Hey everyone. This season on climbing gold, we dove into the present and future of our sport.

We saw a lot of positives and ran into some of the difficult parts of our sport and grappled

with some of the growing pains as this next chapter in climbing unfolds.

Today on our final episode, Alex and I are going to sit down with our executive producer

Lisa Hendricks and our producer John Bergman and look back at some of the learnings from

this last season and make some guesses about what the future holds for climbing.

All right.

So this season, we've talked a lot about how much competitive climbing has grown, evolved, and professionalized in the last five to seven

years. To use John's metaphor that we've been working with, it's grown up and it's kind of ready

to move out of the house and do its own thing. You know,

what did you, what did you all like learn or find the most interesting about this season?

This season, you know, I'm like, oh, this is my childhood. You know, going from a scrappy youth

team doing some competitions to seeing the competitions get a little more professional

to seeing it all start in the Olympics this season. I'm like, this has been my entire life of climbing,

basically. Whereas last season was like crazy stories that I'd never heard. I don't know if I,

I already kind of knew about the evolution and whatnot, but it was cool, for example, I think of

like Alex Johnson mentioning that she and Alex Puccio were sleeping on gym floors in her

episode and stuff like that. And I, Alex Johnson and Puccio, they were doing that. I was like

2008, you know, 9, 10. That was only a decade ago. So when you think about how much progress

has been made on the comp scene and particularly on the American with American

comp climbers in just a decade. That's pretty, that's pretty incredible. That's a lot of,

a lot of progress in a short amount of time. Yeah, even in the last five years, I think somebody

...