89: Turning Pain Into Purpose — Blind Adventurer Erik Weihenmayer on Kayaking the Grand Canyon, Climbing Everest and Building No Barriers

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry. The Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am thrilled and humbled to have our guest Eric Weinmeyer here today. Eric is an adventurer, author, activist and motivational speaker and he has become a celebrated and accomplished athlete. Despite losing his vision at the age of 13, Eric was the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 2001 and completed the Seven Summits the following year, joining 150 mountaineers at the time who had accomplished that feat. But as the only climber who was blind in 2005, Eric Co founded no Barriers, a non profit organization with the tagline what's within you is stronger than what is in your way. The organization helps others with diverse backgrounds and abilities attack challenges head on, problem solve, build winning teams and serve others. In September of 2014, Eric and Blinded Navy veteran Lonnie Bedwell kayaked the entire 277 miles of the Grand Canyon, considered one of the most formidable whitewater venues in the world. That's the focus of his recent book, no A Blind Man's Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon. And in the foreword, Bob Woodruff said that Eric is simply one of the most remarkable men I have ever met. Eric, although we're just meeting through our mutual friend Peyton Lindley, I have to say the same. Thank you so much for being who you are in the world.

Thank you very much. And also I'm very excited or impressed that you pronounced my last name correctly. Nobody does that well. Most people, it's like wine and hyman, Winnie Meyer and I don't know. So saying Weinmayr is like amazing.

I have to confess I got lucky because I happened to stumble upon your website and I saw that you were On Oprah, which I didn't realize. So then I watched this. It's such a moving video. I don't know what year that was, but Oprah said it. And I was like, oh, my God. I didn't even think to ask how to pronounce his name.

Yeah, it's impossible.

When was that Oprah appearance?

I was probably back in, like, 2008 or something like that. There's a little kid that I met named Kyle, and he was. He went blind in kindergarten from cancer, and he was pretty. I mean, of course you're devastated, even as a little boy. And I met him and talked to him and hung out with him, and we stayed in touch. And anyway, he turned out to be an amazing kid. He joined the climbing team and his school. He became the president of his student council.

He just really has gone on to do great stuff. He's actually riding his tandem bike across America in a couple months. So, anyway, so he and I were on Oprah, and he wrote me this letter in braille. And of course, it was the perfect Oprah interview, because I was bawling.

Oh, my gosh. I know I was bawling. And he said when he was going blind, he thought blind people had to just stay home all day. And that you helped show him that you could go do things and be an adventurer and be an athlete. It was so moving.

Yeah. And a few years ago, he joined one of our no Barriers programs. And I actually trekked across the Andes for a week with Kyle and a bunch of people. So, yeah, he's been a big part of my life since that interview.

That is so incredible. You help so many people through no barriers. This was one of the most inspiring set of stories from your book that you layer in not just your journey, this most recent one of kayaking the Grand Canyon, which is its own beast. But you work with so many people with differing levels of ability, and I'm wondering, how do you advise or guide people on this journey where in the beginning they may feel hopeless? You work with a lot of military veterans, and how do you help get them past that blame? Either of themselves or others, or the why me's or. Or the what ifs, you know, who would they be without these adversities, physical and otherwise? How do you counsel others in this way?

Well, it's not an easy map that you're trying to help people build for themselves.

And, you know, I've been thinking about that question for a long time.

You know, people go off and they start with optimism and hope and Then things happen along the way. Sometimes those things, you know, you either get stuck or you get shattered or you get just crushed, you know. And.

So then how do you rebuild your life? You know, how do you create a map that takes you from that dark place to the summit, whatever that looks like for each person? And that's really where no barriers came out of it. It's, you know, no barriers isn't really about kayaking the Grand Canyon. It's really about that map. It's about, you know, I just didn't understand it myself. I didn't feel that anyone had adequately illuminated what that map looked like, what that sort of unexplored terrain looked like between those dark places and those high points. And so I wanted to understand it better. So the last 15 years, I've been diving into it with veterans who have come home from war and are trying to put their lives back together, and youth and people with physical challenges, people with psychological trauma, people with post traumatic stress disorder. And I guess there's no easy, like, I can't give you, like, a nutshell answer, but it's a long process based, basically, I think people have to have an idea that they are not living the best version of themselves. They're stuck, though. They don't know how to get there. And then no barriers provides sort of the catalyst, a little bit of the energy to, you know, hey, come do an expedition with us, do a program. We'll take you through a process.

And slowly and surely, we'll kind of reprogram.

The brain and our psyche and our spirit and our soul.

And kind of equip ourselves for the journey. Because, hey, you went out and you got hurt. Right. But that doesn't mean you should check out. That doesn't mean you should be on the sidelines for the rest of your life listening to life go by. You got to get back in the current. And if you're properly equipped for that journey, then it can be an amazing adventure.

