Name: Alex Honnold on Free Climbing in Guyana and Studying Frogs
Uploaded: 2021-03-30T17:59:21.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Alex Honnold on Free Climbing in Guyana and Studying Frogs' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Alex Honnold on Free Climbing in Guyana and Studying Frogs' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-30. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience how often are you doing these free solo climbs uh you
know I'm working on things yeah like fairly frequently I don't know I was
just on this expedition in the jungle in Guyana it was like a National Geographic
TV show thing and I free soloed the wall we put up just just because the type
of
rock we were on no one's ever soloed a wall like that before so I felt like
since we were there I felt almost an obligation to do it just for like this
climbing history you know you're like oh if you're there and you have the
opportunity you kind of have to now when you see something like that do you
make
a route first with ropes always yeah yeah so our I mean because we were there I
mean it's a whole like complicated natural graphic TV thing so we were there
with biologists we're like studying these endemic species of the tapuies there's
like this whole interesting natural history component to it or sort of
biology component but um but we were just trying to climb this mountain that
had
never been climbed before so the priority is obviously just to get up it to
like
find these species of frogs to like do all the things that are important for
the
TV show but then but then because I was there I was like oh you know on the
side
I can at least do something that I'm proud of and climbing that's also pretty
cool oh wow that's pretty cool yeah so there's like this like pretty and it
wound up being totally insane climbing like really cool like this overhanging
wall of six seven hundred feet high um you know like dangling it's it was kind
of
the best style of of climb into solo because it felt secure like it's the type
of
climbing where you feel safe like it's very very good rock so anything you hold
on
to you know is solid and it's not gonna break and it also lends itself to these
sort of striations in the rock where you can like wedge your hand in and like
feel
really secure but also it's incredible exposure because it's really steep like
because you're in the jungle you can only climb stuff that's overhanging
because
anything that's like less than anything else accumulates like water and dirt
and
winds up with plants all over it so like the only stuff that's really climb
is the stuff that is sheltered from the rain so that doesn't have plants on it
so so
it's difficult just by nature yes it's difficult because you're hanging and so
you're like in these crazy positions where you're dangling from your arms but
you
feel safe doing it because the rocks so good and the holds are so good and you're
just like what a crazy place it's really cool but then when you get to the the
very edge you have to somehow yeah and that's a bummer yeah that seems like the
most gnarly part of it it actually probably in terms of risk it probably was
the
final 20 or 30 feet of like getting onto the top it's all like rotten soil and
loose rocks and like you know yeah it wasn't ideal but how do you decide which
way to go when you get to something like that just what's the most likely path
to
success yeah well so in that particular case um we had already established the
route you know like because it's this tv thing we'd already climbed it we'd put
ropes up but we'd like worked on it the camera guys had gone up and down we'd
like
camped up on this ledge to look for these frogs we'd like done this whole
experience so for the free solo I already had a pretty good sense of like how I
should tackle that part because you know we'd already been sort of living up
there a bit but wow yeah but I'm like what do you do in February you know like
that's my February so these frogs like the idea is to is it really an excuse to
climb or is it like do you really are you really there for the frogs to check
out
these weird species it's a little bit of both yeah well I'm like I know this is
a
long form show do you want to like yeah go deep into it because because it's
actually really interesting so um all right long form so so okay the trip was
the trip is crazy I mean we just are with old up I read freaking eight books
while
we were there because it's the jungle and you know it's the tropics so it's
dark
from six to six every day it's like 12 hours of dark and uh we're in our own
little hammock so I was just in my cocoon like reading books every day and so
like a headlamp yeah yeah my headlamp um because you have nothing else to do it's
like raining and you're just in your own little like personal cocoon just like
reading but um so I read like natural history of Guyana natural history like
you know sort of the the the geology so um like have you seen the movie up like
the Pixar Disney movie the cute thing with the flying house and the balloons
yeah
yeah so you know that's all modeled on like where they fly to the big rock
things
with the waterfalls those are tapuies which are like real things in South
America um that's in Venezuela Guyana in the northern part of Brazil or if you've
seen the new point break they filmed down there on the same rock features I
