Snakes, commitmentphobia, exposure therapy, surfing. We covered a lot of ground in the Huffpo Live interview. I had a blast.

Here are the live events in New York and New Jersey Feb 9 and 10.

Manhattan, New York
Saturday, February, 9, 3 PM
I will be presenting with world renowned Harvard neuroscientist, Srini Pillay
Rubin Museum
In the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City
on 17th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues.
Buy Tix Here

Ashbury Park, New Jersey
Sunday, February, 10, 6-7 PM
Dauphine Grill
1401 Ocean Aenue
Sunset Avenue and the Sea
in the Berkeley Hotel
Asbury Park, NJ 07712
732.774.FISH

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

So I’ve now answered questions about a man’s fear of strawberry ice cream at Book Passage San Francisco, swam down a 39-degree river in Portland to Powell’s Books, run 10 miles to a signing at Elliot Bay in Seattle, and taken questions on the radio about everything from fear of looking bad at the gym to fear of “anything that stretches.” (Below, I’ve linked to just a few recent interviews.) Now it’s onto the east coast where I have book events in DC, New York, and New Jersey (details below). If I’ve learned anything researching all this science, it’s that overcoming fear is about having an experience. And so far, each of these Fear Project talks has turned into a no-holds-barred enlightening discussion of how to better deal with a primitive, blunt emotion in a fast-paced complex world. I always learn a ton from my audience and am really looking forward to returning to my roots on the east coast. See you there!

Q&A with Forbes
Outside Magazine
The San Francisco Chronicle
Wall Street Journal

CBS Bay Area
NBC Morning Show: New Day Seattle
AM Northwest: Portland Morning Show
Kathleen Dunn Show — Wisconsin Public Radio
Think — Dallas Public Radio
CBS Morning Show
NPR’s Insight
Shrinkrap Radio

Manhattan, New York
Saturday, February, 9, 3 PM
I will be presenting with world renowned Harvard neuroscientist, Srini Pillay
Rubin Museum
In the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City
on 17th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues.
Buy Tix Here

Ashbury Park, New Jersey
Sunday, February, 10, 6-7 PM
Dauphine Grill
1401 Ocean Aenue
Sunset Avenue and the Sea
in the Berkeley Hotel
Asbury Park, NJ 07712
732.774.FISH

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

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That’s when Sheri Anderson, a local writer, introduced me to Aaron Paulson and Chip Sell. Aaron, it turned out, is a four-time paralympiad gold-medal swimmer. He was born in India, got polio as a young boy, lost the use of legs, was adopted by a family in Portland where he underwent numerous surgeries and, after making a miraculous recovery, fell in love with swimming. To give you the idea of the type of guy Aaron is, he qualifies to use handicap parking spaces but refuses to use them. And after winning four gold medals for swimming, he’s now into white water kayaking and thought it would be cool to make sure this random author didn’t freeze alone in the Willamette. He volunteered to come with me and called his buddy Chip. Chip is an Iraq war veteran who was nearly killed in a missile blast. He’s now leading trips with Team River Runner PDX , which is part of a national program to bring health and healing through the form of whitewater recreation to military veterans — many of whom have lost limbs.

I was beyond humbled to have Chip and Aaron kayaking with me for my swim. The Fear Project is all about courage and these two men have oodles of it and I couldn’t have felt safer as we paddled and swam under Portland’s beautiful old steel bridges. Watch for Aaron in the next paralympics, now competing as a kayaker. The man is unstoppable.

At my talk at Powells, some of the discussion ended up being about courage and how we mortals can get some of the courage Aaron and Chip have. I’ve thought a lot about this over the last few years, and I’ve concluded that courage is a muscle, one we have to work out.

Sometimes tragedy strikes in a very acute way. You’re pushed to your limit and the only option is courage. But for most of us, the threats we experience are sort of low grade and vague. Is my job stable? What will the stock market do? Are we going to stay together? Is my child going to get into college? These sort of thoughts create a subtle but persistent anxiety that can be, I think, even more difficult than acute tragedy because they don’t necessarily trigger a survival mode that can result in courage and energy. They just make us feel icky and sick and uncertain.

Here are some tips I’ve learned researching The Fear Project that help build courage in the midst of that low-level, annoying anxiety.

• Take up a sport like skiing, surfing, rock climbing or distance running. Studies have shown that extreme sports athletes often deal better with the stress of everyday life than the rest of us, probably because they’ve learned how to make dealing with stress fun. Plus, exercise is a stress release. In a study I cite in the book, rats who were allowed to exercise feel more confident exploring unknown spaces than sedentary rats. And this makes sense, it’s only been 150 years or so that being physically fit isn’t the key determinant in our survival so when you feel fit, you also feel more courageous.

• If you have a tendency toward social anxiety (and millions of us do) force yourself to talk to at least one stranger per day. Set yourself up for small public speaking assignments: giving a toast at a dinner party, explaining the rules of a game to a group. Notice how the more you do it, the less freaky it is, and the more fun it becomes.

