My first fourteener - my first climb to the top of a 14,000 foot mountain - felt impossible to me personally, even though it was a very doable mountain for any semi-experienced climber. But the thing is I wasn't semi-experienced, and I especially was not experienced in snow climbing, which is when we decided to do this — in the midst of a Colorado winter. And the trade-off there is I don't know if my friends actually helped me overcome this impossible challenge. Only passively because they — they were experienced climbers. And they were always well ahead of me on this hike, but usually not far enough ahead for me to lose sight of them. But perhaps it was the knowledge that they were doing it that drove me to push myself further. So while I was like torturing myself for hours on end taking like one step per minute, once I got into that 13,000 foot plus zone, perhaps they led me to believe that it was technically possible to complete this journey, and that's what I needed. But yeah. It always makes me think of what my dad has long said. I don't know what this says about my dad, that this is one of his go-to lines, but he used to tell me that “pain is temporary.” It seems cold and over simplistic, and he didn't overuse it. It's not like he would just say it every day: “Man, I'm having a rough day. Pain is temporary.” But that's what comes to mind when I think about that hike because I can look back now and appreciate it for what it was, and what it helped me build in terms of strength and sacrifice and accomplishing a very difficult goal. But boy, I was not thinking about that line while I was climbing. All I could think about was, “This pain is — this sucks.”

Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio. Last weekend, I was in Texas for a wedding, which I also had a wedding the week before that, which was in town luckily. But it was kind of a weird trip because when I got to the airport, I like waited around for three or four hours until my friends got there. I was staying with them in the Airbnb. And they were running the car and the Airbnb so I couldn't just go myself. And um, and then we went to the Airbnb. It was very nice. Just kinda out in the country. And it was nice like, we kinda stayed up chatting ‘cause I hadn't seen these people in a while, and then the next day the wedding wasn’t ’til 5:30, so we got to just sleep in and chill which was nice. But that night, after we went to bed — it was funny because when I was talking to one of my friends, I said, “You know on the way here, we passed a billboard that said ‘Have pests?’ or something" like it was a, you know, pest company and it had a picture of a scorpion. And I was like, “I am so glad I live in a place where pests aren't scorpions. You know? Like, we have moths right now, but I will take those over scorpions any day.” And so after they went to bed, I was like getting ready for bed or whatever. And I saw something — like my door’s closed, and I saw something by the door, almost like I closed something between the door jamb and the door. And I was looking at it for a second. Like, it looked like a piece of straw or something and then it started moving. And the thing like — I don't know slither is the right word, but I don't know what other word to use — slithered into my room and dropped onto the floor and it was a freaking scorpion! And I was just like "How? Why?! This is the stuff of nightmares." It didn't even crawl under the door, like the thing came in through the closed door. It was just like, huh! And it was like crawling along the wall, and so I kind of waited for it to come…

In the show ‘What Would You Do?’ bystanders are tested on their willingness to step in and help others. Has there ever been a moment when you witnessed something and didn’t step up for a stranger but wished you had? What about a time when you did step up? I was single — this way before I got married, so I was young too, probably 22. And I saw a woman in high-heels and open-toed shoes out in a blizzard. And I stopped for her to give her a ride. She had, um — when I stopped she said "Hang on a second, I gotta get my baby," and she went and got her baby out of a car, her broken down car, which I saw. So I kinda knew it was someone in need. And she got her baby, and then her husband came up and said "Don’t, don't be scared." But, you know, they told me the story about how she just threw on her shoes and was running out the door to get him from work and the car broke down in the middle of this blizzard. And they just needed a ride to the top of the road. And I took 'em all the way home. I didn't think they needed to be delivered at the top of the road in the middle of a blizzard. So that was one time I stopped and I, I helped somebody else.