I had a stroke

I was debating whether or not I should make this video, and I'm not trying to overshare personal life stuff, but what happened to me this week affects things that go on around here, so it's kind of relevant, even though it can be mostly behind the scenes. So I flew to Texas from Washington, and after landing, I went to my hotel, and I was there for maybe an hour or so. And then I was gonna go have lunch and go to this YouTube convention that I was very much looking forward to. And I was on the phone with a Sterling rep. You'll understand more why I'm doing that at the end of this video, and if you don't already, I looked down at my finger, and it isn't moving. And I'm like, ugh, my puffy's pinched off my arm, and I fell asleep, and I hate getting older. And then I'm half listening at this point, and my thumb stops moving, like at all. Like you're willing it to move, and it's not moving. And I'm like, ugh, I hate getting older. Mind you, I'm only 39, and if that's a shock to you, well, I'm 39. But yes, I couldn't move my thumb, and I was like, that's gonna make typing harder, literally what I thought. And then with my phone not working, I was like, oh shit, I'll call you back. And then I was yelling in my phone to my girlfriend, I was like, what's wrong with me? And I knew what was wrong with me at that point. And I was fortunate within five minutes of this whole thing starting, everything came back online. But that, when you have a stroke, is at 39, when nothing's wrong with you, cholesterol's fine, it's not stress-related. Like, you know, I'm stressed out all the time, but like, it's not stress-related. And yeah, so I more or less walked myself into the ER room, and it was pretty hard to say out loud, pretty weird to say now. And they ran a ton of tests, obviously, and they found on the right side of my brain that something was, you know, off for a bit. And that's why it's classified as a non-disabling stroke. I got all my functionality back, and clearly my tongue is working. Now, I'm fortunate, it could have been worse, and fortunate that it is something that can be fixed. Apparently, I have a hole in my heart that a lot of people have. Mine just decided to start creating clots and shoot those things up into my brain. So right now, I'm pretty much on aspirin until I can get that patched. So my fall season, where I typically look forward to getting on El Capitan or squeezing in the last few fun things you can do that don't involve snow, then I'm going to be spending a lot less time doing that. I might be able to go climb here and there, but I'm not gonna travel for it. So it could have been way worse. Could have been way, way worse. Use your tongue to swallow. So if you can't talk and you can't swallow, your life is very, very different if that stuff doesn't come back online. I'm fortunate I was a mile from a hospital, considering I was five hours deep in a cave not that long ago. Not that making it to the hospital solved anything in that moment. Things cleared up on their own. But it makes you think about things like that. So this is a very different video than I was planning on because only, I have not even been home for 24 hours and I was discharged yesterday from the hospital. That I've been planning for last, I've been doing, I've been starting a climbing store where we actually stock the products. We're not drop shipping. We actually stock it and we're shipping it ourselves and we're shipping it the day you order it and all this stuff we'll get into. And that is what I've been working on for all this time. Now, this isn't gonna stop me from doing that. It's just gonna slow down the release of it because I wanna make sure that it's more than super good enough if we take your credit card and you buy something and you trust us with that. And I really take the customer service thing really, really serious, which is why I decided not to affiliate myself with anybody else after I stopped promoting EG, not a joke. I told a friend that I had a stroke and it autocorrected to stoke. And I was like, oh, that's fitting. And I am, I am very stoked about the store. My stroke did not come from stress and I love being busy. And we've got a lot of momentum with this. We've actually been open for two of the three months to patrons and they've been helping us break test the store. So we got 90 orders out over the last 34, 35 days and never missed a day of getting the order in the mail the day they order it by 1 p.m. Pacific time. And even while I was having a stroke, just saying, the system works. None of the patron money has been spent on the store. That has been my life savings and the money I didn't lose in crypto. And we hired two people, full-time, in order to have redundancy in packing boxes. And the idea is that it doesn't take them all that time to put stuff in boxes, but that we can actually add a ton of value and I'll have help on the YouTube side of things to make better and better content. Because if I talk to the manufacturers directly, I'm learning so much. When I touch and see all the gear, do you know how much nuts DMM makes? Like