frickin' love doing it.

0:43 It doesn't feel very hard. So I mean I think the K Forget is find the thing that doesn't feel like hard work. And when you started, were you scared? Of

0:52 Big, tall rock faces and stuff like that. I mean, yeah, I had like a healthy intimidation of th I mean, like my first season in Usemity, the first time seeing L Cap as a climber, uh I was nineteen. And it looks impossible. It looks completely insane. It's like that's so big. But then You know, within a couple seasons uh you know, I climb some bigger walls, learned how to climb and then m a friend and I had the sort of

1:13 season goal like we were gonna climb New Cemetery all season with the aspiration at the end to climb all cap in a day. So basically there's this long progression on L cap specifically, where it's like you go from just trying to get up it to trying to get up it faster to trying to get up it with just your hands and feet, still using protection. But basically there's like all these steps you can take. And so Over.

1:30 a bunch of seasons, you know, I climbed our cap like sixty times, different routes, all these different things. And then eventually you're sort of like oh maybe I can start thinking about free soloing it, which is where the film free solo comes in. And then eventually you do this thing. Then people like, Well aren't you scared? And you're kinda like, Well, I've spent ten years like Building up on this thing.

1:47 I guess that's what people don't see. Yeah. So they just I mean like the documentary Free Soul, I think does a pretty good job of showing the the direct preparation, like the training involved in doing that specific clan. But it just doesn't show the Uh, like eight years before that, I guess. Because the documentary was filmed over two years, and I guess

2:05 I've been going since two thousand six. So it was nine years before that that I've been going to Yosemite and I've been spending maybe three months a year. Climbing walls. Hm. I guess that's the illusion of like all people that do great things and then become like athletes or sprinters or whatever. Ronaldo or Messi is you you don't get to see the Yeah, the whole life that they put into doing the thing.

2:23 Yeah. Yeah. So it looks it like looks like a magic trick when we see the outcome. Like we show up show up on Netflix to watch you climb tight pay like Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I mean people watch some of those programs and they're like, He just walked up and did it. And you're like, Well yeah, after thirty years of practice like I just walked up and did it. But no, it's not like just walking up and doing it. Mm. What do you mean?

2:45 I've literally been climbing five days a week for thirty years. Like that's so much climbing. Like I freaking love climbing and I I climb a lot. On this um on this idea of like exposure therapy as it relates to like fear and anxiety and confronting one's uh things that terrify them. Was that in the early days where you I'm trying to understand were you like scared at some point? Oh, all the time. That's actually something that I think Uh

3:07 You know, I've obviously done so many interviews around fear and like managing fear and all that. And I've talked about fear a lot of different ways over over the years, and I think as I've grown older, I've sort of come to realize that But actually You're just scared all the time as a climber. Like low level fear, low le like but you're

3:22 But climbing is fundamentally scary. Like it's always kinda scary because there are always consequences. Like even if you're climbing with a rope, you're still always visualizing like what happens if the rope breaks? Like what if you know, like is this safe? Like you know, is the gear good? Like is this actually safe? And so You're always a little bit scared. And so

3:38 After years and years of always being scared, you get pretty good at managing that kind of stuff. Because there's a lot of sort of misconceptions swirling around this brain scan you get. Yeah, I know I hate all that stuff. That's just all from the film Free Solo. Yeah. too short of a scene in the film. They needed a little more they needed to let it breathe, you know, explain things a little better, I think. So they scanned a control subject, uh another person scans you, looked at the amygdala in your brain, and the the conclusion that a lot of people have arrived at is that you don't experience fear. Because when they look at these two brain scans, your amygdala's lighting up less when you're shown scary images, basically, right?

4:10 But like shown just this image, like what does that even mean? Like my brain's purple and his brain is orange. Like what does that mean? Like I don't know. But no, I mean the the thing is though. And this is what I wish was explained in the film better. Is that this is We're being shown black and white photon FMRI. So you're inside a sealed metal tube, you're totally safe, you're physically safe and comfortable, and you're being shown black and white photos. And so to me

4:32 Obviously that's not gonna light up the fear response in my brain'cause you're looking at pictures, you're like, Who cares? I'm totally safe. But In a control subject, uh, you know, apparently your brain sort of responds to images one way or another. But I'm kinda like, I've been climbing for twenty years, so I've been like scared quite a lot. And you're kinda like, Well, black and white photos start to lose lose their edge if you've been scared all the time for twenty years. So it's like obviously that's not gonna trigger much.

