Climbing for Ego: A Reflection on Achievement

In this episode, we delve into the controversial topic of climbing Mount Everest and argue why it is an immoral pursuit. Starting with an interview with Eric Weihenmayer, a blind climber of Everest, we discuss the various arguments against the climb. We explore the significant risks to the Sherpas, who face astronomically high death rates, and lay out the dire environmental impacts, including trash accumulation and body retrievals. The episode makes a strong case that climbing Everest is a selfish, performative act that squanders substantial resources and poses serious ethical concerns.

Speaker 3: [00:00:00] We're going to interview

Speaker 2: Eric Weihenmayer, who climbed the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. But, he's gay. I mean, he's gay, excuse me, he's blind. So we'll hear about that coming up.

Malcolm Collins: Climbing.

Simone Collins: The best, the best piece of news reporting ever done, in my opinion. But,

Malcolm Collins: on the topic of climbing Everest, You have to be a complete garbage dookie soul of a human being to do this.

Speaker 9: You're an emotional f*****g cripple.

Your soul is dog s**t. Every single f*****g thing about you is ugly.

Malcolm Collins: And in this episode, we are going to be laying this out. Only garbage human beings climb Everest. And you could be like, Oh no, this is a direct attack. And yeah, it is a direct attack. If you did this, you're a shitty human being. And, but not for the typical reasons. And here I will post a guy who makes one of the typical arguments against [00:01:00] climbing Everest.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: which is just Sherpas die and are forced to do this. And that is bad. And then at the end of the video, I will explain why that is a terrible argument. That claiming Everest is immoral.

Speaker: Everest these days, which is the fact that if you climbed Everest in 2023, you essentially local people in order to do so.

The season began with three deaths of Sherpas who were carrying ropes and gear through the Khumbu Icefall. Fixing lines and ladders through the glacier, that is a task that has to be completed each year. If anyone is going to climb the mountain on the regular route, the deceased local workers can expect to receive only about 10, 000 as a payout from life insurance.

Ridiculous. To put that into perspective, 10, 000 is barely enough to cover the rising costs of living for a small family in Nepal. One estimate I read was that 10, 000 is enough to only keep the family [00:02:00] afloat. for about two years. Now, there were seven Nepali deaths on the mountain this year. Six of them were working, all of them Sherpas

Malcolm Collins: because it's not a very good argument when you actually look at the statistics.

It has some credence to it, but pretty, pretty low. For me, the core reason why climbing Everest. is so selfish was elucidated very loudly when I was talking to my dad.,

Simone Collins: We were talking, I think about inherent values or something like that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I was talking about like, what do you live for? Like, like what's a good life to you, et cetera. And I was arguing that he focuses a lot on trying to maximize the aesthetics. Of being an erudite person or some sort of aesthetic version of who he is. And when he's making decisions, he is making them based on how they change his internal perspective on himself instead of how they impact the world around him.

[00:03:00] And I view this as a very, very selfish way to live..

Simone Collins: You were like, and I'm doing this research for an episode on how terrible it is to climb Mount Everest.

And I'm like, well, at least Mount Everest is the highest mountain. This is not like Kilimanjaro. That's just like complete trash. Like the view is nothing. You're just walking up a dirty mountain, like across like gross, you know, you need like separate shoes just for like the bathrooms. Cause there's poop smeared everywhere.

Yeah. Just a disgusting experience. And you're just shuffling your way up because the guides don't let you walk quickly or anything. So it's incredibly boring. And he's like, Oh no, I've, I've, I've saw Mount Kilimanjaro. Like, and I was like, Oh no.

Malcolm Collins: And then it was like, I told him, I was like, but.

Dad, like, why would you do that? Like, what good does this bring to the world? This seems to be entirely based on masturbating sort of a self image of yourself. So he immediately goes. No, I didn't do it for that reason. He couldn't come up with another reason he had done it.

No, he said, I didn't do it for that reason. He said, well, [00:04:00] the one other reason he came up with was you do it to experience hardship. And I was like, b***h, you're the one who just spent all day complaining about our house being too cold. That is an area where we are creating hardship for ourselves, but saving money, which can go to making the world a better place.

Whereas you can't endure the minor hardships of daily life, which make the world a better place. But are able to undergo big performative hardships that end up costing a lot of money and time that you could spend on improving the world. But then he goes talking about his wife,

Simone Collins: they were in Aspen and she bragged to him about going for quite a few kilometers at a high altitude.

And he's like, well, but have you gone 100 kilometers at this higher altitude? And she's like, I don't even know where you would do that. And then he's like, well.

Malcolm Collins: Mount Kilimanjaro, which I've climbed three times, and I was like, Dad, you just argued to me that you didn't do this just for signaling purposes.

And literally in the next You go off on a tangent about how you [00:05:00] dunked on somebody in a signaling manner for climbing the mountain. It is very clear you only did this to signal to yourself the type of person you are.

Simone Collins: Yeah. To one's own wife, which is not even like, who are you, like, you don't need to marry you.

Like, what are you even doing it for? I won. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so before we get further in this, this is my core complaint about this. Isn't that. It has such high costs. It will go over all of the high costs, whether they are to yourself or to the environment or to money that you are not spending on making the world a better place for such trivial differential benefits.