they have so many different nuts. And it's just interesting when you touch all the cams and when you see a Z4 and you, like I have my cams, right? I don't have Z4s. You see a Z4 versus a C4. It's just that I'm gonna get so much better making videos because I just touch the gear. And then people are buying straight up dog bones. Like I didn't know people bought dog bones for their Quick Draws to replace them, right? Carabiners are fine. And I break plenty and I think one of my shorts are gonna be a dog bone video for this weekend. So it's very interesting to me to learn what people are buying. And I have a direct access to my audience. This is why the emails are so important to me because I wanna have a direct access to you if you're interested in what we're doing rather than depending on YouTube to share my stuff. Even if you click the notification bell, it doesn't always do it. I'm not trying to spam you in the email. I'm trying to like make sure people know what we have coming out and a little bit behind the scenes that doesn't make sense in video form. My videos aren't gonna change a whole lot other than just get better because I have help. I'm gonna still break test concepts. You cannot sell concepts, but sometimes we'll break test specific, literally sitting right here. We'll break test Z4s and see if the single axle versus the double axle really affects the strength. And if it's the sling or if that's that, or if it's this or if it's that, how to replace the trigger wires. And that's just like, I learned a lot about harnesses. We're gonna go into all that. We're gonna break test harnesses. We're gonna break test. I got an old harness right there of an exact replica of what we got in the store. And then we'll break test an old belay loop versus new ones. It's like the content really doesn't change. We just end up selling the stuff that we're talking about. And that is going to fund all of this. So yes, I am stoked. I am stroked. And that was gonna work way better than I should have. Too soon? No, no, no, it's not too soon. Not too soon? It's fucking hilarious. Okay. I'm on a lot of aspirin. I'll be careful with that. I just got this barrel today and I was like, what is that? This is thousands of dollars of titanium from Titan Climbing. Blow tubes. Oh, wow. That is pretty cool. I won't make you watch me open all of this. Anyways, we're gonna put all that on the website tomorrow. And we just got DMN and Bial ropes. And like I was saying at the beginning, we'll eventually have Sterling when I call him back and tell him what happened. And camp stuff is on the way in the mail. And Black Diamond, the whole nine yards. We're gonna have everything I can get my hands on. Wanna see if this is stronger than a number six C4? Because we can do that now. Okay. So you know, I've been saying that we're giving this away forever now. It's been a month. I was busy this week. I'll do it this weekend. I'm gonna give this away to somebody who's opened their emails in the last four or five, their September emails. But I love that. We're gonna be giving this away this week or at the end of the week after people have a chance to open their emails. And if for some reason you're just not into off-whits, we'll give you a gift card to the equivalent of what this is worth in the store. And we don't ship internationally yet, but if you are international and you win this, well, you can help us break test the international stuff. We will be shipping internationally as soon as we get really, really good at the domestic stuff. And we're gonna tackle Canada. And once we get really good at that, we'll figure out who to pay VAT to. And then we can start taking European orders and we'll see what makes sense for us to do for you guys. Because if I'm going to sell you something, I really, really want the customer service to be really good. Oh, you wanna see something I'm not giving away yet? We're doing a whole video on this way over engineered cam that is actually more helpful than I thought it would be. It's the price of three cams and the weight of three cams. But there is actually a few places that it might shine. But anyways, when we make a video about this, we'll be giving it away to those in the email list. Anyways, I really appreciate you guys being a part of this community of people who enjoy watching things break. I like breaking stuff. I like getting to answer questions I'm super curious about. I like to get curious about the stuff you guys are curious about, because at the end of the day, it is interesting. And I have shelves and shelves full of shiny new gear that I get to put in a box and send to people, which you get to send packages of stoke every day. That's pretty cool. And I get to do that because you guys are watching and you guys are a part of it and you engage in the comments and you help steer where the channel goes. And after seven years, it ended up being like this, way cooler than I thought it'd be. I was just trying to make a few highlighting videos. So thank you guys for being a big part of my life. I really enjoyed doing this. Thanks for watching.