The Jordan Harbinger Show - 235: David Roeske | The View from the Top Is Breathtaking

Episode Date: August 8, 2019

David Roeske (@roeske) is a plant-powered portfolio manager, pilot, runner, and the fourth person in the world to summit Mount Everest and another 8,000-meter peak in one trip without supplemental oxygen. What We Discuss with David Roeske: How many calories does an Everest climber burn per day on average? What's the difference between a porter and a sherpa? How does David live a life balanced between investment, climbing, flying, and running? Why do people often die trying to ascend Everest -- even while surrounded by dozens of fellow climbers -- and what are the risks of trying to rescue someone in peril on the slopes of the world's tallest mountain? Why does David only count the times he's summited Everest without bottled oxygen? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/235 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Mind Pump is an online radio show/podcast dedicated to providing truthful fitness and health information. It is sometimes raw, sometimes shocking, and is always entertaining and helpful. Jack up your ears with some Mind Pump wisdom here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFillopo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. And today, we've got my friend David Roski. He's the fourth person ever to successfully climb Everest and another 8,000 meter peak without oxygen in the same season. So I don't know why. And I actually, ask him on the show why he does this, why he climbs without oxygen, as if climbing's not hard enough. Basically, one day in 2007, he goes, ah, I'm going to get my health in order. Now he's a

mountaineer alpinist, pilot, runner, summited Everest twice, other mountain names I can't even pronounce Broad Peak. No bottled oxygen. No bottled oxygen. This is a guy also, oh, by the way, plant powered. So it's just for me kind of unbelievable to be doing all the, like, why are you making this stuff even harder than it already is? He's obviously a guy. who likes to try things out of his league. He's been attempting things out of his league for a while. There's something about the sting of failure with this guy, you know, and he's got this story about himself that he's doggedly determined.

He's just going to put his head down. I met him because he was at a party, and I was in charge of the door. And I tell the story in the beginning of the show. I was in charge of the door. He basically sprinted up multiple flights of stairs in a New York walkup, and I just thought, it seemed impossible. to me that he could have gotten up that quickly. He wasn't even sweating or breathing hard.

Sounds like meth to me. Yeah. Yeah. He just doesn't, he looks the mountaineer part more so than the meth part. He has his teeth then. He does, yes. And his focus, his hard work. I mean, he's also like a hedge fund manager.

So he's, it's really incredible what this guy does. I mean, he is just all around a high performer. Big goals are a topic here, ambitious goals, jumping out of your comfort zone in a way that's obviously not cliche because this guy puts, his nose to the grindstone and actually gets it done. What I liked about this, especially, was that getting the summit is not the end of the journey. It's actually kind of a new beginning, and he just pushes his goal even higher. I'm really impressed with this cat, proud to be friends of them.

And if you want to know how I managed to meet all these great people, it's at events, the curated events. And I talk about that in our six-minute networking course, which is free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests here on the show actually subscribe to the course in the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in great company. All right, here's David Roski.

I'm looking at this picture of you that my wife threw in the notes. And you look like you just got out of like a North Korean reeducation camp. Right. So tell me, give me a little bit of a feel for like your physical makeup. Like you're always a thin guy sort of wired for climbing or what? No, I don't think so. In fact, I was one, I was not an athlete in high school. It was not an athlete in college.

I would occasionally go to the gym, and it would be a very short-lived whenever. I wasn't overweight, but I was not like an athlete at all. And even through my first job out of college several years, working in L.A., I was just kind of going to work and being a finance guy and not super committed to fitness. I actually had a very critical turning point where I made a decision to make a lifelong commitment to that. So I was not always built for climbing. I did like hiking.

I grew up in Colorado. And so I maybe had a little bit of something in there. But I was actually going to pull up that picture to. Yeah. This sort of just got out of a North Korean prison selfie. Yeah. It's pretty scary. So that was the.

effect of about a month from 18,000 feet to 29,000 feet, no supplemental oxygen, climbing to 8,000 meter peaks. And no matter how much you try, your body is just going to cannibalize itself. And it prefers to eat muscle as opposed to eating food. So you try to eat as much as you can. Your appetite is suppressed. And you come out the backside. and I think I was 134 pounds or something.

Oh, man. And how tall are you? I'm six foot. Yeah, so that's not. You're supposed to be 40 pounds heavier or 30. Yeah, so I at least lost 20, 25 pounds during that one month stretch and it came back with extremely depleted batteries. So I do not normally look like that picture.

Yeah. But after each one of these 8,000 meter expeditions, I lose. between 15 and 25 pounds, so I tend to come back looking like a starvation. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's, you have this beard, so it really does look like a POW kind of situation, because the beard and then your ribs are all showing and everything. And we'll throw the photo in the show notes. I mean, it's exactly what you would imagine this photo looks like.

You said your appetite suppressed. Why does that happen? There's something about the altitude. I think your body just goes strictly into a, uh, survival mode. And I'm not, I haven't read a ton about the physiology of it, but I think that it finds it easier to consume calories that are in the form of your muscle than to, or fat, then to digest calories. Now, you are eating as much as possible, but then the other thing is just a calorie debt. So I think you're easily burning, you know, two or three, you know, two

or three times the calories a day as what you can put in. Wow. So do you have any estimate of how many calories that might, like, are you burning 10,000 calories a day or something like that? You know, it's actually a great question, and I suppose I could back into it. I did a workout a couple nights ago for three hours, which I would say is at the intensity that I am hiking for three to six hours on average on a day, not a summit day. but just an average day.

And I have to pull up the picture from my phone, but I think it's like 3,000, 3,500 calories right there. And that's a three-hour hike. And moving from one camp to another on Everest, for example, is sort of a minimum of three hours usually. And on easy days where you're just moving up to another camp, to a climate a little bit and then coming down, it's usually that you know three to four hours up to this next camp you either sleep there that

night or you come back down so that's another few hours and then it's just your basal metabolism has to be way higher so i think six to 10 thousand calories a day could be quite easy to burn and then those are on the the normal days you have rest days in between so those are going to be a little lower but still elevated basal metabolism and then on summit day that's like an all you You start at midnight after a few hours of sleep, and you know, you might be back sometime the next afternoon if you want to keep coming down, which is the safe thing to do. But I've usually been lazy and not come down. So the summit days could be many, many more thousands of calories.

