Exit Point #12 - Brett Kistler

Hi everybody and welcome back to exit point. In this episode, Matt is going to be interviewing Brett Kisler for the listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about Brett? Yeah, Brett's an incredibly experienced bass jumper. He's got nearing 2,000 jumps but I think what really sets him apart is that all of those jumps are done all over the world, everything from Baffin Island to Singapore and all over Europe, but the thing that I enjoy most about Brett is that he's one of the most authentic people that I've ever met and so every time I get to talk to him, it's a great pleasure because he brings an incredible amount of honesty and transparency and thought to every conversation. It's very open-minded and I just really wanted to get his take on bass jumping and what it's like to be human in the sport that is incredibly dangerous. I know Brett also to be very articulate and excellent conversationalist and a very experienced bass jumper. I'm really looking forward to listening to this episode, so without further ado, let's get Brett on the track. Hey, Brett Kisler, welcome to the show. Man, this has been one that I've been waiting for for a long time. You and I to get a conversation on tape. We've had so many in person. Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. I've been really looking forward to talking with you on a podcast sometime, whether it was going to be my podcast or your podcast or whatever format that would be. And here we are. Sweet. Well, I kind of prefaced this earlier saying that I was just going to start with a really simple question. And here it is. What do you want to talk about? Yeah, well, interesting. That is an interesting question. There's so much that I would love to talk about. And so I'm just going to start riffing here. Really, what has been the most profound thing that I've learned through my bass career? I don't know if you want me to go in any background. A lot of people listening to this might know me or know of me. A lot of the newer people probably don't. I haven't been particularly active in a while. Yeah, let's get into just a little bit of a background. And just so I can add some in. I met Brett in 2014 wing suit bass jumping in the Swiss Alps. And I had just picked up my title sponsor, which he had been associated with for the previous several years. And so he was a pretty cool mentor to find just on a random mountain. And then since then I might be remiss in not saying that Brett has been a main facilitator in, can we call it consciousness expansion? In the community. So not only an incredibly experienced bass jumper in my opinion, but also an incredibly experienced just thinker. So maybe you can fill us in on where you started with your bass career and, you know, what led you to bass jumping in the first place? Yeah, so I started skydiving when I was 18 and bass jumping when I was 19. Had, you know, my first bass jump sort of bridge day, 2005, I believe. And from there, I ended up completing roughly 1,500 skydives, 1,500 bass jumps. Over the course of about 15 years. And my most recent activity bass jumping was about like 2019 or so just before the pandemic. And I haven't been jumping much since, but I've been exploring a lot of other avenues that are a continuation of my bass jumping journey. Nice. Anything in particular that you'd like to share on the continuation side? Yeah, yeah. So going back to kind of how it became a continuation versus continuing in the sport as my primary objective. Going back to around, you know, 2016, we had a couple of years where it was just really rough. We lost a lot of people. And it started to get to the point for me where, you know, it wasn't just people that, you know, they were inexperienced or new or they were making different kinds of mistakes or they were just the ones who were charging super hard, not the way that I particularly saw myself as charging. But I started to lose a lot of people that I considered my peers. Those who I trusted to be making really good decisions and who I would have conversations with at the Horner about the very things that might actually end up killing them later. And then having that happen, are we talking 2015, 16, 17 season? Yeah, yeah, that range. Just to qualify this for people listening in the 2016 season, we lost 10 people in 11 days. That's how quickly people were going in at that time. Yeah. And I had, I knew about 16 or so people who died that summer. And one of them that hit me really, really hard was JVH. John Van Horn who, you know, he's a great example of somebody who I consider to be a peer, similar skill levels, similar methodology and approach to the sport. And yet he was taken by a similar kind of mistake that had been made before. And so that one hit me really, really hard. And so what I decided to do was to step back from the sport. And I decided I want to inquire and figure out what it is that is killing us. Those of us who are finding ourselves repeating mistakes that we know not to make. Like, what is it that makes us repeat mistakes that we know not to make? I'm not worried about making new mistakes. It's like, what makes us do the things that we know not to do in the moment that gets good. Okay. Where are you at in that? Have you gotten any conclusions? Yeah. So, I mean, initially, there's the blanket response there is, well, it's complacency, right? Complacency kills. We all know complacency kills. But what exactly is complacency? And I want to ask you this question. What is your answer to what is complacency? What is complacency? Well, it's a combination of ignorance and overconfidence. You know, the idea that something that is inherently dangerous can be done safely. That's kind of my short version of complacency. Okay. So the way the way that I've come to understand it, complacency and other other factors and other motivations that make us jump. The key issue here is a mispriority of fear. Complacency, you could describe as not being afraid enough of the things that are relevant, which might mean that you've suppressed that fear, or you've gotten used to it so you're ignoring the signal, or it might mean that some other fear has come in and taken control, that you might not even be aware of. And so examples of this might be the fear of being rejected by your peers might overstep your fear of how well you can perform in these wind conditions that you're looking at. Or yes, you about to say something. Okay. Yeah. So for now, what I'm understanding is that complacency in your book is a misappropriation of fear. Yeah. Yeah. So the things that you had mentioned about complacency, like overconfidence, well, what is overconfidence, but a misshapen experience of fear? And I think this is really important when you get into the motivations of what brings us into base jumping is that a lot of us really want to feel certain things. We want to feel competence. And sometimes if we feel fear that that makes us feel like we're not competent. When in reality, feeling the fear actually makes us more competent, feeling and processing it. And I think I make a distinction between fear and panic here. Panic is fear that is resisted. Panic is fear that is out of, I don't want to say the word control, but it's it's something that it's panic is fear that it's in like a positive feedback loop and it gets gets away from us takes us out of ourselves. But if we stay in ourselves and we're feeling our fear, then the fear is the signal that recalibrates our priorities so that we don't end up in what we would call complacency. Okay. Well, let's let's let's go back to a bit that you just said because it's interesting having come up in like extreme sports in the 1990s and 2000s where like it was no fear was the marker. That was the statement. The experience was marked by people who were fearless. And it sounds like you're saying kind of the opposite. So where does that fit into your scheme here where like we grew up in an age where if you had any kind of fear, then you just weren't experienced enough. Right. Well, that's I would say that that's the the culture of an identity of fearlessness. And when you have an identity of fearlessness, if you if you approach this sport with the perspective that I'm going to conquer my fear so that I no longer feel it, that is a recipe to bring you straight into complacency. Totally agree. But I would also argue, I would also argue that the thing that brings us to the sport is that on some level, we really want to feel that fear. There's some there's something about the fear of death that brings us into presence that brings us out of the abstract world of our head and all the you know, all the all the minor issues of life and into into the present moment. And so it's actually that fear that we seek, but it's also that fear that we fear that we're that we're afraid of. And that my my conjecture here is that avoiding that fear is the thing that breeds complacency. And it's the thing that allows other fears. And as social mammals, we have a lot encoded into our social nervous system around fear. You know, it's not just the fear of being annihilated on a pile of rocks, but there's the fear of being rejected by our tribe and our society that is just as much of a fear for from any of us. And when when our social fears take over our physical fears or become more dominant than them, that's when you find yourself in complacency, ego, all the all the things that we talk about that are that induce pilot error in the moment and have killed many of our friends. That's like everyone sitting on the top of the cliff and everyone kind of, you know, cajoling each other into jumping and then somebody being like, well, like I'm going to I'm going to send it versus the person that's like thinking like, woo, like I want to I want to walk down, but I also don't want to be the person that walks down from this group, the first person to say like, no, this isn't comfortable for me. Right. Right. And it's like, what is what is the fear there? Well, the fear is maybe I won't be invited on these kinds of jumps. If I'm the one that walks down and makes everybody wait by the car for four hours. Or I might not be invited to events. I might not get sponsorships or just something more deep and subconscious