• Rather than trying to just get a lot of tasks done, make a commitment to focus on those challenging assignments at work that you’re passionate about. This might include turning down some assignments that you’re afraid to give up for stability to focus on the ones that count or lead to the career you’re dreaming of. The research shows that we handle stress better when we’re doing what we love, and we all know the work we do is better when we’re actually interested in the topic.

If you’re in Seattle, there is a Fear Project event tonight at Elliot Bay Book Co. and we’re running there from Seward Park. Meet in the Seward Park parking lot at 5 PM for the 7-miler or meet at Elliot Bay at 7 PM for the talk and signing. Details here.

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

Photo by Marnie Sell

Hello from the beautiful (chilly) Northwest! I’m up here for some Fear Project events at Powell’s in Portland (Sunday, 7:30 PM) and Elliot Bay Book Co. in Seattle (Monday, 7 PM). It’s already a blast. I’m spending the day running around to TV and radio interviews while sampling Portland’s best coffee (listen for me talking too fast after my third cup on one of the recent shows).

To stay on theme that the best way to overcome fear is to expose ourselves to our fears, I’m going to go to both these readings in a challenging way. I’ll be swimming 5 miles down the near freezing Willamette River on Sunday to Powell’s.  And on Monday, I’ll be running to Elliot Bay Co from Seward Park, a run I’d love Seattle folks to join me on.

We will meet at 5 PM at the North End of the Main Parking Lot on Seward Park Rd. From there, we will run a long the water — Lake Washington Blvd Trail S. — and then cut into the book store, Elliot Bay, on the main roads. Here is the route. It’s about 7 miles.

So why do this: Well, as I write in The Fear Project:

Scientists are beginning to get new angles on why athletes like LeBron and Usain Bolt might be so incredibly calm and confident on and off the court and how exercise seems to prepare our brains for handling scary new situations.

It used to be thought that the human brain only goes through neurogenesis, or creating new brain cells, in youth. But scientists like Elizabeth Gould at Princeton have shown that we produce new neurons throughout life, especially in an area of the brain used for learning and memory called the hippocampus. Besides adding new neurons, it appears that exercise might produce neurons that are actually better at dealing with stress.

At the 2009 Society for Neuroscience conference, Princeton researchers presented preliminary findings on an impressive experiment. They took a group of rats that ran on a wheel every day and a group that weren’t allowed to exercise at all. Both groups were then put through a stressful experience that all rats hate: swimming in cold water. Afterward, the scientists checked out all the rats’ brains. In both groups, the neurons showed signs of stress—except the newest neurons, the ones that appeared to have been produced through exercise. Those neurons were as quiet and calm as little Zen masters. Through exercise, the rats seemed to be literally changing their brains to be calmer in stressful situations. Other studies have shown that well-exercised rats are more exploratory in new places, while sedentary rats will tend to try and hide in dark corners and avoid them.

To understand more about stress, fear, and running, you can check out my new article in Runner’s World or you could just get off your butt and come run this Monday. Have a great weekend!

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

“Writer’s block sucks,” my friend Jerusha, a novelist, told me while we drank coffee at Four Barrel, one of San Francisco’s coffee houses that makes you feel out of touch for not having a beard and tight cut offs. “I just feel paralyzed.”

Having suffered writer’s block myself, I nodded, guzzled down my double latte, then suggested she drink more coffee. “Doesn’t work,” Jerusha said. “I just end up jittery and more frustrated at the blank page.”

But that was six months ago. Now Jerusha has a studly new man (with a beard that would fit in at Four Barrel, no less) and she has not only finished her novel, she’s onto the next.

It could just be coincidence that Jerusha’s frozen fingers thawed in conjunction with new love, but probably not. She likely got that boost of confidence most of us do from feeling wanted by somebody we actually see as attractive too. And now there is some biological proof that love really does conquer fear, at least the freezing part.

What’s usually called our “fight or flight” response is sometimes, more appropriately, called our “fight, flight or freeze” response. Though it’s not talked about often, freezing is actually one of the most common unconscious reactions of our fear response — the deer in the headlights phenomenon.

Freezing may have adapted for our ancestors to camouflage or play dead in the face of a predator, but it’s clearly not working too well for us in the modern world. (I’ve personally done the deer in the headlights while giving a speech to hundreds of people and don’t recommend it.)

So, how not to freeze up in the face of a novel deadline or a truck barreling toward you on the freeway? There are lots of methods, which I discuss at length in The Fear Project — but good old-fashioned love turns out to be one of the best. Falling in love, making love, making babies, giving birth, breast feeding, hugging, even just thinking of loved ones — all that sentimental stuff releases a hormone in us called oxytocin. It has long been known that the inability to secrete this oxytocin is associated a lot of problems: psychopathology, sociopathology and narcissism, and that oxytocin is what helps mothers love their children unconditionally, as well as deal with the pain of childbirth (the word comes from the Greek, okytokine, meaning quick birth). But now scientists have shown that oxytocin — sort of like love in chemical form — is what helps mammals move in the face of fear. In other words, bravery.