So I think even though your appetite is suppressed, it's still, it would be impossible to consume enough food during those days. So you're just burning. And what do you eat when you're on a mountain? Just bars, right? like liquid gel stuff you know not not a ton of that um i bring those things as snacks in base camp and an interesting twist on this is i'm actually vegetarian which uh changes the the food consumption yeah that that to me is like you're just adding that in there to be it's like what are you doing

why that is true on the other hand i think it has saved me from many episodes of um food poisoning So when you think about the meat that's either carried in on a yak to base camp or the goat that's slaughtered at its that walks itself in and then is slaughtered at base camp and the hygiene standards in Tibet or Pakistan. They're not the same as down the street here at a grade A restaurant in New York City. And a goat walking into a base camp has probably been eating like mountain garbage for a year. for years for its whole life. Yeah. So I've been extremely fortunate not to have any severe food poisoning on any of the expeditions I've taken. I'm guessing that that's partly because of only eating.

I'm not a vegan, but vegetarian, only eating vegetarian foods, I think has helped. But, yeah, so that's an additional challenge. But you're saying, what am I eating? Yeah. You know, in camp, it's very, it's very simple. and plain, unfortunately, and that contributes to the lack of enough calorie intake, but it might be some cheap cereal that was, you know, that's local, so some weird corn flakes or cocoa puffs.

I would not imagine that you're eating, like, low quality. It's low quality. Well, you know, you can go for super expensive outfitters, and they might bring in Western food. I've not gone that path, and so it's like white rice. lentils, some what they'll usually call doll there, a bunch of eggs and maybe, you know, some tomatoes. And that sort of routine seems to be played over many, many times. So when I come back from a month on that diet, the mere sight of a tomato omelet is just my stomach. Can't do it. And it's white rice. I'm used to like brown rice. I'm used to whole wheat bread. I'm used to whole plant

foods. That's my that's my normal diet. So it's a struggle. On the mountain, on a summit attempt or something, it's pretty simple. You have some freeze dried, easily reconstituted for me to be some pasta, you know, backpacking ration and some oatmeal, instant oatmeal. And those are not high calories. It's 150 calories of packing. Yeah. I'm so surprised. I figured you guys were surviving on like really calorie dense sort of marathon runner food bars. You know, you have a backpack full of just hundreds of these little, I don't know, quest bars or something, but it's not really... So it actually turns out that relying too much on those simple sugars, which will help you get through a marathon, that's not the optimal approach for an expedition. And what you really want is to develop a fat-burning metabolism up there.

You're warmer when you're burning fat. You're less likely to bonk, sort of hit an energy wall. and that energy source can last on those 15-hour days where in a marathon, you know, two, three hours of running, you run out of glycogen. And your body can't process. If you keep on taking gels in, you need water when you do that. So that's actually, yeah, the bars and gels, I really don't even, I might bring a couple gels. I don't subsist on them and the bars are just snacks in base camp.

So you've got to get nutrition before you even get to the mountain. You've got to bring it in your body. Right. Wow, I never thought about that. But you can't bring too much. You can't pack like me or you're not going to make it up the mountain.

You've got to have that balance, right? It's got to be like quality, right? You can't just have a bunch of love handles you're hoping to work her off when you get there. Ideally not, though. I've been really impressed now. most of us don't have the genetic makeup of Sherpa, but I've met Sherpa who come into the beginning of an expedition with a real belly, and because they aren't affected by the altitude as

much as most of us, by the end of the expedition, they've just burned all that off, and that's actually pretty ideal. That's great, because they're already able to hike nonstop for hours, so it's no problem for them. So tell us who the Sherpas are, because I think a lot of People have heard that, but they think it's the guy that carries your luggage. Yeah, that would be just simply a porter. Yeah. But a Sherpa is an ethnicity strictly from Nepal. And they've grown up for many generations in high mountains.

And I believe they do have a genetic gift for performing at altitude. Yeah. So even if they didn't, if they're born there, they're going to, develop lung capacity over 20, 30 years or however. I think that's correct. If you're born in Leadville, Colorado at 10,000 feet and all the time you're going between 10 and climbing the 14ers around there, you're probably going to do a lot better at altitude than other people, even if you aren't really an athlete.

So you actually see a lot of Sherpa who aren't really athletes, but you don't have to be an athlete if you can just keep hiking with a heavy pack for hours. hours and hours. If you can do that, you can be very effective on the mountain. Yeah, that's interesting. I think even if you spent a summer in Breckenridge or something like that, you're going to start to adapt pretty quick. Because once you get past the initial headaches or whatever it is from altitude, I experienced that for the first time. I think it was in Breckenridge, and I just went, oh, this is miserable. Yeah. And the first day I was fine. All my friends were sick and I was like, ah, you wimps. And then I had a couple drinks. And then the next day, I was

like I am miserable. This is awful. This is the worst feeling ever. It's like a combination of a hangover and a headache that you would have with a fever without being hot and you're tired. Right. And it just doesn't end. Well, alcohol is definitely the worst thing on there. I was like, I can drink. I'm fine. It goes to your head a lot faster when you're at altitude. But dehydration is one of the principal kind of compounding factors in altitude sickness. And if you're drinking alcohol, you're getting even more dehydrated. The one interesting aspect of the climatization phase is you have to drink excessive amounts of water. So when I'm moving up, it's in the initial part of an expedition going to the first, you know, base camps.

And I've been at sea level all the time before. I'm drinking 6 to 8 liters of water a day. Oh, that's a ton. Because I drink probably two or three. And I'm going to the bathroom all the time. Right. My friends are like, you drink more than anyone I know. So if you're drinking two to three times that, that's the only way.

You've got to force yourself to do that. Because there's no human that's thirsty that often who doesn't have like a diabetes or like a kidney issue. Yeah, you're just slamming that water. There's no other way to get yourself acclimated. Wow. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, David Roski. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show.

And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of all the key takeaways from David Roski. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com.com slash subscribe.

Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all the latest episodes in your podcast player when they're released so you don't miss a single thing from the show. And now back to our episode, with David Roski. How long does it take to climb some of these, these mountains?

Like, I, I think people don't really get that these are really long expeditions. Because everybody else is done maybe, like, they think, oh, it's a four-day weekend. We're going to go up the, go up K2 and come back down, see you guys on Tuesday. Right. I actually do get that reaction when I tell people, they're like, how long are you going? I'll say I'm going on this next expedition. I'm like, well, I'm going to be gone for the end of the month of July. And they're like, what?

What? Are you throwing a vacation in there? Right. But that's actually pretty short. So most people going on an Everest expedition, that's like a six to eight week thing. I just can't take that much time off. So I guess I've been lucky that my body's been able to handle. But I've done all my expeditions on basically a five-week timeline, four to five week.

