What He Learned Climbing the World's Tallest Peaks

Ryan Hanley: I think today we're losing kind of setting a standard for ourselves and maintaining that standard. And people now are either consciously or I think more often subconsciously looking for a free lunch. Let's go. Yeah, make it look, make it look, make it look. The Ryan Hanley Show shares the original ideas, habits and mindsets of world class original thinkers you can use to produce extraordinary results in your life and business. This is the way. Before we get going, everyone, I just want to let you know that I have messed this up five times now, this intro, and that is a new record. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. We have a tremendous conversation for you today with Matt Dawson, former Naval Academy graduate, graduated from the Wharton School as well, Division I football player, highly successful M&A investment banker, turned extreme sports enthusiast and philanthropist. Matt took on the challenge of climbing the tallest peak on each of the seven continents. He has skied to the South Pole as well as many other extreme challenges, and his foundation supports athletes that create the continuation of purpose in people's lives. Matt's an incredible guy with an extraordinary viewpoint on what high performance looks like, what it takes to get there, and we spend not our time in the tactics and strategies of high performance, but in the mentality of high performance. What did he have to go through to be able to climb some of the tallest mountains in the world? What was going on in his head? How did he deal with the isolation? How did he deal with the pain? What was it that drove him through those moments where every particle in his body was screaming for him to stop? And then how can we, bringing that all the way down to our day-to-day lives, how can we do that with the activities in our lives that we have to deal with, the challenges that come in our lives? How do we overcome those small micro decisions that keep us from becoming the best version of ourselves? It's an awesome conversation. Matt is an incredible guy. You are going to love this. He has this quote that I'm going to share with you right now, just because it pulled on me. "Our true selves are revealed in the margins." I love that. My friends, I give you Matt Dawson. Matt, dude, incredibly excited to have you on the show and just appreciate you taking the time.

Matt Dawson: Hey, thank you. I've been looking forward to this. And I tell you, all my good friends, all the people that know me call me Dawson. So please, call me Dawson.

Ryan Hanley: Dawson, it is. And as you can see on my Riverside, those watching on YouTube won't, and certainly the listeners won't. But most people end up calling me Hanley, so we can just go by last names. All right. I want to start in what might be considered an odd place, but it was one of the parts of your story that jumped out to me the most. You are obviously a driven individual. Naval Academy, you're trying to become a pro football player. You're obviously having a successful career there and then you get injured. And it's not just like a little injury that has a set timetable that you're going to be back from. This kind of takes you off the board for a while and forces you to have a long-term recovery and rehab. And that becomes an excuse for most people. A scenario like that, a life-changing injury to your current moment in time, becomes an excuse for most people. The vast majority of the people would lean on that injury and say, "This is why I can't get ahead. This is why I'm relegated to not achieving this initial dream that I had." And you didn't do that, right? Maybe not right away, and I'd love for you to explain that, but you have pushed through that and are now doing things physically that most people wouldn't even consider. I'm just so interested in what it was, what your thought process was, what you had to go through, what demons you had to fight to say to yourself, "This injury isn't going to define what I'm able to do as a person and the goals that I set for myself." And maybe you could talk through that a little bit.

Matt Dawson: Yeah, no, it's certainly interesting. It's interesting to me that initial question. I appreciate that. You know, it's just kind of taken it in a different direction. And I've had so many injuries, it's tough to kind of figure out. I think the one you're referring to is the bilateral compartmental syndrome. Right. I had the surgery. And it's funny, it played such an important role in my life and continues on a daily basis, even decades later. But it's something that I don't get a chance to really talk that much about. So I love this topic. So when I started at the U.S. Naval Academy, I was a quarterback. Then after my plebe year, which is freshman year, I transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and went to strong safety. But between those two institutions, I had to have bilateral compartmental release surgery because I had compartmental syndrome in both my lower legs. What that is, is around all our muscles, we have a connective protective tissue called fascia. It's basically a bag that supports your muscles. In both of my lower legs, because of all the exercise I was doing, all the plyometrics, the muscles essentially just got so big that it created all this pressure to where it would shut down my deep nerve. My foot would drop and I couldn't pick it up. Now I'm out climbing mountains and doing all this kind of stuff, but I literally could not walk up a flight of stairs without being bent over in pain, almost in tears. It hurt so bad. So between Navy and Penn, I had to have surgery. They released all four compartments in both lower legs, so now I just have two compartments instead of four. Long story short, I lost probably 30 to 40 percent of my speed and power. It was just gone. As much as my mind and body wanted to go—explode here, pop there, jump and run—I physically just couldn't do it. That led to a significant decline in performance. So I went to UPenn. After just a single season of playing there, I quit the team. It was because I was going through some different mental, emotional stuff at the time, but then my inability to perform just stacked on top of that. I was like, "I'm not the person I used to be. I'm not the athlete I used to be." It took literally years for me to come back from that. I ended up only playing two years of college football and then trained on my own for three or four more years to finally get my speed and power back. It wasn't until my early 20s, 22, 23, when I was training full time in Dallas after college to play pro football, that I eventually got it back. It taught me a level of patience and perseverance that, when I look back on, I'm grateful for now because it made me a better person. It expanded my understanding and appreciation of what this stuff can look like. Sometimes it can turn into long term. But it's still something I struggle with on a daily basis. I still have pitting edema in my legs, fluid retention in both lower legs that's pretty bad. I've had multiple surgical procedures to cauterize veins, move things around, flush things out. But I'm out there running 100 miles a week and climbing all these mountains, and I'm still dealing with this stuff on a daily basis. It reminds me that sometimes you can work on something, get it handled, and get it behind you. And sometimes it becomes part of your life. You just have to make that decision: Am I going to allow this to negate my ability to perform, or am I going to find some way to work around it or with it and still perform to the best of my capabilities?

