History of HowNOT2 on Climbing Majority Podcast

I saw an Instagram recently about this guy. He was like, there's no truth anymore. He's like, if I want to look at the internet and type in and say, does coffee make me blind? He's like, I can find an article that says it makes me go blind. He's like, can I find an article that makes coffee, that says coffee, that makes my eyesight better? He's like, yup, there it is. Coffee can make my eyesight better. He's like, there's no ******* truth anymore. You know what you can't find online? Any real answer to how your gear works. Ah, that's true. And that drives me nuts enough to put it on the internet. Drives your entire show. And drives my entire show. So now you can. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm pretty happy personally that it did drive you nuts. Um, because I think you've been obviously a pretty awesome resource and, uh, you know, really stoked to be here and having this conversation, so, you know, yeah. Yeah. Honestly, it's, it's pretty sweet. You know, we're, we're here, we're with Ryan Jenks and I think, you know, unfortunately these days we've got to put the tag as like, AKA how not to, or how not to Highline, have you noticed that in your day-to-day have people come up to you and be like, Hey, you're how not to. Yeah. I debated on whether or not to say my name in the beginning of every video because you have new audience all the time. But when I realized I don't for a while, you're like that, you're the how not to guy, man. I don't know. I guess I am going to rebrand myself. I like the brand to be known more than my name is the brand is going to grow into this thing. I hope. Right. So, um, it's a good thing. Yeah. It's, it's super good enough. You're like, Hey, I'm like, yes, I am. Yeah. And what's funny is I did how not to Highline is the original name, still the Instagram because somebody has how not to, and, and I've leaned into more of the how not to, to, to rip, to offer myself to more of the other sports because I do enjoy the climbing, the caving, the canyoning, and those are the ones I'm focused on right now, but how not to Highline. I thought there was no questions in climbing. I thought I just didn't know the answers that people have already discovered. And there's been almost everything tested. I'll just roughly somebody's tested everything roughly somewhere. They just never put on the internet. They could be a gear company and it's just not in their best interest. Could be somebody who put in all the work to break it. And it's just, it's a lot of freaking work to distribute that information. Or they did make three very helpful articles and then stop. And it's hard to find that distribution is an art. And so consistently uploading something to how allows everyone to know, like how not to exist. And then you can find like, if the information's in that ecosystem, then you can find it, uh, the answer to your question that you have. Well, I think that we're in a day and age now where reading articles is almost a dying art. And if it's not a video, then most likely the general population is not going to digest the information. So it seems like you found a perfect medium to give the information that's lacking in today's society, especially with these extreme sports that are still relatively new. I, I, all right. So people like the, just give me the answer. Give me how many kilonewtons it is. And it's like, okay, I realized written forms to has a place. I'm a YouTube consumer. Like a lot. I did, you know, YouTube red means you can turn your phone, shut the screen off, put in your pocket and hear like, I listened to YouTube every second. I'm not using my brain in the day. If I go sweep something, I'm in YouTube's in my ear, which is funny because I spent a lot of time editing the visual aspect of it and never watch YouTube. But if I just want to know how strong something is, I don't want to listen to somebody saying, smash the like button and just give me the damn number. Well, I want to offer that. I don't want them to, but here's the caveat. They don't always get the context of how it broke. The number is sometimes so irrelevant. If this cam breaks at eight, but it broke at the wire because it went over the edge. I feel like that's more important to know than the number. You're not going to remember the number. Yeah. Also contextualizing the number of like, if it's an arbitrary number that doesn't even represent a real world ball, then you're debating marginal error. Right. So there's, there's so many things contextually and so many caveats. Um, and I think like a wealth and a wide body of information is such a necessity to, to understanding the complexity of the situation. And I do think it's really cool. I feel like you're the principle of your show, at least in my estimation is reverse engineering, right? It's a, we're not going to give you the answer. We're going to tell you what not to do. And then through that, you can discern, you know, what, what you should do. And I think that's a really cool way of giving information and consolidating like a body of knowledge, because you know, what you guys were saying earlier, where one person has three articles and then they stop and then this and that in the information age we're in now, where there's so much information everywhere, all of the time, you know, it's too much work to try and find, okay, this article is here and this, and this, and this. So there's having this wealth of knowledge in this kind of