How free solo climber Alex Honnold faces fear | ReThinking with Adam Grant
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TED Audio Collective. Hi, everyone. Chris here. We have something a little bit different for you today. Instead of a new episode of How to Be a Better Human, we have a new episode of the podcast Rethinking with Adam Grant. This is a podcast in the TED Audio Collective, and you've heard Adam on our show before, and now he's back with a new weekly show from TED where he's unpacking how the world's most creative people think. It's a podcast that shows that all great minds definitely do not think alike.

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Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore how they think and what we should all rethink.

Today's guest is Alex Honnold. You probably recognize him from the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo. He's that climber who did the unthinkable in 2018 when he climbed El Capitan, a 3,000-foot rock wall in Yosemite National Park, without any ropes. However insane it looks and sounds, extremely insane.

Someone who does something that dangerous with such excellence has a lot to teach us about rethinking our own fears and goals. I want to go back to the very beginning and just start with asking you about the story of when you first discovered a love of climbing.

Oh, it's so far back at this point that it's hard to really remember because I've always loved climbing, even before it was technically rock climbing. You know, I climbed on buildings and trees and play structures and walked on handrails and basically played. And then I discovered rock climbing at a climbing gym when I was maybe 10 and then have been climbing full time since then, basically. It's like I just love the movement of climbing. I love swinging around and like playing on the holds.

So I want to spend most of this conversation talking about your psychology. And I know it's really tricky because you can't step outside of your own mind to witness it objectively. But there are also things that you have access to that nobody else in human history has experienced. Let me start, though, with one thing that's, I think, familiar to most free soloers, which is what does it feel like to be up on a rock with no ropes, thousands of feet off the ground? Yeah.

It totally depends because it can feel invigorating, exhilarating. It can feel amazing. But if you're not prepared for it and you actually think you're going to fall off, then it can be truly horrifying and everything that, you know, people have nightmares about. I mean, it really just depends on the level of difficulty of what you're climbing and the level of preparation that you're bringing to it. What goes through your mind on a typical free solo expedition? One that you don't think is especially difficult? Yeah.

If something isn't cutting edge for me, then it's actually quite relaxing and almost sort of meditative. You're sort of swimming your way up a wall. I mean, it's probably similar to the feelings that people experience when they're out for a jog, like general euphoria, like just sort of a contentment or peace or whatever. And then what is it like when you're doing something that's more cutting edge?

That gets a lot more complicated because I don't know, maybe the simplest way is to say that I'm truly cutting edge sewing. I often am not experiencing a lot during the climb itself because I'm sort of an autopilot. I'm just performing and there's there's not a whole lot else going on. You know, I'm not appreciating the view. I'm not thinking about anything. I'm just doing the activity itself, which in some ways is the point. I mean, that's kind of the joy of it, that you're totally lost in what you're doing and you're just doing it.

That sounds exactly like how psychologists would describe a flow state. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've read, yeah, yeah, exactly. You're familiar with Csikszentmihalyi. Yeah, though I actually don't know how to say his name. But yeah, yeah, I have read the book. Is that what you're experiencing? Do you just have more intense flow while you're climbing than any other activities you do? Yeah, I think so.

And to be fair, I'm not really skilled enough at anything else to to reach the same levels of flow. I don't think, you know, because I think part of getting into a flow state is doing something challenging, but also, you know, having a high enough level of skill out of that, that you can do that challenging thing, you know, because there are other activities like, say, mountain biking or skiing or things that I'm OK at. And I can sort of maybe experience flow from time to time, but not really, you know, not the way I can when I'm climbing.

Have you never encountered another activity where you had the same drive to master it that you've had with climbing? No, not even remotely close. I mean, there are other things that I like to do, but I love climbing. Why not? What's different about everything else? It's just so much less fun. I mean, who knows? I mean, you know, I like...

I don't know. I like lots of things. I'm trying to think of like the most addictive things, the things that sort of seize me. And and even the most are just nothing compared to climbing. I mean, 25 years of doing something full time, you get pretty into it.

You could, although a lot of people would say they get pretty tired of it, too, that it's monotonous, repetitive, boring. You have not lost the passion for it. Yeah, but that actually might be an interesting thing about climbing in that it's quite a broad sport. And so...