4:53 Yeah, and I imagine everybody in their life can think of it as a scenario where they have mastery that would sc like a stand up comedian looking out at a stage. Probably wouldn't be As scar as me. Yeah. 'Cause that would that would terrify me.

5:06 Um so a again, this is not necessarily some sort of neurological No, I mean I think the real takeaway is that I have an amygdala and it works. Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? Like 'Cause I think if if the results had shown that I was missing my th then I would have all kinds of I would have died already at youth'cause I wouldn't be able to

5:22 function as a as a human, basically. But you know, it has shown something like that where there are like structural differences or like some real change. But this is basically just showing that after twenty years of conditioning, I respond differently than an average person. And you're like, Yeah, no kidding. Like if you put a monk into an FMRI, their brain responds totally differently than an average person's will. Which I actually think is a really inspiring conclusion because it means that we can all grasp our fears better. And even, you know

5:46 People won't know this about me, but Ten years ago, I sat down on camera f with my friend Ash in his apartment to record a two minute video. And as I sat there, I couldn't I was so scared I couldn't get the words out. So you actually in this two minute video that comes out, you see it go from night and day in the background, just because we did that many cuts over seven hours to try and get me to say two minutes on camera. And obviously after ten years of being on camera, I can now speak without shitting myself. And I imagine my brain state looks significantly different because of our exposure therapy. Totally. Yeah, you should do the F M R I. Yeah, you should have done

6:16 Ten years ago,'cause then you'd have your control and then you do it now, and it'd be totally different. But also the psychologists I've sat with all confirm this. They talk about exposure therapy. Yeah. And and I went through exactly the same thing with public speaking. Like I was always so afraid of public speaking. I was also very shy and like s just not like It was terrifying. And now because of the f Free Soul Film Tour and you know all the public things I've done since then. I'm like basically fine, you know, it's like you still get a little nervous, but it's like basically easy now. You're kind of like, Well, that's a total change. It's like obviously there's a tremendous capacity for humans to learn.

6:49 People talk to you about fear all the time because I mean your work. 'Cause climate's really friggin'. It makes sense. It's totally understandable. Yeah. Yeah. And they also realise, I think, at some deep level that the thing holding them back from who they think they want to be or who they aspire to be is fear often. It's judgment of someone else, it's sort of taking a risk. Totally. So you've become for many people the like

7:10 Tell me, tell me how to overcome. Yeah. Well I think that's Everyone's like, What's your hack to overcome fear? And you're like, There's no hack, you just get really frickin' scared over and over for so long and eventually it's not that scary anymore. But I will say that that's like a very enduring way to overcome your fear. It's like if you're willing to go through that process. Then you are actually unafraid.

7:31 You know, because like you can do like hacks. I mean you can you can like crank up loud rock music and just go for it, you know, like and there are plenty of examples of that in in what I'd call gravity assisted sports. Like say if you're gonna jump a cliff on skis. Like you can get to the edge and be like, This is really scary and then be like three two one do it and just like go. In climbing you can't really do that as much because It's so slow. Like when you climb you make one move and then you make another move. And then you're like, Do I still want to be here? Like it basically fear creeps in a lot more. But sort of in gravity assisted sports, you can have more of that moment where you just like overcome your fear and then it happens. You know, like making a big drop in a kayak or like skis or things like that, whereas like once you commit, it's happening one way or another.

8:08 Anyway, there's a lot to get into it, like No, but I I mean I wanna get into it. Uh I watched a video of you climbing half dome. I think it was. And y it looks like you got scared half way up or Yeah. Yeah, well so that video is actually filmed later, so the voiceover in that video is me talking about the experience of me free so long when I was totally alone, and I did get really scared on half time when I had this whole sort somewhat traumat climate experience near the top of the wall.

8:30 But then when we went back to film it, I had a different traumatic experience while we were filming. Less traumatic, but uh but like very scary for a moment. And they got that on camera, so they basically in the film they just cut the two together as like uh'cause it shows me like being really scared. What's half Dome to start with, and then what was the traumatic experience? Yeah, so half dome, for anyone who hasn't seen, is uh Is this just totally amazing wall in Usemite. It's a two thousand foot grena face. Actually, um, it's the North Face logo. It's a freaking it's that's happening. Yeah, so it's like an iconic wall in Usemity. Um It looks like half of a dome, but actually it's more like a hockey puck just shoved in.