It seems like you help people through no barriers and this sense of adventure and possibility that people think, well, now life's over, you know, on some level, or this life that I had dreamed about, and there's a lot of grief there, but you help show. And, you know, one theme in the book is you're saying other people will often put up barriers unintentionally, let's say, for you, losing your sight, where they just assume what you can and can't do.

Yeah.

And that you chose to shatter those barriers. Like, you couldn't imagine a life where those things wouldn't be possible. And even you, you saw that. I'm forgetting his name in this moment, but the man running across Canada, that I would love for you to share with listeners how that was inspiring to you, because it seems like he served a very special role for you, showing what's possible. And then you've now shown that to so many people through your life and no barriers.

Well, so I want to comment as well on something that you said, because I find it really interesting is that you talked about people saying, like, they think their life is over. And sometimes when people get stuck or get hurt, yeah, they want their life back, and sometimes they achieve that. But honestly, sometimes that isn't happening. Maybe their old life actually is over and they have to start a new life. They have to kind of use the. The energy of. Of that adversity and kind of use it as. As. As a catapult, as kind of a catalyst to propel them in a new place. And that can be a freaking crazy ride for people, but it can launch them into some really amazing places. And, you know, but sometimes it is like saying, hey, I'm. I'm giving up that thing, that thing I was hanging on to, and I'm going to sort of embrace something new.

Now. Terry Fox, he is definitely one of my heroes. Terry.

Terry was this guy that I. When I was going blind from this really rare disease, I was, I don't know, 12 years old.

I saw him on TV. There was a show back in the 80s called that's Incredible, and. And I love the show. And I. I couldn't see very well, but I could press my face up against the TV screen, and I could sort of make out the images as I was losing the last traces of my. Of my eyesight. And they focused one night on this guy named Terry Fox. He was a Canadian. He had lost a leg to cancer, and he decided that he was going to run across Canada. Now, I love that because I was just like, whoa, wait, what? Like what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to kind of shrink into a ball and protect the little bit you have left. But Terry didn't do that. He did kind of the opposite of that. He. That. That thing that happened to him, that tragedy, that darkness, he converted it into something bigger, and he used his energy and it propelled him along that road. And as he ran across Canada, people began to show up and notice him. It was before social media, so it was just like telephones and stuff and newspapers that started latching onto this crazy guy with a prosthetic leg limping across Canada. And by, you know, halfway through his journey, running a marathon a day, there were hundreds, thousands of people showing up to cheer him along. He raised a dollar for cancer research per every Canadian citizen. I think now his legacy has raised probably nearing a billion dollars for cancer research. Just name alone.

Wow.

And, you know, that was so incredibly powerful and profound for me to think about. You know, the idea that you don't have to react and respond the way that, you know, you're. That you're sort of trained to. That you can react in a totally different way, in a totally kind of unpredictable way that you can.

You don't have to retreat, that you can attack. And that's gonna create the kind of future and the kind of legacy and the kind of character that you hope in your life.

But it's a pretty bold decision that he made.

Oh, my gosh, completely. And look at the legacy now, as you said, almost a billion dollars from that decision not to just lay down and shrink, as you said.

Yeah. And he inspired a nation. And he's a folk hero now. He's a national hero in Canada. There's Terry Fox Day. There's Terry Fox, runs all over the world. There's a statue of him, and I think, like, Vancouver.

So, yeah, I mean, he died eventually from cancer, but he lived bigger than he died. And, you know, it's pretty cool.

There's something you said in there. This reminds me. In the book, you talk about alchemy, of turning pain into purpose and darkness into light, and that although most people wouldn't choose these various adversities, there is an opportunity. As you said, if you find the fight, you find the spark, that these stories are so inspiring. Like you, I was so moved reading your book, and it was shifted me on a profound level just reading the book, not to mention interacting with you in person and then that cascade effect. So it's not. I guess it's not to make light of the incredibly difficult journey that anyone has to take. Like, for example, the veterans you described coming through PTSD or anything like that, but that your stories, you know, the ones who do have this tremendous adversity, ends up being so inspiring to millions of people, like Terry Fox inspiring a nation to say, well, if he can do that, what can I do?

Yeah. And, you know, so I had written my second book was this book called the Adversity Advantage. And I teamed up with this scientist, Dr. Paul Stoltz, and he's an amazing guy. Like, really. He studies Resiliency. And he studies, you know, adversity and this idea of how to strengthen your approach to adversity. And he's a genius and I learned a ton from him as we co wrote this second book. But we used to get in these arm wrestling matches because he was coming at adversity from this clinical side where it's like, the faster you pick yourself up and you respond effectively, positively to adversity, the better you're going to be in a dozen different ways, from health to longevity to all these things. And that's 100% true. But I would say, like, Paul, it's not like you are walking down the street and you stub your toe and there's blood like gushing everywhere and you're like, what an opportunity for growth. No, it just doesn't work that way. Like. So this third book was. I wanted to go into the human side beyond anything clinical. I wanted to just understand people's journeys by looking at, you know, with a really clear lens at people's journeys. And yeah, I mean, you know, all the people that I wrote about, and no barriers, they go through hell. And it's, it's, you know, you know, getting shattered is not like something you ask for.