Ryan Hanley: Is there a life philosophy? It could be religion, relationship with God. It could be stoicism. It could be just a philosophy that you developed on your own. Because I'm intrigued by people that don't let the obstacles that the universe throws at them stop them from achieving whatever the thing is that they want to do, be it physical, something in work, something creative, whatever. I played college baseball, Division III, but had plenty of friends play at different levels. So many of them have injuries—it's the nature of sports. Just staying in the sports and physical frame for a sec, very few who incurred injuries to the level that you did, that would cost you years of a career in sports, come back from that. Most of them are now dad bod, great guys, just dad bod, kind of overweight, making the same excuses that most people make for just trying to get through life. They never reclaim that physicality or even a portion of it. For having done this show for as long as I have and talked to amazing people like yourself, there's usually something behind it. For everyone, it's different. I'm just interested in what that is. Was there a quote you held on to, a philosophy? Was there a mentor that you could lean on or someone that helped you work through that? Because left on our own, oftentimes, with no anchor point to grab onto in the storm, we often get blown away. I'm interested in what that was for you.

Matt Dawson: Man, I think that's a great question. It brings up so many different angles. I think that's a question we could spend hours just talking about that single question alone. What I really find interesting about it is it draws in other people or other influences, which I think is critical to understand because none of us do this stuff alone. Even when I'm out saying I'm doing something solo and unsupported, I'm really not unsupported. There are so many people that have come together to create the opportunity that I now have to pursue. Whether it's that or what you're talking about, we don't do any of this stuff alone. The way that I look at it is I examine my life not in quantity or longevity. I'm not looking to be around for 80 years or 100 years just to have that time under my belt. I look at it more of quality and performance. I'm much more interested in being around a shorter time with higher performance than a longer time with lower performance. And I don't mean just physical. I mean physical, emotional, psychological, everything tied together. If I had to think about it, I'm also very big on quotes. I love when people can just take things down and make them succinct and make them resonate with you. I think that's a very special thing. One that I've got that my parents gave to me when I was 16 years old, they gave me a plaque. It's actually here in my office. It says, "Beauty is only skin deep, but bullshit goes clear to the bone." It's a very simple thing. It's kind of crude, I admit. But it just reminds me that we have the decision at every single point whether we're going to skip across the surface of something and maybe just get it done. Maybe it looks good or it sounds good or it presents well or it's good enough. But we all know deep down if we gave it our true, earnest, honest effort. I've looked at this thing literally every single day almost since I was 16 years old. That's something I'm constantly asking myself: "Am I just being beautiful here in a theoretical sense? Or am I BS-ing myself right now in this performance?" I try to set that standard of whatever it is, however I perform, it's in that honest effort where I'm satisfied. The outcome is not as important to me, but it's the quality of the input that I'm putting into it.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, that's so... I have two young boys, 10 and 8, and both play sports and do different things at school. That message that you just related to me, I think, is one that seemingly feels like it's being lost today, especially in youth sports. I bang them over the head with "outcome doesn't matter, it's attitude and effort." Outcome is a derivative of your attitude and effort. You have to be there, be present, work as hard as you can, and be proud of your performance. I tell them all the time, "I'm your dad. I'm going to be proud of you regardless. I'm going to love you regardless. But you got to walk off that field proud, or you're going to have something inside you that feels a little off." It's attitude and effort, attitude and effort. We've become so outcome driven that you get these Instagram channels where people are renting sports cars and doing all the cliche nonsensical things to show a life that doesn't actually exist because that's what they think the outcome is what they really want to present, not what it actually takes to get to that place. That's why I like, especially with individuals like you who have done incredible things—and we're going to talk about those incredible things in a minute—so few people do the shit that you do. I love trying to dig into that idea of what do you hold on to. My question coming out of what you just said is even high achievers have moments where they find themselves in that bullshit spot. I led a tough day with a lot of stress, lead into maybe a few drinks on a Tuesday night, and I wake up and now I'm hungover on a Wednesday. I know I shouldn't have done that. It's not who I am. But now I'm losing a Wednesday because of bad decisions made on Tuesday. Going back to the same crux as my original question, some people will either not be aware that that decision was bad. Some people will just plow through it and go, "Ah, it's just one day," and that leads to more of those bad days. Other people correct themselves and go, "You know what? That was a bad decision. I'm okay. I'm going to move forward." How do you talk to me a little bit about your awareness of your actions and their impact on you, and how you self-correct when you realize maybe you've allowed a bad habit or a negative habit to leak into your life that isn't putting you on the path to the goals that you want to be on?