9:04 It's actually a full dome, depending on how you look at it, but the northwest face is vertical for two thousand feet, it's incredible. And so I free sold. That was one of the first like major free solo as I did it in two thousand eight. Um and one of the things that sort of Made me a professional climber in a way. But when I did the climbing

9:18 I did. The bare minimum preparation. I basically like didn't know. It was It was the biggest thing I'd ever free soloed. I didn't quite know how to like go about getting ready for it. Anyway, I I climbed it and basically hadn't practiced enough, was really friggin' scared, got off route, got confused, skipped some stuff, and then at the very top had this whole moment of extreme panic, you know, but basically like got up into some stuff and all sort of like crumbled mentally and like sort of barely managed to finish the supper slab. Like the hardest part of the climb is like right near the top.

9:46 I was trying to walk across this ledge. Basically I've walked across that ledge face in and face out. And you normally people hand traverse it or they crawl across it. There are like different ways to go across the ledge and I've done it every which way. And then we were up there filming and I was like, Oh, I'm gonna walk it face out. But it turns out when you walk a face out, it's really freaking scary. And so I made it kind of halfway and was like, Oh my gosh, and then bailed. And when you say

10:07 You having Like a like a crisis in your your mind. What does what is that? Is that just oh my God, what am I like how does that sound?

10:14 When you mean so in this case, so walking across this ledge. It's like it starts Maybe as a foot wide, so your foot is fully on the ledge and you're shuffling across it, but then At a certain point. Yeah, I mean that's that's the video I'm putting on the screen for anyone watching. Yeah, that's that's the ledge. But basically at the narrowest part, your feet are sticking out over the lip of it and the wall bulges ever so slightly so it forces your back out a little. And so you're basically like rocking on your heels with uh I don't know, like a seventeen hundred foot drop or something, or eighteen hundred foot drop like straight down below you.

10:44 And so Yeah, it's like pretty it's pretty intense. Anyway, and so I th thought I was gonna walk across it like that and I made it to the bulging part and was suddenly like, Oh my god, this isn't like this isn't for me and then managed to like shuffle back and and change my strategy. Is it like panic in your head? It's not panic, but you're like,

11:03 Oh, oh I made the wrong choice. Like this is bad. This is bad. Yeah. I mean it's not like Full like five alarm. They'll like panic, panic. But yeah, you're like, Oh I'm so screwed. And you have fallen a long long way before. I was hearing it about a time when you were young and you fell off a a mountain and called your mother, managed to call your mother and Yeah, th that was like sliding down an icy coolar type thing. It's a little different than like free falling off of a cliff that's like sliding down a mountain. But yeah, I got totally messed up and and uh

11:30 Yeah. Yeah, and I've like broken my arm several times as a kid falling off things and And then with a rope as a climber, you take big falls like routinely, you know, when you have protection. That's like part of the sport, basically. Mm. I mean, it's certainly easy to visualize falling seven hundred. You know, when you're like standing on a little ledge and you're bulging and you're looking down, you're

11:49 You know, it's easy to be like, Oh my god. You know, it's like if you just bend forward a little bit, you're just gonna take a swan dive, like, seventy hundred feet to the ground. The stats in this sport are I mean of of fatalities. Uh how do they compare to other sports? Uh safer than you would think. That's the thing, everyone thinks it seems crazy. But uh

12:06 It's not that crazy. I don't know actual statistics, but I suspect that it's actually pretty comparable to to skiing or something, you know, because like recreational skiers die all the time, like falling into tree wells or like going off cliffs back or things like that. Climbing Is actually surprisingly safe.

12:23 Which is one of the th about climbing. I mean climbing is very It's very uh Sort of binary where it's like Either you're totally safe. Or you're gonna die.

12:32 And the odds of you dying are very, very, very small. But because They're they're there. They always keep you on. You know what I mean? Like it basically keeps you alert. But you're never really gonna get hurt.

12:45 Is that Including free selling? Yeah, I mean for the most part. I mean a couple of people have died free soling. I mean people occasionally die free solaring for sure. But actually most of the

12:56 the sort of cutting edge free solists have not died Soling. They've like died in other things. I think it was then in the um the documentary on Netflix, um Free Solo where one of your colleagues Yeah, Tommy Tommy is like most free solos are dead now. Um which It's kind of true. But it's slightly mis misstated. I mean, you know, he's just like speaking off the cuff and it's not like strictly true. Like a couple of the best free solas have died free souling, though they died on very easy train.