But that process of rebuilding, that process of alchemy is a really beautiful, inspiring process.

But, but definitely, yeah, it's, it's, it's not like one person I studied, you know, smashed their head against the wall and then got up and said, great, okay, you know, they, you know, they lay on the ground and they pound their fists against the ground and they rail against the unfairness of life. And yeah, eventually, once they've gone through the appropriate sort of mourning and all that stuff, they.

You know, that journey leads them to these amazing new discoveries. But, but, but it's because eventually they realize that they have to open their heart again and they have to sort of move forward in that no barriers type of way.

It's so beautifully said. It reminds me this part in the book where you talked about. In fact, it's a good cue. I'm going to read this one part you say. As blood poured down my face and into my eye, I thought about the motivational poster Rob had spotted on the wall and wished it were that easy. No, I thought barriers were not imagined or just perceived. They were real things with real substance, as real as a square iron bar across a tender forehead. And they hurt a lot. The cruelest part was trying to push forward, trying to navigate, fighting through one challenge after another, trying to learn these Complex languages of the heart and mind, trying to, trying to build something important. And you describe how it's like you sometimes do go two steps forward, one step back. And, and like these barriers are real. It would be fake or false for you to just go up, stand up on stage and tell everyone at no barriers. Like, no barriers, they're invisible. I love how you kind of kept it real throughout the book and shared all these examples.

Well, you know, it's funny because people often say, okay, so your message is that, that barriers are only in the mind. I'm like, no, no, they're real. They're pretty real. And like, they're like, oh. And okay, so your message is like, anything is possible. I'm like, no, I'm not driving a car. I'm not a NASCAR race race car driver. So yeah, not everything is possible. So yeah, no barriers has a real, a realism to it, you know, that, that these barriers are real. And yeah, that experience. I was walking with my dog, he didn't look up and this iron bar was sticking out into space and totally wailed me in the head. And I was laying flat on my back with blood pouring down my eyes. And I was thinking, barriers are definitely not just in the mind.

And so, yeah, there's a lot of struggle.

For people along the journey. There's more struggle, I would say, than there is triumph. But there is triumph. There's, you know, those journeys are sprinkled with triumph and with self discovery and that makes it worth it in the end and great adventure. So that's the common thread that I found with all these people from Hugh, her that, you know, lost both of his legs and became a world class climber, to Mandy Harvey, who is a person who lost her hearing and became a world class songwriter and musician. So yeah, there was, there were common threads that ran throughout all these people. And I've been really privileged to meet these real people and be able to write about them. But again, like, in a very realistic way, like, I did not want to BS people. There's enough books that BS people and present this sort of rosy picture of struggle.

And I just didn't wanna do that. Like.

I just felt like somebody should sort of state these things as hard as they are with all the blood and all the flailing and all the groping and not on the Donald Trump groping kind of way, but in just the life way and, and be real about it.

That's what I loved about the kayaking story, really? You kayaking the Grand Canyon. It is epic. But what's so interesting about you. And I think why Peyton said, gotta chat with you for this show is that I expected that you were just gonna write a book about, like, this is my journey of kayaking the Grand Canyon and describing all the rapids, which you and your co author buddy do beautifully, what the experience was like. But you really zoomed out. It was so much more about the river as a metaphor for life, as a metaphor for overcoming adversity. And actually, you shared a challenge that was very new for you. You'd been a climber for a long time. Like, you said something like you felt as vulnerable as a child starting from scratch, and you had a lot of fear. I actually thought it was beautiful how much you shared a journey that showed what kind of. I can't call them warts because you're you. You're incredible. But that showed, like, warts and all, Bumps, bruises, flips upside down, feeling discouraged, wanting to quit, having the fear and then still going forward and doing so with a team. Like, that's the other thing. I think one of your huge messages is you're not saying no barriers, and you're also not saying you can do anything and go it alone. Like, so much of your success, it seems, involves teams of people around you in various ways.

Yeah, I was terrified. I mean, you know, when I. I was a climber, as you said, and, you know, in a weird way, terrify me more. I mean, it's funny, because I'd been climbing for a long time, and it was like climbing was becoming my comfort zone. And so starting kayaking at 40 years old, by the way.

I was terrified. Like, I was terrified to the point where I was sick physically, like, throwing up and just not able to eat. And.