And that's, I think, pushing the edge of, you know, the limits of human acclimatization right up to the limit. Yeah. And the reason you can't take that time off is because what's even more kind of insane, we were talking about this before the show, is that you're an investment manager in New York City. So it's not like you are training all day and sleeping all day and going there and getting used to the food and the water and the altitude and the air or the whatever. Right. you are just getting off a plane and kind of like, okay, we've got to do this. Yeah, that's totally true. I'm not a professional climber.

I'm an amateur with big goals, essentially, that I've pursued. And I really enjoy actually having a balance between going out and I absolutely love the mountains. I love climbing them. But that's not all that I want to do in life. So I have a finance job. New York City and try to pick stocks by day and manage money for endowments, pension funds, and make good long-term decisions for our investors. And then every once in a while, I'm super fortunate that I've been able to go off and try

to push my own physical limits as hard as I can. You say you're not a professional climber, but I think people go, oh, well, that's, why not? you're the fourth person ever to successfully climb Everest and another 8,000 meter peak. Also, by the way, without oxygen in the same season. So saying you're not professional, I don't want people to get the idea that, like, oh, there's all these, there's so many people, like you couldn't, you can't cut it in the climbing world. It's just that you also do other things. Because I think if someone says, oh, I'm not a professional football player, it's like,

okay, well, you're just not good enough to play professional football. This is kind of a different scenario. Yeah. Now, after I was that fourth person, then a true mountain god, Killian Jorne, came and did the same thing. They actually the same combination of peaks, Cho, U, which is the sixth highest mountain, and then Everest. And he is a true professional. Yeah, I have a regular job, so to speak. And then I have had really big goals that have developed over time in the mountains, but I don't make any money off of the climate.

And in a way, I think really, I'm really fortunate, I think. Now, people who want to spend their whole life in the mountains, they need to make a career of it. But I like not having the pressure of climbing for the sake of my sustenance. So getting to the top of a peak or making it up a new route is not a motivation for me being out there. It's simply for the love of the mountains and the love of this the entire experience that um that goes into it and so i i feel relieved that and it's extremely dangerous that's it's hard enough to face the the danger um without the pressure of performing in order to yeah money it keeps you a little bit safer because you're not like oh well if alice honnell is going to free solo al cap i got to do something even more dangerous right get the limelight so i can get a

sponsorship exactly yeah so i haven't had to push to to do things that I might not be purely motivated to do on my own just for the sake of sponsorship. Yeah, that's possibly a life-saving thing in an industry where you're constantly cutting. Right. Not cutting corner. Doing something a little bit more dangerous than last time. Right. Which is not always a good idea.

Or there's just, there's certain unavoidable risks to the sport of mountaineering. And you're always sort of running along a line of, something that's much more dangerous than most activities. Yeah. Yeah. How do you train with a nine to five? We're in Manhattan, so it's never nine to five. But how are you training with a day job?

Because you can't just like take off at 430 and go to the mountain. Right. There's no mountain. No. Yeah. I think that's kind of one of the cool things about the balance of goals that I have is just having to figure out how to pursue them with the tools I have. Right here and right now, I certainly can't say that New York City is the ideal place to train for mountains.

Probably not, no. Buy a long shot. But I think a little bit of a lesson in it is anyone going after big goals, you can always just start with something with what you have here. And what I happen to have here is I live in a building that has 40 stories. So I hike the stairs with a backpack on, and I do that for hours at a time. I also go to the gym and just turn up the incline to the steepest it'll go. And I did this just two nights ago. I spent three hours on a treadmill.

And most treadmills go to 15%. This one I found went to 30% incline. And I put a 30 pound barbell in my backpack and hiked that for three hours. And this was after a full day of work. Now, I'd have to cut out a lot of other things. And, you know, I think some of the other guests that you've had on and some of the other books that you recommend talk a lot about pairing non-essential things from your life. Sure, yeah. And that's certainly been absolutely a requirement for me to do, I think, to perform well at a demanding job and try to pursue athletic goals that are also very demanding and require your best performance or your life is on the line.

It's required cutting out other things. But if I don't have too much else going on, I can have a full day at work and be focused and productive. And then I can go to the gym. And I was, I think I was on the treadmill until 10 or 1030. Oh, man. Went home, you know, got some food. But I went to sleep. But I, the other great thing is while I'm on that treadmill, I'm listening to books and podcasts.

So I'm feeding my brain, which is also useful for my job. So I don't feel like I'm even taking away. from my work. I'm able to educate my brain while I'm doing this work. So I've found a way with just the very simple tools I have here at sea level to train for big mountains. I think one of the reasons that we met, well, we met at our front John Levy's party, but I was doing something with the door at this party. And it was like, John said, hey, when they buzz, just sort of pay attention because like five minutes later, they're going to be up the stairs on this walk up or four minutes later or three minutes later or whatever it was. And so it would be

like buzz and I'd go like, all right, I'm going to go make a drink and then go to the door. And then it was buzz and then I'd finish my conversation and go to the door. And then you're, when I met you, it was like, buzz and then it was like, tung, tongue, tongue. And I was like, wait a minute. Did I just have a brain fart where I lost three minutes of my life? Like, what happened? So I opened the door and I thought, oh, maybe someone else buzzed and you happened to already be on the stairs. So I was waiting, waiting, nobody else came in and I'm then finally I went hey did you how did you get up here so fast and you're like oh I just ran but you're not breathing heavy you're wearing a white shirt you're not sweating how the hell did you do that because it was like six flights of stairs right and then

that's how we got to talking that you just run upstairs now I remember this uh yeah um I had actually forgotten that but um yeah because you probably do it everywhere it is um you know I am kind of lazy sometimes I go home in fact most of the time I go home to my building and I take that elevator to the 12th floor. Well, yeah, after a three-hour treadmill. And I'm like, you know, I could add on another 12 floors, but I'm like, I'll just go. It's 11 p.m. I'm hungry, and I just got off a treadmill.

