Alex Honnold
Professional Rock Climber. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Alex Honnold is a professional rock climber celebrated for free soloing Yosemite's El Capitan without safety ropes. He also focuses on initiatives to bring solar power to underserved communities.
1shows
1appearances
18statements
5resolved
4supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Alex Honnold said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Honnold views feeling dread as a clear indicator of inadequate preparation
“For many, many years on my to-do list was, you know, solo El Cap, like amongst many other things I wanted to climb, but then I would drive into Yosemite, I'd look up at El Cap and be like, there is no way I'm soloing El Cap, like it looks completely insane, it…”
Honnold climbed previously unclimbed variations during his El Capitan free solo
“A few of the parts that I climbed had never been climbed by anybody before, because they just, ah, are off the normal climbing, like, they're not where you would normally go with a rope”
Honnold: Falling 100 feet in open air is safer than 12 feet
“Because, yeah, if you fall 12 feet and land on a ledge, you'll break both your ankles. But if you fall a hundred feet and touch nothing, it's totally fine. The rope absorbs the force, and you're just like, oh, wow, that was crazy, and then you keep climbing ag…”
Honnold predicts Free Solo will not trigger a wave of reckless climbers
“No, no, I really don't actually. And that's a common question. I mean, obviously, you know, there's the possibility for that to happen. In general, though, I think that rock climbing is actually getting more risk averse than it used to be.”
Honnold: Environmental care depends on meeting basic human needs first
“People don't care about the environment unless, unless they can meet their basic needs.”
Honnold: Ice climbing is too unpleasant and dangerous
“Well, I mean, no, I genuinely don't like ice climbing. It's cold. It's unpleasant. It's really painful. It's you know. Yeah, and it's dangerous. I mean, it is legitimately dangerous. It's that you have all these pointy tools, and you hit yourself with the poin…”
Honnold completed six groundbreaking free solos omitted from the documentary
“Over the course of the two years that we were filming, I did maybe six or seven free solos that had never been done before, that were sort of cutting edge, that were, you know, like, groundbreaking within the climbing community, but, you know, when they edited…”
Honnold: First climber to free solo all five Cathedral walls in one day
“The cathedrals, the mountains sort of on the south side of the valley, they're five. They're three big cathedrals and then two spires. But so it's like five giant walls. I free-solid all five of those in a day, which is the first time that had ever been done.”
Honnold free soloed a 1,000-foot wall after aborting his El Capitan attempt
“Then was not in the film is then I got on my bicycle and I rode over to this other thousand foot wall that was actually the first thing I ever free solid as a kid, basically that got me sponsored. Like the reason I became professional climbers, a route called …”
Honnold skips running and standard fitness routines, relying solely on climbing
“I don't run or, you know, do any normal fitnessy stuff, I mean, I just climb.”
Honnold: Rock climbing preparation lacks external time pressure and constraints
“The thing with climbing though is that you can just keep training. You can keep preparing. There's no time crunch. There's no pressure. There's nobody forcing me to do it one way or another. I was kind of able to work at my own pace and just keep working at it…”
Honnold: Free Soloing El Capitan Took Four Hours After Months of Preparation
“The actual climb all went pretty smoothly. It's just four hours of climbing, but, you know, it's freaking months and months to get there.”
Honnold: Setting the sub-two-hour speed record on El Capitan
“And then partner and I last summer did two hours, which is the speed record on the wall but we were climbing together with a rope and equipment and using all kinds of specific strategies to move quickly.”
Honnold earned $150,000 early in his career while living on $15,000
“My overhead was, you know, 10, 10, 15 grand a year. And I started making, you know, a hundred to a 150.”
Honnold: Donates one-third of income to environmental solar projects
“So I started donating a third of my income through the foundation to environmental projects, because I was like, this is still an absurd amount of wealth for me, you know, like, I don't need all this, like, I can give a third for sure, and so, when I started l…”
Honnold: Giving away wealth is easy when living aligned with priorities
“When you're living exactly the way that you want to be living, it's easy to give away what you don't need, because, you know, you're already on exactly the path that you want.”
Honnold: Most people who attempt to climb El Capitan fail
“The majority of people that attempt to climb El Cap do fail. They climb the first, you know, quarter of the wall or so, and then they come down because they have too much equipment, it's too slow, it's too hard, and they're worked.”
The other half of the tape: Alex Honnold's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Steph Smith 3Naveen Rao 3Justin Kan 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 7
2025 3 mentions in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Alex's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Professional Rock Climber | 1 | 18 | 80% 4/5 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |