Jim Morrison Skied Everest’s North Face In The Wake Of Two Tragedies: On Grief, Risk & Moving Forward After Unimaginable Loss

Jim Morrison is a ski mountaineer and the subject of “Everest: The Other Side,” the new film from Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi. A year ago, he accomplished an impossible first: skiing Everest’s direct North Face from the summit. Jim has also endured unimaginable loss – his wife and two young children in a 2011 plane crash, then his partner, Hilaree Nelson, in a 2022 avalanche on Manaslu. We discuss grief, fear, the legacies of the people he’s lost, and why loss isn’t about living without the people you love, but bringing them with you. Grateful to Jim for sharing from the heart. Go hug your people. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://stories.rivian.com/richroll Birch: Get 27% Off Sitewide👉🏼⁠https://www. BirchLiving.com/richroll⁠ WHOOP: Join now and get one month free👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:21Speaker 01

  If you make a mistake, if you slip or you fall at any point on the descent, you're going to the bottom. There's zero question of what's gonna happen.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Trailblazing mountain climber and skier Jim Morrison.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  One of the greatest ski mountaineers to ever live.

• 1:36Speaker 04

  The first person ever to ski down the north face of Everest.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Most people's relationship with Mount Everest are people ascending from the south side. The north side is an entirely different situation. Not only were you one of the few people to make it to the summit from the north side, but you're the first person to then ski down from the summit. You have a unique relationship with all of this. And you've suffered unimaginable loss in your life.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  In 2011, my wife and children, all of them were killed. Something happened in the sky and the plane fell out of the sky. And in an instant, my entire world just evaporated. I did have a desire to fall in love again. And when I met Hillary, we fell deeply in love.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  The whole idea was that you and Hillary were gonna do this on Everest together.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Hillary started skiing shortly after me and started a small avalanche and swept off her feet and swept out of sight from where I was. And I've replayed that scene in my head thousands of times. I do think there's value in understanding that you can continue after the worst happens.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  The north face ascent of Mount Everest. Most people's relationship with Mount Everest, what they see on television or movies or on social media, are people ascending from the south side, the South Cole, right? That's where you see this long line of people, this queue of people going up. The north side is an entirely different situation. And that's what we're here to talk about, among other things today. Because essentially, almost exactly a year ago, you accomplished this impossible first, where not only were you one of the few people to make it to the summit from the north side, from the China side,

• 3:42Speaker 00

  but you're the first person to then ski down from the summit. And this is a situation that is difficult to get your head around. And I remember when it was happening and reading about it and, you know, kind of seeing photographs and stuff like that and thinking that I understood what you had done. And then I watched Everest, the other side, the documentary that we're on, you know, we're on the precipice of it being widely released and realized like, I didn't, I didn't understand this at all. I had the same experience with Alex, cuz I had Honald on after he had Free Solo at El Cap, but before the movie came out. And I hadn't, you know, I hadn't seen the movie. And he's explaining it to me and it's like, yeah, I got it, I got it. And then I saw the movie and I was like, I don't know anything, you know?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  And this is a very similar experience. I mean, it's just absolutely mind-boggling and astonishing.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. It was a, it was truly a magnificent effort by a whole lot of people to, to get there and to pull this off. And something we worked at for the better part of a lifetime. And it feels pretty great to sit here today and, and have those memories with me and have the success of, of pulling it off and bringing everybody back safely.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  I don't know who said it, but there was some painter, some artist, who was once asked, like, how long did it take you to paint that painting? And the response was, my entire life. And I think it's, this holds true for you as well. Like, this, this is the result of a lifetime relationship with the outdoors and with the mountains. Technically, it was about a six-year, like, formal quest to achieve this goal. But it's the summation of a lifetime of experiences in the outdoors.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I came home and I showed some of the footage to a really small, close group of friends at a birthday party a couple nights after I got back. And my friend Jeremy Jones called me the next morning and he said, it dawned on me this morning while I was thinking about what I saw. I think he had a similar reaction to you. Like, he didn't quite understand it until he visualized it on film. And he said, I think this took you 50 years to, to put this together. I don't think you could have been ready to do this any sooner in life. And that really stuck with me and I think is, is true. I, I was ready mentally in some ways. I was ready physically in some ways. But there's so much experience you get of putting these expeditions together,

• 6:16Speaker 01

  building teams, going into the mountains, studying wind and weather and avalanche and all the hazards. And being able to have the, the experience to aggregate everything into a successful ascent and descent is pretty, is pretty cool to take 50 years to put that together.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  The team aspect of it can't be underestimated. I mean, there were a lot of people, you know, in, in support of this achievement. In the movie, you see like these tents and they're set up like military operations with maps and all kinds of people behind the scenes. You have the film crew, of course, but you also have, you know, just so much logistical support, like all this attention to the weather and the patterns and, you know, people going up to set up camps in advance. And, you know, the execution of this is one of the most complicated things that you can imagine. And I think that that is in contrast with people's idea of Everest,

• 7:19Speaker 00

  where like, oh, you sign up and you go on these expeditions. You're some, you know, private equity guy and you pay a bunch of money and it's kind of all sorted for you. This is a very different thing. Like, when you see the north face and how dramatic it is, it's very different from our association with Everest. So, what is it about the north face? You mentioned all these cooliers and like, what is a coolier? Like, for the average person who just has a very casual relationship with the world's tallest mountain, what is it that you wanna say about attempting to summit from the other side?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Well, the north face is just, it's an entirely different version of the mountain. It's, it's the shadowed side, it's the steep precipice. It starts at 20,000 feet at the bottom of the face, at the bergtron, and it goes straight to 29,000 feet. It's ultra-direct from the bottom to the top. You're not cruising around and going up the ridge in the longest, sort of easiest, circuitous way to the top. You're going the most direct route on the, on the mountain. And there's something really special and really aesthetically pleasing and really desirous to, to climb that route and for me to ski it.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  And yeah, to put that team together to, to do it took a lot of hard work. And I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to every single person involved. And we built that team over many, many years. And, and really, we failed twice trying this. And we really found success by building the dream team. That I was sort of given the, the opportunity and the demand of, okay, this hasn't worked in the past, what do we need to do different? And I said, we need to build the team, the dream team. We need to do it like this. And that's what's gonna make the difference. And ultimately, it was clear as day. It was the ultimate team that put it all together and kind of put the yellow jersey on me at the beginning of the race

• 9:21Speaker 01

  and carried me through a lot of the, the difficulties. And then I was able to kind of stand up out of the saddle and race to the finish and ski back down, to put it mildly.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  The grades are insane. Like, I think Jimmy, at some point in the movie, says, you know, we're talking about like 51% grade or something like that, like the steepness with which you're ascending, especially from, where's the third camp, like at 23,000 feet, from like 23 to 29? I mean, it is a sort of El Capitan kind of ascent.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very, it's very steep. And in reality, it's like 45 degrees. And it's steeper in places. But what's unique about it is it's just so unrelenting. And it's, you know, the face is a couple of miles wide, and it's almost a couple of miles tall. So you're just in a more vast, broader, bigger, longer landscape than anywhere else I've ever been. And if you make a mistake, if you slip or you fall at any point on the descent, you're going to the bottom. There's zero question of what's going to happen. You're, there's nowhere to self

• 10:41Speaker 01

  arrest, nowhere to get lucky and stop. You're, you're going to the very bottom of the mountain.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's called, you call it a no fall zone?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  No fall zone. A euphemism for one misstep and you're dead.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's, that's something we've, we've termed over many, you know, many different things. You traverse across above a big cliff, or you hike across above a big cliff. If you can't fall there, you could, you could fall to your death. So we call it a no fall zone. And often that's, there are a couple of no fall zones on a, on a climb or a ski or an adventure out in life. But this is a broader version of the whole thing is a no fall zone.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  For somebody to do what you do and have been doing for a long time, you have to have a different relationship with risk, death and loss. But even amongst the climber, the climbing community, you have a unique relationship with all of this. And this is the real story, like the, the feat is the opportunity to talk about, like, your journey through life to get to this place and to make this decision, to make this ascent, because you've suffered unimaginable loss in your life. I wouldn't wish it upon anyone, what you've endured. It's been, you

• 12:01Speaker 00

  know, this unbelievable journey to places most people won't go. So that's really what I want to talk about with you today. I want to understand that experience of loss that basically, you know, kind of upended your life back in 2011. So maybe start there and share that story.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Uh, well, in 2011, my wife and children were down here in Los Angeles, visiting some friends. And my wife was flying from Long Beach to Henderson, Nevada, to spend some time with a friend of hers, whose husband was going, undergoing some cancer treatment, and just to support her. And in the course of that flight from Long Beach to Henderson, Nevada, there was, she was flying a small airplane, a Cessna 210. And something happened in the sky, some tremendous catastrophic air mass. And the plane fell out of the sky and all of them were killed. And I,

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I was skiing in Palisades Tahoe, and I hit a piece of ice and hurt my ankle. And I kind of limped down to the car. And I called Katie, looking for her support and her guidance. And she didn't answer the phone. And I started driving and I called her again, and I called her again. And, and then I finally looked up her flight track. And the flight track had just kind of gone off the radar, so to speak. And I, eventually, just before I got to my house, I called the FAA, which is sort of akin to calling the police on your wife, saying, she

