The POSSIBLE MINDSET, Tragedy on K2 & 12-Hour Walks: Colin O'Brady & Jenna Besaw | Rich Roll Podcast

it's dark 24 000 feet on k2 in winter and there there's 10 people now outside with no tents oh my god so a guy pops his head into my tent and he's like hey man like we're out here like we have no tents like can we come inside and before i know it there's seven people inside of my tent this is a bad situation like people are gonna die out here i think people are gonna die out here i'm saying this is a bad like a bad deal hey everybody welcome to the podcast my guest today returning for his fifth appearance on the show if you can believe it is adventure athlete colin o'brady and he's joined by his wife and partner in all things jennifer saw who is appearing for the first time on the show long time listeners are well acquainted with colin's very long list of accomplishments as a 10 time world record-breaking explorer a new york times best-selling author and an expert on mindset high performance and empowering others to reimagine the limits of human possibility colin's feats include the world's first solo unsupported and fully human-powered crossing of antarctica he sets speed records for the explorers grand slam and the seven summits and the first human-powered ocean row across drake passage colin's latest book is entitled the 12-hour walk which is based on this idea that colin had during the 2020 coveted lockdown when everything stopped and like a lot of us he found himself lacking purpose lacking direction and on kind of a whim he decided to just go out on a walk no phone no direction no destination in mind and ended up returning 12 hours later a different person and really inspired by that experience to invite others to experience what he had as a means of personal empowerment so today we talk about that of course including his 12-hour walk movement which invites all of us to join him on september 10 to do our own 12-hour walk which you can learn more about at 12hourwalk.com we also discuss colin and jenna's most recent expedition to everest with friend of the podcast mike posner in addition we cover colin's absolutely harrowing experience on k2 and most importantly jenna's role and her perspective in all of it because none of colin's feats would have come to pass without jenna she's just the engine behind everything they have accomplished together which is why i'm so excited to introduce her to all of you today in addition to just incredible stories throughout this conversation you're going to find actionable insights on tackling limiting beliefs on adopting what colin and jenna call the possible mindset you're going to learn about reframing the limits of your own potential and just tons more so without further ado please hit that subscribe button and enjoy well it's great to see you guys i'm really happy to do this with you and and jenna is here today i can't wait to talk to jenna uh who said no to the today show how many times refuses to be interviewed but you're going to talk today because i've heard enough of this dude over here he's been on the podcast too many times so it's going to be all about jenna today oh god jenna's got the best story so that's perfect we'll riff and have some fun yeah i mean let's start with that i mean what is it i'm interested in you know we've all heard about colin's adventures there's too many to even keep track of all these world records and death defying and you know expeditions etc but you're the engine behind the whole thing right you're the one who keeps it on track who's doing the boring kind of unheralded uh hero work and i'm just curious about like how you keep it all together and and what the mechanics of all of that are about for you because it doesn't happen without i mean colin's always saying like it's jenna it's jenna i can't do this without jenna but you know we've never heard from you yeah well i really appreciate being here thanks for inviting me it's great to see you and having a conversation um you know it it started so long ago colin and i have been together in a relationship for a long time and then business has kind of just organically evolved for us in partnership and um for me it's it's really this beautiful kind of song and dance that we get to share where colin is pursuing some of his greatest passions and i get to be in full support but in full creator mode with him so it's not just me i'm standing behind the scenes helping him create what he wants to it's really kind of a choreographed dance if you will where we get to show our strengths and kind of participate in creating together right and what happens when you get those sat calls and you know he's in paris not a second right um yeah man it's been i mean it's been a learning process right like we've we've grown up together and we have experienced a lot together both super high highs and and some pretty dark intense expedition moments and um you know the the sat phone calls i always answer with an open heart but the biggest amount of trepidation right because i never know if it's going to be all's well we're we're doing great or if it's going to be a tragic jenna has jenna has definitely walked me off some cliffs out there um you know on the edge you know one one that comes to mind i remember calling you um from antarctica somewhere around day 40 of solo crossing jenna there was two people i talked to on the antarctic are crossing by the way on the stat phone well i guess if we count paul simon paul simon was one but there was jenna i had my nightly check-in from there and also adam skolnick oh that's right skullnick his tentacles everywhere i know i've i completely forgot about that because he was doing crazy reporting on that i mean there's new york times pieces there was epic i think there was eight new york times pieces that he shot and jenna was running that pr i mean adam has such a special place in my heart he talked about me being collins rock like adam was my rock during that whole thing i mean he i talked to him every day multiple times a day just because he was reporting on it but he he just became such a close friend yeah he definitely always it was interesting he does such a good job of the integrity of a journalist like hey i'm a journalist and i'm reporting the facts this is journalism but also he's like i also understand that like you're not talking to anyone like jenna's not talking like the two of them only people talking to me during that crossing so it's a very unique sort of position um and like i mean i mean i think i only talked to him two times or something to give interviews but you guys were kind of i was relaying a lot of information to him because i would talk to colin in really brief snippets right those crackly satellite phone calls so it's not like oh we're just having this really easy you know mellow chill conversation but in that i would have to distill down some some pieces to send over to adam so that you could accurately report on the crossing yeah but i think to me like what i was thinking of is there's there's so many moments but one that really comes to mind that combines i think a lot of things was i get to the south pole on day 40 on that crossing and jen i have this great i kind of have this euphoric you you know you thought i was on drugs you see like you know dopamine rush of like oh my god i'm here it's beautiful it's sunny it's all the stuff and like jenna can hear it in my voice she kind of lets me be in la la land by myself like for that day before she drops the bomb and then the next day she says hey we gotta talk for real and i couldn't in that moment i had such a huge piece of information to share with him that i really needed him to execute on but he was just in such a blissful place which wasn't always the case of course right he had a lot of down down days and down moments and i was just like i can't drop this on him yet so let him enjoy it one day won't crush when i have about to tell him so and i remember never forget she's like so now we need to talk for real and she's like you don't have enough i'm running the spreadsheet so jenna's not only dreaming up these projects together she's building them together we're in the weeds that's why i say it's it's a shame it's my name on the world records because it is both of ours completely from you know origin all the way through execution let's be clear i did not walk across antarctica i don't know in a vacuum but for you to be not just my wife the love of my life we've been you know together for 15 years it's been an incredible journey but then for you to actually have to say hey colin you do not have enough food in your sled you do not have enough calories in your sled i know you're starving out there i've been telling you my hips are sticking out my ribs are sticking out i'm exhausted he told me he had to take out a sewing kit and stitch in every few days a little less fabric because it was his his pants were falling down essentially so i'm like running this in my mind while also looking at the spreadsheets and i'm like oh no this calories are running this isn't and you know that i'm burning ten thousand i'm eating seven thousand and you call me and you say there's no way you're going to finish this unless you go down to roughly five thousand and i don't know i mean that's always interesting i'm curious that now richard are both interviewing you so yeah but is that also part of the i mean the new book which we're gonna get into kind of opens with this story about how you have to tell him he can't you're doing 10 hour days in antarctica yeah and you have this moment where you feel like you can't push any further or harder and your neck and neck with rudd um and jenna you're like you're gonna have to do extra hours it was that part of the calorie conversation or was that something different he had already started to do the extra hours by this point by this time yeah if you take it back oh yeah if you take it back to the very beginning i mean to colin's credit he definitely went out there thinking i think i can do this crossing but i would say you didn't have like the best plan like he really didn't not just very under the best babe but like colin's fan was like yeah i'm gonna go out there and i'm gonna walk like about 10 hours a day and we're just going to like see how it goes and i was like that's the plan like that's the plan and pretty quickly we needed to come up with an actual like legitimate spreadsheetable plan that could calculate not only hours and miles walked but calories right calories were the the linchpin in this whole thing um obviously of course it came down to the sled that he was pulling how much weight was in it what how many calories she was burning like all of all the pieces that went into this calculation and so um i mean it it was a nightmare to begin with really when column was like uh i have to walk further and longer each day in order to make this happen and you're gonna run out of calories i mean we figured it out pretty quickly but but i was definitely in that moment for sure in that moment particularly as i'm getting my butt kicked by rudd in the first week i'm calling jenna i'm crying i'm calling jenna i can't do this i mean every limiting belief is in my mind i can't pull my sled it's not going to work i can't go far enough i'm getting my butt kicked i told the press that i'm going to do this big thing and it's going to be an epic failure and he was in a rough spot the first week yeah i mean not only with the food we're talking about on day 40 we take probably back to day five of that and we write about this in the new book the 12-hour walk of you being like you're trying to help me problem-solve like you've been i've you know i've said this to you of course not on a podcast but i'll say it again now which is to me your the balance of the strength that you've shown the love that you've shown me has certainly got me to the finish line but also the poise like how hard it would be in those moments to just be like okay it's too hard whatever like you are you're you're asking me and you're telling me like well can you go a little bit further can't i'm saying i can't go any further his responses were not delicate let me tell you that i have to be a psychologist too like when's the right moment to tell him he's gonna have to go further on less calories each day right yeah and then it's admin and then it's interesting thing right because you're saying this too it's not i guess the one thing it was like your business partner or like your coach or something like this but like totally i mean this is my husband the person that i care and love the most in the world right and i'm having to find his edge press on it see how he reacts and responds assess that make minor detail you know little adjustments along the way and hope hope and pray that it's all going to work out right right and if it doesn't the stakes are high really high yeah yeah yeah and meanwhile behind the scenes just i want to get a you know glean a sense of like the scale of what's required to pull something like this off like my only frame of reference was doing epic five which is like nothing compared to the scale of the expeditions that you're doing and and in that case like jason did almost all of it like i just showed up for the ride with that um but in this case it requires a lot of money in intense pre like pre-pre it's like making a movie like you have pre-production and you got to make these spreadsheets and you got to figure out what's going to be on the sled it can't be too heavy it can't be too light how are we going to make sure there's enough calories how are we going to make sure that he has backup gear if stuff goes wrong because stuff always goes wrong like who's paying for this how is this all coming together like i think like it's you know it's like without a team of like 12 people working you know around the clock no and we've really always kind of been a lean and mean team to me the moment that i come back to always around this um is in 2014 so i was racing triathlon professionally at the time jenna had come out on the road with me full-time for a couple years was kind of starting to step into management think about helping sponsored whatever it was it was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sleeping on people's floors like this wasn't glamorous in fact jenna was like i need to have a real career and i was like no let's do the itu circuit maybe i should get a real job and help support you're like colin that is not my everest yeah exactly like this she's like i'd be like it's cool that you're into this or whatever but it was beautiful in the fact that you've always been adventurous so we're like well at least we can go to all these countries and again like we had no money so we were basically home stays people you know basically opening their homes to us letting them sleep giving us food it's a grind yeah it's a major grind yeah yeah and so we lived that and then we in the we were racing it in south america in the fall of 2014 we went to climb ecuador's three volcanoes there's there's a bunch of volcanoes there but there's three the three tallest ones cayon bay cotopaxi and chimborazo and i had always like loved climbing some mountains but jenna had done a little bit of that but not much i wanted to be very i like i am not an expedition oriented person like i grew up single mom only child like she did not take me camping this is not something that i was like at all privy to until i met you play sports in high school and stuff i did but like you know tennis and i was a skier and i mostly was a ballet dancer and so that was i mean i wasn't really i mean i guess tennis you would consider team sport because there was a team of us but i was a singles player you know like i wasn't in teams you're not like a like a a thrill-seeking snowboarding rock climbing type of place and when i met jenna i met jenna when we were 20 she was 20 and she was in college at that point you weren't playing sports anymore i mean it was like a part of your childhood song but we were so i said let's go climb these mountains in ecuador and holman drew this in the off season so this was colin's like vacation away from sports was to go out and climb these massive mountains and i was like okay what world is this a vacation but like okay i'm in but the year before it the year before they end it with a with a nice hotel right unfortunately we couldn't afford much of a nice hotel at that point either but we we go there because the year before we i've been racing in africa we have been together um racing in africa on zimbabwe and we went and climbed kilimanjaro together and you climbed kilimanjaro and you're like wow that was cool so we said next year let's do something else like this and you know us how old were we at this point i was 20 or 26 27 i was 30 maybe 29 something like that um yeah under 29.29 brought a diamond ring up there in my pocket somewhat of the kyambi this beautiful sunny day asked jenna to marry me and we're on the summit of this beautiful glaciated peak 19 almost 19 000 feet in ecuador mountain called cayme we had this moment that again at the time i didn't obviously i thought getting engaged would be a really special moment but i didn't necessarily know this would be such a ripple effect moment throughout our life which comes back to how do we have the money to do this how do we figure this out all this kind of stuff which was we sat there on this mountaintop and we just looked at each other and this kind of blissed out like oh my god we're going to get married i love you so much moment but just like what do we want to do with our life like just have it like just like an in the moment brainstorm of like let's dream without limits and in the new book the 12-hour walk one of the framing principles literally the first page is something that i define i called a possible mindset which i define dictionary definition learn the front to my own dictionary definition right which says an empowered way of thinking that unlocks a life of limitless possibilities and so on this mountaintop is we're getting engaged we look at each other and kind of do this you know just on the fly exercise of like if there were no limits if money wasn't an issue if we had the resources we had the network if we had this that the other thing like what would we want to do in this moment let's dream without limits and i remember that conversation so vividly and maybe it was uh because we were surrounded by mountains or or whatnot but we dreamed up uh what became our first you know collective world record project which was the explorer's grand slam i said my childhood dream has always been to climb mount everest we started riffing on things that included everest which was like the seven summits world record it explores grand slam the seven summits plus north and south pole and then both of us said the triathlon lifestyle although we loved it mostly there was things we didn't like about it but was it was lacking an impact it was lacking and having sort of legs beyond it felt very self-serving right you show up at a you fly to this race you've trained for this race you fly to this race you show up you race it's over you sponsors maybe you're happy or not yeah if you're gonna make the olympic team then it's one thing yeah like if that's your you know apex mountain for that but short of that you know it just becomes like this washing machine lifestyle you know look i love it i mean i respected all my friends and i mean that community obviously was trying to make the olympics i came up short great friends of mine made that next olympics joe malloy who's a dear friend of both jen and i we travel the world with gary i mean it's amazing guy those guys in the olympics that you're dear friends we train with them a ton but there was a a limit to that and so in this mountain that same mountain we said like let's start this maybe we can like have impact millions of kids with non-profit or something like that and it's funny to look at that moment now because like we on that mountaintop had no we had no money literally no money we had no background no idea how to start a nonprofit knew nothing of press or media or pr or digital scale or social was somewhat new-ish at the time in the way that we think about it now um but that possible mindset that limitless possibility has allowed us in this naive moment of being engaged yeah to dream right absolutely all right but like real talk yeah are you sure jenna that colin didn't bully you into this because it sounds like this is his dream right like where do you like what's your you know because this isn't bred into your dna in the way that it is for colin yeah no i mean everest certainly was not a childhood dream of mine i mean literally not even close i don't think i'd read anything about it other than i knew that was tallest mountain in the world like that was it um and so the the the challenge to climb the mountains wasn't my interest right i mean i was like cool you want to do that great at least you want to do that because that's your thing um but for me it really was about the impact right we we kind of you know started batting ideas around like what's important to us and kids have always been really important to me um i just think they're you know the the next generation there really is who's gonna take the reins from us as we continue to build this world and there just seemed like you know a great combination of colin's love of sports and my interest in impact and how could we do that in a sustainable way that felt like uh something that had you know legs that we could talk about in the world that was interesting i'll also say that's a hundred i love the greatest such a good question because it's fair it's totally fair by like let's climb these mountains like that's clearly me driving that yeah but i think that what was interesting during the time when jenna was observing the triathlon world the scene from helping me with sponsors which was like by the way like a free bike helmet here or there a pair of sunglasses it wasn't like yeah was it um she kept being like and again it's funny because now i think of you as such an amazing marketer such a talented pr person but at that time you didn't have that but you had these instincts like you kept looking at like you were like i don't understand why that guy isn't having more impact or this person's not reaching more people or that wow like we'd be you know sitting on the other side of the world with and hear stories from these athletes and i'd be like why does no one know that story like someone should know that story that makes you so much more interesting than you can just swim back and run right there were beautiful stories of people out there that i was like oh this is what people need to know about these people so you had this like and i was and jenna has one of the strongest intuitions of anyone i've ever met but you certainly had this it's so funny looking back now you've built these very successful media campaigns billions of media impressions whatever through like just your hard work and diligence and figuring it out you haven't done any of that time but you're looking at this you're going there's something in these stories there's something in the way to like transmute this into impact like you felt that thing in the ether yeah it was it was i wouldn't say it was a calling but it felt very organic for me i just oh i get this i feel this i can help help relay it right right right right that first project was a a canvas to paint on and make also i mean we continue to make mistakes but certainly in the early days of like so how do you actually get sponsors i mean i literally didn't know what the difference between marketing and pr was at that time like i'm like i don't know what the difference between i mean they go hand in hand there's a difference i don't you know they go hand in hand but like truly i was like google what is the difference between marketing and pr and how how do we do this how do we tell the story how do we reach people and kind of just and when you're putting these expeditions together like what is the value proposition for the person that you're trying to get money from right like is it a brand awareness thing or is it the impact that they can be involved with because like i said earlier like these things cost a lot of money together you're asking people to like hey we need like dollar x which is a high you know high dollar item no i mean it's a perfect question so the again not trying to shamelessly plug the new book but it really does bring up with the book is framed around limited tell me the title again the book is called 12-hour watch okay but no it's framed or i love it i love it we have by the way paul knows the difference between marketing and apr all right go ahead rich and i have training the same editor 10 year anniversary of finding old trucks congratulations by the way man that's amazing and rick rick horgan shout out to rick corgan who edited my previous book and this book and reached her first job on my book i love rick rick's rich brick is uh rick is quite a guy the smartest people i've ever met quite literally he knows every word literally every email he's like just comes up with new words i'm like i haven't looked at his words yeah he's a genius um but he's done right by you and i that's for sure um but no the the book is framed around commonly limiting beliefs we all have you know ten common and lemon beliefs each one i break down a story from adventure a genomized life um and then speak directly to the reader about how we can overcome these limiting beliefs and we'll get to the larger call to action there but one of the most common limiting beliefs and that's why we're talking about this right now it's not why you brought it up but i pulled my instagram audience and said a couple years ago like what is stopping you from living your best life what what is i just want to know like what were people thinking about and i thought i might get hundreds of different responses but it turned out that i got like the five same responses hundreds of times and really 75 of them were i don't have enough money if i had x amount of dollars i would be doing this but i'm not because i don't have that money and it was the exact same problem that jenna and i had sitting on the mountaintop dreaming about this was like well explores grand slam quick google you can figure out going north pole south pole everest whatever like you're looking you're running a tally of half a million dollars pretty quickly like it's and that's not making any money that's just like it's covered that's covering costs like just purely covering costs um and it would have been super easy to let us stop i mean i think that that's the moment where like you have a good business idea right you're hanging out with your buddy at the bar hey we're going to do an ironman triathlon we're going to race a marathon you're having a beer with your buddy on a sunday and saturday night you wake up on monday morning and you call your buddy and you're like yeah like about that idea yeah you know like like yeah we were just [ __ ] right um and i think easily we could have got home from that trip in ecuador you know the the echo of the excitement of being engaged as young people in 2014 um would have worn off and been like okay but like so like real jobs like what's your college degree you know what are we gonna do um but i know you've talked about a lot on the show rich i think there's a big difference between belief and abundance and the belief in scarcity right like just that belief um and i was actually listening to you and skolnik chop it up on the 10-year anniversary pod of finding ultra you'll have to say say the line but you said something like when you're living in your truth