Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 146: Mount Everest

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

This machine kills orthodontists go listen to Podcasting is Praxis: https://praxiscast.podbean.com/ follow Rob on the Blue Site: https://bsky.app/profile/trufflehog.bsky.social Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

All right, before we begin, I we owe an apology to the people of West Virginia. Sparky, I got your DMs. Yeah, we made a shitty joke about West Virginia dental records. I don't remember doing this. Well, Ross made it. I'm doing this either. Oh, it's made it. So, you know, I apologize for that. Ross apologizes for that, even though he doesn't fucking remember it. Yeah, I don't remember the doing that. I know you don't, buddy.

That's because you drink too much. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I know. I was nowhere. And the other scene I was not in West Virginia at that time, I was a greatest state we have, man. Justin, you know the slide is only showing

like two thirds of it on Zencast. Is it recording right? Oh, fuck. God damn it, dude. I don't think we can keep it. Don't keep it. Keep it. There we go.

That looks nice. Yeah. So you see on the screen before you. It's... You have to do the introductions first. We have to talk about how good open-back headphones are. Yeah. You guys like tasty, tasty how good open back headphones are. Yeah. You guys like tasty, tasty, airy mids. Yes. Yeah. Can I am like grievances against Bose now before I go

to that customer service? All right. Introductions first, then headphones. Yes. Hello, and welcome to Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Razznack. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alex Goldow Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are also key in him. We have a guest. We do have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest.

We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. We have a guest. Hi, my name is Rob.

My pronouns are he and him. And I'm the person you are hearing now. How are you? Also, fuck you, Bose. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, let's hear it. is because I have been spending about 10 minutes yelling at these two, my colleagues, for the fact that we have been running this podcast for what

feels like 15 years at this point. And neither of them has a pair of closed back headphones, which means I can always hear myself in the background and we have to edit it out or Devon has to edit it out. So please, God, guys, it's like, what's up, Alice? My closed back headphones, they don't even have to be expensive. Oh, they're gonna be expensive. Make my ears pop. It's annoying. I like, I like my airy mids. It's gonna make you as pop in them. What What you see on the screen before you is a large amount of limestone. And it's like a fucking various other geological oddities, ice and snow.

And the three words big deadly rock, which usually just say big deadly, which actually think is objectively funnier. Yeah, the McDonald's big deadly. It actually used to say big deadly rock land, but the land fell over. You know, not like a sort of like a house building experiment, not very widely taken up those apartments. Yeah, so today we're going to talk about Mount Everest or Chema Lungma, if you prefer. And why it's not necessary, well, all the ways it can kill you. And what's your merit? Yeah, so many.

It's another biome one after after the caves, when our like the tallest mountain in the world. Don't go the caves, don't talk about the caves, it freaks me, I just talking about the case. The case, the case, yeah, yeah, as you said, it's chama lamba. So freaks me out just talking about the case. The case, the case, yeah. Yeah. As you said, it's chumaluma.

That chumaluma is the like, oh, my God. He's named for it, I think. Okay. Maybe it's like holy mother. It's a motivation to get you up to the top. If you get knocked down, you can get up again. Yeah. It's a whiskey drink.

It takes a lot of drink. Yeah. Well, he does not do that when he's about to fight. Yeah. Yeah. All right, before we talk about Mount Everest, we have to do the goddamn news. Oh, this fucking guy. Our big boy, Federman has been going hard in on,

excuseing Israeli war crimes. fucking guy. Our big boy, Federman has been going hard in on, uh, excuse him, uh, Israeli war crimes. Um, that seems to be like his main thing right now. It's very frustrating. He's now all the funny parts about him aren't funny anymore. Yeah. It's sad to see you guy with a hoodie on just do war crimes. Yeah. I do. Quite a few war crimes, but I am a private citizen. I can just do whatever I want. Yeah. The thing is he's breaking the dress code for doing war crimes and endorsing war crimes, which is, you know, that is progress. Even if the kind of progress we would like to see is fewer, ideally, no war crimes.

Right. We would like to see no war crimes. Yeah, I mean, I think the top level with with Federman is that you have to stop doing strong male friendships and you have to stop checking in on on your friends because I need this man's mental health to be worse urgent. Well, um, yeah, I, I, I, I gotta wonder, I mean, so, you know, no one seems to come out in favor of a ceasefire in the Senate. Except and Dick Durbin did.

Yeah. Yeah. But what's wrong with this as well, just like scumbed this way out of that one. Yes, but that's what kind of sort of damnically so they have hovering over these guys that prevents any of them from having. That forces them all to be in lockstep with the same shitty foreign policy. Oh, it sucks. You know, they just like it.

Like the one guy I want to get over is Brian Masth, the guy who got his like legs and dick and balls blown off and I think Afghanistan and then went to Israel on like a volunteer basis to go and like stack blankets for the IDF for a couple of weeks. And what? Yeah, they're just like a volunteer program that they have that you can go and like, they, they tease it with like, yeah, with like hot IDF girls, you can go and like work on bass for a couple of weeks, lifting boxes.

And he wore his IDF uniform, if you can call it that, from that experience in Congress. Oh, I saw that. That was a funny, I was a sorry guy, right? Am I right in saying that? Thanks, I saw that. That was, yeah, I was worried. I, right? Am I, am I right in saying that? I think so. Um, yeah. But yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's, he's been doing that. No, it just, it all feels like a new low. And once again, I continue to feel like my brain is melting out of my ears. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just don't do that anywhere near the center, tof, Alice, because that's a,

a sad place for memories. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Britain's been insane in its own way, of course. And today, Dave, recording was culminated with the idea that like, her mass-affiliated peace activists were gonna do some kind of like terrorist peace demonstration on, yeah, Mr. Stey, which, you know, obviously you can't use, almost a state of protest for peace, because that would be antithetical to the whole point of it,

which is that war is good. Yeah. World War One was cool. And it's a fun that they're gonna do it again and guys. Yeah. It's interesting the stuff that like we've just kind of like slipped back into the history books. Like World War One is good is just like accepted

now and Britain widely. You know, fucking like how it goes forth was the high watermark of the opposite of that. Every time I read literature about the period, it's just like a famous five novel, there's just some high jinks, and then they gather for Tien all as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So World War One was good, and now Germany is like... Being German. Returning to its original roots. Yeah, yes. When you see the chance of Germany on a cover of magazine saying, uh, being German, returning to its original roots. Yeah. But when you see the chance of Germany on a cover of magazine saying, we need mass deportations because of, you know, an enemy within,

I don't think that that's good. Yeah, I've actually seen this movie before, and I recall it going so well. Yeah, the thing is the Germans learned their lesson, which is don't do it to the Jews again, right? Nothing beyond the Xbox. Yeah, it's some kind of match it that they're that he was proposing that like all Muslims in

Germany have to like take a loyalty oath or like spinky prongs to be good or something. It's insane. It's just mad. Yeah, loyalty oath to Israel and like this is the madman thing. Why? No, bring that back. What? Like, this is the, like, really maddening thing, right? Is I remember all of like a few months ago, when this idea that like, you had like dual loyalty to, to your own country, and to Israel was only an anti-Semitic slur. And now it's both an anti-Semitic

slur and something we are honestly demanding to people. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, man. It's all so fucking dire. I hope this guy I really do. All this guy. Just this by Sweat of God. It's like genuinely such an embarrassment that he was ever elected in the first place. And there's like, did you see the other guy? Yeah, we voted against a Muslim. I mean, depends where the doctor was would have endorsed Erdogan's sort of condemnation of Israel, you know?

But it's a real geopolitical bind there. Yeah, exactly. What I'm saying is I'm calling on our Cuban allies to speed up research on the Havana Reagan and just like get a big advantage. You guys got to go that shit along. Get a point right at the Senate, use the foreign policy change, Reagan, you know, and if forces all of them to to vote for ceasefire and then in the embargo. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll also take that. Hey you guys can I borrow $4,000 real quick? Are you looking at the Metzes? No, you're looking at the fucking headphones made out of like you know stradivarius will. Yeah, yeah. On a date even. Yeah, this is going to get one of those high fidelity XLR cables made out of gold to I think it's from Amazon that says professional low noise

oh boy, microphone cable. It's wrapped around my microphone. This is cable management. This is This is going to relate to remember how you mounted your hard drives. Remember how you mounted your hard drives. Remember that? I remember the one impact that had on the sound quality of the episodes.

A big one All right, this is all gonna relate strongly. I feel to our baffling next news Thank you party congratulations from people who will never ever achieve such a thing and my dad will always be sad of me. My levels are blown out when I do that. Thank you to a hundred thousand of you for stupid foxes matching, like, share and subscribe button. We are going to get some plaques off of this and I'm very excited.

We're absolutely. You two plaque. Yeah. we're absolutely you to plaque. Yeah, the next step is world conquest. So the next the next milestone is like one million. So if all of you make nine people off the street, subscribe to the podcast. Yes, every single one of you. There's a lot of people on the street and just start talking about this

podcast. Yeah, it will only end well. Yes. You will not be incarcerated. We hope this is this is sort of like I think in order to get there, the only way we're getting to a million is sort of cultic practices. Yeah. And I'm in favor of this, you know, go ask convert people.

Yeah. Can I ask you to get it before Alan Fisher does? Can I ask you sort of a practical plaque question? Do you guys get one each or is it like one? And is it like a highlander scenario where it's like, you know, you have to be so ahead and then this is bullshit. They issue you one. And then if you want any more, you have to email the company that makes them and be like, I swear to God, this is real. I have a hundred thousand YouTube subscribers. Can I buy X more of you? And obviously, we need one for me, one for Liam,

one for Justin, one for the Activate Windows logo, and one for Devon. So, like, that's a big expense. That's great though. So that's tax deductible that like you can walk up to the tax office and say, I'm paying less because Luke Shidy plaque. I think that's really. I want one of the ones that they have to make up for like YouTubers, back when YouTubers were still a thing, who did like crazy, crazy numbers. You know, we had to invent this like, you know, golden ruby plaque, especially for Pewdiepie after he like, you know, looked at a dead Japanese especially for PewDiePie after he like, you know, looked

at a dead Japanese guy and went, cool, check it out, like, and subscribe. And like 25 trimming people did, you know, when he got the, when he got the oak, oak leaves and crosses underneath his, yeah, the most cancelable system of like YouTube promotions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought that was a different guy who was, uh, looked at the dead body. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought that was a different guy who was looked at the dead body. Yeah, I was not looking Paul. Oh, yeah, basically all the same guy. There we go. I just searched suicide for my life. I find out that there's a guy called the Dutch official who has two trillion subscribers. I have never heard of him and like kids in secondary schools are

worshipping him like a god. Yes. And I want that for myself, not the worship, but I do want the plaque. Yeah. I don't think you can have both. I think you should commit to both. I want the $10 million subscriber plaque. I don't want to be worshed by teenagers. I also wouldn't like that. Yeah. Yeah. I have one more announcement, which is that I, I, I, you'll save it. Never mind. It does. Okay. Cool. Great. Fantastic. We're so good at this. Um, yeah. That's the team. Sometimes people are like, you know, uh, you know, I'll, I'll tell the story. I got recognized at a funeral, brother's con cast. Yeah. God, I just don't know. I believe you're listening. Thanks for that.

Yeah. I was at Corinne's uncle's funeral with like a billion fucking people. And it was my birthday. And Corinne's cousin said, happy birthday, Liam. And this person was just like, are you Liam from Woldersia problem? And my brain fucking turned off. Nothing is beyond a reach. Yeah. The other thing is like, are you Liam from Wilders? You're probably, and my braid fucking turned off.

Nothing is beyond our reach. Yeah, the other thing is like, a lot of channels do rewards or they trail something in recompense for your sacrifice and subscribing and having to get our bullshit notifications. Are we gonna do anything special for 100,000 subscribers? And the answer is, no, absolutely not. Oh, I've already released the nerve gas actually. Oh, okay.

I don't know if it's the first one. It was the nerve gas. It was the nerve gas. You start giving people things and they just start expecting more from you and that way, madness lies. We like to maintain a hierarchical relationship here. But yeah, and earnest. Thank you to the fans at this time.

Thanks. Also, each shit. Yeah, I, but yeah, and Ernest, thank you to the fans at this time. I also eat shit. Yeah, please don't subscribe. Please don't subscribe. But it's a good news. It's subscribing. We love you. We have to.

We have to. Yeah, we have to ensure this is a professional relationship. That's right. Don't get parasocial. We hate you. We think you're scum, but please subscribe. Also, can you, can you please sign my morning card while we're here because I just I just want you signature on something professional The people who are like hey, well you sign my my Philadelphia teacher ID

That's right. That was sweet. Yeah We signed what what like an emergency services ideal on time. Yeah, we so we still outside anything Yeah, it's it's all side anything. Yeah. It's all side anything. And we'll also sponsor any dumb things. You've been trying to be an easy man to defraud. I was not going to say he will sign. It's not fraud.

Confession. And a race contract. Yeah. We have a race team. We do. We do. Let's go through. Anyway, that was the goddamn news.

All right, I immediately pivot into insulting the fans. We just did that. I'm going to do it some more. All right, so get your 90,000 subscriber plaque. Congratulations. So some of you are looking at Mount Everest and you're going, how is that an engineering disaster, right? Shut up.

It's, yeah, that's my answer. Shut up. I hear you crying about this in the comments because you're a baby. This is a picture of you about to post your little comments about how is this an engineering disaster. You're taking my stick. These guys are like running out of ideas.

They're running out of engineering stuff. Well, I'm running Katrina right now. And now they're just doing whatever they feel like. Well, next slide please. Who's gonna hold high? My answer. Yes. My answer.

My answer comes in two parts. This is part one. And the first part of the answer is, you think this shit is easy? You want to get up here and try and do my job? Yeah, that's why I thought, why aren't you doing air bar app flight 34, if you're a fuck you, all right? I'm sorry the fucking two have flew into the track,

so I'm sorry, I was carrying all of your dictators single malt, you know, we'll get to it, right? Like, and that's like only one half of the comments we get. The other half of the comments we get, why aren't you doing United American, US American flight 34, five, that ends like, I don't, yeah, we'll get to that too. I'm sorry, the pilot who hadn't slept in 72 hours, like flew a shitload of McKinsey people

who were going off site to fire people in person into another kind of tractor because the magic tube that tells the computer not to crash the plane got ice in it, we'll get to it. You stole my whole stick. I have redundant that. Listen, I was championed by the pilot like a plaque to though, because that's pretty heroic right there.

It does, you know, on a philosophical level, shut the fuck up. Not a more practical level. Just imagining all the light scar. I just, you know, it's a disaster show. There's also like, we, do you know how hard some of these are to fucking right? Because a, Ross is a big baby.

And it's like, oh, we need an expert. Like, yeah, yeah, probably, but also shut the fuck up. B, I have been writing Katrina for a trillion years because if I fuck it up, we're gonna get screamed at. And Spencer Hall is gonna come North and beat me to death with his own shoes. Yeah, I'm gonna get Katrina right. And Spencer Hall is going to come north and beat me to death with his own shoes. You're just imagining. You're just imagining.

You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining.

You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining.

You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. You're just imagining. tell of ill of Sherpas as it isn't and you know, they'll beat you to death as they should. With their own snowshoes. We'll get there. Yeah. And with crack ones. Imagine the Air Borad flight right before it crashes all the alarms are gone. Right to a hot side. My wife.

My wife. I'm trying to set an app or out. I'm going to have to apologize to Central Asia now. Aviation disaster specifically. Sometimes it's hard to find a compelling narrative for them. I'm not an aviation girl. I'm not like a mental pilot or whatever. And it's all named like air something flight number. And it's like, yeah, right.