13:21 But then the majority of other great free soulists have died in sort of Climbing adjacent. accidents like wingsuit bass jumping and uh like one got swept to sea by a rogue wave. Like while he was out climbing a sea cliff, but he was like standing on shore and got swept out to sea. You know, things like that where you're just kinda like You know, obviously they're taking risks in their lives and they wind up dead.

13:41 But it's not the way that people think. You know, you see a photo like that and you're like free souling, you're gonna die for sure and you're kinda like, Well, people don't actually really die that way. I mean th they have. I mean not to say that it doesn't happen. But way less frequently than people would suspect. If I was to try and like You know.

13:56 Professionally torture you. Again, I'm not talking in in extremes here. But what life would I prescribe you to live? Oh being like a finance bro or something. I'm gonna like just work spreadsheet, is that what you mean? Like what what is my like worst

14:10 I don't know, something like that. Or honestly being like a choreographer for dance or something. Like I just I couldn't do like or or being like an opera singer. Like I would just kill myself. I just couldn't do that. Why why would being a finance bro be like the worst thing for Alex. Just the idea of sitting a computer in a cubicle.

14:27 Just like Typing. I mean I'm kinda contrarian. I don't like rules. I don't want to like jump through hoops. I don't wanna do arbitrary things. Like I don't want some manager to come and tell me like oh you gotta file that report again, you like missed a line. I'd be like, you go F or so you know, I'd just like walk out of the building. Like it's just I just like don't know if I could take that. Be like no But that's like how most of the world live. We kinda we all live in like, you know, I just don't know if it's for me.

14:51 I don't know. I mean, doesn't that just seem I mean I had this moment I've been in New York a couple of days and I I took the subway down to see some see some friends and I was like coming out of the tunnel and it's like packed with people and I was just like looking at the ground and I was like just you know, following someone else's footsteps up this like beat down path of stairs. I was like

15:08 I couldn't live like this, like not day in and day out every day. Like this is just Like feeling like you're just doing the exact same thing as everyone else around you. I'm like, Oh, it seems so So boring. It's funny'cause so so many of us look at your life and go, Wow. That's not very normal.

15:23 But actually, maybe at a foundational level you're living a much more normal life than When you're out in nature, you're moving your body. Yeah. Yeah, in that re in th in that way for sure. I'm like going on cool adventures and going out and Oh no.

15:37 I think that's also part of why the the al sort of attraction allure with Your life, especially when you watch free solo is You do seem to be a free Man. In a way where most of us aren't

15:48 free, essentially. Yeah, I mean, well, I think we're all sort of aspiring to that to some extent. I mean, most people see that though as like they get their vacation for the year, they they're planning to retire at some point and then they're gonna have their freedom. You're kind of like, Well, no, I mean maybe you gotta try to live that way as much as possible. If you If your young girls came up to you, June and Alice, and said, Dad, what's what is a meaningful life? Like what are the principles of living a a fulfilling meaningful life? Would you give them advice there? Yeah. Yeah, I mean.

16:13 It'd be a long, rambling, multi day conversation with them about y but I mean following your own goals is Is I think You know, certainly one of the the cores of having a meaningful life. Like. Having things that

16:25 you find valuable. I mean really like living in line with your values, finding things that are important to you and pursuing them with as much as you can give them. You when you look at your ear you see twenties to thirties, it kinda looks like you're living like a Buddhist a little bit. I mean, uh yeah, I I went on a a trip once where they called me the monk. So Just because I was living such a sort of acetic lifestyle. I was like Reading I I've never I don't drink and I don't like party and I d just

16:49 For personal preference, whatever. That's all. I'm just like living in my little van and reading books and climbing all the time. Like And those are the things that I'm into doing, you know? It's like it's

16:59 Yeah, it's just Doing what you want to do. Have you ever been depressed or Yeah. Periods from time to time where you're just like

17:11 What am I doing, or why, or what are my goals? Like you know, what's And I think to me the most surprising thing is that you know, I've put like my whole life into climate, like trying to be the best you can be all the time. And sometimes you put tons of effort in and you just don't see results, like for whatever reason you just suck. You're like, I'm trying so hard and I'm just like not As good as I want to be.