Neuroscientist Ron Stoop and colleagues recently found that if they injected oxytocin into rats’ fear center, the amygdala, and gave them the same shock that usually makes rats freeze with fear, the rats still went into fight-or-flight-or-freeze (raised heart rate, adrenaline, etc.), but these love-boosted rats were far less likely to freeze from fear. They had the ability to act and move and respond, which would make sense evolutionarily. If a cat was attacking these rat mother’s babies, freezing wouldn’t do much good. Love helps them overcome their normal response to fear.

The good news is that you don’t have to meet a gorgeous, bearded man (or woman) to get an oxytocin hit. Studies have shown that getting a hug, holding hands, even just thinking of someone — anyone — who loves you, and really feeling that love, usually does the trick. Of course, I am making some assumptions by arguing that Jerusha’s writer’s block was the same sort of freezing brought on by the amygdala. And I’m making some other assumptions by saying it’s Jerusha’s new bearded lover that is somewhat responsible for her new prose. But it’s nice to know that science is finally able to describe at least a small piece of the situation we have all experienced: love thawing the spiny icicles of fear.

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

P.S. — Jerusha is not my friend’s real name.

The question now is: what will your FEAR PROJECT be in 2013? Tweet it out with the hashtag #fearproject. Let’s face down our fears together.

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

* tweet what your personal #fearproject will be in 2013 (example: My #fearproject in 2013: learning to surf! www.fearproject.net @jaimalyogis)

* tweet this post with the hashtag #fearproject,

* share it on Facebook and tag “Jaimal Yogis,”

* email it to 10 friends and bcc jyogis@gmail.com.

If you do all four, you’ll quadruple your chances of winning.

My Fear Project in 2013 is starting today. Ultraswimmer Jamie Patrick and I will be swimming 2.4 miles under the Bay Bridge to my book signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building. Starting around 4:15 PM, we’ll jump of Yerba Buena Island in the freezing cold San Francisco Bay and try our best to make it to shore. You can see our route above and follow our progress live at jamiepatrick.com. If you want to greet us, we’ll be getting out of the water right by the silver rocket statue just south of the Ferry Building. (Bring flash lights and blankets please.)

My Fear Project in 2013 is starting today. Ultraswimmer Jamie Patrick and I will be swimming 2.4 miles under the Bay Bridge to my book signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building. Starting around 4:15 PM, we’ll jump of Yerba Buena Island in the freezing cold San Francisco Bay and try our best to make it to shore. You can see our route above and follow our progress live at jamiepatrick.com. If you want to greet us, we’ll be getting out of the water right by the silver rocket statue just south of the Ferry Building. (Bring flash lights and blankets please.)

The idea here isn’t to be stupid or brazen. Overconfidence is nothing to praise. We have a boat following us for safety. The idea behind this is a sort of Paleo Diet for the mind. We evolved in the wild and research shows that when we’re fit, our brains deal better with stress, fear, and anxiety. If we can work out in new places and find new challenges, the results are even better. I discuss all of the science behind this in The Fear Project, so for now, I’ll sign off. Hope to see you tonight!

Here’s a summary and the book trailer:

Ping Fu knows what it’s like to be a child soldier, a factory worker, and a political prisoner. To be beaten and raped for the crime of being born into a well-educated family. To be deported with barely enough money for a plane ticket to a bewildering new land. To start all over, without family or friends, as a maid, waitress, and student.

Ping Fu also knows what it’s like to be a pioneering software programmer, an innovator, a CEO, and Inc. magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year. To be a friend and mentor to some of the best-known names in tech­nology. To build some of the coolest new products in the world. To give speeches that inspire huge crowds. To meet and advise the president of the United States.

It sounds too unbelievable for fiction, but this is the true story of a life in two worlds.

Born on the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution, Ping was separated from her family at the age of eight. She grew up fighting hunger and humiliation and shielding her younger sister from the teenagers in Mao’s Red Guard. At twenty-five, she found her way to the United States; her only resources were $80 in traveler’s checks and three phrases of English: thank you, hello, and help.

Yet Ping persevered, and the hard-won lessons of her childhood guided her to success in her new home­land. Aided by her well-honed survival instincts, a few good friends, and the kindness of strangers, she grew into someone she never thought she’d be—a strong, independent, entrepreneurial leader. A love of problem solving led her to computer science, and Ping became part of the team that created NCSA Mosaic, which became Netscape, the Web browser that forever changed how we access information. She then started a company, Geomagic, that has literally reshaped the world, from personalizing prosthetic limbs to repair­ing NASA spaceships.

Bend, Not Break depicts a journey from imprisonment to freedom, and from the dogmatic anticapitalism of Mao’s China to the high-stakes, take-no-prisoners world of technology start-ups in the United States. It is a tribute to one woman’s courage in the face of cruelty and a valuable lesson on the enduring power of resilience.

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

In the first part of my interview with JT Holmes — one of the most impressive extreme skiers and BASE jumpers on earth, not to mention an all around smart, nice guy — he talked about his scariest moment in skiing, how he transforms fear to focus, and how his sport helped him with ADHD. In this section of the interview, JT and I got into how he recovers after an injury, how to tell good fear from bad fear, and how he recently jumped of the, uh, Sears Tower. Yes you read that right.