You know, when I say I've spent 25 years climbing full time, what that means is actually quite varied because occasionally I go on on alpine expeditions to climb big snowy mountains. Like this summer, I was in the Alps for a little bit and climbed some some big snowy peaks. But then now I'm back home sport climbing, which means climbing, you know, 100 foot rock walls, which is very difficult physically, but way less adventurous than climbing mountains, let's say. Got it. So the variety is built into the activity. Yeah. And not only does the variety keep the little spice, but

But it also can sort of improve your skills and your fitness in different ways. So like if you plateau in one aspect of climbing, you can work on a different aspect for a little while and then find that that's oftentimes beneficial for the area that you were plateaued in. It's just this nice thing where, you know, when you feel like you hit roadblocks in your progress, you can always just move sideways a little bit and work on something a little bit different and still find that overall your level is slowly rising. It almost sounds like you can cross train within your sport. Yeah, no, that's exactly it.

And I'm sure you've heard it talked about as a sampling period where you're supposed to try out lots of different sports and sort of figure out what you're good at and passionate about, but also develop different kinds of skills in different areas. It seems like you violated that trend a little bit. Yeah, maybe, or maybe I'm just not a world-class athlete. You know, it's hard to say because in some ways I'm a very well-known rock climber, but that's also because there aren't very many other climbers doing what I'm doing. But, you know, I'm not competing or anything, so it's hard to judge that.

how strong of a climber I am compared to others. But anyway, that's a whole different thing. I mean, the only reason you're not competing is because as far as I can tell, no one else on earth is insane enough to try some of the walls that you're scaling. Yeah, well, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, N equals one is still competition, right? If no one's even willing to enter the competition. Yeah, well, that's, yeah, I often joke. It's like, it's easy to be the best if no one else is doing it. Yeah, but there's also a reason that no one else wanted to opt into that contest, right? Oh, well, it's just because nobody else has the inspiration for it. You know, no one else is excited in the same way. So excitement. I want to talk about emotion. I often have heard people call you Spock.

And I think it's an unfair characterization because you're very clearly not immune to emotion. But I think what people seem to be talking about is fear and how you seem to keep your cool in situations where other people would be, you know, at minimum concerned or alarmed or just downright terrified. And I want to, I guess maybe one place to start on that is, do you remember feeling fear as a kid? Yeah.

Well, I don't know. I don't I mean, I'm sure I have childhood memories of being afraid of spiders and things like that. But I don't remember that well. But I'm trying to think of some of my early climbing experiences that were very scary. And and they mostly are what you would expect from a beginner climber. Like the first times that I learned how to climb on gear, which is when you're climbing with a rope, but you're still placing hardware into the the mountain to attach your rope to. That's a little bit different than what you learn how to do when you're climbing in a gym.

And so when I first learned how to climb on gear, I was very afraid that all my gear was just going to fall out. And so like if I fell, you know, everything would rip out of the wall and I'd land on the ground and I would die. And that's a pretty common fear for people learning how to climb on gear and relatively well-founded fear as well. You know, like that's an appropriate thing to be afraid of because if you're learning, you often are placing bad gear. And so it takes a while to get through the learning curve and to actually feel confident with it and know that your gear is safe and everything is okay. And how did you deal with that fear?

I mean, the same way everybody else does, you know, take some deep breaths, compose yourself, just try your best. I'm sure I've tried everything that everybody else tries. You know, when you're on the ground and you give yourself a little pep talk, you're like, this is going to be OK. Like, I know what I'm doing. I'm going to be OK. And then you go up there and you feel really, really scared. And you're like, OK.

Oh God, just take some deep breaths, pull it back together. But I think the difference though is that if you routinely experience that level of fear, eventually you get better at managing it and you get better at ignoring it when it's appropriate. And just to be clear, even as an adult, I still feel fear and I still feel all the same emotions as anybody else. It's just that

I think as I've gotten older, you know, and as I've climbed full time for so long, I've just gotten a little bit better at managing those feelings and compartmentalizing them and, you know, mitigating them in different ways. Basically, you could say I have a much more rich and varied relationship with fear than most people.

I think one of the things that I found endlessly fascinating, I guess when we first met, was I think I had just read that neuroscientists had found that you had limited amygdala activation in your brain, at least in response to sort of ordinary stimuli. And I remember really being riveted by this because whenever people hear about the amygdala, they think about it as fear circuitry.

you know that's wrong, that it's actually the threat detection system and that the amygdala is basically, you know, the fast visceral response to detect and prevent whatever might be a threat. And I guess through that lens, it sounds to me like what you've done is you've trained your brain to not detect a threat in a life and death situation or at least not to respond as quickly and intensely as...

as most people would in that kind of situation. No, that's an interesting framing because I think actually what I've done is train my brain to detect threats more acutely, you know, actual threats. So that test, you know, I took a fMRI scan with, you know, a battery of images being flashed at me. And to me, it seemed perfectly natural that my amygdala wouldn't trigger while looking at pictures while laying in a safe metal tube because I'm totally safe. I'm just laying in a tube. But apparently, you know, the average person

human responds to images that they see the same way they would an actual threat. So if they see a picture of a spider, you know, it triggers the same thing as if there was a spider there. But I mean, to me, it seemed totally appropriate that after at that point, I think 10 or yeah, 10 years or so of free-souling at a high level routinely, I should be able to differentiate between seeing a picture and an actual visceral threat to my life.

So I guess for the average person, I guess when I think about this through the lens of exposure therapy, they're going through flooding and they're arachnophobes and they've just had a spider dropped in their lap. Whereas what you've done is much more systematic desensitization. Yeah. You looked at pictures of the spider, you had it across the room in a cage, you drew it, and then eventually you approach it. Yeah. And now I feel very comfortable with the spider crawling all over me as long as I know that it's not venomous and I know it's not actually lethal. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so that, I guess, you know, it seems like there are situations where you detect, you know, a real threat when you're on a wall. I know you talked about a climb at Half Dome where you panicked.

And I wondered what activated your sense of threat there and how you calmed down. Yeah, actually, it's not even so much that I panicked on Half Dome. I think looking back on it now, I see it more as a gradual erosion of my mental state. Because basically, there were a series of missteps as I climbed Half Dome where I got slightly off-root at a certain point. And at

At the time, it was the biggest and hardest thing that I'd freestalled. So, you know, as it is, it's already psychologically quite demanding because, you know, it's already a big step outside of my comfort zone. And then the last difficult part is up at the very top. So, you know, as I was already getting both physically and mentally quite tired, I got to the hardest part. So it's not so much that I panicked, but it's more that it all started to crumble. You know, like everything was already starting to fray a little bit. And then you're like, oh, no, now it's really falling apart. That's almost worse. Yeah, no, it kind of was.

So when I think about emotion regulation, I think about cognitive reappraisal theory, which is all about saying you can either let emotions immediately guide your behavior or you can pause and reframe them and say, okay, why am I feeling this? What does it mean? And then try to deal with it with a little bit more distance and a little bit more rationality or reasoning. It seems like you do that almost instantly. The moment you start to feel afraid, you start to reappraise emotionally.

Is it that quick for you or do you have to do this consciously? It's not always that quick. Sometimes I have to do that consciously where I have to sort of look inward and be like, what is going on? Like take a deep breath, compose yourself, pull it together. This is totally irrational, you know, because I still experience irrational fear. I mean, I still have days when I go climbing and like, is the rope going to cut? And you know, it's totally unfounded. It's irrational, but you still can't help but be like, I hope my rope doesn't cut.

But it's funny to hear you say that with reappraising because I actually, you know, I don't know the terms for it because I'm not a psychologist. But I often talk about that with fear because I feel like fear has this like an overstated impact on people. And I'm like, why don't people treat fear the same way they treat hunger? Where it's your body showing you, like basically giving you some information. Like when people experience hunger, it's their body telling them that it needs nourishment at some point. But most people just set that aside and then they eat lunch whenever it's convenient. Right.

But with fear, most people experience fear, which is basically their body telling them that they could be in danger. But then they immediately freak out and act on it. Basically, it takes over their cognitive process. They're like, holy shit, I'm afraid. I'm like, why can't people set fear aside the same way they set aside hunger and then deal with it when it's appropriate? I'm kind of stunned here because you just articulated what psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has spent most of her career building a body of evidence behind.

which is the idea that there are only a few kind of basic emotional experiences. And then we have a choice about how we interpret them. And so you might experience like a high intensity negative emotion, but it's up to you to label that fear or anxiety or, you know, reasonable concern or whatever else you might interpret it as. And then- Or to reframe it as something positive where you're like, I'm nervous and excited for what's to come, you know, as opposed to I'm terrified of what's to come, even though the physical sensation is,

almost the same. Which is also amazing because a former doctoral student of ours, Alison Wood Brooks, did her dissertation on the idea that calming down is much less effective when you're afraid or anxious than telling yourself you're excited because excitement and fear and anxiety are both highly activated emotions that arise under uncertainty. And so you can choose to say, wow, I'm really freaking out or think

Things are definitely going to go badly. And so I should feel dread versus I'm feeling, you know, intense arousal with uncertainty. Like maybe there's something good could happen. And I'm excited about that. Is that what you're getting at? Totally. Totally. You can reframe the like, oh, my God, I'm scared into, wow, I am on right now. And I'm about to send, as a climber would say, like I'm about to perform something.

Wow. And so you actually have these thoughts as you're climbing? I mean, I definitely, I have experienced moments when I'm free-souling where I can kind of look at myself and be like, you are afraid, like you are over-gripping, you're breathing too quickly, your vision is narrowed, you're, you know, basically like all the things that you expect to happen physiologically when you start to experience fear while climbing. And

You know, then you can just take that breath and be like, OK, time to time to reset, you know, like relax your grip a little bit, take in what you're doing and start again.

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I noticed something else. Okay, so this whole conversation is just going to be you describing your psychology and me giving you a bunch of terms for it that you don't need. But it sounds like you talk to yourself a lot in the second person. And I'm thinking about Ethan Cross's research about how when you say you can do this or, you know, you're not afraid, you're excited as opposed to I can do this or I'm not afraid, I'm excited, that you create some self-distance and it's actually more motivating and believable. Is that something you're aware of?

Yeah, maybe I've never thought about that, but it is true that a lot of my visualization and like a lot of the ways I think about climbing are sort of more you. And I think that's kind of in line with what I was saying that with hard soloing, I'm often on autopilot where, you know, there's a certain feeling of being outside of my own body or outside of yourself, you know, where it's like my body is doing what it's supposed to do.

And there's like almost an observer. Yeah, it's almost like when psychologists talk about self-distancing, they often go the extra step of saying, you know, if you're afraid, think about somebody else who's afraid and give them advice because the advice you give is usually the advice you need to take. But also, you're going to build your own confidence by, you know, by talking to that other person. And then it seems like you already know what you're doing. You've also had a lot of experience overcoming fear to, you know, to even go for a climb in the first place. And...

I was really struck when watching Free Solo that with the early days of El Cap, you just said, it's too scary. And I wonder what led you to cross the border to saying, yeah, it's scary, but I want to go for it.

Yeah, that's a big, it's a long journey. So we were just talking about freesolding Half Dome. I did that in 2008. And so starting in 2009, I thought that it was time to freesold at all cap because it was like the next obvious thing. I didn't really realize. As one does. Yeah, well, you know. I didn't realize how much further down my personal journey it would actually be. But so I started thinking about it. But then each year I would just drive in Yosemite, look at the wall and be like, that is completely out of the question. Like, it's just...

Like I mean calling it scary almost doesn't even do justice to how impossible it felt, you know It's not just they're like, oh it looks scary. It was like no that is completely out of the question. That is that is Totally off limits, you know, but then I guess over the years I just started to you know, I just worked on other projects it's basically six years of doing progressively bigger and harder climbs of other kinds and then coming back to it and and having it feel a little bit more comfortable because I'd done so many other things and

Basically, there just came a day in in 2015. Actually, I remember the specific climb because I'd actually taken a couple of months off climbing. I've been like trail running a bunch and just scrambling a little. But I went up to support a friend of mine on El Cap. So I climbed El Cap with him. And it was the first time that when I went up to the wall, I was like, you know, like I could imagine maybe soloing this under the right conditions with the right training, you know, all those kind of caveats. But it was the first time I looked at it and it didn't seem totally out of the question.

And then sort of by chance right after that is when the director is a free solo approach me about doing a film. And so I sort of harnessed that motivation to then actually work on ultimately free soloing it.

Wow. It almost sounds logical. Not quite, but almost. It reminds me a little bit of the proverb that says, you know, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And my reaction is, no, don't eat an elephant. Yeah, I have a similar reaction to your desire to free solo a 3,000 foot rock wall. Yeah, I know it does seem kind of...

Kind of outrageous, but you know, you have to remember that I was spending three months a year at least in Yosemite climbing full-time and so it's something that I was looking at all the time thinking about all the time and as a climber you just know that it's such a historic, you know that it could be such a historic moment for climbing like it's just it's an important thing that should be done eventually and I felt like you know, I could be doing it. Yeah. Yeah for sure.

Maybe this is because the closest I've ever gotten to being a climber was heavy, heavy belaying in the Swiss Alps or belaying in a gym. But I hear you say that, and I think if you succeed, there's a decent chance that people who never would have tried El Cap before are going to die climbing it. No, no, I actually sort of disagree in some ways. You know, there's always a little bit of a...

a prize of the first, or at least with climbing, like doing the first ascent or something is very exciting. But in some ways, I think it takes some of the pressure off for people doing the second or third ascent. So you're really only doing it if you're highly intrinsically motivated. And so it's kind of better in some ways. Are you saying then both that it'll attract people who are motivated for the right reasons, and it'll also help them focus and do it for the right reasons? Well, I'm just saying it'll keep away people who are motivated for the wrong reasons anyway. Yeah.