17:28 Like that's challenging. You know that's I mean everybody faces that to some extent where you're like I'm working hard at a thing but I'm just not Achieving the results that I want. And between the between the

17:39 Sort of that period of no man's twenty and thirty where your career hasn't taken off yet. The d documentary's not out, you've not climbed Taipei. How much money are you earning from Climbing. I mean the first my first couple of years my sponsorship through the North Face was like

17:55 Uh I think my first year was like ten K a year. I was like, This is amazing because I was living in my car. And Um You know, making ten grand when you live by yourself in a van is like More than you need, basically.

18:06 Um, it obviously went up but beyond that at at some point. But it was you know, like in the ten to a hundred range for the first For the whole Yeah, for years.

18:16 Then at some point it increases. Yeah, and then it increases. I mean, then free solo is obviously like a big thing. Yeah. That sort of opened up all these opportunities. Uh, because then I started doing corporate speaking and stuff like that. And the I mean, as I'm sure you know, that's just like a whole different world. And so then you go from just like making some money from sponsors to like making money from from other corporations and they're like, Okay, now you're making some money. One of the things when I was I was hearing you talk about some of your

18:40 Incredible climbing stories is Um I was trying to understand What role visualization or Or your preparation. plays and how that's like transferable to m to me and my life. We talked a little bit about just how much preparation you did for something like L Cap.

18:54 But you you it sounds like you really break down the challenge into smaller bits. And then really go through those those individual steps. Whereas a lot of people will just look at L Cap and go, Oh my God, they'll be terrified. And that's impossible. Yeah, which is fair. I mean I spent years looking at our cap and being like that's too big, that's impossible. And then you know, after years of that, I kept hoping that I would look at it and it would like look easy somehow and I'd be like, Cool, now I'm gonna do it. And it just never looked easy.

19:19 And so Then finally I was like, Okay, I'm gonna have to like put some real work into it and then I started slowly breaking it down and and and then once you like break it into pieces and start working on the pieces, then you're kinda like, Okay, it starts to feel more reasonable. Break it into pieces and start working on the pieces. What does that mean in terms of climbing? So if we I've mean I've got this this uh Model here of

19:39 Type of one. You know, and this is also a metaphor for any any challenge I have in my mind. But this is actually perfect because it's right here. Yeah. So I scouted this in September of this year. I did the clim in January or whatever. In September we went and um Well, we had to like one make sure it was possible before you sort of like commit to a doing a whole T V program. You're kinda like, Let's make sure we can do this. And then they also had to get all the sort of marketing material. You like get the photos of the building, like all the stuff that becomes the trailer and whatever. And so we went in September to sort of like do the prep. And so

20:07 We I basically checked out all the different pieces. And so Anywhere where you see it looking a little bit different, you know, it's like this whole bottom part is like a low angle slab. It's like punctuated with these two little ruis, these little like coin things or whatever, the clouds or whatever they are. No, and then there are the dragons on the corners. These are all overhanging, like each of these eight blocks is like a big overhanging thing. It feels a little bit different. Then you get up here. There's like these balconies. These are actually overhanging

20:31 Like basically each little segment of this is quite different. You know, obviously on this model like looks looks the same, but Um, each transition between the different pieces is like a thing, so I checked out all of them with ropes. And and yeah, you just go piece by piece all the way up the whole thing. And you hadn't ever climbed it before we saw it on Netflix Live. Well I hadn't free saw it no, but I had climbed I climbed all the pieces with a rope for sure. I'd like checked out the different things. Okay, so you so you you look at these as individual challenges every step. Yeah, it's like you go well, even like just getting off the ground the first move is a slightly different move than any of the other moves. You have to like jump up to a thing and like press it out.

21:07 Um then climbing over these little clouds is a different thing. Each dragon is a different thing. Yeah, I mean it's just You know, there's a surprising amount of complexity to it. And so our first on the scout, you know, I had a note on my phone and I'm just like writing down all the different Basically, I'm trying to learn it the way you study anything, where I'm just like making notes and sort of like from floor fifty four to seventy two, it feels like this. I climb the south east corner, the left or right, you know, just and then yeah, just writing it all down.

21:31 And I mean there's this famous photo of you hanging with your leg. Yeah, that's this these are the rings up here. So you're hanging you're hanging here from here with your leg. Yeah. Now I Uh this is really a question of endurance. Like how do you plan to have the energy Like how do you know if you're gonna have enough energy when you're up up here, when you're just planning it? I mean well that's this is what makes it exciting'cause you can't be sure.

