Breannah Yeh is a slackliner, highliner, and content creator who has spent the last six years dedicated to life on the line. Whether she's landing tricks on a slackline in Los Angeles or walking highlines suspended thousands of feet above the ground, Breannah brings a joyful and creative approach to a sport that demands intense focus and balance. Through her videos, she shares the challenges and rewards of slacklining with a community of more than 2.5 million followers.
Breannah Yeh is a slackliner, highliner, and content creator who has spent the last six years dedicated to life on the line. Whether she's landing tricks on a slackline in Los Angeles or walking highlines suspended thousands of feet above the ground, Breannah brings a joyful and creative approach to a sport that demands intense focus and balance. Through her videos, she shares the challenges and rewards of slacklining with a community of more than 2.5 million followers.
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Breannah Yeh:
That's my favorite part about slacklining is when someone hops on the line for the first time, their legs are shaking and they're like, "I can't do it." There's some people who are like, "Okay, I can't do it," and walk away. And then there's some people who are like, "I can't do it. Let me put some time into it." And then they'll stay there for half an hour to 40 minutes and then they can walk across it. It just shifts something in your brain where you're that is so cool to see.
Shelby Stanger:
That's Breannah Yeh, also known simply as Yeh. Breannah is a slackliner and content creator who's been pursuing adventure sports full-time for the last six years. On a casual Tuesday, you might find her landing slacklining tricks on the beach in LA or modeling designer clothes as she balances on a high line, thousands of feet in the air. She'll even hang on a hammock from the line, which is a heart-stopping sight. Seriously, imagine waking up in the morning and looking down to see miles of rolling canyon below you. Yeh also skydives, she paraglides, and even cliff jumps. Pretty much any crazy thing you can imagine, Yeh is willing to try. With over two and a half million followers on TikTok, Yeh is a prominent voice for finding joy on the slackline and beyond.
I'm Shelby Stanger and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard.
If you've never tried slacklining, you should definitely watch one of Yeh's videos. I promise it'll make you want to hit the park and hop on a slackline too. Her personality is goofy and welcoming and she almost always has a wide grin plastered across her face. Yeh slacklined for the first time when she was only 13 years old and it's been the only thing she's wanted to do ever since.
Yeh, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You're one of the wildest people I've seen on the internet.
Breannah Yeh:
Thank you. That's a high compliment. Thank you so much.
Shelby Stanger:
So you're in LA right now and when you were 13 years old, you had this wild idea to become a professional slackliner, which I didn't even know existed at the time. So I'm curious how this dream even came to be.
Breannah Yeh:
Yeah, I even thought it was impossible for a while, but yeah, so how I started was I went to a rock climbing gym when I was 13. My cousin brought me there and I actually went to rock climb. So the first time I walked into the gym, I saw the line and I was like, "What is this?" And I remember hopping on it for the first time and I stood on it and I was like, "Oh my God, I can't walk." What in the world? I couldn't take two steps and I would fall off and then I'd get back on and then eventually I'd get three steps and I was like, "This is so crazy. Does anyone else in the world know what this is? Do other people walk this?"
And yeah, I realized the goal was walk from point A to point B and in my mind it clicked the more time I put into it, the more steps I can take to get to the end. And so sure enough, the rest of the time there, I ended up just trying to cross this line, not rock climbing. And that turned into me going back basically every weekend until I graduated high school. And it took me about a week-ish to a week of training to actually walk across the line. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is how it works. If you put the time and the effort into something, you can make it to the end.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeh kept going back to that gym, determined to improve her skills and build more confidence. One day when she was there, she saw someone doing tricks on the line, which is called tricklining. She immediately approached that kid, his name is Alex, and they became fast friends. Alex and Yeh started traveling and competing together, even winning a little prize money. Keep in mind at the time, Yeh was still only around 13 years old.
Breannah Yeh:
I started as tricklining, which is where you're doing the tricks and doing the flips and stuff. And so at the time there were still competitions and people were pushing it. It was kind of that grungy thrasher-ish culture of skateboarding. Everybody was like, this is such a cool new thing. So people were creating new tricks, setting up slacklines in random places and I don't know, just cool stuff. And so when I found it, I was super, super inspired. I would watch YouTube videos of my slacklining heroes, which at the time there's not that many slackliners. So there were people that were my heroes and I would go to these competitions and all my heroes were right there. There was a handful of people.