apex, which is how not to. Um, yeah, it's obviously just such a, such a crazy, awesome resource to have in this day and age. If that's what drives me to keep doing is people like it. I like, I, I break stuff for my own curiosity, but like I'll break stuff that I don't care about knowing there's a lot of people that nerd out about certain things and a lot, a lot of knots. I don't care. You just, I use the same five knots all the time, but I know some people really care and I'm like, okay, I feel like this is helpful to all the sports. Like breaking bolts is helpful to all the sports. The problem is I have one party trip. It's pulling it slowly to destruction and it can be, you know, like I can do it in a shock load manner and I'll get into the nuances of that and misconceptions there. And it's like, if I break 12 carabiners and one break stronger, but the gate was wonky the whole time, people go buy the strongest carabiner. I'm like, that is not the purchase decision you should be making. I like having carabiners with a very narrow nose. You can get more than one in a hangar or a gate that's usable. And they keep buying the stuff or, or wanting to talk up something that broke stronger. The butterfly not breaks at 16 kilonewtons, a figure eight at 18 kilonewtons, who besides me is ever getting at those numbers. I think that your channel breeds that. Not like it doesn't breed it. It's just like the way that people are digesting the information. It's like such an easy number for people to hyper focus on. And so you're going to notice those kinds of people who are making these purchase decisions simply based off kilonewtons, but I think there's a lot more people probably that aren't engaging with you that are making more educated. Oh yeah. There's, there's a whole 99% of the audience. I actually am just guessing what they're thinking. And in a lot of like trolls and stuff, like I realized that's like 0.1, not 1%, but 0.1%. And I have to take that in consideration. They're the loudest though. They're the loudest. And I mean, my girlfriend's constantly reminding me. And it's like, that is such a misrepresentation of the audience usually, but there's always a grain of salt. There's always some, there's always a grain of truth to everything somebody says. And so I try to listen to the trolls. And be like, they kind of have a point. They're just rude about it, but they kind of have a point. And that's how the channel has gotten better is because I'm willing to listen to like assholes, even though like they, they have, there's some meat to meat spit out the bones. And there's some people that are nice about giving me feedback, but I don't think people realize that I'm a, I have very limited resources and even more limited time because I joke, I'm a one and a half man show. I have a lot of help. And then the camera turns off and then the 80% after that I'm very by myself. And so when I only have so much time and want to consistently produce content, I am going to put out something that's not perfect and that's super good enough thing that I usually say about gear is my mantra for life because I am a at the end of the day, it's like this video is going to help people. You're going to walk away with more answers and questions. You can hear it. It might not sound great. And it's, I'm not going to go refilm it super good enough. But I think a good analogy that I've heard before, uh, was in the Falcon guides book of anchors. And it's one of the intro parts where he talks about an anchor that is good enough, um, is, is good enough, essentially, which is what you're saying. And then an anchor that could hold the gravitational force of Jupiter, I think was his analogy is not better than an anchor. That's good enough. You know, it's like, it's at a certain point, it's like when it, when you've reached, you've hit all the criteria and it's, and it's going to provide the value and it does what it's supposed to do. Um, you know, there is, and there's obviously a fine line you want to drive to be better and being a perfectionist. There's good things that come with that. And there's bad things that come with that, but ultimately we don't need to hold the gravitational Jupiter. So, yeah, unless you need to, and we'll show you like how to maybe accomplish that, but it's also, I love trying to share how to think about something. And so we're trying to add more meat after the break test of this is how you can digest these numbers. And then all of a sudden 30,000 people see a pattern where it's all breaking on the hydraulic side. And I'm like, no, you can flip the coin and get head seven times. I just don't think that sign means anything, but I think that you're, you're offering the meat, like we talked about before. And I think that's the most important part. Like, as long as you're always hitting the meat and offering something genuine, adjustable to your audience, you're going to continue to grow and be successful. And I think that's why you've come so far. It's because you're offering the meat and like you, you know, you sound, sound like you're a little harder on yourself in terms of the quality or the video or the audio. But I think that that's, it's like icing on the cake, you know, like as this channel grows and as you become more into this, this persona that you're creating in this channel that you're creating, those things will fall into place. You might have a crew, you might have, you know, sponsorships, you know, shout out to anybody who's interested