21:52 But you know, I've done a lot of climbing in my life and I've done a lot of climbs that were like twenty four hours. I mean I've I had this experience in Patagonia once it was a fifty four hour push with like the last twenty hours we hiked without food. Um,'cause we got caught in a storm. It's a whole crazy story. But basically, you know, I've had a lot of experiences in my life where I've done hard exercise for more than twenty four hours. And so This, you know, I expect it to take me somewhere in the hour and a half, two hour range, and I'm kinda like, Yeah, I mean I'll be tired after two hours of exercise.

22:18 But I'm not gonna be exhausted. You know what I mean? Like I know that I have a much deeper reserve than that. So much of the conversation around um after you've done this, or some of the conversation was around whether this was a harder challenge than Oh capitan. No. No, it's obviously much easier. I mean, I'm doing it on live television, you know, it's like obviously it's easier.

22:37 But What makes it cool is that it's different, it's fun, it's challenging. Like for me it's really like in my sweet spot. Where it is challenging enough. Like it's it's not easy, you know what I mean? Like saying easier than L Cap.

22:49 It doesn't. You know, LCAP was like a ten year life project that I did in absolute secrecy. I did on my terms. on the correct day after years of effort, I had failed attempts. I had you know I mean like L Cap was like an all consuming life project for years. Kinda like obviously you can't do that for live TV. It's like you just can't put Anyway. Mm-hmm. But this was very much in my sweet spot where you're like, Oh, it's hard enough

23:13 That is But it's hard. Like it's cool, you know, like it's fun, it's interesting, the climate's engaging, it's uh you know, gave me something to train for for months. It's like it's super fun. But it's not. You know, it's not like the absolute limit of what I can do. Cause you just can't do that on live TV. I mean, if nothing else, so I was climbing the southeast a Because it gets good morning light and it looks beautiful and it's like great for filming.

23:32 But if I was trying to do the absolute most cutting edge climb I could do, I'd be climbing the northwest right because it'd be full shade because it'd be good better conditions, you know, it'd be colder. Like you just don't want to be in the sun, it makes your skin, you know, it makes you hot and stuff. And so You know, just things like that. You're like, Well if you're doing it for T V And you're trying to broadcast it, then you want it to look good. But like, if you're trying to do it for hard climbing and good conditions,

23:53 You do in four shade. And Netflix had a a ten second delay just in case you fell. I mean I'm sure part of it's in case you fall, but part of it's like What if somebody unplugs one of the things, or you know what I mean, like It's so complicated. There's so much stuff going on. It's insane.

24:06 Was there a hardest part of this, a part y where you were a little a little nervous? The thing I was most nervous about when I started was were the bamboo boxes. Like doing these eight or hanging segments'cause they're just so relentlessly the same. move and it's just it's pretty physical. You like you get tired for sure. I mean the actual physical hardest moves. Um, like actually randomly one of these corners up here would have been quite a hard move, but there was this freaking security camera bolted onto the wall. And so you use the security camera as this handle, it was really freaking cool. And it was like bolted onto these giant bolts, so it like looked super safe and you know, it was like very robust and secure.

24:38 But it would have been kind of like this extreme jump, which I wasn't you know, it's probably possible, but would have been like a major thing. But instead you just reef off the security camera. I was like, That's so cool. It was uh there are a few things like that, like individual moves that are kind of muscly. But overall it's the the stamina, like the challenge of doing this over and over for Hundreds of feet.

24:58 was the hardest thing. Do you have a conversation with your with your girls and your wife before you go and do something like this about Just in case you don't come back. I don't know. Not with the kids'cause they're too young and it like they wouldn't they don't understand it anyway. Um, and not with her because she came with me to Taipei or she was there for like the whole end of it. I went a little bit earlier so I could adapt to the time zone more and like feel better. But um

25:19 But basically she was with me, so you know, like we went to bed together that night and like woke up that morning and had breakfast together, so it didn't feel like a big goodbye, you know, it's kinda Actually she was with me at the base, like and we did the start together and then I literally was like, Okay, bye and walked over and did the thing and saw her going to the top. So we were only apart for like an hour and a half of the whole you know, it's like and I saw her through the window a couple of times. And so it felt like she was just there having the whole experience with me. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. Yeah.

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