the universe conspires what's the what's the word when your heart is true the universe will conspire to support you i mean i think yeah to kind of drill down to brass tacks on that what i hear in your story and i've experienced this myself is that on some level you have to believe it's possible and you don't have to completely buy into that you can have rational skepticism like wow that's going to be really hard i don't i don't know if i can do that but what can i do right now i don't have any money but i can go do this and i can i think the more little kind of steps you take in the direction of that thing that you you know dream about or aspire to have in your life there is energy that kind of coalesces around that and then the next step will be reveal you're not i think a lot of people just sit around and they want to see how the path is going to unfold all the way to the end or the destination and it doesn't work that way like you have to with each step you get a little bit more confidence and you get a little bit more evidence and you know i can't like pick iron man like iron man's expensive yeah so well i want to do an iron man i don't have any money and i don't own a bike but you know i borrowed my friend's bike and i rode for a while and then you know after doing that for three or four months this other friend of mine had an extra bike and he said he'd sell it to me for like you know 20 of what it's worth and you just you kind of make it work and then the more that you do that the more the universe kind of opens up to you and things happen and that sounds perhaps a bit too ephemeral or mystical and maybe even privileged but i've seen it happen in my life this is certainly the path that you guys have have taken like totally things occur when you just keep pushing forward incrementally 100 and i think that it comes also back to you're gonna get like your buddy didn't sell you the bike on the first time you thought about having a bike that might be like when you're thinking about how to get a bike for three months and that finally comes around meaning like you didn't like give up on your dream to have a bike after the first you got to earn the dream totally i love that diligence and work ethic right and the more that the more kind of sweat equity you put into it the you know the more opportunities you're creating for yourself and it doesn't it doesn't lay out linearly or on the timeline that you would prefer right eventually the person you least expect to open a door for you is the one who does and i i mean two two four one there's a to me there's amazing help me tell this story but we we were six eight months into trying to raise money for the explorers grand slam project and had raised very little a triathlon sponsor of mine had who a guy high net worth guy named brian gelber who would help me out first mars i've said i'll help you once you show me you can have some proper sponsors like i'm not just gonna write you a check so show me a nike sponsorship show me like a real quote-unquote sponsorship and then i can maybe you know help you guys out so that was a big thing only if we could prove ourselves basically right but it's like here's a little shred of hope like okay there's a crack here like now i have something to work with but then six eight months down the road we still had raised basically zero dollars and we finally by you know friend of a friend of a friend had introduced us to someone at columbia sportswear who had introduced us up the chain at columbia sports where after five people said no we actually get a meeting with tim boyle who's the ceo of um columbia sportswear based in portland um and they also own mountain hardwear and surreal and a bunch of the other like you know whatever climbing brands and we're like oh my god this is our big shot like this is our big shot we prepped for the meeting jen and i were like did we like read his mom's book about the starting of the company we do all the things we like buy their clothes to go to the office and of course we couldn't afford and we walk in and he sits down and he looks at us the first thing you see he's kind of like who are you guys and you realize like we've been prepping for this meeting and this is like two minutes in between something actually important that he's taking and we're like oh shoot and we like we're ready with this whole we're thinking he's gonna give us the time of day to like do the whole presentation we're like we have this like website with like a video on it and like whatever and we like play it for him and you can just see his eyes just kind of like glaze over and he's like cool cool like uh hey good luck with that like good job you guys good luck with that and we're like being ushered out the door and jenna is just a complete savage like i was like well don't i was like i was like this can't be it like this cannot be the end of the road for this because you know in looking through all the different sponsorship opportunities i was you know when you just can feel something is right i'm like this is the one we cannot let this slip through the cracks and i just pivoted and said like mr boyle like colin here's a local guy from portland you haven't even heard his whole story give me five minutes to tell you what you need to know here and i just truly from the heart like i and i am not one to just like raise my hand and speak up and like you know jump into the middle of something and it just came out so organically and so naturally i shared exactly what we were trying to do how much money we were trying to raise and i think this was for the explorers grand slams never died literally we had nothing and jenna what she's being humble jenna is generally a really a natural introvert and um just uh i don't know you're not one to just like you but in that moment to be like actually excuse me mr boyle like he was like what like i just thought it's like who's this girl's 27 year old girl sitting in the corner she's like excuse me miss bro actually i think there's a little more it's like to this like you know high-powered ceo and she kind of sits him back down in his chair and just goes like goes in it's like there's more here so i think it's a combination of that belief in abundance which is to even get that meeting it was like no no no yes meet a guy at a coffee shop who could introduce you to here there and both of us like doing that but also in the moment like you're in this moment and you're like okay i could do these inflection points where you know you have to crush it yeah and they're saying the guy's saying no he's literally saying no and jenna's just like i was even like i think both of us really live by this quote a closed mouth is never fed and it was like i hadn't even had the chance to ask for what we wanted before getting shut down and i was like oh no this is the moment where you have to speak up and you have to say at least if you get to know you get to know right right but it was a really beautiful um exchange and ultimately led to our like first legitimate like real sponsorship right so what is it what did what did you say specifically that turned the tide it's a good question i mean it wasn't recorded so i don't know exactly you know specifically what i said but i really i was like colombia wants this and needs this like i can see this for you guys as a brand this is critical to what you're trying to um use as a campaign and they were doing tested tough tested tough yeah and again this was years ago um and it's just like everything that the project was sharing out in the world was exactly the same talking points as this campaign um and i think i just kind of you know gave a little bit from my standpoint she just she just locked in it was just like i'm not taking like he was just like whoa she's not taking no for an answer okay well it sounds to me like that about it it was like a vibe shift from hey you know we need this for us to here's how we can fulfill your need which is to extend your brand awareness on this messaging that's completely on point with what you're trying to do and not for nothing you're not really doing a very good job on it right now and in a really unique way exactly like i was like what we are bringing you're not gonna get anywhere else like this is colin can bring this uh we can bring this as a team and like you want this not in like a you know crazy way but just in a very complete honest way and i think he saw that i think he finally saw the passion and was willing to take a risk on us and yeah i mean that that was a huge turning point but it certainly was not it wasn't going to pay for the balance of what we were doing it was just to be like oh you know you know a domino had fallen like whoa columbia sports project that allowed us sort of the ability to kind of go out in the world but then we were still a lot a lot of dollars short you know of raising money for this first project and um you know basically just kept knocking on doors and i think you know my mom said this to me for a long time i don't know if it's her quote i'm probably not but she says you know luck comes to those who are prepared um and you know getting our first project off the ground was two and the two of us waking up every single day with our mind flooded with doubt right like our mind flooded with all these doubts like oh this isn't going to work this isn't going to this but then getting up and doing it i mean i'll be curious for you like you're talking about you know being on kauai starting the podcast like there must have been all sorts of moments like when you're like i'm doing this pocket a pod what how do i even download that like like it's that same moment like what was that for you like when you're like getting your thing like going well the difference is like it was just a fun creative thing like i didn't do it because i was driving towards some vision of what it could be it just felt like a cool creative outlet that i enjoyed and it organically built from that and then at some point when it kind of kicked in and i was like oh people are really digging this like how can i turn this into something more than what it is currently and that's been a journey of just gradual iteration like there's there was no big you know crazy spike or viral moment it's just like showing up for it every single day just like you're training for a race like putting in the hours and the miles and yeah it's like we're in this amazing studio but yeah it started in a warehouse in kauai with a very humble you know kind of approach to what we were doing and it was really out of like but my heart was true like i was doing it for the joy of doing it not because like oh i can i can turn this into like a job and the consistency and the passion and i think that it's interesting when we reflect on our you know our first project and that moment with tim boyle jenna fully turned the tides on even me who have been known to be resilient and persistent like i was like well i guess that's it like i was ready to walk out of that room before jenna really stepped in um but same for us like that was that first project was born from can we just do this can we like break even and just have the like the honor of being able to attempt this not like can we do this and turn it into a books and speaking and this it was like literally can we do this and have this non-profit that like helps some people like just from that pure place of the why and i think that the i mean i talk about it in the 12-hour walk when i talk about the money chapter which is obviously something that's big big topic for everyone myself included was like we had this why of wanting to do this and there was a financial requirement for doing it but the persistence the passion wasn't like oh so let's raise this money so we can quote unquote get rich or have like a nicer car or a nicer thing it was like we just want to do this to have the impact the passion the perseverance the the adventure the curiosity of doing said thing and i think i think in that moment in that you know that tim boyle moment and certainly there's so many other inflection points in our life you know where things have gone wrong we've rewrited it whatever but that passion that desire like the love of the game like i just like wanting to do this our heart being true the way you said it rich in your book i think it's it's part and parcel of that yeah i think there's this misplaced idea uh you know that uh you know people want to be like they see you on stage at some ted event or whatever and they're like i want to be a public speaker and they chase that but what they're missing is you have to go out and do the thing that lights you up to be you know unique and interesting you have to go live a certain type of life so that when you get on a stage you have actually something to say that has resonance totally you know so it's a little bit backwards i think prophets walk among us as a writer and podcaster for nearly 10 years i've become more convinced than ever that our world is populated by scores of beautiful and brilliant people who have amazing stories to share those that we don't know who can teach us something new and leave us all the better for the experience of their sharing and so i've dedicated my career to tracking down the most compelling profits on the planet going deep with each of them on my podcast to elucidate the best of what they have to offer and to sharing the insights gleaned for the benefit of all but the podcast is not the only medium by which to share their stories which is why i'm proud to announce the release of my new book voicing change volume 2. more than mere words on paper voicing change is a physical manifestation of the magic inspiration and timeless wisdom that transpires each week on the ritual podcast the first edition of voicing change was a beautifully rendered book worthy of display on any coffee table and volume 2 follows in that tradition by