So I'm going to take the elevator. I think that's forgivable. Thank you. I know some people have but more dedication than I do. But I have enough. But yeah, I actually have found in this whole process, I sort of backing up to that story about getting fit and choosing to get into to fitness, which was not until I was 26 years old, did I make this conscious decision, all right,

I'm going to invest in my body on a frequent, like, near daily basis because that's, I want that for the rest of my life. Yeah. And that really led to all of the other things that I've done since then. It, it, at first I was just working out, weightlifting, and then I ended up entering a race here with the New York roadrunners and I found, oh, that four-mile race was really fun. And let me try that again. And then I got a little bit better. And I was like, wow, that growth, that improvement from whatever place I was to that next place, that was really fun. I want to keep that going. Then that

became a passion. So it wasn't until I was actually 32 that I got the inspiration to pick up high altitude mountaineering, but by then I'd been running for, I guess, six years, and I'd run the marathon in New York a few times, so I had this base of fitness. You finished the marathon in like 238, though, right? I mean, you're doing it pretty quick. Now, now I've gotten it down to 234, 235, but, you know, I didn't start, I started from, I, I will say I probably had some natural ability, but it was not developed. Like a runners build type situation.

Yeah. And, you know, my first races were probably faster than average, but it was all a development thing. But so I had that base of fitness. And then in this, as I started getting into mountain climbing, then I realized, oh, the stairs are kind of interesting. And I'd heard about the Empire State Building run-up, which is a race upstairs. And after five or six years of running, I decided to enter that.

And so when we met, I had already been doing those for a while. And now I do the run-up One World Trade Center and Empire Stapling and a few others. And they are taking that six-flight hike that you met me on to 88 or 104. How do you, there can't be that many people on a set of stairs, though. So is it like, hey, if you're slow, go to the right and if you're running up, go to the left kind of situation? What they do is they figure out where you should essentially start based on prior experience. So if it's your first stair race, they'll start you in the back. And then it's chip timed and they only release like one person every five to ten seconds.

So a stair race can take all morning three or four hours because they can't let everyone start at once. Yeah. But then it's just your timing is just the net timing from when you cross the mat at the beginning to the top. That seems like a better and safer. Because I'm imagining people running up and bumping into each other. Oh, yeah. Or like, somebody slows down and it's like, now I'm stuck. There's no true jam, but you, like, you do overtake people if you got placed a little bit behind them.

And you're actually on the rail. So a huge benefit is pulling on the rail with your arms. You want both arms and legs. And so you end up kind of sliding up underneath the person. And if they are polite, they'll hop to the left. They'll get off the rail and let you pull through. Yeah, that makes sense. in a pretty competitive race and if you're kind of neck and neck they might try to make you actually go out around

so annoying that's that's it got to be so irritating move yeah right but you don't even quite have the you don't want to waste a breath to tell them to move right you're like you do say something like coming through and i often like my hands are like slipping up underneath um but eventually people will yeah you need like a belt with a button that you can push that says move or Or a little horn, an air horn belt. Yeah, that has to exist. If not, you know, feel free to run with that way. For that huge market.

Yeah, this is a pretty niche, somewhat dorky sport, I'd say. Yeah, yeah. It's very New York. Like, you probably, maybe in any big city you can find a skyscraper, but you can't really do this in Troy, Michigan or whatever. Probably not. So you're taking five weeks off work, but everybody else who's doing this is doing these mountains in seven, eight weeks. Yeah. So you're doing it in a month.

change maybe they're doing it in two full months so you get there and they're already like yeah i'm acclimated i'm warmed up i've already started eating yak butter or whatever the hell yeah that is true i've i've always come in a little later so i'm actually preparing to go on um a second uh attempt on k2 in a couple weeks here and i'm watching on instagram and i'm seeing all these people who have just begun arriving in base camp. And so that makes me antsy on the one hand, but I know I just, I wouldn't get the opportunity to go at all if I was taking more time off. And I'm actually trying to keep it under a month this year because I tried last year and it's kind of hard to ask for a big trip like this two years in a row from my work. So if I can just go and give it a shot,

I will. And I'm, I'm going to turn around if it's unsafe. But I also think there is, some benefit to coming in a little bit later and spending less time. So you have two curves you're trying to optimize for. You have your climatization, which is improving when you're there, but you also have your fitness, which is rapidly declining. So just when you're up there at altitude, you're not doing those great workouts every day. You're climbing to a new camp one day. You come back down and you rest a couple days and you have no interest in doing pushups and like, you know, sprints around your camp that's not happening and you you couldn't even want to right because you're just burning the storage that you brought with you yeah so you have so you just sit around you'll talk to

people um you play some cards whatever but you're not you're not exercising except when you're moving to those camps so during that period of time you're you're getting out of shape and so what you ideally want is by the time you're just to climb to enough to climb the mountain you haven't lost enough too much fitness to no longer have the fitness oh man so there's a wind There's definitely a window, not even to mention the seasonal window. Right. Because you can't just go, hey, I got Christmas off. Let me go climb a mountain.

Right. No, there's 20 feet of snow. Yeah, there's a few, there's literally a few days. And that's one of the things we saw this year on Everest with all the tragedies, the people who died there. The weather window was very narrow. And everybody was trying to jam up into that. And that caused those crazy traffic lines. Yeah, explain what that was. Because I think I probably saw it on your Instagram, or maybe I was just really.

researching you for this and I saw this. And it was like a huge line. I mean, it looked like Black Friday on a mountain. Yeah. There was just people are touching each other and just sitting down on a mountain that you're probably not supposed to hang out on for too long. Definitely not. I mean, it's kind of depressing really to look at those pictures. One, for the safety aspect. Two, for just the, it feels like it cheapens the mountain. But also, um, um, people up there when you're when you're in that position like you are gradually dying essentially because you're uh those pictures were taken in the death zone and i want to hear about what that is in a second the long the longer you spend there the more uh danger you're in and because of the altitude because of the altitude even the people that are on oxygen which a lot of the people there uh just probably shouldn't have been there so regardless of how much oxygen they were on but it becomes this compounding like a whole cat like one little thing goes wrong somebody's sick they're tied into the line the people behind um aren't skilled enough to walk around them so then they're held up then somebody

else who isn't sick just because of exposure gets sick um altitude sick so i you know that all of that combined to create some of those uh you know the tragic deaths that happened this year tied into the line so there is there like a rope keeping you from falling off essentially is that what that is? So for for most of the climbers doing Everest these days, they're going up a fixed rope that's put in by an advanced team of usually a mix of Sherpa and some Western climbing guides. And so at the beginning of the season, they put a new rope up. And then everybody simply hikes along that within a sender. So it's not real mountaineering. It in my, it's not climbing, uh, really. Everest isn't that much to do with climbing, especially just hiking, but there's a lot of exposure.

And so you're at great risk if you do take your ascender, this Jumar thing that slides up the rope and it's attached to your harness. So you keep walking and you slide that up a little bit each time you take a step. It's dangerous when you unclip that because now there's nothing there if you were to trip. Oh, God. And so nobody wants to let go. Right. No one wants to let you pass either. And so just...

