“I would have to say when I was younger, like probably my
early 20s, I did enjoy the feeling, like the rush you would get from
doing these kinds of things, but as time went by, I started getting
kind of a negative association with adrenaline. I don’t like the way
it feels. I don’t like being scared. I don’t like terrifying myself any-
more. I do not like the feeling of adrenaline. I think adrenaline is
actually a nauseating sensation, and it actually makes me feel sick
to my stomach. You get that feeling of your heart coming into your
throat and your whole body becomes super hardwired, and you
become just so hyper-focused. Honestly, I don’t like it. I don’t like
it at all. If I could do what I do without it, I would, but unfortunately,
that’s just not the way physiology works.”
He compares his motivation to the motivation of astro-
nauts. “They didn’t go to the moon to see how much adrenaline
they could get. They had an incredibly difficult task, and their goal
was to get to the moon and back in the safest way they possibly
could. That’s my goal now. I do select incredibly dangerous things
to do, but my goal is to try to get in there and get back in the safest
way I possibly can. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I don’t.”Table Mountain
In 2012, Jeb was flying wingsuits off Table Mountain in South Africa
shooting for a show calledReal Sportson HBO. He did a week of
jumping for the show and when it was time to wrap up, he had
a little extra time and decided that he would do a few extra jumps,
just for fun. Since he was training for another project he had some
friends set up balloons to use as targets that he could fly toward. “I
was talking to my buddies who set up the targets, and they told me,
‘Jeb, it’s kind of windy. You know, be careful. We don’t suggest you
go for the balloons.’”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. If I see the balloons moving, I won’t
go for them, I’ll just fly over them,” he responded.
Looking back Jeb realized that ignoring the balloons was
harder than he thought at the time.
“When you’re moving 120 miles an hour and you’re looking
at an object that’s as big as a balloon is not really easy to do.
“I’m just so focused on the balloon that I’m thinking, ‘I’m
getting that balloon.’ And I did. I hit the balloon. The problem was
I hit the cliff before I hit the balloon. I hit the ledge, clip the balloon,
and then start tumbling off the edge of the cliff. As I start tumbling
off the edge of the cliff, the first thought that went through my84 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge