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

**Steven Bartlett** (0:04)
If your kids came to you, you have two girls, right? If they came to you and said, Dad, give me advice on what I should aim at in life, would you tell them?

**Alex Honnold** (0:11)
I wouldn't give them advice. I'd be like, you do you. You find the thing you love to do, go hard. Basically, learn some skills, get good at something. What do you like to do? That's kind of the thing for me, especially with climbing, is if someone had told me you're going to train climbing for the rest of your life, I'd be like, oh, that sounds like kind of a grind. Because it is hard work. You're hiking up hill with a heavy backpack, and it's cold and it's windy. It's basically physically uncomfortable. Being a professional rock climber means that you're physically uncomfortable all the time, often. It's hard.
But if you're doing it because you freaking love doing it, it doesn't feel very hard. So I think the key for a kid is to find the thing that doesn't feel like hard work.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:49)
And when you started, were you scared of big, tall rock faces and stuff like that?

**Alex Honnold** (0:55)
I mean, yeah, I had like a healthy intimidation of things. I mean, like my first season in Yosemite, the first time seeing El Cap as a climber, I was 19, and it looks impossible. It looks completely insane. I was like, that's so big. But then, you know, within a couple of seasons, you know, I climbed some bigger walls, learned how to climb. And then a friend and I had the sort of season goal. Like we were going to climb Yosemite all season with the aspiration at the end to climb El Cap in a day. So basically there was this long progression on El Cap specifically where it's like you go from just trying to get up it, to trying to get up it faster, 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 a bunch of seasons, I climbed El Cap like 60 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. But then people are like, well, aren't you scared? And you're kind of like, well, I've spent 10 years building up on this thing.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:47)
I guess that's what people don't see. Yeah.

**Alex Honnold** (1:50)
I mean, like the documentary Free Solo, I think does a pretty good job of showing the direct preparation, like the training involved in doing that specific climb. But it just doesn't show the like eight years before that, I guess, because the documentary was filmed over two years. And I guess I've been going since 2006 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.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:13)
I guess that's the illusion of like all people that do great things and become like athletes or sprinters or whatever, Ronaldo or Messi, is you don't get to see the...

**Alex Honnold** (2:21)
Yeah, the whole life that they put in to doing the thing.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:23)
Yeah. So it looks like a magic trick when we see the outcome. When we show up on Netflix to watch you climb Taipei, we're like, whoa, he's hanging from his leg.

**Alex Honnold** (2:31)
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 30 years of practice, I just walked up and did it. But no, it's not like just walking up and doing it.
I mean, like, I've literally been climbing five days a week for 30 years. Like that's so much climbing. Like I freaking love climbing and I climb a lot.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:53)
On this, on this idea of like exposure therapy as it relates to like fear and anxiety and confronting ones, things that terrify them. Was that in the early days where you, I'm trying to understand, were you like scared at some point?

**Alex Honnold** (3:03)
All the time. That's actually something that I think, 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 the years. And I think as I've found older, I've sort of come to realize that actually you're just scared all the time as a climber, like low level fear, low level, like, but you're, but climbing is fundamentally scary. Like it's always kind of 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 after years and years of always being scared, you're pretty good at managing that kind of stuff.