didn't see that but so you're not missing anything no it's really bad but uh
but a
lot of my friends worked on it so it's like it's cool and it is like an
incredible climbing place out of respect for Patrick Swayze I just yeah exactly
yeah you didn't you didn't miss anything I actually fell asleep watching it on
a
plane oh really when you fall asleep during an action movie you're kind of
like come on yeah but um but the climbing it is cool and it and anyway so it's
on
these things called tapuies which are like these big quartzitic sandstone walls
that stick out of the jungle and so if you imagine a huge raised area of land
that
because it's in the jungle has been massively eroded by the constant rain over
the last 40 million years so now you wind up with all these like slender sort
of
towers and mesas you know so like do you know angel falls like no it's one of
the
biggest waterfalls in the world here like pull up a picture angel falls is a it's
like oh yeah yeah there we go oh that's a that's a rhyme that's you know that
is
that's what we were going on yeah that's so beautiful so if if you could looks
fake
yeah it does look fake isn't it crazy I'm pretty sure that one is a rhyme and
if
you look to the left of the one you were just on that we climb this little wall
to
the left of it can you go back to that one Jamie because like if I was a
done yes so so that I think someone built that totally so if you could pan that
photo to the left though obviously you can't because not in the frame we climb
this little mountain to the left and so this is a really famous peak because
the
summit of it marks the boundary between Brazil Venezuela and Guyana it's used
as
like the marker to separate those three countries and so we were climbing this
sort of little bastard step brother next to it but with you know that peak
though had never been climbed and was like new to science for the different
species of frogs and all that kind of stuff if you're an explorer and you've
stumbled upon that you would think that that was like a structure yeah like it's
so square and flat and some and some of them did like European explorers that
first came into the region had all kinds of names like the white cathedral and
things like that like that tower they're just a bunch of look at that one click
on
the one your cursor's on Jamie that's so oh actually so again so actually you
see on
the left side of that there's like the hint of a little thing in the distance
that
I'm pretty sure that's the thing we were climbing the thing to the left that's
like just starting to appear out of the clouds yeah I'm pretty sure that's the
peak that we climbed god it's so beautiful yeah yeah it's crazy except to be
fair the Sun only comes out like so we were there in the dry season and it
rained
like eight hours a day and we were in the clouds non-stop it was totally grim
and
that's the dry season yeah and so you see these pictures where you're like it's
so
beautiful and you're like yeah for 30 minutes a day you know and the rest of
the time you're just in the get in the water yeah get to work that's so wild
man
like really if I stumbled upon that I would think someone built that yeah no
it's totally incredible what is that gee I didn't even get to the cool part of
it oh it was so yeah asking about the geology yeah like how does something like
that form it's so strange yeah so that's the stuff I was reading while we there
so
it's like this huge bed of sandstone which then gets metamorphosed like
compressed into quartzite so like really really hard sandstone and then you
know the
Andes so you have Gondwana like one of the mega continents that predates Pangea
I
think like yeah so like you know if you imagine all the continents on earth
were
one sort of combined so South America and Africa you know fit together at the
the
horn and so this rock is most similar to rock in parts of Africa actually and
so and
part of what makes the the biology there so interesting is that the creatures
on the
summit of some of the tapuies are more closely related to creatures in Africa
than
they are to the ones in the jungle below them because because the summits have
been
separated for so long you see I'm saying like yeah because the top of that
those
islands basically they've been separated from the jungle below for so long that
they more closely resemble where they came from in Africa than than the
creatures that live in the rainforest below it's like this totally incredible
you
know I mean it's just it's just an interesting part of earth are you aware of
the
Olmecs do you know what the Olmec civilization was no the Olmec it's really
it's a quite a mystery they don't exactly know what they did or you know what
what
their culture was all about but they had these heads that they left behind
these
sculpted gigantic stone heads that resemble resemble African people that's not
the
Easter Island stuff or no no that's different it's different this is the Olmecs
oh
wow where and where were the Olmecs in South America oh yeah it says Olmecs
yes South America Mexico Central America and there's a lot of them and these
images are very African looking faces and they don't really know what the
history of
them were huh and they know they they think some of them existed in the
neighborhood of 6,000 years ago but you know when when you're when you're
looking