I would fly there with my friend and there would be a couple international athletes and everybody's just dirt bag kind of hippie vibes. Everyone's 20s and I was 13 and I was like, this is so sick. But basically how they would do it was I think there would be 10 people depending on how many people were in the competition, but they would bracket them. And then if you won your bracket against one person, you would go on to the next level. And basically it was based off a point system. So at the time there wasn't really an actual judging style or set in stone way to judge. So it was kind of like how cool does that look? How extreme does that look?
Shelby Stanger:
Do you make money at these contests that you're competing at when you're young?
Breannah Yeh:
When I was younger, I don't know. I believe I won my first competition - I got second place. Because I got second place and it was a world qualifier or world competition I was second in the world. That was the title for women's when I was like, I believe 13 or 14. But to get back to your question, there was small amounts of money, not anything you can really survive off of. Which is why I was like, okay, even if I become the best female slackliner in the world, I couldn't do this forever.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeh knew that when she graduated high school, her options for becoming a professional slackliner were limited. She could get a job slacklining in the circus or on a cruise ship, but instead she chose to go to college and study business. Still, she wasn't closing the door on slacklining entirely. Even though she stopped competing as much, she attended a school with an active slacklining scene, Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. In fact, that's where Yeh first started highlining, which is just slacklining except you're way up in the air.
Breannah Yeh:
Throughout college we would party on weekends, wake up, hung over on Saturday and then we'd go rig a line up on the top of the crazy hill and go slackline. That's when I really found my love for highlining, I think. Highlining is so much different than tricklining where I almost say it's a different sport completely because with tricklining, you know where you are and you're on the ground and you can do tricks and you end back up on the ground. With highlining, now you're hundreds if not thousands of feet up in the air, everything's below you, everything's above you and everything's to the side of you. It's a mental battle.
You really have to learn to trust yourself in these different ways because to walk you through it, you harness in, you tie in, you get on the line and you scoot out a little bit, right? And at that point you're aware of how high it is and you're like, dang, this is really high up. And so your body starts to freak out whether or not you've want it to no matter how many times you've done it in the past. It's just a normal human reaction to being hundreds if not thousands of feet in the air. And so you have to be as calm as you possibly can so you can walk across to the other side. Make sure to remember your breaths, but you're also fighting this human instinct of freaking out.
So it's just this huge mental battle where you have to calm yourself enough and calm your heart rate and remember to breathe enough where you can be calm and not shake and walk across to the end. And at some point while you're walking through it, you're battling yourself and battling the line that's moving, the wind, everything. And at one point you kind of find this almost euphoria if you can reach this balance where you're just kind of step, step, walk, breathe, step, step, walk.
A lot of highliners have mantras, I guess, while they're walking where some people count, some people will be like, "Breathe." A lot of times I'm just like, "Don't fucking fall." Or I'll just repeat that over and over over. And then I'll be like, "Breathe, breathe. One, two, breathe." So yeah, it's just a crazy sport. It's wild. Not only do you have to hike hours up a mountain, but you hike hours up a mountain, rig this line, and then now the fun starts.
Shelby Stanger:
Slacklining and particularly highlining had a way of calming Yeh's busy mind. Out on the line, she could focus and get into a flow state. She even put slacklining on her resume when she was job hunting after college, which she thinks helped her land a job in the mobile gaming industry. In 2020 during the COVID pandemic, Yeh moved to Los Angeles where she worked remotely, slacklined, and made TikTok videos about her time on the line. Eventually she caught a lucky break that allowed her to move into content creation full-time.
Breannah Yeh:
One day I was sitting on my phone. I already wanted to quit my job and I was sitting on my phone and I was like, all right, I'm going to post a slackline video and I'm just going to put my phone down, go back into work. And I posted a tricklining video to the Cardi B Up song..."and it's up, and it's up," you know that song? And so I put my phone down and I checked my phone sometime that night and it was kind of picking up and I was like, okay, yeah, that's crazy. And then right before I went to bed, I got a message from someone and they're like, "Yo, Cardi B posted your video on Twitter or something." And I woke up the next day and I guess she had re-posted on her story and the video was doing numbers on TikTok and stuff.