Matt Dawson: Yeah, it's something that I think about a lot. I have literally the same conversation with a lot of people that I trust and respect in my network that I admire about what they're doing. I think today, look, it's very important to show ourselves grace. But at the same time, I think today we're losing kind of setting a standard for ourselves and maintaining that standard. People now are either consciously or, I think more often, subconsciously looking for a free lunch. All I can say is that one of the biggest things I've learned in my life is nothing is free. Everything has a cost. Everything. I don't care. Each success has a cost. Failure has a cost. What I try to do is set a standard in my life, and I meet that standard or I attempt to meet that standard, and I don't care about anything else in the sense that it hurts. It's supposed to hurt. I'm setting a standard because I want it to hurt because that hurt and that pain is going to help me connect with myself, understand myself, and grow. I think that's what it is where most people are just kind of... And look, I fail all the time. I'll set a standard and I'm like, "I want to do this today or I want to be this person or I want to hit this time," and I'm telling you, I fail on a daily basis. But as long as I know that I'm putting everything that I can into this thing, if I do get a little sidetracked, having that ability to step back and not allow myself to repeat that same habit or that same action over and over again is key. I think it's a combination of understanding that we are going to fail every single day, allowing ourselves to have that grace because we have to understand what our ultimate goal is. Are our actions and thoughts taking us toward that goal or away from that goal? If you fail to meet some standard or fail to perform in some way and you just start beating the shit out of yourself and driving yourself down into this shame hole, is that going to help you achieve what you're looking to achieve? The answer is no. Sometimes we need to punish or adjust ourselves in a certain way, but to do it in a sense that's ultimately going to help us achieve our goals. So I think it's walking that narrow line of how you bring yourself back out of it. Showing yourself grace, but at the same time, not giving yourself too much leniency. I think today people are a little bit probably too easy on themselves in a lot of regards. Finding that line is key because, like you mentioned, you go on Instagram or social media or watch a commercial and it's like, "Oh, it's okay. It's okay to do this or it's okay not to do this. Buy my product, buy my service, you'll feel better." It's kind of getting us a little too far afield from where we need to be.

Ryan Hanley: You know, it's funny. I had a conversation with one of the parents. I coach my older son's baseball team. There was a kid on the team who's very talented. He's a good kid, but he's completely willing to take an entire half a game off because he missed a grounder or struck out. He'll just literally give away three innings, head down, standing wherever he is, and just give it away. I ride him on that particular aspect. I try to be constructive with it. I'm not yelling at him because they don't listen when you yell. But I'm on him about it, reminding him. His mom pulls me aside after one of the games and she's like, "Why don't you like my kid?" I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. The reason I am on your kid about this particular aspect of his game is because I like him. Because I want him to be successful. Because I think he's a good ball player. Because I think he's a good kid. That's why I'm on him about this particular aspect of his game, of his personality, that is keeping him from being as good as I know he wants to be. If I was just letting him do it, that would be me not liking him." It was an eye-opening experience for me. It happened just this last summer because, to your point, we've shifted. I remember being coached in high school football. My coaches would be spitting through your face mask, raging mad. My thought—and this is the big difference—was, "Oh, I deserve to get yelled at. I did miss that tackle. I did play the wrong assignment." Today it's, "Why are you yelling at me? Why are you yelling at my son?" I'm yelling at your kid because he struck out, put his head down while he was in the field, and let a grounder go right by him because he wasn't paying attention, because he was in a shame spiral about this one thing that happens dozens of times throughout the course of a season. It is a shift. Before we really get into the meat and potatoes of the stuff you have going on—

Matt Dawson: Hey, I'm sorry. Let me just jump in for one second.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, please.