You know, but I wanted to understand. You know, in a way, it was weird because a lot of the soldiers come back and take part in our no barriers programs. And, you know, some of the trauma that I had, I felt like a kindred spirit to some of those. To some of those veterans. Not like I had ever been shot at or anything, but, you know, slamming into a rock without being able to see it in a massive rapid that just slams your face right into a rock and you flip over and your head's bashing against rocks underwater and you're trying to roll back up and you feel like you're going to drown. Um, like, it was really overwhelming. And. And you're exactly right. One of the pieces of this no barriers life is the kind of team that you're able to build because you cannot do it alone. If you're going to do big things, you are not going to do it alone. You just don't have enough inside to, to be a lone wolf. So blindness sort of fleshes that out for me. I'm definitely not going to kayak a river or climb Everest alone. So I've become hopefully kind of an expert in building this amazing team around me of people who, when I'm down, when I'm crushed, they lift you up and they help you sort of figure out the map that still exists in front of you even though you can't see it at the time.

Yeah, it was as much the success story, like testing different walkie talkies, testing how you're going to communicate, testing so many things. I loved, I loved reading about all your experimentation.

Yeah. Not to be kind of over overdoing it, but I mean, that's another part of the no bears life that because we point out a bunch of different things, we call them elements when we run our programs. And another one is we call pioneer. And it's like, yeah, if you're going to get back on this track, then you, you're going to have to innovate along the way. You're going to have to be kind of an engineer of your own life. And blind people get really good at doing that. You know, being able to understand how big a room is by echoes. You know, you're not seeing a thing, so you have to click and listen to the echo. It's blind people call it echolocation.

You know, how are you going to match your clothes and how you're going to.

You know, figure things out and technology, you know, like, you know, type on a computer. You know, you're constantly forced to try to be a pioneer and it's just a struggle, like, for sure. I mean, I'm not always a good pioneer. Sometimes I'm, I'm the one on my stomach pounding my fists, just so angry and, you know what I mean, upset. But anyway, ultimately you got to sort of pioneer things. And I love the stories of, of our, our people that have gone through our programs. Like, we had this veteran who had one leg blown off and that was his good leg because his other foot was, they saved it. But it was, it was really bad. He could barely stand on it. And he wanted to climb a mountain with us. We climbed a 20,000 foot peak called Lobache. And you know, he was trying to suck it up and just be tough like, you know, I can do it. I'm a soldier. I'll Just, you know, push back the pain. And we realized very quickly that wasn't going to happen. You know, no amount of sucking it up was going to work for this guy. And so we started looking around one of our partners and no Bearers was this cool company called Side Sticks. And they made these really innovative sort of support crutches and they had different attachments for snow and ice. And. And so we hooked them up with this thing. He used these side Sticks, he climbed the mountain. He would have never gotten there without sort of embracing that tool. And so that's really inspiring to me because how many tools are there in front of people and they just blow them off because of their ego or because they don't have time or they haven't really taken the time to be a discerning person, you know, looking and understanding their environment totally.

And it seems like what you just described, that being a pioneer, being dropping ego, being willing to use the tools at one's disposal, and then patience, probably to just try and fail. Try and fail. And this.

Co interdependence, you would probably say, not codependence.

Yeah, sometimes a little co dependence.

Yeah. But like, speaking of technology, I thought it was fascinating, fascinating hearing about your experimentation with echolocation. And I mean, it's wild. I love even to hear where you're at with that now and then brainport this technology, I don't know if you're still using it, but where you have a device on your tongue and you can feel the shapes of things in front of you, like say more about either or both or whatever is your latest pioneering experiments have taken you.

Well, I've been fortunate.

To be able to connect with amazing people. So, like, I wanted to learn echolocation, so I connected with this pioneer. He's a blind guy named Daniel Kish. And I wrote about him in no Barriers. And you know, when he was a kid, nobody gave him a cane, so he had to sort of figure out his environment. The only way he could do it was to learn to click. And he does this really cool kind of he calls it. It's like a bat interrogating the, you know, his environment. And he's listening for the echoes, sound being vibration bouncing off of objects and coming back at you. So he can tell, you know, a cup in front of him. He can, you know, he's. He can ride a bike down the street and click. And he can say, yeah, there's a building on the left and there's a gargoyle on the right. You're like well, come on, dude, are you cheating or something? He taught a kid and there's a YouTube video of him playing ping pong using echolocation. I'm like, you know, so I don't have the skills to that degree. That's a phenom. But Daniel came out and taught me, you know, how to do all kinds of things in my community that I couldn't do before, like find the way to my backyard across a creek and, you know, by clicking and hearing the trees and counting the number of trees along the way and then being able to take a left and up to my backyard. I mean, you know, we. It was just so fun to be able to, you know, find ways of breaking through barriers in my backyard with Daniel. And he's come on to be a part of our no barriers community and teach a lot of clinics for us. You know, he'll blindfold a bunch of people and have them navigate with their ears. Now brainport is.