Air rectum, like four or five five. Exactly, exactly. And they can't all be Japan Airlines flight filling with liquid shit, you know? As pilots, this is exactly the situation we're trained to avoid. They could fill like with shit. Yeah. So so my second half of the answer is the entire rest of the podcast. Next slide, please. Rob and I sort of like wrote this half and half between ourselves and all of you are hostages. I, if you're wondering what I'm doing here, by the way, I'm an entirely amateur about near

and I haven't done any of this shit. So, you know, I like it. I think it's interesting. More than any of us. So, I'm a very accomplished mountaineer when I, when I search Google Maps. Over a period of like tens of millions of years India would used to be like detached smacked into the Eurasian plate traveling northward

And then there was a plane in between China and India you can see here China's the right India's the bit on the left Used to be a plane in between them India's going north the Eurasian plates going south These two plates smacked into each other and formed Himalayas mountain ridge It used to be a plane in between them. India's going north, the Eurasian plates going south. These two plates smacked into each other and formed himalayas. It's mountain ridge. These are the tallest mountains in the world. Beautiful. And they're actually like...

They are incredible. They are just magnificent things. They are some of the most breathtaking spectacles on this planet. It's, yeah. Amazing. And they're... Can you do me a solid? What what take your goddamn allergy meds? Okay

So these are these are baby mountains to like that only 50 million years old Which is to be shorter than the than the then the Appalachians But this is the thing the Appalachians are like 500 million years old That's their years old. They're older than the Atlantic Ocean. As is the Susquehanna River. Yeah. Like the Himalayas, the Himalayas are like,

it means home of snow, by the way, which I think is cool. That's poetic. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of it. There's a lot of snow. They're so young. No one's snowing. There used to be, which is kind of terrifying.

It's not wearing a good shirt on. Hey, shut up. Get that. They're so young geologically that like, there are still there are birds that evolve to fly over them rather than change their migration routes. Yeah. Demo is our cranes. The beautiful. There's like some like bond next like cranes as well that fly over them.

And they can just fly 30. That's I mean, that's commercial airliner height. Yeah, as bad as they're gonna get a hell of a surprise them that bird strike happens. Just like inhaling a bunch of like cranes into the engine of your have your 747 or whatever. Yeah. Um, if we go to the next slide, we can get a good luck fighting an airfield.

It's a it's a political map, which is in a kind of like a Kanbarat is labeled in the top right India geographical map. Not all of this is India. I just got this off of an Indian map. We're there. As if going on. My mind and the future to Hindutva. More than a few disputed borders here. Yeah, my mind is hot to him, dude, for more than a few disputed borders here. Yeah, guys, what it's what we did was we went to the highest shittiest place in the world and just fought over it endlessly, some sick fighting up here. Like, you know, guys with like pickaxe handles kicking each other off the edges of glaciers. Yes. But yeah, so the Himalayas,

But yeah, so the Himalayas comprise, you know, there's a tiny bit in India, there's Bhutan, and then most of it's Nepal and Tibet, which is, you know, part of China under protest. And pre-European settlement, Tibet was like, you know administered by various Chinese empires had its own empire for a bit Ended up a Buddhist theocracy after the Boxer revolution and Stayed that way until China invaded in the 50s and then Nepal is Was a monarchy until 2006 Pretty old monarchy and then one of the kids went gamer mode with an AR 15 And just kind of like hook out a bunch of their own rural family.

Unexpected political development to say the least. That's a reverse Budwier right there. Yeah, a lot of the politics in Nepal, which was a constitutional monarchy, is now just a democracy, is now just a republic, is various flavors of malists, which is why because you get moderate malists, which is kind of what it is. You have like a malist administration that is like very, very keen to keep tourism up. This will be a problem later. Be them into the mountain that craves blood.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unlike in the Americas, there isn't like a documented history of pre-European mountaineering as far as I can tell. It's more that you work around the mountains, you live and work in the valleys and stuff. And the mountains are like mostly considered sacred, like, you know, one year here. And also, like, some of the valleys that these people have been living in since, like, forever basically are higher than any mountain range in, like,

the continental United States, basically. So, like, their mode of being is just like what you would consider maybe the adventure of your lifetime to get to. Yeah, lots of, like, carrying very heavy loads over, like, very dangerous mountain passes. Yeah, lots of like carrying very heavy loads over like very dangerous mountain passes and like very fast rivers as well, because that, you know, glacier. Very, very steep. Yes, Rob.

This isn't like, well, very steep in terms of rivers. You know, it's like it makes it go faster. Yeah, yeah. If you notice, it's also like a notoriously like poor country, like it's one of the poorest in in In the world, I think and like yeah, the the rare occurrence in also because it just like it doesn't have that much like it has Mountains and some water and that you know that kind of them's the brakes is not you know They don't they don't have like a big port or like or don't sit on an important tray, root or anything, they have these passes and not much else going on.

A little bit of subsistence agriculture and stuff. It's interesting that they consider it the mountain sacred as opposed to the traditional European way of thinking about mountains up until the romantic period is sort of these mountains are a goddamn nuisance and we wish we could be rid of them. Yeah, I mean, Petro, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean,

I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean,

I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, If we want to put a marker in, I'm sort of eyeballing this, but if you see the little bump top left of the K and Cuncheon Junga, which is the third highest mountain in the world, that's wherever it is. It's on the border between Nepal and Tibet. It's like the border runs through the summit, I believe, so like half a dozen,

it's getting to that in half of it, Senegal. Next slide, please. All right, we also got to talk about these guys. These are Sherpa people. Oh, the drip. Yeah, I was about to say they look real good. They are. Yeah, massively cool.

Just yeah, look at that. Every photo I've seen of Sherpa men, they've like at least one guy has been wearing a cowboy hat. That's like something they have very, very keenly adopted from the West, and it looks cool as hell. You have to salute a pro cowboy hat culture. This is an ethnic group, like 100,000 people, maybe more.

And generally in the West, Sherpa means, we tend to treat it as Nepali's for guy who holds my stupid ass up the mountain. Yeah. And has the deas and see not to leave me there, even though he probably should. Exactly. Because we are like racist pigs.

And we have this like way of typifying societies, you know, like it was the thing where, you know, in particularly in the British Empire, where we were like, okay, well, this know, like, it was a thing where, you know, uh, in particularly in the British empire, where we were like, okay, well, this is, this is like a warrior tribe, and this is like, you know, whatever, um, in order to pick who, who got to do what in like an era administration and stuff. And the Sherpa kind of got like pigeonholed into being like, smiling helpful, climbing people, um, which sure, but, you know, it's but it's an ethnic group. There's more going on than that.

And they live and work in these valleys, which has adapted them in a lot of ways, including, genetically, to be very good at climbing and living at high altitudes. And later on, as we'll see, this becomes a way for them to gain employment through hauling people up mountains. If they use their superhuman abilities to compensate for a weak pale European bodies. Pretty much.

I'm sedentary. Yeah, I mean, pretty much any major European expedition of the first half of the 20th century, even into the 60s, maybe even 70s, would have not only like sharper guides, but like a huge number of porters would like carry all of their shit. Yeah, still a thing. But yourself, you fucking stuff is a big thing. A lot of like, even if you don't do like the full of mountaineering stuff, like we're going to be talking about,

like a lot of people just go to the polter, like do, it's a very famous sort of tourist walk to go to Everest Base Camp and back. And then most people already have porters, and especially if you do like longer stuff, you really don't need to do any kind of summit to like employ Sherpas and porters and all that stuff. And also, there's certainly if you're mountaineial, it's also a legal requirement that you have Sherpas with you.

You must by law have guides and Sherpas and Portors local people with you. You got to keep the economy stimulus. Right. Right. Do they have like a Sherpas union? They will get to that. Oh, that's an important point. Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, so for now, I'll confine myself to saying that the early mountaineering stuff, I enjoyed reading Anna Perna, which is the French first attempt to summit that mountain. These guys are universally treated terribly, especially the porters. And it's taken for granted that they will remain cheerful

in all circumstances up to and including falling off a mountain to their deaths. Cool. Yeah, they usually don't rate a mention. Yes, some of the stuff with Alan Pernod is just diary entries where it's like, yeah, another one of the guys fell into a river and drowned today. It's like, whatever. Yeah, it's changing now in the last decade, I would say,

but any time before that, I was just like, we got up to mountain and by we, we mean a bunch of white people and don't you, I don't know how to do things right. Right, right. Exactly. Next slide, please. All right, so this is about the colonization of India.

Do not colonize India, first of all, easy mistake to make, but don't try your best to avoid it. But that's something that we did. And having done so, we Britain then got involved in this like so called great game with Russia, where we're like, any day now, the Russians are going to like sweep down into Central Asia and they're going to try and take India off of us, which has made us very wealthy. And we don't want them to do that. Therefore, we're going to have to do a bunch of intrigue. Some really interesting intrigue, like we, the word pundit for like someone, you know, like a, like a common taste

of, makes its way into English. It means school teacher originally. It sounds like a great alternate history where India becomes part of the Soviet Union. I mean, at that moment, where it was sort of like potentially in the bounce, but yeah. Yeah, but yeah. So we had these guys pundits who are sort of like

locally recruited spies who were sent into Nepal because Nepal and Tibet were closed to foreigners at this time, until like, I know four I want to say when we negotiated the treaty with them. And yeah, because what we wanted to do was to survey India, this is very useful, like militarily, scientifically, all of this. We did like a lot of like geological survey, and we wanted to survey Nepal and Tibet as well, because they wouldn't let us in. We just recruited some local spies with gadgets,

even, especially adapted prayer beads, to use for measuring distances and stuff, like undercoverers as monks and holymen. It's a wild bit of history. But yeah, mostly what we tried to do was to to survey Tibetan Nepal by distance, use it like a telescope, whatever you look at the mountains, which you can see because they're very tall. And you go, how tall do you think that is and try and measure it with maths? Well, I always got malaria doing this, by the way.

Yeah. Pretty miserable conditions. Yeah. That's just part of the job back when surveying was, you know, a very manual effort. Oh, you're going to, you know, you're going to wind up in pretty strange places and get weird diseases. Oh, yeah. Fun fact, the first star on the CIA is all of dead CIA guys. It's an Ivy League guy who tried to hike over the border

into Tibet and got air hold by some Chinese border guards. So like from 1800s to the 1950s, very difficult to get into at times. So yeah, so the highest, the highest of these peaks, very obvious. 15, 15. And and this guy wore the geological survey, went, how can I sort of carry favor here? He's like, well, I'll name it after my boss. And this is incredible. Fucking incredible. Like, just so funny. Well, if you have 100,000 subscribers now. You should get like many things, geographical things are named after you.

Mount for sure. There's your problem. Yeah. So just never end you. Avalanche. They never they never gave they never gave K2 a proper name. Yeah, this is an interesting thing because K2 people have have tried about the same time that like, you know, the government of Nepal, like, really

started pushing for like, Chamolongma or Satya Grahav for Everest. People like went back and thought, well, how can we like decolonize K2? You know, why is it called that? And legitimately, it's like in the back of beyond so much that no one has bothered to name it in a way that anyone's recorded before just K2. But Pete 15, Chamolongma was named after this guy on the left, George Evrest, who was the head of the Geological Survey of India, pronounced his name Evrest, and one of the reasons why he didn't like the idea of calling it Mount Evrest is because nobody can fucking pronounce my name. And they're going to get a rock. Yeah, you know, he was touching the lathe of heaven at that moment because it's Mount Everest now, irrespective of how this dead guy pronounced his name, which was Everest.

Also, I think that it's still befitting that we call it Mount Everest, you know, and get this chlammy list, pick, pick's name hundreds of years after, like a geeky go socket forever and into eternity. That's good. Yes. Yeah, for sure. If we go to the next slide, so we negotiated access to tin-a-poor 1904 and immediately pretty much having begun this, you know, thing of like

mountaineering and mountaineering for pleasure in Europe and likes, you know, and climbed a lot of like mountaineering and mountaineering for pleasure in Europe and like climbed a lot of the Alps. You had this phenomenon of alpinism and alpenists. Yeah, this sort of starts going around like, I mean, it has long history, but around like the age of when like English public schoolboy started going on the grand tour

and they'd come to Switzerland and the Rhone Valley and they'd see all these incredible mountains and some of them would like go up there including I forgot her name but one incredibly cool woman who did Mont Blanc in like a form like Victorian Hoopska which is just like incredibly boss yeah which is just very very cool but that's where it all comes from and then around that time they also start because it's also a nationalist thing, they start climbing up all these big peaks, because if you're, I don't know, the Englishman on the biggest peak that pees you're better than the German Empire or the French Empire and so on

and so on and so forth. So it has like public schoolboy mixed in with weird Victorian nationalism. It's all baked sort of into that cake. It's also interestingly, because the kingdom, then, of Nepal, was able to sort of play all of these powers off against each other by issuing, like, generally, one license for an expedition per year would rotate nationality. So if the British don't do X Mountain in 1924, then the Swiss get to try it in 25, the French in 26, or whatever. And you have these series of British expeditions in Tynapour, which survey a lot of routes, because you have to hike to these places in the first place. You have to map out these mountains,

you have to break trails to get there. And then that's before you're even like at the base of it looking at it trying to find a way up it. But pretty quickly like Everest is, you know, sort of like gone for. And we have a bunch of like reconnaissance expeditions. Mostly I'm gonna talk about this guy on the left. This is a George Mallory. It looks like a Gaya George Russell.

Yeah. It's genuinely striking the resemblance. It's all chin, you know, they give you one of those chin in public school, and it's filmed sometimes. And yeah, it was World War I veteran, like Giff did mountaineer teacher at one point. It's not a chance at all, actually. at one point. I thought it was a chance. Yeah, it was actually. And ultimately, he was part of an expedition in 24 that tried to summit. And he and his partner just disappeared. Yeah, yeah. It's one of the great enduring sort of minor mysteries, whether or not they made

the actual summit. No, but I mean, obviously, nobody knows because they didn't live to tell the tale they vanished up in the cloud and you know we're I'm not going to say never seen again but you know nobody knows what happened but in on May 1st 1999 an American mountaineer called Comrade Anca who by the way is is a legend among the serious mountaineers. They found his body below the yellow band, which is above 8,000 meters, but well below the summit. We'll get to where that is on the mountain, but in all probability, they did not make it.

Although I think at the time that was Angke's expedition to discover more about this expedition and how they did it. So among the things they did is they recreated all the period like mountaineering outfits, like the guys in the picture on the right, and they tried to see if purely on like a material technical basis, you could do it. Anker said that you could probably do it if the weather didn't blow up in your face. That like they had the requisite technological skills

and the ropes. It was all the zillion times heavier than the stuff is now, but technically speaking, it would have been possible. Did they know to do things like bring supplemental oxygen? Did they have the technology to do that at the time? No, they just went. As far as I know, a Mallory has no supplemental oxygen. This is this is a sort of like, it's also like pure alpinism, right, where as it kind of like evolved as a doctrine, right, which is that you assault the mountain, right? You like, you like, you hike up to the base of it, you go, I think I can climb up that way and then you just do it. I'm nearing up, I'm nearing up, yeah, exactly. And you genuinely assault, you go, I think I can climb up that way and then you just do it. I'm there. Go up.

Down there. Go up. Yeah. Exactly. And you continue the assault. You install like a cable lift. You add like a little mountain hut with that serves that has a restaurant in it. You know, you get a full Swiss thing, you know?