So I was like, okay, this is really crazy. A little bit after that she posted it on her TikTok as an ad... That was getting bigger and bigger. And so I remember going out of my room and I told my roommate, "I'm going to quit my job." And two days later I ended up quitting my job, like calling my manager and was like, "Hey!" I think they knew at the time too what was happening because I think they had seen the video and they knew I slacklined, knew I did social media a little bit. So yeah, short story, Cardi B reposted my video and I quit my job.
Shelby Stanger:
Up to this point, Yeh had spent several years towing the line between the status quo and pursuing her wild idea of becoming a full-time slackliner. When this video took off, everything changed and her days have been focused solely on adventure ever since.
Breannah Yeh is a slackliner, adventurer, and content creator based in California. In 2020, she quit her job in the gaming industry to make slacklining videos full-time. She was picking up brand deals, but it wasn't until she linked up with famous YouTuber Mr. Beast that Yeh's popularity exploded.
Breannah Yeh:
That first year was a lot of traveling and just taking every opportunity I was getting. There was companies like Nike reaching out. A couple weeks after I quit my job, Mini Cooper reached out and was like, "Hey, we're going to send you a car. Can you do a brand deal with it?" And I was like, "Yeah." And so everything was just fast. Everything was just project after project. And then all of that was just feeding on itself leading to cooler and cooler opportunities.
And I ended up doing a Mr. Beast challenge. They reached out, they emailed me. I don't remember what it said. It just said "Mr. Beast slacklining." And I was like, "Is this a fake email?" For those of you who don't know who Mr. Beast is, they're living under a rock, but ... No, I'm just kidding. Mr. Beast is basically this internet personality that creates video challenges and he basically owns the world now, I don't know. And he just gives out money and does game challenges and stuff that for people who win.
Shelby Stanger:
If you don't know who he is, ask someone who's a 10-year-old boy. They'll tell you.
Breannah Yeh:
Yeah. He's essentially this guy that does really big challenges and gives out big sums of money. And so I knew that he's one of the biggest YouTubers at the time already and now he's one of the biggest YouTubers and does TV. But going back, I received an email from the team and I was like, "Is this real? What is this?" And jumped on a call and found out that they wanted someone to do a slackline stunt for one of their videos without telling me too much.
And so I ended up being the consultant and rigging the slackline and also being the talent luckily enough. And so I flew out to Moab and the whole Mr. Beast team flew out on their private jet, I believe. We rigged the slackline across the Canyon in Moab and I walked across it and I got $20,000 for it. It was the most insane thing of my career because he was the biggest YouTuber at the time. And one thing led to another where it was just cooler and cooler projects and just stuff to get slacklining seen, right?
Because I grew up with slacklining being right there and I wouldn't have known about it otherwise. I was that kid who saw it in my gym and I would search up slacklining and there'd be a handful of slacklining videos, tutorials. But it was all from the people that I'd met before. And so I was like, okay, if I could be that person to show slacklining to one other person and get them stoked on it, that is my goal.
Shelby Stanger:
That slacklining video wouldn't be Yeh's only brush with Mr. Beast. In 2023, she was invited to compete in a challenge for his YouTube channel. Yeh won the challenge and the prize was $250,000. She used part of that money to take her fellow contestants out for a game of paragliding laser tag. It was a pretty maximalist experience, but a perfect example of Yeh's passion for bringing people along on her adventures.
You've taken your mom on adventures, you've provided adventures for other people. Talk to me about this because it sounds there's a lot of giving back in what you do.
Breannah Yeh:
Yeah, I think that is the coolest part about what I do is because when I quit tech, I basically took back a lot of time in my life to do the things that I wanted to do. And a lot of my life has always been around family. I'm a huge family person, but the thing about tech was I was on call, I couldn't really do the things I wanted to do. So when I quit, I got a lot of that time back and I was like, now I have this platform and I also have time. And with this time I can do anything I want to do. I can tell whatever stories I want to do. And I was like, well, now I can go hang out with my family.
Me and my mom and my dad and my sister, my family were really close. My grandparents also helped raise me. So I was like, I can take back this time and I can go do the things that they didn't get the chance to do with them. My mom has had ... she has the craziest life story ever and you can do a podcast all on that. She was a refugee, jumped off a boat, all this stuff. Anyways, so-
Shelby Stanger:
Where was she a refugee from?