You know, all these innovations are sort of a similar vein because brainport is based on this idea of neuroplasticity. And it's really. As I wrote the book, I realized that no Barriers is really based on reprogramming the brain. The idea that when one thing happens, one barrier happens in the brain because of trauma or because of.

Because one part gets damaged, that there you can create new neural pathways through and the other parts of the brain can. Can kind of rewire itself to do that job. And so brainport is essentially a device that you wear a camera. It's a video image that it's taking. And that video image gets translated through a microprocessor. And that. And that light image is translated to a tactile image that is like on a plate, on my tongue. It has like 4 or 500, what are called tactors, these little vibrating pixels. The eyes get, you know, 10 million pixels, but this just gets 4 or 500. So I'm just getting the shapes of things and I can use it to see holds on a rock face. I can see it to best is playing games with my kids. I can play tic tac toe or war cards. Card games. Rock paper scissors is really fun. Yeah, you can do special cards. No, no, just regular car. Yeah, yeah. In fact, that's pretty easy because you can see the two or the three or the king. It's. It contrasts against the, you know, the white or dark light or dark behind it. So that's actually really easy. And fists are really fun. Hands, fists, scissors. You know, when you're playing Rock paper, scissors. Because I can zoom in and I can look, see the difference. And, you know, that is as close to sight as I will get in my life because I've, you know, both my eyes, I've lost both my eyes. And there's no, you know, technology, there's no cure to my blindness. So, you know, ideas, our technologies like brainport are going to be the sort of the future for a lot of blind people. You know, kind of a technological solution to being able to see the world in a different way. And so this guy, Dr. Paul Baccarita, who is a pioneer and neuroplasticity, he decided that, you know, hey, if your eyes don't work, then let's create a new portal into the brain. Because it's the brain that sees, not the. Not the eyes. The eyes are just the hardware. The brain is the true thing that actually is seeing. And so when I am looking using the brain port, my brain is lighting up with image, with images. Like I like when I could see. So I know that, you know, the visual cortex of my brain is lighting up because I am just. I'm seeing in my brain.

It's amazing. I love the innovation, the creativity of someone for him to just make that connection that, hey, it's really our brains that are perceiving images. And what's another part of the body that has all these transmitters? The tongue.

Yeah, the tongue he found was the most receptive thing. He tried the back, he tried the feet, he tried all, you know, he tried all the stuff. And he finally found the tongue was the thing that has the most. Packed with, like, sensors, you know, for taste. And, you know, as I wrote the book, I also realized that all these connections in this, you know, and Mandy Harvey is a person I wrote about. She's become a friend and just somebody I really look up to. She went deaf in her music program in college. And then eventually, long story short, irony.

By the way, isn't it? Or not a cruel irony. Sometimes I think life gives this perfectly weird twist. But it's like, she's a music student.

Yeah. She wanted to be a music teacher. Yeah. She goes deaf and music school. Yeah. What I described in the book was like, I used to be a fan of Monty Python. Flying Circus, that was this really hilarious show back in the 70s. And, you know, this sort of. Just in the beginning of the show, always, I just. It was so odd. This sort of cartoon foot comes out of the sky and just crushes this little Swiss village and it's like, yeah, that's what it was. Sometimes you make your own problems, right? A lot of times that's the case. You know, we're. We're actually doing things that are creating our own misfortune. But when in certain instances, like Mandy's case, it's just the cosmic foot just coming down and crutching her life out of the blue.

So she gave up singing, and her dad got her back into it and said, hey, let's just sing a little bit, and I'll play the guitar and we'll sing like old times to connect. And she realized that she had perfect pitch. That sound, that hearing was in the brain, that the ears.

You know, like the eyes, they're not the thing that hears. The ears are the hardware. The brain is what hears. So she had a very similar experience.

Understanding that that music was in her mind, in her brain, and she had to figure out how to get it out there. And so she developed all these amazing techniques where she sings barefoot.

And she feels the vibration of the music, the other instruments, through the stage. And she uses an iPhone, I think, to. When she sings, she has, like, a couple notes, like, kind of in her brain that she knows, and she starts with that, and then she starts working her way through learning a new song by watching the iPhone. Like, it's like a pitch kind of thing that tells her whether she's on pitch or not. And it's light, a certain color, I guess, lights up. I'm not a big musical person, so. But. But I. Because I could be describing that a little bit off. But anyway, so she uses technology to get the right. The right notes, and then she learns new songs, and now she's started writing her own music. So she's writing music that she will never hear and. And. And singing it, presenting it to the world. It's just. It's stuff that you would think is like, you know, like fiction.