in sponsoring, like get this guy, some, some crew and some audio equipment, you know, like the, the, but the meat is there and I think that's the most crucial part. So, so good on you for, for keeping that. I think we're always our own worst critics as well. Right? Like, you know, for myself as someone who is aspiring to get more into creative space and, you know, get into YouTube and these other zones, you know, I've, I've looked at your videos for quite a while and I've thought, wow, they're so genuine. They're so amazing. They're well filmed. They're well, analytic, analytically put together. The information is so useful. Like there's a million bars or boxes that you tick that I would say, like, this is an amazing creator who produces amazing content. So there's always like striving to be better, but also like, you know, we are our own worst critics and kind of turning around for a second being like, oh, actually I'm producing something that's like pretty ******* rad and awesome. You know, that makes sense. Right. And I don't think enough of us do that sometimes. At the end of the day, I know that it's pretty helpful. And the videos are because I consume how to make YouTube videos obsessively that they are today I'm confident in my edits. I'm confident in what I'll put out. If the audio is shit, it's like, yeah, it was an Iceland bro. Like, it's like, I'm not like insecure about like, I'm like you film on El Cap while you're like hanging on a shoestring. And like, I was in a cave literally mid free climb on mud, whipped out my phone, licked the lens and shot what I was doing. And I'm like, I don't care how that comes out because like the content's good. But I, when, wherever, when you, if you ever break something with me, you walk away with me with more questions than answers, though you have some answers. I want the audience to feel like they were with us, laughing with us, watching all this stuff, but like cut it down to where you're just like, get to the point. But like, we'll spend four hours breaking something, put it down to eight minutes. And some people are like, that was long. And I'm like, well, you've got to experience everything we did in eight minutes and, and you've got to engage with us in our reactions. And it's like why we chased the next rabbit. And at the end you have some answers and more questions because that's how science works. And people say, oh, it's fine. What you're doing isn't science. I'm like, no, the intro is the hypothesis. The body is like, whatever the five science principles are, I don't care. I'm telling you, we have data with information. We check it, whatever. At the end of the day, it's helpful. I would say that's absolutely scientific. It's it's, it's us discovering something. It's the, it's the high school version of science. And a lot of it is really hard to translate into something that's real life. You know, like you're right there on the front lines, like showing exactly what people can interact with on a visual level. And so it's much more digestible. It's, I think science in general, sorry. I think science in general, actually you, you'll get this more controlled cause and effect result depending on if it's like, you know, deductive reasoning. But there there's too many variables in the real world that you can't account for. It's like, you know, I think in one of your videos I was listening to recently, it's like a fallacy. It's like you have this theoretical mathematics that says X and then you actually go out and you put it in real world and all these variables have been introduced and all of a sudden it's why. And so that's something that's kind of about, we could call this like schoolyard science or, you know, like, like fun science, whatever you want to call it, right? When you go and test these things in these applications, it's like, well, you're not getting a black diamond instruction manual that says every single time you pull this cam like this, it's going to perform in this exact manner, but you are getting a super useful view into like, Hey, like there's probably this pretty sweet range here that I know, and there's this margin of error and now I'm like this much closer to certainty that I'm not going to like, you know, have a ground fall or my piece isn't going to blow or if it does blow. It's user error, rock quality, and not actually this device is going to break on And those are all like extremely useful pieces of knowledge that you need to be able to calculate in real time and make good decisions. Um, so, you know, I think it's like, it's just crucial. You know, the most shocking thing to me is a huge part of my audience are engineers. And I'm like, wow, I'm like, I'm a painting contractor, but okay. And, and, you know, let's say it literally in the instructions that say the wet ropes are weaker and nylons weaker. If you Google nylon as a property, nylon is weaker when it's wet. And you're just like, I don't, I just don't think that's the case. And I, and I feel a lot of responsibility now, especially as more people watch to not be wrong because too many people will just take us a YouTube video from a guy they don't know while they were watching it while they were pooping for 10 minutes and, and walk away thinking they know something more than the instruction manual, which is great if it's right. But at the end of the day, my Canyon buddy's laughing because like, it's like all the ropes are wet and we test it and we test static rope and dynamic rope and drop tower and slow pull and weigh in late gets really in depth. 