INTRODUCTION
Brad Gobright’s eyes were categorically disarming. For those who knew him, especially those who loved him, to be held by his undivided attention and to be the recipient of his cherubic smile were among life’s most righteous affirmations. There was a certain assurance in his gaze, and, as his closest loved ones speak of it, his smile offered the type of stillness found in an alpine meadow. It was not the assurance of tall and mighty and endless forests; it was not an indomitable thing. It was something precious, unlikely, and beautiful, often unseen by most. Full of light, delicate and generous, those were the attributes of Brad’s love cast upon others. Overflowing with love, Brad Gobright’s life was also full of devotion and what I can see now as a great sense of ordinance. The truth is, while often fox-holed into a profile that was comic, absurdist,
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and even unintelligent, Brad’s life was flush with these broad and glorious and, ultimately, very human plots. He was a most unique, truly inimitable person—something I learned in friendship with him, years back, and learned again through the process of writing this book. But as unique as he was, he was also strikingly familiar. Seen by most people as an outrageous climber—as the subject of mostly sensational climbing media—there was a lot about Brad that the world did not know; that most of us did not know. It wasn’t anything overtly secret, as there was no shameful list of liabilities. Instead, behind the shroud, unseen to most, was just the good stuff, the best stuff. At the underbelly, Brad’s life had richness and humanity and, at times, exquisite vulnerability. The crux of it, as I came to find out, would be how to present this delicate love, this endless devotion, this great ordination, on the pages in a book.
In early 2020, after having read a short piece that I had written about Brad online, Di Angelo Publications reached out with an offer. Due to Brad’s unlikely heroism, his lightness of being, and his quizzical, sometimes inscrutable persona, they were transfixed with him. A more detailed, full-length biography, they suggested, was needed. At the time, I was just beginning nursing school, and having never written anything beyond the length of a short story, I was largely overwhelmed. The truth is, up until 2020, I had only ever written to personally practice what felt like a discipline of mindfulness. Having a project at scale, deadlines to meet, and the thought that any of my work could suddenly turn into something up for public review, felt largely nauseating. Still, after suggesting we first publish a collection of short works to help ease me into the landscape, I agreed—with one caveat: Brad’s family needed to be on board. That summer, while shaping the rough drafts on what would become Aperture Alike, I met with Brad’s parents, Jim and Pamela Gobright, to discuss the prospective book.
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After a few fond get-togethers and my being the beneficiary of Jim and Pamela’s great hospitality, we had spent enough time learning about each other to issue what felt like respective votes of confidence. Little did I know these would be the fortuitous beginnings of a deeper friendship. With profound love and encouragement, they told me that two of the greater lessons they had learned from Brad were to never shy away from an adventure and to always lean into the long journeys of the human heart.
Lights green, we looked ahead. Quickly, a year passed, Aperture Alike was published, and nursing school went into its second season.
In January of 2021, with Pamela’s help, I was given a list of Brad’s closest climbing partners and friends, which led to even longer lists of contacts and acquaintances. Beginning a thorough process of data collection as the contacts naturally lined up, I began to arrange phone-based interviews, meeting in person whenever possible. Unfortunately, considering many of these partners and friends of Brad’s lived across a variety of state lines and latitudes and there were the ongoing realities of a pandemic to surmise, face-to-face interactions were limited. For ease of documenting, I recorded nearly all of the interviews, with each person’s permission, on my old iPod. By the summer of 2021, and on a short break from school deadlines, I had what I believed to be sufficient content to begin composing a first draft. As with any work, before words went to the page, I first had to navigate a process of framework and scope. The primary questions I had to address before writing this book—before I even conducted any interviews—were, what is the purpose of a biography, as a genre? And what is the story I am attempting to tell?
After some thought, I concluded that a biography ought to be, at least idealistically, about all of our lives. In other genres, that notion is often underwritten. Human stories apply to all of us—heroes, heroines, and lay folk alike—and therefore, so do the
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truths implied. But in certain biographic works, we lose that same undertone, which makes us feel we are only learning of someone rather than taking a journey with them, or better still, taking a journey for ourselves. Thus, in writing this, I very explicitly aimed to show how Brad’s truths were, and are, fit to be ours also. With what may be called a bit of foolish optimism, my aim with this book was that upon finishing it, the reader would feel they learned as much about their own life—through moments where I have inserted places to pause and see how the protagonist’s arc parallels our own—as they did about Brad Gobright.