of that I might not be able to see myself as the competent, rager charger of the castle that makes me feel value from whatever my childhood experience might have been. Yeah. And strange because like the most experienced people are the ones that generally walk down. You know, the most confident are the ones that are, you know, picking the perfect conditions to jump not the ones that are, you know, getting away with it. And I can also say from like experience that, you know, there's another fear of being seen as judgmental. You know, if you're the one that the first one to walk down, then like everyone looks at you like, oh, look at this person judging us for our decisions. And it's like, whoa, like, yeah, no. Or there's there's another way that fear can get complexified here. If you're if you're at an exit point and you, you have decided that it's not safe for you to jump and that you want to go down. And you're also afraid of the way that people will respond to that. Then you're going to bring it to them with some kind of forceful, like better than this, like talking down to them, like, hey, guys, this is dangerous. You should not be jumping here. We should all be going down. And then that's actually going to invite the thing that you're afraid of, which is the social rejection and finding yourself in that situation where others want to jump and they're making you wrong for not because of the way that you brought it up. So I've seen this happen a lot throughout throughout my, my, my base career, where a mentor or somebody who really had that wisdom and that experience had fear of a student or just somebody else that they were jumping with. And they saw something dangerous. And their fear of being involved in an incident, their fear of having to make that phone call, their fear of losing their friend, brought them to, to yell or be angry with, you know, with the person for doing what they were doing. And coming from a place of, again, that just becomes another form of ego to be better than somebody else. And telling them that you know better for them is a great way to be rejected and a great way for them to shut down to you. So there's there's a lot of different kinds of fears here. And so I, the, the invitation that I have is this is a sport that we all got into because we have some kind of love relationship or at least a curiosity and fear or we wouldn't be doing this. And so the, the invitation is to really feel what is it that you are actually the most afraid of? And what happens if you let yourself actually feel that fear? Whether it is interpersonal social fear or it's identity fear. And you know, how do you keep present? How do you stay present with the ever present physical fear that your body is always fear feeling? Whether or not you have convinced yourself you're no longer afraid? You may have just subconsciously stamped out the feeling of fear. But it's there. Everybody who has been complacent knows deep down that a part of them knew the dangers and yeah, was choosing not to pay attention. Yeah, I can relate to that especially early on in my career where my goal was to just overcome fear. I saw it as kind of an enemy, you know, and so I did things that were incredibly dangerous and just tried to reframe my body's ability to feel fear. And eventually that got really, really dangerous. If you step on that emotion such that it's so quiet, you don't even really notice it, then you're losing an incredible sensor. And that's when you get into some unsustainable jumping for sure. Nowadays, I can say that fear, the fear response is actually saved my life on so many occasions. It's like not even funny. Yeah. And so to speak to an example of how our childhood and our upbringing and our prior experience can color the way that we jump and really it's unavoidable that it does for all of us. Something that brought me to jumping, I would say, something that shaped my consciousness in such a way that made me attracted to jumping, was that when I was a kid, I had an older brother, he was six years older than me. He had a bunch of friends. They used to do all kinds of cool things. They'd make go cards. They do dirt biking and paintball and all kinds of activities that me being six years younger really wanted to be a part of, really wanted to be involved with. And they also, you know, they had their own traumas and whatever and they would do a lot of hazing. So one kind of example of a story here is that they would build what's called a potato cannon or potato gun. So you'd get a bunch of PVC pipes and you'd make a chamber and a barrel and jam a potato down the barrel, fill the chamber with something like traditionally it's done with hairspray, which is quite flammable, but they would do it with like map gas just to make it super extra powerful. And then, you know, I'd be with them because I'm like, this is cool. It's chemistry, it's engineering, it's hanging out with my bro and his friends and, you know, feeling that connection, feeling that mentorship. And that's something that I really wanted was this connection with my older bro and his friends and to be doing what they're doing and to be welcome. But also, I was the youngest and, you know, they would, I very quickly find myself chased around the yard by the potato gun and having, you know, supersonic potatoes whizzing by my head. And, you know, we'd be playing paintball and sometimes I'd be on a team and then suddenly find that both teams were against me and just getting railed. And so I've, one of the things that happened during that time is I learned that, hey, I, when I'm hanging out with these people, I am constantly in some form of danger. My body was feeling this, like, this threat. And also, the more threat was recognized by them, the more they'd like tease me and like poke me. So I learned to be afraid and also suppress my fear as a form of getting connection. So I learned that the social connection was more important than my physical safety, as long as my physical safety was above a certain threshold of not dying. You know, the fear would come out when I had a potato gun pointed at my head. But when we were just hanging out in the garage working on, you know, working on go carts, the fear would be just more suppressed. And I could be there and learning, but also always having a little bit of that fear under. So bring that into base jumping now. I have this ability that I learned to suppress the physical fear. And at the same time, be so nonchalant as to be able to develop personal connections with people. And the base jumping is such a perfect feeder for that, you know, standing on an exit point when everyone's feeling fear and everyone's, you know, everyone's a little bit naked in their, in their nervous response to whatever's going on. And also, there's this brotherhood element, the sisterhood and this camaraderie aspect. And so it's really, it really fit that form of being at risk. And through like in the space of that risk, being in connection with people, including, you know, those who were older than me mentors, I got into base at like 18, 19. So for me, everybody was older. They met, they kind of fit that, that mode of somebody who was kind of like a brother figure. Not everybody that had peers to my age, but there were a lot of, you know, older figures that I had a lot to learn from. So that, that's one of the things that kind of brought me to it. But it also set me up for a lot of risk and a lot of failure, not necessarily failure. I didn't, I never actually had any fatal, obviously accidents, didn't injure myself base jumping ever. But I definitely made a lot of decisions that were not optimal. And the cool stories to tell on that one. Oh boy. Yeah. Let me maybe one that has a fear involved where like, you have a misappropriation. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. I mean, a great example would be my third base jump. I had gone to bridge day. I had made two base jumps and was feeling really great about it. And then I got invited by my local crew in Northeast Ohio to a smokestack. And so I was like, fuck yeah, I'm going to go jump to a smokestack. And you know, it was a reasonably tall smokestack. It had a decent ish landing area. You know, theoretically, it was as far as Northeast Ohio is concerned, it was kind of just what people were jumping. So I was like, yeah, cool. I'm going to go do this. And you know, the desires there where I want to be a part of this group, I want to get in with this crew. I want to do the jump. I want to develop my skills. I want to be seen as somebody who's competent, all those, all those things. And of course, I just absolutely was not ready for that jump. I didn't even have the gear awareness to bring a stash bag. I had I had a borrowed rig that you know, I'd used I borrowed for bridge day and he let the person let me keep it for a little longer. And so I show up and I don't have a stash bag. And they're like, what's what's this? And like, so I had like a white trash bag that I was going to use as my stash bag. And I didn't have the correct size pilot shoot. So they gave me the correct size pilot shoot. And so here I am. Like this is I know the I know the way that you teach based jumping. And this is the exact opposite showing up with no clue. And like, yeah, you know what? Like my surrogate big brother and friends or something are going to teach me how to do this. Like show me what's up. And we get, you know, we get up to the smoke stack. And like, I didn't I didn't have the correct size pilot shoot. So instead of doing a free fall, we did a PCA, which actually was the better choice for safety all around. But my initial plan had been to do, you know, go and throw. And it was dark. I couldn't see the landing area. I remember and this is how I know that I was in over my head. Is that I was actually feeling terror the entire time, not just a comfortable level of fear, but I was actually feeling terror. And when I jumped, I had this like blue screen of death in my face. And then I came back out when the parachute opened. And then I was like flying it. And I couldn't see the landing area. I could kind of see it. There was like a glow stick there. I come into land. And I couldn't see how high I was. And I basically stalled. And would have probably broken