He is, by his own admission, a quiet guy. He lives in Boulder, Colo., with his wife, a botanist, in a 3,000-foot tract house.

"I'm a pretty weird person," he says. "The last time my wife and I had someone over for dinner was maybe three years ago."

"I'm interested in obsessive types," he explains. "I think it's a way of understanding myself. I'm not even religious, but I get fanaticism. I get the appeal of it. When I was 23, I climbed this mountain in Alaska called Devil's Thumb alone. It was incredibly dangerous, and I did it because if I thought that if I did something that hard and pulled it off, my life was gonna be transformed. And of course, nothing happened. But I get the search for purpose. Happiness means nothing to me. I just want to have meaning and purpose."

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-jon-krakauer-everest-into-thin-air-20150925-story.html