When does a stunt become too dangerous to attempt?
Last weekend, Netflix broadcast one of its most nail-biting live streams ever. In front of an audience of thousands – probably hundreds of thousands – climber Alex Honnold would be climbing one of the tallest buildings in the world, Taipei 101, without any safety equipment whatsoever.
To say it was risky was an understatement, even for someone as skilled as Honnold, who famously free soloed the El Capitan rockface in Yosemite in 2018. The event was delayed for 24 hours because of rain; Honnold ended up climbing the skyscraper in high winds. The livestream itself was being broadcast with a ten-second delay, in case tragedy struck.
He did it – otherwise, this would be a very different story. “Sick. I’m so psyched!” he said once he reached the top. Then he took a selfie.
Great for Honnold. There’s little doubt that, regardless of the stream, he would have attempted the feat anyway; in post-climb interviews, he’s talked about being paid an “embarrassingly small” amount to risk his neck for Netflix’s execs. But what it says about us is much more concerning.
“How much are we willing to risk to get views?” influencer Jamie Laing (of all people) posted after the event on Instagram. “We used to get excited about a new episode of Friends. Now major streamers are broadcasting someone risking their life live.
“Let’s be honest - we all tuned in partly to see whether he might fall, or what might go wrong.”
Laing has a point. Over the last few years, it feels like record-breaking, death-defying stunts have taken over our screens.
It’s not just Honnold and his ascent of Taipei 101; every time I’ve logged onto YouTube in the past few months, I’ve been shown a video of seasoned daredevils attempting to ski down Everest (incredibly, the climber in question, Andrzej Bargiel, actually scaled it first), skateboard down literal buildings or complete obstacle courses in the sky wearing a wingsuit.
These flashy stunts have all been curated by energy drink company Red Bull, before getting picked up by international media and shared online – great for the brand, and great for the people featured in it – providing they survive.
They certainly get clicks. A video titled ‘I Skied Down Mount Everest (world first, no oxygen)’ has accumulated 30 million views; the other, ‘Biggest Skate Ramp EVER (world record)’ got nine million. And let’s not forget Red Bull’s 2012 stunt, in which the late Felix Baumgartner jumped back down to Earth from a height of 24 miles – high enough to see the curvature of the planet. It was live-streamed, of course, and broke YouTube records, drawing more than 9.5 million concurrent views, and more than a billion views total.
“There was the same giddy excitement [as with Honnold] leading up to the broadcast of the jump,” the Guardian wrote about Baumgartner’s feat.
“And then, when he entered an uncontrolled, life-threatening spin after 90 seconds, there was the same sense of grim self-examination. You realised that you were simply a rubbernecker, tuning in to the macabre possibility that something would go wrong.”
Even away from Red Bull’s penchant for doing the obviously insane, people seem to have developed an appetite for watching people risk life and limb on screen.
The recent match between seasoned boxer Anthony Joshua and influencer Jake Paul, for instance, saw a whopping 33 million tune in to see a wildly mismatched fight in which Paul’s jaw was broken, live on screen.
Certainly, part of this trend is down to social media. As Laing says, watching a new episode of Friends doesn’t quite cut it anymore in an age where people’s lives have never felt as accessible as they do now, or fame as tantalisingly close.
The pursuit of going viral has tempted thousands of keen (mostly male) youngsters to attempt increasingly dangerous stunts to stand out in an increasingly crowded online space. People like Honnold, and pretty much anybody who does an extreme sport, are certainly risk-takers, but when camera crews come knocking, it’s hard not to believe that some of them are being pushed to take risks outside their comfort zone in the name of garnering clicks.
We’ve come to expect videos where freedivers descend to depths of 100 metres or more on a single breath, or couples illegally scale skyscrapers to take Instagram-ready photos from the top (Russian influencers Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus got a documentary of their own, Skywalkers, on just this). Baumgartner himself died last year after a paragliding crash in Italy.
Plus, of course, there’s climbing, where influencers like Lincoln Knowles are attempting to find fame with videos like the ones titled ‘free solo a harder route every day until I fall.’ Free soloing is notoriously dangerous: world renowned free soloer Brad Gobright fell to his death in 2019, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping Knowles.
“If I didn’t have this external pressure [from Instagram followers] to keep upping my soloing grade, maybe I would just have stopped,” Knowles told online website Climbing in late 2025. “Basically, I have this challenge that holds me accountable, where I have to keep soloing harder.”
“This is, like, everything I hate about influencer culture,” Honnold, incidentally, added in the same piece. “That outside pressure influenced my soloing as well,” he said. “It will always factor in, but by posting on social media, you’re putting it on steroids.”
Plus – and there’s no getting away from it – this stuff sells, for all of the reasons described above.
We live in an age where much of our lives are lived online: we filter the world through our smartphones, and scroll through endless newsfeeds from the comfort of our sofas.
As a result, watching people do something actually dangerous draws the eye like a magnet. If authenticity is a buzzword for our times, this feels about as authentic as it gets. Yes, in action films, people do far wilder things, but the knowledge that a real person is risking their neck to provide us with five minutes of entertainment adds something of an extra frisson to our teatime viewing.
What this means for television feels profoundly depressing. Netflix hasn’t released the viewing figures for ‘Skyscraper Live’, but they’re sure to be impressive, and it would be surprising if they weren’t savvy – or foolhardy – enough to follow that up with something else.
What next? Bomb Defusal Live? BASE-jumping Live? The more dangerous, the better, the execs might think. That is, until somebody gets hurt.