• 13:56Speaker 01

  must have done something wrong. She's not where she's supposed to be. I need your help.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  And I got a call from a friend shortly thereafter, who was in the air traffic control world for part of his life and had friends there and had reached out to people. And he called me and he just said, they're Jimmy. And I answered the phone. He said, they're gone. And I was, you know, I said to him, what do you mean? I, I didn't understand what, what that meant, or had never been able to visualize that. And in an instant, my entire world just evaporated. Everything that I'd worked for, everything that I cared about, was literally just gone in an instant.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  And I was completely broken by it and didn't know what to do and didn't, started simply just trying to understand, am I going to evaporate? Is this all, like, am I going to just fall to dust on the floor here? And I took a breath and I took more breaths. And eventually I drank water and, you know, kind of like you're on an endurance run, going the longest distance you've ever been at your worst spot. You just start trying to focus on how, what do I need to do to keep, keep existing? And I went through a really long, traumatic period of

• 15:25Speaker 01

  time where I was crushed. And day by day, I put one foot in front of another. And I had a profound moment, they highlight this in the film, where I was on the laundry room floor one day, and I looked out the window, and I saw these beautiful pine needles on a tree. And I was screaming. I was in like a blood curdling, just broken state. And I looked at those pine needles with this beautiful blue sky behind them. And I just visualized that moment for a second. And I appreciated that beauty and nature. And I used that to sort of help me get back on

• 16:10Speaker 01

  my feet and stand up and take a step forward. And eventually I walked up my driveway and I walked into the street and I gave myself tremendous accolades for just stepping over that crack in the asphalt. And I've just been carrying that

• 16:28Speaker 00

  One step further.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Forward, one step further at a time.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  How old were your kids when this happened?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  My kids were five and six. Hannah, my daughter, was five years old. And Wyatt, my son, was six years old. I was skiing with them a couple of days beforehand. My son, at six years old, skied through the fingers at Palisades Tahoe, which is this proverbial, like, really hardcore ski run underneath KT22. And, you know, we were just getting to that age where I was doing things with my kids that, that I love to do. And we, you know, I'd called my wife the night before. And we talked and I, I was pinching myself. And I had told her about this deal

• 17:21Speaker 01

  that I just landed with our business. And I felt like we had the world by a string and we were going to live this really fruitful life. And our kids were growing up to be magical little people. And, and then it all came crashing down.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  You mentioned the pine needles as this sort of catalyst into

• 17:52Speaker 00

  some form of self-care action, which is a symbol for nature writ large, right? Like, this relationship with nature that you have as a, as a healing modality. It's one thing to look at the pine needles and divine some degree of inspiration to get up off the couch and go outside. It's another thing altogether, to have this relationship with the world's largest peaks. But essentially, it's the natural world that animates you. And I want to understand the

• 18:33Speaker 00

  profundity of that relationship, because I think this is at the crux of the conversation around the movie. Like, what is it about these ascents and these mountains that move you to take these risks and put yourself in, in positions where life and death are, you know, that's a, that's a very real gamble? Like, what are you getting out of it? Hillary speaks to it directly in the movie. But what is your relationship with that?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I think at its essence, the true core of what I'm, what I experienced and what I'm chasing is, is presence and is being focused on now and what's happening right in front of us. And what I began to learn through this grief journey was that the past was the past and there was nothing I could do about it. It was, it was over. And no matter how much I lied on that laundry room floor and screamed and cried, it wouldn't bring them back. And yet I had this incredibly beautiful moment right in front of me that

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I was just ignoring and I was choosing to stay stuck in that awful devastating place. And I had to force and choose to take a step forward and go into that nature. And for me, the communing with nature, the stepping outside, the going for a walk in the forest or climbing up a mountain, days or weeks or months later, just became the greatest source of healing and forward. And eventually that led to bigger and bigger endeavors and bigger challenges. And like many of us, we, we put a big target of a, a big race or

• 20:26Speaker 01

  a big mountain or a big endeavor on the board. And then training for it becomes the journey and all the work that goes into it helps us stay focused on what we think is important in the world. And for me, that time outside, walking uphill with friends and with Mother Earth, it brings me closer to my kids and lets me think about and have times to, to connect with my wife and Hillary and lots of other people I've lost in the mountains. And just has, has given me that opportunity. And, and I think I've used the term, it's

• 21:08Speaker 01

  a forced presence. You know, I, I spent a lot of time reading and learning from Eckhart Tolle. And my guess is his take on, on what I'm doing in the mountains would be like, okay, you could just be present without going to the mountains. That's, that's someone who's not as good at the sort of spiritual practice. They're having to do it, they're using something to force them to be present. But for those of us that aren't as good at the spiritual practice that, that I think he's done such a good job of helping people see and, and realize and learn about. Going for a walk or climbing a mountain can be

• 21:48Speaker 01

  a really, or going for a run can, can be really helpful. And for me, it's just kept me alive, kept me going, given me the opportunity to do my best work.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  The enlightened view is that everything is available in the present moment and your facility to understand that is, is a, is a function of just how present you are in the moment. Like, which is all there is actually. You know, there's this story about the past and things that have happened and what it means. And there's the time that we spend thinking about the future, ruminating. But essentially the only thing that is real is like right here and right now. And when we're right here and right now, everything's

• 22:39Speaker 00

  fine. But we are wired to not be present in the moment. And we seek out these experiences to connect with the ineffable or something that is divine, that can provide us with a wisdom around like, what does life mean? And what does it mean to live a meaningful life? And, and you know, what is my purpose? And Hillary, in the movie, when asked this question, basically says, when I'm on these mountains and I'm on the summit of these big peaks, you're in this liminal space between the material world and the spiritual world.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  And that allows her, it's almost as if there's this thin layer between like God and man. And in that space, there's a sense of connection that is just not available in everyday life.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Hillary, Hillary referred to that as, as the netherworld. And she asked me before I went to Everest in 2018, I was going to climb Everest on, on the north side of the mountain via the standard route up to north side. And she said, what do you think about when you're up there and when you're close to the netherworld? And we had a whole conversation about it. And I went on this trip and I was up high at like 28, 28 and a half thousand feet, climbing ahead of my team by myself. And you truly feel like you can reach through to the other side. It's just almost this invincible line, all

• 24:22Speaker 01

  of a sudden, that you feel like if you just were to walk over there, you'd fall to your death. Or if you were to sit down and get exhausted, you might perish. And you're existing at this sort of edge of, of what's possible. And I had this incredible spiritual moment with my children where for like 30 minutes, they were with me. I felt their presence that I had been searching for and dreaming about and looking for and praying for for many, many years, hopeful that they would come out of the forest on the other side of the river when I was in some really remote place, or when I was looking out at the ocean

• 25:05Speaker 01

  at sunset, I would see them on the other side of the waves. I would get some sign that they were okay, that they were, that still existed in our spiritual world. And for 30 minutes, they were with me, they were laughing, they were encouraging me. And I felt them so strongly, like I'd never imagined. And it was, it was an incredible situation. And I, I connected with Hillary about it afterwards. And, you know, I think she's talking about something that just has always been for her, this desire to get back to

• 25:46Speaker 01

  that, that edge of, of, and I think you can do that in all sorts of aspects of your life. And it's really just surrendering to some of what we spend all our time. Like, I gotta get there. I gotta do what's next. I gotta go. I'm in the line at the grocery store and I've got to hurry up and get through the, through this and get home and get the to-do list done. But if you just stop and slow down and focus on being present, you might notice something spectacular and you might, for me, I, I had moments where I was in the grocery store and I looked at a child in someone's arms and I started flirting

• 26:28Speaker 01

  with a 12-month-old child and got them to smile and just found a tremendous amount of joy out of that moment, mixed with this like awful reality that I'd lost my children. And it was those moments that started to help me realize like, I don't have to suppress the memories of them every day. I don't have to push them away. I can live in those moments and celebrate who they are every day. And doing that in a remote place in the Himalayas at extreme altitude, in many ways is easier because you strip away everything else and you get to focus on just what's right in front of you. And maybe it helps

• 27:12Speaker 01

  you connect with being present.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Well, also realizing you can have a analogous experience in the grocery store flirting with an infant.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  You absolutely can.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I've been trying, you know, for, in so many acts of my life since 2011, to connect with those moments and to do the, do little things in my day-to-day existence that make my life better and make other people's lives better.

• 27:45Speaker 00

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• 30:10Speaker 00

  The Hillary that we're talking about is the late Hillary Nelson,

• 30:17Speaker 00

  your life partner, who I had the good fortune of knowing just in the tiniest bit, I had her on the show many years, you know, many, several years ago.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  When does she enter your life? How many years after the tragic airplane accident?