Breannah Yeh:
From Vietnam. Their boat crashed and they were on the shores near China and then ended up in Hong Kong, Philippines, and then came to the US. That's where she met my dad and basically worked every single odd job that you can think of. My mom worked in pediatrics, she worked at a dental office, they mowed lawns, sold stuff at flea markets, and then eventually opened up their own restaurant. But essentially they've worked their whole lives. They haven't really got to explore and do these crazy adventures.
I think a part of what I do is now I can come back and give those adventures to them and go and travel with them. And that's a huge part of why I like to do this content is if these are the people that I am trying to inspire to go outside, then it's I have to bring these people onto these adventures with me. So it's just I feel really lucky that I'm able to be in a position where I can just take off on a random day and be like, "Okay, mom, let's go do this. Mom, let's go to China."
Or I brought my sister and my mom skydiving and I was like, this is so sick that I get to be able to do this. And then people see that content and it's like, okay, well maybe it's possible.
Shelby Stanger:
Tell me a little bit more about what you've done with your family. So you've taken your mom and sister skydiving.
Breannah Yeh:
Yeah. For Mother's Day, I was like, "Oh, let's go get dim sum. Let's go get tea." And we ended up actually driving her out with my sister to the middle of nowhere and she was looking at her phone so she wasn't really paying attention and we get there and we're like, "Just kidding, we're going skydiving." And she's like, "What?" But she was super stoked, which is why she wasn't like, "I'm never doing this." She had mentioned that she wanted to do skydiving in the past way back when. And so we ended up, yeah, all going skydiving.
That's also one of my favorite parts of bringing people on adventures because after seeing that person experiencing that, they have this glow or this mindset glow that you can almost feel where it's like, I never thought I would be able to do that. And when you're like, okay, I can do that, or I just did that, it goes with you to other parts of life.
I also did a series where I would go to random locations in LA and I called it the Noodle Series and I would hold up a sign that said "Noodles" with a cup of noodles or something on a table and I would wait for someone to come up to me. And if anybody was interested enough to come up to me, I'd be like, "If you want this cup of noodles, you have to come on a full day adventure with me." No questions asked, all surprise, I'll pay for everything. And so I did a couple videos with that where I brought someone skydiving. We went on a swan boat ride and everybody has the most insane stories every single time.
The girl that I brought skydiving had gone through an accident years before, so half her body was metal. So she was like, "I don't even know if I can do that. " I had brought someone highlining, brought someone cliff jumping and skimboarding. And it was just every time you talk to these people and it feels this mindset shift of I didn't know I was ever going to do ... Not that I was never going to do this, but I didn't know what was possible, I guess. And adventure has this way of shifting how you think about other parts of your life.
Shelby Stanger:
Pursuing adventure has opened up Yeh's world. It's pulled her out of the 9:00 to 5:00 grind and provided her with multiple once in a lifetime opportunities. She's scaled trees in the Costa Rican jungle, balanced 3,000 feet above Yosemite's valley floor and become the first woman to highline in Hong Kong.
Where else have you been slacklining around the world? It sounds you've been so many places.
Breannah Yeh:
I did one in Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. It was on top of a mountain called Pedra da Gávea. And two years ago, me and my friend Martín Hernandez, who's a slackliner, I got a sponsorship from Gatorade and I was like, this is the perfect opportunity to pitch this project to them, because it was around the time of Carnival. So I was like, okay, kill two birds with one stone where I was like, okay, let's go do Carnival and let's go rig Pedra da Gávea and we can do it with Gatorade.
And I fly out to Rio de Janeiro and we're like, the weather is pretty crazy because it rains on and off basically all the time and especially that time. And me and my friend get there and we're like, okay, how are we going to do this? So we were basically figuring it out as we were there because you can plan ahead of time, but you really don't know until you're there and see the setting.
And about two days in, we meet this guy and he's like, "Oh, I can bring you guys up there." And he basically leads us up this super, super steep mountain. Me and my friend with 30 pounds of gear on our backs and we're dying. We finally get up there and we rig this line and after we rig the line, perfect timing, the clouds roll in and cover the entire line and we were like, "What the heck?" And I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to get out there anyways because maybe these clouds would disappear."