showcasing even more of my favorite conversations in an elegant publication replete with interview excerpts essays and stunning photography making for an exquisite companion to the first volume or a satisfying stand-alone work picking up this book allows you to revisit the wisdom of your favorite everyday prophets and physically interact with the life-changing ideas contained within voicing change volume 2 available now while supplies last for a limited time order your copy today only at richroll.com so you go on and you do all of the i mean we've you've been how many times you've been on the show like four times or something like that we've gone through like you know like nitty-gritty expeditions you know like well you reached out to me you're like hey i want to come back i was like bro you've been on so many times okay i got you got a book like what else are we going to talk about but like you're the full concept though it's like jenna's gotta come um but uh so we don't need to like anybody who's enjoying this can go back and there's plenty of conversations you know around the antarctica expedition the seven summits etc and i encourage everybody to go check those out we'll put links in the show notes um but let's let's kind of uh get to the new book which i think is really interesting uh in that um it provides you this opportunity to share lessons that you've learned from these various expeditions but to do it in a cons in a context where there's some actionable takeaways from people and it's all wrapped around this idea of of the 12-hour walk so explain how you had this kind of epiphany around this experience that you could share and create community around totally yeah no um it is really exciting for me and we'll get into what the details of it are but it's fun to now have written this book and have it be coming out that's really at its core a call to action for people to get involved not to observe me doing an expedition or something like that um which i think you know i love don't get me wrong i love documentaries about other people doing stuff they light me up but this is a direct you know me speaking to the reader essentially um throughout the entirety of this book and the call to action around taking your own 12-hour walk but the really the origin story for me was during covid so um i think the last literally i was looking the last time i was on the pod um i have a picture of you and i on march 8 2020 and i'm at your house and we've done kind of a two-part follow-up to after the drake passage and all that we did you know did two-part episode and march 8th 2020. it's crazy right like i'm at you're so the lockdown date was like when did the nba called off 11 11 11. so three days later i have this vivid memory of standing with you the you know the the microphones are off we're saying goodbye and giving you a hug and you said to me you said you know calling up julie and i got this trip planned to italy in may like because italy was you know first hit right do you think that's gonna like what's your take on like if you think that's gonna happen and i was like i literally i remember i remember giving you a hug and being like bro may it's march 8th man like right by maybe yeah it was such an interesting like three days later it was so weird how it went from like well there's this thing kind of going around but i just remember when it was two things that happened the nba uh called off their games and i was like holy [ __ ] and then tom hanks yesterday in australia and i was like everybody come home yes i'm gonna go to the market and stock up on canned goods and you know that was the start totally so i and the reason you know of course it's funny though those headlines that you just say actually in the chapter 12 the last chapter this book um i open with those say news flash those march 11 with those headlines tom hanks nba canceled the season because also jenna and i had planned to climb mount everest together that spring um and we talked about that that was like exactly it was coming up yeah right around the corner and did uh those of course derailed that entire thing but also you know context for us in our life we had i had just completed the drake passage row a couple months before that and then my first book the impossible first came out on january 14th and i had been in the kind of beginnings of post you know book tour books out um you know super humbled and honored to you know hit the new york times bestsellers list boom kovid everything's cancelled speeches the rest of the book tour just like you know that's the least of the world's problems but that was just on our personal life what was going on like we had this kind of whole thing mapped out jen and i were going to everest and it was just like just like everyone else just life instantly you know derailed right and it's funny to think back you and i'm like remember thinking hugging you and like maybe even touching your face as we're saying goodbye and then was like in rich's house like huh that's not like a thing that happened to you for a long time um but uh so then we end up going um i was pretty i was pretty afraid in those first few weeks of code but not afraid for my own safety necessarily but like just the societal breakdown of like that moment of like are they going to close this and they're going to close the borders and are they closing state borders and like all this kind of stuff and jen and i live in in jackson hole my whole family basically is in oregon you know five sisters parents etc jenna's parents are back east but we have a big concentration of family in oregon where we where i grew up we lived a long time and so it was kind of like i would feel more comfortable if we were like within the state border of oregon we didn't feel like we could go be with my parents you know based on their age and all that sort of stuff of like still keeping their distance um but my family has a cabin on the oregon coast on a really small little coastal town 300 people population manzanita oregon um and so generally a way to ride out the apartment yeah exactly we were like in the middle of nowhere the rules there were which town manzanita it's like a small beach town on the oregon coast like south of cannon beach north of newport i don't know the oregon coast at all but beautiful i do that's where i did like my fifth step when i was in treatment at cannon beach yeah yeah it's like 20 10 miles south of there it's close like really close to there um anyways and the rule in oregon was they're closing all the beaches all the state parks but you could be in a beach town if you were a homeowner of that be a resident or whatever like so you can you know drive out from portland and walk around the beach but if you were there you could be there that's what like the lockdown rules were in those first couple months so me jenna and our dog jack went out loaded up our car in wyoming drove out i went to costco and bought like 10 100 pounds of rice like literally i've never i still have cans of chili that i bought like on march 12th or whatever exactly yeah colin like really i i really haven't seen you that scared i scared in different ways but in that like kind of materialistic gathering hoarding yeah even jenna was like it's a little more low-key about it but anyways we end up in oregon coast and we kind of had had this whole plan i mean jenna had trained jenna said i want to climb everest which was really cool we can talk about that it's incredible but she without you know she just said not a big background that a year before that i want to climb everest so we've been training for that we do the drake passage row book tour all these kind of things we kind of had mapped out like a pretty 2020 year of doing this big documentary with discovery and this all of a sudden just cancel cancel cancel cancelled so we find ourselves sitting in the oregon coast just kind of staring at each other a little bit i mean i think a lot of people have that moment of just kind of like what are we doing what are we doing now and i'm like in my house you know like this and so in that moment i'll i'll be honest you know my my mental health definitely suffered um was not was not feeling good you know days would go by where i'd be like get up in my pajamas and it'd be like 8pm i'd be like still in my pajamas and be like i guess we're just going back to sleep and i love the oregon coast it's just a special place but it's you know it's rainy and dreary and it's pacific northwest in the spring you know kill me now and yeah it's not this la 73 and sony every day um and i'm sitting there and i think to myself when was the last time that i felt like really deeply at peace like when was the last time just in my body and soul where i felt just calm and like comfortable um and it hadn't even been in the previous year before covet you know it was great to write that first book and get all the attention off the antarctic crossing was was really you know humbling but it also came with a lot of feel like elevated pressure and intensity and different stresses and all of that and then boom we did this rowing project which was successful was awesome which is exciting but stressful and so there was a last time that i really thought of myself feeling comfortable and calm in that moment was during my antarctica crossing like by myself alone walking around out there and as you know because you lived at rich you were in new york city right after my antarctica crossing and it was the first time i was really asked any questions by you know hotel lobby we ran into each other yeah so serendipitous it was so special yeah for those listening rich and i have come i come in new york city after the anarcho crossing running toward each other hotel lobby and basically midtown right you're on your well what i remember about that is it was winter and it was like kind of sleeting out a little bit and you just finished antarctica and you were headed over to cnn yep and and we were like really close to columbus circle and we were laughing because they they said do you want us to send a car like you couldn't walk from it was like four blocks so we had to brave we thankfully had a car we'd have to brave the main streets of manhattan but in that moment and you you came to my friend's house a couple days later i think after that where friends gathered and just said you know asking me questions about antarctica and what was the resonant from that moment that ends up being the last chapter of that book um and still is to this day is one of the most beautiful moments of my life just this resonance of infinite love this sort of beauty and creativity of that moment and sitting there in covid i was kind of brought back to that moment of going like wow when i had nothing when i was alone in antarctica walking for days starving hungry under this like incredible stress externally i actually found this deep place of like peace and contentment and so i say to jenna i kind of i'm like i'm like i'm going out tomorrow and she's like okay and i was like i'm going on a walk she's like yeah we walk every day and i was like no no no all day 12 hours like i used to do in antarctica by myself like i'm headed out you know onto the oregon coast and the one one of my favorite things about the oregon coast is that the beaches are these just long you know basically desolate flat beaches that are great for walking and so i walk out i go walk out my door don't have like a specific planner than to basically stay out all day um and remember my phone buzzed in the first you know 30 minutes like it does you know someone texting me or some notification or something like that and i like do my the knee-jerk thing pick it up and look at it and i'm like what am i like what am i doing like and so i throw the phone into airplane mode um and walk for the rest of the day you know i walk for you know basically 12 hours um you know conjuring what i had done in antarctica and tapped back into very quickly just the the flow the the meditative bliss the silence the stillness of my own brain my own psyche without sort of the external inputs of noise or sound or even you know music or podcasts or anything of just like the silence like of my own brain and i came back and i don't know what your memory of this jenna but just i i remember just feeling more calm and at ease than i had felt in a really long time yeah he just had this like kind of the spark was back in his eye um which it had completely gone away you know and in him setting out that day i had heard it in his voice you know when you know your partner really well and i'm like oh he's on to something like something is about to have a change and him coming back in and walking back through the door that what day he i mean he was changed he was just different he was more calm more fulfilled you just felt like happy again yeah and i think you know in that moment when in that covered moment couple months in the pandemic when everyone's you know just me me and billions of other people on the planet trying to figure out what the heck's going on you know the isolation something i always thought i was really familiar with but it was weird to be isolated in the context of modern society i guess yeah is that weird thing of like i got this like i know how to be alone yeah like i'm the guy who watches an article alone like what do i have to worry about and then four months later you're like yeah this isn't so good no and so what came from that i mean that was the initial spark but ultimately it was kind of like wow you know i've you know i've done several 10 day of apos silent vipasta meditations i've walked across antarctica by myself completely alone like you know i've done these things are pretty intense out there solo adventures but all of a sudden i walk out my front door and i basically get the same sort of experience in terms of just in the internal experience of just a reset a