• 30:36Speaker 01

  The accident was in 2011 and I met Hillary in 2015 on an expedition to climb and ski Makalu, the world's fifth highest peak. I think I met her in the Kathmandu Airport on the way to this expedition and we became fast friends climbing the mountain and she got me to open up and talk about things that I hadn't spoken to other people about and just spending time talking about my wife and my kids and life and what I'd been through in those four years just really

• 31:15Speaker 01

  propelled me a step further and she shared some own, some of her life stories and tragedies that have happened in her life that we kind of commensurated about and, and then we just started looking at the mountain and the conditions and snow and ski lines in a very similar light and realized we, we shared a lot of similar passions and after that trip, we many months later started dating and started going on adventures together and we just kind of went on a tear and found a

• 31:55Speaker 01

  ton of success, did, did some incredible things in the mountains and shared a lot of joy in the mountains and a lot of, yeah, amazing moments.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Prior to meeting her, did you have a sense that you would be capable of allowing yourself to fall in love again?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think in the months and years after losing my family, I, I, I really wanted to recreate what I had. I wanted the future and I was always yearning for the future. How am I going to get that back? How am I going to find someone and meet someone and have a family and, and recreate this, this thing? And I, and I did a lot of work to realize that nothing ever happened in the future. That's to quote Eckhart, like he, he told me that face to face. Nothing in his sort of Yoda voice. Nothing has ever happened in the future, ever.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  You met him, you had FaceTime with him.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I did. I, I really enjoyed his book, The Power of Now, and I read it and listened to it. And then I went to Vancouver and met him and sat down with him and spent some time with him and,

• 33:16Speaker 01

  and the way he said that to me, like, and it was just so clear and simple and factual to him, really made an impact in that it's just never happened, Jim. It was the vibe he was giving me, like, stop trying to manifest the future because you really just have what you can do now. And it just made a really big impact on, on how I started moving forward. And I did have a desire to fall in love again. And when I met Hillary, we fell deeply in love and I built an incredible life with her and I feel really fortunate for not just doing that once, but, but doing it twice. And

• 34:01Speaker 01

  I'm sort of entering that third chapter of my life now where I have every intention of going back out in the world and sharing what I have with someone and building a life with someone and,

• 34:15Speaker 01

  you know, hopefully living happily ever after and sailing off into the sunset.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  The predominant theme in the movie, and you articulate it at the end, is that what you have learned from navigating such tremendous grief and loss is not that you have to learn how to live without them, it's about bringing them with you. And I mean, that's a profound insight and I'm sure you had to climb a lot of emotional mountains to arrive at that as your, as your kind of life philosophy, but I think it's powerful. And I, I think that the achievement of, you know,

• 35:01Speaker 00

  summiting the North Face and skiing down is essentially just a platform for you to be able to share what you've learned from these extreme experiences, not just physically, but emotionally, like, because if you look at life as a waveform, like you're just, I mean, you have these insane peaks and valleys, like, it's just like, it's going like this, like the thing is just jagged as all get out. A normal person has, you know, gradual kind of dips and ebbs and flows or whatever. It's like, you're just compressing the waveform, but nobody gets out of life alive and everybody at

• 35:42Speaker 00

  some point is faced with grief and loss. We all have these experiences. I know Oprah kind of contextualized this to you as, you know, we all have our own Everest, right? And so the wisdom that you've gleaned from your life and from these adventures, you now have this opportunity to like, share that in service to other people who are navigating their version of what you have endured.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I really relish that opportunity. I think it's my, my purpose here at this point. I, I sat down a few days after my wife and kids passed away and I had a memorial service and I decided I wanted to get up in front of everyone and say something. And I sat down to put words to paper and at that moment, all I wanted to do was end my own life. And I had this profound moment where I just decided, either I'm going to end my own life, I might as well just do it right now,

• 36:51Speaker 01

  or I'm not, and I'm going to try to do my best and I'm going to try to live my life in their honor. And I think that helped me get through that moment and that through that day. And I've taken that forward and I've been through so much loss and so much grief, but in sharing that story with others, sometimes I meet someone who I've had an impact on and it, and it does feel valuable and positive. And so I hope this film and eventually a book that I write will help people figure out that there is a way through their, their own Everest story, whether it's a tremendous loss

• 37:36Speaker 01

  or about with depression or about with sickness in their, themselves or their family. And we all are going to go through these highs and lows. And I think you can say that mine are more dramatic than others, but when you're in the, when you're in the gutter and you're in the bad place, for whatever reason it is, it's, it feels pretty awful.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Your pain is your pain.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's often just such a small turn of the dial to take you from, I'm mad and I'm upset and I'm depressed and I feel terrible to, I'm great and everything's wonderful and I'm having a great time. It's like somebody can make the right joke and create the right vibe and all of a sudden you're having a great time at the party versus I don't like it here and I want to go home. And I think if we can figure out how to infuse ourselves with more of what brings us happiness and joy and gets this, gets that volume turned up a little bit, then.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  We're all going to live a better life. And for me, a lot of that is just stepping out of my normalcy and going outside and taking a walk with nature and meeting new people and doing new things. And I think there's, you know, so much of us feel like we have to do something dramatic to get us out of our life situation. But it doesn't start with the hardest part of the climb at the top of the mountain where the crux is. It starts with just deciding you're going to go on that journey and starting to pack your bags and starting to plan for the expedition. And eventually you step over the crack at the bottom of the face. And eventually you make your first step up the

• 39:28Speaker 01

  mountain, but you don't climb through the crux until you get there. So you don't have to focus entirely on that. You have to plan for it, but you don't have to do the hardest part of the journey all at once. You just have to get started.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Hmm. There's a sort of moment of levity in the movie when you and Jimmy are in a tent and you're like, and I think, I don't know if it was you or Jimmy, like, you're like, I thought this was supposed to be fun. Isn't this supposed to be fun? You're like, no, the fun part is afterwards, when you tell the story, but you know, it illustrates this point of this being this huge journey. And if nothing else, like, the movie affirms this theory that I have that like 90% of climbing is like, people packing their gear, like, the amount of gear is insane. I think I made this joke when I had Emily Harrington on. All you guys do is like, spread all your shit out all over the floor and you just spend hours and hours like with these ropes and the carabiners and like packing all

• 40:25Speaker 00

  this stuff. And, you know, that's, there's a, there's a, like, there's something ritualistic about that.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. We obsess over making sure we have just the right amount of stuff, maybe a little bit extra, but concerned about how much weight it is. And should I take this? Or should I do that? And some part of that is just putting yourself in the mindset of getting prepared to go into this, this battle you're going to have with the mountain and putting on your own armor to prepare yourself for the, you know, when we get like six feet off the ground, everything changes. You get more than 12 feet off the ground, all of a sudden, you feel like you're going to get really hurt or really worse if you are to fall. And we have to put ourselves in a mindset of how to prepare for that, that

• 41:15Speaker 01

  fear that's going to come into us and how we're going to move through it. And for Emily, that's having just the right tools to stick in the crack and the right rope and the right outfit and the right earrings and all the right things.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  What is your relationship with fear? When people ask you, like, how do you manage your fear? How do you channel it? How does it show up?

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, I think my relationship with fear is, I've learned to use the fear that comes in my, it's something that's going to happen. When I was at the top of Everest and I was looking at what was in front of me, I was very afraid of the consequences and of making a mistake or having something not go the way I had planned it to go. But I use that fear to say, wow, this looks really icy. And this next turn looks really dangerous. For this reason, the snow is not smooth. And there's a rock right there. And you better be perfect with that. I use that fear to help me understand, you have to work

• 42:19Speaker 01

  really hard to make this next turn. And the part of the fear that says, oh, my gosh, you should panic and you should run and you should hide. I don't find a lot of benefit from that. So I just sort of bifurcate those two and stick the other one, let it go out the window and focus on the part of fear that helps me be more focused and more in the zone and more alert. And the part that says you should run or fight or flight, I try to just turn off and not pay attention to. And if I am paying attention to that fear, if I do feel that anxiety fear, or that shortness of breath, or that, then I know something's gone horribly wrong. And that's, that would be a place to just stop

• 43:04Speaker 01

  and say, I either need to calm down and get rid of that sensibility, or, or just stop altogether and say, I can't do this anymore.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  I would imagine that, that ability to compose yourself in that way just comes with the amount of experience that you've had in these high-risk environments.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And I've had that sense where that, that anxious fear is creeping in and I'm able to push it back and overcome it. And I've had that sense of just know that, that isn't helping me. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna listen to it. I'm gonna listen to the part that says, watch out for what's next, or you're going to regret it.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  So you fall in love with Hillary. You guys are building a life together. You kind of inherit her sons from her previous marriage. You're helping to raise these boys. And you're going out on these adventures. Not only is she your life partner, she's also your partner in adventure crime. You know, like, you guys are just going on all of these expeditions as a, as a kind of joint unit. And what you share is not only this love of the mountains and being mountaineers, but it's the ski aspect of it that is unique in the mountaineering community. Like, you're not just climbing these mountains. The whole thing is like,

• 44:29Speaker 00

  we want to ski down them. So talk about how that differentiates you from how people think about climbing. And what is the experience of skiing from the summit of a gigantic peak?

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Well, I guess I'll just tell a story to talk about that. And we climbed Denali, Hillary and I, and we went there with the desire to climb the Cassine Ridge. I really wanted to climb this, this route on the south side of the mountain called the Cassine Ridge, which is 9,000 feet long and technical and, and just has some reasonably hard rock climbing and ice climbing and snow climbing. And when we got there, the mountain was in really tough conditions for that route. And this Park Service said that three parties had done the Cassine that year. All three of them had been rescued. Could you please pick a different route? And our team name was called Cassine or Bust. And Hillary and I

• 45:26Speaker 01

  said, well, we'll figure it out. And we went up on the mountain. We looked at the mountain and we saw really great conditions for skiing. And we ended up climbing to the summit and skiing the Mezner Kuar, which was kind of a dream run for me at the time and something I'd been chasing my whole life. But I convinced her to go back and to go around the other side of the mountain and climb the Cassine. And we did, did that and finished that a week later, which was amazing and really fulfilling. But from the summit, we had to walk all the way back to 14,000 feet. And I just, I'll never forget, her, her attitude walking into camp was like, that was so dumb, walking downhill. Like, that is so hard.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  It's physically just really hard to walk downhill. And she just would prefer to ski downhill. So we, we both, I think, our whole lives looked at mountains as like, we want to go up the challenging way. We want to climb the biggest peaks on the planet. But I've always looked at those photos and tried to say, well, I don't want to climb this route. There's nowhere to ski. I want to climb this route because there's a pleasing and aesthetic way back down on skis, which is just fun and challenging in its own way.