at stone it's hard because they they just the carbon date the stuff that's
around
the stone as they unearth it but that doesn't really necessarily give them an
accurate sense of when it was constructed it just gives an accurate sense of
how
the sediment yeah of where it's around covers it yeah so the stuff in Guyana
though is on totally different scale like the the stuff that I'm talking about
the I
think the tapuies have been eroded away like isolated for 40 million years or
something which you know far predates humans and then I think the rock itself
is
like 1.5 billion years old it's like ancient ancient it's incredible rock
it's really cool it's just so wild the way it formed the look yeah it's funny
because I mean you saw the pictures it looks like islands and you know early
explorers thought that they must be islands or something but it's actually just
the eroded remnants of what was once like a giant you know elevated plateau oh
yeah
totally so this is what the summits look like I have a bunch of photos like
that on
my phone it's just like scrappy little iPhone pics of like here we are on this
crazy you know because you're like in the clouds you're in the mist it's like
kind of grim and it's raining but then the summit is like this totally wild so
like all those plants are incredibly well adapted to this harsh environment and
they're they're really high rates of carnivory like plants that eat things
because they're basically no soil one of the books I read said that described
it as
a rain desert like you think of a desert normally is having lots of soil but no
water and there you have infinite water but no soil because it's a stone
surface that's getting rained on so much that it washes all the soil away oh so
for any of the vegetation to live there they basically all have different
strategies where they're rooted straight to the stone and then they they eat
you
know they eat bugs and things that you know they eat insects or they eat other
plants or they you know they lots of plants that grow on plants and it's just
like a whole crazy web of life that's like really different than what you
expect
not it's weird because it's so abundant yeah it's got it's an unusual form of
life but it's everywhere yeah like that's so rich and green like you'd have
yeah
though actually I bet if in that photo if you'd pan the photo but to the side
there'd be like big expanses of bare rock because the summits like yeah they're
little pastures and things it's almost like alpine meadows if you go into the
mountains and in the northern hemisphere there'll be like high tundras and
things where it's like yeah it feels really lush but then there's also a lot of
exposed rock because when the Sun comes out you know you're at seven to nine
thousand feet in the tropics so it's really intense UV exposure and it dries
things out instantly so it's really hard hard climatic conditions for life wow
that's wild yeah and so these organisms these creatures that live up there
they're they're closely resembling creatures that live in Africa and so that
was part of what you're studying yeah so we were with this biologist who was
trying to do an elevational transect of of the river basin that we were in so
basically starting from the rainforest where the frogs are pretty well known
and
then going up through the cloud forest which is kind of as you gain elevation
to the actual wall and then the species all changes as you gain elevation which
is
kind of normal and then the things on the summit of the tapuies on the summit
of
the the the stone island are completely different again and so he was basically
doing research on how how the different species you know basically what the
deal
catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch
back catalog jre videos
on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio
experience on spotify you
can listen to the jre in the background while using other apps and can download
episodes to save on data
all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium
account to watch new jre episodes
you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to
get this full episode of the joe rogan experience

Alex Honnold on Free Climbing in Guyana and Studying Frogs

the Joe Rogan experience how often are you doing these free solo climbs uh you
know I'm working on things yeah like fairly frequently I don't know I was
just on this expedition in the jungle in Guyana it was like a National Geographic
TV show thing and I free soloed the wall we put up just just because the type
of
rock we were on no one's ever soloed a wall like that before so I felt like
since we were there I felt almost an obligation to do it just for like this
climbing history you know you're like oh if you're there and you have the
opportunity you kind of have to now when you see something like that do you
make
a route first with ropes always yeah yeah so our I mean because we were there I
mean it's a whole like complicated natural graphic TV thing so we were there
with biologists we're like studying these endemic species of the tapuies there's
like this whole interesting natural history component to it or sort of
biology component but um but we were just trying to climb this mountain that
had
never been climbed before so the priority is obviously just to get up it to
like
find these species of frogs to like do all the things that are important for
the
TV show but then but then because I was there I was like oh you know on the
side
I can at least do something that I'm proud of and climbing that's also pretty
cool oh wow that's pretty cool yeah so there's like this like pretty and it
wound up being totally insane climbing like really cool like this overhanging
wall of six seven hundred feet high um you know like dangling it's it was kind
of
the best style of of climb into solo because it felt secure like it's the type
of
climbing where you feel safe like it's very very good rock so anything you hold
on
to you know is solid and it's not gonna break and it also lends itself to these
sort of striations in the rock where you can like wedge your hand in and like
feel
really secure but also it's incredible exposure because it's really steep like
because you're in the jungle you can only climb stuff that's overhanging
because
anything that's like less than anything else accumulates like water and dirt
and
winds up with plants all over it so like the only stuff that's really climb
is the stuff that is sheltered from the rain so that doesn't have plants on it
so so
it's difficult just by nature yes it's difficult because you're hanging and so
you're like in these crazy positions where you're dangling from your arms but
you
feel safe doing it because the rocks so good and the holds are so good and you're
just like what a crazy place it's really cool but then when you get to the the
very edge you have to somehow yeah and that's a bummer yeah that seems like the
most gnarly part of it it actually probably in terms of risk it probably was
the
final 20 or 30 feet of like getting onto the top it's all like rotten soil and
loose rocks and like you know yeah it wasn't ideal but how do you decide which
way to go when you get to something like that just what's the most likely path
to
success yeah well so in that particular case um we had already established the
route you know like because it's this tv thing we'd already climbed it we'd put
ropes up but we'd like worked on it the camera guys had gone up and down we'd
like
camped up on this ledge to look for these frogs we'd like done this whole
experience so for the free solo I already had a pretty good sense of like how I
should tackle that part because you know we'd already been sort of living up
there a bit but wow yeah but I'm like what do you do in February you know like
that's my February so these frogs like the idea is to is it really an excuse to
climb or is it like do you really are you really there for the frogs to check
out
these weird species it's a little bit of both yeah well I'm like I know this is
a
long form show do you want to like yeah go deep into it because because it's
actually really interesting so um all right long form so so okay the trip was
the trip is crazy I mean we just are with old up I read freaking eight books
while
we were there because it's the jungle and you know it's the tropics so it's
dark
from six to six every day it's like 12 hours of dark and uh we're in our own
little hammock so I was just in my cocoon like reading books every day and so
like a headlamp yeah yeah my headlamp um because you have nothing else to do it's
like raining and you're just in your own little like personal cocoon just like
reading but um so I read like natural history of Guyana natural history like
you know sort of the the the geology so um like have you seen the movie up like
the Pixar Disney movie the cute thing with the flying house and the balloons
yeah
yeah so you know that's all modeled on like where they fly to the big rock
things
with the waterfalls those are tapuies which are like real things in South
America um that's in Venezuela Guyana in the northern part of Brazil or if you've
seen the new point break they filmed down there on the same rock features I
didn't see that but so you're not missing anything no it's really bad but uh
but a
lot of my friends worked on it so it's like it's cool and it is like an
incredible climbing place out of respect for Patrick Swayze I just yeah exactly
yeah you didn't you didn't miss anything I actually fell asleep watching it on
a
plane oh really when you fall asleep during an action movie you're kind of
like come on yeah but um but the climbing it is cool and it and anyway so it's
on
these things called tapuies which are like these big quartzitic sandstone walls
that stick out of the jungle and so if you imagine a huge raised area of land
that
because it's in the jungle has been massively eroded by the constant rain over
the last 40 million years so now you wind up with all these like slender sort
of
towers and mesas you know so like do you know angel falls like no it's one of
the
biggest waterfalls in the world here like pull up a picture angel falls is a it's
like oh yeah yeah there we go oh that's a that's a rhyme that's you know that
is
that's what we were going on yeah that's so beautiful so if if you could looks
fake
yeah it does look fake isn't it crazy I'm pretty sure that one is a rhyme and
if
you look to the left of the one you were just on that we climb this little wall
to
the left of it can you go back to that one Jamie because like if I was a
done yes so so that I think someone built that totally so if you could pan that
photo to the left though obviously you can't because not in the frame we climb
this little mountain to the left and so this is a really famous peak because