quieting of the mind a calmness an inner strength etc and so it just kind of the spark of this thesis was is this me being able to tap into my experiences that i've gone to the extreme ends of the earth to kind of conjure within my own psyche or is this something that's likely a could be a prescription for any person at any moment of time and i've been thinking about writing another book but i thought to myself as as proud as i am of the impossible first you know that's a memoir about my life that's me just like the finding ultra is about your life it's an incredible i mean finding ultra love the book incredible story it's you talking about your life it's me talking about my life and there's implicit things that are guiding principles of sharing sort of other things people can take from that but i became more interested in the idea of is there a book that i can write that takes my experiences but they can actually give somebody something actionable and something tangible to take home themselves not just like well unless i go to the summit of everest with my wife or i go to cross antarctica solar if i wrote a boat or this i'm not going to be able to have this feeling so like that's just not me and so when i did this 12 hour walk thing i was like wow like this was amazing it conjured all the things that i'm trying to like conjure my own self to like knock me out of this kind of low moment and could this apply to other people so i very quickly kind of drafted some test subject jenna included um and said jenna i'm gonna need you to go out and walk for 12 hours um and you know from that the the 12-hour walk which yes it's a book um now but is also what i'm really thinking about more than anything is this global movement you know my goal is to inspire 10 million people to take a 12 hour walk and the book breaks breaks it down and goes through all these limiting beliefs and it'll entertain you from all these stories from our life etc but at its core i mean to you know rick corgan probably happened to be saying this but like it is simple like walk out your front door put your phone on airplane mode take a day by yourself and look 12 hours might sound far and long but this is not an endurance challenge this is meant to meet you exactly where you're at like if you if you walk one mile or if you walk 50 miles like it doesn't matter take as many breaks as you want like this is not like something you're building up to this is something for you to take a day because although of course there's a physical element to it ultimately this is you training your mind and taking that day on plug i mean i'd love to ask you rich what for you you're you know somebody who's endurance sport athlete who have done some incredible things meditation practice all as soon as you've done but once like in the last five years say what's the longest that you have spent by yourself with no external inputs and what i'll define that which is sleeping doesn't count of course um the second someone's in a room with you talking to you that clock resets every time you look at your phone the clock resets every time you've got music on or podcast on or whatever the clock resets like i'm curious like what's the longest period of time you've spent i mean i'll tell you it ain't 12 hours you know the only thing that comes to mind was a portion of like 29029 you know when we were there together and i woke up really early one morning and kind of went up and did a couple spins by myself yeah maybe that was a couple hours yeah and that's probably where our i've maxed out and i were in the tent adjacent to you and i think we kept you up jenna came back late and we were being loud or something like that i couldn't sleep and then you guys got home yeah you guys came back really late we're in the tent next to me and woke me up and i was like [ __ ] it i'm awake i'm just gonna go back up on the mountain in the dark you know which was fine before us but then we're like rich you got to do a victory lap with us yeah and then i got [ __ ] for like like i snuck out and like you know sandbagged everybody like that was not the intention trust me i wish i could have slept in yeah um but yeah the point being that you know i haven't you know even as somebody who loves all of these things and appreciates the the value that they bring like my life's busy and i got you know lots of moving pieces around me and you know i haven't carved out the time to do something like that but i think that the beauty in all of it is the simplicity of it and how easy it is to understand and the fact that it's taking the core of the aspirational and making it entirely accessible you know even if you walk a mile and sit on a rock for you know most the day or whatever you're still engaging in this process it's a no-cost affair and it's not demanding physically or it's not necessarily demanding physically it's really a walkabout it's a compressed silent meditative practice in which you're compelled to confront yourself without devices to distract you or entertain you totally yeah exactly and i think it what's what's fun and interesting about about that concept and why i'm really excited about it is i'm not here to vilify social media like being like don't ever be on social media don't ever check your phone in life i'm just saying like hey like this day take a day take one day i mean the subtitle of the book is invest one day conk your mind unlock your best life i think we can have i know if you're feeling stuck if you're feeling depressed if you're having a tough time if if you're not feeling even stuck or depressed but you're just like wanna reset or you're you're pondering a career change or a shift or anything's going on your mind like it is so easy in the middle of our day-to-day with all of our responsibilities to not take the time to kind of look inward um and one of the book one of the the the chapters on this book that i'm really passionate about is around intuition um and that's through the frame of my k2 expedition which we haven't we haven't spoken about we'll talk about some point but the is is kind of i say when you know you know like you know the answer like it's amazing how we actually and a lot of the big decisions in our life know the answer um but we don't give ourselves the time to reflect on the oh this this to-do list or this pros and cons or whatever but 12-hour walk opens the possibility for that as well and so you know i mean to me what's so fun about this is i love being the athlete in the arena again like i said proud of those things but this is saying like you know my my next mount everest is for everyone listening for everyone to be a part of this to be involved in this we uh you can do the 12-hour walk any single day we've actually created an app funny enough for this sort of thing that basically puts your phone in airplane mode and counts down but also keeps maps open so you don't get lost um you know which is helpful um but also on september 10th we have a larger sort of call to action right which is you're going to let's do it you're going to everybody's going to everyone's going to do it on that on that on that individually but together yeah so goggins has the 4 by 4 by 48 you go you got the 12x1 yeah the 1251. i like it so rich what are you doing on september 10th sometimes i actually already put it on my calendar amazing um so i already have it blocked off to do it uh there's a possibility i might be out of town doing something but i don't i'm not sure in which case i'll do it you know beforehand amazing but uh yeah i already made a point of making sure it's it's there i love it i think i think it's cool one thing that i love it and i i'm really curious to hear your feedback on it the people that we've had you know test doing this it's been amazing people oh you know all different ages you know all the way up to people in late 70s have done this to friends of ours contemporary friends of ours younger you know people who have never done anything you know never done a 5k never a 10k no not like non-athletes like really a wide cross-section of people and the just the original initial feedback's been amazing you know people crying people having these breakthroughs but one things i found the most interesting about committing to do it like if you're listening to this and you're thinking like am i going to do that am i not going to do that is the limiting beliefs that pop up in your mind when thinking about doing this like literally like you haven't even done it yet but like you're listening this you're driving your car right now you're listening to this podcast and you're like yeah but like i'm a busy guy and like where am i gonna find the time right or i hate being uncomfortable you know i just don't like being uncomfortable if i'm on my feet that long that's just not going to feel that good you know your listeners i think are more like kind of step outside their comfort zone folks but that's a pretty common experience people just kind of wanting to not you know push a little bit or i'm not strong enough right i'm not a runner i'm not a walker i'm not a you know those limiting beliefs are popping up around why not to schedule the 12-hour walk and then kind of diving deep and writing this book what i realized is whatever limiting beliefs are coming up for you myself included when i try to put this on my own calendar because i'm now doing this somewhat regularly i realized those are the same limiting beliefs that are also holding me back from unlocking my best life or doing the things that i want to do so for right now the first excuse is i don't have enough time it's likely that you're also saying that limiting belief to yourself in a number of other buckets in your own life that are holding you back so i think it's an interesting the 12-hour walk the experience of the one day is incredibly powerful to get through it not least of which because to get to the point of saying yep it's on my calendar september 10th i'm doing it you actually have to fight against the mirror of your own limiting beliefs to get there but on the other side of it i mentioned it before you unlock what i call the possible mindset this all of a sudden you're like whoa if i can do that if i can commit to that if i can push through that if i can spend that day alone with myself what else can i do what else can i unlock what other pieces what other limiting beliefs can i shed and get past and so for that reason i think it's really valuable as well not just even the 12 hours but the experience of getting to the start line so to speak as you well know the difference being between something like this and a marathon like if you if you are going to do a marathon you got to register you pay the fee maybe you got to fly to the city you got to book the hotels and so there's that um external kind of pressure like well i spent all this money like i have to see this through but with this it's like yeah i didn't like i can just back out like no one's gonna give a [ __ ] until we get that fomo going on you know until we get but yeah no 100 and that's where it's intentionally it's intentionally clean in terms of like it's simple it's like yo this costs no money people immediately go to well when i'm on vacation and i'm in this beautiful place and i this whatever and like if you want to wait to that fine but don't like a mood follows action thing so you're waiting for the world to you know create the perfect circumstance as opposed to just saying well tomorrow's as good as any other day because i don't have to go to work so i'm just gonna do it and i actually have found with the people that we've tested doing it um people walking out their front door actually have in a lot of ways an even more profound experience um allie rogers who i know you you and i have both done a lot of a lot of work with over the years so she'd create a bunch of amazing video edits so inside of this book there's a bunch of qr codes that you can scan and kind of brings you into these videos right each chapter is is sort of a prescriptive uh it kind of ends with some prescriptive stuff based on stories that you tell about your experiences uh and then the qr code leads you to like these videos that are like there's some pretty intense videos there like you know footage from you you know at your lower moments on you know on the you know like base camp and all that kind of crazy [ __ ] but the so ali was was also one of the original test subjects of this and she walked out her front door in minneapolis in december middle of winter in december you know um and does a 12-hour walk and it was awesome to hear her reflections um i don't think she would mind me sharing this here but of her being like oh i walked past the house of my old friend from when i was 10 and realized you know oh this memory came up or this memory from childhood or kind of an old grievance with a certain thing like the echoes that you have in and around your hometown or your front door your local community it's interesting both on a positive and negative but it's a very grounding part of your life particularly when you have the stillness of your own mind when i was walking across antarctica memories would come back to me and they'd replay in these visceral details and so again you can do the 12-hour walk anywhere but i really do encourage people to do it right out their front door not like i'm saving it up to be on the vacation to be here to be there it's like yo like no more excuses like saturday you're gonna be home you don't have to work that day figure out child care and you walk out your front door because it also then as you go about your day-to-day life the following day the following week the following month you have this imprint from the walk where you're like oh i remember on hour seven when i was on the corner of you know fifth and main or you know wherever that is in your hometown going like huh and it can bring you back to that place of feeling empowered and strong um which i think is is a really cool byproduct um of doing it out your front door as well yeah so jenna what was your experience of doing the walk yeah so colin comes up with this idea and i'm test subject number one um we were spending time in moab at the time so um after the oregon coast yeah after the wrinkles so november 2020 is when i took my first 12 hour walk and just like colin said i it took me weeks to come up with the right the right day to schedule it because i was like i don't have time on this day and this is too distracting oh but my ankle kind of hurts like should i let that heal a little bit and finally you were just like jenna that's not the point the point is put the day on the calendar commit to it and walk out the front door and i was like okay i can't remember the exact date but it was november something 2020. 