Matt Dawson: I'm just laughing because I'm thinking back to high school, football, college, and even after college. I've had coaches damn near rip my head off, literally grab my face mask and be here spitting on me and everything else. I haven't thought about that in a while. One thing that's very important to understand the distinction of is when we talk about performance, and talking about that kid striking out then putting his head down and missing grounders, it is not to tie our self-worth and self-love to performance. This is what I found when I was coming up through. I inadvertently and subconsciously tied my sense of self-worth, my feeling of deserving love and of being worthy, to my performance. I sought to achieve in order to prove that I was worthy of being loved or that I was important or that I mattered. It took me literally almost four decades to figure out what I was doing and why that was wrong and how that was hurting me and hindering me in many ways. What I came to understand was it's not a matter of earning self-love and self-worth. It's a matter of demonstrating self-love and self-worth. That's a huge, huge distinction. That helps to alleviate us of shame and guilt when we fail to perform. That's what these kids need to understand. You keep your head up and you keep pushing and you keep trying because you're showing yourself, "Hey, I'm worth this effort." We're all worth this effort. When I get out there and I'm training for 1,000 hours a year alone in the mountains and on the roads and in the gym, and I'm bleeding and hurting and we're on expedition, I'm telling myself sometimes, "Why the hell am I doing this? This is tough. I don't want to be here. I want to eat Cheetos and sit on the couch right now." And I'm like, "Listen, man, you're out here because I love you and you're worth the effort. That's why we're doing this." When people look at it in that way, it helps to approach it in a different way. For me, it's been a much more beneficial way.

Ryan Hanley: I love that. I think you just made a great point. There's a misunderstanding by the vast majority of people that someone who achieves at a high level doesn't struggle with the same desire for comfort or crappy food or a beer like they do. Every high achiever I've ever spent time with, in my own moments of highest achievement, there's always that part of your brain that's like, "It'd be great right now to pop a beer and watch the football game and just veg out for five hours." I would love that. But everyone fights with these battles. It's a choice. I'd love your feedback on where you would take this. People who haven't gotten there yet—and I believe everyone's capable—they've never really been at their peak achievement level. They feel like, "Well, I'm just not driven like that," or "I really like to relax." They feel like somehow they have this draw to comfort that someone like you who's climbing the highest mountains in the entire world doesn't have that draw. You were blessed with some lack of desire for comfort and fun stuff, and you're just predisposed to do this crazy shit. I've never found that to be the case. World-class athletes, entrepreneurs who've run incredible companies, they're making a decision every day: Cheetos on the couch or go get this shit done that I told myself I wanted to get done. One, do you agree with that? And two, when that desire hits you—you wake up in the morning and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to go for a big run today. I got a time I want to hit." Then your brain, because we all have this inside us, says to you, "Hey, we haven't relaxed in a while. Just pour yourself a cup of coffee, turn on SportsCenter, chill out. You don't need to go for the run. You went for a long run yesterday." In that moment where you get a strong pull, some days you wake up ready to go. Those days when you get that pull to just, "Man, that couch is calling my name," how do you get past that? What's your process for making sure you stay committed to the task you set yourself to?

Matt Dawson: I love that. It was funny. I was actually thinking about this on Tuesday because I had a big leg workout on Tuesday. I call it the bargaining. First of all, let me tell you this: every single day I face this question. There are certain parts of every single day where I'm like, "I know I need to be doing this, but this over here looks a little more easier or interesting." When I talk about the bargaining, there's always a part in everything we do that's demanding where there's going to be some piece of you that's trying to get you to do something easier. It's like, "Maybe my glute is just a little tweaked today. Maybe my heart rate's a little low, so maybe I didn't sleep quite as well. Maybe I'm a little bit tired, so I can take a couple heart rate off this run. Maybe I'll stop at 20 minutes earlier. Maybe I'll stop the set three reps sooner." I just laugh because I call it the bargaining. I've been doing this long enough that I look for it because I know it's coming. I still do it on a daily basis. When I was going through this leg workout the other day, this thing was 750 reps per leg, so 1,500 total reps. When I was walking in there, I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to tear this thing a new asshole. I'm ready to go. I'm motivated." About halfway in, I'm like, "My glutes are a little tweaked. Maybe I can stop this set." So I even face it. What I think about is that my life is not just about me. More importantly, it's the role that I play in the world and the role that I play in the lives of others. This ties back to what we were talking about earlier about setting a standard. I know that if I set a standard and I fail to meet that standard, I'm not only letting myself down, but more importantly, I'm letting others down that are depending on me. These may be people in my direct everyday lives, or these may be people that never meet me. Because I honestly believe that everything we do will eventually impact everybody else, I feel like I'm letting them down as well. What I think about is when I'm telling people that are close to me, "Hey, I love you and I'm here for you and I will help you in any way that I can," what person is standing behind that pledge? What capabilities does that person have? If I'm with a bunch of friends on Christmas morning opening up presents, what person is sitting there? Is that person the one that fought through all those days to be the best version of themselves for everyone? Or did that person give up every single day, and now I'm sitting there a shell of the person I could possibly be for them?