Why don't they want to let you pass? Like the competitive kind of thing? Yeah. They think you're going to hold them up later, maybe? There is a bit of when you're up at that level, I think the intensity of the situation pushes everyone to a little bit of a survival mentality of, I have to protect myself first at all costs. And whether that's your ability to get to the mountain, you know,

a minute before the next person, or anything else. That's why you do see a lot of what seems like inhumane behavior. Yeah. Up there where people become very apparently selfish on the mountain. That's a whole other thing that we should probably talk about. Yeah. Keep going.

I was curious because on that note, that's this David Sharp controversy. And I guess he was freezing to death or maybe he was just dying of exposure, altitude, whatever. And like 40 people, literally 40 people. people passed him and then he ended up dying and people were like, whoa, what are we, what are we doing here? Yeah. This guy died easily could have been helped by dozens of people and wasn't. Right. So it's a, it's not quite a moral dilemma, but it's a, it's, I think, a challenging situation for a lot of people when they get there because one, they know that if they expend any extra energy, their, their own life is partly at risk, whether they think of that, think of it.

that way. It's just instinctual. Two, they've put a lot of work into getting there and money. And so they're just pure selfishness. They're like, this guy, if he shouldn't have been there, that's his fault. And so you see what appears to be incredibly distasteful human behavior up there. And I think the only way you don't act in that manner is if you've made a decision ahead of time about how you're going to act when someone is in need around you. And then the other complicating factors is those psychological studies we've seen where if there's a group, there's a dilution of your feeling of responsibility. Yeah, like the bystander effect. The bystander effect. You see that in New York City all the time. Someone passed it on the sidewalk and people are stepping over them.

It's like somebody else is going to help that. Yeah. I don't need to do it. And so I think that probably adds on to all of those other factors. And so if you're the only person there, then maybe at least a higher percentage of those people walking over the sick body would have helped. You put them already in their oxygen-addled brain state. The fact that a lot of them have sunk their entire life savings into being there and they don't want this guy's life to get in the way of their son. Oh, man. Yeah. I think that you have to decide ahead of time. And the only way to react in the, in the ethical way, is to decide ahead of time.

Like before you get to the mountain. And throughout your life, it has to be a practice like that famous quotation. You don't rise to the level of expectations. You fall to the level of your training or you fall to the level of the values that you've lived the rest of your life. those values have to be at the core of your identity. Otherwise, in that extreme of a situation, you're going to be like all those other people. So a lot of people look at those pictures and think, oh, my God, how could all these people walk by? Right.

And those are those same people. Like if they were on the mountain, they would be that person. Because in the moment you go, oh, I'm so close. There's people behind me. They'll help him. And this guy's already, what can I do? How can I help him? He's, uh, yeah, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's just taking a break. There's all these

rationalizations that happen. Absolutely. Right. He's not that sick. He's just, he's, he's, he'll be fine in a few minutes. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. But you made, most have made that decision before, because you mentioned you're making a second attempt at K2. Yes. I remember talking with you, I guess last year or the year before or something like that. What happened on the first attempt? Because you had already made that decision, then you kind of had to, right. You had to put your money where your mouth is. literally, I guess, at that point. Which, you know, it's very interesting because I had been talking about the lessons that I had hoped I had learned from climbing other mountains. And one of the big lessons that I had said I wanted to learn was to put people first. And I'd actually

been a beneficiary where someone let me squeeze into their tent at 25,000 feet on Everest when the wind was too strong to pitch a tent for myself. And it wasn't a, um, survival situation, but it was a urgent situation. I could have hiked back down in the dark, but a bunch of people in their tents said, you know, no, you can't, you can't stay with those. Figure it out. Figure it out yourself. Oh, they said no. Oh, I feel like I could never, I could not live with myself being like, get out of here. Right. I just couldn't do it. So they said no. And then this one guy said, yeah, there's two of us in here, but you can squeeze in, even though it's, you know, real inconvenience. And that was incredibly kind of him. And so I saw that. And when I got done with

that trip, I thought, wow, that's the way to live. You want to put people first above all else. And I kept telling people that. But what good is it if I didn't live it out myself? Right. People first, as long as it's me. But if it's somebody else, sorry, buddy. Right. Yeah. So last year, I was trying to do. another double header, I do Broad Peak, which is the 12th highest mountain, and then K2 there in Pakistan, both without oxygen. And on my first run up the mountain for a summit attempt, my partner and I were at the highest camp. And it was really interesting. We had slept the night before. We were planning to rest a day and then go for it. We woke up in the morning and there were some other

people coming into camp and or packing up their tent site. So we got out and started talking to them and said, hey, what's up? They're like, yeah, we know, we'd come up here. We were going to try to make a summit attempt. One of our partners went off on his own to go for the summit. We decided not to. He didn't come back. We'd been waiting for him. We saw him at one point, but then he disappeared on the mountain. We think he fell into a crevasse or he fell off. And we've been waiting here for, I don't know, 24, 36 hours and they thought he's done. And so they were packing up and going to go down. They were just going to leave? They did. They left? Oh, those are some friends. Well, I guess I don't know. What do you do? I don't know. Yeah. Rough, you know,

rough situation to be in and clearly very sobering. So my climbing partner and I were just like, wow, well, you know, that's intense. We're just still there. Like, there's nothing else to do. But later in that evening, that was in the morning, later that evening, we got a radio call. And the radio call said, well, someone at base camp was just randomly looking through a telescope and saw someone moving up on the mountain slope. And then they sent a drone up and they found the guy that had been presumed lost. Oh, man. He was just wandering around lost.