• 46:41Speaker 00

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• 47:22Speaker 00

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• 49:22Speaker 00

  So hence commences a series of expeditions where you guys are going to like gigantic peaks and skiing down. You do a series of these. And at some point, you hatch this plan that you want to do it on Everest. And you know, the movie chronicles this phase of your life. The whole idea was that you and Hillary were going to do this together.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Uh huh. And I think it's something both Hillary and I looked at long before we met each other and knew about and followed and read about the north face of Everest. And then in 2018, we finally achieved the goal that we had both had of climbing and skiing Lotte and the Lotte Kuhar, which is right next to Everest. It's the fourth highest mountain in the world.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  And we skied this sort of dream run of ours and got to the bottom and crossed the Bergstrand and high-fived and pinched each ourselves and couldn't believe that we'd pulled it off.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Had anyone ever done that before?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  We were the first ones to ever do it. And it was for us, a true achievement and the best run we'd ever done together or separately, I think. And at the same time, at that moment, and like often happens when you're out on a big expedition or a big life project, you sort of dream up the next one. And we were, there was one thing left after that, and it was the north face of Everest. So we started talking about it and sometimes nervously talking about it because it's a much bigger endeavor. And after Jimmy came back from Antarctica on a expedition, he was on with Conrad Anker and others, he was really high on life and

• 51:13Speaker 01

  really high on the mountains. And we sat down to hear his stories about climbing Olvotana. And we pitched him on this idea of, we want to go to the north face and we want to ski it. And he'd been there himself trying to do it in 2003. So he was very familiar and intimate with what it was and what it would take. And he just kind of had one of those moments where he, I think, said, Oh, my God, this is, this is going to happen. And then we just started, started down the path, originally planning to climb and ski it in the fall of 2020. And then COVID shut us down and the mountain was closed and the world was closed.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  And we delayed until 2021. And year after year, we just sort of delayed the trip.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  So in 2022, you and Hillary go to Manaslu. And the idea there was like, this is sort of a training mission, right? Like, we got to get our ski legs going and let's climb this insanely high peak and, you know, get to work on practicing so that we're ready for Everest.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Hillary really wanted to, to get up high again and, and stay fit and stay connected to what it physiologically would take to acclimatize to a high altitude. And didn't want to have so many years between the last time she'd been at extreme altitude and Everest. And so we went to Manaslu to climb and ski that. And it was really Hillary's trip. It was her, her passion and her desire to go. Of course, it didn't take much to get me to leap at the opportunity and, and go with her. And we climbed through some pretty

• 53:01Speaker 01

  adverse conditions and made it to the summit. And we started skiing and Hillary started skiing shortly after me and started a small avalanche and was swept off her feet and swept out of sight from where I was. And I started a

• 53:26Speaker 01

  new chapter of my life at that moment, trying to find her, trying to rescue her, trying to get to her. I was at that moment certain that she was okay and alive and had stopped herself somewhere down the mountain. And I skied down to try to, to get to where I thought I could see her. And I was above a bunch of cliffs. And I knew if I went any farther, there was a really good chance I would perish, which I was entirely willing to do and wanted to do. I wanted to get to her so badly. But I made the decision that I can't do that because if I, if I die, I won't be able to help her and she needs my help. And so I

• 54:11Speaker 01

  climbed back up and skied off the other side of the mountain and looked for a helicopter. And I guess I want to stop and share that in that moment, I, when she slid out of sight, I didn't want to be in the mountains anymore. I didn't understand why we were there and why we would take this risk and how we could be in a position where she potentially wasn't coming home to her children. And

• 54:45Speaker 01

  I had a real difficulty with the decision we'd made to, to come there and to do this. And spent days searching for her and putting together the best team I could find in Nepal and worked with the best pilot and some incredible Sherpa friends to go find her and rescue her. And ultimately, we found her deceased and dug her out of the ice and were able to bring her body back and have a cremation ceremony for her. And I think bring a lot of closure

• 55:27Speaker 01

  to her family and her friends and her community and the world, which was tremendous and awful and

• 55:41Speaker 01

  positive and transformational at the same time that we were able to find her.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  I had no idea that this event had been captured on film. And it's quite arresting to actually see this happen on a screen. Not only do we see the, the sort of snow shelf just basically dislodge and take her with it down the side of the mountain, we see this like pyrrhic choice that you have to make. Like, am I gonna go down here and, and, and truly like most likely perish in search of trying to recover her? Or am I going to back up and take a moment and try to enlist the help of others and do this more responsibly?

• 56:31Speaker 00

  And the pain on your face. It's, it's a lot to watch for anybody. But now, it's on a huge IMAX screen. What is that like for you to have to relive that?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  It's pretty awful to, to be blunt.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  It's something I clearly wish never happened. And had I known it was going to happen, I would have said, no, let's go to the beach. Let's do something different.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  But it did happen. And I think

• 57:19Speaker 01

  the filmmakers decided to share it as part of visual understanding of what happened. And, you know, we spent six years of our lives with cameras around us. And Hillary and I made the decision that we were going to do this. And we agreed to be filmed and we got used to it. And it became normal and commonplace. And I wasn't sure what they were going to put in the film or not put in the film. And it's certainly part of the film that I don't want to watch over and over. But I've replayed that scene in my head thousands of times. And when you go through a traumatic event and you're part of it, you, it's part of,

• 58:05Speaker 01

  certainly part of what I do is just visualize that situation and replay it over and over and over and over and try to figure out how you can affect a different outcome. And the fact of life is, you can't, you can't change what happened, no matter how many times you obsess over it or cry over it or replay it. And I have done that enough times that I'm now able to watch it. And it doesn't totally bring me back to an awful place. And

• 58:40Speaker 01

  I think what I have done is I tried to, to accept what's happened to Hillary and I'm trying to carry her forward with me. And I have over time gotten to a place where I feel like she's there with me. And I had a tremendous interaction with her on the summit, where I felt like her, her spirit and her soul and herself was there supporting me and encouraging me and that she was proud of what I was doing. And I feel like I can channel that grief and that negativity and the hard, hard stuff that I have over time

• 59:23Speaker 01

  packaged up and decided to carry with me. And I can, I can access a little bit of it right here, just to sort of answer your question of how is that, how you, how do you do with, with watching your, you know, your life partner, your loved one perish right in front of you? It's, it's not something I would wish on anyone or want anyone to experience. But I do think there's value in understanding that you can continue after the worst happens.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  After the worst happens a second time?

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  A second time. Yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  I would think for almost anyone, that's a point of no return. To have to weather that again, it's just, it's unimaginable, dude. You know, I mean, I like.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  How do you get up out of bed after that?

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Well, I, I have the unfortunate

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  experience with losing your, your wife. And I'd spent

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  11 years waking up every day and going through life every day, knowing what it was like to lose your children and lose your wife. And I tried to tell myself that some of that experience were going to help me through this unimaginable event with Hillary. And

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  there were things that I had learned

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  that helped me through those many years. And there were things that I tried to not repeat, like I, I stayed away from alcohol afterwards. I, I don't think that really helped me diving deep into a bottle of, of liquor and narrating myself, maybe helped ease some of the pain the first time around, but being a bit older and I just made the decision, okay, I'm not going to do that. And there were little things that I did that made it more

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  possible, maybe.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  But then there were all kinds of things that just were new and different and I didn't expect and wasn't prepared for and hit me in a different and unique way. And I've just been treating every day like it's a, like it's a new day and it's a journey. And I'm just doing my best to, to get through it. And, and also

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  celebrating this one and unique life that we get to live as a gift. And I'm happy to be here. And I feel really fortunate to be living the life that I'm living. And

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  I have tremendous and beautiful things happen to me all the, all the time. And if I didn't, if I didn't allow those to happen to me, I think I would just be living in this broken and crushed and depleted place. And it's really just a,

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  you know, my life is much like an endurance run. And there's this thing in, in endurance sports, where like, if you're going a long way, don't worry, it'll change. If you're feeling really good, you should probably take in some calories and drink some water because you're, you're not going to feel good later. And if you're feeling really bad, you should probably take in some calories and drink some water because you'll get better. And I've taken that approach to my life in many ways and just know that I'll come through some of the troughs. And I spent a lot of time talking to my therapist about my life feeling like a stock chart, like the ups and downs of the

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  S and P 500. And if you just, if you're an investor and you know that eventually it's going to come back, you don't always sell at the bottom and, you know, panic, you, you realize things are going to move forward.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  With the vast vacillations of your stock market ticker or waveform, or whatever you want to call it, that's set against this sort of unspoken assumption that your life would be better if that curve was flattened, like, and, and you're living a more balanced life. And, you know, Hillary, the movie is like, talking about getting the balance question and saying she wants to punch people in the face around that. Like, that's a whole other side, side question. But

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  one difference in these two tragic incidents in your life is that, is that what happened with Hillary was very much a public thing. Like, at this point, you're public figures. And she is this just absolutely beloved person, not just in the climbing community, but she touched so many people that are way outside of this community. And, you know, I had the good fortune, as I said earlier, to have met her only once. And, you know, maybe we spent a half a day together. But that's one of the podcasts and experiences that, that, you know, I reflect on the most of the thousand that I've

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  done. Like, she just was that kind of person. So for people that aren't familiar with Hillary Nelson, like, what was it about her that made her this indelible figure that inspired so many people all over the world?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Well, she was, she was beautiful in mind, body and, and energy. She, she carried a incredible smile. She was incredibly fit. She was really strong and independent. And I think, at the same time, really, really humble and really kind and really desirous to just uplift the people around her and, and live a good life and live a really independent, driven, passionate life. I think,