Right, right. And. And this, to me, is the. No barriers. It's not that there are no real obstacles in the path. It's that what we perceive as barriers are often not the case or. Or. How can I say that? It's like, of course, as you described, sometimes you actually get hit in the head with a metal rod, you know, but of. Of. I think the barriers that you work so hard at dismantling and helping others dismantle are the perceived. Lose my hearing. I can never sing again. And she is this beautiful example of not just leveraging technology and these pioneers, as you've described, but figuring out, oh, wait a second. That's an easy Assumption to make, but it's not actually true.

Now she found her way back to hearing. But in other cases, I actually like. One of the guys I wrote about was this guy named Andy Parkin. He's an amazing guy. He was an amazing climber. And he, you know, he got, like, the highest climbing award that you can get in the world for pioneering a new route in Patagonia. And then he was guiding, and a huge rock fell and crushed him and just destroyed him. Just broke, like, every bone in his body and, you know, just did awful things to his body. And he said, you know, I want to climb again, but I don't really know if I'll ever be able to do it. And he would wheel his wheelchair to the window of the hospital, and he would look out at the mountains, and he would. He just was so bored, he started painting.

Which is something he did a little bit when he was a kid. And then when he recovered enough, he hobbled his way, you know, to the base of mountains and he would paint them because he thought, that's as close as it'll ever get by doing that. Yes. He rehabbed himself and he climbed still. He, you know, he climbs better than he ever thought he would have. But more important than that, he became an artist.

So that alchemy process doesn't always lead you exactly to the same spot that you left and you wanted to get back to. Sometimes it leads you to a new place. And so he is a famous artist now. He has a studio in Chamonix. He's, like, critically reviewed or, you know, praised by. By critics, and they talk about his painting. Is his sculpture being sort of very no barriers esque, you know, like, kind of showing a map to where people want to go in their lives and, you know, really expressing, not like pounding your chest on the top of mountains, but sort of the fragility of life. And so he's a famous artist, and he's in great demand. And, you know, he's hired to, like, do monuments and things like that all over Europe. And, you know, he calls himself an artist climber.

Oh, wow. Love it.

Yeah.

How's that for a slash career? That was awesome. Yeah, I thought. I thought. You put it so beautifully earlier when you said sometimes they are starting a new life. It's. You can't. There may be barriers to living the exact life that you would have had before all of these injuries. That life may be gone, but there's a new one here.

Yeah.

And in his case, and it's so beautiful, and I just Love to love hearing his story.

Well, Hugh her is another guy that I've gotten to climb with. And he was one of the co founders of no Barriers, the organization. And he lost his legs in the mountains and he wanted to climb again. He was kind of a tinkerer. He was never much of a student, but he was like a tinkerer. He liked, kind of liked engineering. So he went in his garage and he built these legs that, you know, enabled him to climb again.

You know, and he kind of had to give up his notions of what human legs look like and, you know, what prosthetic legs were supposed to look like. He just kind of built these legs that are very functional for climbing and through that iterative process became a way better climber than he ever was when he had legs. I mean, he could wedge his feet, his man made feet into seams on the rock that no human foot could stand in. And then by doing that, he got inspired. Right. Creates an energy and a confidence. And then he decided, well, maybe I should go back to school. And he worked his way through his PhD program in bioengineering. And now he runs the biomechatronics laboratory at mit. They build the most sophisticated prosthetic legs in the world. There's 64 million dollar legs, you know, with computer microprocessors that think like a thousand times a second, you know, and, and it's just incredible the stuff he's doing. And he would never be delivering that technology to the world without having gone through that.

That, that journey himself.

Right. I love the story of you guys doing a climb together with Hugh and Mark. And you said we were missing legs, we were missing eyes, we were missing all of these things, but together the three of you made it.

Yeah, I did a climb with Hugh and in this really cool tower, it's one of the Fisher Towers, called Ancient Art. And we were an all quote, unquote gimp climb. We had Hugh, who's double leg amputee, me, who's blind, and Mark Wellman, who's a paraplegic. I got to carry Mark a couple miles down the trail. I was in my 20s back then. I could carry 160 pound man on my back, but. And then we climbed this tower together. And, and for me, that was really kind of the conceptual beginning of no barriers.

Right. Because you got, you did it and you did it on your own between the three of you, but no one of you could have done it by yourself.

Yeah. And that would, you know, and that experience gave me more questions. I guess at that time than answers. I mean one I wanted to understand as I said what that map looked like, you know. And like for instance, Mark does these pull ups up the rock face. He invented this pull up bar that locks onto the rope and he, he pulls himself up and he slides up the rope on an ascender that's connected to the rope and then he pushes this pull up bar up and it locks off with like these teeth on the rope. So he's essentially doing pull ups up the rock face and you know, he's like scraping and grinding his way up the rock face and you know there's blood and like dirt falling in his face and you know, and it's this really herky jerky process, you know, like he'd be pulling up and like he wouldn't be making any ground and he would look down and his foot that he couldn't feel was stuck in a crack and he would have to like awkwardly reach down and free his, you know, his foot that's just like stuck in there. And I thought that's not a movie. Like, that's not the way they portray this in a movie. This is, this is a grittier.