Let me be clear. The Fear Project is not about advocating that you go risk your life.  But I think guys like Holmes inspire the rest of us to push our limits in areas that might really make our lives better — talking to that girl you have a crush on but are too scared approach, quitting that job you’re bored at to write that novel or make that film. After all, if JT can figure out a way to jump off the Sears Tower, the least we can do is get off the couch and dream a little bigger.  I also want to thank JT for being part of The Fear Project book (B&N, Indiebound, Amazon) and donating his incredible footage to the trailer (right).

What are all the injuries you’ve sustained over the years?

You know, typical to most skiers, I have some knee surgeries over the 15 years or so that I’ve been skiing really hard. Three knee surgeries and they feel pretty good. Also, a broken finger, broken back, broken tailbone, you know, stuff like that.

From what I understand, when something happens like that where you could have been badly injured, you’re going to be more tense the next time.  That’s what fear does. Do you  you’re more hesitant after an injury?

Oh, I’m more hesitant to avoid that happening again. I don’t want to ever want to tumble down a mountain like I did the Bec de Rosses in 2010. I don’t ever want to do that. There’s just too much of an element of luck. I could’ve hit a rock. I could have dislocated my hip. But I don’t think I’ve become more tense and become worse at falling. I don’t really think you become better at it either. I think it’s something that is innate in your being. If you can fall well once. You can fall well forever.

Do you have to go through a mental process after an injury where you’re visualizing yourself doing well again?

Well, if it’s a really bad situation where you almost died and you didn’t die because of luck, or you put yourself in a situation where you may have seriously jeapordized your life or your spine — in those situations, I experience an anger toward myself and post traumatic stress depression. That has happened maybe once every two years since I became an extreme sports enthusiast.  So now I can recognize it, and I can analyze the depression. It’s the same thing if, say, a girl dumps you. The first time you think it’s the end of the world. You think you’re never going to recover. But after you’ve been dumped a few times in your life, you can say, ok, I’m really down and out about this girl right now but in a few weeks I’ll feel better. And if I go and exercise and live a healthy life I’ll feel better. And if I sleep well I’ll feel better. Same thing with the post traumatic stress depression, I can deal with a little better each time. I can sleep it away, live healthy it away, and get back out there and ski at a reasonable level and get back on the horse slowly.

So you rebuild slowly after an injury?

It’s not a jump right back into it. Maybe three wekes after the Bed des Rosses fall, I was physically capable of skiing at top level for a ski movie, but mentally, no. I didn’t have the mental capability to call up Match Stick production and say, ok, I’m ready to do some filming.

So, yea, you start small. Get back out there. Get the feel for it. Jump off some cliffs. And you got to learn from what went wrong. Whether it was you or one of your friends who had the close call or you, you got to analyze it and not make the same mistake twice.  Sometimes you have to do an overall evaluation and say, look, I took two major falls this year, and uh, one of them I got lucky, one of them, I got hurt. Maybe I need to tone it back 10-percent. When I’m looking at a line, maybe I’m 80-percent sure I can do it, and I need to be 90-percent sure.

How do you balance that caution with the feeling of wanting to stay on top? Like you said, your field can be financially unstable where you might be killing it at one point, and then having trouble the next. Do you experience that fear of staying on top so you can continue skiing?

There is a balance to be found there. There is a huge pressure to perform above everyone: jump bigger or do more tricks or whatever, to be the baddest dude lighting your hair on fire that there is, but the task at hand is, one: to have fun. Two: to keep your sponsors and company affiliations happy so you can continue to have a career. You’re not going to do that if you’re injured. If you go and try to hit the home run and be the glory guy, well, now you’re down for six months and the guy who was out there skiing smart is, you know, doing a much better job for their sponsors and companies. That’s where you find your balance.

Can you think of a time where you’ve decided to pull back, when you’ve been on that cliff and you felt spooked and you decided to trust that?

Usually, when you’re thinking about doing something, I think it’s important to be decisive. And if you’re not feeling it, you just don’t do it. But then again, you can’t just be a wussy. You have to say, ok, if I’m not feeling it, why am I not feeling it? Do I have a good reason to not feel it. If it takes too much to talk yourself into it then you don’t do it. There have been a couple times when it’s just a gut instinct thing. Maybe you’re worried about avalanche, maybe you’re not feeling balanced on your skis. You definitely have to listen to that inner voice because when you don’t, you often end up saying to yourself, man, I knew that wasn’t going to work.

 That’s one question I keep asking myself in surfing, and thinking about this book. Is there any distinguishing factor between good fear and bad fear — fear you trust and fear you push through.  And how do you know?

Experience, just a lot of experience, and I think that you actually don’t know. Sometimes you do things that maybe you shouldn’t have done and you get away with it. Fall back on some talent and pull a little bit of luck out of the luck bucket. And a lot of people do that a few too many times and get over-confident. They might get away with it for forever. They might get away with it for a  little bit of time. You never really know. I don’t think there’s a defining thought or a certain level of anxiety in your head that sets the bar.

Do you set a standard for yourself though? I mean, when you were growing up learning to ski, I assume you weren’t going to launch a 100-foot cliff when you were 15. There’s an incremental nature to how far you’re willing to push.

I had a string of injuries when I was riding dirt bikes a lot as a kid: broken finger, messed up shoulder. Nothing major, but my dad, I remember him saying, I think you need to scale it back maybe 20-percent, but I was like, whatever old man. But I always remember that, and a few times I’ve said to myself. I think he was right.

Do you find that by understanding fear on the mountain, you find yourself being more fearless or confident in other areas of your life?

That’s a good question. Umb, in a certain light, depending on the situation, I think you have more confidence. I think it becomes ingrained in a professional athlete, a professional extreme athlete especially, that you have to take some risk to be successful. So then you take that into your life and your business model. If you’re a businessman, you’re going to say, I have $100,000, and I’m willing to gamble with 80-percent, but only because it’s a calculated risk and I’m used to calculated risk. I’ve looked at every side of it and every outcome. I’ve done my research and I’m prepared to take this risk. So I think the principles of evaluating any risk in life, they transfer. If I’m faced with something that’s really scary, I’m going to do my research. I’m going to hike up that mountain and look at it the morning before I ski it, but I’m also going to look at it the weeks coming up to it. I’m going to really go and sit at the bottom of the Bec des Rosses and I’m going to do all my research so it minimizes that calculated risk, and whether or not to take it. That’s really invaluable in life when you’re weighing any decision. For instance, this summer we got a job with Transformers 3. And this was a huge job.  This was an opportunity to fly wing suits in an urban environment. So it was a golden opportunity as a BASE jumper to jump off of buildings.

That sounds terrifying.

Every single one of the guys I brought into the job, we sat down and said, this is going to be scary. When we get to the city, it’s going to be on. We’re going to be peaking on adrenaline.  It’s going to be scary. We just trained like hell together. Mike Swanson and I probably did 180 jumps together. Sky dives, BASE jumps. We could just communicate without speaking. We could anticipate each other’s moves. I knew how his parachute was opening.  I knew when he would want to open and how to avoid it. We just took our fear and transferred it to focus. We trained really hard, and when it came down to doing it, we performed at top level.

So sounds like you look at what all the possible threats are going to be, and any threat that is in your control, you synch it up as tight as you can with training.

If there is a way I can get from being 80-percent sure about skiing a line to 83-percent sure, if I’m scared enough about it, I’m going to make damn sure I get that extra 3-percent. So you turn that fear not only into emotion when it’s go time, but you also turn it into motivation for research.

Does fear make you suffer or are you just able to turn it into focus?

I think I can convert it into focus. I think that’s one of the things that I do quite well. At a certain point, you got to say, I got to stop focusing on the fear and focus on how to do this right so that the disaster doesn’t occur.

And when you got to that point when you were up on the top of the buildings, how did you feel?

Terrified [laughs]

What building were you up on?
We jumped off the Sears Tower, which is now called the Willis tower. We jumped off two different sides of the tower and on one side in particular we took a really interesting line, a very cool line, a very visual, mandatory right hand turn around another building. It was the type of thing where the architecture of the Willis tower is such that, there are a lot of 90-degree angles to it. It’s not just a block. So we jumped off and immediately we were basically engulfed by windows in a dive.  We jumped into a vertical V. So then we’re falling next to the building, gaining speed, and then we had to make a mandatory right hand turn and carve a soft left around a building called 311 Wacker Street.

The line didn’t even occur to me at first. I scouted the building like three or four times, but then on one beautiful sunny, inviting day, I said we could fly this and it would look really cool for the movie and all the location, creative guys for the movies were like, yea, that would really match our vision for this scene.  And to jump a building that is that iconic, you know, if you can leave your mark…I think in ten years if people were there with wing suits, it would still be a scary thing for somebody to do. They would look back and say, wow, those guys did this in 2010, that’s bad ass.

Because wingsuits have been around for how long?

Well, it’s just like skiing, you know, it evolves. There are certain things that have been done at Squaw Valley will stand the test of time, and I think the line we did off what we’re calling Suicide Corner on the Willis Tower will stand the test of time in the BASE jumping community.

So take me through a BASE jump. You’re freefalling for about 15-seconds or something?

Yea, about right. With a wing suit off the Willis tower, we were falling about 14 seconds, I think.

So how close are you when you open?

The building is 1425 feet. I think we had to cover about 650 feet of horizontal distance. So 1400 feet, if you think about it, it takes a little while to get the wing suit flying because you have to gain speed, so knock a couple hundred feet off right away, so then you have 1200 feet and you need about 400-feet to open and land in an urban environment. Pulling at 400-feet is not low, but that’s not high either. So then you’re taking 1225 feet and you’re taking it down 825 feet of usable. Basically we needed to fly properly. And the other thing was, when you’re turning, you lose altitude. You can fly at 2.5 horizontal feet to one-foot vertical. You do that by just adjusting your angle of attack. So all the numbers were there. We knew we could fly from here to there, even with the turn, but if you messed up… If you let yourself become overwhelmed by the fact that there were buildings around, and cars around, and people around, or that you’d never jumped off a building like this, and the consequences were really high, and there was a helicopter flying around filming and there were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent, if you let that get to you and you didn’t perform, you’d have been in big big trouble, big big trouble, landing in the middle of busy streets, with powerlines – big danger.

What do you do right before when you’re going to jump?

We talked about it. We said, look you know, it’s an intimidating distance to cover, but it’s not a long distance to cover. How are you feeling about this? How are you? You good? You know, and you try, if you can go like this with your mouth (flaps his lips like a horse), that’s like, alright, I’m relaxed enough. If you’re super tense, you probably can’t do that with your lips.  Also, we toned it back a little bit. We did a jump with two guys and and then three because it was a tight line.  And then we went back and we jumped four. We never jumped five because it was just a comfort thing. Plus, we jumped the other side first and this was a major pain in the ass for the movie. They were like, why do you need us to build two platforms? They had to get double the amount of permissions from more buildings and shell out more bucks and they were getting the city to say, ok, you can shut that street down and then that street. It was major logistical hell, and I was the stunt coordinator and I was just like, we have to do it. We needed that warm up. We needed to jump the building on the easy side and get comfortable rather than go straight into the city and do the gnarliest thing we were going to do.

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

San Francisco — Swimming in the chilly San Francisco Bay may not be the way most people would choose to arrive at their first book signing, especially in the dead of winter, and especially at night. But that’s exactly what San Francisco journalist and surfer Jaimal Yogis will do this January 8 for the release of his new book, The Fear Project: what our most primal emotion taught me about survival, success, surfing…and love. Departing around 4:15 PM, Yogis and famous ultra swimmer Jamie Patrick — one of the elite athletes Yogis profiles in his book — will swim the 2.4-mile length of the Bay Bridge between Yerba Buena Island and the Embarcadero. There, the two will climb ashore for Yogis’ first talk and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building. The event begins at 6:30 PM.

“Jamie’s unprecedented adventure swims were part of what inspired me to investigate the science of fear and courage,” Yogis says, “so swimming with him to celebrate the release of The Fear Project is a huge honor. Plus, swimming in the bay at night freaks the heck out of me. And as I learned writing this book, if you want to overcome a fear, exposing yourself to directly to that fear is the fastest route.”

In the opening chapter of The Fear Project, Yogis describes an Alcatraz adventure swim with Patrick that nearly goes terribly wrong. “We learned our lesson,” Patrick says. “We’re going to do this safely. We let the Coast Guard know exactly what we’re up to, and my dad, Jim Patrick, a lifelong sailor, will be following us the whole way in his boat.”

Patrick knows all about taking calculated risks. He’s the first man to ever swim across Lake Tahoe twice non-stop, a distance of 44 miles. He’s currently training to return this summer to swim the circumference of the lake, 72 miles, which he calls the Tahoe 360.

“Frankly,” says Yogis, “I always wondered why Jamie puts himself through the sorts of things he does. I couldn’t relate. But when I actually saw Jamie finish the Tahoe Double it moved me deeply. It made me realize that I can do more than I think is possible. All of us can if we understand how fear holds us back.”

Spectators can watch Yogis and Patrick come in at the Ferry Building pier near the silver rocket statue. They can also follow the swimmers’ progress at http://www.jamiepatrick.com/live

Details
Book Passage, talk and signing
When: Tuesday, January 8 @ 6:30 pm
1 Ferry Building San Francisco CA
Tel. 415.927.0960

To interview Jaimal Yogis or Jamie Patrick please contact: Aly Mostel at aly.mostel@rodale.com or 212.808.1684, Dan Ozzi at danozzi@gmail.com or Kathlene Carney at kathlenec@carneypr.com

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

Jonathan Goodwin, a British escape artist with a shiny bald head and a 007 air, has, over the course of his career: buried himself alive, bound himself in locks and chains under ice-cold water, hung himself on stage, covered his body in 200,000 bees, swum with sharks, and had a car park on top of his head.
 
“I’m not really an office person,” Jonathan says when we meet near his home in Los Angeles.
 
Many escape artists are illusionists and they always succeed at just the last second. The interesting thing about Jonathan’s escapes, many of which he performed on his own Discovery Channel show, One Way Out, is that they are 100-percent real and about one-third of the time, he fails, suffering the consequences. When Jonathan was covered in 200,000 bees, for example, and placed on top of a washing machine that would begin shaking if he didn’t escape from handcuffs within one-minute, he fumbled with the cuffs, and he was stung thousands of times. “I was sick for a week,” he laughs, “really nauseous.”
 
But even through horrible mishaps, Jonathan always maintains the cool wit of a skilled Television host and I’d like to know how.
 
“Basically,” Jonathan says, “I never risk death in escape artistry. A.) because I’m not stupid and B.) because it’s a creative thing. There are lots of my predecessors, largely magicians, that would tell the audience that what they’re doing is lethally dangerous and if they don’t escape in such and such a time they’re going to die, and they always escape in just the last second.  But it’s kind of patronizing to the audience to pretend that they would actually risk death. Most of them love themselves far too much to make it plausible. So, one of the things I told myself when I started doing escapes was, I will never risk death. I will risk serious pain and humiliation. And basically, I think what is the worst thing that I would be willing to really have happen to me. And then I work backwards from there.”
 