And by here, a differential benefit is that somebody goes, well, what about the hardship of climbing on Everest? And I'm like, There are hardships that you can endure, equivalent to climbing Mount Everest, that don't put random people's lives at risks, that don't waste tons of money, that don't waste years of your life that actively make the world a better place.

You, you So [00:06:00] why did you choose this hardship over those hardships? Because of the signaling ability it gave you. Or they'll say, well, what about like the views? It's like, well, you can look at a picture. We're going to VR simulation. We have those these days. And they're like, it's not the same.

And I'm like, yeah, it's not the same because you're not freezing your brain. butt off, you're not undergoing permanent brain damage, which by the way, you do undergo. Almost everyone who climbs Everest undergoes permanent brain damage. I'm going to put two studies on screen here. Only one in 13 Everest climbers had normal MRI scans.

So you have a less than 10 percent probability of not undergoing permanent brain damage. And this also Wow.

Simone Collins: I didn't know that. So you're really screwing yourself up by going.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. You're not just wasting tons of money. You're not just putting other people's lives at risk. You are permanently f*****g up your brain.

And this was true three years later. They did follow up scans on these people. Oh, so permanent damage? Permanent [00:07:00] damage, almost like everyone who goes. Specifically, you have frontal subcortical lesions, you have microhemorrhages, you have cortical atrophy, the loss of brain tissue, you have enlargement of the varicorobin spaces, fluid filled spaces surrounding blood vessels, you have subcortical lesions, white matter hyper intensities. You have reduced white matter density and volume, reduced gray matter density and volume in specific regions of the brain. And what does this end up looking like? You typically have a loss of memory both short term and long term, and barbia psychia which is a slowness of thought.

So you think slower afterwards.

Simone Collins: So you are, you are. Slightly retarding yourself for the rest of your life, just to be able to tell people that you climbed Mount Everest.

Malcolm Collins: And a lot of people are willing to do that. I mean, you

Simone Collins: already have to be so damaged.

Malcolm Collins: Other people's lives at risk, slightly retarding themselves for the rest of their life.

And they're not even [00:08:00] showing that they have done anything of particular difficulty anymore. You could just spend

Simone Collins: a lot of money. Yeah. You

Malcolm Collins: could just spend a ton of money and you know, there's been instances that we'll talk about like

Malcolm Collins: I kid you, not that guy, you just saw being carried down from Everest in a sack. That guy.

It's the same guy.

who you're about to see on tour and during this, he didn't even think the Sherpa who took him down.

Speaker 17: T. Ravi Chandran, intends to proudly wave the Jaluga Milang flag at the summit of all the world's tallest mountains. It does not matter if the mountain is steep or if he has to squeeze in between narrow crevices, he will not forget to carry the Malaysian flag with him.

Speaker 18: The first thing that we put on our tent is the Jaluga Milang. Oh, it's a boat. Um, pride

Speaker 17: he hopes the government will recognize his [00:09:00] contributions to the nation and will call on him to say a few words On Mede Kade,

Speaker 13: Wow! Look how far I climbed! And I'm not even tired!

Speaker 14: Wake up, you lazy Sherpas! We've got a mountain to climb!

Malcolm Collins: So there's

Simone Collins: the 1 instance that I learned about last year.

Who this is a 2012 instance of Sharia shock, chlorophene who was a Canadian who. Basically had no reason to have anyone permit her to climb Mount Everest in terms of her experience and her training, but she just basically paid so much to an outfit that was like, yeah, sure. Well, whatever you say you, you want to pay that much.

Okay. Let's do this. Because you can always get someone, you know, it was going to be like, you know, everyone has a [00:10:00] price. And that's the problem is now I think Everest is really full of unscrupulous climbing outfits that will just take about anyone. And she, by the way, perished in, in the dead zone on her way back down from the top on a uniquely crowded day because she ran out of oxygen because she used up way too much because she wasn't fit to climb this mountain.

Yeah, well hold people. That's other problem.

Malcolm Collins: Other people have made it down but have like screwed up other people's ascents. So there was another influencer Ravi Shandra, who was also found in the dead zone. He apparently was by himself there and some other team had to abandon their ascent. To pick him up and bring him down and he ended up not even thanking them thinking like his insurance company and sponsors and like pretending this didn't happen in like his tour about his climb.

But he, he made it to the top. And if you look at the pictures of this and I'll play some video of this,

Speaker 5: Camp two where I witnessed the most extreme enlarged lines of the entire season. as we were at camp two, we could see every [00:11:00] single team that was ahead of us moving up from camp three to Camp four.

I mean, my teammate Tyler described it as a black mamba, and there's just no other better way to describe that thing. If you saw my viral video of lines on Everest this year, this is most likely where it took place. And these same people went up to the summit together, and that just created even more lines, which were all documented as well.

Speaker 20: The lines. Everywhere you go. People. Crowds. all the lines, lines, lines! All the lines, lines, lines, lines! And then There get to be so many people that they make fast pass. So you stand in line to get a ticket to stand in line later.

Then there's lines for the bathrooms, lines for the drinks, lines for cantankerous and rare cantankula plates.

Malcolm Collins: It's just lines and line. It's a, it's a, it's a corporatized thing. Now you are going to the top to wait in line for an hour to spend a few seconds on the top of a mountain.

Simone Collins: Well, what makes things worse is the inexperienced climbers [00:12:00] make the line because they slow everyone else down.