Matt Dawson: And I know that's kind of gets a little heady and gets a little intense. But honestly, that's how I think about it. When I understand that I'm not just doing this for me, I'm doing this for everyone, that helps to increase my perspective and get through a lot of it.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, no, there's a lot in there. And dude, go heady as much as you want because I think the surface level shit doesn't matter. This underlying stuff is what, in my mind, why I do this show. I do this show not for tactics, tricks, and strategies because we can ChatGPT that shit today. I want to know the deeper questions that keep us there.

I have this TEDx talk that I'm working on right now, scheduled for the spring of 2025, that is all about the idea of status. You climbing mountains, skiing to the South Pole, playing football at a high level, being an M&A investment banker — you've done incredible things, some of which individually would be a life's achievement, and you've done multiple of them. That sets you apart as a different kind of person than most people we bump into in our lives.

I have a theory that there is a large pull on people not to achieve their highest goal because of the change in status they will experience in achieving that thing. If you want to climb even one of the highest peaks in the world, you have to dedicate yourself. You have to put months, if not years, of work into training, equipment, time away from family, time away from friends. You can't go get a beer — or ten beers — on a Friday with your buddies watching college basketball. If you're trying to get to this next level physical goal, it starts to change your status in a community. All of a sudden, you're not one of the beer-drinking buddies; you're this fitness guy.

I believe status changes up actually restrain us more than the potential for a status change down. We can explain away or excuse away a status change down, and people will come around us and say, "You're okay, we're here for you." But it's the status change up that I think creates the most fear because it takes you out of a community you know really well and makes you someone different. One, do you agree with that? And two, in your own life, have you had to deal with that?

Matt Dawson: Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point. I haven't thought about it in that context, but as you're speaking through it, I think it's very well said. I think you've got a great basis there for that talk, and I'd love to hear it once it kicks off.

It is something that I have dealt with. Even with my closest friends here in LA — I've been very fortunate to build a great network of people that love me tremendously, and I'm there for them. But when I started making a lot of these friends, it was back when I was in my party days, going out four or five nights a week. I wasn't training. I was out getting drunk, doing drugs, partying, traveling, all that kind of stuff.

When I moved away from that and finally found a sense of purpose in my life for the first time, I found a better sense of direction. As I started moving toward that, I naturally started disconnecting more and more from those people. It was a challenging time, a confusing time. What worked for me was that I wasn't asking them what they thought about it or what they thought about me. I simply determined the direction that felt the most authentic in my life at that time, the one that was going to create the best version of myself.

Once you start to get on that path, you can feel it. I'm not saying you'll have total clarity, but you feel a greater sense of understanding, connection, and ease. Once I had that, it felt so good and so right that I was willing to risk anything and everything to move in that direction. I stopped seeing people I used to see once a week. Now I see them once a year. Every single thing in life has a cost. You can't do everything all the time. You just have to understand what is most important to you.

I've lost certain people out of my life, but I've also gained certain people. Maybe I have a little bit less total elements in my life, but the things I have now are more substantive and mean more to me. It's a more austere lifestyle, but I enjoy it so much more, and it makes me a better person. You just have to understand that things have costs.

Ryan Hanley: There's a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that has been a driving principle since the first time I read it. At some point, I'll have it tattooed on my arm — I'm working on a sleeve on my left arm. It's: "God will not make manifest the work of cowards." For some reason, that quote just imprinted on my brain. This idea that we know the cowardly decision. A lot of people don't like that word because it feels harsh. I don't necessarily care. I think we need that type of language in our lives.

We can feel it, right? We're choosing a lesser version of ourselves every time we make those decisions. We all make them, and that's why we give grace. But the cowardly decision does not lead you to that promised land, to whatever that is for you. It could be, "I want to be an incredible dad." That could be your goal. I want to be there for my kids and be the most awesome. So don't do the things that take you away from that. It could be scrolling on your phone. It could be taking a work phone call at dinner.

It doesn't all have to be high achievement that gets you national recognition. I feel like we misconstrue what living an authentic life is. Everyone's authentic, dialed-in peak version of themselves doesn't have to be something the national news media wants to cover or that Monster wants to sponsor. It can be whatever that thing is. I want to be the best accountant in my town. I want to be an incredible spouse or partner. The achievement of a goal doesn't have to accrue you recognition to be worthy of the pursuit. I think that's such an important thing to talk about. As you were talking, I just love your mindset.

So I want to transition into some of the things you probably expected me to ask you when you logged in today. But you had an experience — I want to take a quick stop in 2016, and then fast forward to 2021 and the things you've done past there. In 2016, you have two major negative impacts in your life. You lose your mom. You have a hard breakup. And then you go on and start doing solo training. Correct me if I have some of the timeline wrong.