Yeah. I mean, this is what I want to hear. She can't visit. It's lovely. Those huts are great. I love her here. I like Switzerland a lot. I've only been once. It was a long time ago, but it was really good.

Yeah. So this is one of like two schools of mountain Aaron, can talk about the other one a bit. But this is like Alpineson or like a salt style mountain Aaron. Yeah, so it's sort of, it's normally called like siege alpineson. It's literally like you get all the shit you need, all the food you need, all the ropes you need,

all the everything you need. You put it in a big pile and then like you move the pile from the biggest pile to one camp above where you build another big pile and then once you've stockpiled all your stuff and built a long line of ropes, you build another camp above that and so on and so forth and every time the pile gets a little bit smaller, we drag everything up and then like once you're fully secured, you hop onto the next thing, that's sort of how that goes, that's how they did it, and that's also how the first summit was achieved. Maybe install an escalator, you know. Rise out, rise the bound by simply building over it. So there are two main routes up Everest that are sort of like popularly done.

There's the one that almost everyone does now, and then there's a route from the north through to Bat that for a long time was like politically impossible. But that one has like a long fixed ladder into it that a Chinese team put in and 75. But you just have to like climb up it for long periods. So yeah, because I have I have engineer engineer brand. I'm like, we could probably stick a cog railway on there and make this a lot easier. How do, how do cog railways do with massive avalanches and, you know, falling ice cubes the size of, you know, several houses? I should know. You, you build a snow shed.

This is a solve problem. Part of the reason why I put Mallory in here is because he sort of gave mountaineering its raison d'être in terms of like why climb this bullshit mountain particularly, which is because it's there, right? This is the kind of like existential challenge is the thing the thing is there therefore climate for like pleasure and it's it it's speaking purely for me. It is true. Like I like to go into big mountain and stand on top of things. And I don't think you need a better reason than that. It because it is there because it looks cool. And you want to go up there and see what's up there. And like it's just it's incredibly cool and good. I mean, the stuff that happens on average, not so much, but you know just the doing is very very cool

and I think because it's there is still the single best reason. Before we move off this slide loop, like tiny side note, I found this while doing a little bit of reading about Mallory, is that one of his teammates included a veteran roa from Oxford I want to say, and an inventor called Sandy Irvine, who before he went up to Everest, I can't remember if he survived or not, but he had also applied for a patent for a new kind of machine gun. And I tried, I promised you to find the patent because that would be cool, but I could locate it in time. Everest machine gun. I like that, like, I have a shining mask. These guys aren't dressed like this for the photo, so they dress like this, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm. This is like a brief, brief history. So 1953, we at the first summit, which is... At the coronation of Queen Liz with the second, last time the British Empire did a fucking thing. Yeah, it was a sort of a signal moment

for British excellence in New Zealander and a Nehalees man, climbed in Madison, in Nepal and Tibet. Yeah. So there was this real culture shift as well in terms of mountaineering where there was this move away from this kind of like alpinism that we've seen, the kind of like a salt style thing, to this much longer, much more siege- thing of like, you know, you've

built a bunch of camps up the mountain, you take a lot of people and a lot of shit, and you have like multiple pairs of like climbing partners. And you know, maybe one of the best mountaineers of his day, Eric Shippton, was like the guy who got sidelined off the command of this expedition because he was like, it's getting too big, it's like unworkable, it's barely even mountaineering anymore. And you know, instead they got some other guys in and and they ran at like a military operation, which you know, kind of was. And yeah, mountains successfully conquered with the use of down jackets and supplementary oxygen. As you can clearly see, it's, yeah. So, yeah.

So, it's an inquiry on, and Tens' Norge. Tens' Norge, the, the Nepalese Sherpa, treated not well after this, not as well as he should have been, certainly. He got the George medal out of it and Hedler got a knighthood, which sort of that distinction kind of tells you everything you need to know really. It was briefly a feature of like Nepalese nationalism that Norge got onto the summit first. I don't think that's true, but I also don't think it matters. Yeah. Doesn't matter at all for like, for this, unless you go solo, which you will get to, but

it doesn't matter if you're first or second, like the last step, who gives a shit. And something that you've done, like, you've done the impossible. It's something that Hillary never claimed either. It's a Hillary quite a nice man, very self-effacing. Yeah. He's not still alive now, I don't think.

But he lived for like a few days. No, he passed away. He passed away. But still very, very active in commenting on mountaineering. And ever since, it was like, yeah, it was a team effort. But yeah, so successfully, successfully conquered highest mountain in the world, stood on top of, great, fantastic.

Next slide, please. Yeah. So then we get to these guys. These are, they are fucking cool as all get out. They are Peter Habler, Austrian and Reinhold Messner, German, very German, both very Austrian and very German. The second most insane German man of the 70s after Werner Herzog. Yes, 100%. What were they cooking in Germany in the 17th? Well, it's not bad. Brought words.

But they were the first pair to do the summit of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. So they just did it under their own steam in 1978. This was a thing that genuinely at the time, everybody says, you can't do it. Like, it's impossible. It's like the two hour marathon. Like you will by going up that high because it's not good for you. We'll get there without oxygen like you will die. They had looked to say to them literally like you might do it. But even if you come home, you won't recognize your wife and children.

It was sort of considered undueable, but they did it. You know, with vast amounts of training and insane amounts of natural skills, but they proved to the world that it could be done and not only that it could be done, that it didn't need to do it in like the sort of siege mentality style. They did it in much smaller groups, much smaller packs. On the bottom left, you see that's Habler being photographed from below by Messner, Messner by the way who almost went snow blind because he had to occasionally take his goggles and gloves off to take these pictures to prove that they had actually done it because they knew that

if they didn't come home with pictures, nobody would fucking believe them. And this is as a side note, but just as a demonstration of how insane these guys are, on their way down from doing the summit without extra oxygen, so about 300 meters, so when you get below the rock band, Harbler glistarded, which is literally sitting in the snow on your butt and just pointing yourself downwards and going, whee!

And he went from the summit down to camp four in an hour. And that's like a descent of, I want to say 3000 feet or something in an hour on the highest mountain in the world. And if you tip left or right, nobody will find you again. Yeah. Which is, I can't believe, like you begin to describe how insane that is, but it's also incredibly boss. World slide champion. Yeah, undivided.

Yeah, they would also do later on the very famous eigennorth face in 10 hours without knowing the route. They would just get up there because they were trying to rescue some stranded Polish climbers. And this was made to world famous because at the time Clint Eastwood was down there filming the eigen-sanction, the movie, which is actually filmed on the Eiger. It's for that, it's quite cool even though it's a rubbish ass movie. And Harbler would again sum at the Eiger North Face in the day at the age of 74. So, you know, if you want to aspire to be spawned, being Peter Harbler is one option, You could also be Ryan Hope Messner,

but then you have to be much, much more stranger and insane. Yeah. Messner has this kind of like Emanus Grease thing in his later years. He was like, it's not mountaineering unless you lose three fingers doing it. This no change to me as a person.

It was like almost mystical kind of alphanism. It was very, Iism. It was incredible, but like, because you knew he had done it. But yeah, not amount of kind words to say about the sort of present state of mountaineering as an activity. No, I mean, this is part of, I don't know, difficult organization, I guess, but like, part of the discussion is like, now that because we've done pretty much every peak and like the most accessible way, the whole conversation now if you're serious mountaineers like do you do it in the right style. So do you do it fast and light and not with these siege tactics and you know how much can you do in a day and like how, you know, can you do it in even more strange and spectacular ways? We'll have a picture in the latest slide of something the Russians did on Everest in 2004, which is insane.

Yeah, we need, the thing is we need to colonize space urgently because the mountaineers are driving themselves insane. That's about the say, you know, we need, all right, so a little bit of a smart, let's go. We need to make new mountains. Yeah, pretty much, because like, you know, a fuck hellizing Berlin, mountainize Berlin, so that we can give the German something to do, because they're going nuts not having new mountains to climb. Yeah. Next slide.

Oh, this fucking guy. Yeah, so this fucking guy now. So this is the guy on the left is Dick Bass. He is mostly both the oil terrible fucking terrible fucking guy comes from a family of oil tycoons and later you can see it just on his little collar of his of his blind whites better of the skewers. It's cool. Yeah, his cool turtleneck, he bore it before Steve Jobs in reverse. But yeah, and later opened a skewer results. So that's the kind of guy he is. And he found another guy at some fucking rich people result called Frank Wells, who would one day become

the president of the Disney Corporation. So another good guy basically. And he had done, bass had done like some of the famous climbs in North America, like Matt McKinley, but said, I want to do more and I want to do it better. So what they did is because they had far, far, far too much fucking money. They went out and hired some of the very best climbs in the world at the time. David Brashear's Rick Ridgeway, some of the others. And they said to them, we will give you you a shed load of money and also your own chance

to do these mountains. If you guide us up the highest summit on every continent, this is called the Seven Summits. Now it's a fairly sort of, it's a tick list and all tick lists, basically. Certainly for start, like still like modern mountaineersers but also now for rich dickheads. Never let rich dickheads in your hobby, whatever it is. No. So dickbass becomes the first person in the world, so including the entire fraternity of like serious mountaineers to do this, although a. Right not messener, you know, of course would say that his list is dumb and gay, because he thinks that you can still see out of both eyes, what the fuck is wrong with you?

No, it mainly centers around the question of which one is the highest peak in Oceania. Bass would say Gorsuchusko, which is like a big hill in Australia, and the other one is Kastens Pyramid on New Guinea, which is much higher and also much more terrifying to get to because it's 5,000 meters high and it's in the middle of jungle. So it's not such an easy achievement. But basically, I was about to say it is very funny that one of these is just like, you know, a fairly large mountain in the Appalachians, you know, about that size. It's like, wow, I climbed up to the Mill Mountain star in Ronok. Yeah.

I think by the thing about, you know, people who do the tallest one in every state, and you get, Florida is just like a literal hill. Yeah. Yeah. So basically they publish this book. You can see it on the right. It's called Seven Summits because Seven Summits. And they basically kick off, then it becomes a new rage because these guys who are supremely wealthy and to in their defensively baseless, a very fit man who did these things, not under his own scene, but he certainly was a very, by the end, he was quite a reasonably

capable mountaineer. He needed the professionals to drag him up it, but he was not incapable, but he kickstarted this off as like, no longer content with rooting the world with golf courses and things of that nature. They were like, it was like, it's genius. Deathstone Golf. I think it has a ring to it. I think we can get away with it. Golf, don't the moon. Why not? You know, yeah. I'm looking forward to like getting our proposal to an insurance company and us going like, look, we have this idea for a business and can you insurance on this one? Step one, sponsor dirt racing team. Step two, sponsor every

step expedition to golf up there. Well, you've heard of mini golf, but this is going to be mega golf. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yeah. I could see it all like, you know, the little windmill of the midi golf park going like the windmill going like 110 miles an hour because of the gusty wind. Try getting your ball through that, you know, it's just, but yeah, basically so with this, roughly speaking, you get the advent of, of rich dickhead tourism because going to the poll is very, very expensive for all the reasons and going up mountain the advent of rich dickhead tourism, because going to the poll is very, very expensive for all the reasons and going up mountain the size of Everest is even more expensive. So you have to have a lot of money if you are an amateur and you want to get on with this. So what that leads to next type, please is this. This is a picture from 2012 at the time, but this is a pretty good summary of the modern Everest

industry, because it is 100% an industry now. It depends on which records you believe, but about 7,000 people have now done the summit of Everest. If you're curious, the record holder is Kami Rita Sharpa, who's done it 28 times because he's a guide. And the female record holder is Luckba Sherpa, who has done it 10 times also because she's a mountain guide. But the vast majority of people who have done this, so many of the thousands, are basically

very rich tourists with wildly varying skill levels, which occasionally get people killed, but we will get there. We'll get to that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why are they all in this one line? We will also get to that, but this is, this is like a good day on Everest. That's what it looks like now. All these people trying to do this. The specter was taken in 2012 by Simone Moro, who is a very gifted Italian mountaineer, and he was at the time trying to do this without oxygen. Basically, what he says is just an amusement park now. It's the highest mountain in the world. The line that you see before you is 200 climbers, slowly ascending up to the South call.

And basically, he said, this is insane. This is incredibly dangerous, I'm getting the fuck out of here. It, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's sort of a brief symbol of the modern Everest like tourism experience. In 2014, there was a Chinese woman named Jin Wang, who managed to take a helicopter to 21,000 feet and then started her climb from there. So skipping vast majorities of the base camp to high-rop and, you know, as to whether or not that's still mountaineering is, you know, it's a difficult conversation, but it's certainly indicative of what has happened to this mountain and this climb.

Yeah, I mean helicopters are only getting better. They've landed one on the summit now. I mean, landed in heavy air quotes. The FAAI definition of landed, which is the rotors are still turning, but it's like on the ground for two minutes, you know? Yeah, they've touched the screen. Everist basically, yeah.

So we're looking at a nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded type situation. It's exactly a parking in New York, Everest, things of this nature. Yeah, it's one of the reasons that like people who are committed mountaineers don't do this route anymore. They either do something far more terrifying or they do it without supplemental oxygen

or they do it in winter, which is another, it's just incredibly scary thing to do. But they don't do this anymore because, yeah, because it's this now. Yeah, and as sort of further evidence of the circus, if we go to the next slide. So this is Everest base camp. And this is, this is a luxury activity for rich decades now. You see these glamping motherfuckers in the giant space domes.

Surprise. They don't just build permanent structures at this point. Yeah. I mean, we'll sort of get to why that is, but yeah, and the ice camp is not, is not like permanently occupied, and it now can't be. But it's still too high, is the short answer. This is, you're still like, climatizing on the way up just by being here. Yeah, this is a Everest base camp, is at 5,200 or something. So that's 16,000, 17,000 feet up in the sky. Some of the people can't stay there anyway. Like it sits even at this altitude, people start being quite extravagantly sick. Yeah, it's a very pleasant, extravagantly sick. I haven't been and I don't really want to, but from what I understand,

Everest base camp is a very, very weird atmosphere. Just by virtue of the people and the situation, and just all of this luxury stuff, the Sherpas had to carry this up, install it, and then they're going to have to break it back down and carry it down again. Like none of this stuff is staying here over winter. down and carry down again. Like, none of this stuff is staying here over winter. And it just feels so gross as the main thing. It's wrong. It's like, you're looking at something that, like, nature

and, you know, common sense dictates should not remotely be there. And yeah, it is because rich dickhead tourism. It's, yeah, it, it, it, I get just kind of not good just from looking at it. So somehow we've told you why it's gross. We go to the next slide. We enter our next section, which is how you actually do it. What it's like walk a lot. Yeah. Yeah. A little bit of big. Yeah. Before we get up, you know, before you can put your boots on and put your crampons on and start, you know, your track to the roof of the world. Next slide, please. You have to pay a certain amount of money.

Fuck. It's a change right there. Yeah. There was a house in some places. There was one guy who tried to do it on the cheap and got away with paying $7,000, but he did freeze to death in front of a lot of people. So, you know, you got to pay. It sounds like he didn't get away with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's not really a thing where you can get a deal on self-guiding.

Yeah. Take the self-guided tour. Everest. Yeah, so this is just a screenshot from a website that sort of collates all the different companies that are available. G now just touching the microphone. Yeah, dog is near the microphone. So what you see here, this is just a snapshot.