Malcolm Collins: And you're risking your potential life and any other good you could do with your life. One to 2 percent of climbers who attempt to summit die. So you're risking your life.

You're blowing tons of money. How much money? 30, 000 to 160, 000. Although the sort of median range is 50 to 60, 000 per ascent. That's like

Simone Collins: an Oxbridge Masters. That, you know, good, like, year spent doing some really fun studying in a gorgeous place.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you could be doing productive work. You could be doing productive research.

Well, if

Simone Collins: you just want to do something indulgent, that's what I would do with that money. If I like, had

Malcolm Collins: nothing to do with my life. I would respect somebody more who spent that money just partying for a year. They would do less damage to their brain. They had better

Simone Collins: stories. It would be more fun, more interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. More interesting than I waited in line for ages.

Simone Collins: No, honestly, you'll probably do more good, like, getting s**t faced and, you know, You know, like, doing crazy things as [00:13:00] long as you don't drive or anything,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Right, but the, the, the point here being is that there's a lot you can do with 60, 000 that is good for the world.

Like, if you don't spend that on yourself, for somebody in a developing country, that can feed dozens of families. Oh, that's game changing

Simone Collins: money, yes.

Malcolm Collins: That could be spent on medical research. That could be It is, it is not like, Oh, I'm just spending this on myself, whatever. It is, I am choosing this to spend on myself for a completely self indulgent reason.

And I know, like, when I, I Self indulgent. Like, I play video games. That costs money, right? That doesn't make the world a better place. But I understand that I should be ashamed of that. Okay? You I wouldn't brag to somebody about how much video games I play or you know, I wouldn't brag to somebody that I hadn't wasted the time to like beat a Dark Souls game on whatever, you know, like [00:14:00] that is a sign of my failing as a human being.

Okay, my failing to vanity, my failing to addictive loops, my failing to. The worst thing you can do is to treat your sins as if they are virtues because it leads to terrible decisions like we see in the case of Everest. Now let's go over the costs of, of, of claiming Everest in, in terms of like the world.

All right. So body retrieval. There are approximately 200 bodies on Everest. Removing bodies typically costs between 50 and 100. 30, 000 and 70, 000 per body. In some cases they can reach 100, 000 or more. It requires six to 10 Sherpas working for most of a day to bring down a single body. So that's in addition to all of these costs, frozen bodies can weigh significantly more than their original weight due to attached ice.

Simone Collins: Oh gosh. Yeah. Oh, like when you have a slightly. [00:15:00] Yeah, something out of the freezer and it's all caked with not good

Malcolm Collins: and these have to be brought all the way down. Helicopters typically can't land above camp too. So you're bringing these down significant distances, risking the life of everyone who's carrying this body.

You know, this is a huge risk to them. And also that that person who died unceremoniously can like. Had a chance at bragging rights, had a chance to challenge themselves in a way that was pointlessly dangerous, pointlessly damaging, pointlessly expensive just so that we know, oh, oh, there's the body of somebody who would rather pay, you know, at minimum, you know, 20, 000 to masturbate.

Okay, but

Simone Collins: why can't we just create a body dumpster? On Everest, just out of the way, because it's an eyesore. Like I, I don't get, like, I, I get, I understand that it is. An eyesore to the [00:16:00] tourists, but honestly, they're kind of there to see the dead bodies. I say it's a feature, not a bug, right? As long as they're out of the way, just make a giant pile.

And then you have the benefit of having them see what a******s they are on the way down. I don't know why we're risking. You want to

Malcolm Collins: create a dump at the top of Everest and hear one of the base camps. This is a holy mountain to the Nepalese people. Yeah, and this

Simone Collins: shows, yeah, don't mess with the mountain.

Here's the giant pile of bodies to show what the, what the mountain is. No, no,

Malcolm Collins: you may misunderstand how holy the mountain is. So for Sherpas, for example, some of them have to spend like five hours a day on off season doing prayers just to ritually cleanse themselves. For the sin of going on to the mountain.

It is a very bad thing to do to leave bodies and to understand the size of the trash heaps up there as well. There's an estimated 40 to 50 metric tons of debris, like oxygen canisters and I'm

Simone Collins: sure people just dump them at the top. They don't care because, you know, You're about to die or something.

You don't really Well,

Malcolm Collins: the teams are, are [00:17:00] very selfish about this. It's even a common practice for teams to cut the logos out of their tents so they can just leave them at the top without being traced back to them.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's so screwed up.

Speaker 7: My expedition leader, Garrett Madison, actually commented about how some teams will cut their logo out of their tents, so when they go down and they don't need a tent anymore, they can just leave theirs there, because how is it going to be traced back to them? There's no repercussions.

Malcolm Collins: And Oh my lord. The war is now described as an actual dump, quote unquote, with piles of trash being left behind by descending summit teams emitting a foul odor.

So you're staying in a camp that smells like you're staying in a dump.

Speaker 6: Pushing right beneath the death zone at camp 4, it was an actual dump, like, simply put, this place was trashed. Just look at this video I filmed, I can barely name most of the things that are in this shot. It even smelled horrible up there, which is very weird because at altitude, I lose my sense of smell, but I walked in there and it smelled like something. I don't even know what.

Malcolm Collins: And now you [00:18:00] might have like a corpse pile near it. Bring in some necromancers, right? That's

Simone Collins: why I said the dead zone, they'll all stay refrigerated there. They're not going to thaw out in the dead zone.