2020 and i had been staring at this ridgeline that was kind of outside of the house and i was like you know what i'm just going to like wander up that road and see where see where i go and i spent literally six hours walking up this meandering ridgeline and just so in awe of the beauty um that was surrounding me i don't know if you've been to moab before but it's a pretty stunning place with the red rocks and um i mean for me it was a complete sense of clarity um actually around family that's just kind of what kept coming up and resonating for me and you know we're looking forward to becoming parents at some point soon and and taking on that next big adventure which i know you're very familiar with um but even more so you know my parents um they're aging my dad turned 85 this year and my mom will be 78 in a few a few months she probably wouldn't want me to say that but um and i'm sure she's listening oh yeah she listens to everything we do so she will be rich um and i just really had this kind of clear centered understanding of i don't have that much more time left with them and i think as a result of that you know i came home with just this deep resonance of i need to spend more time with my family um you know we've chosen to live in jackson hole and like colin mentioned his family lives in oregon and my family is on the east coast and so the christmas after that we gathered 15 family members for christmas in jackson hole and it was so special and just a really beautiful reminder both to not only gather for big holiday events but small ones and i just think you know i had come up with all the excuses of why i couldn't make the trip out of easter why you know it was just harder to fit in um but knowing like that deep knowing after taking the walk and on the walk being like oh this is what's really important right so the walk catalyzed that awareness that allowed you to kind of create that reality yeah that's really cool sorry to interrupt the flow we'll be right back with more awesome but i want to snag a moment to talk to you about the importance of nutrition the thing is most people i know actually already know how to eat better and aspire to incorporate more whole plants more fruits vegetables seeds beans and legumes into their daily routine sadly however without the kitchen tools and support very few end up sticking with it so because adopting a plant-based diet transformed my life so profoundly and because i want everybody to experience some version of what i've experienced we decided to tackle and solve this very common problem the solution we've devised i'm proud to say is the plant power meal planner our affordable all-in-one digital platform that sets you up for nutrition excellence by providing access to thousands of highly customizable super delicious and easy to prepare plant-based recipes everything integrates with automatic grocery delivery and you get access to our amazing team of nutrition coaches seven days a week and many other features to learn more and to sign up visit meals.richrol.com and right now for a limited time we're offering ten dollars off an annual membership when you use the promo code rr health at checkout this is life-changing stuff people for just a dollar seventy a week literally the price of a cup of coffee again that's meals.richrol.com promo code rrhealth for ten dollars off an annual membership all right let's get back to the show i also like that um it's this whole thing is in contrast to the impulse of somebody like you who's always thinking what's the crazier thing and the bigger thing that i can do and it's like you've done all this stuff how long can you chase that you know notion of like the next thing i have that i'm gonna do has to be bigger and more impressive and just to bring it back to something relatable and very doable in a in a kind of sharing way totally and i think i think as i've you know gone around and done a lot of public speeches and met all sorts of people in different contexts and things like that and you know certainly people love to ask me questions about my you know world records and different feats and things like that and don't get me wrong i'm happy to tell those stories and share that i've certainly learned so much and in the book you know tell those stories and vivid rich detail you know edge of the seat kind of storytelling stuff to apply these lessons um but i'm fascinated by humans i'm fascinated by stories and i think that too often people think oh well you have this story so i don't want to share my story because it's not important or it's not as big or grandiose or something like that and that couldn't be farther than my orientation the world like i am fascinated by every single person i'm sitting across every single story that's being shared and i think we all are walking through this life just trying to figure it out right good days bad days everything in between and so to me what i'm so excited about the 12-hour walk is of course i get off the stage i'm the speaking engagement and i just told somebody about how i was the first person to cross antarctica and supported you know no kites no dog you know whatever you know make this crossing that no one had done yet and the first thing is like well this is so unrelatable like that's cool man like crazy inspiring but like i'm probably never going to go down articulate and walk across it um other than my pal lou rudd who i do still stay in touch with from that guy oh that's good to hear but uh in this context what's fun is to have a common frame uh i'm excited for this book to come out and for people to participate in this and sit across from people and ask the same question that you just asked jenna like i'm excited next time i see you to be like rich what was your experience with a 12-hour walk what was your experience with the 12-hour walk and just to hear the the difference of all the different things the good the bad the emotions the processing the ripple effect of decisions made um in those moments you know even just in the small test group of people we've had do it over the course of the year or so building this book people have been like oh my god i thought about this and i took these actions and now i am doing x with my life or i'm i've made this shift or i've made this change um and so from that standpoint i'm super fascinated because i love the idea of mindset i love the idea that we all have this you know i say i love to say the most important muscle any of us have is the six inches between our ears you know we all have that we all have this mental capacity young old you know depending on measuring your circumstance we have this ability to flex and develop this and to me it's exciting to being really not just a book but to launching an idea a movement of sorts into the world that people can have a shared common experience around which is individual which is solo but also the collective whole which is why again september 10th it's like hey we're doing this you're doing this alone from your front door i'm going to be walking you're going to be walking we're going to be walking together alone together but there's that common experience that accountability to how can we all grow from this what can we learn what are our own unique experiences from that so for me that that piece of was exciting i was i was laughing before when you were talking about walking up and down that road um when you did it you told me don't tell what was like a guy drop was it like i mean i was on the same road so i i left the front door walked out onto you know like a small street there's a wide shoulder um and you know it was dawn when i left and i'm walking up this large hill actually and the car drives by you know a few cars pass me on the way and then six hours later i'm at the top i have some water or whatever turn around walk back down and it's like probably dusk like it's getting late um the sun is definitely setting and i've been out there obviously i'm you know sweaty and whatever it was moab and warm and this car comes down the road and is like slowing down next to me and i'm like oh what is this the guy rolls down his window and he's like hey um i'm not trying to like distract you or interrupt you but like were you walking on this road this morning uh do you need a ride [Laughter] and i was like oh my gosh thank you so much i actually set out to walk all day for 12 hours and he was a little taken aback but was like oh my god that is so cool and then he just kept like cheering for me like you know for a little ways down the road but it was a really good moab's a place where people go to have long walks exactly it's a good place for it it was a great kind of like community moment where people were clearly noticing i mean several cars have passed i'm sure other people noticed that i was out there for a long time um but that they you know stopped to take take a minute understand what i was doing and and just have the the graciousness to be like are you okay do you need anything right right yeah yeah and if something goes terribly wrong are you allowed to take your phone off airplane yeah so they're having this so to be clear this is the liability there's a liability if the lawyer has asked me the liability question um you know in the back of the book um there's a list of faqs and then that also links off to the website which has even more faqs um which is again it's completely freaking the same time but i encourage people to actually sign up so i can share more information with you which is emails from me you know basically being able to have a little bit of a dialogue um and one of them of course is around safety it's like bring a head lamp wear bright clothes if you're walking on a street without sidewalks walk in the direction of the trap so left side if you're in the right side driving country it's like but in the phone hold on here's my idea yeah this should build us into it if i don't care what happens but if you have to take your phone off airplane mode the clock goes back to minute one that's right yeah i gotta read it you heard it here first the app like i said we built an app 12 hour walk app that basically puts your phone on airplane mode gives you a few prompts and things to set some intentions as you set off and effectively is a counter and a google maps interface inside of the app again so you can because i don't want people to have to be like clicking on their phone and turning it back on off so the gps actually works with your phone off so you know the blue dot will move around you can zoom in and out of the map um so we've solved that problem for you guys so there's really no excuses but i don't know i should plug into my app and tell my the dev guy to say if the airplane mode gets triggered off and there's a phone call made it usually shuts the app down it's like yeah like the whole your whole phone is like ready my mom did the walk um she'd kept her phone in airplane mode the entire time but she did from her front door she lives in hood river oregon um and uh she did a point to point though so she said i want to walk in one direction to see just mentally it's better to do it do it that way yeah you know you can't turn around right i will say my turn around i was like oh man yeah yeah yeah and you would walk i mean i would walk downhill downhill beats the legs up but the uh but yeah so she had range with my stepdad hey i'm gonna not get on my phone on this time but i'm gonna turn it on at this time and give you a call and share my position with you which is you know she ended up wherever out in the dallas or something like that no in that area i was like you know she walked you know i don't know 25 30 miles or something like that um but uh and that's and that even that's kind of a fun thing for her she loved the walk in so many ways and she also lives you know in this semi-rural part of oregon and she's like someone she's like like she's driving to the costco which is the next town over in hood river or excuse me in the dalles and she's like oh this is the 30 minute drive of my car but like i walked here and beyond this like she's like very like you know proud of that in her early 60s just like heck yeah you did like that's super cool so people interpret it a lot of different ways but the the single direction is definitely something that i think people will do as well and i say that in the book i say look you have to plan your out ahead of time just like life you choose a destination but like put on the walk-in shoes step out your front door so the book opens the introduction of the book is this story that feels like it's right out of an episode of billions you know and so i'm interested in maybe you could tell that story and why you chose that anecdote to contextualize this narrative yeah yeah so um again early 2020 right before the pandemic um kind of in that area of the book tour of the impossible first speaking engagements things like that coming back from the row um i was invited to give a speech to a bunch of wall street bankers and they had invited me you know to