It only goes as you see from e to i. So this is not all the companies that are doing it. There's there's like a whole bunch more that are off screen. And the cost, as you can see, is anywhere between 35K and 125, oh, sorry, 200,000 for the Fertabac signature adventure trek up Everest. What the hell is that? Oh, they probably like put you one of the domes, you know, you know, you got, you got a sunscreen. You get, you get, you get, you get, you get, you get taken up and a pressurized sedan chair. Well, there is a, what there is a pressurized way, but that's not what you want to do. Like evacuation bag. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, the other

thing is that like, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the other thing is because base camp isn't assessing what doesn't have rules. Like you can pitch a bunch of tents wherever you can clear it. So a lot of these companies will like have their own sort of separate adjunct camp. And you can be like, oh, this is, you know, the high max camp or whatever, the ultra prestige level where you've got to have like a fucking landing or something to get in. And we've, you know, we've, we made a guy carry an espresso machine up here or whatever. Yeah. So like, as these are just the prices for like the expedition itself, then there is like

a whole bunch of stuff on top. Roughly speaking, it cost most people, including airfare and stuff, about 10,000 years dollars to get there and back. You pay another $11,000 this season for the margineering permit. You pay a $4,000 non-refundable trash deposit because all the shit that you use needs to get taken out, although it frequently doesn't, and it's really gross. We'll talk about it later.

Yeah, so there is, you have to hire local people at another five and a half K roughly speaking, and then you have to pay for your own supplies. And that is about 30K per person. That includes like your gear at stuff. And it also, in like 99% of people includes your need for supplementary oxygen bottles, which cost about $500 a person, because the sherpas have to carry them up the extremely dangerous route. And you'd need at least five

of those per person to make any series bit further for the summit. We'll talk about them in a little bit. Saving somebody by cutting out the oxygen and just lying. That's why I think you're... I got two oxygen tanks right here. I slapped my chest and immediately fall. Yeah, if you're wondering, by the way, I think I have this right. If you're looking at the bottom two, it says international mountain guys, brackets, hybrids, and then bracket, Sherpa, I think bracket hybrid means also white guide. I'm fairly sure that's what that means.

I think bracket hybrid means also white guide. I'm fairly sure that's what that means. That's a, you know, in case you're in case you're for the racists. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fully. That's for South Africa. I mean, I could be wrong about that. And, you know, but this comes out in America. So freedom of speech, fuck you.

What was it? And like, it's a good income for like professional mountaineers to like help haul people up mountains like this. It certainly is. So you've paid a bunch of money. You've hired, you know, you're getting domed off in the tent. But I have a bunch of thoughts about the economics of getting domed off in the tent that I'll get to later on when we get to like 2014. Yeah. Next slide, please. I mean, sex workers, it is a real thing thing maybe not a base camp necessarily but like There's yeah, no it can't go Graham

Right, yeah, the actual mountaineering. Yeah, so this shows the main path. This is the path that Hillary and Tending Sherpa took It is it is the main trade route. This is where I forget it goes because as Alice already mentioned The other main route is through Tibet, which China closes a lot and has a bit more problems with you parking your big ass dome, whereas Nepal doesn't have that.

Some sort of like fragment of communism survives in the CPCs institutional memory where it's like no flat screen dome. There are, I should also mention, because like this is a bit important, because like serious mountaineering still gets done on this route as well. So there are 14 other lines to get up this mountain, which includes the picture on the right, that is the 2004 Russian Dyrtismar Northface route, Dyrtismar meaning the most direct line possible.

Just the most Russian thing to be like, I call I'm mountain, you just go straight up. Real salt mentality, yes. I mean, that picture only shows like the the the the final end of the like the top of the route, but obviously that's a little bit different than going for a walk. That was an astonishing feat of mountaineering. And obviously no guide in their right mind is gonna take you up that, because you would both die. It's like imagining the fucking dentist who paid 100K

to get to the summit of Everest. He's like on the top taking photos for the gram and then like to rush and guys hold themselves in the side of the taxi. It's so difficult. Yes, it's true. It's like lit. We have Climbs Street straight because Boris Subair.

Yeah. Just you're from the guy's like, what did you pack your oxygen? And he just pull out bottle after bottle after bottle of vodka. And two and two collationic carbs. Never know what is the snowbet celebration. We got far on the route. Yeah, basically, so why apart from, you know, China not letting you get domed off, do people take this, this route? It's because it's the easiest.

It's also why Hillary and Tensing did it in this particular manner. Yeah, I do find it funny that they chose to name the climbing brand, the North Face, the ubiquitous one, when, as you see, the North Face is the one that the Russians are climbing up vertically like Spider-Man, it's like sort of turning point Everest, interesting, you wear the North Face and get you climb the South Eastern face. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, technically speaking wear the North Face and get you climb the South Eastern face. Yeah. Yeah. You I mean, technically speaking, the North Face like now, most of their stuff is for like more for people want to look like I'm up near and just like, I don't know, go to the big Tesco. But so they just have Jack, it's a warm.

Are you catching sprays over here? Yeah. But like, if you want to be a cool dude, they make the summit series these days, which is they are like, oh, you actually mean it stuff. Anyway, different conversation and I support other brands as well. Big, big Arctarex guy. Now I live in Switzerland, so mama. Yeah. Essentially, the big way to do this is certainly up to cap three is you need to acclivatize. That means you need to go to base camp, stay there for really long time,

because like your body, and especially your lungs need to get used to the air being thin and there being more CO2, and it, you know, not essentially being very good for you. So your lungs need to train. So what you do is you stay for a long time in base camp, then you make your way to camp two, you stay there for a bit, you go down, you go back up, you go to camp three, you go back down, and then you do that for a couple of weeks,

and then you hope you get a good weather window, and then you make the summer push to camp four, and then the summer. Yeah, that would be really important, Liza. Yeah, because the weather windows are often very small, because as you will imagine, the tallest mountain on earth catches some wind and other weather. And also, as I said before, even at base camp, because it's over 5,000 meters in altitude, you can already get acute mountain sickness in various and delightful forms from the altitude, and you might even need to get helicoptered out base camps or rep before you start going to the... And some sort of bad, actually start climbing. Yeah, I mean, listen,

if you need to get helicopter doubt in like the worst situations, dead or alive, they will just sling you under a helicopter, you know, in just deal with that, you know. You will also need some other bits, next slide, please. Yeah, so this is sort of similar to what we've seen before. Like, basically, if you are paying, you are not going up there like a big hero,

because you are presumably far too incapable to like install your own ropes and manage your own self. So what you do is you clip onto a fixed line. That's what you see before you. That's why literally, these people are walking in a line. And that's because the Sherpa Guides have gone in front of you ahead of the big summit weather windows and they have built a path for you. They maintain the path, they build camps, all that stuff. So basically, what they do is they fix long lines of rope to the mountain and what you do is you clip, you clip into the rope and

then you put one foot in front of the other and then you get to a transition point, you clip into another rope and then you continue until you reach the summit or as the case might be not. Yeah, so you may, from looking at this picture, the one before have sort of off your road free will come across some of the problems that arise when there's a big queue and everybody's on the same rope. And you can't detach yourself from the rope. Mountaineering sort of like free spirited individualistic activity. Yeah, I'm the fucking rope.

Everybody in line. Get on the rope, shut up. I'm pretty sure there's enough demand here that they could put in a car railway. That's an answer for no experience. Yeah. The only problem is you will have to rebuild the car railway constantly. Every day. Yes.

You just devoid the glacier, you know? Okay. The D-R-T-R-T-R-S-I-E-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I-S-I That's an elevator. Yeah. No, it's sideways. It's a railway. You could do like the young Ferrari arc and have most of it in a tunnel. Yeah, I mean, the IGA has a tunnel too. I mean, there was a, so China did say in 2015 that they were going to build a rail tunnel under Everest, but they also said they were going to do that by 2020. So there's a lot of other things. I like the idea of a bunch of people like standing on the other side, like looking at the

watch and just kind of stamping the finger on when it's fucking drunk. I'd be funny if they had like they have an emergency exit from the tunnel at the peak of Everest. I mean, there are some trains and there's a lot of stairs and Tibet that you have to get a doctor's note to ride because the air is so thin that like even just being a passenger is dangerous. Oh, yeah, it's they call they go way way up there. The cars are pressurized in everything. You know, so that them when you get off at Laza, then you get the altitude sickness instantly. The altitude sickness that goes you instantly. We'll talk about that.

We will. Well, we'll talk about that. We'll get 35. So that brother. Yeah. Get special. These are locomotives for the atmosphere, which were made in Erie, Pennsylvania. Nice. Shout out. But you know, like, as you can see, like, again, none of this is possible without the Sherpas, because they are the people who make the ropes that allow you to haul your fat ass up there. Next slide, please. But you to haul your fat ass up there. If you don't want to haul your fat ass up there. Next slide please. I'm most about you to haul your fat ass up there if you don't want to haul your fat ass up there anymore. Also that, yes. This is the other thing you need. Basically, you need

supplemental oxygen because your body, nobody's body, is designed to be at these altitude for really any serious length of time or at all. These are also carried up and placed there by Shurpa Sport teams who therefore have to make several very dangerous crossing through the Kumbu Ice Fools. We'll get there. But yeah, that's what this looks like. This is Camp 2. I think, oh, Camp, yeah, I think it's Camp 2. And like, basically, you have to, you have to do it this way. These are picks from what are the guiding companies. I can't remember which one, also I don't care, it's not promo. They charge about 10,000 US dollars for you to enjoy the privilege of breathing while going up Everest. You can also not have that optional extra.

Yeah, so as a brief site now before we move on, during the pandemic, obviously the Nepalese healthcare system is not the best in the world. During the COVID pandemic obviously the Nepalese healthcare system is not the best in the world. During the COVID pandemic, the Nepalese government was actually begging climbers and expeditions to bring their empty oxygen tanks back down to Kathmandu because the country had run out of supplemental oxygen and they really didn't need it to treat some patients. If you want to have a nice glimpse of the disparities between how different people live in this world. Not as important as getting your orthodontist up a mountain. No.

Tourism is a great thing to base an economy on. The healthiest, isn't it? I mean, the one thing you don't necessarily need on the mountain, but that you definitely leave on the mountain is next slide, please. Oh, my God. Look at these beautiful views. Wasn't this worth going halfway around the world and paying $100,000 for? Yeah, so there's a real spectrum here, like whether it's like you throw a drink bottle over the side or whether it's you leave your mummifying corpse on the mountain.

Where you deserve to be, let's be very clear about that. Yeah, anything that goes up has to come back down or it just stays there. And because Everest is one of the driest places in the world, it like preserves stuff very, very well, even stuff that isn't plastic. Also, the piss and the shit, because people should do be shitting. You do gotta shit somewhere.

And the traditional mountaineering thing to do for this is you just kind of dig a hole and shit wherever you might not bother with the whole And someone has worked out that each season you leave about 12,000 kilograms about 26 and a thousand 26 and a half thousand pounds of shit on Everest like literal shit It's like not at all uncommon when you're like pitching tense at camps to be dodging other people's shit frozen all

Yeah, or just frozen turds at that point, you're probably adding more weight to the mountain and shit than play tectonics are adding to the mountain and rock every year. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, it might be shrinking. We're actually not sure. Um, but yeah, no, I think Everest is still growing. I think every thing. But like even stuff like, you know, used oxygen canisters, like increasingly get recycled, but still a lot of them just get dumped. We keep this up for a couple million years. That's going to be a geological feature. Yeah, these the small yellow ones are like camping stove fuel for cooking, a lot of like drinks containers and stuff. And this is a view for a lot of it. Yeah, except higher up when there's slightly more corpses in your view, but rainbow valley. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So at this point, you have your line, you have your oxygen,

So at this point, you have your line, you have your oxygen, you've had it shit. Let's start going up the mountain. Next slide please. This is the Kumbu Icefall. This is a picture from 2015. It changes every year because as you can see, this is where a very, very big glacier tips over into terrain that was slightly hanged at a higher angle. And therefore, it is not a solid glacier anymore, but a very broken up, bubbly field with giant blocks of ice called Srax. And every year, before the commercial season starts, specialized teams of climbers, Nepalese Sherpas go up and create a new route through this death trap. Because all of this is very slowly but very surely shifting downward. Because it's a glacier, it moves.

So it's unstable, and a lot of these blocks can and occasionally do tip over. And people underneath it don't tend to survive that kind of thing. Like I said at the very beginning, tell me that putting a root through here with like ropes and aluminum ladders isn't fucking engineering. Look me dead in the eye and tell me that that's not some serious fucking engineering work.

Justin just like, well, yeah, okay, but you could, but you could maybe sort of dig into the rock on the side here and build a staircase and I'm thinking, you know, I have some kind of like concrete over it. You need another snow shed is the thing, but probably those are just looking at Everest. This isn't some ways that like most dangerous, but on the numbers, it's more dangerous because, you know, more people go through it. You have to go through it multiple times. You try and time it so that you do it when

the ice is most stable, it's at least stable on the day because the sun's melting it. But yeah, this is the kind of thing that needs a lot of staging through and building those roots and maintaining those roots and moving all of your oxygen canisters and camping for your stoves, like packs and stuff is very, very dangerous work, which is why it gets done by Sherpas. Surprise, surprise. Yeah, as an orthodontist, you only do this like five times or something. If you're the Sherpas supporting the orthodontist, you will do this many, many more fucking times. Although the guys who put up these roots are called the ice doctors, which I think is just a very cool job name. And I don't want their jobs because I like living, but I do think it's a cool job name.

So now you come through base camp and at the top of the ice fall where this sort of all stabilizes again is camp one and from camp one you go to camp through two and that is through the Lodsy ice face. Next slide please. Big wall. Big big big, big icy, big, glaciated wall. Again, here you can see the fixed lines that everybody is on all the time. Basically, what you do is you clip on with a thing called a, called a Juma. You have two of them. Basically, it's slide Juma up the rope, kick the cramp on, kick the cramp on slide, the Juma up the rope, kick the cramp on, kick the cramp on, and so on and so forth until you get to camp 3 and ultimately the summit. This is, as you can imagine, certainly at the altitude, very, very hard and very, very difficult, not that difficult, like technically, but it is very, very hard because you're exerting yourself at a very high altitude.

And as you can see, most people will, at this point, be already wearing their like full down suits. And the sun does hit the loads you face in the afternoon. So you can do this, you know, kick-stepping at many thousands of feet in the air, whilst also boiling because the sun is cooking your down suit. So, right before we get to cap three, the slope angle goes to more like 40 or 50 degrees, which I think is what you see on the right. Which is just, yeah, the last bit is, yeah. But then you reach the delightful safety of camp three. Uh, next slide, please. You can, you can have another shit here. You can throw an oxygen canister down the, down the face and like, kill a bunch of people. Oh, that'd be funny. Yeah, whatever you want.

You can play guzzardo. Yeah, I definitely want to roll something down this slope here. You couldn't stop me from rolling something. No, no, I would be one of those cheese rolling competitions. They sat. Yeah, I need any like a big boulder or something, you know. Have you just invented the sport of orthodontist bowling? Is that what? Yeah.