The story I was expressly trying to tell was, therefore, about more than Brad alone. It was not just going to be a text about Brad supremely living and then tragically losing his life. It was going to, in some measure, ask each of us how we might be sadly or lamentably not living our own. But as much as it would ask of our lives, it would also celebrate them. Brad showed us the brilliance of life in ways that few could. He saw light shine from the center of the universe, he saw wildflowers in spring, he saw abundance and glory and the might of existence, and he wanted us to see it too. So that became the story I tried to tell. What I aimed for was a view of life—of all our lives—that would refresh us; a story that was about a young and intrepid man, but also about each of us. A story that might, all at once, make us cry for the acknowledgment of what and who had been lost, and have us weep for the sheer joy, enlightenment of, and surrender to all that had been found. I wanted the reader to close the book and, even if only for a moment, take nothing in their life for granted. Even more, I wanted them to want to live it as never before. I wanted all of that not because I thought I was qualified to deliver it, but because I thought that’s what Brad would have wanted—a space where we could hold his life and our own lives together in wonder.
And so, after a few drafts, re-drafts, and revisions, which have passed the likes of Di Angelo editors and Brad’s family alike, we’ve
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come to The Greater Fool. On the title, some context is owed.
For me, there is a certain magic in foolishness. I for one have always romanticized the function of folly, and I don’t think myself alone in this matter. Look close enough and it can be seen throughout human history, from the first painted caves and scrolls to the scripts of Hollywood today. Whether it be the village idiot, the errant knight, the town fool, the noble fool, or, of course, the greater fool, humans have always had a fascination with the edge of reason. From time immemorial, studying the way of the foolish has been the way of the wise. Precisely because it is counterintuitive and challenges our epistemology, we find treasure not by writing off, but by leaning into the dissonant parts of life.
For the first handful of years that I knew Brad, his brilliance was not as obvious as his charm, but by 2015—largely considered his breakout year—the pieces were adding up. Brad wasn’t just a misfit with a deeply pure heart, but a blooming wildflower keeping company with the icons of the climbing world.
As his first few features in magazines began displaying a happy-go-lucky, nonchalant version of the kid, an entire slew of curmudgeons somewhere in Brad’s old life looked on from afar, quite honestly confused. This is partially because Brad had more than a handful of stories in local lore that were not bright and shining, and for those events, he was rightly chaffed. Certain folks couldn’t let go of that old image of him; they simply couldn’t believe he was onto something so grand and so clued in. But Brad kept being himself, his own northern star, and in short time, even the skeptics had to admit the kid was tapping into exceptional frequencies. Those who were first exposed to Brad from 2015 onwards would’ve only known him as a spritely, zealous crusher—part underdog, part goof—who, when stuck in a jam, could just buckle down and pull through moves with a strength that was only outsized by his massive risk tolerance. But
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those of us familiar with his early years saw him as something else entirely; we’d seen the transition, the pupa, the cocoon, and, yes, the unlikely, beatific result.
Whatever it was that got him to where he was, I felt compelled to decode it. I had a sense there was more to his magic than his lucky charm, his spriteliness, or even his incredibly strong fingers; I just needed to find something to hold it up against.
By 2015, Brad was already being compared to the mighty Alex Honnold, whom he had already befriended, and with whom he would eventually share many historic, highlight-reel days. The thing was, Alex already had the market cornered on almost everything iconic in climbing except for foolishness. Rather, he was the spitting image of poise—the collected, mindful climber. Hell, he was a humanitarian and an environmentalist, but he was no laughingstock.