I'm very interested in this idea of solo training. I'll give you my experience to explain why I find this so intriguing. I do ruck walks. I have the 5-1-1 ruck vest. I do 40-pound ruck walks almost every day. I used to wear earbuds and listen to podcasts. Then one day I walked out of the house by accident — I was thinking about a couple things, put my vest on, boom, out the house I went. I got ten minutes into my walk and realized I didn't have the earbuds in.

[Laughter]

All of a sudden I'm like, "Well, I'm not going back now." So I did the full hour — 30 minutes out, 30 minutes back. I came back and the ideas that crept into my mind, the good and the bad. I started thinking, "Hey, you haven't followed up with this person," or "You're slacking." So what is it about solo training in particular? And as you state in a lot of your work, distraction-free solo training — what did you find so captivating that it became such a part of your life?

Matt Dawson: It's 100% to this point — 100% of my daily training is done alone. For me, it's been a critical element to my success. I look at why I'm doing what I'm doing. Obviously, I'm going out there on a physical front to increase my physical capabilities and technical skills. But more importantly, this training and physical exertion is a tool of introspection and self-reflection. It's simply a tool. That's why I choose to train alone.

Number one, to make sure I'm not being motivated by some exterior force or presence. You never know when you're going to be alone. You never know when you're going to have someone there. In a lot of your hardest moments in life — whether on a mountain, sitting alone in your bedroom, or in the car when you need to make a decision — you're going to be alone. It's critically important to me to prove to myself that I have the ability to perform without some sense of exterior motivation.

But also, it allows me to connect with myself and reflect on certain elements. When you get out there in these stressful situations without external stimuli — I'm not hearing the theme track to Rocky or some motivational speaker telling me how to adapt and overcome — you'll feel that the more you get toward your limits, the more discomfort we experience. Our minds tend to speed up and get noisier. The more you push, the harder you go, the more they speed up and the noisier they get.

It's almost like moving through an hourglass. In the beginning, there's all this room. No pressure. Nice and easy. But as you get down to that final funnel point and your mind is absolutely screaming, wanting you to stop, coming up with every excuse to get out of it — if you can just push through, recognize what's going on, force yourself to get quiet, get comfortable in it, release into it, not be scared of it, and just hang on — sometimes it's literally just a few seconds. Sometimes it's hours, sometimes it's days. But you can get through to what I call "the other side."

I'm telling you, things just open up. Your life opens up. Your mind opens up. Your understanding opens up. Everything you can possibly imagine opens up to this deeper, greater understanding. I've experienced that time and time again. When I finally break my personal gravitational field and get through to the other side, my awareness opens up, my capabilities open up. It's a magical feeling. It's something you become addicted to. I know where I'm trying to get, and training alone enables me to get to that point more effectively.

Ryan Hanley: I was listening to Steven Kotler, a flow researcher. He said something similar with different words. He said you have to go through what you just described — that sped-up, noisy moment where your body's screaming, "I'm going to fall apart," your mind screaming fear and doubt. If you can get to the other side, that's where flow lives. You've heard every major athlete describe it, and I'm sure you've experienced it too. When you get through that moment, the world slows down, the doves come out. You can see, predict, and move in ways you didn't even know you were capable of.

There's a cost to getting to flow. People try to do it with drugs, with all these different techniques. At the end of the day, you just have to paddle through the tumult to get to the ease. When your mind is filled with music or someone else's words, you're not going to get the tumult. Those things keep you from getting to all that stuff because they keep your brain occupied on less than 100% of the full task.

Matt Dawson: You said that very well. One point I think is important to understand is that it doesn't have to be physical. It can be psychological, emotional. Maybe you're going to have a conversation with your partner, your husband, your wife, your business partner. Maybe there's something you've been putting off, something internal you need to deal with. It doesn't just have to be physical. We can find these moments in a lot of different challenges we face in life.

The key — and this ties into the book and a lot of the concepts I talk about, of strength and surrender — this ties into surrender. What I mean by surrender is not giving up and giving in. It's moving toward your greatest fears, trepidations, and challenges, and allowing yourself to experience them to the absolute fullest. Not running from them, not fighting them, because when you fight them, you feed them. Allowing yourself to feel the magnitude of whatever challenge you're facing — that is the only true way to effectively surrender. In my opinion, it's the only real way to get to that other side, fully and authentically as you possibly can.

Ryan Hanley: We've heard the quote a thousand times: the only way out is through.

Okay, fast forward to 2021. You decide you're going to start putting real, legitimate fear of death into your life. You're going to start doing some extreme activities. Talk to me — explain for the audience some of these things you have done, the challenge you set for yourself, and then let's get into why you actually decided to take this on.

Matt Dawson: I'll do my best to scale it down. In 2018, a very good friend of mine, Jay Jablonski, and I started Dawson's Peak Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3). Our mission is to inspire the discovery and pursuit of individual purpose — to get people to understand that we're all capable of living greater lives, not only for ourselves but for others. To move from self-centered to service-centered.