30,000 views. I drop test a monkey fist that you're never going to use in life. And I get a half a million views or I'll leave out some details doing stuff on El Cap filming, how to poop on it, a million views. And you're like, I'm really, when I dive deep into a topic, I'm like punished because it is a little bit more boring, but I have to prove the thesis or the, the, the theory that it's the wrong. And if there, if there is a context that they're right, when I'm bailing, repelling, it can hold a killing intent. You don't have to be worried about it. I don't know who is leap climbing with a wet rope. Uh, maybe if you're ocean, you know, but that's free. Free. So I don't know who's climbing with a wet rope, like a saturated wet rope. That's not dry treated. Yeah. That's an, Oh, Oh, dry treated. You know, the difference between a waterproof shoes and normal shoes. Waterproof shoes take longer to dry out when they get wet. Same with the dry treated rope. You're just like, it does actually get wet. When we tested it, it held the same amount of weight of water. It took, it took longer. Dry treated ropes have a place, but when you hear dry treated, you're gonna be very disappointed repelling off El Cap and it's squeegeeing the water into your lap. So I think we've, we've gone off on an interesting tangent here. And I think in the beginning we talked about reverse engineering. So I think, why don't we reverse engineer you, Ryan? And why don't we take it, take a step back here and go, you know, like, who are you? You know, give a nice introduction of yourself and maybe we can start off of, you know, like, like, where did you grow up? How did this all start? What inspired you into getting into this and kind of take it back a step? A little autobiography here. Um, grew up in super flat, central California. I didn't discover Yosemite until I was basically 18, 19. And then when I got up those cliffs, like a hiker and you get near the railing and you're like, oh my God, and that feeling stuck with me, ran to the base of El Capitan, said, how do I climb this? And they said, go to a climbing gym. And so I did. And they had a slackline at that climbing gym in Pipeworks in Sacramento. And I discovered slacklining and climbing more at the same time because of the climbing gym. And then this really new cool thing came out called YouTube and Dean Potter was like the coolest thing on there. If you're into climbing and he was slacklining and climbing and real rock was a thing. And masters of stone was, I was discovering, it was already out, but like discovering these masters of stone things. And when people were combining climbing and face jumping and wingsuiting and rope swinging, you're just like, oh my God, this is the elixir to life. You're just like, I'm 20 and want to prove myself to the world. But I never got good at climbing. I got stuck at like Yosemite five sevens because trad climbing in Yosemite is, uh, you just like, you kind of don't fall. And I, especially when you don't trust the gear. Right. I came from, this is 2005, 2006 climbing was like falling still wasn't like mainstream. Okay. You're like, there's still a lot of gear fear, but then I'd like leaned more into the big walling stuff. And eventually I stopped that because I thought I was going to die every time because I'm only on these two personal anchors that say not for personal life support. And you're just really confused about like these CYA tags on gear. And so I actually more, more into highlighting, which was always like to me cooler than climbing because it was like more of a mind fog, more or less. And as soon as I learned how to rig it, which I had to reinvent everything, there was zero on the internet. When real rock pans over to Dean pot or free soloing, you pause a blurry two 40 P video and you're trying to study how they build an anchor frame by frame. And I didn't know there was a community where to reach out to them. Facebook's barely a thing at this point. No, like it was around, but like, Oh my God, Bobby told me about like, Oh, I found out mountain project. I'm like, what is that? Bobby and 20, I think 19 told me about mountain project. And because I knew where to climb at this point, I knew the people I was climbing with. I didn't need partners. I didn't need beta. And so I climbed 18 walls at this point. I've highlighted rig hundreds of Highline's established dozens of them. And I just gravitated towards Highline because it felt in theory safer because everything's redundant. You don't get on unless you know it's safe and you only feel fear because you're scared. No, there's no logical reason to feel fear. Um, and it was the safest form for how afraid you could be. And I liked overcoming that. So Slack on companies wouldn't touch Highline tutorials with a 10 foot pole, the liability, right? So I was like, well, I want to practice making a YouTube channel because I want to make YouTube channel for something else. And I was consuming three hours of YouTube a day in 2016. We'll get to that in a minute. Guys ahead of his time. And then I was going to, so I was like, you know what? I just name it. How not to. Don't don't take it too serious. That way. It's like the, the disclaimer is built into the title. That's literally, they have a thought process behind the channel. So how not to Highline because I was only going to do Highline. What is maybe 10 videos? I could probably explain anchors, getting the line pulled