Alex Honnold (3:33)

There is no adrenaline rush, you know, like if I get a rush, it means that something has gone horribly wrong, you know, because the whole thing should be pretty slow and controlled and like, I mean, it's mellow.

Narrator (3:43)

This is Alex in the film Alone on the Wall. He's done more than a thousand free solo climbs, but none were tougher than this one. Here he is just a speck on the northwest face of Half Dome.

Ben Shapiro (3:57)

Yeah, this is crazy.

Narrator (3:58)

You can barely make out the assembly valley floor below.

Matt (4:01)

No.

Ben Shapiro (4:02)

Bad.

Narrator (4:02)

As he pauses to rest and then.

Ben Shapiro (4:04)

Man.

Narrator (4:05)

He's the only person known to have free soloed the northwest face of Half Dome. What do you consider Alex's greatest achievements to date?

Matt (4:14)

That he's still alive.

Ben Shapiro (4:15)

Yeah.

Matt (4:16)

If you look at the past, people that have made a real habit of soloing, you know, at least half of them are dead.

Ben Shapiro (4:23)

Yes, that would be. Yes, that would be the thing. Yeah. That's the thing about climbing without ropes or a harness or a net. Yes.

Emily (4:32)

So Jimmy Chin is like his producer.

Ben Shapiro (4:34)

I know Jimmy.

Emily (4:35)

You know Jimmy.

Ben Shapiro (4:35)

Uh huh. Oh, wow, that's cool. Yeah, I'm pretty friendly with Jimmy actually.

Emily (4:38)

Jimmy's incredible.

Ben Shapiro (4:39)

Yeah.

Jimmy Chin (4:39)

You know, we spent days rigging on the root, trying to imagine something. Someone climbing it without a rope made us very nervous.

Ben Shapiro (4:49)

Jimmy's an amazing, a great climber himself.

Alex Honnold (4:52)

I mean, if I didn't feel fear, I wouldn't have to do all the prep work. I would just go up and do the route. The correct way to manage fear, I think, is to gradually broaden Your comfort zone, until your comfort zone includes things that seemed previously impossible.

Ben Shapiro (5:10)

I mean, actually, that is a good approach to fear. It is a very bad approach to being alive. Like, it is a good approach to fear in, like, your everyday life is to. Is to gradually, through exposure therapy, get used to doing more and more scary things. You can do public speaking, for example.

Matt (5:26)

Do you know the F word?

Ben Shapiro (5:31)

Fornication. When the stakes are you fall off a mountain and smush. I am less pro.

Alex Honnold (5:38)

I'm treading lightly. Some climbers remember, like, every movement of every route. I'm definitely not gifted like that. I knew the hardest parts pretty well, but the rest of it was all a bit of a question mark. Slightly more pumped than I would have liked.

Ben Shapiro (5:59)

How's he even finding footholds?

Alex Honnold (6:00)

A lot of the lower climbing, I was thinking about it as I did it. Like, do I grab this one or is this secure? Is it that foot or this other foot?

Ben Shapiro (6:09)

Look at these holes. These are insane.

Alex Honnold (6:10)

Should I try a different foot?

Ben Shapiro (6:11)

These are, like, centimeters wide. This is so close.

Alex Honnold (6:13)

I got my finger stuck on one of the pockets. Which is one of the classic ways to yourself when you're soloing. In retrospect, maybe I could have given it another day or two of prep work.

Ben Shapiro (6:25)

I'm glad he had a retrospect, which.

Alex Honnold (6:27)

Really is part of the appeal of Free Solon, you know, is that level of focus.

Ben Shapiro (6:30)

And he's doing it, and he's doing it like jeans and a T shirt. He got up that morning, rolled out of bed, and just put on whatever he was going to get to get coffee.

Alex Honnold (6:39)

It's just this overhanging panel up high on the wall.

Ben Shapiro (6:44)

Oh, my God, I can't watch this stuff.

Alex Honnold (6:46)

It's more fatiguing than the other pitches because the angle kicks back.

Ben Shapiro (6:49)

It's terrible. Also because it's steep fatigue, like your finger. His hand strength must be insane. His finger and hand strength must be just ridiculous.

Jimmy Chin (6:59)

Alex's ability to manage fear and to free solo the biggest walls in the world is truly remarkable. But what inspires me the most is the intention and purpose that he brings to his life. He pushes us to all ask ourselves, are we living the life that we want to live?

Ben Shapiro (7:21)

I mean, again, I think that watching people do incredible things does bring up that question, but it also bring. I don't know how you can do this and not bring up the question, what is a human life worth? Like, truly, you only get one of them.

Emily (7:33)

Well, I mean, you're also taking a risk driving to work.

Ben Shapiro (7:36)

I mean, he's so my risk driving to work, I promise you, is low. Like, here's the thing. If I'm driving to work and I get in a car crash, there's still a pretty good shot I'm gonna live. Son of.

Emily (8:00)

That's a good point. Yeah.

Ben Shapiro (8:01)

Okay. Like if this dude falls off a 2,000 foot high wall, he's dead.

Emily (8:05)

Okay, so the boulder problem, if you remember, in free solo, this is first him discussing the boulder problem and then we're gonna watch him actually can do it. But this was like the riskiest part of the climb.

Alex Honnold (8:12)

Either karate kick or double Dino to an edge on the opposite wall.

Emily (8:18)

So he was figuring out one of two ways to do it.