my back, except that I landed a mulch pile. And, you know, I was basically just like in resistance the entire way down trying to just not die, rather than flying my parachute with agency and watching where I was going and referring to a well of knowledge and understanding that I'd built over time. I was just in it. And that was an example of having optimized for connection and my jumping ambitions over actually having the safety in my body that I was actually prepared for the jump. Dang. Okay. So I'm curious to get into some words with you after that incredible story because I think a lot of people myself included have been on exit points and have mislabeled what they're feeling because, you know, the actual physical feeling of it can be so close. So far, we've mentioned panic, fear, and terror. And so in your opinion, like, where are the dividing lines between these things? And how does one know that they're in a panic state versus a fear state versus of, you know, a terror state? Yeah. Yeah. That's good question. So you've heard the phrase we've talked about this before that the other side of fear is excitement. You know, if you go back to a lot of the old wisdom traditions, like Chinese medicine and some others, there's this idea that every emotion has a virtue on the other side of the emotion, or at least all the difficult emotions. So on the other side of sadness or grief, there's joy on the other side of fear, there's excitement. You know, and the other things are like on the other side of jealousy, there's compulsion or like different, I don't know if that was a Chinese medicine thing, but we in the poly community talk about that kind of thing a lot. And the idea is when you fully let a feeling through you, it transforms into something else. And the way that you can tell if you are in, or the least the way that I tell, if I'm, if I'm in over my head, is if my fear is actually expansive, if I feel my fear and I'm resisting it, it feels constrictive, right? If you're, if you're, if you're resisting the fear, your tense, your movements are a little bit jerky, your speech is maybe a little bit stuttered or impaired, you're not thinking clearly, right? Okay. But if you actually let that fear move through you, and if that fear moves through, it becomes excitement, and there's, there's an elevation, your body is metabolically preparing for what you're about to do. And that's more of an expansive state. And when you're in, when you're in a competent fear, that is transforming into excitement, you're standing at the exit point and your world gets bigger. You see more detail in the things that you're looking at. You, you feel more spatial resolution. And, you know, there's, there's this feeling that you get, right? So you're saying that that present moment is actually fear-induced. The thing that people mostly talk about when they have that time dilation where they can see the, you know, the butterflies, wings flapping and everything gets really, like, really vibrant. Right. Right. Yeah. It's adrenaline. You know, adrenaline is a, it's a, it is a modifier that makes your body more elevated and prepared to act. And that is that feeling that we love, that, that feeling that we, that we really enjoy when we've completed a jump and we're flooded with it. And we're just excited. That, that's that feeling of adrenaline and, you know, other, other hormones as well. But so, so this, this distinction that I make between healthy fear and terror or panic is that there's, first of all, you can have a healthy fear that you're resisting. And to the extent that you resist that fear, that fear is not able to reorganize your consciousness and your body and your metabolic system to prepare you properly for what you're about to do. So you're basically jumping with one hand behind your back. If you're not fully feeling the fear, secondly, if you feel the fear and it doesn't process through to some kind of excitement, then there's probably something internally that knows that you're not ready for what you're about to do or knows that you haven't yet accepted the risk of what you're about to do. Man, we're saying so much here. Okay. We got to go back a couple points because this is something that I think it said a ton, but I believe that you have a better line on it. And it's an emotion moving through you. Like I hear that so much of like, let it pass through you, let it move through you. So, you know, can you give us some practical magic on what that actually looks like? Yeah, what that means. So an emotion moving through you, one way to think about emotions is it's a bottom-up reorganization of your entire being of your system from the body with, you know, endocrine response and cortisol and, you know, all these metabolic shifts that prepare you for, you know, what your body predicts is about to occur. And then there's the emotional, there's the emotional background that you're that you're consciousnesses in so that, you know, if you're afraid, if you are in an elevated state, if you are in an excited state, you are more likely to be thinking quickly and kind of shaping your consciousness towards things that are really relevant to the moment. And when you're relaxed in the opposite of this, when you're in sort of a parasympathetic dominant relaxed state, that's when you're more brainstorming. You have more divergent thinking. You're you're thinking more creatively, but you don't have time to think creatively when you're in the middle of a wingsuit flight and you're going between some trees. You need to be doing convergent thinking where your input, output loop is very tight so that the moment something occurs, you don't even think about it. Your body is already processing what to do based on your past experience and all of your training and all of the reflexes that you've built in through through all of your, all of your practice. So I would say that one way to describe emotions moving through you is that the emotions are recalibrating you to prepare you for the moment that your mind that your senses have predicted that your body has predicted from your sensory input. Okay. So yeah, go ahead. In other words, yeah. Well, another example of an emotion moving through you is sadness or grief. You know, if you have many many of us have lost a lot of friends in the sport and we've had this experience where you go through all the different stages and one of those stages is denial and denial is that state where you're just not ready to accept the loss. And so you're in some level of resistance. You're not ready to feel the loss. And in that state, you're still in the picture, you're still in the situation where you might pick up the phone to call your dead friend and not realize that they're dead until you do that. And you're like, oh, yeah, they're dead. I can't call them. So there's still information and predictions that your that your body and your mind are making that are not accurate. And then once you've processed that grief when that grief finally moves through, that's when your model of the world has been updated with with that loss. And it's like, okay, yeah, I can't actually call my dead friend. They are dead. It's not even going to occur to me as a thing to do anymore once I've processed it. But now once you've fully processed it, then you get to just experience the gratitude and the joy of ever having known them. And this happens in waves. It's so can fear. Fear can move through in waves as well. So back to the exit point, one resisting fear is to not accept that the environment is dangerous and that you should be feeling this emotion. Accepting fear is to look at the reality, the situation of like you're about to put yourself in a in mortal danger. And the fear is reasonable. Yeah. So the the difference between fear and terror would be that if I'm if I'm feeling my fear and I've accepted the outcome and the consequences and the risks, then it just turns into an elevation of my senses and elevation of my metabolism and that we experience that as excitement. Excitement and also a a vigilance, right? There's a there's a vigilance, a readiness and excitement. And you know when you've when you're standing at an exit point and you're feeling that, that's that like, okay, things are good. This feels good. And if you're suppressing any part of that, then whatever information you're suppressing because it's inconvenient to you is that's where your blind spot is. Yeah, simple as that. Yeah. Yeah. Where you you just kind of justify the poor conditions or you know, you end up at an exit point that's slightly lower than you thought or you know, the wing suit terrain is looking a little scarier than you know, you had initially surveyed. You know, you're like, all right, I'm just going to walk that one out. But then you actually do need all of that information in order to make it through the flight because those are the realities of what you're about to do. Right. Right. And you you'll notice this at when you're when you're jumping with very experienced people, it's the ones who are the most experienced, who are the most open about their fear on an exit point. You know, I'm thinking about like Hank Keller as an example of a person who he will just show exactly what he's feeling on an exit point. And you know, the new guy will be the one who's like, yeah, okay, yeah, I got this. We're good. You know, and it's the new guy who will later on be pointed out as having had some complacency and blind spot him the way that they're jumping and it'll be the person who's been fully feeling their fear and just being open about it, which also another tangent here is that being open about your fear actually permissions other people to feel their fear and it makes you and your whole crew safer. So are you a proponent then of vocalizing? Oh yeah, absolutely. I think what what would happen, what would happen if over the course of the next 10 jumps, you and your crew all decided to at the exit point before jumping say one thing that they're afraid of and it doesn't have to be about the jump. It could be somebody could say I am afraid that I'm not competent enough with my canopy to land in this landing area and feeling that fear I still feel good enough about doing it, but I feel that fear. Another person could