Got it. Wow. But also that's all a bit of a stretch because realistically there's so few people interested in so few people capable. And so it's just like, it's just not that big of a, it's just not a problem. You know, it's not like there's a line at the base. Yeah. There aren't that many people who watched the movie and woke up the next morning. They're like, I'm going to go free solo cap tomorrow. During, during the free solo film tour, I routinely got questions about, you know, like, is this going to inspire kids to risk their lives and things like that? And, and

And it was interesting because I was doing all these film events. So I was I was chatting with movie audiences all the time and doing Q&A's. And my takeaway was that most folks would watch the film and they'd come away inspired to sign up for their first marathon or something like that. But nobody came out of the film inspired to go free soloing, you know, like nobody saw it and was like, I want to do that.

But they all were they all felt like, you know, it's time to start working on that book that I've been procrastinating on for so long. And I was like, that's perfect, you know, because people use it to draw motivation for whatever it is that they're inspired by. But almost nobody is actually inspired to go freestyling. Yeah, that's I was really that was one of the things that surprised me the most actually is, you know, when I've watched inspiring movies before, I often want to follow in the in the hero's footsteps.

And, you know, this did not have that reaction at all. I was like, nope, that is not for me. But I could probably be challenging myself a little more and stretching myself beyond my comfort zone a little more. And it sounds like that's been the dominant reaction that you've seen. Yeah, that's certainly what I've seen. So I know you get this question all the time and you've been answering it for a quarter century, but I have to ask it. And I'm hopefully going to make it more interesting than the usual version of it after you answer, which is.

Why? What is the ultimate purpose of being the first to climb a wall? What's the ultimate purpose of any of it? You know, like, why have you written so many books? Like, why do you teach? You know, it's like at a certain point, you know, you just do the things that you enjoy doing, that you feel like you're good at doing, that you feel like you can contribute in some way. And you just like it.

That's the part that puzzles me, the contribution part. So when I've studied meaningful work, I've found that the single strongest driver is a sense of having a positive impact on other people. And one of the things that's intriguing to me about climbing is you clearly find a lot of meaning in it, but it's not as obvious to me who benefits from it or who it helps. And so how do you connect those dots?

Yeah, that's a very fair question because it is true that climbing isn't really helping anybody. But I think you could ask the same question to, you know, the first skateboarder to try to land a 1080 or something like that. You know, it's like, you know, it's basically just pushing...

And this sounds really douchey to say, but, you know, like pushing human progress in a certain way and like human potential in a certain way. And if you feel like you can do something that humans haven't done before, I feel like there's almost an obligation to do that just because, you know, it's showing a certain capability. And you're right that it's not making anybody's life better and it's not improving global conditions in any way. But it still feels useful. You know, it's like it's it's like a classic exploration. You know, I mean, you're you are just pushing into the unknown a little bit.

That was exactly what resonated with me about, okay, what drives you is you're an explorer, you're an adventurer. You're pushing the boundaries of what humans think is possible and what we're capable of, which I think is just inherently cool. And I think you already gave us also an indirect way that it helps people, right? Which is it inspires people to pursue their own challenges and raise their own ambitions, right?

The way that you do this, I think, is maybe reflective of a distinction that psychologists make when they study values between benevolence and universalism. Benevolence being kind of, I care about helping specific people. Universalism being, I care more about humanity and the planet. And from watching you and reading your work, it seems like you're low in benevolence and high in universalism when it comes to your value system. Yeah, that's really interesting because...

I don't know if you know, but I have a foundation, the Honol Foundation, which supports solar projects around the world. And

And that's exactly the case. I am very universal. I care about projects that help populations and that help the global environment and things like that. But I really have never cared that much about individual like and it's funny because most nonprofits try to fundraise by being like, you can help Timmy and Timmy needs your help. And I'm like, I do not care about Timmy. I care about, you know, the community or like the freaking continent. You know, like I care about the bigger picture sort of things.

Well, I think that's also consistent. I don't know if you would identify this way or not, but what I know about your finances suggests that you're more or less an effective altruist. And when I think about the effective altruism community, it's a very similar ethos of, I'm not going to donate my money to baby Jessica who fell down a well. That's irrational. In fact, it's even irrational for me to keep more money than I need for myself. Like, why should I give more of it to me than somebody else? Yeah, that's exactly. I'm like, my needs are met, so I may as well be doing something that's useful. Yeah.

And it's such an interesting characterization of useful because it's not it's not how most people would define their purpose. Well, the thing is, if I find all my purpose and I don't want to say all my purpose, but I find, you know, much of my personal satisfaction from going climbing every day, you know, I don't need to buy myself a tiger or like buy a Porsche or something to feel more satisfaction. I'm like, I'm already doing exactly what I want to do. So I may as well, you know, do something useful.

Yeah. So when I think about failure and success, I think most people who would walk in your shoes, even with a perfectly healthy ankle, they would be afraid of failing as a climber. I think you live in a pretty interesting version of a world where the fear of success is real.