Malcolm Collins: Even on the summit, people have found things like Coke bottles just like, oh,

Simone Collins: drinking a Coke at the summit.

Summit. She

Malcolm Collins: was. And and and to get them on people are dying, cleaning this up. So, for example, a Sherpa died during a cleanup operation on of trash from camp for and a soldier in the Nepalese army died at camp 3, while participating in a trash removal effort. So. Yeah. People are, so you're staying at dump sites sitting around in lines.

Mm-hmm . Like the people who tell me they're doing this for like, the awe and magistery of it. It's like, I've seen the pictures. Okay. You're do, you're clearly not. There are other mountains that you know, there are other things you could do. I wouldn't even say mountains, which I view as a, a very self masturbatory thing to do.

Mm-hmm . There are other things you can do [00:19:00] that don't require all of this. It's it's I just hate self image augmentation through expensive acts like that's I think when you know that your moral compass and the moral compass of the society that has raised you has just gone completely off the deep end.

No, I want to get into the arguments around Sherpas and is this immoral because of the Sherpas dying?

Simone Collins: I just I just looked up Mount Kilimanjaro toilets and I understand why you have to have a separate pair of shoes. To go into that s**t everywhere. Yeah, no. Like all the popular mountains are gross.

Don't like, why, why would you go onto them? You know, especially you can, in a good theme park, they're literally repainting overnight because there's so much gross stuff smeared onto the walls and and whatnot. You don't wanna go somewhere where there's a lot of foot traffic and not a huge amount of infrastructure to clean that stuff.

It's not [00:20:00] sanitary.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and it's like, why can't you just undergo the hardship of climbing a local mountain? It's likely just as beautiful. You, you don't have to put other people's lives at risk. You don't have Though all the Mr. Ballin videos don't,

Simone Collins: like, I think you and I would probably agree that it's just irresponsible to go out hiking, because keep in mind, there's Ballin and, and other like, you know, Missing411.

Stories about people who go out hiking and they want to go show off how like rugged they are and then they die and then a bunch of people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of taxpayer money, local taxpayer money to find these Yahoo's who go out even, you know, Seasoned explorers and stuff.

It's not okay.

Malcolm Collins: Designed to teach people and kids how to live outdoors and off the land. That is not Everest. Yeah, but you can do that without

Simone Collins: going into the wilderness. You [00:21:00] can do that with, in a safe nearby space where you're easy to find with cell phone coverage.

Malcolm Collins: And I point out that we are not like anti outdoor people.

My dad was on the board of like, outward Bound. Outward Bound.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you used to work as a river guide.

Simone Collins: I was never paid. I was too young to be paid. You were

Malcolm Collins: too young to be paid, but you, you, you did do this every summer. You'd go be a River Wrath guide. And you still have the voice for it.

Like when she goes into River Guide voice, it's shocking to a lot of people. Because she can, like, get this booming voice out of nowhere that's very commanding and that she kept having to use it around our wedding because people, like, were, were doing it and saying, you know, go to the, go to the, anyway I want to get here to the Sherpa argument because I find this one more nuanced and less obvious than just a why are you wasting time on something that obviously brings no good to the world and it's just self masturbatory.

So, and here I would note that my criticism of climbing things like Mount Everest does not attach to people who are doing it for things that clearly have value, [00:22:00] i. e. if you're going up as a research team that, that, yeah, I'm like, okay, yeah, sure, research. But like, that's such a minority of people doing it, but like, I don't need to, you know, really pontificate on that.

Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: are you questioning Sherpas? I mean, the No, no, no, hold

Malcolm Collins: on, hold on. What I'm questioning here is, is the reason that climbing Everest is immoral because Sherpas die doing it. I think that's a minor reason, not the primary reason. And I'll get into the argument here, okay? Okay, okay. First, the ratio of Sherpas to clients has increased significantly.

In the early 1990s, the ratio was one Sherpa to every five clients. Today, it's common to have two Sherpas per client, and in another statistic, I heard 1. 62 Sherpas per client. So what you're seeing here is the number of Sherpas has exploded And per client, because it's just so easy to do it now, because they just have these huge, like, teams around some individuals who are doing it.

So somebody telling you, I claimed Everest, doesn't really mean anything anymore. You know, you've got the diploma mill of Everest now. [00:23:00] But as for the Sherpas themselves, and here is the argument that, okay, but this is really bad. You are needlessly risking people's lives. Sherpas. Had 4, 053 deaths per 100, 000 full time workers.

Avalanches are the primary cause of Sherpa deaths for 46. 4%. So around half the Sherpas that die, there's just nothing you can really do to avoid avalanches if you're climbing Everest. It's not like they messed up or something. It's just a statistical risk. I

Simone Collins: guess not disproportionately. An avalanche takes out everyone in its path.

It's not because they're carrying stuff.

Malcolm Collins: If you're talking about 4, 000 Sherpa deaths for 100, 000 workers. How did that compare to other high risk professions? U. S. soldiers in Iraq, 335 deaths per 100, 000 workers. For Alaskan bush pilots, another one of the most dangerous jobs out there, 287 deaths.

Commercial fishermen, 124 deaths. Minors, 25 deaths per [00:24:00] 100, 000. Sherpas are an astronomically more dangerous profession than like compared to anything else. You're talking about for active U. S. soldiers in an active war zone. It's 335 versus 4, 053 for Sherpas.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's really bad. This is

Malcolm Collins: many multiples more dangerous than being in an active war zone for these individuals.

Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. I didn't realize it was bad. I mean, I get why they do it because you can make so much more working on Everest than doing pretty much light and just by such an order of magnitude than anything else in the area. It's really tempting, but that's yeah. God, what a hazard. That's terrible. Yeah, no, but then you're gonna die.

It's not good.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, why do I hate this argument? Right? Okay so [00:25:00] the obvious counter argument to this is Yeah And the sherpas know this and it's the best economic opportunity in the region that they have access to By a long shot families and give them a good life And people are like, well, it shouldn't be the best economic opportunity that they have access to in the region.

I haven't seen a single person making this argument attempting to improve the economy. I know, but it is. Like, what do you want to do? But it is. But it is. It's 7 percent of the country's GDP. You can't knock out at 7 percent of the country's GDP industry and expect things to be fine for the people. When you're dealing with the level of poverty that these people live in, that's children starving to death.

That's still people dying. You can't say, well, hypothetically it would be nice if it wasn't. The only way they had to make money, but it is the only way they have to make money and it's actually getting better for them over time. The sherpas have noted that the [00:26:00] amount that they make per year has gone up dramatically over time.

Especially recently. With the extra commercialization of the field and the number of Sherpas being used has gone up. So that means the number of people making money on this has gone up. And then you can say, okay, okay, okay. Well, they can't be earning that much compared to the local populace, right?

Like, why is this so interesting to them? The average annual earnings for a Sherpa. Are 4, 000 to 10, 000 and keep in mind. They're only working during climbing season. anyone here who's thinking,

Simone Collins: all right, what would you need to pay me to deal with some entitled a*****e probably or if not entitled a*****e, at least entitled, you know, person who's willing to, you know, an Everest person and risk my life and how many climbs is a Sherpa doing, you know, probably three climbs a season, I would imagine.

I don't

Malcolm Collins: know, I'd have to look this up. Maybe just

Simone Collins: one. But even, even just one client, [00:27:00] how much would you need to be paid? To put your life on the line for that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, but this is a problem. They are thinking like privileged, you know, people who live in a developed country Yeah, where they don't have to worry about genuine scarcity And so they don't understand what they're suggesting when they're suggesting taking away these people's source of income Yeah, so the point I was making is now For per year, Sherpas are making 10, 000.

This is a huge bump up from what it used to be. It used to be around 4, 000 to 5, 000. So it's, it's rising, which is great for them. Now you could say, well, what's the average monthly salary in Nepal, right? To put this in context, it's 230 to 270.

That's, that's why they're doing this. And that's average, you know, half of the people are making less than that or might not be mean But you know what? I mean, right like um, and I also note here that the minimum wage in nepal Which is what a lot [00:28:00] which is the alternative for a lot of sherpas Because a lot of the sherpas are not people with high skill sets.

They're acting like well Why don't they have coding backups? Well, they're the group of people who would otherwise be earning minimum wage The average minimum wage in Nepal not the average, the minimum wage in Nepal is 115 per month. That's the alternative for these people, for a lot of them. And then you can be like, okay, well, what about like top earning professions in Nepal, right?

A software engineer in Nepal is making 7, 000 per year to 14, 000 per year. Consider this in contrast with a Sherpa is 4, 000 to 10, 000. So they're earning in the. Range for a non skilled profession of the highest earners in their country. Okay, that's that's that's to me. Insane that you would say, oh, people aren't going to on the [00:29:00] net suffer if we remove this earning opportunity from

Simone Collins: also, we just we need to build an escalator and a slide.

All right, let's build an escalator and a slide. Let's just fully commercialize it.

Malcolm Collins: Change it. Okay. So what we need to do is we bring people to Everest. We're like, okay, now you're entering the Everest secret society. You get to base camp. We are going to use AI imaging to create an image of you at the summit.

Nobody actually goes up anymore. You take all the money that you would have spent on all of this useless stuff. We'll give it to Sherpa's families and other poor people in Nepal and Sherpas who died because they don't get that much in their insurance packages. Yeah. And, and we'll send you home and you can brag to everyone.

Or like,

Simone Collins: yeah, set up a luxury hotel in Nepal. That's just for the secret society. We're like, Hey, for the month or so that you'd be climbing Everest. You know, do you really want to do that? Or do you want to just party with a bunch of other wealthy people? For four weeks in this, [00:30:00]

Malcolm Collins: we can cover up all the lines.

We can cover up all the dump. We can cover up all the bodies. You don't have to worry about any of that anymore. Because, because it simulated Everest, everything's a dokey and you're actually contributing a benefit and that benefit to society because your money is actually going to making the world a better place.

I feel like.

Simone Collins: Maybe Nepal could pull it off, especially if No, here's the great thing is no, no, no, no. So like, what if one of the outfits also like one, an extra expensive package is tragic death on Everest and, and Nepal, like the government's in on it, they'll issue the death certificate. Like, yeah, we wanna fake

Malcolm Collins: their desk, tragic desk, whatever.

Yes.

Simone Collins: Because you still, like, no one would believe it if there was a secret Everest Cabal, but like, suddenly the survival rate's 100%. Mm, suspicious. No one believes it anymore. So, some people go and they never come back. Tragic death. Oh no, this is a big problem. Oh my gosh, so tragic. We need to stop this. Yes, they're

Malcolm Collins: still like wealthy [00:31:00] divorce lawyers.