be I'm afraid that you'll all think that I'm a pussy if I walk down or I'm afraid that if I speak about the wind condition then that'll make me look like I'm not actually very experienced or I'm afraid of talking about the line that we're flying because I don't actually know some of the things you guys are talking about here because you're more experienced than me, so I'm actually just making it look like I know what you're talking about while I'm actually trying to learn without asking questions. What would happen if that was the way that we actually approached exit points together? Well, I mean, I bet people would make a whole lot better decisions. I kind of take that for granted because I came up jumping with my solid climbing partner Ian Flanders and so for the first 10 years of my base career, I had somebody that was an intimate partner that I could share everything with and so it was no big deal for me to be like, oh, dude, I don't know if I can make that landing area or you know, I'm afraid that these conditions aren't like great for me or whatever else like he was, I knew he had my back 100% and so I've experienced very little jumping with, you know, groups that don't have that ability but yeah, just hearing that that wouldn't be possible sounds incredibly uncomfortable. Yeah, and but it's the reality for many people and it's reality for all of us on some level. There's some amount of suppression of our of our emotional wisdom that occurs all the time and we've only really been speaking about the acute fear of being on an exit point but what about the broader general fears that we feel throughout an entire career? You know, there's an example here is that when I started base jumping or even when I just started thinking about base jumping, I would find myself in a normal daily life situation and I'd be afraid of something. I'd be anxious about my anxious about work or project or anxious about some social thing and I'd have this escape of closing my eyes and just imagining being in freefall and in that freefall, I'd feel freedom and a lot of us talk about jumping as a thing that brings us freedom and my question there is what does it like freedom from what? Yeah, and for me, I wasn't aware of any that background of fear because I had developed this ability to suppress it and this identity that I'm a fearless person and this identity that I that I can keep it together in scary and dangerous situations and so I wasn't actually recognizing that much of my life was actually driven by fear and that the jumping was actually some way that I could feel fear and feel like I was actually an agency where many other areas of my life I felt frozen and stuck. So yeah, you can spend an entire life in some low-level freeze response and you know, for me jumping was actually one of the things that punched through that so that I could recognize what it actually felt like to be in ownership of my fear and then ask the question, well what happens if I apply that to other areas of my life? Yeah, absolutely that's that's why I got into it in the first place as well for the quote-unquote freedom aspect of it because I thought my fear was holding me back from doing a lot of the other things in life that I wanted to do you know from you know pursuing a job that I wanted to you know approaching somebody that I was attracted to at a bar and I figured like well if I get to the edge of you know the human experience by trying to overcome a fear of death which you have to face when you're base jumping then all of the rest of these will just kind of fall in line and will be relative non-factors and that's that's what like the first you know strategy of mine which I'll say was not great was to just completely stamp out that fear through you know over what's the word for it over indulgence yeah over over indulgence of what over indulgence of like that fear inducing state until like it just got comfortable and normalized you know like okay like you're feeling you know a ton of fear but like I can still operate incredibly well through it and rather than letting like it flow through me just you know just stepping over the coming over the top of it which like you know the in an aggressive highly dangerous like way was executable like it it allowed me to execute in that environment but like not with very much precision and that eventually became the problem because it's like I gained proficiency in base jumping you know my precision needed to increase you needed to land in tighter areas and pitch it at you know more precise timings and you know fly through trees and you can't just you know flex your way through that and so this yeah that brings me to another thing which is often we we find ourselves in activities that will bring us to a certain emotional state that we subconsciously need to feel and resolve and example you see this outside of base jumping in let's say like money business finances there's people who are just a hungry ghost for money and no matter how much money they have it never feels like enough because they never actually let in the feeling of of that I have enough that feeling of satisfaction that feeling of contentment and I've been there myself with with the money game and that's been that's been an interesting we could do a whole podcast on my parallel journey with like the the money and abundance or scarcity the hungry ghost there but I think a lot of us in in adventure sports and action sports have a hungry ghost for fear there's a certain level of fear that we are actually subconsciously wanting to experience and it might be that there's you know for me with my with that family history that I talked about there's encoded somewhere deep in my subconscious there's some level of existential terror of that something could happen at any moment that hurts me and I don't feel it day to day but it's somewhere there in the subconscious and it might come up as just ADD it might just be that my subconscious is a little bit oriented towards threats so when I sit down to get some work done I don't feel as much you know working memory available to me I don't have as much focus and that used to be the case very very strongly before I started jumping you know I would find that when I when I jumped afterwards I would be able to focus and I'd be able to be present because some amount of that fear latent this is my story now is that some of that fear that was latent in my system got to be processed in the jump I got to go out and be in a situation where I was feeling that fear and feeling it in a way that I had agency and that made me feel in contact with myself and process that fear so something that I think can happen is that if we're not really fully feeling our fear then we can find ourselves on a treadmill of making things more and more scary more and more dangerous more and more intense and be having that hungry ghost thing just like some people just like you might have with money just like you might have with love or sex or any of these other core drives and desires but you could have you could be a hungry ghost until you finally allow yourself to feel fully that existential terror of existence that exists for all of us yep and some people when they have a really really close call that'll be the moment where everything shifts for them you know yeah yeah I called that the road to Damascus moment where you get knocked off your horse and blinded by the light yeah and yeah yeah that was that was for me my first wingsuit bassies and where like I nearly killed myself jumping in Italy having been on an exit point with many people who were more experienced than me lending some confidence to the terrain flight that I was about to do but feeling incredible amount of like rational and justifiable fear that I wasn't going to be able to do it and that jump ending up in me having to make some pretty like severe last minute in the moment decisions that were a lot of luck and you know getting through that situation having flown below terrain having never flown below terrain so yeah definitely you know you work your way down you work your way down until your body just like throws up that fear flag and like you cannot suppress this anymore like you nearly died there yeah yeah and so so I noticed that we've been talking a lot about fear and there's there's a couple there's a whole another piece to this you know there's all our behavior is driven by approach and avoidance so fear is this avoidance this thing that keeps us from danger but then there's the what are we approaching is like you know love what is it that we love what is it that we that we want and the hungry ghost thing can occur there too you know there's we can have a desire to feel competent we can have a desire to trust ourselves we can have a desire for camaraderie and connection we can have a desire for adventure and these are a whole another aspect of what it is that motivates us and what we just out of curiosity real quick because I love the words do you believe that fear and love are Antonims because quite often people like look at it is like fear and hate as the flip side of the coin but it seems like you just presented fear and love as being opposites there I'm glad you asked that because I actually see them all as I see it all as love actually if you're feeling fear there's a love for yourself that that that is behind that fear you know there's there's a desire to continue to exist if you are afraid of having accident right and that's that's one of the reasons why this if we categorize fear as something to be avoided or conquered or to not have any of no fear then we're actually cutting off love for ourselves we're cutting off the parts of ourselves that are like hey is this really what I want to be doing right now or hey have we really thought through all of the consequences you know we I know that we're here with a bunch of our you know friends and on this exit point with somebody who we really want to impress and that's great I love that I love myself enough to want to you know build a reputation in the sport and be trusted by other others and given opportunities to do new kinds of jumps and go to events and all the things that come with that and do I also love myself enough to prioritize my safety if those two things find