across, you know, stand up straight. How hard can it be? Well, as I started to scratch into the details, cause I'm like, oh, actually I think people need to know this detail. I found out nobody really knew the details. And then I would try to explore them on my own. And then that's, it's just a rabbit hole of where I am to 500 videos later. I'm finding out how little people actually know that are willing to talk about the gear. Because even the engineers have tested it. They always test more than UIAA is requiring. They know a lot about it, but at the end of the day, they don't have always a horizontal crack to go put it on and drop a 300 pound thing. They don't always have the time, energy, resources, or curiosity after two years of development to do these weird things with you, but as a Highliner space, net rigor, rope jumper, you're doing really weird things. And so we find that the absolute limit of gear because of this little niche, I kind of found myself in because I found I liked rigging more than walking. I like big walling because it requires me to touch my gear more than to actually put my fingers in the crack and climb. I like gear and I like knowing how it works. And I big wall today now because I'm not afraid of how it works. I'm not afraid when I'm rappelling that I'm going to die. I understand that where the risks are in rappelling, because that actually is where more people die than lead climbing, even though rappelling is more vanilla than lead climbing, you feel scared lead climbing. You should feel scared rappelling, but it's not because your rope's going to break. Your rope's as strong in a U-shape like that as a carabiner. The bolt is not going to come out. If you have anything that looks normal, it's a bomber. We were afraid as Highliners because we're putting on so much force because Dean Potter had like a winch that put 5,000 pounds of force on it. And he would break bolts. So we were putting four and five bolts into every Highline area. Per side. And we discovered that you don't need to do that. And now people are just two or three. Two's redundant. Three's overkill. Four's stupid. Even in sandstone, you don't need four. Just putting the right part of this is like, so lead less trace was that slogan to like reduce how much impact we are having. Rig all natural if you can, to where you're just using, wrapping a bolt or a tree, you're putting cams in. Oh, don't, don't click. Ryan, please don't ever teach anybody to rig Highlines on cams. We know you're like, do stuff like that. We don't want other people to do it. Well, they're fine. If you do it, right. Why are we withholding information? That's too much user error. There's user error because the resources out there are just lightly touching the surface because everyone's afraid of liability. Have you ever heard of a YouTuber being sued for wrong information? We can talk about, no, I've heard of this situation. Oh, talk about the crypto stuff. It's like you can get away with staying and doing more on YouTube than you can almost anywhere else. And it's good. I'm not AMGA certified. It's good. I'm not engineer. You know, got some association with an engineering firm. Nobody wants to be associated with the guy who's saying more or less. Whatever he wants on the internet, and it really concerns usually older men, 60 and up, sometimes Australian. It really concerns. Then I have no overlord over me. Other than just you get the shit trolled out of you. If you, you know, say too much stupid stuff, which I think is good. If I say too much stupid stuff. Oh, science. It's peer reviewed. Read the comments. You'll find out if it's right. Or you'll, you'll like learn how to think about what I'm doing. If you read 30 comments, you'll also learn that you'll probably hate humanity after reading about 30 comments. Well, I think, I think science actually has a massive replication error. I was just saying, I think science actually has a massive error when it comes to being like replicable, like a lot of studies, like people don't actually go out and reproduce the study to create validity in it. So it's like, maybe it's reviewed by people, but it's not actually replicated. Whereas there's a lot of things you're doing where you'll show a lot of consistency and a lot of replication, like in breaking forces or stuff. So that's actually something really interesting that you could, you could kind of boast, I think. Well, I show people exactly the machine I'm using, how it's pulling, what I'm connecting to it. You see the whole process. So you can either replicate or change one variable. And I try to show people how I build my break test machines. How to pull something with your car safely, how to use the line scale three in a way that doesn't break it. Because it only goes up to 30 kilonewtons. That's like the range it likes. You, you realize a lot of stuff breaks higher than that. And if you get all ambitious about, I'm going to do this thing I see on YouTube, like I want you to, I want you to put in a chart, share it with me and I'll include it on the blogs that are relevant, but you can replicate what I'm doing and see if it's working for you. I actually like trying to replicate other people's experiments where they thoroughly show what they did, do it as much as I can like them and see if I get similar results. And sometimes I get very different results, which is just a whole nother rabbit to chase, but it shows people I'll get on this and then I'll get off of it. Science isn't clean. There