And he was out on a glacier and not tied into anything by himself. and there's crevasses and he's alive. So if you're in that situation, is that one of those, like, it's not a matter of if, but when you just fall to your debt? Because if you're not roped in, you kind of don't know where you are,

that's got to be about the most dangerous. It's highly dangerous situation. I personally think he made a very bad decision to go off by himself. Yeah, I don't know. I can't follow that logic at all. I fully disagree with that decision on his part, but it was a dangerous place for,

him. There was probably not, there was a decent chance he could have made his way back without falling in, but there's a video that, I don't know if you saw, but there's a YouTube video that was taken by the drone pilot, which shows both me and my partner. So the drone ended up going up and down the mountain. They had to wait to recharge it, but it helped guide us to this climber. Oh, man. A 63-year-old guy who had a lot of experience mountaineering, pretty old school didn't carry a radio or like communicator. That's

really dumb. I get it you're older, you didn't grow up doing that, but like, it's like new responsibilities for new times. Yeah, and you're alone. Right. So I get it, you're with a group, your friend has the radio, you should probably still carry one, but if you're alone, just humor

me on this one and take a radio. Exactly. Yeah. Totally. Irritating. So they ended up using the drone to lead us to him. And my climbing partner and I, it took a while. We went down. Directions were wrong. Had to hike back up to the camp, Camp 3 on Broad Peak. And then we went up a little higher and tied in and went across this glacier and found him. And now we're roped together, which now if somebody falls into a crevasse, the other people can fall on their ice axe and save them. So you have to, that's

like the movie scene where you right whip your ice hammer out and fall on it on the head fall on the head if the person on the other end of the road falls into something you fall to the ground in a self-arrest position and oh my i don't i don't have the like i'm getting jittery thinking about i mean it could be the coffee but i'm i'm getting i'm like getting like a full body kind of cringe feeling where i just can't it's the same feeling i get when i hear about people drowning in a cave underwater i'm like i just can't think about it that that gave me a bad Yeah, yeah, clearly you have, okay, so you shouldn't go caving on the water. You can stick to glaciers and mountains.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, David Roski. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget that worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show.

show notes at jordan harbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us in the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. It really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our episode with David Roski. Okay, so you're up there, roped into this stubborn guy. Right. Yeah, he was actually pretty stubborn.

We found he didn't really want our help. He had been without water for, I don't know, 36 hours. And he was half dreaming, half hallucinating. He was telling us he would close his eyes and false like kind of microdream. And he would see helicopters there to pick him up or Range Rover there to pick him up. And then he'd open his eyes and wake up and realize, oh, there's nothing here. That's got to be the worst feeling. It's insane.

But you're so loopy at that point with the oxygen deprivation that I don't think it's even that scary, which is really weird. That's bad for you. That's even worse for you. Because then you think I'm fine. Yeah. And so we got him back. Now we had spent a lot of energy and we brought him back to the high camp. Another team had come up by then and they took over from there in terms of melting snow and making him food and water.

And they actually brought him all the way down from there the next day. But we had spent our energy. And so we gave up that particular summit attempt and we came back down and rest of a few other days, went back up and successfully got Broad Peak. But by now, we were cutting in right to the good weather window that was coming up for K2, and you need a little bit of time to recover between mountains. So my partner and I were looking at the weather forecasts, and we thought, you know, we're going to wait a little bit, and we should be fine to go a little bit later.

And then as we kept seeing these forecasts come in, we realized this window that's coming up right now is the only window for K2. And we tried to make it up the mountain, but we got halfway, and then it starts snowing and we gave it up. So that's got to be an exercise in kind of like mitigating cognitive bias because you want it so bad. Right. But that optimism bias is what kills so many people. Sure. Yeah.

Or summit fever or just a lack of. What's summit fever? Summit fever is when you see the summit or you're close enough to it, where you can really taste it. And you end up, it's like that Everest movie where they kept pushing through their, their, their. agreed upon turnaround times. They're like, okay, it's 2 p.m. Oh, you know, it's the weather, you know, it's only there. It's another hour. It's really probably another two or three hours to the top, but you feel so close and you've put so much, it's that sunk cost, you know, mentality. And so summit fever is when you keep going against all rational reason to turn around

because you feel it so close. And it's got to be the worst, especially for someone in your position because it's not like all right i'm coming back in a month or i i can for sure do this next year you have to get time off make sure you're in the right oh yeah like this is a whole there's years of opportunity costs right to save someone's life and then on top of that if memory serves he was not nice to you as a result he was like it's pretty thankless he was um i think it's pretty tough on the ego to accept um assistance that um anyone could call a rescue i know um i hope i'm never in the position where I have to accept that because it means you kind of screwed up. You know, you make bad decisions.

Better than dying. In his case, I would say bad decisions. If you're caught in an avalanche and it's not your own, you didn't get yourself there because of a stupid decision. Rescue me. Sure. But if you're a trained mountaineer, you don't want to be in a position where you endanger other people's lives.

So I can imagine how difficult it was for him. to accept the idea that we were there to help him. Well, especially being Mr. I don't need the rest of my group and I don't need a radio. I mean, he's already, that ego was already out of control, which is what got him there in the first place. So the fact that a bunch of like young guys had to come and rescue him and then bring him down the mountain, that must just been, that was like the final kick in the guts. Yeah.

And we didn't love it. My partner, Frederick Strain and I, we thought, man, like, we've just spent hours coming to help you and you don't even want to take our chocolate, you know, take the warm water we brought and you're saying you don't need help. That certainly rubbed us the wrong way, but it really was about knowing, hey, whatever his reaction, we did the right thing. And so you can sleep at any night of your life if you know you've done the right thing. Even if that person is sort of throwing it back in your face. So we, you know, we left him with that other team.

We came down the next day. We didn't know that this would end up delaying us on our next attempt. It was just, you know, we were the only ones in that, at that camp that could help. And that was the right decision to make. Yeah. It's kind of like when your drunk friend wants to fight the police, you're just like, oh, I really want to let you get arrested, but I don't want you to get arrested. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. I can say, do you, so do you have, like, really good life insurance? Do they make life? They don't, I, I have tried, you know, just, hey, like, I mean, this is a separate topic, but, but for these mountains, the risk is so great. It's very sobering to have to write up your will for your parents. Yeah. And, you know, list where they're going to find stuff. Oh, man.

It goes through that every year. It's, you do not want them to be in that position. It's under the mattress in the guest room now. Right. That's not under my mattress. You have to be responsible, though. Yeah. So, I was asking if you got really good life insurance.

Oh, right. But I'm wondering also, you call them and they go, oh, yeah, sure, tell us what you're going to be doing. And then they're just like, you're an idiot. Click. Yeah. What are you doing? You know, I've tried to get, so like to that point, you know, making the wills, etc. I've thought, you know, if something were bad to happen, I'd want, you know, big donations to be made to my favorite charities.

and, you know, my parents to get something. And there's, I haven't been able to find any life insurance policies that, that will accept, like, they all have the exclusion, like, high altitude mountaineering. Yeah. And so, and they're like, oh, why are you calling right now? You know, like, do you have any foreign travel planned? Like, also, are you, like, I do a bunch of things that are on the exclusion lists, like flying airplanes and stuff. Oh, yeah, you're also a pilot flying air on airplane. So it's just...