Alex Honnold (8:20)

It makes more sense to do the big two handed jump because you're jumping into a good edge, so there's actually something to catch.

Emily (8:24)

He seriously considered doing this without ropes to just catch the ledge?

Ben Shapiro (8:28)

What the. Yeah. See? Okay, so he's practicing. Thank God he's got a rope on him. I mean, that's.

Alex Honnold (8:32)

The idea of jumping without a rope. Seems completely outrageous.

Ben Shapiro (8:35)

Yes.

Alex Honnold (8:35)

If you miss it, that's that.

Ben Shapiro (8:36)

Yes.

Emily (8:37)

Really, Alex?

Ben Shapiro (8:38)

Then this is another news.

Emily (8:41)

Yeah, there. If he missed that karate kick there, he would have died. Just did the karate kick.

Ben Shapiro (8:48)

What is happening?

Emily (8:50)

It's the craziest piece of film ever.

Ben Shapiro (8:52)

I. Oh my God.

Emily (8:57)

Oh, he's way too relaxed. Just wait for some of these clips. Savvy. He gets so relaxed.

Ben Shapiro (9:01)

What is happening? Oh, my God. That's crazy. Like if he had jumped, that's. Oh, but why you did this? For what? Why not? Why? Why not? Just why we invented entire apparatuses to avoid this.

Emily (9:17)

Oh, it keeps you.

Matt (9:19)

You tie in a rope.

Alex Honnold (9:20)

This is a safety device.

Matt (9:21)

Yes.

Alex Honnold (9:22)

I don't want that track.

Ben Shapiro (9:26)

And also airplanes and also cars. We have like so many cool things as human beings to avoid death and make our lives more comfortable.

Narrator (9:41)

Climb.

Emily (9:42)

This is the last.

Ben Shapiro (9:43)

I mean, I know Mark was excited being up there. Oh, no, no, no, no, Emily, no. Why? No, no, why? Is the right question.

Emily (9:56)

Because it's there and he has to climb it.

Ben Shapiro (10:07)

He's done it. Well, there's an elevator inside that looks impossible.

Matt (10:13)

The whole climb is like that. It's a sheer wall and he's like Spider man crawling up this thing with no rope. So this guy truly is, I think, the greatest athlete to ever live. A more reasonable critique that you also saw, which is that, well, it's reckless and suicidal to do this and it's unethical to air it live because part of the entertainment value of it, let's admit, is, is the guy gonna fall or not? You don't want him to, but that what makes it so captivating is that he might fall. And the fact that he doesn't have any harness ups the stakes and the ante quite a bit. So there's a reasonable critique that it's just not ethical to do this. And there's a worry that, well, now that we've done this and Netflix, I'm sure, got. I don't know what their viewership numbers were, but they were pretty substantial. Now we're going to have more of this kind of thing. We're going to have more stuff where people are risking their lives live on camera for streaming specials. But I understand that critique. I don't agree with it, though. I think. I think it's good. I think we need examples of men who are willing to take extraordinary risks in pursuit of greatness.

Ben Shapiro (11:37)

So Matt is totally wrong about this. Okay? The reason that Matt is totally wrong about this is not because you don't need men taking risks in pursuit of greatness, but you have to define greatness in actual concrete terms. So if you're going to have people risk their lives to, say, discover a new continent, for example, which is Matt's typical example at Columbus, totally agree. If you're talking about people risking their lives in order to create new scientific discoveries or open new venues for investigation on behalf of humanity, like going to space, I totally agree. If what you're talking about is we have to have people do incredibly dangerous things to show that people can accomplish and do incredibly dangerous things on a sort of broad level, then I disagree, and I. And I strenuously disagree, because it turns out there are lots of things that you can do in life that are unbelievably dangerous and that you have a slim chance of survival, you could theoretically train to have a better chance of survival. But I'm not sure that that necessarily means, quote, unquote, greatness. Now, again, he is great at what he's doing, and it's unbelievable to watch, and it's extraordinary. And I see why Matt saying what he's saying. I mean, it can be inspiring, right? You can be inspired to be the best that you can be as long as you're not inspired to, you know, try to climb a rock with your bare hands and die. But it seems to me that there are better examples of quote, unquote, greatness than putting your life in a position to be taken from you and in pursuit of greatness. And I'm just thinking to myself, what do you mean by greatness again? Doing a thing that is very difficult to do. Like, there are lots of things that you could do that would be very difficult to do that Matt would not consider to be greatness. I would assume. If you put your head in an oven and you just kept turning up the temperature and you were able to survive at a particular temperature, then I assume that's a form of greatness. I don't know what would make it so awesome, really. Like, are you stretching the bounds of human endeavor? If the idea is that you're discovering new ways to do a thing that will then be applicable to more of humanity, I think that that's right. But I don't buy the idea that humanity's scope and scale have been broadened by this. Again, I think you can find it personally inspirational that a person can do a thing like this, but I think that on a moral level, is it worth the potential cost? Absolutely not. Well, that was terrifying to watch and raises serious life and death questions in a way I didn't think that we were going to in that video. You can leave your comments on it below. Lifelock how can I help? The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.

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Ben Shapiro (14:16)

What do I do? My refund though. I'm freaking out.

Alex Honnold (14:19)

Don't worry, I can fix this.

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Emily (14:25)

I'm so relieved.

Ben Shapiro (14:26)

No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way.

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