i think the audience was 500 people or something like that but the night before they said hey we'd love to have you over to this dinner just kind of like a smaller more intimate group to kind of meet you um in a small context there's only going to be you know eight people there or something like that and i was like great and so um i am in manhattan new york city um i've gotten i've gotten to know manhattan over the years but i was you know a public school kid from portland oregon raised in a you know lower middle class part of the city you know new york's always been kind of like big bright lights big you know big big pumping fast city um for me and i i've always i don't know i don't know if you have this experience even more of an east you grew up on the east coast but like doorman like being like having like a doorman is like always like kind of like i don't know it feels like having like a chaperone or like somebody like an overlord or something like that even though i know it's like a nice fancy thing to have in new york but um it's actually funny enough wearing the exact same thing that i'm wearing right now which i very common outfit for me black t-shirt you know low top jordans i walk through into this you know lobby of this very very fancy um upper east side apartment and i get this look from the dorm excuse me sir like where are you going what you know why why are you coming in here like whatever and i was like oh like i'm invited to this thing and the guide should never forget the doorman like looks at me and he's like no you're not like just like and he says to me if you never forget he says to me if you're with catering you need to take the service elevator he's just like super just like straight to the heart like you don't belong here and i was kind of like oh i think i'm in the right place it's this apartment the name whatever realize i'm in the right place and he sends me up and i'm in this you know fancy elevator um and i've only seen this a handful of times but it's some of those fancy elevators that like actually goes directly into the penthouse and then you open into yeah it's not like a lobby or like a floor it's like the elevator goes like into the foyer of this person's like insane new york city apartment and that was the case so doors open boom i'm in this penthouse apartment and there's you know a group of guys and they're all you know 65 i just guess you know mid 60s to later in life um and you know we sit sit down for dinner and you know these guys are suited and booted you know custom tailored suits the patek philippe rolex watching you know the lots of big water yeah big watches and the whole deal and i'm sitting here t-shirting jeans and you know little top jordans um you know just being myself really and we have at dinner um you know the host was super generous introduces me everyone kind of introduces themselves and you know these guys are all you know you know i'm speaking of 500 wall street guys who are all you know doing great i guess in the wall street scene but these are the you know the the fund managers or the ceo of this or that the other thing um and you know we have a conversation um the start talking about different expeditions i share with them you know certain you know stories of antarctica and you know they're curious about everest and have you seen dead bodies on everest this kind of stuff and you know something i've been asking people for years now starting with school kids and i've asked it to thousands and thousands of people now as i stop the room at one point and i say you guys been asking me all these questions it's great conversation but like i want to know more about you guys like what's your what's your everest like what did you dream about when you were a kid is was it this like was it being right where you are you guys have obviously been wildly successful like what is your everest um and i expected there to be sort of this like raucous response of like oh yeah like i set out to buy this or you know own this or do this and all these things you guys were clearly like the quote unquote american dream of the pinnacle of success and there was sort of just this awkward like kind of like they're all kind of looking at each other and like no one says anything and it was just like a it was a noticeable moment of just kind of like huh like i get it like i ask little kids this question and i get kids raising their hands you know i want to be the first person my everest to be the first person in my family to graduate from college or my mount everest is making sure the snow leopards are off the endangered species list of course i don't you know expect that from a group of 65 70 year old you know really successful bankers but i did expect sort of some passion around you know what their everest was in their lives anyway so after this sort of awkward moment the conversation kind of continues on and we finish up the dinner and i'm getting ready to go and getting ready to get back in this uh this this elevator and go home for the night and go to give the speech um the next day and this guy was the oldest gentleman at the table um like if i had a guest maybe 75 something like that walks over to me and i'm about to get in the elevator and he kind of grabs me by the shoulder and he says hey hey yeah colin can i can i speak to you privately for a second it kind of pulls me away from the rest of the group super sincere um soft-spoken guy um you know just like the rest of them obviously very successful in his career and he kind of pulls me aside and he says like you know you asked us an important question there and i'm embarrassed to say that like none of us really gave you an answer myself included and he's like ever since you asked that i had asked it maybe you know an hour before that you know before dessert or whatever in this conversation like he's like i just been sitting here thinking about this and like i don't know if i have an answer and he was kind of stumbling over his words but in essence um he says to me like i've made more money than you could possibly imagine in my life but he paints this picture me goes but i used to go to the summer camp and i think it was the catskills and i used to sit on this row boat summer camp when i was a you know in my early adolescence and he goes there's not a day that goes by where my mind doesn't drift back to this moment on this boat at summer camp the simplicity of these days and it kind of leaves it hanging there um and we have a little bit more of a dialogue and i write it write it more succinctly in in the book um but in essence he's saying to me without saying it like kind of like i don't know i've i've had all this quote-unquote external success made all this money but i'm not that fulfilled is essentially what he was saying to me um it's like he never took the time to actually ask himself the question what his everest was he started off on a path and just kind of let the river right take it or the everest was the you know financial success and the power that comes with that only to discover that it didn't provide the fulfillment that those simple uh you know memories seem to serve for him yeah and so it was it it certainly that moment has stood out for me so significantly in my life you know over the years a couple years since then um and certainly in the the essence of this 12-hour walk you know i asked the reader directly to answer that question for themselves after sharing this story which is what is your everest you're taking this walk like what's your everest frame it like think about like what is something you're trying to this isn't necessarily about achievement it's not like oh i want x amount of dollars it's like you know family friends relationships career health i mean it can be anything but kind of having that that moment right you know conjuring that possible mindset like jen and i did on that mountaintop what do we want the remainder of our days to be like whether you're 80 years old and you're you know have most of your life in the rearview mirror most likely or you're you know 20 years old like but just having a moment to ask that question and i think what really stuck out to me and particularly you know where i where i come from my background etc is it's very easy to you know you said it's like an episode out of billions like to imagine the the room with the 100 millionaire billionaire guys and be like well they did it like they're this is like success and happiness or whatever i don't know what happens the right word but just like they did it like they crushed life they they won the game you know essentially um and to have this insincerity of this guy just basically be like kind of really vulnerable with me in a quiet moment of being like man like i have all this but there's something more um and so it framed to me for me this idea which is whether you're that guy or you're any number of other archetypes or people living this life this thing we call life which is meaning you can be stuck challenged depressed having a hard moment fulfilled unfulfilled hoping to have more hoping to have less whatever but if you don't take that moment to check in with yourself if you don't ask there's no right answer to the question what's my everest there's literally no right answer the only wrong answer is not asking the question not taking the time to actually answer the question but more importantly take action towards that and it's not a the book the 12-hour walk itself isn't a manifesto of blow up everything in your life and make every change tomorrow if that's the significant sweeping change that you need to make in this moment great like that's your path but it's also just a check-in of just saying like hey like man like i mean it reminds me a little bit of i'm not going to try to project too much on you but you in your late 30s early 40s with your law career and not being as fit as you were as a swimmer and this just going like wait like what like is this my life like and and you obviously found this whole other vocation calling beautiful path since then but not without actually having the guts the gall to say wait a second well there was there was an inflection point for that but the endurance piece was really a version of the 12-hour walk it's all that time spent alone where you're wrestling with those questions and you're just you're living in the experience of trying to figure it out and it's not about the answer as much as it is about like the willingness to like grapple with it you know like what could it be what would be good i don't know like being honest with yourself and trying to figure out like what a better path would you know could look like a hundred percent and that's that's where i think the the power what's so interesting and what i think is powerful about um the prescription of the 12-hour walk for lack of a better word is we're all different we're all thinking about different things this this idea of this 12-hour walk is meeting you at a specific moment in time in your life like i don't have the answer this book is chocked full of prescriptive advice saying hey this is how i overcame you know i have myself colin and brady have dealt with all of these limiting beliefs and let me tell you i mean i throw you into all these stories where i am deeply fearing failure i'm deeply fearing criticism i'm deeply you know actually failing you know or feeling like money's not abundant like i i am experiencing all these limiting beliefs and i share stories in a rich way that to get you know gets you kind of interested in the storytelling of that but i zoom out from it and go and my advice on getting through that is x y and z i think it's powerful i think it's it's strong advice but at its core i'm actually saying but you actually have the answer for yourself i'm not gonna try to pretend like i understand or i am you know some omniscient god-like presence that understands every single person's circumstance or point of view i'm just saying you can definitely gain something in your circumstance by taking this day alone in your thoughts walking and being in your body and mind the same way that you were as an endurance athlete you know in this inflection point in your life the same way i was walking across antarctica but realizing any person listening to this is like yo i can walk out my front door and tap into this sort of inner knowing about this and actually overcome these limiting beliefs and make make even if it's a you know to summon james clear a one percent difference every single day is is all that you know it's it's multiplied over time is compound interest in in your life of shifting making those changes towards your best life and so i think the 12-hour walk i know the 12-hour walk can be a huge catalyst for positive change and i'm just excited to share it with so many people yeah nice man well i want to change gears here let's talk about k2 i mean it's been you know an interesting year and a half uh for you guys in terms of expeditions and challenges and loss yeah yeah um yeah k2 i mean it's ultimately a sad story um but came from also a really beautiful place and something that you know jen and i were able to share part of that journey in the physical space together which was really beautiful um we you know coming out of covid thinking about expeditions etc mountain you know jenna had jenna had trained for a year to climb everest in the fall of 20 excuse me in the spring of 2020 from the chinese side we had flights to china on april 4th 2020. i want to hear from jennifer that's not a great has been quiet over there talk about yeah like you're getting your head around that yeah i mean obviously we'll dovetail back into k2 but um yeah i mean i had i really had raised my hand and said like can i climb everest do you think we can do this um do you think i can do this and and colin was like i think if you trained for it sure i totally think you can do it and so