is nothing clean. That NBS number on this ice screw is a single number that does not tell you about how this thing works, how it interacts with the ice, that this breaks before this, unless it's in bad ice. It's, they try to isolate everything down to a single number, which I get it. They're standards. They need to do that. They need to do that, but you do not understand your gear because they stamped a number on that carabiner. Do you feel like it's obviously you're filling the void here, but do you feel like there's more manufacturer, uh, like it's more their job to be educating people on how to use it? Or do you think that it's appropriate to leave it to the public to either figure it out or to have people like you come up? If I was, if I had, uh, was associated with the gear company, I would approach the CEO as this is incredible marketing that people understand your product at a very intricate level, uh, because people are emotionally attached to their gear. When you fall in, if that thing didn't catch you, you'd be dead today. You hang that cam on the wall. You're like, you care about that yellow alien. You even hang the ones that break. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You care about your portal edge. It's the most expensive thing you spent money on and you can let people figure it out, but at the end of the day, it's actually in your best interest to really put me out of a job and make me not feel like I need to test it. And it's not necessarily their job and I can see why they avoid it. And a lot of gear companies are afraid of call it sponsoring me or giving me gear intentionally to test because I don't even know what the UIA standard is. I think there's a 10 millimeter pen in there somewhere. I think a hundred millimeters per second. I don't know. And I don't care. Yeah, that's not what you're testing. I love variables. They isolate it down to be comparable. So this ice screw can be compared to the other ice screw. And that's great. They need to do that. But I, I don't care. Gear companies have already tested this stuff. I'm not trying to shit test their testing to make sure they're, that's what the UIA for, that's what the CE stuff is for. They're being like legitimate companies are being quality controlled. But I want to know when this thing's tipped out, when it holds, I think everybody who puts that in where you should have a number four, they want to know if it'll hold. I mean, it sounds, sounds good to me. Yeah. I think, I think I'm sure there's some weird legality and liability issues to this that we're, you know, probably not super privy to that's probably affecting that and, and I also think just from a PR slash, like, you know, not understanding how the public's going to take something because, you know, even if let's say your ice screw example, you know, the hanger breaks at 14 K and the screw can hold, you know, way more, does that, like, what does that really mean? Like, is that a negative thing that it breaks at 14 K and when the average fall is going to be five K and like, you know, depending on how you'd want to view that, that's either just really good, crucial information or somehow viewed in some legality or negative aspect. But I mean, if you've done something to produce 14 K on, on a ice screw hanger, I mean, probably **** anyways, you know, I would assume at least, right. So I don't know what you've done, but like, it's, it's not even that relevant in some, in some aspects. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you'd already have other problems and, and you're not supposed to fall. Anyways, you got knives hanging off of your feet and your hands. And I try to iterate with people. It's like, this doesn't mean it's bad. If this, if this steel hanger is breaking at 20, this is at 14. Like, that doesn't mean this is bad. This is like potentially lighter. There could be potential benefits. Just know that. But if you're going to go rig, I don't know, hypothetically a highline that's 500 meters long and you're using ice screws, which you shouldn't be, it should be, you want to know. Like 1% of the audience needs to know what I'm actually showing. But man, if you can understand your gear, you can actually push limits. And, or just not be afraid. And when we start doing these A to Z content, things that we're leaning into more now is I want to incorporate. If we do a sport climbing A to Z, which is really boring for me, it's so basic. But what's fun is if I integrate, this is a rope, it breaks at this. When it goes up and down, it's your weight. Plus their weight is roughly what's up there. You're still a 10 to one safety ratio. Watch this rope break. It breaks like this. Watch the rope break up here. It looks like it's pinched, but it's actually 27 kilonewtons up here. And your carabiners do this, make sure they're closed or they'll do this. And I'm just B-rolling the whole time. Bam, bam, bam, slow-mos with my cracked cheap Galaxy S9 that I filmed. So people like, they see that they can trust this gear, but I'm like, be careful if you lean back and don't check that you're on rappel and you've already taken personal anchors off because your stance was good enough and you lean back and your carabiner wasn't in your rope, you might die. If you, if you don't tie it on the other rope, you might die. If you hold your Grigri down because you're not belaying, you might kill them. This is where the danger is. You don't have to worry about this aspect. That's a helpful course. And if