Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1189 - Alex Honnold
Uploaded: 2018-10-25T23:57:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1189 - Alex Honnold' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-10-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1189 - Alex Honnold' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-10-25. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1189 - Alex Honnold

Should I do headphones? It doesn't matter. Yeah, I like headphones.
I kind of hate hearing myself that a lot, though.
Oh, you sound good. Why do you hate hearing yourself?
Dude. Try to pull this sucker up, like, about a fist from your face.
Good to see you again, man. It's been a long time.
It has been. With a guy like you, it's always nice to see you're still alive.
You know, I'm doing my best. Do you get tired of hearing shit like that?
Oh, I don't care. I mean, I get it a lot.
Do you get tired of, like, the weirdness of, like, interviewing with people and
they're like, you know, you know you could die.
Is this scary? Yeah. Yeah, that's all right, though.
I mean, the thing is, yeah, it's funny, touring with the film.
We've been doing Q&As every night. You get the same questions from the audience
all the time.
Yeah. And part of that is tiring.
But then part of it, like, people ask the same questions because they're
obvious.
Because everybody wants to know the same things. And I'm like, I understand
that.
One of the weirdest parts of the film is when they're showing all the guys who
have died from free soloing.
Yeah, though, actually, they didn't all die free soloing.
Oh.
That's actually one of the, that's probably the only thing that I take slight
issue with with the film.
Oh.
Because it's slightly hyperbolic.
Because two of them died base jumping and one of them died rope jumping.
They all were free soloists, which is kind of what the film is saying, that
they're all free soloists who have died.
But they all died in the mountains doing mountain-related extreme activities.
Yeah.
That's not, that doesn't make the story as good. You got, that's like poetic
license.
Yeah.
They got sneaky.
Well, you know, I mean, they all were free soloists, but yeah.
That's not the same though.
Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, I, I prefer to, the other way to look at it is that
no free soloist has ever died doing anything cutting edge.
That's my favorite statistic.
What does that mean?
That like, no free solos has ever died doing hard soloing.
Like basically a free, a few free solos have died falling off an easy turn or
just falling off sort of routine or, you know, I don't know, just falling off
the mountain, but none of them have ever died while doing something cutting
edge, something that had never been done before or something that was, you know,
hardcore.
Hmm. Do you think that's because when you're doing something that's a little
bit easier, you relax?
I think that's probably part of it, but also I think part of it is just a
numbers thing.
You spend so much time doing easy stuff and so little time doing really hard
stuff that, you know, it's just statistics.
But, um, how much, how important is it when, when you're free soloing to have
that edge, to be like really talk, cognizant about how intense this is?
Like if you got too calm and too relaxed.
No, I, I think that's, I think that is kind of the concern for sure.
And I, I've noticed that in, for myself anyway, and I, I try not to do very
much easy soloing anymore because there is a certain complacency that over time,
you know, you just do so much mileage on easy terrain.
And then you're like, this is so easy.
This is so easy.
And then you slip and you die.
Whoa.
You know, you know, fighters look at things that way too.
Like they, at a certain point in their life, they don't want easy fights
because they need to get challenged.
Otherwise they won't train properly.
And then they wind up losing to be.
Yeah.
You have to take it seriously.
Yeah.
Well, the difference between a fighter say when they're not trained and not in
camp and just their skill and what their body can do without, without going
through a camp is probably only like 70% of what they are when they actually go
through everything with full intensity.
Eight weeks.
Totally.
Two times a day.
You know, physical therapy, massage, visualization, conditioning, all the, all
the things that make them who they are the day they step into the cage.
Like when you free solo.
It's funny.
That's so that's, yeah.
I mean, yeah, you saw the film.
That's all, uh, exactly the level of preparation that went into it.
Do you take time off before a big free solo?
Do you like, do you rest your body or peak?
No, it's kind of the opposite.
It's the, no, it's the opposite.
It's the sort of ramping up to it.
Right.
But do you, is there any concern that maybe you haven't given yourself enough
recuperative time, like for the day of?
No.
Well, so for me anyway, it was always sort of the opposite because the real
challenge of free soloing is the psychological side, the mental side of it.
It's not so much the physical, like I don't necessarily have to physically
perform at the absolute limit of what I'm capable of, but I have to mentally
perform at that level.
And so, and the mental side of it comes so much from confidence and feeling,
you know, feeling prepared.
And so, I don't know.
So when I, when I freestyle at El Cap, I kind of knew that I wasn't actually,
um, like I'd probably already started to decline a little bit physically over
the course of the season.
Cause the two months in Yosemite is just kind of grueling on your body.
Like all the, the time I spent going up and down on the wall and preparing, it's
very, very tiring.
And so I kind of realized that I was starting to get sort of deeply fatigued.
You know, I was sort of a week away from like having started a slump of like,
oh, I'm kind of pooped.
But the thing is I knew that, that because of all that preparation, you know,
psychologically I was as, as good as I was ever going to be.
So even if I was physically starting to be a little bit tired, it's like time
to, you know, it's kind of the, the, the different curves.
You have to hit it right at the right moment.
Now is your psychological preparation just you getting your mind into it or do
you have like specific techniques you use or a form of meditation or anything
that you specifically concentrate on when you're visualizing success or.