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  she said something about having a passion as a compass in life being really important. And I've latched on to that. And I think that really defines who Hillary is. And she picked something that she was really passionate about. And she just drove forward with that, that passion as something that helped guide her in all her ups and downs. And she had a tremendous impact on people all over the world. And the outpouring of, of love and support for her after she passed away was truly remarkable. And I,

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  I think that she, you know, has helped so many young women and men decide that they can, they can go do their own Hillary moments. And I don't think she quite understood the impact that she had on you or on the world. She was just doing her best. And as you see in the, in the film, just trying to not get frustrated with, how do I pack my bags and finance and prepare for this big expedition and this big goal in my life and yet get my children fed and off to the bus on time? Because every single day at home is a new challenge of just getting them awake and clothed and out of the house and off to school and all the things in between that. And I think she juggled

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  a lot in her life and really did it with a lot of mastery. Although, looking into herself, she was constantly like, am I, am I good enough? Am I doing okay? I'm failing at, at all these parts of my life. But in reality, she was, she was crushing it and succeeding.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Because of the way that she lived her life, she became sort of an avatar for this broader discussion around the tension between like adult responsibility and fidelity to authenticity. Like, she is a mom of these, you know, adolescent teenage boys. She has responsibility to make sure that they're taken care of. But she's just this person who, in order to be her, has to go and do these things. And how do you square that equation? And lots of people have lots of opinions about this. On the one hand, like,

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  she is the model of the, the strong woman who's not going to be told that she's got to be in the kitchen. Like, she's going to go do Hillary, come hell or high water. And not only is she going to go do it, she needs to do that in order to be able to show up as the best mom that she possibly can. On the other side of the equation, like, how dare she do this? Like,

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

  How irresponsible of her to put herself in these risky situations and create a scenario in which these boys no longer have a mother.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Hillary struggled with that internally a lot.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Jimmy, at her memorial service, called her Athena in Gore-Tex. For people that don't know who Hillary was, she was, she was kind of Athena in, in an outfit, ready to go climb a mountain.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  And she was incredibly strong and powerful in her own right. And she got there through incredible parents, a really strong childhood where she was brought up in Seattle and spent a lot of time on a boat, had a lot of time by herself, had an older brother and older sister, a lot of independence and a lot of freedom outside, but also grew up in this sort of normal patriarchal society and didn't, didn't want to be that woman in the kitchen, didn't want to be that person that needed to listen to, this is what you do and this is who you are.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  And she was really driven to show herself. And I think in many ways, to her, more importantly, show her children and the world that you can have a passion and you can live your passion while you still exist in our society and on our norms of being a mother. And, you know, she would go on these expeditions and she'd come back and she'd read the comments about how dare you, how dare you as a, as a woman with children, go do something that were, that would risk you not coming home. And she was dumbfounded with the fact that the men that were on those trips that didn't

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  have children weren't receiving the same comments, or that did have children.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  They did have children, right, right, right.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  And she just, she just couldn't understand, why are we as a society so focused on, there's only, you know, the woman has to be the one that needs to stay back and needs to stay behind. And I think she endeavored to have a, a true balance in, in that, even though balance is hard. She would go to these mountains and she would go up along the route and she would find somebody that was struggling and she'd say, let me carry that for you. Let me put the tent in my pack. Let me put the group, group stove in my pack. Yes, I are also have this other group gear.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And she would historically typically have the heaviest pack, man or woman, on the expedition. And that's why everyone was so blown away by her strength and her fortitude in the mountains and her being in front still, breaking trail for the Sherpa and for me while we're going up Montesloo to the summit. She's in the front of the pack, breaking trail. And then she would come back to Telluride and she would be thrust back into being a mom and going to drop off and interacting with her friends in this normal, everyday world of, of life at home.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  And that balance was, was always hard for her, but she did her best to walk a fine line through it and the manner that she thought was the right way to live.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  It's sort of the version of the special operator who returns home after, you know, spending time in a conflict zone and, and has trouble acclimating to daily life. Like, I would imagine returning from some of these extraordinary expeditions, there is a version of that, that, that you, her, and just your fellow climbers experience.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you come back from this, you know, edge of possible existence, pushing yourself in a really inhospitable world and environment and pushing yourself really hard physically, mentally and, and doing it with a team that you endow yourself to, you commit to, and you know you put your lives in each other's hands. And then you, you're back home waiting in line for a sandwich and you see the girl at your sandwich shop and she says, how's it going, Jim? And you're just like, well, I, I just had this crazy event in my life and now I'm trying to re-assimilate into normalcy.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  And we call that PTSD, which is post-traumatic stoke disorder.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  It's hard and it's, it's also wonderful. You know, I think we're really fortunate to be able to push ourselves in a way that

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  takes mundane life and makes that a challenge and something worth living for and takes the opposite of mundane and makes it a challenge and worth living for and tries to force us to, we try to force ourselves to find a balance in all that.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  In the wake of Hillary's passing, you now inherit this role in the boys' life, a different type of role. The boys appear in the movie, their screen time isn't very much, but I think they're really the centerpiece of the discussions that are happening around the movie. This relationship that Hillary had to her sons, your responsibility to these boys and the decision that you are going to continue in this quest to summit the north face of Everest and, and ski down, which is somewhat understandably, I suppose, difficult for the average person to get their head around.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  Like, haven't these boys suffered enough? Why would you put yourself in a position for them to have to suffer this again, potentially, especially after you witnessing Hillary's passing and having this realization, like, I don't even want to be on this mountain and, you know, like, having a, having, having your, like, relationship with the mountains be rearranged by that traumatic event?

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Well, when we lost Hillary, I felt compelled to do whatever it took to go as far and as hard as I could to find her and to find her, her body.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  Which you did.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Which I did. Then I felt really, I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility of what to do next and how would she want to be taken care of in the afterlife, which resulted in us creating this cremation ceremony. And then I came back to Telluride and I figured out, what, what do I do next? And I wanted to plan a memorial service. And in that thought process, in that journey of what to do, throughout the whole thing, my overarching goal was those boys, was how do I find, I wanted to find her for her

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  parents, I wanted to find her for her brother and sister, but more importantly than anyone else was for those boys. And then I wanted to celebrate her so that the boys could see that impact that we talked about that she, she had on the world that they didn't truly know and understand. To them, she was just mom. To them, she was mom that dragged them up mountains and made them go on mountain bike rides that they didn't want to go on and, you know, dragged them through the mud, so to speak, to build some character in them.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  And they loved it and they hated it. And it was sort of a typical relationship with mom. But to the world, Hillary was this Athena-like woman who broke barriers and moved mountains, so to speak. And I wanted the boys to know and understand that. And so I started trying to plan just a celebration of her life where I wanted people to speak about who Hillary was to them. And I think that involved, you know, really influential, amazing people that had spent time with her in the mountains, that involved senators, talked about how she made things

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  change in, in climate and in Congress and talked about the tremendous impact that Hillary had left on all of us. And then next became day-to-day life of how can I keep that going forward?

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  A friend of mine, Timmy O'Neill, said at her memorial service that people die twice. They die when their soul leaves their body and they die a second time when spoken word or stories about them cease to be told. And I took that as a direction and a demand to celebrate who Hillary was. And going back to Everest became a endeavor where we could tell the full story about who she was and share that with the world and put it on, finish this film that we were working on and we were going to finish either way.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  It was either going to have one outcome or a different outcome. And I just felt like it was the right and honorable thing to do was to try to keep going. I thought she would want me to do that. And I sit here today proud of what we did and I totally think it's fair and understandable that some people will watch it and disagree and some people will be threatened by the concept of taking those risks and pushing yourself that far. And why would you do that? And shame on you.

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  Well, you've certainly, not only did you succeed in the goal of summiting and skiing down, like you've succeeded in creating new interest in her story. Like, we're sitting here today talking about it. This movie's going to come out. Everybody's going to be talking about her. So she lives on in that way. And she lives on in that you committed to seeing through this thing that you were going to do jointly with her.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, and I did that through the selfish act of climbing a mountain and skiing down. And if, if, there's, there's no other way to describe what you do with your free time to fuel your body and fuel your mind and go out a little farther than you were on your last run than saying it's selfish. You leave your family behind, you leave your kids behind, you leave your community behind to go spend those time putting in those miles on the trail and climbing your proverbial Everest.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  It is selfish. So I don't want people to think that I don't think that it is such a, such an act. There's lots of things we do that are selfish. And there's also things that we do that are of necessity, like getting up in the morning and eating breakfast and eating, fueling your body is a necessity.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  And then on top of that, the high risk aspect of this, that people struggle to truly understand, we were talking before the podcast and, and I was saying that part of that is premised upon a misconception around the certainty of life. Like, life is uncertain, there's no guarantees. And we sort of say that flippantly while also believing that if we live our lives in a, in a kind of traditional way, that we then are in control of the future in a way that we're not, that is truly an illusion. And so people like yourself and Alex Honnold and, you know, these sort of like individuals

• 1:21:50Speaker 00

  who have a different relationship with risk are confronting for the average person who is living their life in a way where they're trying to create security through predicting the future and this sort of illusion of being able to control outcomes. What's going to happen tomorrow? Well, if I do this, then I'll be safe tomorrow. And your life is a testament, I mean, it's in the context of taking tremendous risks, but your life is a testament to this uncertainty. Like, things happen, they're bad, but we still have to move forward, get up every single day. And the best way to honor these people who have passed that we love is to bring them