And I can imagine, you know, as much as I can understand what it's like to be Alex Honnold saying like, oh no, if I succeed in climbing El Cap, what's next? Am I going to have a purpose? Will I lose my identity? I think about psychologists who study goal displacement and the idea that when you achieve a major goal, it's kind of a radical reorientation of your life and you're giving something up and losing it. Did you go through any of that? I think that

For me, maybe it was a little bit different than some other major goals that people achieve because I freestyled El Cap and it was a moment for the climbing community, but the film wasn't out yet. And so then I spent the next year climbing as I normally would as a professional climber, like going on expeditions and challenging myself in sort of normal ways. And then the film came out and then that was just complete insanity for a year. You know, nonstop travel, promoting the film, going to the Oscars, you know, all these wild events, etc.

And so, you know, that's kind of when it felt like something fundamentally changed. But at that point, I was already two years past having actually done the thing that I was proud of doing. And so, yeah.

I don't know. You know, it's felt like this long, drawn out process. And by this point, I mean, I guess it's four and a half years since I sold it all cap. And I've done tons of other climbs that I'm proud of. You know, I've done a couple other film projects. I've worked on all kinds of other things. And I'm like, you know, I'm pretty content just chugging along and continuing along the climbing path. Love it.

Because of all the publicity and, of course, the one-of-a-kind achievement, you have ended up on a couple other paths as well, one of which was giving a TED Talk. I found your experience at TED, from what I know of it, to be the most unusual one I've ever seen.

I remember, I think the first awareness I had of it, I think I'd given my talk the previous year, and I went like, yay, excited to enjoy TED, don't have to be on the stage, might actually have fun. I do remember, though, seeing you shaking backstage before you got on stage, and it's just, it's the most incongruous image. You look totally chill on El Cap, and now you're just giving a talk, I guess it's

it validates the theory that people are more afraid of public speaking than death. Yeah, no, I have always been afraid of public speaking. And also, I mean, especially, I mean, you know, the, the Ted main stage is pretty intimidating. And at that point I hadn't done any mainstream things like that really, you know, I hadn't done the whole free solo film tour yet because that, that film tour, uh,

really desensitized me to standing on stages. But at that point, you know, I had none of that practice. And it's funny because I can go train for climbing, you know, five hours a day, six days a week and love it and feel energized from it. But trying to memorize my TED talk, I could maybe practice for an hour and it felt like pulling teeth and I hated it. And it made me feel I was just like, I'm so bad at this. And I'm just this is so heinous. You know, I was like, this is just not my calling.

It is. It's really hard to find Flo memorizing words on a page or screen. Yeah. Well, I was like, I'm just not cut out to be an actor. You know, like this is not my passion. Well, even if you've written your own lines. Yeah. You still feel like you're performing somebody else's material. It's funny, though, because since then I've gotten much more comfortable speaking and, you know, obviously do it quite a bit more. But I mean, the Ted main stage is pretty intimidating. Yeah.

It's still, though, I mean, it's just you realize how weird that sounds, right? Because it's like, well, you're not going to die. And, you know, the worst case scenario is like, not that bad, because they probably just won't publish the doc. Do you realize how odd that seems to a normal person? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I hear that but I mean it's not that surprising that when you have to do something at a very high level that you're not good at if that it's truly horrifying, you know, I mean I think most people's nightmare would be having to perform opera or something on a stage without without any training, you know, and that's and that's essentially how I felt going into Ted I was like here's a collection of several thousand of like the most important people in the world all sitting here watching me do something that I'm not good at I was like, oh man, like that is that is high pressure and

Well, maybe there's an expectations component too, because I wouldn't be worried about singing opera. I mean, I wouldn't want to do it, right? It would probably be embarrassing, but I don't think anyone expects me to be good at it.

Whereas you give a talk, you're just talking. Of course you're going to be good at that. And if you're not, that seems like a much more devastating blow to your ego. Yeah, maybe. And I think part of it is that when you're speaking at TED, everybody else is so good at it. And so many of the other people there have spoken many times. And, you know, and many of them are professional lecturers that do it, you know, basically full time for a job. And then there's me who dropped out of college, you know? I feel like that worked out okay for you. But yeah, you know, I think...

The only way I could understand this was the distinction you make. I think you call it risk and consequence. I've always thought about it as just the severity versus probability question of...

Your odds of bombing on the TED stage were probably higher than they are of you falling when you climb. And so you're not worried about how severe the consequences are. You're just worried about the odds. That's totally fair. And there's the sort of misguided feeling that bombing in front of so many people will be almost as bad as dying. I mean, you know how embarrassing yourself in public can feel as bad as anything else in life.