So it's like, okay, you need to disappear.

Simone Collins: It's how just, yeah, it becomes a new tragic boating accident. And, you know, it's, it's, it's a very posh way to die, obviously, you know, dying never is so sad, so sad. And then of course, but all their, all their holdings were in crypto and their wallet was on them on the mountain.

Fell on a crevice, don't know where it went. Oh, tragic. Fell on a crevice? Yeah, fell on a crevice. All that, all that crypto gone forever. So sad. I don't know that that's the, that's the real dream, I guess, is and because these are all such insecure people who have to be able to say, I summited Everest.

They, you know, would

Malcolm Collins: Steal me on the other side of this for me, Simone. Okay, okay, okay. What net good is gonna come out, like, to the people who are like, no, I actually, like, climbing Everest is a good thing for, like, and when I say a good thing for my personal development, it needs to be a differentially good thing.

A good thing that you could not have achieved by something of equal cost and [00:32:00] risk to life, like, with less cost and less risk to other people's lives.

Thoughts.

Simone Collins: Okay. So, so I wait, I really, really want to climb Everest and I'm talking to you and you're saying, why are you doing this? It seems

Malcolm Collins: completely selfish,

Simone Collins: completely selfish. And well, I'm saying, well, one, like this is the economy of Nepal. I am supporting it. To

Malcolm Collins: what I say, then just give the money directly to them all.

Don't make it risk their lives for you.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I, I guess, gosh, this is, this is difficult. Okay, I don't care about Nepal. Screw, screw Nepal. Screw the Nepalese people. Screw their traditions around Everest being sacred, whatever they are. I don't know about them because I don't care because I'm not culturally sensitive, etc. I just want to be the best and I want to climb [00:33:00] the hardest mountain, although I think K2 is harder.

Yeah, but

Malcolm Collins: this is the thing, right? Like, you're like, first, it's not the hardest mountain, two it's, it's just the highest status mountain, which again is part of the problem here. And again, you're like, okay, I want to be the best. Why do you need to be the best in this totally pointless way that society respects, but like reality doesn't respect the fact that you were standing on some arbitrary peak?

And again, there are other ways you can be the very best without trashing the environment, wasting money and sacrificing other humans lives.

Speaker 21: It's gonna be the very best, to catch them is my real test,

Simone Collins: yeah, when also a lot of society really doesn't respect. I think, you know, Everest has become one of those things that people now see is quite douchey. So I also don't really understand why a lot of people. I think a lot of [00:34:00] people in their childhoods, like younger now, I do think in the future, the, the Everest market will crash because we've reached a point at which the vast majority of the coverage of Everest is So, Like, oh, so many people die on it.

It's, it's sort of a grotesque interest in death or just should in front of people loving on how annoyingly long the lines are. And, you know, the vast majority of the pictures of the summit of Mount Everest is this massive, massive line of people. So I think the market will crash. I can't steel man it because I, I really can't,

Malcolm Collins: you know, the woman who died that

Simone Collins: I mentioned at the beginning of this.

Her whole thing was just this sort of very narrowly cited, like, I, I'm just going to do it. Like she was the kind of person, like she ran for office in Canada. She just did a bunch of things in her life was always like, nothing's going to get in my way. Like you say, I can't do it. I'm going to do it.

And I think that's a lot of the people who go out there, it's [00:35:00] very much that sort of spoiled toddler syndrome of. Like they, they just stubbornly insist that they can and must do it. And then because it is tedious and difficult to do it, I think it can motivate a very specific type of person.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I see them as spoiled toddlers.

Well, I see them as worse than that. Like to me, I see somebody and I've mentioned this in another episode saying, I claimed Everest is like having a swastika tattooed on your forehead. I'm like, Oh, I know you're a garbage human being. Thank you for communicating that to me.

Speaker 9: You're an emotional f*****g cripple.

Your soul is dog s**t. Every single f*****g thing about you is ugly.

Malcolm Collins: But it's not the only category of recreation I see is like that.

Like. If I knew that playing video games, like my preferred form of recreation, like, randomly killed somebody, like, one in ten times I hit a specific key or something like that, or one in a hundred times I hit a specific key, I'd be like, yeah, I should stop doing this, like, I might like video games or randomly killed me I'd be like, yeah, I should [00:36:00] stop I should, or I should at least not be bragging about it but Everest isn't the only category of this, you know, whether you're talking about free climbing, for example, the other category of this.

Free climbing

Simone Collins: really freaks you out.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I don't like it. Another one, well, it's interesting, this doesn't freak me out as much, is dangerous style spelunking. Like, Oh, that freaks,

Simone Collins: I can't handle. Mm mm. No. I've listened to

Malcolm Collins: so many stories about people who have died in this. It's always, like, the dumbest thing.

Why did you crawl into a tunnel if you didn't know you're going to be able to crawl back out that tunnel? I like it. It's like well, you you're putting your life in other people's like do you have nothing Of to offer the world like you can't even like sit down and try to make yourself somebody who could offer the world something

It's like, you go up to someone and you're like, Hey. You've been gifted this one life to try to make it count, to try to do something good for the world. And then they're like, you know what? I think I'd rather shove myself in a hole and you're like, whoa. Excuse me. You'd rather do what. Yeah, I'm going to go. , in the desert and shoved my head in a hole and you're [00:37:00] like, what? Why would you do that? I don't know.