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  with us and to live the best life that we can, rather than ruminate or become a victim or isolate from community and humanity and nature.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. I think I've, I've been given the, the opportunity to move forward with life after tremendous loss and I've taken it as, as just that. I could say woe is me every day and say, I wish my kids were here. I wish I was going to Parents Weekend, like friends of mine are in their respective colleges this weekend. Or I could wish I still had them, like the two infants I held in my arms last night, a couple of friends that had baby girls recently.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  But I, I don't have them here and I didn't make a choice to not have them here. I make a choice of how am I going to spend my time and how am I going to move forward? And sometimes I take unnecessary risks. And there are, there are those that don't think unnecessary risks are worth taking. I was walking to a rock climb recently and this is somewhere I go often and there's a tree that fell down across this ravine of granite. And I kept looking at that tree, thinking I could walk across the tree instead of walking down into the bottom and back up.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  But it was, it was like a teeter totter. And one day I walked across it and it, it teetered until the other end of the tree hit the rock on the other side and stopped. And then I was able to continue across it. And it looked a little sketchy. It looked like maybe you would fall off if, if you did it. And I was walking up there with a friend and I did it with her and she said, that's an unnecessary risk. She walked around and I, and I was like, wow, that is a really good name for a rock climb. I really like that. And I've thought about it a lot since. And I'm a person that likes to take unnecessary risks. I realize that in of myself and I don't think there's something inherently wrong with that.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  I wasn't endangering anyone else. And I like pushing myself a little bit, whether it's in this conversation with you or in walking to the crag, instead of doing the, the same normalcy of what I normally do, I like trying to find a faster way across that little ravine and shave a few seconds off and do a little more.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  You just can't help it.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  It's just who I am.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  I saw some panel discussion and it was you and Alex and Jimmy, I don't know what event this was, I was watching it this morning. And there was a question around like motivation and drive. And Jimmy was like, Jim doesn't have an issue with this. Like, you just wake up every day like with this feeling like of, I have to do something, you know, not necessarily crazy, but like I have to push myself and, you know, where is that edge and what am I trying to accomplish today? Like, you, you don't have a problem with that. Like, you just wake up, animate it to do that.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  No, I'm just, I'm an achiever. I, I took the, the, I, there's a book called Strength Finder and I, I did that many, many years ago and I, if you fill out a form, you do it online, you take a test, it tells you what your strengths are. And there's a book full of all these great, wonderful attributes that all of us humans have. And my number one was achiever. And, and what I read in that description of what achiever means is you start every day at zero. No matter what you did yesterday, you're starting over today, you've got to achieve something, you've got to get there. And it's, it's a blessing and a curse, but it's just how I, how I am. How am I going to maximize what I'm going to get out of this day? And when someone turns to me and says, it seems like you're just trying to like figure

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  out how you can fit more into your day and do even more and get more out of it. Like, when are you, you're driving me crazy. And I look back at them like, what else would you do? Like, if we can get this done and go for a run and have a wonderful dinner where we meet some new people and have a great time and do something we've never done and before we go to bed tonight, that seems good to me. I mean, if we can solve cancer and help somebody across the road and do something else, I'd much prefer to do that than, than less.

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  I'm with you. I'm wired the same way. But I think Eckhart Tolle might have choice words for that.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:27:18Speaker 00

  You know, he's a guy, it's, it's a Zen Cohen, because you want to wake up excited about life and you want to chase things and achieve things and build things and be of service to people and, you know, have that relationship with life that is invigorating, while also at the same time recognizing that stillness is actually the place to be. And if that impulse to climb the giant mountain is being animated around a story of whatever happened to you when you were a kid and this misconception that that summit is going to make you feel a certain way about yourself or fulfill a need or like a hole in your

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  soul, then you're kind of on this hamster wheel.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  That you can never get off of. And the exit ramp to that hamster wheel is the path that Eckhart is talking about. And these things have to kind of live in tandem with each other.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  For me, that's what I've found they have to do. He, not only does he talk about stillness being important, he talks about standing in line at the grocery store and seeing that infant and flirting with her and getting the joy out of that. And he talks about not...

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Sitting in your backyard, watching the seagull come and land perpetually. There has to be a balance in that. You can't just say, okay, I'm going to focus on accepting all the good in my life and I'm going to sit outside in my backyard, which has this incredible view, the place that I live in Lake Tahoe. And I have been given so much by that environment and that sublime view that I have. And I've taken so much from being there and it infuses me with a lot of good things. And it's allowed me to slow down and accept and process and just be still. But for me, I can't do it perpetually.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  I have to continue to challenge myself and I have to continue to put myself out there in my society and not just go build a house in the woods and do nothing. That doesn't feel like the right path for me. And it is a constant struggle of, am I present or am I just trying to create a new problem to go solve?

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  After seeing Free Solo, I didn't think it was possible for Jimmy or anyone else to create

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  an adventure documentary that could compete with what he achieved in that film. This movie does that. The visuals are so arresting and I just watched it at home on my television. I can't imagine what it looks like in IMAX. I can't wait to see it in the theater in that way.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  On some level, it's a sports documentary. You're seeing avalanches. You get a sense of how precipitous the grade is when you're skiing down and how icy it is. And just one small move and it's over with. Like I just, my palms were sweating. I just couldn't believe how compelling and arresting and gripping it was. I really felt like I was there, like in lockstep with what was happening.

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

  It's expertly rendered and it's also a really difficult watch.

• 1:30:58Speaker 00

  And it's been interesting to gauge this early reaction to the movie and the conversations that are percolating up around it, even though the only people that have seen it to date

• 1:31:10Speaker 00

  are people who have attended these festivals. Venice Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto, right? Those are the big three. I'm a huge movie buff. I listen to all these movie podcasts. I have a favorite film commentator. This guy, Sean Fennessy, he co-hosts a podcast called The Big Picture.

• 1:31:30Speaker 00

  And he said,

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  "This movie looks incredible. It has pulverizing emotional moments. It's one of those movies like everyone was talking about at all of these festivals. Like you gotta go see it. It's a must see. It's a must see. I'm not going to tell you what happens, but like you have to see it."

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  He also said, "It's about people whose psychologies I don't understand at all. Like I have no idea what compels people to do the things that they do in these films."

• 1:32:00Speaker 00

  And I also had some frankly, like ethical misgivings about it. Like, should this movie even exist? While also weeping three times during the movie. And I think that crystallizes how many people are going to feel when they see this movie. There is this internal conflict. I'm seeing this arresting thing. It's so astonishing. There is something celebratory about you seeing this through and having this cathartic moment at not only achieving your goal, but as a symbol of reconciliation for all of

• 1:32:41Speaker 00

  the loss that you have endured, while also having these emotions around the risks that you have taken and the people who are in the crosshairs as a result of the risks. And it's not just you. The movie does a good job of going into the homes of so many of the crew members and the people and the Sherpas, et cetera, all of whom also have families, sometimes children, spouses, newly, there's a newly married couple. And you get a real sense of the wager that's taking place for not just you, but all of the people that have bought into you realizing this dream.

• 1:33:24Speaker 00

  And I think it's really difficult for the average person who, like we were talking about earlier, who has a different relationship with risk, who isn't called to the mountains in the way that you and Hillary are, to get their heads around this. So what do you want to say to that person who is feeling that internal tension and is unsure about how to feel about this film? And, and not just the film, but like the actual lived events that transpire in the film?

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  There's a, there's, that's a very profound and, and deep question that I think will take the rest of my life to fully think about how to answer. And I hope I will sit down and write a book about it at some point. But I think you said something earlier about

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  painting, painting a line. And, and at that moment, I thought about a climb and a ski that Hillary and I did on a mountain in India where she had been for 20 plus years trying to get to this mountain. This, and she carried a photograph of it and she'd made a life out of trying to get to this mountain and we skied it and we made the first ascent of it. And the next day it snowed and our tracks, the lines we painted on it were erased forever.

• 1:34:48Speaker 00

  Like a mandala, like the monks who do the sand mandalas.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I guess to some degree, this would be our passion and in our art.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  I feel compelled to do what I do. It's, it's not something that I'm making just a conscious decision to do, which certainly I am. I am a very fortunate

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  human being that has everything that I could need and want. And I can do what I want to do. And I, it's not lost on me that I have tremendous good fortune to put me in this chair. But

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  I'm just living who I am and I have, I have this calling and I've gotten good at it. I've found it along the way and it's, it's what I do. It's, and I don't really believe in you are what you do. I'm more of the, of the mindset of you do what you are. And this is who I am and I'm compelled to do it and I'm good at it. And I know I can do it. I knew I could accomplish this goal. And I struggled a lot with, should I keep going? Not only after losing Hillary, but after going there and failing and going back and failing again. And it was never lost on me that there was a tremendous amount of risk, not just for

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  me, but for the entire team that was there supporting me.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  But they wanted to do it too. And that's who they were. They were collectively joined in this effort to try to achieve this goal of getting to the top of the mountain so that I could ski back down. I understand it if you just can't look at that and find meaning in it or, or find hope or find joy or see the music that we're trying to play or, or appreciate the art that we're trying to make.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  And there'd be plenty of people that listen to that, that just poo poo it and disagree. And, and I think that's okay. We're all, we all have different passions in life and we're all here for different reasons. And

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  I've, from a very young age, was compelled to ski off the, off the peast, off the side of the run and felt a tremendous satisfaction of going somewhere that I felt like people hadn't gone before and exploring, whether that was in my backyard or in the game I was playing in my room or on Everest. And I think for me, that's provided a tremendous amount of drive and, and passion and self-worth. And I've tried to honor that and push it forward.