I got a shove the Indiana Jones rock down the slope. You're like at the bottom of the climb. You're like hooked in. You see the Indiana Jones rock at the top. You're like, oh boy. I can read you wrong. I can read you wrong. This is one for the offensive bowling animations YouTube guys. I hate it when I get a 7 10 orthodontes split. They're so fucking hard to clean up. Get in there, Dr. Powers. Get in there. Get out of the red flinced on this one. It's a living, I say, as I ball it or the hardest it was. Yeah, I don't want to spend too long here, but basically all I wanted to do was point out, you see how all those tents are sort of horizontal on this incredibly sloped piece of glacier. That's because the shrapers go up every year and hack out like horizontal platforms for you to put your tent up. Well, for them to also put your tent up

so you can collapse and heap inside it. Just, you know, again, 99% of people would not be doing it without the incredible logistics and support of vastly underpaid people who take incredible risks to get your fat ass up there. Ah, next slide, please. Well, it's still hard enough physically that it makes you feel like you're doing something really difficult, but you are, but it's been

not when surfing you fucking pussy. Yeah. I will be I will be in the Tiki bar. This is one of the problems of climbing every season that you're hooked onto the thing climbing up and there is going to be like a mountaineer or like some extreme sports guy who is like on some shit on the way down in an unconventional manner. You know, you're climbing up and you're climbing up and you're like, okay. All right, Guy. There was a, I want to say it's a Slovakian guy whose name escapes me, who skied from the summit of Everest all the way down to base camp.

What the fuck? Yeah, that was just up the guys. He came down on like wingsuits. Yeah. That's it. Anyway, this is on a good day. Again, foreshadowing what happens when there's a good weather window. This is everybody moving up to camp four for a summit push. And somehow between camps three and four, you encounter this thing. It's called the yellow band.

As you can see, it's limestone. You just need to do a quick bit of traversal at about 26,000 feet. And the robot is extremely gem stuff. I'm massive out of it. Right. And if you slip, you, you are suckin' some dog. Well, you're on your face, boy. If you, shut up. I don't know. If you went out for like a small local hike and you just saw this, like, you were like,

oh, I'm just gonna get up that. You wouldn't think twice about doing this because like, as you can see, it's not like a technical thing to do. It's just trying to do this at like a rock angle between 20-30 degrees at this altitude while we're in crampons while exhausted while carrying oxygen is not that easy. Also it takes about two hours to traverse this band and if you slip it takes you a long time to get up and everybody else behind you has to wait because there's only the one fixed line. So do try not to do that.

I'm seeing this kind of pedestrian load with this amount of vertical circulation and public transit brain in me is saying, what a fucking escalator in. I'm really enjoying the Rosniac program for how we ease these public transports. Okay, if we make it boring, no one will do it anymore and we won't have these problems. We just want to have a little, yeah, a little. The bus that goes up 9 million switchbacks. Yeah. Maybe we do run an escalator, but like at a slightly faster speed, so people think it's

frightening that way. Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. I think those high-speed moving walkways they have on the Paris Metro, except I'm not sure how you do the speed transition on an escalator. That's very confusing.

Someone will figure it out. So, yeah, you make your way from Camp 3 to Camp 4. Next slide, please. Almost made up. You're very close, and that is also sometimes the problem. You only have about 3,000 vertical feet to go at this point. The problem is because you can now see the summit, you can see the summit pyramid in the back there. You do tend to go a little loopy because

you are now so close, you can see the goal and you've paid so much money and it's so close and God, you just want to get up there. You know who cares what the weather's doing is fine. You'll be fine. Don't worry about that. And also like you are now officially in bodies, delightfully known as the death zone and your body really just doesn't want to be there. Just really doesn't want to be there. Yeah. So here's the thing, right? If there's a place called the fucking death zone, don't go there. Yeah. I would avoid it. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone.

You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone.

You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone.

You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the death zone. You would avoid the fuck around. So yeah, you are now between the South Corp of Everest at 26,000 feet and the summit at 29,035 feet. Yeah, this is, I think this is from an interview with Simone Morrow again. I'll just read a little bit. Climbing at this altitude is a cocktail of euphoria and deep suffering, stars pop in your peripheral vision, the moisture drains out of your body and your voice becomes thin, tainted by something you can't put your finger on, the moisture drains out of your body and your voice becomes thin, Tainted by something you can't put your finger on. A fit climber with a resting heart, heart rate of 45% per minute, can crumple on an easy snow slope. You think you're in control until you have to do something very simple, say,

a simple, small stove that you've put together a thousand times before. You can't do that anymore. Mountaineering at Extreme L2 has nothing to do with normal mountaineering. Up there, every single step is torture, every moment becomes sadly difficult. Actually, this is in the view with Harbolo, one of the guy who did it without oxygen with man. It's insane, like Austrian mystics, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, like over half of all deaths on Everest occur here, the others mainly in the

ice fall below. That's because literally like your body is not designed to be at these altitudes. Physiologically, it doesn't want to be there. Like for example, the lack of oxygen in your blood slows down wounds closing. So if you like get a little bit lupian and clumsy because you're at this altitude and like you cut yourself on your crampons or your ice axe, they don't close so well no more. You also tend to not eat or drink very well because you're so fatigued like you can't make yourself do it.

So you do tend to be constantly pushing yourself forward on empty and also you haven't really been sleeping because try sleeping with an oxygen mask on or off at 26,000 feet. I'm still with the CPAP, but I'm fucking fine, but I guess I'm just built different. You'd be fine. Yeah. See you on the mountain next season. That's all I gotta say. All right, W-T-Y-P-S-S-E-R-S. I have a question. Which is, you have all these effects of hypoxia, what you have at oxygen mask,

is the oxygen just not sufficient or how does that work? Well, the problem is like if you can turn like the dial up and just have like full blast oxygen and get a nice night's sleep, but then you probably won't have enough oxygen in that same bottle to make the summit the next day. So you're basically trading off, like basically you're sort of living at a minimum viable level. So that when it comes to the summit push,

you have just enough liters of compressed oxygen to just make it back up and back down. But like it is very much. It's very much on the edge. Yeah, the liposome factor's like weight of oxygen canister. Yeah. What they could do is put a big pressurized dome over the sun. Run an oxygen line up there.

Or not even that. It would just be a large ventilation system at that point. You know, I'm just saying, there's engineering solutions to all these problems. I think it goes like the palm jamaria at the boggut and just like making a tiny Everest on Everest and putting a bunch of luxury condos on them. Yeah, another thing that you have apart from the hypoxia, which is affecting your higher cognitive functions, such as decision making, which probably don't need up there. No, don't get rid of that. The other thing is because of the lack of oxygen, you have these

huge hormones, surgeons of epinephrine, epinephrine and dopamine. While your actual body is decaying, you have these periods where you feel incredibly exuberant and capable of doing anything. You know, at a time where that might not necessarily be true. Right. You know, you feel like it could push for the summit at a time when it's unsafe. Yeah. Yeah. And also like apart from, you know, that's all the quite a great regular stuff that the main thing is that everyone does tend to get is you need to go back down the mountain because people tend to burn themselves up to get to the summit.

And on your way down, maybe you just take a step left instead of right and you just pop off like 8,000 feet or you maybe you sit down because actually you're quite tired and you just fall asleep and never wake up and then you become a popsicle. You become a landbars. Yeah, unless a mess and ship is when you go up and carry your ass down, you just stay there.

You become a landmark because, you know, like we said, it's very dry, you just get mummified, you know? Yeah. And like, it's very dangerous doing that. There was a woman called Hannah Laura Schmatz, who died in a sort of like very obvious position. Again, just just of exhaustion, just like collapsed. When people felt bad. This like Nepalese police inspector and a Sherpa went up to bring her down. Both of those guys

died, just like fell off the mountain. So yeah, it's yeah, for a while for a long time. Many years, those this, this corpse green boots, because you know, they do just went headfirst into a snow drift, only things sticking out these these bright green mountain nearing boots. And I think his body lasted up there until, like, actually got swept off the mountain, like. I thought they brought him down eventually. I'm so tired to run out of it. It's very hard.

Like, there was earlier this year, there was a bit of controversy around, I forgot her name, the Norwegian woman, who was, well, the first to do, like, the 14, 8,000ers without oxygen and like she she did it. But the last one she did was K2 and there was control of sears to whether or not they had walked past like a dying climber basically

and not helped. And it's like, I can't remember what happened there, whether that was true or not. But like the basic thing is you are already so pushing yourself to the limits of human functioning that the thought of like carrying another like 200 pounds of human in a down suit is pretty much you're not doing that. If you sit down there, you fall there unless like a handful of extraordinary human beings come by like the show.

Strong man, right. Yeah. You're dead and you're staying there and like, you know, not helping is not just like, not easy. It's very liable to get you killed as well. That's why that's generally speaking. Not possible. Yeah. Anyway, you're very close to the sub of now and all you have to do is next slide, please. You have to get over this thing. This is called the Hillary step. It was very, very famous. This is on the left hand Step. It was very, very famous. This is on the left-hand side, you see what it looked like before the 2015 earthquakes. And on the right side, what it looks like today.

So this was at about 8,790 meters up. It is a series of 12 individual moves on this big block. You see on the left-hand side. And very obviously this is a big bottleneck because like you can't have five guys going up there at the same time. It's one person at a time and I think you can only descend like if one person is descending, nobody's going up at the same time. The climbing is not very hard. Again, if you saw this in a park and you felt reasonably confident in like base level climbing, you would just do this.

I could probably do this on a good day. If it weren't for that row, I was a big row. I'm worried about shit. Now, if you'll, if you'll join me on my, well, there's your problem in bezels, $300,000 to go. They are getting the prestige package. Yeah, the racist package. Yeah, a quick side note, if you do this without the fixed line, if you fall from the left-hand side, you fall 8,000 feet straight down the left side of the mountain. And if you fall from the right side, you fall 10,000 feet down the mountain on the other side. So don't do that.

I'll do that. I mentioned Rainbow Valley earlier. This is a little geographical feature you can see from the summit of Everest. And this is all the people who did one of those two things. It's called Rainbow Valley because it's a lot of dead bodies in very brightly colored climbing gear. So they're just sissing and having eaten know, having eaten shit on some jagged rocks.

On the other hand, your situational awareness rapidly improves as you get all that more oxygen in you as you drop that part. You have a bed in like hours, days. Don't worry. Nothing bad is going to happen to your corpse. I'm taking the joke about the, the, you know, I'm taking you down the left shaft. I'm taking down your corpse's boots. I'm taking a, I'm taking that jacket to all have that. Well, they out of their expensive jacket. So, you know, probably a resell bucket for them. I'm making my money. Exactly. A lot of expensive climbing gauges left up there, absolutely, going back in. Yeah. Anyway, after that, yay, congratulations.

Next slide, please. You did it. You did it. You did it. Congratulations. Congratulations. You've suffered an Everest. This is the whole size of the summit, by the way.

That's small. It's snowing ice. I mean, it's a summit. And you can get some photos to stick in your, like, waiting room, because you are an orthodontist. And maybe your secretary will finally look at you and bang you, like you've always been wanting to shoot. And you deserve to be so unhappy.

It's a fun story to tell at a wedding reception. It's true. Or at least you think it's fun. The people you're telling it to may not. Maximum time up here is like half an hour max. And then you, you want to get down sooner rather than later because this is a good way to just become exhausted and leave it too late and you have to climb down in the dark

when you can't see and it's much colder when you die. Yeah, that's, that's not foreshadowing, by the way, that's just a coincidence that we're talking about that. If you go to the next slide, I have saved you all several hundred thousand dollars. This is the view from the summer of Everest. Now you don't have to go. You're welcome. This does count for your college credits, still.

You're going to have to go. You can now say, somewhat evasively, I have seen the view from the top of Mount Everest. You know what would be your goal? You're going to have to go climb Anapurna now, sorry. We're the other Anapurna's in the lives of Matt and for instance Anapurna. If we get stupid rich, what we should do is open a college. That's objectively the funniest thing we could do. If we get stupid rich, the funniest thing we could do

is do some really high altitude art installation. You know the like, you know, towns in Montana or whatever that have like a, you know, go sports team thing on the side of the mountain overlooking town. We do one of those, I'm like nook say, so that anyone who has to go up to the matter of the summer that it gets to see,

like well, there's your problem written in stones or spray something on one of these. Big, big welded girders, like on the summit ridge of �. Yeah, I'm funding the car railway to the top of Everest. That's just what I'm doing. This is a safety hazard, this whole thing. If the love of people want to go up there, we've got to start fixing some shit.

So remember what we said about how we weren't doing any foreshadowing. Next slide, please. A little presentation I've put together within a presentation of the ways you're going to die. Yeah. Now, what's not commonly known is this actually used to say ways the mountain will kill you, land. Those letters. If we go to the next slide, please, I'll run us through the major hazards. We've kind of touched on most of these already, but so this is a this is a Sirac. This is the bottle Nekke too,

so called, which is climbing up an ice slope towards. Ah, freaks me out just looking at it. It's just like that whole world or bits of it is liable to like just pop off and crush you at any fucking time. So so so rack is like an ice overhang big ice cube and the these move and it's like an essential part of how glaciers like descend. And if one of these falls on you you you may be get crushed by the entirety of it, which is like a block of ice to size of a house or a side-row. Look at the kill zone.

Yeah, you just, you might get hit in the head by a rock and killed if it misses you. You might die in an avalanche that it starts if it misses you. These are really, really bad news and an absolutely routine occurrence and you're just like dodging these. It's also sometimes,

because it's like, you're like the draw, you might be fine. It might have a hole in it and you have sort of a buster keyed in situation, you know? Yeah. Absolutely people alive have had like very, very near misses where like a block of ice, the size of like, you know, VW has gone past them and missed them by like inches, you know? So that's a Sriracha.

If you didn't have that euphoria from just like the hypoxia, you will have it after that fucking thing misses you. Next slide, please. You know, the weather. Now, weather takes many forms. You could get lost in the storm and die. You could get to your coldness storm and die. You could shelter from a storm at the wrong time or in the wrong place and die. And because you're so far

up, the wind speed is like, you know, up to like 200 miles an hour, so you might just get blown off into a chasm and die. But also it's on a better so This is, this is why we're talking about like weather windows. This is why that's important is if it is like, yeah, if there is a storm coming in and like if you're able to forecast that, you're not climbing the mountain. And this is true of any mountain. Like you can die in Scotland this way. People do every winter, every year, every year, people dying, die. Yeah, easily like, oh,

Scotland, Scotland's easy mode. I'm in rowbacking. And next thing you know, Oh, Scotland's easy mode. I'm Monroe backing. And next thing, you know, mountain rescue, like hauling your frozen corpse off of Blanco, or whatever. Yeah, Ben, Ben never seen Blanco, are like quite famous for just like slaughtering people who didn't see you coming. Yeah, because it's kind of the thing.

It's like, it doesn't have the like cultural cache that Everest does, and it's like, you can get a train there. And so people are like, yeah, I can just walk up in trainers, you know? know, it seems like I just a nice, you know, a nice stroll up a hill and then suddenly boom. And you're gasping for breath and dying. Absolutely. That's why that's why I limit my hiking to the Mill Mountain star in Rona, which I'm about to put a goddamn railway on. Yeah. Next slide, please. This is another, another CUMBOR ice-full favorite.

This is a Krovas. Krovas is French for whole. Don't fall in the hole. Don't do that. Don't go in the hole. That's really bad. These are generally like bridge with these, like, aluminium ladders, like you can see.

You get a bunch of them, like, lashed together. As you can see, these can go really, really long. And for the most part, they stay stable unless they don't and you just get pitched off the ladder and die, or you know, attached to a rope and you have to like haul yourself out. Sometimes which is possible, but like do it at, you know, 7,000 meters up. While wearing a lock kit and not being able to breathe. It is like, it's not difficult rope work, but like at that altitude, you can't light a stove. So good luck. Or, you know, you have to have the shepherds haul you out and like build a rope system.

possible, but, you know, they're going to, yeah, also fun kick your kidneys out and you deserve it. Fun detail about crevasses. These can and do regularly get like snow bridges over them where You get like a thin layer of like snow and ice that forms over the top that isn't enough to support a person's weight but does make it invisible and Yeah, so sometimes you can just like disappear down a hole that is you know hundreds of meters deep

Yeah, and then Of a glacier and I think they two years ago something they And then, uh, the bottom of a glacier. And I think they two years ago, something they, because like the great glaciers are retreating now, and occasionally they find not as much people, but like people that are now millimeters thin and scraped, because they've been caught between two ice layers because of a caress. Um, so they are very, very big pancakes now. Do you know what preserved pancakes are of vol-falls yourself? Isn't that like the thing that like Anna Perner likes to do is that it kills you and then it choose you up and then it spits you out like months later?