I get out there and the clouds just roll through me basically and somewhere in between that the clouds just disappear for probably half an hour. It was just the perfect picturesque opportunity and actually at the top we ended up meeting this drone guy that agreed to take drone footage for me. I was like, "Oh, I'll give you 50 bucks or something. Do you think you can take a video of me? " There's no guarantee he's ever going to send me the videos, but then sure enough, a couple of days later he sends me the most insane epic videos of just aerial shots of the most iconic spot in Rio because it just overlooks everything.
But yeah, that was a crazy story, a really crazy story of right place, right time. Everything had to be perfectly aligned to do that.
Shelby Stanger:
Your job is so interesting because it involves you figuring out your wild idea every time. In some ways you're a stunt woman. I'm going to go do this crazy stunt and I'm going to film it, but then I need to get there. Then I need to figure out how to pay for it. Then once I'm there, I have to figure out what gear I need. And then you have to get the right gear to safely rig a line from two mountains and then you actually go do what you want to do.
Breannah Yeh:
Oh, yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
And then afterwards you've got to film it, edit it, post it, your creator wild idea adventure. It's amazing. It's really interesting.
Breannah Yeh:
It is wild, right? And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about where it was like, I never thought I could make slacklining a career. But slacklining is part of my career now, but it's the creating is the storytelling, which is also another one of my passions. I love storytelling and making videos and making something that was like, okay, how can I have a viewer experience what I experienced? Telling stories and creating is what I made into my career and slacklining's just a part of it.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you train for slacklining? You have to be in shape to hike. You have to be in shape to balance.
Breannah Yeh:
Yeah. I realized on that trip how out of shape I was because I was hiking up this mountain and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this shouldn't be this difficult." And then I whipped myself into shape, start running, hiking more, even more. It was very much a, "Okay, we're going to do this line and I'm going to hike it regardless of how hard it is. " But then I realized, wow, then it starts getting crazier because then there's alpine lines, crazy stuff and that takes actual training. A lot of my training really is just staying in shape. I love running. I climb a lot. That's also a part of it.
And then, yeah, I like to say there's nothing you can do to train for slacklining, but slacklining trains for everything else. A lot of people use slacklining to train for other sports. So skiers use slacklining. Yeah, you train slacklining by slacklining.
Shelby Stanger:
That's so cool. Do you have any goals and aspirations of a place you really want to go slackline or highline next?
Breannah Yeh:
Yeah. I have a whole list of places that I'm like, I want to do. So I really want to go highline the Northern Lights. I've never seen the Northern Lights in my life. If anyone out there hears this and wants to pick that up or wants to do that, I want to go highline the Northern Lights in Norway or Iceland or something. Because remember what I was saying about right place, right time? That is the ultimate definition of right place, right time, because you can't time the Northern Lights. You have to time it perfectly or you can't time it perfectly, but you also have to time it perfectly. So Northern Lights, I want to do that. I really want to do a line in China. I still have family in China and I really want to just show them slacklining.
Shelby Stanger:
Any advice on someone who wants to become an adventure content creator?
Breannah Yeh:
Yeah. Some people want to have it all figured out and I think it's harder when you have it all figured out because once you just start doing it, you'll kind of find your voice. And then you'll find the thing that you really talking about or doing. And I feel I haven't even necessarily ... I shift so much. But you'll eventually find the thing that you want to do and then you'll start doing it and then you'll see it either does well or doesn't, and then you'll shift and do something else that you're really interested in.
And I feel that's a lot of content creation is just trying new things and seeing what sticks. Because if you keep on doing the same things, it kind of starts getting stale to you. So then it'll get stale to other people too. Keep going where the fun is. That's kind of my goal right now. I don't have it all figured out.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeh may shift focus a lot, but she's built her life around a few strong values: giving back, sharing adventures, and following joy. If you need a dose of joy yourself, I highly recommend her YouTube channel, Yehslacks. You can also check her out on Instagram @yehslacks. That's Y-E-H-S-L-A-C-K-S.
If you liked this episode, be sure to listen to our episodes with Dylan Efron and Faith Dickey. Both talk about the art of highlining. We'll link to them in the show notes.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Thanks again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen.
And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.