You know, a grittier journey that I really want to illuminate and I want to understand what that gritty thing looks like.

And then the second thing, you're right was this idea that, you know, we weren't going to do this alone. And I thought, okay, so let's build something together where we all come together and we lean into each other and we say, hey, we'll will one educate and inspire each other and we'll lift each other up. We'll elevate each other to break through all these barriers in the world. I don't think we're going to do it just as blind people or amputees or people with PTSD or kids who experience poverty. Like we're not going to do it if we just isolate ourselves and say, you know, only blindness, right? That's not going to work. It's just too, it's too specific. So what we have to do is the idea of no barriers is lean in and really come together and get stronger as this really big diverse community with this no barriers life being a thread that runs through the community like glue.

One thing you said about kayaking the Grand Canyon, that is if you deciphered the river carefully, you could discover a hidden map through the chaos. And these are such themes from the Grand Canyon experience of the relationship between control and letting go. The relationship to Fear the relationship to chaos. Now that you're a couple years out, how, looking back, how has that experience transformed you as you look ahead?

Well, I think.

You know, as we go through our lives, it's really easy to build up a lot of crust, you know, like, to just kind of build up a lot of armor that sort of protects you from all the chaos and all the challenge of the world. And I think, for me, an experience like the Grand Canyon, going through all these rapids and sort of being able to square off with them and face them and move through them and understand that I wasn't like, the biggest thing there. I wasn't the most powerful thing there. I was like this little wimpy human being. And a lot of kayaking is, yeah, of course, being proactive and. And making very clear, defined movements, but then it's sort of letting go and riding the energy of those rapids and getting through some of those rapids. They were so big, and you kind of squeak this line through afterwards, you know, I remember just feeling like that armor, that protective armor had just been ripped away. And I felt very.

Similar to what I imagined maybe Terry Fox feeling like, you know, running across Canada. Just that. That light, that whatever that is, you can call it the soul, you can call it the human spirit, you know, you can call it whatever you want, but that real sort of thing inside, growing and connecting with this beautiful place in the Grand Canyon, connecting with all these people like. Like Mandy and Hugh and Mark Wellman, these people that I wrote about and in my life, and just feeling a sense of that light, sort of connecting to something bigger than me. And so. So that's something that I. That I.

That I hang on. And it's sort of. There's no way to say it in any other way, except it sort of borders on spirituality. It's. And I know that it's out there and that I can find it.

You know, when I. When I go through the process, that sort of truly authentic process of no barriers.

Yeah.

That'S. I love it. I mean, it's just so powerful. I was. As I was looking at the pictures at the back of the book, I couldn't. I almost was crying, like, every single photo. Just looking at every picture of the journey along the way. I was on the subway, too, by the way, and just, like, I could barely keep it in just to see how much power and heart and soul and hustle and spirit and light, as you said, to connect into something so vast and.

Yeah, and the grateful. The gratitude for my team, you know, my Friends who linked their fates to me. And, yeah, you know, Harlan Taney, who was my guide through the Grand Canyon and guided me through his home. I mean, essentially, the Grand Canyon was his home. His. He loved this place, and it was like, you know, his place. And he guided me through it to my home, back to my home, back to my family. And so just this amazing gratitude for. For these people. My friend Rob Raker, who taught me how to kayak and guided me through the process, was like the engineer behind all the problem solving. And he got cancer, Stage four prostate cancer that he's still profoundly struggling with halfway through the training. And he decided to stick with it.

Yeah.

And see it through. His time is finite, you know, and so, you know, for him to give me that gift was like, you know, the. The thing I realized that kept me going many times because I was like, I'm not going to let this guy down. And he believes in me. I'm not going to. You know, I'm not going to. I'm going to aspire to the person that. That this guy believes in.

Yeah. He and Harlan just seem like such epic guys. Like, just such superheroes, you know, like, of their own. Like, just the most.

I think of them for sure as superheroes. Yeah.

And your wife, Ellie.

Yeah, yeah, she's another superhero.

Tell me this. How does your wife. You're risking your life, you're doing these grand adventures. How does she keep her wits about her and not worry about you? Because she's not even the one in the kayak.

Well, she's got to be tough. You know, she's a tough lady. And.

So she's gotten used to this over the years. You know, she knows that I'm not a crazy blind guy, that I'm just, like, throwing my life away, that I'm not just taking massive risks and hoping to live through it. You know, that I really. There is an equation. There is a sort of an approach to, you know, with redundancy and a great team and all the stuff that we've been talking about. So she trusts me.