The way we do that is by creating large-scale global expeditions. We sponsor athletes where viewers can draw parallels between themselves and the athletes and say, "If this person is doing X, Y, and Z, I can find something comparable in my life — whether physical, emotional, or professional — and I can try to achieve that."

The current project is called Seven for Soldiers, where I'm essentially the guinea pig. The original intent was to set seven world records in 12 months, from May 2021 to May 2022. I would complete the Explorers Grand Slam — climbing the highest peak on each continent and then skiing to the North Pole and the South Pole. I was attempting to be the fifth person to ever do that in a single year. Then trekking solo unsupported across the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, rowing a boat across the Atlantic Ocean, and finally flying a plane around the world.

We were able to accomplish everything we set out to within those 12 months, except for the North Pole, which got closed down for the fourth or fifth year in a row — this time because Russia invaded Ukraine and shut that region down. The flight also got postponed because the costs associated with renting aircraft, logistics, and fuel due to COVID and the Russia-Ukraine situation went up four or fivefold. We decided to postpone that to a more manageable cost. But within those first 12 months, we achieved everything else we set out to.

Ryan Hanley: Which of those — not necessarily the most challenging, but which brought you the most joy and sense of accomplishment and fulfillment?

Matt Dawson: I like that question. I don't think I've gotten that question before. Normally it's, "What was the most challenging? Where was the most painful part?" I love that you're coming from a slightly different angle.

I think the one that brought me the most satisfaction was Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America. That was actually my second attempt on that mountain. I tried to climb it back in 2017, before the concept of Dawson's Peak Foundation was even around. At that point, I had just learned about big mountain climbing and was trying to figure out what I liked. I failed to summit with my entire team because the weather was so bad that everybody got turned around. That was my first failure on a mountain.

I'm not used to failing a lot in my life. I mean, I fail all the time, but I try to hold myself to a standard. When I failed to summit in 2017, it lit something inside of me — an inferno that just continued to grow. Years later, on a random Tuesday at 3 in the morning, I'd wake up just thinking about not summiting. It bothered me. I used that as fuel in my training. I might want to cut a set short, not go that extra mile or climb that extra 500 feet, and I'd think back to failing on Aconcagua.

When I finally got the chance to climb it again in early 2022, I had just been down in Antarctica for an entire month. I was no longer acclimatized. COVID was rampant on the mountains, so I had to take a helicopter into base camp. I went from sea level to nearly 23,000 feet in three days. The final 500 or 600 feet of that climb, I was in rough shape. I was experiencing high altitude cerebral edema. My vision was going in and out. I had really bad diarrhea, really bad dehydration. My arms and legs were going numb. I was on the verge of really falling to pieces.

It took something special to find something special in myself to get that done. I was literally finding a rock in the snow maybe ten feet away and just making it those ten feet. Then we'd figure it out. I did that for hour after hour after hour and finally got to the top. I was joking with my climbing partner, "This is probably the best and worst I've ever felt in my life."

That meant so much to me because where I thought my limits were, it showed me again that there's so much farther out there than we think. I'm nothing special in that regard. We look in the distance and say, "Okay, there's my limit. If I can just get there." But when we get there, we can put our hand through the cloud. It looks like a cement wall, but it's just a cloud. So maybe it's not here. Okay, it's over there. You get there and you continue to understand that these limits are not real things for the most part. That was a good example of that for me.

Ryan Hanley: Isn't it interesting that your most joyful moment was accompanied by your most painful moment? It seems like exactly the way it should be — that sense of achievement in that grind.

I have to ask about Antarctica. I'm very intrigued by that mass down there. What is that like? What is Antarctica? I think people just think of penguins near the shore, and that's probably most people's exposure. But it's an enormous mass. What is that environment like? What did it take to get to the actual South Pole? What is that experience like? I think people can imagine high mountains — they've seen people climb those. But Antarctica seems like another planet. As regular people, we get so little information. What is that environment like, and what are the unique challenges of skiing something like Antarctica versus a climb? Obviously you have altitude, but how do you mash skill sets from a climb to a ski and manage those different environments?

Matt Dawson: Antarctica is a very interesting place. I've heard it described in different ways all the way back to the early 1900s. Some people call it "the great white everywhere" or "the great white everything." There are mountain ranges in Antarctica — Mount Vinson, the highest peak there, I had the opportunity to climb. There's life around the edges, but once you get into the interior part of the continent, up on the plateau, there's nothing. When I say no life, I mean there may be some fungi or roundworm, but other than that, nothing for hundreds or possibly thousands of miles, except for the station at the South Pole.