In fact, I can remember reading a primary profile piece on Alex between 2008 and 2009. The article was published in Climbing magazine, and he had the centerpiece; the title of it ran as, “Nobody’s Fool.” The piece, one of his earliest appearances in press, painted Alex in colors that he’d keep for his entire life. In the text, he was portrayed as a mythic climber, not without his own idiosyncrasies, who was as sculpted and high-functioning as he was deeply aware of his place—and climbing’s place—in a world of global inequities and larger plots. Truth is, it was a great article, and an accurate one. It was a contrast to the longoverused tropes of recklessness that accompanied any talk of a free-soloist’s mental framework in that day and age. It put to rest all the bullshit notions of death-wish thinking and the slopping remnants of the 1990’s bygone era of “Xtreme” this and “No Fear” that. Alex was, indeed, nobody’s fool, and nobody’s adrenalin junkie either. In so doing, he turned a much-needed page, essentially ushering in a new era for the outside world on model characters and character types. If, in 2009, any stragglers of the
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“Go Big or Go Home” era remained, after Alex, they vanished.
Then, in 2015, came Brad: a breath of fresh air arriving at just the right time. His model was almost a perfect antithesis to Honnald’s, and his timeliness came at just the right inflection point—not only for the climbing world but for my world, too. I’d always been prone to a certain lens on life, a bit too in my head and hard-pressed to find connection in the heart. Consistently afraid to go and live the full life that I deeply desired—both in climbing and beyond it—I could barely get myself out of the gates, let alone out of my own head. And perhaps I wasn’t the only one stuck in fear and analytics, flummoxed by the vacuum of self, unable to unlock the secret joys of life. Others around me, it seemed, operated on the terms that the modern world had handed down, and did so with the same baleful results. Collectively tripped up by certain idioms—like the notion that you could somehow think your way toward right, or good, or valiant living, rather than needing to live your way into clear thinking—I sensed most of us had, at least in some form, gone awry. But Brad was not most of us. For years he’d been putting action first and watching joyfully as the desired mood and result followed.
Finally, after years in his operating system, Brad was getting some proper comeuppance. His spotlight was not only well deserved but also, like Alex’s, redefining. Failing hard, tackling giant objectives, going in over his head—Brad’s path worked. It didn’t depend on smarts, wit, tact, or guile, nor did it hinge on the precision of the master’s path. It simply required an elementary, almost childlike reboot of curiosity, and a willingness to go in the direction of uncertainty.
So, given Brad’s model, especially compared to Alex’s, I needed to pin a title on him tha fit for the praise he deserved. The climbing world had already drawn so many comparisons between them—sometimes even pitting them against each other as rivals, when in fact they were spirited friends—that I figured I
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should, too. While Honnold was decidedly Nobody’s Fool, Brad was, for me, the Greater Fool—three simple words packed neatly into one homely epithet. Folly, a notion that Alex could fully distance himself from with his mastery, was the exact thing that Brad could use as a defining strength. It felt uniquely fitting and somewhat true to the analog of its economic etymology.
In the finance and business world, the greater fool is the person whose troubled scenario comes down to one essential problem: by some lack of insight, they’ve mistaken the perceived value of something for the actual value of it. If the stock or asset they’ve bought in on is, in the eyes of the market, seen as spurious or overvalued, a sell-off always occurs. After the herd running wild and the ensuing market correction, the worth of that stock or asset can, in a matter of minutes, sink to absolute zero. But standing there, unphased as ever, after the dust and the punchlines settle, is the greater fool—the one poor chap out of touch with reality just enough to hang onto something when all others let go. When the world around them sees only an empty promise, the greater fool maintains there is worth to be discovered after all.
But every now and then, markets are wrong. And every now and then, presumptions on lifestyles and people are, too. As it turns out, the climbing life—Brad’s climbing life—offered more than ephemeral dances with delight. In fact, the way Brad took it, its value stands without question. That means, yes, it is something at least partially derivative of the boulder fields, the disheveled sleeping holes, and the homeless, dollar-a-day living trends that he maintained. It was not the result of a cozy Sprinter Van and a well-paying remote work lifestyle, fine as those things may be. It was deeper than that.
Brad’s paradigm did not depend on a person selling all their possessions and casting them to the poor, it only asked them to become poor in spirit—to be open. That was the needle’s eye, after all. To come to a place in life where, for the sake of a new
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experience, one might ditch all the tricks, tools, presumptions, targets, and even the operating systems. That was the only requirement. From that point forward, it was simple. At the heart of Brad’s climbing life was a devotion to this perfect blend of an ascetic, ego-deflating practice mixed with an overtly aesthetic, bound-to-nature’s-bosom, steady state. It was about curiosity, dedication, and a willingness to believe that you didn’t need to see the next step to take it. So long as you took it—in fact, because you took it—a step would indeed arrive at your feet.