themselves in apparent conflict okay then what do you think about this statement it comes sort of a pretty cool movie in Sean Connery says at one point he says he who fears nothing loves nothing yeah yeah yeah I would I would say that he who fears nothing has just suppressed their love for themselves and so like if we look at that on like a sliding scale can we also say that you know the more fear somebody has or let actually rather than that how do you assign fear for yourself you know is the amplitude of your fear the same as it was when you started jumping and if not why not and if so why so well I mean that it shifts over time right you're not as afraid on your 150th jump or your thousandth jump as you were on your first jump for reasons part of those reasons are that your your prediction your subconscious unconscious your body's prediction for what's going to happen is much more calibrated than it had been before and you have a higher probability of the jump falling in certain ranges of what you consider success or at least predictable and you know in order for me to get as scared as I was on my first jump I have to do something that involves something that I've never done before or something that involves a level of performance that is equivalent to like that my likelihood of achieving that level of performance is equivalently unknown as my very first jump was okay I'm also kind of asking like has your love for yourself or others of the world shifted over that period such that your fear has changed one direction or the another hmm yeah I'm not sure I fully understand the question but the thing that comes up in that question is that you know yeah I have through through the journey of self-exploration that is the sport and the the kind of hard choices the hard realities that it brings to you including loss of friends loss of uh you know like injuries and deaths and the processing thereof like obviously this is one of the things that basically any base jumper will say to you is that when they've been jumping for a significant number of years that it's about the people you know it's like the people are the most important thing and a lot of it a lot of it really just brought me into contact with what it is that you know being a human being a social mammal what is the most thing that the thing that is most important to us is connection and whether that's being in connection with myself and my needs and my desires and understanding and being with what my what my body and mind together really want from a jump when I'm standing at an exit point to being in connection with the environment and the wind and the line and my equipment and a landing area and my mood on that day and my emotions and being in connection with those that I'm jumping with so that we are fully supportive of one another and you know not not supportive in a way that we are you know you'll find a lot of support in base jumping where people are like yeah you got this when somebody doesn't and that's not support you know so it's like what is what is really truly supportive of not just each other's egos or our fragilities or our or our identities but what is supportive of the deepest part of each of us that in some sense can't be destroyed that can't be that can't be lost with a shift in identity yeah okay so maybe I can wow that was I was incredible for myself like let me explain a little bit maybe you'll have a piece to hook on this in the beginning of like my jumping like I did not have let's say love for my legs at all like I did not understand how fragile they were I did not understand the inner workings of my ankles and the fact that like if you injure them they'll never be the same and so love for that component of my body was quite low which led me to be not afraid doing a lot of stuff that I shouldn't have been later on seeing like our friends get like femur breaks and ankle breaks and seeing their lives change like drastically because of those injuries my love for my legs increased dramatically and so did my fear of doing things that I shouldn't have been doing which then led me to like try and train a lot harder so that I would then you know reduce that fear so I could do the things I wanted to do but there's like one physical example of like you know what I'm talking about where you know my love over time for myself has shifted and so my fear has shifted and then going to your point of like you know the human connection part like losing our friends in that 2015-16 season and I did the same thing like I stepped away from the game because my fear had increased dramatically to the point where it was no longer something that I could I couldn't ignore it you know and I looked at what they were leaving behind when they went in and totally reframed that thing in my head that was like oh well you know burn it at both ends and let's the whoo fucking party till impact like whoa you know my love for life for the things around me for the things that they weren't going to get to experience you know markedly increased and so my fear was like at all time highs and that's when I decided to you know get out of the sport for a little while and try and answer the same questions that you were asking of like why is this happening I think the only time in my base jumping career where you know fear was you know the least I guess and love for myself was highest was when I was trying to you know grow as a human being and get over some of these evolutionary you know fear patterns and so like back to our you know points about freedom you know in order to attain freedom you know I looked at it as like okay I loved myself enough to put myself in jeopardy such that like I might die in order to give agency to the rest of my life and so like fear was pretty low even though risk and danger were quite high yeah the freedom piece is interesting like the paradox here is that if you have this identity that I am a free person being a free person means that like fuck authority you know fuck the man I'm gonna go do whatever jump I want and it's all about fucking charging the castle and I don't remember how you put it uh I'm I'm almost sounding like I'm a little bit speaking derogatory here and I don't mean to even be doing this but there's this like yeah send it so there's like there's a send to attitude and it's like how free are you if you only feel free and that identity of proving that you're free and if you if you're jumping as a way of showing to yourself and the world how free you are and what freedom means then is that you're not can you're not constrained by fear you're not constrained by what other people think of you you actually are you're driven by all of those things and how much freedom can there be found when you're like you know what I love myself whether I'm somebody who walks down from this jump I love myself whether I'm somebody who isn't part of the uh you know whatever the like the group think culture of this particular crew is right now because I'm thinking about things that others aren't I love myself whether or not I bring up a concern that others think is ridiculous I love myself whether or not I ever jump again like how the what kind of freedom does that actually bring you even in your jumping it might be for me in the past couple of years I haven't had particularly strong interest in jumping though I still love it I may still go do it again some time and I also know that when I go jump again it's going to be with a lot of awareness and paying attention to all of the signals from within me and not just the ones that are serving the way that I want to feel free and in that it's a deeper freedom there's there's the freedom to point my my excitement and my ambition and my drive in so many directions I can travel to places that aren't certain types of terrain you know I can learn from and hang out with and love people that aren't you know on the same in the same kind of uh wavelength in certain ways and there's so much freedom there and I don't lose I don't lose the attraction or the the love of what jumping brings to me and has brought to me I totally agree with you and I again I'll say that the initial strategy there was radically unsustainable like it was a wild time for me to live through but not something that I'd ever want to go back to and you know led to the most dangerous jumping years of my life you know the fucking hucket let's send it you know trying to you know bash through that that evolutionary like you know pattern was I don't know in my opinion not not the best way to cope about it but hey you know hindsight's 2020 yeah yeah I'm grateful for all the things I've learned some some of them you know I don't know that I would have learned any other way because nothing else has brought me into such deep contact such as you know something we haven't talked about competitiveness right that's a that's so something that we can have is that we want to be better than others or we want to just be as good as others or compare ourselves or somehow stand out and one of the things that I loved about that I love about air sports is that it's an individual sport there can be competitions that's for the competition people but I didn't really love I don't really like being in like team or competitive sports I love being in just you know beating my own personal best or exploring but I also had a little bit of an identity around that and I didn't want to be the kind of person who was competitive which you know meant that when you know when we were when we met in the Alps and we were jumping and you had you pulled out a G4 wing suit and I was like wow like I had no idea you were sponsored by G4m2 am I that out of the loop with my sponsor like did I like and then there's the whole like did I fuck up somewhere like how did I let myself like lose control of this like resource you know and then in that there's this like but I don't want to be the kind of person who's competitive so I would like stuff that down and not let myself feel the jealousy and then there be like a little bit of resentment and that like feeling a little bit of resentment for you and Ian in that moment really fucked with me when Ian died at the event that I invited you guys to that I was like yeah you know what I'm gonna not be doing the competitive thing right now I'm gonna do the cooperative thing they're on board with my sponsor this is great I'm gonna invite them to an event that'll be good for this sponsorship for all of us and I also just wasn't letting myself feel the jealousy and then when Ian died that mine fuck that part of feeling jealous was like you know the the jealous parts of us that we suppress they they start to say some really fucking evil things sometimes like I'm not evil but like some things that are really scary to us like yeah you know like what if what if this person had an accident and got out of my way you know like what if they just had like you know an injury that took him out for six months then like that would be convenient but then there's the the conscious part of us it's like no no no no don't think like that that's that's ridiculous that's like absolutely ridiculous and then an accident happens and then that part of you is like shit shit shit like I actually thought that thought and that that can be its own traumatic moment of like like who do I really think I am like do I really deeply actually love the people that I say that I love when there's a part of me that like some part that would find it convenient if harm came to them but again suppressing that makes it control you so letting that in be like yeah you know what there's a competitive fucking part of me there's there's a part of me that just wants to be the baddest ass motherfucker on this planet and wants to be seen and loved for it and it's okay that there's the part of me that wants that and that wants to get all the opportunity isn't all the sponsorships and I also don't need to receive all of that you know like it's okay that there's a part that wants that and there's also a much bigger part that just more deeply wants to be in connection with the people around me whether or not I'm feeling threatened yeah strangely enough even on that same incident I had similar feelings after he went in and not even derived from competitiveness like Ian and I had talked about each other going in all the time to the point where like when he finally did I was like oh my god like I've imagined this this situation so many times it feels feels like I manifested it and along the line of you know imagining your partner going in you also look at like all of the silver lining things that could happen you know you're like okay well if he goes in like we'll have this awesome party for him and like that'll be bad because I'll see all of our friends that like you know and this thing will fall into place and that thing will fall into place and you know afterwards you're like oh my god did I really think about all of that did I really think about all the positives that would come of somebody going in like that it it it's hard to reconcile that for sure yeah I mean it's one of the original minefox for me and I'm sure there's a true for others some that may know it some that may not but check in with yourself who you're listening to this when I first got into the sport it was apparent it was written all over the place how dangerous it was and it was known that like if you're in the sport for a while you're going to make some of the best friends of your life and you're going to lose them or they're gonna lose you you don't get to pick and some part of me was like yeah you know what that's the hero's journey I need you know the the people who have been through that are the people with the grit and those are the people with the the you know they've they've developed this wisdom they've developed this something you know they've lived life to have like loved and adventured and lost is to have lived fully and so there's something about that hero's journey that I think speaks to a lot of us and it spoke to me and then also every time I actually did lose somebody there was a part of me that was like no not like this this is not what I wanted there was there was the part of me there was there's the part of me that was like yeah you know like I am such a badass that I am in this sport where people die all the time and I'm still doing it because you know I am the one who conquers my fear and I can handle the loss and then when the loss happened it's just like fuck that part of myself would be the feeling like how did I ever feel like I wanted to get myself into this place into this mess but then interestingly that it was true being on this journey has actually given me a lot of life experience a lot of wisdom and it's like a lot of ups and downs you know we we talk about the magnitude of life you know you can live a life where you just kind of like little ups little downs and it's mostly just kind of flat line or you can live a life with wide magnitude swings and you know you can you can approach that from the perspective of this is just how life is happening to me or you can approach it from the perspective of this is actually something that I've been choosing all along even when it hurts really really badly even when I feel like maybe I regret the part of myself that was looking forward to such a challenging life in all these ways and yeah there's that's one example of a motivational system that that you can come to terms with and love and see the love in it for yourself all along or you can subconsciously fight it for years your choice all right so let's get into some you know practical advice here because I feel like a lot of people talk about what you just said and the advice is like well you know we went through this but we don't want you to go through this you know and I can certainly relate to you like I got into base jumping for a lot of things but I also got into it to experience death to be close to it to you know you know I don't know if if it was motivated to you know see like what I had seen because after I'd seen it I was like holy shit man like that was wild but certainly there was a motivation to be in a community where you know death was on the line and where things could go wild and I would be tested as a human being and after going through it I can also tell you exactly that what you just said like it was one of the most one of the most positive experiences of my life like one of the most tragic and yet one of the most most inspiring and you know looking at other people in the community it's hard for me to pick a correct line on that because like I don't wish that experience on anyone and yet I envy anyone who's gone through it right so it's like how do I reconcile those two things yeah yeah I mean it's there's a fear of life and there's a love of life and like you can you can avoid ever being exposed to death well you can't fully avoid it but you can try you can try avoid being exposed to death you can try to avoid being exposed to fear and your life may become will become smaller if you do that and that's a perfectly okay choice to make and you can also choose to get as close as possible to the thing that you're afraid of and that's okay for those of us who are you know seeing somebody who's getting into the sport and it's like man I really don't want them to experience what I had to experience like well maybe that's actually what they want you know maybe maybe maybe our assumptions our projections are incorrect it might be that somebody who is somebody who is you know jumping very complacently and dangerously maybe there's a part of them that actually wants to have an injury and go through a road to recovery and have that story and they might not be consciously aware of it but there might be a part of them that is for some reason attracted to it and who are we to tell them that that's not right for them but we can you know being with each other and being in connection with each other that's what this is that's what that means is being connection with who each of us actually is in that moment and what they actually want and not assuming that everybody wants to live or that everybody wants to stay in one piece or that they don't want to lose friends or that they don't want to have fear or you know you know difficulty motions some part of us really wants the fullness of life and the fullness of life can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people and certainly includes death yeah forget so what do you say to the jumper that approaches you and you say you know you ask why did you get into the sport and they reply I want to experience death yeah well I'd say well what does what does that mean to you like do you want to experience actually dying like first of all like let's define our terms so like if they want to experience death then great what do you want to experience about death what is it that makes you want to experience death you know a lot a lot of people would just go straight to trying to talk them out of it if if their answer is that I want to actually die and not just be like close to it it's like well what is it that you get from that what does that do for you is it is it some kind of legacy that you get from having died is it is it that there's some kind of pain that goes away or you feel goes away if you die is it just that you want to be seen as a person who is ready to face death and what if I see you anyway regardless of what you what way you want to be seen what if I actually see you in a way that you feel truly seen and not try to change you or talk you out of whatever it is that you think you want and what does that do to that desire in that person well from personal experience I can say that it it seems like it reduces it you know I think one of the most powerful stories I've ever heard about somebody wanting to experience death was not in the basement of the world but in just the everyday world where it was a husband and wife and the husband was suicidal and the wife for one reason or another at one point calls up the police and says hey I have no reason to really think that this is can is happening right now but I believe my husband is on the golden gate bridge about to commit suicide can you go check and she gets a call 15 minutes later and the cops are like yeah actually he was on the golden gate bridge and he was you know over the rail and we have him now he's at the at the station like you need to come and get him and they had kids so it was it was a big deal you know to like lose a