Yeah, I mean, I guess, yeah, your point is if you fall, then at least you don't have the embarrassment. Yeah, exactly. I mean, honestly, that is one of the things with free-souling. And the film Free Solo being a little bit of a special case because it was being filmed as a documentary. But most of the free-souling I've done, I'm totally alone.

And so if I feel at all uncomfortable, I can just back down and there's no pressure. There's no expectation. It's just totally internal. Like, am I excited to do this? And if I'm not excited, then I don't need to. And so there's very little pressure and there's none of that pressure to perform. I mean, it's funny because people think of free-souling as very do or die. And, you know, that is true to some extent that, you know, if I fall off, I'd probably die. But the thing is, I get to choose my day and only perform when I want to. Yeah. Yeah.

I guess, you know, at some level, it seems like you are more afraid of embarrassment than death. Yeah, I mean, death before dishonor, you know? Wow. Is that related to something that I remember in the film you referenced very obliquely, and I didn't know what was behind it. I think it was the bottomless pit of self-loathing. What is that? I've been more angstful at various times in life.

And and not necessarily in a bad way, not in like a dark, like depressed, you know, having to whatever. But I've often tried to sort of harness that angst or that general feeling of like I should be doing more or achieving or whatever. And basically like harness that to do the things that I want to do. And same with there's there's sort of a rich history and climbing stories of like old school stories of folks having devastating breakups and then going and soloing big, scary walls.

And, you know, as a classic, like, oh, I don't care if I live or die. I'm just going to do this thing. And so I've sort of channeled some of that angst over the years to like never, never quite feeling that, like, don't care if I live or die, but just being like, this is the perfect time to harness this kind of thing. It's like, you know, you have all the feelings anyway. May as well use them for something that you want to do anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I guess in the three years or so since Free Solo came out, I'm sure a lot of people have been wondering, has your attitude or stance changed at all? Are you now more worried about the consequences of falling than you were before? No, not really. So far, no changes in how I feel about risk and managing risk and all my climbing. I mean, I still want to be a responsible father and everything. But no, I mean, the thing about it is that

I've always wanted to survive. You know, it's not as if I'm just rolling the dice and like hoping that it works out OK. I mean, I'm always putting as much effort as possible into doing the things that I love to do as well and as safely as possible. And so I'm open to the idea that having a family might change the way I look at it all. But I mean, so far it hasn't yet, but we'll see.

No, I understand where you're coming from in that. I think it sounds like you want to achieve and survive. Yeah, I mean, ideally, ideally. Those are both worthy goals. I think that's actually a line in Free Soul, or maybe it's something that my wife, Sonia, has always sort of pushed is like, why not have both? You know, like, why not have a stable relationship and climb at a high level and, you know, do the things that you want to do? And, you know, the I guess we've been together almost six years. And that's kind of been, you know, a theme throughout. It's like, why not do both? Yeah.

The thing that trips me up a little bit is why not do it with the ropes? Well, I know it changes the experience and I know you've talked about that at length, but like you still you still get the satisfaction of, you know, of doing the climb and knowing you are capable physically of doing it. And you still experience the rush of getting to the top and having, you know, really stretched your body to its limits. And like, you don't have to worry that you might die.

Yeah, yeah. And to be fair, that's how I spend most of my year and most of my time. Like actually, when we're done chatting today, I'm going to drive to a local cliff and go work on this project with a rope and, you know, basically just push myself physically as hard as I can for the afternoon. And that's how I spend, you know, most of my time. But then occasionally you just want that extra that extra little test, let's say.

You do. I don't. Well, yeah. I was a diver. Springboard only. I wasn't even willing to take enough risks to compete on platform. And it seems like, you know, that was one of the things I was thinking about as I watched you climb is I would get up on a 10-meter platform knowing I've spent years working on the skills to somersault and twist and land headfirst and it's probably going to go fine.

But I'm just terrified of getting lost in midair and crashing on the water. It hurts. And I think that really held me back as a diver. And I wonder, given that you've scaled much bigger mountains than that, what would you say to somebody like me who, you know, even after developing this skill is still afraid of some pretty basic challenges in a sport?

Well, so I mean, I talked to beginner climbers about this quite a bit, you know, at events and things and people like, how do I get less afraid of lead climbing or, you know, basically climbing with a rope? And, you know, I mean, I think my first question is always, are the fears founded? You know, so in your case with diving, like, are you likely to get lost in midair and then just belly flop onto the onto the pool? You know, like, like, like, does that actually happen frequently? Because if so, then then it seems justifiable that you're sort of afraid of it because like that would suck. But.