The opportunity costs were high, sure; stuck in minimum wage jobs, Brad wasn’t getting any standard earning power, nor was he keeping certain important relationships close. But with time, those relationships did come. He would learn by his own forge and his own pain precisely what was missing in his life. He would learn about imbalance and ratio, and how even in poverty there can be plenty of gluttony. That is precisely where the details of his story come in; it’s what fills the pages that lie ahead. But as for the model—and the asset which the traditional greater fool would not sell—by 2015 and beyond, there was no disputing its value.
It wasn’t all glory, of course; nothing ever is. But it had magic not only for him, but for anyone willing to follow. So follow we did—at first in magazines, films, and on social media, but eventually in small doses applied to our own lives, we followed with action. I’m not suggesting it was delirium or anything like market pandemonium, but in speaking with his climbing partners, friends, loved ones, and romantically beloved, I can tell you that everybody took on parts of Brad’s approach on life. In the years since I published my short story on him, from many conversations at campfires and parking corrals, I can also tell you that his reach went far beyond his immediate circle.
Brad inspired hordes of people to live anew and put a light in our lives that we didn’t even realize had been missing. The beauty of it, from the Greater Fool point of view, is that he was always
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destined for it. The Greater Fool, at least in economics, is a lot more necessary than any one of us as individual bystanders are, for they are the prime movers. Truth is, the market relies on the Greater Fool not only to hang onto that asset in the dump cycle, but to sell others on it too. It’s how commerce is driven and how markets stay fluid; it’s how ideas translate off the page and into the heart. The true nobility in the Greater Fool isn’t that they can see value in something that we can’t, and it’s not that they can endure a host of mocking bystanders while they’re busy making bricks without straw. It’s that after all the scorn, they’re the ones with magic in their pockets, the ones selling us on something we pawned off to the rubes. The sweet irony of the Greater Fool is that every good thing that’s ever lasted the test of time in the human experience—love, charity, compassion—was founded by one of them.
That was it, clear as day. What John Lewis was for the notion of “Good Trouble” all those years ago, walking across the Edmund Pettis Bridge, Brad Gobright was for the notion of “The Greater Fool.” More than anything, he could restore the conversation of why foolishness is not so foolish, after all.
For the rest, you’ve got to just get in there and turn some pages. If anything sticks, it will not be because I wrote it but because Brad or one of his many loved ones lived it. I invite everyone to take a journey with Brad and with the people who loved him, if for no other reason than to see if he might also be a Greater Fool for you, too. Follow along to see if he might soon have you relearning how to embrace the whims of your inner delight and how to listen to the words of your inner voice—the one that is, so often, just sitting there, wishing to fully exist.
In the chapters that follow, you’ll find the narratives are told as much from others’ perspectives as they are from Brad’s. His many adventures—and misadventures—are seen as much from the cameras, eyes, and hearts of his partners as they are found
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from the remnant crumbs he left us in his musings on social media, in passing conversation, or in B-roll cuts of footage. In many places, it may well feel as if we’re living Pamela’s journey as she reminisces on Brad’s life with glittering pride and, at times, painful despair. Large swaths of the book are devoted to his relationship with his mom: a beautiful, rare glimpse at a heartwarming bond. In the small details, in the choices he made, and even in the routes he named, we’ll find love letters between the two of them demonstrating how some things just carry past space and time. In some places, we’ll explore truly tall tales that are flush with joy, while in others we’ll cradle into the pits of fear, loneliness, and anxious disconnect. Some parts are savage, outrageous, animalistic—as one must be in order to climb at the scale Brad did—and others are patently light, whimsical, borderline absurd. But whether it’s in the details of the day that Brad first crawled out of the womb, or in the day that more than five hundred friends and loved ones gathered in a small church in Orange County to remember him, what you’ll find in Brad’s life is the same thing tucked under every corner of your own. It’s about love.
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