I like it. It makes me feel good. Gets me off.

That's the crazy thing. That's a crazy thing.

or Dangerous types of cave diving where it's like look I don't mind if you spelunk in like a big cave just explore it and enjoy it.

But there is a point Where whether it's mountain climbing or cave diving or anything like that, where there is a form of it that is fun and recreational, where the risk to other people or yourself is marginal point where the only reason for what you are doing anymore is to increase the risk.

Simone Collins: Well, and part of this, it may be, it reminds me as you're giving me these examples, it reminds me of. Sexual arousal pathways gone wrong, how, you know, obviously it's, humans have evolved to have instincts that make them interested in things associated with sex because humans who are not at all interested in those don't tend to reproduce at really good rates.

So then they don't really inherit the future. And so there's not a [00:38:00] whole lot of us who aren't really into that. But then, you know, there are some people who then have really weird arousal pathways with regard to certain things and they take it too far and they die, like through specific Expeciation or through other things, you know, shoving stuff up their butts and they really shouldn't because that's not really reproductive.

And I think that humans also have, and this is a really, really good trait that has built civilization that has created inventions and amazing things for pushing limits and exploring. And, you know, pushing themselves as far as they can go. You know, wanting to prove things to yourself. And that is a good thing.

It's just, these people are the equivalent, in terms of that, like, super stimuli, as the person who ends up choking themselves for arousal, or, you know, doing a bunch of other things.

Malcolm Collins: The people who die on Everest. Are the moral equivalent of the person who dies because they put a light bulb up their butt to get off Yeah, or a gerbil up their butt to get off.

Speaker 22: It's called autoerotic asphyxiation this is my problem with it. The risk reward. [00:39:00] It's not good. And I know the reward because I read about it. Like, apparently, by cutting off the oxygen or something like that, you increase your orgasm until it's one and a half times as powerful.

That's the one you had the Thursday before last. But is that really that important? I mean, we have a lot of things in this country. It's, you know, it's raining in the forest. There's all kinds of s**t we have to think about, let alone whacking off. That's our big problem. But the risk, good lord.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's just

Simone Collins: they take it too far Like it's there's there's a place for that and you've taken it too far

Malcolm Collins: Well, no But you knew like the guy who put the light bulb up his butt knew there was a risk and putting a light But it really turned him on, you know, the guy who put the gerbil up his butt. He knew it was a risk it created a positive emotional state for him and he's like this is more important to me You [00:40:00] Then the risks that this is incurring or the pain that this is incurring others in the case of the gerbil

Speaker 23: Okay, now, Butters, could you bring over Lemmy Winks for me, please? S**t! Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Newton

Malcolm Collins: you know, I, I think this is when we begin to as a society framing the people who indulgently spend the one lives that they are gifted in these really, really selfish ways. As the same as the type of person who ends up in a hospital with a light bulb up their butt then we can lower the people who are doing this performatively.

Cause a lot of people are just doing this performatively. And yeah, there's gonna be some like You know, small portion of the population that just can't stop themselves from climbing dangerous mountains are going into dangerous holes are putting gerbils up their butt. But you know, that is that is where we can be like, okay, well, you know, you at least understand that everyone sees you as the guy who died putting a gerbil up his butt.

But [00:41:00] yeah.

Simone Collins: Yep. Everest. Garbage. In every respect. Can't understand it. But what is wild is that, while I don't personally know anyone who's climbed Mount Everest, we do know, I think we've encountered multiple people, not just your dad, who've climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. So people are still doing this to a lesser extent.

Malcolm Collins: No, I said Everest is the type of thing he would have done if the opportunity had come up at the right age.

And I will say, I respect my dad. I like my dad, but this is one area where like his moral structure is just very juvenile. But it's because he's a first generation American. Like, we'll, we'll have a separate video on this, which is like, why are first generation atheists so likely to have athetic value systems, hedonistic values?

I was actually,

Simone Collins: I was going to say, it seems like the, there was a rise in this kind of behavior as religion. [00:42:00] A little bit, I think,

Malcolm Collins: because it's not that religion didn't have pointless ways. You could challenge yourself, but the pointless ways you could challenge yourself in religion. We're usually meant to lower negative.

Externalities

Simone Collins: are broadly pro social. We could say.

Malcolm Collins: No, or anti social, they'd say, go cloister yourself in a room and don't talk to anyone for 30 years. Like, that's a very difficult thing to do.

Simone Collins: Hey, you know what? No, it is broadly pro social because it takes the crazy a******s and removes them from society.

Come on.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we got to tell everyone in Everest. Hey, hey, the new thing is, can you get off social media for 20 years? Go for it! Go for it! It's so hard! The challenge,

Simone Collins: the real, yes, that's how you really know.

Malcolm Collins: Thoughts? Like, I, I, I like that. I think that's what we need to be pushing. Um, the, the new but no, I think that all of this is sort of downstream of the first generation didn't really have any sort of [00:43:00] a meaningful alternative to it. Well,

Simone Collins: and they didn't have, they didn't have some other way to find meaning or achievement in life.