They're just like, you're uninsurable, man. You're asking for it. We're not going to roll the dice on you. I have to make good decisions up there and hope the mountain gods smile on me. Yeah. I'm honestly, though, the most dangerous thing, and maybe this is incorrect, but I think the most dangerous thing you do is probably jogging around Manhattan. Possibly. Because the odds of you getting hit by a car jogging, I'm not...

I say this tongue-in-cheek, but I'm not obviously hoping for that to happen. that's so much more dangerous than highly trained, highly controlled, regulated flight. Oh, okay. Flying, I think, is pretty safe. Yeah. These mountains, the mountains are dangerous. They're very dangerous. But jogging in a city like Manhattan is also statistically not that safe.

Right. I've been hit by a biker in Central Park where I thought it would be safe. It was definitely half my fault for turning too quickly. So I've experienced that here. That's interesting. I think, yeah, the mountains, there's just no way that that's safe, especially without oxygen. Right. Why make it harder?

That's the question, right? People go, oh, yeah, mountaineering. And then you're like, yeah, and also I'm not bringing the thing that everyone else needs to survive. So I did climb Everest once and I used oxygen at the end. I didn't want to. It was my first time at that high of an altitude and I'd only been there a couple weeks. I don't really. I got to the top, but I don't really count that as a real summit, and I don't want to diminish

the climbs of other people who choose to use oxygen, but to me, using it is a performance enhancing drug. It's bringing the mountain lower. Oh, yeah. I could see that. Essentially, you're challenging your body to climb something that would be the equivalent of, say, a 6,000 meter peak or 7,000 meter peak, not an 8,000. 800 meter peak. And so I went back a second time because I wanted and also not to diminish the accomplishment, but I was surprised how almost anybody with average fitness can climb Everest with oxygen. I was wondering about that because you see a lot of people up there now. They're not, I thought going the first time I'd meet all these insane athletes. And then I'm like, I think I'm more

fit than most of these people, just because I'm a, you know, a decent runner. And there's, you know, a lot of people that it was just their life passion. And they were not that impressive as athletes. I knew that doing it without oxygen was totally different. So right. Some 8,000 people have summited total and just about 200 have done it without oxygen. So that I knew was going to challenge myself to a whole other level. And I really, one of the big aspects of climbing that I love is, is testing my own limits. Sure. And so that was kind of, hey, this is an ultimate test. I don't know if I can do it, but I'd like to try. There's a huge rise in like guy who just sold a startup paying to go to Everest and then framing a photo of him doing it. Not that that's, I get that.

That's pretty awesome. But it's not the same thing as like doing it 50 years. ago or something, which is kind of, you're kind of reenacting that challenge in a way. Yeah. It's still, look, the technology today, it's nothing like the old treks, you know, a month just to get to base camp on the Tibetan side, which is how I climbed Everest. You drive to base camp. People in Nepal are taking helicopters, which that's even more. But it's just, and then, you know, the equipment we have today is so much lighter and warmer.

So making it a little bit more. There's this idea in alpinism called fair means. And to climb a mountain by fair means is generally considered climbing without oxygen. It also includes a bunch of other things, usually not using those fixed lines, not using Sherpa support. On a mountain like Everest that's so commercialized, it's very hard to do it in the most purest way, but doing it without oxygen was the step that, um, kind of one of the lines that I thought I, I, I want to challenge myself to that level. How much does it cost? Like 50, 70, 100 grand?

It can. Um, I never paid that much because I didn't go with the, the expensive, like, full, uh, amenity sort of Western expedition. Yeah. So you're carrying your own crap, not having someone carry it for you. You don't have a chef or whatever with you. I mean, there was a cook in, in advanced base camp still and still had yaks carrying stuff up there. You have to have that though. You can't not like I mean you could do it by yourself. It's very hard. So there's such a range.

I ended up paying about 30 grand and I was able to do for 30 grand. I was able to do two mountains, Cho, you and Everest in my last expedition to to that part of the world. Are you just paying for it or do you get like, North Face or some sponsor to... Yeah, I don't have any sponsors on that. But what you could go as cheap as $10,000 or so for the most basic of permits. And the logistics operators will get you the permit and they'll get you transportation to

Base Camp and then you're on your own. Oh, man. You can get something, you know, somewhat in the middle where you get services up to advanced Base Camp, but you're on your own above that. And then then you have just this range. And so a lot of the numbers quoted in the press, the 80 to 120, these expeditions do have great Western food. I've gone in to their tents and drooled at that. And they even have like sonnet tents at base camp and like a plasma TV that they truck in.

Dang. It's just playing Xbox at base camp. It's a whole different kind of experience. And, you know, that suits some people. Now, Pakistan, the Caracorum range is a lot more wild than the Everest area. And for Pakistan, you end up needing to hike in for 60 miles. It's about a five-day trek just to hike yourself to base camp. So they're not carrying some of those amenities to base camp.

It's a little more wild. They're leaving bodies and stuff up there, right? Like, I meant to ask you that before, but it seems like if you die in the mountain, in fact, there's like a landmark guy. He's a, sorry, he's a guy who's, well, he died. And now he's like a milestone like, oh, we're passing old Jimmy or whatever. Green boots. Green boots.

Yeah. That's crazy to me. It's crazy to non-climers. It's, it is crazy, but because it feels like you're on the moon when you're up there, it's such a harsh and alien environment that someone that's frozen, you know, inside this cave and you don't really see their face. But you see, it's weird that it's not as. it's not as weird when you put, when you add that, like on the street here, that would be absolutely. Yeah.

Like imagine there's just a guy at Rockefeller Center that's been dead for 20 years. No way. But when you think about, okay, you're going to the moon and someone was there, you almost feel bad about moving them because they're a part of that ecosystem. Like their story lives on because of that. So I was actually very sad to hear that this famous climber that's called Green Boots. He was in a cave. They called it Green Boots Cave on the northeast ridge of Everest, which is the traditional route from the Chinese Tibetan side. He had been a fixture there for many years.

So you pay homage almost as you go by. You think about that person and you think, you know, there go I, but for the grace as well. So it's a good reminder to be grateful and to be cautious up there. they moved his body, I think, last year a little bit off the trail so you no longer can see it. And if I ever were to climb Everest again, I would be a little bit sad going by there. Yeah, I think it's also probably a good warning. Like, hey, this guy was really experienced and he died here. So just maybe...

Happened to anyone. Maybe don't take off without your group and bring a radio when you do. Right. Yeah. That kind of thing. Yeah. I know even the Sherpa's, those guys, there's avalanches, those guys die all the time. They don't make a ton of money.