Oh yeah. Next slide, please. This is my favorite slide because I have to talk about medical stuff. I really like that for some reason, even though I have no interest in medical care. So we mentioned the death zone. Your brain doesn't like you going up that high.

This is all sort of variant symptoms of AMS, acute mountain sickness, which sometimes you just go to base camp and your body doesn't like it and you can't climb the mountain and you might die anyway. And in it's sort of like most serious forms, AMS takes sort of three manifestations. There's hape and hape, which I always really enjoy. Haces are high altitude cerebral edema, which is your brain goes bad. Hapes are high altitude, pneumonal edema, which is your lungs go bad. And then hape is high altitude, flatulence expulsion, which is you get the fart. These are all genuine, like recognize two of them can kill you instantly, stone dead, and the third one is you get fart.

Yeah. So, this is also do with localized hypoxia, as is frostbite, which we'll also talk about. But essentially, this air pressure or lack of it for very, very bad for you. And I include an image of haste-in-juiced brain herniation, which is when under that lack of pressure, brain are the best. Yeah. So if you see the gap between the brain and the skull, which would normally be full of like, meninges and CSF. Yeah. Ideally, you want your brain to be air-gepped. That's kind of important for you to live.

That's brain in there, because the brain has just like, yeeted itself out into the lining of the skull. It's not good, and this does not make for good cognitive function. Yeah, apart from eating itself against your skull, it can also do the other thing, which is quite literally, you know, increase in size and then try to escape out the base of your skull. That is also not good for your continued existence. Yeah. Yeah. The the the E in both of these is edema, which is swelling. And essentially what's happening is your body is trying like fuck to oxygenate you and it's it's going too hard and you just rupture something, you know, you rupture

a bunch of blood vessels in your lungs or your brain swells and like, you know, damages itself that way. And you know, the symptoms of these are like a mistakeable progressive, very fast in onset and can just kill you, stone dead if you are not like off the mountain immediately. Which is where to where we get to the evacuation bag. This is the thing. Yeah, yeah. So it's a relatively recent invention. I think it's a portable hyperbaric chamber. It's got a gamma bag.

It's an I love this picture because it just looks like a fucking ad from the 1980s. Like, there should be coke, like a Coca-Cola written on the side of this thing. It's a great, I love it. If you're in this, you're not having a good time. Is the thing. You're having a horrible time. But like, for the ad, they can't show that.

So it's just like, yeah, check this shit out. Check it out. Yeah. Have a good time. Yeah, so you need to be at a lower altitude and it's easier to put you in a pressurized environment that it is to get you to a lower altitude. So just put your one in.

Yeah, especially as you get progressively high up from like certainly camp three onwards, lowering someone down the loads you face and then getting them, you know, in an incapacitated state through the ice falls, you can imagine what it would be like to try to do that. Yeah, to think they should just be able to roll it down, you know, it's a cylinder. I think that's way to do it. Yeah, like curve off to the side and like go down like, you know, an 8,000 meter drop. Yeah. So yeah, what they basically do is they just like, they fully stick you in there.

Yeah. So yeah, what they basically do is they just like, they fully stick you in there. And then they fill the chamber with oxygen, so it simulates low raltitude. And hopefully that reduces the swelling in your brain. And then, you know, you can get down fingers crossed on your own two feet. But what they have also done in the past

is like they've taken people who are stuck inside these bags. And like with ropes lowered them down the louts you face back to camp 2, which you got to imagine, that's got to be quite the trip. The other thing is we think slung underneath helicopters. Like wild. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up.

Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. Try not to wake up. bag, I asked Jen with a guy inside. And the thing is, dude, you're inside having a bad time, but and then this is another problem for us to use with or without this bag, you're having a bad time in a way that

may be non-cooperative, right? Because particularly with Hase, you know, symptoms of, well, any kind of neurological symptoms can often include confusion, aggression, panic, all things which are not conducive to being helped off a mountain. And much less so when you're inside a big back, what they could do, I'm thinking the two ways you could do it is you could have a big slide off the side of the mountain. You just sort of jog the little thing. One of those air-lied slides just whoosh. The other thing is if you had like more of a solid thing is you get to have a cannon right,

and then have a parachute attack. All right, I've lost the leg. And obviously I'm always down to hear my cannons. Yeah, my my my moot here is extremely high altitude helicopter that just blows a shitload of other people off the mountain in the course of the summer. Now what I think we should do is build that core railway and then get like what's the German railway gun

again? The gross subeta. And then just move that up there. And because it's like shoot people into Tibet, that'd be amazing. Yeah, the other thing that you have to do in this bag is you see the, you know, the Coca-Cola woman's doing it with her right foot is obviously while you're inside the bag, you're still breathing, and otherwise you get carbon oxide poisoning. So they have to like hand pump with like, well, those pumps that you would use to do like foot pumps that you would use for like a little inflatable

raft, if you're going down a river or something. And you have to like foot pump 20 times a minute at like 8,000 meters of altitude to keep your friend alive. Because if you stop pumping, they also die inside the bag. So this is another thing that would be solved by building the cog railways. You could get some electricity up there. Also, if you do tend to get in the bag and then survive it, people do tend to like form it a lot inside the bag. So it'll be very pleasant by the time you get out. And bear in mind, they're not buying a new bag after each use, you know, you're not

getting that close thing it out. That's obvious of each other. Speaking of hypoxic tissue injuries, if we go to the next slide, very briefly, I apologize in advance if you're grossed out by stuff close your eyes for a bit. Yeah, so we got to talk about Frostbite. Frostbite is not generally like, it's not a proximate cause of death, but it's pretty fucking nasty. This is the least worst picture I could find. Yeah.

I commend you on the effort of finding a picture that is not a zillion times worse than this. I wanted one that didn't have any like visible macrosis in it. So this is very early stage Frostbiteite and this is a matter of seconds between this and the like really bad kind. So any exposed tissue at like at high altitude is exposed to all of cold of course because both the temperature and the wind and because your body is like trying really hard to oxygenate you and so you get these hypoxic tissue injuries, most often in the extremities, right?

And particularly in the hands, particularly in the feet, particularly in the face, you like, there's a wild number of professional mountaineers who have just like lost their noses because it's one of the first things to go because you have like, you might not have, you have goggles on that protect your eyes and you might have like, you know, a scarf or a mask or something that protects your mouth, but like your nose is like more exposed and it might just die.

And yeah, it swells up, it blisters like this and then you get necrosis, which is when the tissue dies from lack of oxygen turns black and eventually falls off. And once that's said and there's nothing you can do about it. No, once it's black, you are fucked. You are losing it. Yeah. There's a lot of like, it's love self-amputation. There's a lot of like, sort of surgical amputation. When I read out of her, and one of the things I was struck by, was like, not knowing anything about how to treat frostbite or prevent frostbite,

when they started getting frostbite, one of the things they did to try and restore blood flow was just start whipping each other. What? You can try elaborate rituals to whip up a man half-half-half amount. No, but I mean, I understand the thought process behind it, but this of course makes it much worse, because like, you know, bruised skin, you know, he was... The thought process of just guys being dudes, and you know, Iised skin, you know, he was the thought process of just guys being dudes and, you know, I think that's fine. And yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so obviously if you get this,

particularly if you get it in the hands and the feet, makes it almost impossible to walk, or the whole tools, or like a rope, which, you know, it leads to you having a very, very bad time, do not lose your gloves, bring a spare pair of gloves. Next slide, please. Sorry, before we move off this one, please. What are the signs of severe frostbite, like hypothermia? I mean, is the reverse sensation, is that your body feels like it's burning up? So you do some drinks, who have hypothermia and they are like half-naked and have taken gloves off because they think they are burning up. So you know, it's fun. What's the good hypothermia?

What you could do to the human body. Yeah, absolutely. All right, if we go to the next slide, and everyone who has body horror from Frost White, I'm really proud of the visual. So yeah, sometimes I was ruined it for you. I'm so sorry. So you know how I said your eyes are mostly protected? Well, what are they? Not right? Sometimes being on the mountain, sometimes the mountain just blind to whenever it feels like it's sea attached image. So if you're looking at what one thing is that I changed the background of black when we do the actual slideshow. Imagine this as white. I thought it worked either way.

So I think it was snow-blind. It was actually red anyway. Could you look at the inside of your own blood vessels? Yeah, snow, very, very, very white, very reflective. And you're closer to the sun. Yeah, so snow, very, very, very white, very reflective. And you know, you're closer to the sun. There's a lot more UV radiation, which is just bouncing straight off the snow.

And you know, if you're ever looking at the sky out of that, directly into your eyes. If you don't have goggles that are protected against UV, then you will just experience snow blindness. You'll just like not be able to see anymore. Yeah, far from not being able to see at like further advanced stage of snow blindness, it can feel like you are constantly having sand in your eyes, which must feel delightful. Or you can literally no longer open them, they just chuck. And once again, much like the pressure bag, try rescuing someone who's slow-blind

when you yourself already fatigue and disoriented maybe from sub-integoverers and then taking them by the glaved hand, pray to God, and then leading them off the mountain without them teetering off the side because they can't see shit. Yeah, it's like, it's like when I accidentally touch my eyes after handling a Carolina Reaper

two days ago. I'm not a dumbass. The co-op is the dumbass for not stocking any other kind of pepper. It's okay, if you're like, it's fine. I have my like expensive goggles, you know, I'm not going to lose them. I brought an extra pair of goggles. I'm not going to go blind on Mount Everest. You can just do this anyway because another, another low pressure injury, you can get

retinal hemorrhages, which are much as they sound like, you know, it's really bad for your blood vessels and you need those. And if you have a blood vessel in your retina, that's like supplying your eye with blood, like ruptures, you don't see anything potentially. Are you just thinking about that? That really weird silicone phallic eye with the blood boy. Like, would he bring his blood boy up there and just let you wear his retina?

The thing is, it's not the blood, it's the blood vessels. You know, you would need to do do some interesting sort of like transplant surgery. But yeah, no, so you can just go blind out of nowhere. There was a guy who died doing exactly this because he's summited. And then on the descent was like blinded instantly, because I guess God picked him out and was like, nope, not this one. And yeah, perhaps I'm surprisingly died on the mountain. That's sufficiently virtuous. Yeah

Next slide, please So it by way of closing like how do you avoid all this stuff? How do we climb Everest as reliably as we do even though it's a dangerous enterprise? My short answer is oil Yeah, yeah, oh Boom oil. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, Patrick chemicals. Yeah, Patrick chemicals. Plastics. Because now we have waterproof insulating clothes as opposed to wool that get soaked. We have Gore-Tex, which is an incredibly unpleasant manufacturing process and also very hard to recycle or impossible, I think. Oh, totally, I'm still.

It's sustainable, yeah. But tell you what, it keeps you warm and dry. still ain't able to. Yeah. But tell you what keeps you warm and dry. You have like stronger eye sacks, stronger crampons. A lot of the old guys, you saw them just use like a fucking Alpenstock, just like a wood pole. Just like a wood pole with like a metal and aluminium like pick on it. Like boss that you do that, but also incredibly heavy, by the way, and also one of those things, it get a, because we were talking a little bit early about like, don't fall. Like most people, if not everybody has like their ice axe, like attached with a sling to their hands, because if you drop it, you are in real big, big trouble. But if you slip and you start falling and then you drop your ice axe, all of a sudden your ice axe is like wildly flailing about the mountain and maybe hitting you whilst you shoot down

the mountain. Very, very sure is that. As our prep points, which are also very pointy. But also blogs, single biggest thing, if I had to point to anything, it was the kind of thing when it was first developed, Mountain Ears thought it was cheating, because people's assent rates went up by a factor of 10. It's ridiculous how much having access to pure oxygen makes you better at climbing. Again, the limiting factor is you've got to carry it up there, or someone has to carry

it up there. But it makes all of this stuff possible. Better goggles, all of this stuff is lighter, so you can carry it more easily. Also, this is a strange detail, but I picked this up from a lot of mountaineering memoirs. The one thing that mountaineers in particular I've noticed, site is the difference that made this kind of like

golden age and mountaineering possible, isn't oxygen. It's rubber souls for boots. Like, right from souls, the grab is so much better Yeah, I have a couple of sets of boots with vibram on it and like it is Truly ridiculously awesome stuff like that. Yeah, the grip and the staying power and like it's not indestructible But it takes like it takes a real beating before it wasn't as it is Pretty spectacular. Yeah, I mean it's frozen. I mean, yeah, yeah, it's it's wild. All right, so that's that's how we do it, but you know, sometimes the answer to how do you how do you conquer all the stuff as you don't you just die and with that in mind you deserve it.

Our final presentation. I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm you're willing us to stick to a bit, even in the face of overwhelming displeasure and hatred. Love you so much. So yeah, you have stepped off the Hillary step and God is now giving you this presentation with like a stick, right? So next slide please. Obviously people have been dying ever since, you know, 1924 at the earliest, but I feel a good place to start would be 1996 because it changed a lot of the culture

around mountain area. Yeah, it was also the one where the broader public sort of went, well, what are people doing up there? And it was also after the advent of, like we said, like this was this was about a decade after Dick Pass and the advent of expensive advent tourism. So what you get is the 1996 disaster, John Crackow wrote a very, very famous book called Into Thin Air about it, although as its companion, you should probably also read if you want to, and it totally precreased the

climb, because there was certainly, let me put it mildly, some dispute over what exactly went on. Climbers love to put it to put out like dueling books, anapurnia and through summit, interthin air and the climb. There's like dozens of these. Yeah. Later on, the two mega Austrians or Messer and Hadler also fell out and did dueling books. Yeah, this is where mountaineers litigates stuff is in books. Yeah, so a total of eight climbers die in a window

of about 24 hours. The whole thing was made, later made into the movie Everest, which is surprisingly okay and quite good if wildly harrowing. And then maybe in that sense, not a falletine treat. Anyway, so what happens in 1996, this is in the early days of commercial climbing. Two teams called one expedition

called adventure consultants, the other one called mountain madness, great name by the way. I would not go with joking expedition. Yeah, I was about to say we've got on one hand we have mountain madness, which is full of mad manner. I'm going to do stupid things on the other hand. We have adventure consultants who are like a McKinsey operation. Oh, yeah. Where's that flash of the picture of Pete Budschergata? Yeah. Yeah. So they both go up on May 10th and by May 11th, it is a total shit show. This is partly because there's considerable rivalry between the established sort of well-known

Operation Team called Adventure Consultants and also the brand new team mountain mountainous mountainous. Mountainous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It really worked. Yeah, it kills you instantly expeditions. You will die incorporated. Let's mountain madness was then led by a very, very experienced American mountaineer called Scott Fisher. But the basic, what are the underlying problems of all this is both teams need to make the money for the season and they need to make a name

for themselves for the future season. So both of them have a strong commercial imperative to get all their clients up and back down. So they in the next Britain, next year's brochures can say, hey, we got everybody up and down. And but in terms of, like we said, this is a difference reader to and mountain madness had taken on a number of clients that maybe ought not to have been there noted that none of their clients had experience of being over 8,000 meters in the first place. This is now not unusual, which is not, you know, a sign of how much worse things have

gotten. Yeah, basically like what happens in terms of the actual practicalities, it is a series of small errors that lead to terrible, terrible outcomes for eight people, including a number of fixed ropes that was supposed to have been set up by the Sherpas, but weren't, which includes an hour long wait at the base of the Hillary step, while the Sherpas put one up anyway. You can imagine that that kind of throws your timing off. Basically what happens is there's a series of much further delays which means that everybody gets to the summit, apart from a few who turn around and say, I'm not feeling this, this is not going well, I'm booking it. Everybody else makes to the summit but they make it down late. Much,, the cutoff time to get to the summit is about 2 p.m. I think they were

still submitting at 3.30. Those are not windows you can have at this altitude at this time. And it is, I just have a question regarding like having experience over 8,000 meters. Is there like, like an easy 8,000 meter mountain you can climb so you get that experience beforehand? No,000 meters. Is there like a like an easy 8,000 meter mountain, you can climb so you get that experience beforehand? No, absolutely not. No, I mean, this is the thing. There are mountains that are like that don't have the Everest experience. Like you can climb like Akinkawa or like Denali and and get acclimated that way, but you have to be a mountaineer to do that. So, you know, if you don't want to do that. A lot of people prepare for this stuff much lower down, but they either do technically much more demanding things, which creates a series of physical, automated reactions that you don't have if you are just applying to all these companies.