the
summit of it marks the boundary between Brazil Venezuela and Guyana it's used
as
like the marker to separate those three countries and so we were climbing this
sort of little bastard step brother next to it but with you know that peak
though had never been climbed and was like new to science for the different
species of frogs and all that kind of stuff if you're an explorer and you've
stumbled upon that you would think that that was like a structure yeah like it's
so square and flat and some and some of them did like European explorers that
first came into the region had all kinds of names like the white cathedral and
things like that like that tower they're just a bunch of look at that one click
on
the one your cursor's on Jamie that's so oh actually so again so actually you
see on
the left side of that there's like the hint of a little thing in the distance
that
I'm pretty sure that's the thing we were climbing the thing to the left that's
like just starting to appear out of the clouds yeah I'm pretty sure that's the
peak that we climbed god it's so beautiful yeah yeah it's crazy except to be
fair the Sun only comes out like so we were there in the dry season and it
rained
like eight hours a day and we were in the clouds non-stop it was totally grim
and
that's the dry season yeah and so you see these pictures where you're like it's
so
beautiful and you're like yeah for 30 minutes a day you know and the rest of
the time you're just in the get in the water yeah get to work that's so wild
man
like really if I stumbled upon that I would think someone built that yeah no
it's totally incredible what is that gee I didn't even get to the cool part of
it oh it was so yeah asking about the geology yeah like how does something like
that form it's so strange yeah so that's the stuff I was reading while we there
so
it's like this huge bed of sandstone which then gets metamorphosed like
compressed into quartzite so like really really hard sandstone and then you
know the
Andes so you have Gondwana like one of the mega continents that predates Pangea
I
think like yeah so like you know if you imagine all the continents on earth
were
one sort of combined so South America and Africa you know fit together at the
the
horn and so this rock is most similar to rock in parts of Africa actually and
so and
part of what makes the the biology there so interesting is that the creatures
on the
summit of some of the tapuies are more closely related to creatures in Africa
than
they are to the ones in the jungle below them because because the summits have
been
separated for so long you see I'm saying like yeah because the top of that
those
islands basically they've been separated from the jungle below for so long that
they more closely resemble where they came from in Africa than than the
creatures that live in the rainforest below it's like this totally incredible
you
know I mean it's just it's just an interesting part of earth are you aware of
the
Olmecs do you know what the Olmec civilization was no the Olmec it's really
it's a quite a mystery they don't exactly know what they did or you know what
what
their culture was all about but they had these heads that they left behind
these
sculpted gigantic stone heads that resemble resemble African people that's not
the
Easter Island stuff or no no that's different it's different this is the Olmecs
oh
wow where and where were the Olmecs in South America oh yeah it says Olmecs
yes South America Mexico Central America and there's a lot of them and these
images are very African looking faces and they don't really know what the
history of
them were huh and they know they they think some of them existed in the
neighborhood of 6,000 years ago but you know when when you're when you're
looking
at stone it's hard because they they just the carbon date the stuff that's
around
the stone as they unearth it but that doesn't really necessarily give them an
accurate sense of when it was constructed it just gives an accurate sense of
how
the sediment yeah of where it's around covers it yeah so the stuff in Guyana
though is on totally different scale like the the stuff that I'm talking about
the I
think the tapuies have been eroded away like isolated for 40 million years or
something which you know far predates humans and then I think the rock itself
is
like 1.5 billion years old it's like ancient ancient it's incredible rock
it's really cool it's just so wild the way it formed the look yeah it's funny
because I mean you saw the pictures it looks like islands and you know early
explorers thought that they must be islands or something but it's actually just
the eroded remnants of what was once like a giant you know elevated plateau oh
yeah
totally so this is what the summits look like I have a bunch of photos like
that on
my phone it's just like scrappy little iPhone pics of like here we are on this
crazy you know because you're like in the clouds you're in the mist it's like
kind of grim and it's raining but then the summit is like this totally wild so
like all those plants are incredibly well adapted to this harsh environment and
they're they're really high rates of carnivory like plants that eat things
because they're basically no soil one of the books I read said that described
it as
a rain desert like you think of a desert normally is having lots of soil but no
water and there you have in