• 1:37:46Speaker 00

  You mentioned the art of it.

• 1:37:50Speaker 00

  And when you use that word, I can't help but think about Dean Potter and this Dark Wizard series that, you know, came out recently. Because he very much inhabited the artist's spirit in terms of his relationship with adventure and risk. And with somebody who

• 1:38:11Speaker 00

  who leveraged his darkness to achieve these amazing things in both healthy and unhealthy ways, like he was trying to reach some sense of purity of existence, like that was the kind of event horizon of of his quest. But while he was motivated by, you know, some really like challenging, emotional, dark

• 1:38:40Speaker 00

  inspirations, I see yours as very different. I mean, first of all, I would dismiss people who want to look at what you have done or just your relationship with the outdoors at large as some kind of ego-driven stunt thing. Like, this isn't like a Red Bull situation, you know, where you're just trying to do an insane thing for the laws and the likes.

• 1:39:10Speaker 00

  Nor is your motivation one that comes from, from that, like, really grisly, dark place. Like, I feel like your why

• 1:39:21Speaker 00

  is deeper and more profound. Like, you're trying to make sense of these things that have happened in your life. You're trying to reconcile your grief and your loss. You're trying to

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  connect with the divine or the ineffable, or try to have a spiritual understanding of your place in the world and come to or arrive at a place of peace with all of this, so that you can come down from the mountain and share for the benefit of others what you have discovered by dancing at the very edges of what's possible. Like, that's how I see the whole thing. And it puts you in a powerful position to speak to people who have suffered loss and grief and share some inspiration and some tools for how to process this and how to move forward and how to continue to engage with the beautiful, temporary aspect of being in a human body.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. I think that my my journey through climbing mountains and, and taking risks is certainly different than Dean Potter's in that I'm not coming from a place of darkness. I would like to think I'm coming from a place of light. And I've always wanted to do this. I've always been the person that I am today, since I was a small boy. And losing my family, losing my children, brought me back to the mountains. My life sort of came full circle back to pushing myself on skis and going uphill.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  And that, that came through the physical effort of, of enduring what it takes to go up, bringing, like, breaking me down to a more raw self, where I was able to connect with them in a better way. And I was able to break down my own barriers and choose to sort of package them up and take them with me. And I, I think I have this belief that

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  when you lose someone, you're draped in this incredible grief. And I've often said that it feels like a big, heavy, wet blanket that you put on yourself. And you don't ever get rid of it. You don't, you, it doesn't go away. It's not something you move past or move on from or get over. Those are, these are words that people, are you over it yet? Or are you good now? You learn to, to package that up and to take it with you. And I have this, this visual sense of that. And, and I've enacted it in the mountains by like packing that up into my backpack and putting the backpack on my shoulders and walking up the

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  sort of Siphias hill, rolling the rock up the mountain and going through the suffering, which has helped me, myself, my ego, get through to the other side and, and put one foot in front of another and do my best. And it is all those things. It's, there is selfishness in it. There's selflessness in it. There's ego in it. And there's a lot of things that I'm doing that aren't for the ego. I, I learned from Eckhart about the ego and that it's something we all have, no matter what. And if you can take it and put it in a box, and I've sort of visualized it right here on my shoulder.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  And if I know that that's part of what's going on in myself, then I can understand, okay, how do I make sure I don't let it drive where we're going? But I've just lived this life that I'm living to, I'm just doing my best along the way. And

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  I hope that I can sort of encapsulate some of the why for, for some people of how they can move forward after they had a hard day at the office, or they lost their, their cat, or they lost their children in an accident. And we're all going to lose things. And you said it earlier, and I think it's worth bringing up again. Nobody gets out alive. That's a Jim Morrison comment. No one here gets out alive. And I've, I've known that my whole life. I've, from a young age, embodied that spirit. And I think, I feel like

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  we're in this magnificent place called Planet Earth. And it's, it's the best it's ever going to be today. It's not, it's not going to get better tomorrow. We're, we're hurting our planet. We're degrading our world. I don't think our society is going towards better as a collective being. I think we should relish where we are and appreciate where we are and do our best to celebrate the good things in life.

• 1:44:35Speaker 00

  The day that you summited, it was just a gorgeous day. I mean, the sky was completely blue. At one point, I don't know if you were at Camp Three, you're like, oh, it's, it's going to go down to like 30 below tonight. So it's cold. But then, like, is it that cold during the, like, when the sun is shining? You guys have your gloves off, like? It strikes me as fairly temperate. I don't know if that's really what it is, but maybe like relatively. But the point being like, it was this amazing day. And it was literally the last day before your permit was going to expire, right? And Jimmy's like, why is it always this way? Like, you, you, you start this in August and you're in mid-October, right?

• 1:45:20Speaker 00

  By the, by the time you're, you're like summiting, the amount of time that you guys are up there and waiting for that weather window. But the ski conditions were absolutely horrific. I mean, it was just a sheet of ice. So the prospect of you skiing down that was total insanity. I mean, that meant less likelihood for, there, there weren't going to be any avalanches because it was locked in. But it just raised the risk element of the ski part to like 11. And watching you do that, and the way it was filmed, where you can really see and feel the grade and the risk had me on the edge of my seat. I mean, that's where it did feel like this sports documentary.

• 1:46:02Speaker 00

  Obviously, you succeed in, in this descent, which takes you four hours. And you emit this cathartic, like primal scream that almost feels like a bookend to the scream when you're in your laundry room. And you feel like you can't go on and you see the pine needles. Like, there's a thread from that moment to this moment that feels like something has been completed.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, I did really complete something there. I, I had a tremendous moment on top of Everest with Hillary where I, I felt like all of the

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  The effort that was put into this, all of the loss, all of the tears that were shed over losing her, for me personally. And our collective drive to, to do this thing, we, I felt like she was there with me and we saw it through and we made it to the top. And then I had to turn and

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  take off my extra big down layers and turn into a skier and stand on the top of Everest like I was at home and the sun was shining on me and I felt

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  pretty, pretty good in that moment. I felt like I had about five minutes before I'd have severe frostbite and I needed to get out of there.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  And I skied down and I was in the most present form I could be for those four hours. You know, laser focused on exactly what was right in front of me and nothing else. And I wasn't thinking about Hillary and I wasn't thinking about anything other than exactly what I was doing that whole time. And

• 1:47:49Speaker 00

  One tiny slip up and, and you're, you're going down to your death. Like, I think you say, like, you know, if I'm a half inch off in these turns.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really consequential skiing and really, really difficult conditions, 11 on the condition scale. And, and then I crossed the Bertrand at the bottom and I got to safety for the first time in that whole descent. And I just had this tremendous release of immediate connection to Hillary, immediate, like, we did it, we did it Hillary, we, we, we pulled it off. And I think what is really interesting for me personally, is looking back up at the mountain the next day

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  and the following day from our advanced base camp and staring up at this sort of giant proverbial goal and weight and difficulty that I was always trying to overcome. And I was always trying to build an arsenal and a team and go to battle with this huge, challenging thing called Mount Everest, in my case, but everyone has their own version of this.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  And I

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  thought about and dreamt about and visualized all the different things that could go wrong and how I could good, my best day and my worst day. And, and then after I achieved it, I skied down and I looked up at the mountain and now it's just this like, I see Hillary on the summit. I feel her energy and I feel this through line from the laundry room floor to today where I feel a sense of

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  peace. I don't think there's a better word for it with,

• 1:49:46Speaker 01

  I, I did my best to see this, this thing through and we pulled it off and it was really, really fun and really, really hard. And just like some of your career as a runner, you, you get a lot of satisfaction out of making it across your goal and getting to the finish line, but doing that with Hillary and celebrating her life and seeing her larger than life on the screen and watching her son Quinn see her for the first time on the screen and breaking him down to just incredibly raw and emotional state of just sobbing for

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  period of many, many minutes after he watched the movie for the first time and then talking to him about it afterwards and celebrating who she was and having it be something that, you know, it, it hurt him so much because it was so real and her, just her voice for him brought him back to who she was and that she's not here anymore. And I think we

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  are at a challenge of whether, when we lose someone, whether we ignore those feelings and suppress them and push them away so that we can get to breakfast and move through our day, or whether we take them with us and celebrate who they are. And

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  I think that Quinn's starting to find a balance through that on his own. And I think there's some positives that the film will help him do that.

• 1:51:26Speaker 00

  And the other boy, Grayden?

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Grayden. Grayden's a senior in high school. He's doing really well. Uh, he's in Costa Rica right now at surf camp, mixing school with surfing and

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  put in a lot of hard work in the first three years of high school and applied to school already and hopefully he's gonna, he's very, very studious and excited about what's in front of him. And both of the boys are doing well and I'm really proud of them. And they both live with their father full time when they're not in school and

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  I think they have a tremendous community around them, trying to support them and this

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  challenging thing called life with, with one parent and one great community and no, no Hillary.

• 1:52:16Speaker 00

  I'm glad to hear that. You're familiar with a certain kind of high altitude existence, but not the one that you're currently occupying, which is not a base camp. It's like the Venice Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival. Like you've, you've traded, you know, one extreme experience for another. Uh, and now you're on the kind of like press circuit with the film, like that is disorienting in a different way. Like, how has this experience been for you to be like doing this red carpet thing?