it's free and entertaining, then guides can be like, Hey, go watch this. It's down, it's boiled down to an hour and a half, everything you need to know is in there. So when you come tomorrow, you can actually retain what I'm going to show you. And it's this beautiful baseline for people to show up more prepared. They can get more out of these courses that they're paying guides for. And man, you get them when they're young in the sport, you got an audience for life. It sounds like that was kind of like where you see a little bit of an evolution moving forward is like an A to Z on certain topics. How did this, I guess, gear testing specifically start? Like what kind of machine were you using? What was like the evolution of kind of your testing process from beginning to now? So like any channel teaching something, it's got that A to Z vibe. Like we're going to show you how to do something today. And I never thought to break stuff. And then I, in several videos that maybe only it was every other Wednesday at first, but then shortly after I realized I could do every Wednesday and I kind of needed to, to catch up with how much I'm exploring and I, and I was too cheap to mail all my webbing because it was a lot of webbing to a balanced community, just so loops on the end. So I don't have to carry those heavy web blocks. You just click the loop to the anchor. And then you only need one weblog instead of four. I'm like, Whoa, big deals back six years ago or whatever. And I was too cheap to send the loop. And I was going to have somebody at the load. I drop zone. So it up for me, but I'm like, Oh my gosh, if this breaks, he sold the backup. And like, I actually need to know like, this is going to work. And so in loops were kind of new at the time for us. So in slings are a thing and climbing, I mean, it's someone right there. And so I bought a crane scale on eBay that somebody sent to me. I was like, Oh, this should work. It was a 50,000 pound crane scale for $400. I'm like, well, that's perfect. I'll never go above 50,000 pounds. And which is true, but it also reads in 50 pound increments and it weighs 75 pounds and it takes a shackle that weighs 12 pounds and use like in the rabbit hole begins. And so I put it between two trees and I used to come along. And then I realized I am in the direct line of where this cable is going to be flying when I, if I am successful and break it, which I was not. And we'll get into that. So I got a ram puller to pull dents out of cars, right? Cause that's a piss. I'm going to use hydraulics. So you pump it and it gets smaller. Most hydraulics, they get bigger. And so I had to learn how hydraulics work, which is not that hard. It's a plunger with fluid going in or out one side and in and out the other moves the plunger. But I didn't know that. And I was like, I'm also standing right next to this sample when it goes flying. So then I was like, I don't want that. So I put a pulley on there and I pulled it with my van and I realized I couldn't keep breaking this up because it was too stretchy. Rope stretch. You do not realize how much rope stretches before it breaks until you try to break it. And so all these trees are what? 10 feet apart. You got your crane scale, your pulley, like you got five feet of play, but you're dumb and you make your sample three feet long. Well, that thing's going to stretch to nine feet before it breaks. And so I, so I didn't want things hitting my van. So I did a two to one to a two to one to a two to one to a two to one to my van. And this was all with a tractor supply pulleys. So everything's really heavy. When I was pulling heavy stuff, shit went flying. And these were all on trees that were in like a semi circle. So you could like two to one and you're leaning over all day to do 30 samples in a day was an astronomical task for four people. So then I eventually had the guy that did my van partition wall, who does like unique random projects, build me the SlackSnap 2.0 machine, which is the aluminum machine everyone's familiar with. And that's what I would break stuff with. But I'm like, oh, hydraulics are hard. I know pulleys. I'm a slackliner. Pulleys are cool. So I get a Costco winch. And what is it like 15 of these pulleys? The whole thing weighs over a hundred pounds. So to reset it, you have to the very loud Costco winch to push it back out because it went to preschool. Pull the pulleys. Realize you need to go more. I can't believe Bobby hung out for those that era because he was resetting that stuff is awful. So Bobby was in this already. Bobby shows up, gosh, 2019. And yeah, so I'm already breaking stuff at this point. He shows up. He's read the Bolting Bible. And so he's like, I'll come break stuff. He's an hour and a half from me. People think he lives with me. I'm like, no, no, we batched. We film in batches. But anyways, so you have SlackSnap 2.0. But then I can't break stuff in the real world. So I try to go back to pulleys. I'm sorry. I've evolved to hydraulics. And I finally learned how those work because I have to, to break bolts. Hey, Bobby, we should break a thousand bolts and rock. Can't just be 10 bolts. It's got to be a thousand bolts, but you don't want to buy all the stuff. Learn all the stuff. Get into it. All invest. I invested $10,000 of my own money into everything I needed. I bought all the bolts. No one gave me free bolts. All the glue, all the drill bits. It's crazy how much it took. And then we would go install all of these in a driveway that they were