partner and lose also a father and so on in that drive from her home to the station she had to figure out what to say to this person you know how how do I play this and the gamut that she came up with was to explain to him how much she accepted that decision to like want to die and she said look if you ever want to do this again just please call me and I'll go with you wow and she never had to deal with that again yeah like he in that one moment of being seen of being accepted it totally eradicated his desire to experience that thing yeah and I've noticed in in my life when others have feelings about my base jumping you know like my partner if they're trying to talk me out of it it's not at all effective but if they're like you know hey so I know that you're gonna go you want to go jump great if you dial miss you and I love you it's like the like changes the calculus a little bit it's like okay well I had been considering a bunch of factors and now somebody's giving me more factors to consider but it's not that I have to consider them it's not that they're telling me what's good it's just like oh well I well if I'm feeling this love from this person and that's more present with me right now then that changes the whole calculus a little bit the more presence I am with how much I'm loved the the more you know on on both sides there's like the fear comes up a little bit but not not the kind of fear if I'm not resisting it's not the kind of fear that would make me more dangerous in my jumping it's the kind of fear that makes me more vigilant and then there's also a little bit of a reduction in the desire to really charge it hard you know it's like and that might make it that the kind of jump that I might make upon hearing such a you know loving and accepting a phrase or statement from my partner might be that I'm actually just more interested in doing an enjoyable flight where I'm taking and smelling the roses and enjoying my flight and like like the things that I'm the subtle subconscious things that I might have been driven to do become less it's like if I'm already loved as I am then I don't need to prove anything on this jump to myself or to any anyone watching or to anybody that I might imagine watching from you know from the other side you know okay so it's the calculus at this point we've unpacked this thing quite a bit let's spend a little time packing it back up yeah now I can say personally I came to base jumping to you know be a confident executor in a dangerous environment and I think a lot of people would agree with that what role does fear play as we try and be these confident executors in this incredibly dangerous environment yeah well I would suggest that like what if what if fear is exactly what we're looking for what if fear is actually what we're here for and also what we're afraid of and that makes them in some sense the same thing and and what if we approach fear is something that we welcome and that we love and that we honor that we are here for we're here for this fear I'm going to feel this fear I'm going to feel the fullness of my life which includes all of the physical social abstract ego identity fears and just pay attention to them and let them transform me into whatever it is that I become okay so if we're going to turn fear from an enemy into an ally what's the first step in doing that yeah I mean the easy answer is feel it but that's also not necessarily the deepest answer because it's like well if you have some some deep subconscious inhibitions then just taking that instruction might not necessarily take you there so inquire like what is it what is it that I'm afraid of and it might be many many different things and how is that fear love how is how is the kind of fears that I have been afraid of feeling how are those actually a deeper love for myself if I feel them okay so observe it accept it question it I wouldn't even say question because question implies a little bit of skepticism but more like inquire welcome welcome and feel it when you when you feel it in your body when you're standing at exit point next time feel in your body what that fear feels like and don't try to understand it analyze it judge it just feel the feeling in your body and see what happens because if you're actually feeling a feeling it always moves and shifts if you're resisting a feeling it'll stay the same and there's this there's this fear that we have or this there's this belief that we have that if we if we let a feeling in it'll take over us if we let it in we'll be we'll go crazy we'll be driven nuts by it uh it'll never go away or it'll drive our behavior but that's actually the opposite what happens if you put yourself in the situation where you're feeling that emotion that you've been avoiding and you actually let yourself just feel it feel into the texture of it feel into the color what muscles are tense what happens if you go into it deeper and let those muscles be more tense if you're shaking what if you just let yourself shake even more and then what happens what happens on the other side of that how prepared do you feel how calm do you feel how how do you approach uh the jump itself and how do you approach those that you're with and do this in other environments too you know having a difficult conversation with a partner or it sounds like what you're presenting is that fear is an incredible tool for self-knowledge self-awareness um and uh you know overall preparedness yeah well i'll take that one to the bank um and i am also going to employ that little tactic that you brought up earlier of you know wherever a moment an exit point pass into around let's let's share some fears um ultimately um i think they're incredible sensors and um you know fear is a is a great emotion uh to let into your world in order to uh help you make better decisions yeah and if you if you're really interested in the things that i had to say and you want to learn more about this uh i have a podcast with coach of mine uh it's called the art of accomplishment and we explore how self-self exploration can shift our lives in all kinds of different ways and leading to deeper connection with ourselves our environment and others and uh yeah the art of accomplishment sweet and uh we'll post a link in our uh in our little notes here at the bottom so you don't have to go search and for it you can just click and um breath thank you so much for coming on the podcast man this was uh like i think the first discussion that we've had that's universally applicable like we've been hammering on base jumping base jumping base jumping and this one just feels like it's applicable across the board to every single thing so yeah thank you so much man for sharing your thoughts yeah thank you this is emotional base jumping you know it's like base jumping is it like what we've talked about is that base jumping is actually an emotionally driven thing whether we like it or not and also the things that we learn from it can teach us to go into our emotions approach them the way that we approach base jumping and feel them and feel life fully no matter what we're doing yeah thank you Matt your boss welcome all right low so um episode with Brett Kisler ended up being about a topic that you have an incredible amount of experience and um interesting and so uh for this outro we're going to do something little different we're gonna bring him back on the podcast that you can ask him some questions and clarify at some points that i feel we're important to you all right well let's get him back on and uh here we go all right hi Brett thanks for joining us to close out your session with Matt i'm really sorry i couldn't make it yeah it's really good to join good to see you yeah thanks man i'm fascinated about the the psychological the physiological effects that come with base and it sounds like you're someone who's put a great deal of thought into the subject yeah yeah that definitely have and i really appreciate your level of self-awareness and your ability to tie your motivations and actions back to previous behavior patterns and maybe the conditioning that you received uh through the hazing you received from your older brothers it sounded like equal parts super fucking fun and scary as fuck childhood yeah i mean that's that's base jumping right like there's a reason why i found myself in that it's like scary scary as fuck and also really fun and there's like a lot of brotherhood and camaraderie in it and uh you know it's a little wild yeah you know that point that you guys discussed about how season jumpers can be so much more open with their fears is totally spot on um i think base if you're in it long enough seems to have this universal capacity to to humble everyone and that is really expressed through people's openness and acknowledgement of their fears um another takeaway that i had from listening to you guys discussion was how subjective this experience with base really is and i mean i think that that could even spread out to the human existence just in general but there was a couple of points where our opinions seem to diverge and um the one that i can think of first is like how we perceived fear as or how you perceived fear as a catalyst uh for our body to metabolically prepare for for what we're about to do and then another one was um it being fear that is the sole moderator of complacency um so let's dive into those for a second and let's see if you can clear it up like yeah i think that these are giant topics and we could fill an entire podcast with them just alone so i'll try to keep it brief so in in regards to complacency uh yes i think that fear can be a factor but i think it's unreliable um fear is very much like an illusion it's our reaction to a perceived danger and i i think we all know that human perception can be pretty squirrely um how you experience fear changes drastically um on a variety of factors that can play into this like exposure to stimulants too much coffee for example your fitness level uh how much sleep you've had and i think and for me complacency really comes down to a level of personal discipline and training um let's take my pre-jump process for example which i've developed through um talking to fighter pilots high-performing athletes uh listening to elite soldiers my training