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  It's pretty wild. It's been pretty unique and different. And

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  I'm just trying to take it as a, you know, a, a new and interesting life opportunity and celebrate it where, where I can. And, and then I've also found myself back home in Lake Tahoe,

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  going to the same old cliff to go rock climbing with the same old friends I've had for multiple decades and turning to them and being like, there is nowhere else on planet Earth. I'd rather be on this Saturday than right here, right now with you guys. And it really has helped me

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  appreciate those, those rare moments where you're you know, having dinner with John Malkovich and talking to him about who you are and telling him about this film and then seeing him at the film the next day and he decided to go and then seeing him at a party afterwards and having him be so excited about what he got out of the film and how powerful the story is for him. And, uh, you know, oh, you're gonna be in Toronto. I'll, I'll see you in London. And it's been

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  Your new buddy.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  It's been fun to have those

• 1:54:05Speaker 00

  Wild.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Those interactions.

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  And it's also, you know, really not lost on me that I'm very fortunate and very proud of and appreciative of this community that's put their arms around me the moment my wife and children crashed and has done so much to, to help me through this, this challenge we call life.

• 1:54:35Speaker 00

  I'm fascinated by this friendship that you have with Oprah. How did this start? I mean, you were, she threw like a, like a big thing for you and Telluride at her, does she have a house there? Like at her house, you did her podcast. But from what I understand, there's like a real friendship here. Like she is very drawn to you. Like, how did that start? What is that about? Like, I want to know everything about this.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  Well,

• 1:55:01Speaker 00

  Whatever you're comfortable sharing.

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm very comfortable with, with the whole thing. She's just an incredible person and just has a, a way about her of, of lifting the room up, lifting the world up, lifting humanity up. And she's got a tremendous amount of energy and just her aura is spectacular to be around. And I'm, I met her essentially doing her podcast. I was asked to be on her podcast. I was, at the same time, I was going to be in Santa Barbara speaking in an event. And they asked me if I would do it on a Tuesday because they knew I was speaking on a Wednesday.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  And I said, no, I can't do it. And the reason I said no is because I wanted to watch, have her watch me tell my story. And then I would go to her podcast afterwards and

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  She leapt out of her chair and I pointed at her and I said, I'll see you tomorrow. And I went to her house the next day and did this podcast and she just, she's just a very real and special woman who I connected with and I love talking to and love sharing stories with and, and we both had homes and tell your ride. So she told me when she was coming to tell your ride and we had dinner and, uh, you know, just sitting at a table with Oprah Winfrey, sharing a meal was, is one of the true joys of my lifetime and hearing her stories about how, what she did in her business and how she built her business and what's, what's,

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  just how she works in her mind is, is, is truly magnificent. And I think she just spends every day trying to figure out how she can make the world a better place. One little incremental step at a time and she lifts a few people up and those people lift more people up. And I think she's just made a tremendous impact on, on humanity and to be around it. I, for me, it's just, it's a gift.

• 1:57:10Speaker 00

  It's pretty cool. Like she has gone out of her way, like she's, she's enamored with you. Like for, you know, like this is just such an interesting thing, you know, she's gone out of her way to like really celebrate you and celebrate this film and what it is, I think she, she understands what it is that you're trying to communicate. Um, and if you had to put that in your own words, how would you articulate that?

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  What I'm trying to communicate?

• 1:57:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Like what she, like how she's translating her understanding of you and the movie into something that is helpful and of service to her audience, because that's what she's a master at. Like she can take a story and then she can identify that kernel of truth or that important piece. And she knows exactly what to say to her audience to make it impactful in a positive way for them.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  Well, when I call her, she answers the phone, like on the first ring and she's like, I was just about to call you. It's, it's one of those sort of connections that feels divine in the universe. And I think she has a way of seeing the emotional arc of my life and my story and saying, this is important and this is something you need to figure out how to share. And she has a unique way of encouraging me to do it. Certainly as someone who I respect, and if Oprah tells me to do something, I'm going to do it. She's

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  helped me sort of see the, the path of how I can share that story and, and tell it and, and help people that have suffered loss or grief or are going through something really hard in their life and, and see a way to, to get through it and get to the other side of it. And I go a tremendous amount of gratitude for her. And it's, it's certainly, as you said, not just with me, it's what, what she seems to do in her day to day existence. I think she can just walk into a room and she just finds that energy. She wants to sort

• 1:59:23Speaker 01

  of find the kernel and uplift it. And, um, she's going to help me by pushing me to tell my whole story and, and write a book. And, uh, I really appreciate her for that.

• 1:59:37Speaker 00

  That's very cool. There must be moments where, for example, you're, you know, at one of these film festivals, seeing yourself on screen or you're, you know, hanging out with John Malkovich or whatever, and thinking like, how is this my life? Like there's a surreal aspect to it, but also this bittersweetness because of all of these things that happened to create these situations and the choices that you made to be able to be in this position. Like what is the interior experience of like celebrating the fact that like you've done these great things and you're carrying this powerful message that's helpful to other

• 2:00:18Speaker 00

  people. And now there's this amazing cinematic event happening around you while also recognizing that in many ways, it's a function of the, of, of this tremendous loss that you have endured.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Two edges of that, that I think about. Um, I guess I'll put the bad one first and then we'll end with Oprah. You know, going to these festivals and, and seeing the film for the first time and, and having this tremendous reception from a crowd and so many people congratulating you, congratulations. And it's, there's part of me that in a really tough way wants to say congratulations on losing Wyatt and Hannah and not having them here for all these years. Congratulations on all the things that I missed out on because they

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  passed away and it's hard for me. And then there's another side of it that is just really wonderful and really positive. And the reason I mentioned Oprah is I had a really tough weekend, the, the weekend that I showed the film to Quinn and Graydon. And I came back from that and I thought a lot about where I was at in life and what I had been through. And, uh, I had been dating a amazing woman and I broke up with her for other extenuating circumstances. And I was just in a really tough place on Monday morning and Oprah called

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  me and she wanted to ask me to do something. And she said, she realized the situation I was in and she said, I'm not going to ask you to do it. And I was like, look, I'll do absolutely anything for you. Tell me what it is. And, uh, through the course of our conversation, she, she read something to me and she told me something that I, I stood outside, I was in the Tetons in Jackson Hole and I looked up at the Tetons and I'm standing on this little deck and Oprah Winfrey's in her just immaculate prose is, is talking

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  to me. And I'm visually climbing, like my hands are on the rock of the Tetons and I'm infused with Hillary's energy. Like I feel like I'm completely connected to her and she's not gone and she's not unaware of where we are or what we're doing. She's right here and she's with me and I'm carrying her through this journey, through the highs and lows of this whole circuit that we're on. And it was just a really tremendous moment that I tried to say, okay, stop, put this in the memory bank and make sure you can access

• 2:03:25Speaker 01

  it later and take note of this magical moment you're in, which I've had the opportunity to do a bunch of times recently. And I'm just, I feel really fortunate for being in this position.

• 2:03:39Speaker 00

  With that awareness and in closing here, what is the message that, the distilled, crystallized message that you want to communicate to the person who is watching or listening to this, who is in the midst of grief and loss and trying to make sense of how to move forward?

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  I wrote this for, for Oprah. She asked me to, to write something down that she could give her guests at this parties that she threw for me. And I started with this idea of that for a really long time in my life, I've thought that losing someone meant you had to move on from them and you had to move forward without them. And that I've just come back to a place that I don't believe that anymore. I believe we can lose someone and decide to move forward with them. And if you just lost someone or something that's

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  so near and dear to you, it's really hard to visualize that today. But if you just take the time to day by day, put one foot in front of another.

• 2:04:59Speaker 01

  We get to a place where not talking about my children is not what I want to do. I want to talk about them. I want to bring them up and I want to carry them forward with me and I want to celebrate them here and every day into the future. And I want to do the same with Katie and Hillary and all the other people I've lost. And I feel like their energy is what has helped me get to the top of the mountain and helped me be my best and helped me make the ultimate ski run for me on planet Earth and in the best form that I could make it in. And I don't think I could have done it without

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  them. And that energy that they are fueling me with has helped me be my best self. And I guess I'd like to say to the person who's lost something, like, accept that today's hard and celebrate the small wins that you have of just getting through today. And sometimes that's just taking a moment to drink a glass of water and look out the window and keep going. And eventually, you can package that person or that thing up and carry it with

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  you and take them to the seashore and have them look out through your eyes at that horizon instead of only feeling like they need to come be the ones to save you. They can actually come with you and they can watch the sunset with you.

• 2:06:39Speaker 00

  Thanks for coming and sharing with me today.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:06:43Speaker 00

  It's a really powerful message. It's a beautiful film. It's a confronting film. There's going to be a lot of cultural conversations around the film. So I'm so glad to be able to sit with you and get your perspective upfront before all those conversations kick off. And I think that you are, as I said at the outset and throughout this conversation, are in this really powerful position to be of service to people who are enduring hardship right now. I think Oprah saw that in you. And I would encourage you to stand up and

• 2:07:24Speaker 00

  take the reins of that. I think it's a real, purposeful mission. It's a beautiful one.

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. I look forward to it and I'll do my best, one day at a time, to get through this journey of putting this big film out into the world and then taking all the packaging it all up and figuring out how to retell my story in a way that hopefully will help those people that have been through hardship and loss.

• 2:07:53Speaker 00

  And the film is just another full spectrum, you know, kind of experience, another episode in your, in your, like, you know, wildlife. Man, it's crazy. And there will probably be many more. So come back and share with me what you learned along the way, my friend. I really appreciate your openness and the time you took to share with me from the heart.

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

• 2:08:21Speaker 00

  Right on, Jim. Thanks. Peace.

• 2:08:33Speaker 00

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