going to tear up. And the lady like waited to have it be the last thing and all the landscaping so I could keep pulling this stuff. We only hit her house like three times with flying shrapnel. So now I know hydraulics. So then we put hydraulics in the SlackSnap machine and it's like five times easier, which the machine is five times easier than the pulley system in the trees. So then I'm now back into the pulley era where Iceland, where we tested ice screws, you can't even use a winch. You're like hiking 45 minutes and we're like, okay, I'm going to do an 80 one-to-one. So you have the four double SMC pulleys, two on either side. That's a nine-to-one, your typical three-to-one, and you three-to-one that. You got a progress capture with the gree-gree. But rope stretch, this is where equalization, hold on. This is where mechanical advantages of myth came out. Because if you have any rope stretch, when you're jerk pulling, you lose all of the umph you're going to get through the stretch in the rope. Because there is over a hundred feet of rope in this thing. In order for it to be six feet apart from each other. Because it's an 80 one-to-one, or like however the math turned out. So I realized that it's not practical. And you can't use a winch in progress capture with a gree-gree. So you have to go with no mechanical advantage outside of like the nine-to-one. But you can't put 50 kilonewtons on SMC pulleys that are rated for 45. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. So I'm learning in Iceland what I joke is a five-to-seven. Seven people pulling a five-to-one is more efficient than anything else you can do. And we learned the hard way. Sit like you're in a rowboat. Then pull and have your feet spread out. So you fall in the other person's lap and not into their shoes or crampons. Because you will, when it pulls and breaks, fly. Just like the sample will. So that's SlackSnap 3.0. SlackSnap 4.0 is to go back to the nine-to-one, but with a capstan. So if I can carry the capstan, now I can go break bolts in the wild that were installed 40 years ago. If we go up there, they will snap and be able to drill it out and replace them. That's a whole nother evolution. And now we're getting into SlackSnap 5.0, which we'll save for the end of this podcast if we have time. Yeah, I know. We will definitely have time. Wow, that is... Yeah, I mean, I'm... It was hard. The level of understanding that you've developed about these systems over the years is astonishing. I like, way above my pay grade in terms of like how all these things work. Way above my pay grade. I'm not an engineer. So my background, a little bit more about just me, is I'm a painting contractor. I've had up to eight employees. It was my dad's business. He's had up to 20, and that was never... That's not profitable. And so I did well for 20 years painting with my dad. I ran jobs. I learned how to solve people's problems. And I learned construction. So I kind of have the gist of how things work from a hands-on perspective, not an engineering perspective. And yeah, that's a lot of rabbits, old boy. But I don't know... I did not know how to edit videos. I still am very green when it comes to audio. I am just now able to identify that the audio is bad. Load cells are a nightmare. Nightmare. Because science is not clean. And anybody who thinks their load cell works super good does not understand load cells. We spent how long figuring out audio in here? In a system you already have dialed? Because we changed one element. I'm in the room with you. And when you change a load cell, you have your cell phone on near it. No one could solve that problem for me. My cell phone was putting out so much juice because I was in a shop that it was throwing my numbers off and giving me inconsistent numbers. I love the Line Scale 3. Even has a heart on there. But this thing... Did you put that sticker on there? No, no. The Line Scale 3... Also, if you don't... If you girth hitch it, it could change your number. If you have to turn it to see the number, you could change the number. It's deforming the aluminum, changing the voltage. That's how you get your number. And if it's too cold, too hot, too anything, it's not perfect. People like the bathroom scales. You step on it. It's never what you technically want it to be. But it's like, it's a number. It is a clean number. And when people, people who put out videos of break tests, occasionally gear companies or random people, they'll put one number on the screen or their load cells already scrubbed the data. But when you go to 10,000 hertz or 10,000 times per second, that voltage is all over the place. And it's got to like clean that, average it out and stuff. And then you have to know how long you need it to go and when that sample is going to break. Because when you're at those speeds, you're limited on the time and data it can compute. So, yeah, they just load cells and audio and video and storytelling and Premiere and YouTube and titles and thumbnails and break tests and stretch and steel and aluminum and titanium sparks. And you're like, that's good to know. And then people's opinions. I have good days and I have bad days on this channel. And the good ones are really good. And the bad ones really suck. I notice a lot of creators, specifically in the YouTube sphere, they burn out. They usually have two years or take long breaks. If you make it past two years, six months, you make it five. If you make it past five, six months, you make it six months.