For the bees stunt, Jonathan spoke with doctors and bee experts about what the bees will do if they’re agitated in certain ways and whether he could survive 200,000 bee stings.  When he had a car parked on his head, he found out exactly how much pressure the human skull can endure and then, well, tried it. “The research is fun when you have something on the line,” says Jonathan, “because then you really make sure your research is solid.”  He got the green light that he could survive the bees,  which didn’t make the fear go away, but knowing that he wouldn’t die kept his fear within a tolerable zone in which he could still crack jokes, think critically, and look handsome for the camera. “I’m always pretty scared of what, say, the bees will be like,” he tells me. “When I pitch these ideas to the producer, I think yea, that would be great, that would be a really cool and fun thing to do and then the moment that they go ok, let’s do it, that’s the moment that I go, ok, I’ve got to do this thing. And at that moment, it’s always pretty terrifying, and where that dissipates is knowledge. That to me is the biggest single secret in how to beat fear is knowing as much about what you’re up against as possible.”

The full interview with Jonathan Goodwin (who, by the way, has a new show coming in 2013) will be posted here soon. Stay tuned.

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

While reporting The Fear Project book, I realized quickly that I couldn’t just interview scientists who study fear in the brain and body. I had to get to the people who experience fear in its most raw and physical forms — the experiential experts. Not all my reporting ended up going into the book, but every interview was fascinating. This is an outtake from an interview I did with one of the best big-wave surfers in history — if not the best — Darryl “Flea” Virotsko.  Nobody but Flea has won the Mavericks big-wave competition in Half Moon Bay more than once. Flea won it three years in a row. . Here, we discussed his first experiences at Mavericks and fear. Later in the interview it got pretty juicy so stay tuned for the other interview installments. I should also note for the kids that, after drug abuse nearly killed him, Flea is now sober and doesn’t recommend anyone surf Mavericks on LSD.

Tell me about your first time at Mavs? It was 1992?

91. We surfed the Lane and Middle Peak when we were kids and that was big to us. And Vince Collier, he had a shaping room and he was kind of like our dad, but also our friend, you know.  We always looked at his charts in his shaping room. There were all the different depths of the ocean and why it breaks that big at Mavericks and this and that. We were all pretty into it – wow, that’s cool.  And one day, he looked at his little weather buoy box and said, “it’s good up there, we should go up there.” There’s no wind. And me and Zack Acker were on acid – like a half hit of acid. And we went out there and it was completely glassy, just pristine, and so we, uh, just paddled out.  It was insane. It was fun, glassy, and got plenty of waves. And after we went out there we would just jump off anything, just like – what I’ll take this one on the head, I’ll laugh at that. It was on. It was crazy how on it was.

Did you have any nerves? I think it would be flipping terrifiying on acid?

No, I was really in tune on acid. It was just a half hit of acid so it wasn’t too major. I was just psyched.  Once I got one wave, I got another wave. I was just doing laps. It was a great session. After that, we just drove up there every time it broke. We borrowed boards from Vince Collier and different people, Bud Miller. And then we started getting our own boards, but they were hard to get back then. It’s hard to make a board that big. Arrow, Pearson Arrow was doing some boards. And Vince Collier was making his boards.

So you honestly never had any nerves out there?

You can’t really. You see some gnarly situations out there, just like what: waves just folding in half – 20, 25 feet – and just spitting both ways. And the sound of it is just crazy. You just got to be prepared out there to deal with it. When you get into a bad spot or you put yourself in a bad spot, you have to be able to bring your level down, calm down, deal with the situation at hand, not like – oh my god, what am I going to do – you can’t freak out, you’re wasting energy.

How have you done that? Did you build up to that?

Oh yea, I’ve been through so many different things at Mavericks where I got held down.  I almost died, caught on the rocks, everything. From all those experiences, I’ve learned a little bit from every one of them. So if I get myself in a situation, I’ll know exactly what to do so I won’t get more worked than I need to.

Did you ever have a situation – like that 04 wipeout at Waimea, or pinned to the rocks at Mavs, or the 07 wipeout at Mavs – where you just got rocked so bad and you had to work through it to get back out? How do you push through that?

That’s a good question. The gnarliest was when I was pinned to the rocks. There were like five different steps to that situation. There was pearling, then not going over the falls on that wave, then being right in the zone on a 25-foot wave that nobody wanted. I was swimming to get under the lip.

So what happened exactly from the beginning?

I dug a nose right in the bowl. Then there was this 25-foot wave coming right at me so I just started swimming and I dove through it and I got pretty much through it but my board got caught, pulled me back through, beat me, and then it was all through the rocks, caught on the rocks for seven waves. It was gnarly and I remember going home and crying. I laid in bed and I thought I was dead, really. To get over it, the next time it broke I just went straight back out and did it. That’s how you have to do things like that.  