When people talk about colonizing Mars and get excited about it, I think, "You don't understand deprivation and absence of life until you've been down there." The best way I can describe it: I was skiing for 12, 13 hours a day trying to get to the South Pole. Imagine being on a big treadmill, put it in a freezer that's 30 or 40 below, put it in front of a white wall, stare at that with your face a couple inches from the wall, and do that for 12, 13 hours a day while pulling a sled. That's essentially what it's like to ski down there.

It's sensory deprivation in so many regards that it forces you — if you're going to deal with it effectively — to go to a special place, a deeper place. A lot of people take music or podcasts. I didn't take anything because I wanted that additional challenge of being so alone with myself. It was a very special place, a tremendous experience. But it can be lonely and isolating if you're not careful. It can be destructive if you're not careful. But if you can use it in a conscientious way, it helps you have a more full and enriching experience because it enables you to connect with yourself on a deeper level.

Ryan Hanley: There are so many movies created around the concept of deprivation, loneliness, isolation, and the impact it has on people. It feels like it would be very easy to spin off the planet in that moment. A couple days in, a couple hours in, you look around and think, "Am I ever going to get back? Will I ever have another..." The stuff that seeps into your mind saying, "We shouldn't be here. What are you doing? Why did you take us to this place?"

How did you deal with that sense of isolation and come out of it in a productive way? How did you not let it start to eat at you and start making excuses — "Today I'll just go for 10 hours instead, take a few more days of camp because I deserve it"? How do you fight through those nudges when you don't have a podcast or motivation in your ear telling you to keep going?

Matt Dawson: A lot of it ties into what we've been talking about with life — it's a matter of perspective. Too often when we face challenging times, whether daily, psychological, professional, or physical, we have a tendency to make our worlds very small. Sometimes it's an important and critical tool to make our world small, but we can simultaneously enlarge our perspective in a greater sense.

When I was going down there, I had a chance before I went — and even when I was down there preparing — to read a lot of stories about people who had faced those same challenges, but to a harsher degree. Amundsen when he was the first to get to the South Pole. Scott, Shackleton, Mawry from Australia. I read about what these men faced when they were out there for weeks on end or months on end, having to winter over. When I was out there, it took me a week to ski 70 miles, the last degree. I was thinking, "I'm out here for a week. It's a very challenging environment, dangerous and life-threatening certainly, things can change at a moment's notice."

But when I thought about it in the greater context of what these men had been through, what they were capable of, it showed me what I was capable of as well. I felt like if these guys can do it, I can do it. If they can go to that level of challenge, I can do the same. It helped me have a better sense of perspective. What I was facing might be extremely difficult in the moment, but I was capable of so much more. I just needed to find a way to get quiet, figure this thing out, push through it. And then I was more than able to do it.

Ryan Hanley: Matt Dawson, my friends, absolutely incredible. If people want to get more from you, dive deeper into your world, follow your journey, what are the places they should go? We'll have them linked up in the show notes as well. Where are those places they can get more from you?

Ryan Hanley: Matt Dawson, my friends, absolutely incredible. If people want to get more from you, dive deeper into your world, follow your journey, what are the places they should go? We'll have them linked up in the show notes as well. Where are those places they can get more from you?

Matt Dawson: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is my first book is coming out. I'm very excited about it. It will be released January 7th, 2025. It's called *Strength and Surrender*. I actually just got one of the copies here. So we're just proofing it out right now. But it'll be available for pre-order before that time. It'll be the audiobook, paperback, and the e-book. And literally everything that we've talked about is in there and just so much more.

Whether someone's interested in just reading about the mountains and all the training — it was this tall and the pack weighed this much and it was 100 degrees and all that — all that's in there. But more importantly, it's about the story of the human experience, about my personal redemption from being lost to a place of feeling better, from going from having a life of self-centered to service-centered. All the things that I've learned, like the biggest things I've learned from strength and surrender. I wanted to create a visceral experience where people could take it on in a different way. So that's coming out.

And then Instagram is just @DawsonsPeakPAK. And finally, the website is just DawsonsPeak.com. That's my personal website. It links to our foundation. And the last thing I'll say is, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, Project 7 for Soldiers — 100% of our net proceeds that we raise are benefiting our veteran partners on this, which is Hope for the Warriors and Gary Sinise Foundation. So I'm not making a dime on anything that gets donated. So please get involved. 100% of the net proceeds are going to those two groups.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, we have a big audience that is big supporters of our military and things like that. So guys, head over — wonderful organizations. I appreciate the hell out of you, the work you do, and certainly the time that you spent with us today, Matt. Thank you so much.

Matt Dawson: No, listen, I really appreciate it. I've truly enjoyed this. I love that you came at it from a different angle. You asked some interesting questions, and also I appreciate your insights. So thank you very much for having me on.

Ryan Hanley: Let's go.

Matt Dawson: Yeah, make it look, make it look, make it look.

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