And yeah, I mean, like other religions give you sacraments, like you can join religious service or you could have a family and like you. are really maxing it out by doing that. And, and if you want to get intense, have 10 kids. If you want to get intense, become a nun, you know, there are things you can do. And the problem I think with, with broadly society is the way now that you max it out is by spending a lot of money or doing dumb s**t, like climbing Mount Everest.

Malcolm Collins: They coded value, moral value to their self perception and society's perception of themselves, rather than any sort of objective or well thought through value system.

Simone Collins: Well, and I, you know, I would argue that a lot of people did things like join religious service, or, have a lot of kids or do things like that.

To signal, but at least it, it [00:44:00] harnesses that desire to front and harnesses it for good. Like people who just gave a lot of money, like, think about what wealthy families used to do. They used to like the Carnegie's like they, they gave so much, you know, all the libraries and the theaters and like all these other things.

And then before they think about what the Medici's did, like they built and there's all art they commissioned and like they sort of gave things to society and get a fountain in your town or something, you know, and now it's, it's not being spent on something everyone can do. I think a lot of that too is, is driven even by weirdly anti capitalist sentiment.

In the, like in the past. You could become a wealthy benefactor and give to society and be celebrated for it. And now like the Chan Zuckerberg initiative wants to like end human disease and people like, Oh, screw you. And maybe that's another issue too, is now because it's not cool to be a patron, you can't even like, you can't flaunt your wealth in a [00:45:00] way.

That benefits society because society will hate you for it. And so instead, they're spending it on still like doing things like climbing Mount Everest. And that's killing Sherpas, and that's killing other like people.

Malcolm Collins: Here's another great example, like the billionaires who all died in that submarine trying to see the Titanic.

Simone Collins: Right, well, because they couldn't. They couldn't possibly like found a library because then people would be like a rich person. I mean, they still made fun of them, but if they'd done something more public facing, it was meant to benefit other people. They would have been criticized for it. And that is, yeah, I don't know.

I'm just, I'm just starting to think about this more.

Malcolm Collins: Well, we have now wealthy people are

Simone Collins: demonized for trying to do good for trying to give to society.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And I think that if we look at the people who are trying to live our value system, right, like the billionaires this is one of the reasons why we, even though like there might be reasons to criticize Elon Musk, he's clearly trying to get us off planet, which is like our core goal.[00:46:00]

for pronatalism in a way that hurts his ability to make money and stuff like that. He's trying to like, you really need to cut billionaires some slack if they are broadly trying to do things in alignment with your value system. Oh, he's,

Simone Collins: he's trying to set up self driving cars to drive people around cities.

He's, he's trying to set up like

Malcolm Collins: dramatically lower the number of deaths.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And people are like, Oh, can you believe this? Billionaire months. I just it's so annoying. But yeah, I think that's that's another issue though is if you show that you if you use your wealth to try to help society, you're going to be Not only not praised, but actively criticized.

You're going to start to do stupid indulgent stuff like climb Mount Everest

Malcolm Collins: or just like the bottom of invest endlessly

Simone Collins: on, like, go to, like on all these ayahuasca trips and just look inward and then spend all your money on mental health and like,

Malcolm Collins: the only way this is averted is through social shaming and through, through realigning a society's [00:47:00] perception of individuals who put themselves at these sorts of pointless risks as.

The guy who died sticking a lightbulb up

Simone Collins: and rewarding people who use their resources to give back because right now we just punish them.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we just punish them. We just punish them. And it's worse than just punishing them when we praise them. People attempt to punish us.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. So it's very serious.

I was just listening to an interview. On the honestly podcast with Mark Andreessen between Barry Weiss and Mark Andreessen and Mark Andreessen was talking about this. He was like, there used to be this sort of social contract in America where if you worked hard and built a company and made a lot of money, then you'd get to go to all the fancy parties and you donate money and people would celebrate you and it'd be fun.

You know, like that would be like a good motivator. And now people are doing that and they're trying to give back. Bill Gates tries to give back. Jen Zuckerberg tries to give back. Elon Musk tries to give back. And Elon Musk gets like attacked by the U. S. government and [00:48:00] society and Mark Zuckerberg gets attacked by the government and society.

Like, they get hated. You know, people have all these conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and he's a monster. So the social contract has

Malcolm Collins: Oh! I have a call

Simone Collins: with Abigail Schreier. I'm sorry, I have to end the call. You can end. I'm sorry. I love you too. Bye.

Speaker 25: Mountains high but hearts are small Chasing glory, watch them fall Waiting lines and freezing nights Dollar bills and blinding lights Footsteps

Speaker 26: echo empty fame Rescuers call out your name Risk their lives for hollow gain Frostbite thoughts and [00:49:00] freezing pain Climbing To nowhere, while the world is crying, we ain't there.

Dollar signs in hollow air, risking lives for glory's glare. A

Speaker 25: valley hear the cries, hungry hands and angel eyes. Thousands could be fed and warm, yet we climb into the storm. Is it worth it?

Speaker 26: Look

Speaker 25: around,

Speaker 26: we're in a mountain shroud. This pressure's not a game. Chasing peaks is just insane. Climbing Everest to nowhere. While the world is crying, we ain't there. Dollar signs in hollow air.[00:50:00]

Risking lives for glory's clear.

Everest to nowhere. While the world is crying. We ain't there. Dollar signs in hollow air. Risking lives for glory's glare. Climbing Everest to nowhere. While the world is crying. We ain't there. Dollars

for glory's glare. Glory's

[00:51:00] glare.