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow. – Mary Anne Radmacher

Feel the fear and do it anyway. – Susan Jeffers

I define myself, no label, connotation, or society will ever tell me what I am, what I will be, or who I can be. I decide! Freedom is never out of style. – Coco Chanel

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh… -Jack Kerouac

The masters in the art of living make little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their minds and their bodies, their information, their recreation, their love and their religion. They hardly know which is which, they simply pursue that vision of excellence at whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing. – James A. Michener

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before. – Rollo May

If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone. – Maxwell Maltze

He who never made a mistake never made a discovery. – Anonymous

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? –Unknown

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon

One of my biggest, most tangible fears has always been to go to the movies…by myself. 

Tonight, I am going to tackle this fear by going to see Life of Pi, solo. The film fits- it’s about a boy who loses everything- his family, his animals, and almost his life, in a shipwreck, and embarks on a quest to survive, his only companion an adult bengal tiger. It’s a story of self-discovery and strength of spirit and will, a story about, well, God- whatever you perceive Him to be. Yesterday I was going to see it with a friend, but they cancelled and it got me thinking…why not just go alone? I’ve always preferred watching movies alone — “Yeah, at home” I threw back at myself, “not publicly alone. Not when there are couples and families and groups of friends and first dates surrounding you.” I let the negativity win and decided it wasn’t the night for it; I’d wait for someone to be available.

Then today I woke up thinking how I still wanted to see the movie, and how ridiculous it is that after everything I’ve accomplished in life, I still haven’t tackled this comparatively minute fear. Why does this scare me? “People will judge you. No one goes to the movies alone unless they have to. What if people laugh at you? What if you get anxious, start feeling awful and can’t enjoy the film? Or worse, have a panic attack? What if…”

Ugh. The problem with negative thoughts—and negativity in general—is they spiral. Once you start it’s hard to stop, and like a virus, negativity spreads.

STOP! I finally shouted out-loud to myself. Be positive!

Does it matter if others judge me or laugh at me? Does it matter what others think of me? Is it even any of my business what other people think?

No…not really…ok, NO!

So…what are the pros of doing this? What are the positive possibilities? Do the positives outweigh the negatives?

A Max Erhmann quote popped in my head:

“Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.”
- From his poem Desiderata, circa 1920

Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings, I repeated.

I made a “pro” list: no one talking or distracting me; an increase in personal courage and strength; potential (really, likely) relaxation and enjoyment; a chance encounter with a friend.
I forced myself to think of all the other activities I do by myself regularly, and how the likelihood of me succeeding at this one other thing ginormously outweighed the likelihood of failure. I THEN realized that failure is completely relative and unless I view an event as a failure, then it can be whatever I want it to be. It’s my life, my action, my experience, and my opinion is the only one that matters.

I watched the trailer again to amp myself up, checked movie times, and glanced at the clock. Next showing in 30 minutes, next one after that was 3 hours later. I knew that if I gave myself 3 hours to change my mind I wouldn’t go, so I started getting ready.

I went. I saw. It was great.

Because I arrived late I spent less time worrying about other people’s thoughts and more time worrying about missing the movie. The ticket guy was nicer than usual and flashed me a smile. The combo of tardiness, positivity and focus on the present moment saved me much of the anxiety I had so dreaded. There were a few moments here and there where I felt slightly awkward- I laugh louder and cry more than most people during films, as well as jump and scream on cue. This time was no exception, but I was mostly too present to notice, focused on enjoying the film.

In retrospect it’s hard to believe I was so afraid; it was so easy once I got there. And yet mine is not an altogether uncommon case. In fact, several friends of mine voiced similar angst when I told them about my venture.

How often do we do this? Create negative situations and environments in our minds that seem (and often become) real enough to paralyze us? A negative thought repeated often enough becomes habitual, gradually causing anxiety, stress, depression and even agoraphobia. It very easily goes from “I’m afraid of what people think” to “I’m afraid of people” to “I’m afraid of going outside.” Written here this sounds completely absurd, but most people do this constantly. Like I said, negativity spreads, often before we’ve noticed it’s there. Thoughts are powerful stuff.

Now, I am not expecting you to go out and face down all your fears at once. That would be unrealistic and probably do more harm than good. However, I’d like to encourage you to sit down and think about what scares you. Write it down, make a Fear List. Start with your thoughts. Think about why your fears exist—think about the thought patterns they instigate or produce in you. Why are you letting this negativity invade your consciousness? Write the negative thought corresponding to each fear. Now make a second list. For each fear and negative thought, write a positive counter-thought, the antidote for that fear. If that’s too difficult, make a list of what you’re grateful for. When you’re finished, burn, tear up or throw away the Fear List. Let it go and let the negative thoughts go with it. Read the positive list aloud, and stick it somewhere safe. Repeat as necessary. Positive thoughts are just as, if not more powerful, than negative ones. It is therefore in your best interest to utilize them to empower yourself.

If nothing else, our fears can seem more manageable when we keep our blessings and strengths in perspective. Count your blessings- and not just on Thanksgiving. Good luck!

Order The Fear Project on: B&N, Indiebound, Amazon