"not dead yet"

Moontower Munchies #107

Friends,

Rich Roll interviewed Alex Honnold last year while he was promoting the Nat Geo film The Devil’s Climb. The film chronicles Alex and his good friend and inspiration Tommy Caldwell’s 2,600 bike ride from CO to Alaska to summit the Devil’s Thumb.

credit

The interview is awesome. Full stop. The film was also fantastic — beautifully shot, an amazing story. Watch with your kids. Great stuff.

But I want to share some bits from the interview that hit me:

🔨 On Endurance

Effort is effort—you have to try hard if you want to do hard things.

“Long runs and rides feel the same as mountain expeditions—you’re just grinding in a low gear all day. Whether that’s hiking uphill, bushwhacking through temperate rainforest, or pedaling a bike, it’s all just slowly pushing your body for 12 hours. These pursuits don’t help your rock climbing—it's too different—but they keep you connected to how to stay uncomfortable for long periods without real risk. Big cardio efforts remind you that effort is always uncomfortable. Rock climbing is the same—your body hurts, it sucks, but you keep going.”

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🧠 On Attribution and the Myth of the “Freak”

People want to call you a freak because it’s easier than admitting success comes from grinding it out.

Alex notes that his achievements come from 29 years of constant effort. He’s frustrated when people assume his amygdala (fear center) doesn’t function, as in the audience question: “Is there a support group you attend for people whose amygdala doesn’t fire?”

It’s obvious that if your amygdala doesn’t fire that is not a sufficient condition to do what Alex does. But he goes further into the amygdala story that everyone who saw Free Solo latched on to. He explains that his brain doesn’t experience a fight-or-flight response when shown images of fearful situations in contexts to which he is habituated. He says this shows that he has a healthy relationship with fear and his response is not being triggered by situations which are not threats. Looking at images is not threatening.

As an fyi he thinks horror movies are stupid. He says jump-scares work for good reason but hijacking your natural emotional response for a cheap thrill doesn’t make a lot of sense to him. You’re watching a movie, the situation is not actually dangerous. There’s plenty of ways to induce real fear you can grow from. Go do that.

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😨 Fear Is Information

“Fear is just information. It tells you where to focus.”

He doesn’t conquer fear—he reads it like a signal. Honnold isn’t fearless—he just metabolizes fear differently. What sets athletes (Kris: and traders) apart is how they respond.

[Kris: preparation, visualizing scenarios in advance, having at least a simple if/then contingency plan is key to staying calm and preserving agency.]

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🥾 Life Is a Series of Steps

A parenting insight disguised as life philosophy:

I had a thought while hiking with my daughter a couple days ago. I hiked her uphill in a backpack, and then she kind of staggered downhill as much as she wanted and I carried her home. It was lovely.

She was wandering down the trail, rock to rock, pretending to climb. At one point she got bored of the rocks and started going animal hole to animal hole, putting her hands in them. I tried to discourage her, but I loved how curious she was.

There were stretches where I couldn’t see her for a moment, and I felt totally fine—because I feel at home in the mountains. That’s when it hit me:

I think part of parenting is to be comfortable in enough places that you don’t project your own fears onto your children.

[Kris: Alex has a deep respect for how our relationship with fear and risk impact our ability to thrive. It’s elemental. It’s underappreciated. Improving our relationship to fear strikes me as perhaps the highest leverage objective in one’s quest for personal growth. I feel very deficient here so pardon the projecting.]

She was just taking steps. Playing. Wandering. Exploring.

And it totally hit me.

Life is just a series of steps. You just keep going.

For someone known for monumental, cinematic achievements, Honnold’s life philosophy is radically mundane. His world runs on consistency—not constant epicness.

For me, being a Matthew McConaughey fan, this is well-received. This insight is how he came to terms with his father’s death. It played prominently in his adlib at the end of Dazed and Confused…”just keep livin’. L-I-V-I-N”.

Sounds so simple it’s dumb right?

But he discovered that truth at about age 22. An age where we search for grand narratives. But to realize that moving one step forward is the whole game is something most people, if they ever even realize it, don’t realize until much later.

Last Friday morning on the way from Escondido to Pasadena, my family stopped at this monastery. We happened to meet an 86-year-old monk from Saigon who showed us around. At one point he answers his cell phone. A funny image already. It’s a friend.

Suddenly, my wife is laughing hysterically.

What happened? What he say?!

Apparently the friend asked, “hey what’s up” and our monk replied:

“not dead today!”

Alex, Matthew, the monk. They know what’s up.

It’s hard to be bitter when you sit in gratitude. Need even a small something to be grateful for? Use my line:

Any day I wake up is a good day.

Stay groovy

☮️

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