No, when it's not even necessarily visualizing success or it's visualizing for
me, it's visualizing the experience.
Like sort of imagining what everything will feel like, imagining what it'll
like to place my foot on a hold or what, you know, grabbing like the sensations
of it and the exposure of it.
Um, you know, thinking through what it'll feel like with so much air around me
and no rope, you know, just that basically to make sure that nothing is
surprising when I get there.
Dude, my hands are sweating.
Just talking to you.
I'm not kidding.
Feel that.
Feel that.
And that's fucking gross.
Right.
That's a clamp.
I realized it.
Like when I'm talking to you, I'm thinking about you doing this and my hands
started fucking sweating.
Yeah.
You start thinking about thousands of feet of air and you're like, Oh yeah.
I think it's start thinking about chalk and powder and that shit like that.
God damn dude.
Um, have you ever, um, gone to like a sports psychologist or have you ever like
actively tried to coordinate a program for mental training or anything like
that?
No, not really.
No, not really.
I mean, so with, with free selling El Cap, I found that, uh, I needed to create
enough space for, it's not so much mental training, but, um, but create enough
empty time so that I had, uh, so that I was able to sort of process.
Um, so, um, I don't know.
Um, I don't know.
I stopped responding to email.
I erased my social media.
I like sort of freed up my life.
And then actually my girlfriend, um, left for sort of the week ahead of time.
So that was just totally by myself in my van with nothing going on, like no
distractions.
And so that's not exactly, you know, mental training, but it was giving myself
the free time that I could just sit around and think about things.
You know, I could process like it in my own terms and my own time.
When was the last time we talked?
How many years ago was that?
It's so long.
I feel like it was at least four, right?
Oh no, it was like six or seven.
I was it?
I think so.
I think it was like 2012 or something.
During that time, how much has changed in your life in terms of the way people
perceive what you do and the amount of attention that you get?
I would imagine that having that alone time now.
Yeah, it's much harder.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, totally.
It's, it's funny.
I mean, I've tried to not let my life get busy over time, but it just sort of
naturally happens.
I mean, it's just success.
Yeah, exactly.
There's so many more times.
People want to talk to you.
Yeah.
When I reached out to you, I reached out to you a couple of times, but I was
like, this guy's probably getting fucked with all the time.
Like someone's probably always poking at you and you're just trying to get a foothold,
like literally.
Just trying to hold on.
No, I mean, no, I mean, I appreciate all the opportunities I have now.
And, you know, I mean, I'm very happy with the way my life has changed over
time.
But certainly when I look back at 10 or 12 years ago when I was just a single
20 year old man living in a car, like I had nothing going on.
You know?
Yeah.
If I had like one interview in a month, I'd be like, well, it's a big month for
media, you know?
And then now on a film tour, it's like completely outrageous.
It's totally the other end of the spectrum.
Now when you're doing this film tour, when does the film actually come out?
Oh, the film's like out, it's in theaters, like you can go see it right now.
But you can't get it on iTunes yet, is that what it is?
Oh, yeah.
So it did a month of festival circuiting, you know, earlier in the end of the
summer and then it came out in theaters at the end of September.
So it's right now, I think this weekend is its widest release.
It's like 400 theaters all over the country right now.
Wow.
And then in theory, it's through National Geographic, so I think it'll be on
television on the channel at some point.
And then eventually it'll stream somewhere.
I don't know.
Is it strange, all this attention?
Yeah, I mean, well, I don't know.
It's in some ways, it's a natural extension of all the stuff I've had over the
years.
You know, like having a 60 minutes piece and many years ago was a bit of a,
like, was a flurry of attention.
And so that kind of sort of prepared me in some ways, you know?
But yeah, I mean, it's great.
I mean, well, you've dealt with this your whole life.
I mean, it's just like an interesting.
Yeah, but I feel like it comes with what I do.
I'm in show business, you know, show business.
That's, you know what I mean?
Yeah, that's fair.
Well, you're a climber.
Yeah.
And the most radical kind of climber, you know, free solo.
You think, when I think of what you do, I think of quiet tension.
Yeah, that's kind of fair.
Yeah, because it should be, it should be sort of meditative and relaxing and
quiet.
Yeah.
But then obviously you're also sometimes straining your entire body.
You know, like trying very hard physically and, yeah.
Well, I remember one of the things you said to me the last time we talked was
that it's, it's very mellow.
Because if it ever gets intense, something's gone horribly wrong.
Yeah, you're doing something wrong.
Yeah.
No, that's, that's, I still feel exactly the same way.
I mean, that's, yeah, that's always the challenge is to keep it, keep it
relaxed.
But for a guy like you, my perception of a guy like you, who's that, that
person who's doing that activity, then to sort of juxtapose that with this
media tour type environment and dealing with all these people, that, that, that
seems to me like it would be really annoying.
I mean, yeah, it's very different than my normal, normal lifestyle, I guess.
But the thing is, you know, it's sort of an adventure and it's an experience in
its own way.
I've been, I've been kind of calling it a expedition film tour because I've
done a lot of expeditions in my life.
Like last winter, I went to Antarctica for a month and, and it's not exactly
the type of climbing I normally do.
And I don'