You can live on that mountain and still just as easily have the mountain gods decide to take you that day. Right. Is there anything that can keep you warm up there? Is it the cold that's getting to you or is it just mostly altitude and dehydration? So the thing is, I never was terribly cold. I got maybe minor frost nip in my fingers and toes, not full frostbite. When you're doing it without oxygen, your blood gets a lot thicker than with. with it and you're a lot colder.

So what feels warm to someone on it is going to feel a lot colder to someone without it. I was warm enough. And it's really, I think, the altitude compounds the effect of the cold. So it can be, I mean, it's very cold. But you're also wearing these one piece down suits that are like a sleeping, you're walking around in a sleeping bag. So. Yeah.

I've seen the photos on your Instagram. And it looks like almost hard to be. move in that suit yeah yeah it's a bunny suit yeah yeah it's uh it seems like still though you're up so high it there's so much wind there's snow right i don't know if it rains probably not it's too high yeah but like there's just no way that you're warm every inch of skin that's out has to just be burning you have to you have to cover so um you know you wear like liner gloves so that when you pull your hands out of your mittens to try to take a picture you don't want them to get flash frozen by the by the wind crazy

I don't want to climb when it's so there's like a there's a rule of thumb for summit day it's something like no worse than 30 kilometers of wind and no worse than minus 30 centigrade. So I don't know what that is like maybe you know 15 miles an hour maybe minus five or minus 10. And if it's colder and windier than that, which it's that wouldn't be that cold for Michigan. I mean, it'd be cold, but you could survive, but you add the altitude, and that becomes, and all the clothes you're wearing, it's not wise. And I just have no interest in climbing all, like, through conditions worse than that. I'll wait. I mean, it's hard enough, and you're not using oxygen.

So it's, you don't have that. It's not, you're not trying to punish yourself. I feel like a lot of these guys that do extreme sports, they're actually trying to punish themselves. Yeah, there is, almost. It's maybe particularly in some of the ultra, I think like the ultra marathoning. Yeah, you know who Dean Carnaz is, for example. I think there's an, he's such a nice guy, really interesting dude. I interviewed him a long time ago.

There's an element where I think he just likes feeling horrible. Right. I think there's an addiction to that. One thing I think mountaineering teaches is the ability to suffer well, but I don't want to take it to the point where I'm doing it strictly for the, endorphin release of of that suffering, which I think that you can get there. So I think that you've made a good observation. Some people do actually sort of get off on let me actually put myself in this place. Those places can bring a level of introspection and meditation and learning that I think are valuable. So it's a bit of a fine line. And so I would say there is an aspect

of this high altitude mountaineering that is where you're putting yourself in a tough situation to learn more about yourself. For me, I don't do those 100 mile races or 140 mile races to do the

desert, the Nevada desert. I mean, I remember Dean literally telling me that he would like shit himself multiple times. Yeah. And he's like, yeah. And they say it with like that kind of like like yeah you know you shit yourself twice and it's like a little i don't ever want to do that fried in that yeah like he's like yeah you know if you haven't shit yourself twice and while running 50 miles

and not sleeping for three days or 150 miles while not sleeping for three days like you right you're not up there with like me and a rich roll and i'm like okay i don't need to be up there with you in rich roll you guys it crazy so it's it's interesting because i i would say i'm sort of on the borderline of that I do want to learn what about myself when I'm pushing my limits, but I don't, you know, hey, I'm probably biased or blinded. So I don't know, maybe I am crazy too, just at a different degree than some of those ultra marathon guys. But I think there is some level of transcendence or something that can come from finding those edges. And so I would say at the end of like a summit day on Everest, walking back into camp, finding out feeling my batteries as depleted my personal body energy source as depleted as ever, there was some probably euphoria at coming back to camp at that. I actually have an interesting quote that what you say reminds me of.

A famous climber named Mark Twight talked about what he was seeking in personal, I guess, revelation in climbing. And he wrote, we valued duration over intensity because the long route insists on introspection and self-analysis. For ourselves, success on the short, intense route left too much downtime to start to believe our own bullshit. So we went long. When 24 hours nonstop wasn't enough, we went longer. When 40 hours only hinted at lessons available to those who would invest more, we went longer again. Finally, after 63 hours on the go, and in the days and months that followed, we realized we had found what we were looking for. That's intense.

Yeah. That's taking it to a really, really wild level. But when I read that quote, I was just like, wow, there's something there. Hey, man, I know we have so much more we could talk about. I definitely have to have you back. but thank you so much for coming on the show today. My pleasure. It's been really enjoyable, and I agree. There's a lot more that the mountains have a lot of beautiful lessons to impart, so I hope I can share some of those.

There are so much more. I wish we could have gone even longer. This guy is just madness. He is really, really good at what he does. He wanted me to note that no one ever needs to do Everest or K2 or any mountain without oxygen. If that's not the idea that consumes them and it consumed him, So if you're not obsessed with it, don't do it. That's his advice. And that, you didn't really need to convince me, David. I wasn't aiming at it. But thank you.

And he did manage the summit K2 this time. He just got back. By the time you're listening to it, he's been back for just a day or two. And so he managed to make it to the top. Very incredible. It was awesome to see the photos almost live as it was happening. And it's just incredible. I want to see what's next with him.

We've got to have him back on the show. Let me know what you think of this one, because this was a little bit outside of our normal fare. but I just had to wrap my mind around this guy's work ethic, fitness level, so much going on with him. And a good dude to boot. So thanks to David Roski for that. We'll link to him in the show notes, his Instagram if you want to follow his adventures. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people like David Roski, manage relationships using systems and tiny habits. That's in our six-minute networking course, which is free.

That's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. A lot of people go, oh, well, what's the price later? It's just free. I literally don't even have my stuff together enough to say. sell you anything right now with the baby and everything there's no upsell the course is complete you don't get halfway through and have to put in your credit card it's just free the world's a better place for you knowing this stuff jordan harbinger dot com slash course and don't say you're going to do it later you got to dig the well before you're thirsty once you need relationships it's too late to

leverage them this is the stuff i wish i knew 20 years ago and it takes six minutes a day all right it takes like five but that name was already taken jordan harbinger dot com slash course and by the way most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from David Roski. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. And I read everything, especially the reviews, so review us on Apple Podcast, please, so others can find the show. Instructions for that, Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. This show is produced in association with Podcast 1. This episode was

co-produced by Jason DePhilippo and Jen Harbinger. Show Notes and Worksheets by Robert Fogarty. Music by Evan Viola, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own, and yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Otherwise, I'd probably have better advice. That was more well-researched. But do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show.

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