You know, if it's something that you're vaguely afraid of but actually never happens or is incredibly unlikely, then you sort of have to work on ways to set that aside.

You're like a self-trained cognitive behavior therapist. Let's figure out if your thoughts are rational and your fears make sense. And if they do, let's figure out how to mitigate them. And if they don't, let's change them. Yeah, that's exactly it. And you kind of have to be a climber because the thing with climbing is that literally every day you have feelings of fear around certain things because it is a very high consequence activity. You can die anytime.

doing routine climbs with a rope if you know certain things go sideways like it's totally appropriate to have fear around that because there is a chance of death you know but separating out when that fear is useful or not is is the challenge

Right. That makes sense. And so when you think about talking to ordinary non-climbers about trying things they're afraid of, whether it's writing the book that they wanted to write or getting on a stage, is there other advice you give that people can translate from your world to theirs?

I guess general life advice is like, just do the thing, you know, just try. I mean, especially because most aspects of life are relatively low consequence for failure. You know, like writing your book, like, is there any downside to you writing a whole bunch? Like, yeah, maybe your book doesn't sell, but you're probably a better writer as a result. You know, it's like, I think most things in life don't have a huge downside to them. So it's like, why not try? I love that. I think when psychologists study regret, one of the things they find is that

Yeah, many people are afraid of failing, but in the long run, they look back and they're more likely to have regretted failing to try at all. Yeah, I think an interesting thing with that is that, like, is it even failure if you've learned from it and you've taken those lessons onto your next project or the next thing that you're working on? And it's like, that's not necessarily failure. It's all just part of a long term learning process. But that's an important thing in climbing because so much of climbing is failure.

Like basically most days that you climb, you go and you fail on things. You try things that are very hard for you and you fall off over and over. And then every once in a while you succeed in actually climbing it. And, you know, that's less true for free soloing, obviously, because with when you climb without a rope, you make sure that you're not going to fail. But for most of climbing, you fail all the time. And so you kind of have to take this broader look at how you define success and failure, where it's like, oh, as long as you're, you know, building fitness, building skills, learning from it, like that's all success.

So I have to ask you, Alex, what is your greatest fear? I think when I was younger, I had a lot of the fears that you expect from people. Like I was kind of afraid of spiders and things like that. And I think with...

you know, years of dealing with fear nonstop, they've all sort of fallen away. I guess my greatest fear is like public embarrassment or public performance or like what I said earlier about opera singing. I'm like, that is still for sure. That would be a nightmare. And like, yeah, I could do it, but I would be so bummed. I just don't want to be dishonored.

I love that. And you have such a specific and unusual definition of honor. How would you define honor? I don't know. That's an interesting question that I've never been asked. I don't know. I think living the correct path, you know, doing the right thing.

Whatever that whatever that means for your specific circumstance. It's funny because I often think of myself as either what I call on the program or off the program. You know, being on the program means eating well, exercising well, training, you know, doing my work like climbing hard, all those kinds of things. And then off the program is, you know, occasionally when you're just eating way too much dessert or like watching shows every night or doing whatever, you know, basically just your whole life is a little bit looser. And, you know, I don't know. I think I think living with honor is very close to just being on the program.

Wow. Wow. I think that's a really great way to define it. Well, Alex, this was a blast, even more fun than I expected. And I now have a few new research projects to launch based on a few of your answers. So watch out. There may be some data coming in a couple of years. Awesome. If you need any help climbing, you just say the word, you know? I'll try not to make you regret that. And I definitely don't want to regret that. Classic. Thanks, Alex. Cool. Yeah, cheers. Have a good one. You too.

I've been thinking a lot about Alex's idea of being on-program or off-program. When you have a specific, seemingly impossible goal like he does, you definitely want to make your decisions according to a clear map. But in life, most of our decisions don't come with a map, and I think all we need is a compass. There are lots of wrong options, but there isn't one right choice. The ideal next move is often the one that's directionally correct. It brings you a step closer to your core values.

In an unpredictable world, you can't make a master plan. You can only gauge whether you're on a meaningful path. For more from Alex Honnold, check out his own podcast, Climbing Gold. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Alison Leighton Brown.

When I interviewed Margaret Atwood, she told me that she had an alter ego, Peggy, who, you know, would make the to-do list and do the laundry. And then Margaret did all the creative work. That's not going on in your head. That's interesting. I'm like, I wonder if that would help me get all my real life tasks done because I hate doing things like that. I'm like, maybe I should assign them to Earl, my friend Earl, who does like grunt work around the house for me. I think I would want to delegate a task to an Earl. I'm going to do my laundry. Or no, Earl is going to do my laundry later.

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