Or you spend more time at altitude, and you have more time to acclimatize, and you simply have a body that does that. Some people's bodies that don't react, or don't react well, others do, that's kind of a genetics coin flip kind of thing. So yeah, it is at this point, after people start coming down, much later than planned,

that the weather takes a turn for the decidedly much worse and in the middle of the afternoon and into the evening a full-blown blizzard strikes up with snow pelt of more than 70 miles an hour hitting you in the face basically. Yeah, which is like we know. Yeah., apart from you know, being here in the face at 70 miles an hour, one of the expedition leaders, I believe this was Scott Fisher, started to suffer from either hate or haste or both, and was maybe even hate. No clue on the fact. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But basically he was no longer mentally and mostly not capable, not capable, but any more to do anything because his brain was being scrambled.

The other thing that happens, of course, in a high-speed lizard is that the fixed lines get buried in mounts of new snow, which means you can't clip from one rope into the other very easily. The visibility, of course, goes to shit to shit and critically as well. The existing trail that everybody had stomped out next to the guiding lines got wiped out as well. So now you don't know where the guideline is, you can't see the trail has gone and your mountain leader is either already dead or like non-responsive basically. The end result is we're about going to too much detail, but it is incredibly unpleasant. A, people die, six people die of exposure on the mountain.

Two, we think die from falling off the mountain. I mean, their bodies have now been found, so we don't know. And it is just a horrendous day all around on Everest. Yeah, and to many people. That's worse than the next one, though, yeah, many, many people learn lessons from this sensible lessons. Next slide, please. 2014. Yeah, so that we've had an intervening few years of like

Everest being a machine, being an industry that works very well, and that industry depends on sending sharpers on these like positioning routes through the combo ice fall to move all the shit. And this is a very dangerous thing. Everyone knows it's dangerous. That's why we make shepherpers do it. And then, well, inevitably, this is what happens.

Yeah. This is the, yeah, I mean, you can see it on the slide. It's fairly self explanatory. A very large block of rock detaches from the hanging glacier above. The estimates are that it's about 35 meters thick and about ways about 32 million tons. And it breaks off and it falls pretty much dead on top of the sharp teams creating the route through the ice fall., killing 16 in total. It keeps the rack.

Just hit like heads going up to the bunch of them and avalanche hits like a couple more I think. Jesus. Yeah. They were in the field, they were making the route, but they were also very slow because they were carrying tents and stoves and other things needed to pre-stock the higher camps for the commercial season. It was, you know, a disastrous loss of life, you know, it's hard to talk about in sort of a fast-alveane. work while, you know, dying basically, each of these Sherpa earned about $125 a day while doing this very difficult, very expertise work. Right. $125 a day.

I mean, but by like, Nepali standards, being a Sherpa is like a well-paying job, but that's kind of the problem is that they're being paid well by Nepali standards to do a job that like, people are also paid very well by American standards to do. Yeah. standards to do a job that like people are also paid very well by American standards to do. You know, like no, no American professional climb would ever accept, you know, sort of that little money to do the same thing. I think the minimum legal standard for like a Swiss mountain guide is like 600 francs a day, and that's for easy stuff. And that's excluding like food and lodging and stuff that you also contribute to a few higher

Swiss mountain guides. So just to give you an indication of the difference, each of the families did get after big protests and things that happened afterwards. I have some thoughts about those on the next slide. Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about that. And in the, well, we'll just get to the next slide. And also just as a side note, this ice fall gets more dangerous every single year because of climate change. That makes this more unstable and more unpredictable

with every season and every year. So it's at this point I'd like to recommend a fairly searing documentary that's just called Shurther. Yeah. It was was following this climbing season. was following this climbing season and speaks to the sort of like immense racism with which these people are treated in their workplace because after you know over a dozen of their friends and their colleagues had been killed, you know, expedition companies continue to try and push them to work and this ultimately led to a strike by Sherpas, which ended up ending that year's season. Which it wasn't even intended to do. All they wanted was a pause.

And if you watch the documentary, the expedition organizers, in particular Russell Bryson, Hi Max is a massive piece of shit. in particular Russell Bryson, high max, is a massive piece of shit. Like, ultimately try and like, cajole and threaten and lie and bully these people into going back to work.

It's intimately familiar for like, anyone who's ever been in like a strike or a labor dispute, absolutely familiar boss behavior, but it's happening at like, you know, 6,000 meters. And what's really striking about it too, is you see the clients who are, you know, sitting in there like very nice tents, confining.

Yeah, because there's like, I think at this point, there's between like four and 600 like clients who have paid to do this, and they're just sitting in their tents and they're waiting, and of course, you know, the orthodontist from Ohio, it doesn't want to wait. Yeah. And this is another thing with like weather windows as well as there are a lot of, especially

the cheaper expedition companies kind of make them money by people not climbing Everest because it's people who like aren't able to do it or are forced back or don't have the weather window who's still end up paying for the next year when they can do. But there are companies, especially on the more expensive end, that will sort of purport to guarantee the best possible chance. And people tend to read that as like, I will absolutely go up every year this year. I will, you know, I've paid this money. I'm not gonna have to, like,

pay it again next year to come back. Give me my God damn high altitude treat. Roughly speaking. Exactly, exactly. I do like the idea of the shirt performance saying down tools and they just leave everyone at camp. Yeah, I mean, that's basically what happened.

And things got genuinely very, very heated. I mean, there have been sort of like, there's been ill feeling before and one of the things that's most infuriating about the movie is the kind of like, the fetish that the guys like Bryce make out of the kind of like, good relations that they have with the Sherpas, which is sort of a cultural misunderstanding where, you know, a Sherpa people are willing to like, be polite to you and smile at you smile at you and be deferential to a point. There was one thing where two Austrian climbers nearly started a riot at base camp because of some cultural norms. One of them had gotten into an altercation with a

chef and he called him a son of a bitch and that's not that offensive in English, but it's a mortal insult. And it, you know, very nearly ended up with like people threatening each other with ice axes and stuff. So yeah, and ultimately what happened is that this, you know, killed the season for the year as well, it might have done, but they sent the, you know, Nepalese Minister of Tourism out. And the Nepalese government, you know, has too much money in tourism. And ultimately, I said, go back to work.

And this is still simmering years later. Yeah, there have been altercation since a couple of years ago, with fist fights about people saying things and going up fixed lines, and what they were not supposed to. It's still very fraught. And obviously, these sherpas who are doing this incredibly dangerous, highly skilled work up the mountain, you know, have what I think is very good, sort of an increasing sense of their own dignity and value. And then just no longer want to want to just take anything and everything

thrown at them, which I think is more than good for that. Yeah, absolutely. More than overdue. We got the next slide. Yeah, absolutely. More than overdue. If we go to the next slide. Yeah, 2015, which is like a much wider tragedy, this is, it could be an episode on its own. So, yeah, so Nepal got hit with a massive, massive earthquake in 2015, which is like an 8.7 or something. It's like, yeah, it was crazy. Absolutely devastated the whole country. I mean, like places where it took weeks to get like anything like rescue and because it's like in very remote valleys that are now even harder to get to. This also did affect Everest directly though, because a couple of avalanches just swept through base camp. And yeah, just took out a bunch of people killed like 22 people, I think.

I think the first one took out the medical tent even. So you had people trying to do first aid on the side of a mountain that already very high altitude covereditudes covered in, you know, presumably, turds because this being base camp. It's just it's it's it's it's real bad. Yeah, and the the also yeah, it also in you know, referencing couples lines ago, removed the Hillary step because that's now fundamentally different, which in a weird like cypology this whole thing, for like a couple years the NEPA leadership ministry of tourism tried to deny that the earthquake had like shifted the Hillary step because it's so iconic

that they thought if it wasn't there anymore, less people would come. Yeah, I mean, the whole, the whole economy is like absolutely dependent on this one mountain, which is not sustainable. And on the idea that the mountain will never change and will always be climberable as, you know, first of all, as the glacier retreats more and more and more of the computerized mounts,

this is kind of a prefiguring thing, which is that ultimately Everest Base Camp is going to have to be abandoned. Like, it cannot continue to be used past a certain point because it just will no longer be safe. What that means for climbing the mountain, I don't know. I mean, they'll recite it somewhere, but like it, yeah, the frequency of reciting and the placing and it will all change and none of it will be for the good. And it will contribute, you know, as we always do to killing the very things we pretend to love. And the thing that drives me particularly insane about this is that after the earthquake could kill 22 people on Everest and like thousands in the pool, pretty much immediately, clients started

like pushing for their abilities to climb anyway. And then the next expedition went up four days afterwards, which yeah, just you want, talk about like walking past dead bodies. It's not necessarily like, you know, sort of stumbling past someone in the death zone. It's this. Yeah. It's literally turning your back on the ruins of base camp and saying, well, we're off to have our adventure now because we paid for it. It is an exceeding inhumanity that would let you do that.

And yeah, not, not a good sign. And fortunately, we didn't learn anything. Next slide, please. Yes. This is 2019. It's a good day to be on Everest, as you can tell. You see the guy in the foreground sitting down, because there's a quinoa. It's, I think you can just see the Hillary step on that little just below that little snow field in the sun on the left hand side of the ridge. Over here, but yeah, this is 2019. It was, you know, I hate to be the bearer of surprising news, but it was very overcrowded that day. but it was very overcrowded that day. This wasn't one single thing like a avalanche or whether it's front moving in,

but basically this is the tragedy of overcrowding. That year, 381 permits have been issued, which was the highest ever number on records, but of course you have to remember that they, each of these people has to have a shurper with them, as per the law. So, well like 800 and some of people in reality are going up the mountain. This is partially driven by a new influx, money from India and China now wants to get up there.

This is no longer the white man's thing. It's a new money wants to get it on the action, have the same bragging rights, at the same God awfulawful Davos conference centers. So, you know, on the day itself, because this was quite a small good weather window after a long session of sitting still basically, this is about 200 people trying to make the summit, which is madness, is you look at that,

and you think, I mean, this is madness, is you look at that and you think, I mean, this is this is this apart from a desecration of a mountain and a sport and, you know, I don't know what people this is, you know, because it is, we were so long, some people spent between 10 and 12 hours making the summit. Most of them spent like this waiting, just queueing, yeah. And then another four to six going down back to camp four again in the same queue because there's one set of fixed lines and you can't just pass each other. There's also meant that like nobody had enough oxygen for that. So that meant that the Sherpas had to like turn down your oxygen flow to like a bare minimum to keep you alive but maybe not making good decisions or some of them because of the prevailing attitudes

and the way these people are treated ended up giving up their own oxygen supplies to people who were dead or dying up there. It is an immense human tragedy that kill a whole bunch of people for absolutely no good reason. And it's only possible because the Nepalese government cannot say no to the hard currency that this brings in. Nepal is dirt poor and because it's Nepal nobody gave a shit after the earthquake and we've just kind of left them to sit alone in the rubble, as the West is want to do when something else happens online. Yeah, it's a desecration of something that should be a monument to human achievement and it makes me want to throw up. There's a thing that's, I think,

one of the bleakest things from Sherpa was that, so it's a Sherpa sort of religious observance to before climbing the mountain, you ask the mountain for permission to climb it, right? Which is, you know, I think it's a nice thing if nothing else. And this is now part of the tourist experience. It's sort of a spectacle. Because, you know, if people are able to climb and they're told that it's safe to climb, then they will. And increasingly, you see this with people who, there was this woman, a Canadian woman from Toronto called Shria Shaq Lawfin.

She died on Everest climbing it and no climbing experience whatsoever. Like catastrophically irresponsible to accept her as a client. She had to be taught how to use crampons, like at base camp. Yeah, I know. Yeah, that's a common story.

People needing to learn how to wield a nice sex, how to put on crampons, how to put on their gear, how it works, what a Jumar is, like stuff that, I don't know, like I know how to put on my crampons, I know how to do basic stuff with a nice sex. I wouldn't come within a thousand fucking miles of Everest apart from the fucking cuesues and this disgusting shit. But for this to be the first mountain that you climb is like the last hubris.

Well, also, yeah, yeah, yeah, last year. I mean, you know, this isn't necessarily the most important thing here in terms of what we're desecrating, but I think mountaineering as a sport, as a discipline, you know, as insane as, you know, various German Austrian men are, they may have had a point that like, once it was proven that it was physically possible to climb Everest without oxygen, that it should only be climbed without oxygen, because, you know, if nothing else, you wouldn't leave so many oxygen canisters up there. But also it would still be sort of like a technical physical challenge. It would be an immense test of your technical and physical skills. You like this woman with no experience wouldn't even get to

base camp. No way, no way on God's Earth. Yeah. It's well, and the thing is, this is spilling over to other mountains, to it, like, it used to be a point at which like, you know, you could, you could still do this kind of like extreme mountaineering on Anapana or on K2 or on Kanchinjonga, and you know, it was, it was less of the rest of, and that's still true. People are, people are sort of like most interested in Everest, but like it's it's spilling over as well And as more people go and summit Everest, it kind of devalues its currency at Davos or whatever and so now increasingly you see people He's like a two-stream tourism is they want to do K2 or they want to do like multiple summits And they want to say that they you know

They did you know all of the 8,000 meter peaks You know and you get to do something exotic. Like I'm going to be the first person to bring my cat to the top of the average. The real bad should told me on that shit. Yeah, that was a, it's that that was I did put in the notes. I'm trying to remember if it was produced by the Discovery Channel. I think it was or some some American company.

They did like it was like a some American company, they did like, it was like a sort of a documentary series season, I don't know, not a competition thing, but they were like, it was, they had eight climbers attempting Everest and they all had like various disabilities. So there's one guy with one leg, one I think a woman who was blind.