But, yeah, no matter what, it's still a hard life. It's still a hard life for your family.

And. But. But, you know, we get. We get really good quality time together. Like, we're all going to go to Nepal this summer. Arjun, he has a Nepali mom. He's from Nepal. That's another big piece of the book.

Yeah.

And we're going to meet. He's going to meet his mom this summer, and we're going to go trekking in Mustang on a no Barriers youth expedition. And so, you know, my family gets to have some pretty awesome adventures as a result of these decisions.

Absolutely.

They get some perks.

Oh, yeah, big time. And that's so exciting that the Nepal visit is coming this summer.

Yeah. He said when he's 16, he wants to meet with his Nepali mom. And he's going to be 16 and he's scared, but.

He'S going to do it.

Yeah. But he has the number one dad for inspiration.

Okay, two questions to wrap up. Because you lost your sight at such a young age, what would you say now? What's your superpower these days?

Well.

I guess maybe my superpower is just insight. Right. Experience. Like when I climbed Everest, when I finished that climb, I thought, well, maybe, you know, it's like your darkest recesses of your brain are like, maybe it's just a fluke, you know, like, maybe I just got super lucky. Maybe this is something you'll, you know, you aspire to and you never repeat. Right. And then it's just sort of like after that, it's trying to refind, you know, that Everest. And so those are your fears, you know. And pv, who is our team leader on Everest, Amazing team leader. He said, don't let Everest be the greatest thing you ever do. And so that embarked on this adventure, growing no Barriers, adopting my son from Nepal, kayaking the Grand Canyon.

And it made me understand that this isn't a fluke in our lives, that if we kind of embrace these ideas and certain.

I keep calling it a map, even though it's a messy map and the sort of waypoints along the way, if we kind of understand what those are supposed to look like, we can continue to keep moving forward in these really incredible ways for as long as we want to do it.

And so just kind of understanding that sort of rough equation, I think has been a huge strength in my life.

I love the messy map. Just by sharing your insights and your experience and as you said, your goal for no Barriers, the book of keeping it real and the messiness of the map. But there's still something there.

And you're still the map that slams you into a wall, sometimes into a.

Wall underwater, but yet it also launches.

You to some pretty amazing places. Like my son.

Oh, my gosh. And that's such an incredible story and thread of the book as well. Eric, if you could encourage listeners to do just one thing when they stop listening to this, what would it be? Including attending the no Barriers summit in October, which I'll have you tell them about that, too.

I think it's just, you know, I mean, maybe it comes down to this, just. And this was not me. This was a soldier, one of our soldiers that told me this. He said, you know, to kind of live this life that we're talking about, it kind of takes courage. But not like. Like Rambo courage or like, you know, like this heroic courage. It's just courage to wake up each day and not let yourself be jaded, not let yourself, you know, kind of stray away from who you wish to be, but just making little decisions, you know, every day that sort of lead you in the right direction. Just making little, like, even insignificant decisions of courage every day. And. And they lead you down a path.

You know, down that map, down that. Down that river.

But it really does take just lots and lots of little moments of making courageous decisions that then add up to big directions in our lives. So I think people can break it down into something very concrete. Just think about every decision. Is that decision going to stop you in your tracks or lead you to a dead end? Or is it going to propel you forward in that sort of crazy, spiraling way?

So beautifully said. So beautiful. Thank you so much. Eric. You really. You're one of these guests I have where I'm just speechless to even say thank you and just for being who you are and your incredible work, the books, the documentaries. And please tell everybody about where they can get involved with no Barriers this year if they would like to.

Well, we have programs for veterans, for youth, for kids, for people with physical and psychological trauma, and so definitely learn about nobarriersusa.org and then we have an annual summit. It's our big signature event where we bring all our community together and we don't exclude anyone. Right? I mean, you don't have to be blind to be a part of this community. You can just be a regular mom or dad with a family, and you want to live in this way. But we have this big event, we call it our summit. We have it in a different beautiful place every year. But this year we decided to go to the Big Apple. We decided to kind of get into the epicenter of thought and culture, media. And so we are having our Big Apple no Barriers Summit with probably four or five thousand people in October, fourth and fifth in Manhattan. So please join us. Be a part of it. Our first day will be on the Intrepid with all these amazing speakers and activities and technologies that celebrate this no Barriers life. And then we'll end it the next day. With a no Barriers adventure that's going to be really exciting and then a big concert. We're calling it no Barriers Live in Central park with with with amazing speakers and entertainers that will be sort of reflecting of this no Barrier spirit.

It sounds incredible. I really can't wait. I hope to see you there.

Yeah, I'll see you there and I'll.

Put all the links in the show notes. Eric, again, thank you so much for being who you are and doing the work that you do in the world.

Awesome. Thanks.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

Sam.