through uh as a first responder in life and death situations it's imperative for us to downregulate the physiological effects of fear so when we're downregulating that fear we're trying to get into the sense of flow and that seems a little bit opposite of what you're trying to say maybe maybe you could clarify a little bit there yeah yeah to clarify to clarify a front one point um i wouldn't i wouldn't say i'm not sure if i said this but if i did say that fear is the only moderator of complacency then that's not what i mean to say there's always so many different stories that are always that are all true or somewhat true um so yeah that's not what i mean to say uh i do think that there's a really big component to the different ways that we process and prioritize or suppress fear and how that plays into complacency because it really affects what signals we're allowing in and i completely agree with you that our fears whether it's space jumping or whether it's just in you know going on a date are our representations of our history their conditioned responses that aren't necessarily or that you know they kind of necessarily aren't actually attuned to reality until we process the the data that's coming in now our reality in the moment and so that's one of the things that actually processing fear does and so you you mentioned this discipline uh with practices to downregulate the nervous system downregulate fear and i think there's a common misconception that you know what we want to do is we want to reach a calm state so that we're acting from from a place of calm and we're relaxed and we're not panicked and so we often try to go straight to that end state by kind of forcing that state so we try to downregulate the fear uh and those practices that you can do that will dissociate you from the fear so you're not feeling it there's also practices you can do that will actually move the fear through so that it then settles and so like one of the things you could do for example is breath work uh met mentioned that you do some breath work at the exit point and that's also something people do often on a plane they're like there's this thing that people say like fear is excitement without the breath uh and i think the the thing that's true there is that breathing actually increases the rate of emotional processing so if you have if you have a bunch of fear in your system whether you know regardless of how accurate that fear might be or regardless of how conditioned it might be on your past that may or may not be a match for the present the the breath work that you might do or the practice is that you might do to be in touch with yourself will allow that fear to move and it'll adjust such that you are now in the present moment and no longer in the past state where the fear was conditioned so if you if you were all about part we we're all about actionable advice right so um we'll be specific here um like my technique that i like it seems to be most effective for me is box breathing or a combat breathing and uh and then visualization and then uh vocalizing a pre-flight checklist and then vocalizing emergency procedures and i don't feel in my pre-flight check or my pre-flight preparation that there's a disassociation it's more of a down regulation like you talked about and um and um again this is highly subjective but i feel like this is playing so much into my level of complacency because or lack of that because these i'm relying on the skills that i've trained and i've trained them so many times that they're submitted now to muscle memory so that i'm allowing myself to react intuitively and also being observant as as much as possible to any possible hazards and um i think this is a more competent way um for approaching fear at the exit point by being more um let's say logic driven than feeling driven how would you respond to that yeah i would say that actually the way the thing that you've described is actually no different than what i'm than what i'm proposing so if you're doing box breathing what the breathing is doing is getting getting your getting emotions moving getting the fear moving the fear but because you're not resisting the fear it's just something that is felt as uh it's felt as an activation your body it's felt as just that you're present and then what you're doing with the checklists is orienting your attention to what matters and when your entire being when your body including them on the level of muscle memory are satisfied that your awareness is oriented towards what matters then it will relax naturally back down into a parasympathetic calm state but if you're not successful in doing this then what what tends to happen is that you still have that fear stuck in your system somewhere and that will show up as muscle tension so if you have people who aren't breathing like students on their first skydives you know they're not breathing they're not they're not as aware of what's going on they they have you know some kind of internal conflict about what they're supposed to be putting their attention on and they're unfamiliar with it then there'll be a lot of fear stuck in the nervous stuck in the musculature as flight flight freeze which leads to you know locking up your muscles and potato chipping or flailing or even just having like unnecessary or unhelpful constructive frustration and anger which might be the flight the fight version so what I what I'm kind of describing here is I think that what you're what you've described as your procedures are actually a really good very specific way to approach the thing that I've been talking about in a very general way and so you you could clarify it yeah you're welcome. Let's let's jump on to another point that you brought up about about sharing fear at the exit point and from my experience the last thing that I well let's let's let's zoom out and leave a little bit wider here in my experience of opening technical exit points the last thing that I wanted to hear from my jumping partners was their fears what I wanted to hear and what I want to hear is objective observations to make sure that I haven't missed any potential dangers and I feel that you know for maybe a lack of a better term my ability my cognitive ability at the exit point is somewhat limited with the amount of stimulation you know I'm I'm thinking about down regulating I'm thinking through my procedures I'm vocalizing I'm also going through the the measurements and I don't want to hear from my partners dude I'm so scared right now I don't want to crash I don't want to be obliterated on a pile of rocks what I want to hear is objective observations of you know it's 150 down to 70 out I'm a little bit concerned because the last time I jumped something with those measurements my toes were pretty fucking close and I think that that is a huge shift in approach of how we're communicating at the exit point and perhaps we have the same opinions here but maybe you could comment on that yeah yeah I think again what you're describing is a subtlety I think what you're what you're looking for at the exit point is you want a really high signal to noise ratio of what you're really what you're joint awareness is on so it might not be helpful for you for somebody to walk up next to you and be spending some of that exit point time on just talking about broadly how scared they are or like how concerned they are about their taxes or like something totally irrelevant you know or just something that's very obvious you know like yeah I am afraid of exploding on the rocks I don't want that to happen you don't really gain anything new from that but if it's something that someone's feeling and they're feeling shame about feeling that it actually is helpful for them just to voice it and have it be seen so on one level even saying I'm afraid of my taxes can have your body release that fear and especially if there's a culture of that being welcomed and just dissipated but then the thing that you're describing that is really in a technical jump keeping you safe is you know what in your words you said well I'm concerned about this or that of the other thing the concern comes from a fear the fear is your body your nervous system your awareness tracking where the thread is coming from and so the thing that you're pointing to is you know when you're on a technical jump with experienced jumpers you're looking at very subtle dangers and you are assessing those things and that given the limited amount of processing time you have to make a jump and be in a jump you're wanting to be in a high high signal to noise ratio processing of what's going on so you want to be looking at the details and you do want to be doing it objectively if you're looking at something objectively you're also able to experience the emotions that that observation brings up you know if you're if you're seeing that there's something that is dangerous that you weren't expecting and your your attached to making the jump versus walking down then whatever disappointment might come up or whatever whatever feelings or emotions might arise from the observation you want to be able to feel them and if you don't feel them and process them through and reach homeostasis after processing it then your decision making is going to be distorted by the information that you're not allowing to move so I think again it comes back to a common misconception which is that yes we want to be in a calm state when we're jumping but going straight to the calm state doesn't necessarily work because if we have signals coming in and we're not listening to them and we suppress them then they just continue to knock on our door even if it's just in the in the form of held muscle tension that makes us less efficient and takes us out of flow that's absolutely correct I mean it's definitely easier on some jumps than others to get to that low anxiety state Brett we're running out of time thanks so much for answering those questions and really looking forward to having you back with us again in the future yeah thank you for the clarifications they're really good cheers buddy and we want to throw out a shout out and a thanks to our co-producer and sound engineer Mark Stockwell thanks again for riding along with us cheers everybody see on the next one cheers ciao