And you know, like, I'm not saying that if you are disabled or differently able, that you cannot do things at the extremes of human potential. But what like, I watched one half of an episode, I was just like, but, you know, there are brilliant climbers who are differently able to all who are missing limbs or what are who are who can't see or anything. But they have done that for years and years and they don't do this as like a vehicle to get their Instagram to blow up. And it's the relationship of Everest to disability is a really interesting one because, again, I think just as you say, like, yeah, there's a lot of times when it's like absolutely

laudable. But equally, I think, you know, disabled or not, there's this kind of like real disease of record breaking. Right. If you're seeking, understanding the sanctity of it basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like seeking it for yourself or you're using it to like,

prove you or your community's determination to something. And it gets really, really tenuous at times. It's like to be like, I'm the 27th left-handed person to climb ever-ostor whatever. And it's like, I tenuous at times. It's like to be like, I'm the 27th left-handed person to climb Everest or whatever. And it's like, I don't have any interest. Like, I'm sure there's already been a first trans person to climb Everest, right?

But like, I would have no interest because like, what does that have to do with us? You know, it doesn't say anything other than the kind of like vague platitudes about like determination and like strength and stuff. And you know know it's like the old joke Everest is like littered with the corpses of extremely determined people. There are ethics here and there are ethical concerns that you know I think you can be absolutely reductive about at the end of the day and be like well don't fucking go and I think you'll be onto something more than the person who is sort of like, you know, seeking to raise a bunch of money

to stand up to cancer or whatever on top of a mountain. To raise awareness or something gross like that. Like just don't, you know, and also if nothing else, you know, you and your dumbass, you know, wanting to be the 28th-left-handed person on Everest might die up there, but you know, chances are not unreasonable that you'll take a bunch of shepherpers with you. You know, no deserves to die for your stupidity, only you deserve to die for your stupidity.

Yeah. And you do just... Oh, 100%. Let's be very clear on that. Yeah, I just think we could have avoided all of this by building the car growling if we had simply built the Cog Railway at least I'm a camp for this is not like an insurmountable engineering challenge. I love the idea of Ross like, single-handedly, but not letting anyone odd accept the Sherpa. No, no, no, no, no, that's what I'm imagining. When the Sherpas down tools and they leave all the rich people at camp three and they take the secret escalator down. Come on, everybody, let's go, let's go. We have no 12 times, no 12 times.

It's just capitalism, really. And I guess capitalism and egotism, two things hand in hand. And if you have any kind of passion, especially in outdoors ones coming for that too, whatever it is, you look at rich people, like imploding themselves, and also like a Titanic historian of some repute, trying to look at the Titanic,

and it's like, no, this money poisons everything, it touches. Yeah. And if you wanna just go up a mountain, you know what you can do? You can go to Switzerland, you can take a cog railway. It's pretty far up. And then there's a pretty decent meal at the James Bond themed restaurant. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. It's good for you. Yeah, you can go away. You have a mountain and then you meet a cow. It's like, how did you get here? Yeah, I just said go up the young Froyok. And yeah, fucking don't leave Everest alone, you know, until we build the Everest car railway. Speaking of someone who really does love these mountains here in Switzerland and like things

they're very beautiful, can I suggest that you only go up the young Froyok and you all stay there and don't bother me when I'm doing something And not have a million jackasses with me I have been going for a while with Rob Rob can not wait to greet you No, no, that's fine, but just that one Keep it there, keep it like close to Geneva And don't, yeah.

Leave all the normal people to like go climb like unsurveyed peaks in the Oberon to hint to Obergoge or whatever. Yes. Exactly. All right. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this trip through capitalism and also Everest. Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you. This was good. Yeah, subscribe to our Patreon so we can build the car-grailway, but first we have to do a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Oh, and also listen to podcasting and practice before we do safety third.

Yeah, now safety third safety third. Yeah, please, please do that. Hello, Alice, Ross, Yellium, X or guest. Did it. You got it. So actually, only, only, only, only hello to Rob. How did they know? I know.

I know. He's a little. You pass, but barely. Oh, been that this story comes from a construction site in Vermont. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, building a new recreation center at a ski resort. Oh, it's snow today. Hey, apical, topical. I was a dumb young high schooler and the company was run by the father of friends So it was an easy way to gland the job and make enough money to pay for a gaming computer for myself I don't know as we do for gaming computers. Yeah, yes record this part

Not a big job like this you would have lots of specialized contractor teams each of whom has a specialized niche that they fulfill I was on the air sealing and insulation crew. We would air seal all of the cracks and seams between the outside wall framing studs with specialized insulation foam and silicone coque. I like to describe my job as squeezing coque between two studs, which was something that had the advantage of pissing off my homophobic co-workers while also being completely true. Very easy to piss off a homophobic. After we were done air sealing, other trades would come through to do wiring, plumbing,

and etc. And then we'd go back through the wet spray cellulose insulation into the wall cavities where it would be then sheet rocked over. This was the much harder half of the job and we were typically pulled 60 hours a week or more. The only people who would be on site longer were the Mexican sheetwalk rockers. Okay. Yeah. Mexican sheet rock refers to a specific kind of not. It's it's only if it's from the the Mexico. Yeah. Otherwise, it's just sparkling it's from the, uh, the Mexico, the, yeah. Um, otherwise it's just sparkling gypsum board. After the, I think it's actually a cis the club of the sons of anarchy. The Mexican, Mexican sheet rock.

After the insulation was installed, a building would then have a leak test where the doors and windows would be closed and the air compressors used to create a positive pressure environment and combined with smoke machines to look for leaks. How, yeah, hotbox and skiers all. Yeah, this is where our story probably begins because in the new recreation center building we were helping to build for the ski mountain, It had failed the leak test in two locations. One was an exterior facing window, 30 feet above what was destined to be a racquetball court.

And the other was where the roofing trusses, C's slide one, met the corner wall of another part of the building. This was also above a racquetball court, but a different racquetball court because you need so many. No, it's a, it's it's it's a rec center for a I mean, I love going skiing and then like in the evening doing a jonte game of rackable. That's that's a sense of People like doing that. Yeah. Oh my god Since I have a death leaf fear of heights. I declined to take the 44 extension ladder to go reseal the window frame and consequently

got volunteered for the roofing truss. Yeah, you deserved it because the new guys got the scut work. I've never heard that word before. Part of the reason I brought up all that context because usually when we were doing air sealing was in the stage of construction where all it was there was framing 2x6's in plywood or chipboard, which is heretical trash. That meant that we could easily get into all the weird crevices and nooks since for the Vos part, we could just step through the framing timbers of the walls. However, this was after a leak test it failed and the building was most of the way done.

You know, they had done the sheet rock, the electrical, the plumbing, the windows and everything was already installed. What that meant in this case was that the sheet rock was also done already. So a hole had to be cut for me to get into the ceiling. See slide two. Don't love this already. No, no, no. I climbed up, I climbed up the ladder. I climbed up the ladder. I climbed up the ladder and were in my way into the hole, cut into the sheet rock. My crude MS paint skills are making it seem larger than it actually was.

The gap was only about 14 inches across and there was a non trivial amount of wiring. I had to negotiate and I had to make full use of my adolescent build to get through and into the ceiling cavity. I like the Saddam Hussein, mate. Yes. At this stage in my life, I was skinny enough to count ribs

through a t-shirt, something which is adamantly no longer the case. Yeah. With me came my heart hat. So basically, he's like a sheet rock chimney sweep. Yes. With me came my heart hat, since this was a construction site, one of those shitty old flashlights, like you see flickering

out in horror movies, and about four cans of spray foam. It's given their spray around. Yeah. The horror movie comparison feels apt. Since well, there was a tiny bit of ambient light that came through the hole I had crawled into. That wasn't really angled anywhere near where I needed to go and fill with foam. And it wasn't particularly bright. I won't use phrases such as Stigian Abyss. It's that'd be going too far but it should put you in the right frame of mind. I don't know what a Stigian Abyss is. Like the River Sticks. It's not particularly a bit of a... It's a pit of hell basically. Like the pit of hell, okay. Air sealed in this case also meant light sealed so

it really just was just me and trusty old mr flashlight I quickly started crawling through the framing truss towards the suspect corner this was kind of like playing on the jungle gen on a playground except that all the bars were in the same line and the vertical clearance was rapidly approaching zero I had been told not to walk on the sheet rock of the ceilings that's doing so could easily put my foot through it and plummet me to my death 40 feet below. He's dying a rockable cold. Well, I wasn't enough for there merely to be the raw concrete of the racquetball court. Unlike my co-workers court, which had been fully emptied so she could get the ladder in position to the window, mine was full of tools, toolboxes, and nice, happy, fun things like table saws and chop saws.

If I did fall through the sheet rock, wristly in palement on unforgiving steel tools was guaranteed, rather than merely pan-caking on this softened for giving concrete. See slide three. Fantastic. Yeah. Sorry, was your supervisor like the weird puppet from the soul of this? Okay. Okay, so this is junior Prince of Persia. Yeah. Sorry, we just supervised it like the weird puppet from the soul. Okay, okay, so this is junior Prince of Persia. Yeah, something I want to clarify is that well my MS paint drawings and the provided reference figure of a ceiling truss Basie make it seem like there's a lot of room for crawling around there. Absolutely was not There was a low angle roof met to handle the snow fall the snowfall weight of a ski resort

Justin probably knows the figures better than I do. 30 pounds per square foot. But that means it's expected to handle several tons of snow and have room for safety margin. Everything was two by six is at least. And that meant that they're quickly stopped being room for me to try and reach the corner as they're stopped being room between the trust timbers, long before that corner was actually reached. My first attempt to get further in was to discard my hard hat, as I wasn't particularly worried about falling debris since I was inside the skill ceiling

space, and this was at the end of the day after everyone except us and the sheet rockers had gone home. While discarding the hard hat did give me a few inches further clearance, it also subjected me to the occasional poke from a roofing nail sticking through. But as long as I was careful, it wasn't that big of a deal. Okay. Right. Safety to face it. Yes.

The bigger problem is I still can get anywhere near the leaking corner. As scrawny as I was, I wasn't scrawny enough. So that's when I did what I never should have done and began to test the load bearing capacity of the sheetrock. Now for those listening at home, not familiar with the construction trades, sheetrock is somewhere between chalk and banana bread in terms of structural integrity. Most of the actual cohesion comes only from the paper sandwiched in. It would have been screwed into the same framing traces I was walking across and when I

have confidence the screws would hold my way, I was not confident of the sheetrock one. Do not ever do what I did in the story. It's a miracle. I'm still alive. Regardless of the insane risk, the sheet rock somehow held and I'm sure as well as I could to spread my weight out in what little room there was between the two trusses closest to the wall squirmed out on my belly towards the leaking corner. The fit was so tight, I couldn't actually look at the corner had had my hand I had my arm at full extension to shoot the foam gun and also point my flashlight in the corner at the same time. So I had to play kind of a juggling act of wiggling my arm into the extension.

Pushing myself and far into the corner as I could, spraying a bunch of foam, backing up to the point where gaps existed once more in the trusses adjacent to me. So I could move my arms again, maneuver my flashlight into position so I can illuminate the corner, adjust my head so I could see the corner, see that there was still areas not yet coated in foam, and then repeat that process. No, basically roofed truss. Yeah, roofed tr I got a roof trust. Blunky.

I caught myself. Retreat. Retreat me on go to my death at that point. Like bonus difficulty came when I needed to replace the cans for my phone gun. But eventually I emptied all the cans in the corner and figured if that isn't enough, nothing I can achieve here will be and work my way back towards milkshake. Get out of the way. Work my way back towards an area of the ceiling tall enough to get off my belly and cease my cave diver impression. There's nothing here worth dying for. You know, it was at this point when I

recovered my heart. It was at this point when I recovered my heart and looked back around to try and start working my way back to the entrance point I realized the ambient light had gone from minimal to zero I worked my way deeper along the length of the roof. No shit get out of the way Okay, he's gone I worked my way deeper along the length of the roof so I could look at the wall I had come in I worked my way deeper along the length of the roof so I could look at the wall I had come in directly rather than just the angled Forest of trusses and came to the inescapable conclusion that I had been walled into the ceiling

At some point one of the sheet rockers that obviously come through seeing the hole uncovered it and covered it complete with spackle. Right. So sheetrock, it very easy to get through. It hits you onto a rack. It will call very difficult when it's going to like get you out to safety. I shined my flashlight. It's weird. Why does this rock centers read everything smells of a Montelato here?

I shined my flashlight along the sheet rock. And I had no way of telling where I'd come in. And while the rats nest of wiring precluded some of the gaps in the framing they didn't give me enough of a frame of reference to even begin to start. I knew that to kick my way through the sheetrock would be trivial and easy but if I even if I came through at the right spot a 10 foot drop awaited me and if I came through at the wrong spot the aforementioned 40 foot drop onto steel tools similarly awaited me. My literally paralyzing ferrofights kept me from making any rash decisions, so I began

to yell, holler, and scream, and shout in the vain hopes that someone could hear me. I had to say, working on a construction crew teaches you words and phrases that would make a sailor blush, and I made full use of my repertoire to express my frustration with myself, my coworkers, the sheet rockers, and the universe in general. Invented a new anti-Mexican slur. We invented racism too. Yes. Even as I did it, I knew it was in vain, hope, because as I mentioned before, us on the

insulation crew and the Mexican sheet rockers were the only people who stayed on site after four. I also knew my coworker wouldn't hear me because the planet bin that after she did the much easier job of stealing the linky window, she'd move on to another trouble spot in a different building. I had a dumb luck that blesses adolescences and allows us to survive into adulthood. Not long after I had started my tirade, the site overseer from the firm managing the job site was doing his end of day rounds before officially closing the site and happened to hear me.

He got a different ladder since mine had naturally been stolen when the hole was sealed up behind me. He got a reciprocating skull. I got paid for sealing up this hole with this handy ladder. Yeah. He got a reciprocating saw and cut a new hole for me to get out of. My understanding is that the sheet rockers got read the Ryan act and I learned a valuable lesson. Don't go in the hole. I actually met, I actually met back up with my old boss a few years ago when one of his sons was getting married and related the story to him then. I assumed he had heard about it through the grapevine, but apparently he had never heard.

So I was able to get a few good laughs from it, even now it remains one of my better stories. I hope you got as much enjoyment from it as I did and keep up the good work. As much enjoyment, not as much enjoyment from it as I did and keep up the good work. As much enjoyment, not as much terror. Uh, yeah, please do not do this. Don't go on a whole. Yeah. Yeah. I know there's, you know, those memes you kids like so much about this is my hold, etc. But don't, don't, don't actually go in the hall. You see, don't become the little meme boy. If you, if, if, if you see a hole that looks like it was made for you,

don't go in it. I was trying to trick you. Anyway, that was safety third. All right, next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Yeah, Rob, if the people want more Rob, why can they find you? If they people want more Rob and the occasional Liam and Rose though, no Alice yet, but maybe one day, they can listen to podcasting is praxis.

It can be found where good and also bad podcast can be found everywhere. We're on Patreon, it's the usual deal. Mainly we deal in the exceeding levels of misery that is living in Britain. So yeah, it's that kind of deal. But okay, if you watch movies and have a better time with it. Yeah, that's about it. That's all I got to plug. It's a good podcast. I enjoy listening to it. It's like trash future, but different. It's like trash YouTube, but good. I can I can close I know.

I can't say that we're two're we're two. We're like a super bucket-owned brand version of trash subscribers. That's right. All your friends get nine parents Well, have them subscribe before you kill them then kill your parents. Yeah, we're doing like time Any whole stuff. We're enlisting subscribers from the dead. Yeah, go to the graveyard and start subscribing Nine you should accounts. Yes. Don't you want to go to your debented on's house and grab all those pre-approved credit cards and just sign a rope. Yes, it's cool. All comes out of the wash. Yeah, that's right. Rob, thanks so much for coming. Yes, thank you for coming on. I think I was. Thank you so much.

Having me. Yeah, any side. All right. Build the car railway. Bye, everyone. Bye. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.