um we were living in jackson hole and i i really did put my head down and i i trained i mean i climbed up snow king every day i did hit workouts which is you know i'm not like the most like go to the gym kind of person but i did like i did it and obviously column was very much so overseeing that um and sure enough you know the time was passing and it had been a year and it was march of 2020 and we were meant to fly to china to climb everest together from the north side and obviously that got shut down very quickly um and and in the aftermath of that of course i was really upset at the time i was like oh man like i i finally set my own personal goal right not not a call-in goal i set my own goal and it just it didn't work out it didn't pan out and so i think just the the defeat of that was i mean it was it shook me enough to say like i'm not gonna that goal i'm just gonna let it go like it wasn't meant to be i guess and then kind of in that same moment where we're describing the oregon coast where i'm kind of struggling with my own you know desire passion the 12-hour walk is born the same thing for you you just were like i'm done like i'm like i was like we could push the training another year whatever and jenna was just like like no i'm all like this like there's way bigger problems in the world there's way too much going on like i don't need to hold on to that um it wasn't a childhood dream of mine it really was you know kind of watching colin in the mountains and experiencing that firsthand and knowing friends and i was like it's just kind of like question mark like well maybe i could do it too um and then after kind of that year i was just like i'm gonna take my name out of the hat on that one and then so then later in that year you know the himalayas both the chinese and the nepalese side were completely closed the other part of the world where between china and nepal you know the 14 8 000 meter peaks are the 14 tallest mountains you know in the world the other region of the world is the karakoram in pakistan so there's five of the 14 tallest mountains in the world are in pakistan including k2 which is the second tallest mountain in the world a little bit shorter than everest not a lot but significantly more dangerous um significantly more challenging technically um and the um the 14 8 000 meter peaks have you seen 14 p the nims movie or i haven't watched it yet yeah i can't believe i still haven't gotten around yet because everyone says it's unbelievable yeah it's great you know and you know we've we nems is a part of this this story as well on k2 but um basically the um the 14 8 000 meter peaks for you know catching people who haven't seen that movie or don't know the context of that those are the 14 tallest mountains in the world um and 8 000 meters is roughly 26 000 feet and that is sort of what's known as the death zone the altitude above where the human body is slowly dying um even with supplemental oxygen you really can't survive up there for very long and the mountains have all been climbed in summer they've all been climbed solo they've all been climbed you know kind of lots of different ways but only 13 out of the 14 of them have been climbed in winter so winter of course being much more challenging than summer the days are shorter the temperatures are ridiculously cold instead of minus 30 or minus 40 you're looking at minus 70 minus 80 you're looking at ridiculous winds short days so maybe only you know seven eight hours of daylight with 16 hours of dark dark cold night um and k2 although had been attempted going back to the 80s of some of the best climbers in the world have attempted it over time had still never been climbed in winter and so um you know several public you know big publications had written about this winter k2 climb as sort of the last great prize and high altitude mountaineering um and again people have tried this even recently people have tried this and really not come close it's not like people have been just below the summit but it's like really been this sort of very out of reach kind of project and um i guess dovetailing off my personality or other things i've attempted you know people having that out there that carried out there was was definitely interesting to me um and it was also interesting timing which ends up playing significantly into this entire story of k2 which is that people um since all these mountains have been closed for the you know better part of 2020 all these professional mountaineers around the world had been kind of stuck at home on the bench right and all of a sudden pakistan announces pakistan will be open to international climbing tourism um you know this winter right everybody rushes in and all of a sudden like you know k2 and winner tons of winners no one would be attempting it and when someone did attempt there might be like three guys over there or like the a group of polish national team you know ten guys went over there and twenty seven every date wrong by a little bit it's not like there was like lots of teams attempting this like if there ever was a team it's like a small team or one person like whatever and all of a sudden there were um god what you know how many like i mean not crazy number but like 15 plus the plus like somewhere between like maybe 15 or 20 um of the top you know climbers from around the world from all around the world and a strong nepalese contingent um but like guys from all over the world from from south america from europe from all these different places um and what ended up ultimately happening for large and large part was um this guy named dawa who's a sherpa really renowned climber uh had the world record for the fort the youngest person to climb the fourteen eight thousand meter peaks and he's like a um businessman now runs runs uh like a logistics company he basically realized all these people were kind of chomping at the bit to do this and he was like well how about i set up the logistics to do this and everyone kind of comes under the same permit meaning you're going to climb independently from one another once you're on the mountain but like it's hard to get to k2 in general let alone in the middle of winter you're talking about you know 200 balti porters carrying for you know 100 miles on the longest glacier in the world the balteral glacier um and really insane track to get in there lots of logistics and complicated so long story short most of us colluded and basically went under this one singular permit logistically but still with the idea of climbing independently so i went over there with my climbing partner dear friend long time friend and climate partner a guy by the name of dr john who i've known for years who if you follow mike posner on instagram he was posner's guy yeah so we i was friends with posner i introduced posner to dr john um they became you know dear friends and practically brothers at this point and dr john helped train postner for everest um which was super cool and then in that vein i really wanted and jenna wanted to come to k2 and come to k2 base camp i was not climb the mountain but like come to the base camp the the track in the k2 i'd never been to karakoram but it's one of those places at least for me that for forever right like oh you think the himalayas are amazing you think the alps are amazing like wait til you see the karakoram like it's just on another level um and so we we realized that we could trek in together particularly if posner came as well because then posner and jenna could exit together could exit together in the middle of winter so anyways get on a tangent there but basically we all check in the four of us me dr john posner and jenna all trek into k2 baseball this is christmas new year's eve 2020 going into 2021 yeah and this was part of posner's training for everest yeah yeah yeah exactly so john said hey this is a great training if you have high altitude you've never been in the expedition environment you'll meet some of like the best climbers in the world and just be able to kind of riff with them and you know posers got infectious personality you know been on the pod a couple times and dear friend of ours and just amazing human so uh you know he's singing songs and you know hanging out those videos of him entertaining the sherpa yes you know it's unbelievable well as a quick aside so we go and climb we get to to base camp only spend a couple days there and then john might go up the mountain we'll get into the climb itself but it's the funniest side which is then jenna and posner yeah leave pose and i and one other guy leave with a bunch of baltiporters who were bringing stuff out and i mean it's winter this is the coldest environment i have ever been in this was not like chicago cold in the middle of winter like frigid i mean i have not been minus 30-40 yeah i mean just really like bone chilling cold i'll never forget it base camp's at 16 000 feet yeah and it's a week it's a week each way it's a weekend it's a long trek yeah and so pose and i and another guy named jerry are tracking out and again there's it's not like it's set up like oh there's huts along the way or anything there's like makeshift little tents and there's maybe six balti porters with us as well who are like cooking up over you know a little kerosene we called it fire in a can like it was really primitive on the way out and you know it's high altitude people are coughing a little bit and we're not really thinking so much of it because it's so cold we're just trying to stay warm and keep moving and pose and i got so sick and as you can imagine what time of year this is winter but also like in the middle of copen before vaccines before vaccines and technically we didn't test positive for covid but we i mean again who knows what pakistan testing was like at that time but we definitely got copied i mean we were so sick like ended up in this tiny little town of skardu the planes weren't flying we couldn't go anywhere no electricity cinder block out jenna gets stuck basically in the middle of winter in pakistan with posner in a tent first of all for a week and then in a cinderblock sort of hotel but with no like they're in their sleeping bags and down coats inside of a building like with seeing their breath for another what seven to ten days in skardu bag so anyways jenna and posner leave i think they're making a quick exit clearly it takes them a couple weeks and jenna you know we've had some amazing experience with poser over the years but i think jenna you know in a tent with poser in the snowstorm in pakistan these two like know each other like they live side by side in it together uh with covet um but uh we end up so basically the way high altitude mountaineering works in short is you climb up and down the route several times you get acclimatized at higher camps and you come back down the mountain um to rest but because it's pakistan in the middle of winter we're coming k2 in winter like the the moments to climb are few and far between like we're just getting hammered in base camp by this ridiculously cold weather and there might be like a day or a day and a half on the horizon where you're like okay we're gonna go stock camp one or stock camp two like this is our moment there's not like lots of days where you can move so there's a lot of being hunkered down these tents um so again we kind of collectively logistically everyone sort of decides to collude in the sense that like instead of like every person putting their own section of rope or own this or that like it's like each part of the route that's going to be open we know we're going to collectively use the same fixed ropes over rope gets put there people are going to use it etc which makes a lot more sense than basically a dozen separate parties on the exact same ridiculous how does that mesh with like the etiquette and unspoken rules around like what it means to summit yeah so that i mean at this point like that's pretty standard particularly i'm like i'm on certainly on you know an everest expedition now there's you know people so many people over there at this point where it's like there's it's pretty hard at least in the standard route to not do it that way it'd be really complex otherwise people kind of do it slightly differently a little bit of more independence or whatever but it's hard there's people paying into the same yeah pool and for everest specifically but on k2 there was a funny story from years previous where there was a russian expedition a polish expedition and they're very competitive with one another and they literally were putting ropes you know two feet beside the other rope like this is the russian rope and this is the polish rope and like don't touch my rope kind of thing but we you know very quickly that was like not a thing and it was actually amazing like there really was a deep sense of general camaraderie um on this expedition between the different teams different climbers even though truly there was just world-class climbers over there people that i widely admire from around the world and i didn't know what the vibe was gonna be like and like it was it was welcoming like it was we're sharing cook tents we're having cups of tea we're shooting the [ __ ] during the storms like hanging out basically um and uh so nims who's obviously famous from the 14 peaks you know world record that he set um in 2017 18 right eighteen eighteen eighteen ten yeah um 2018. um and he brings his same crew of guys that worked with him that you know that he hired to help him out with the other project some of the most incredible climbers in the world you know mingman david sherpa um you know uh ming matenzing like so many of them these guys are just like i mean such amazing humans but also just uh incredible climbers yeah and so they're all over there and mad respect to them they were pre-acclimatized when they got there they got there a few days before us on the track but were acclimatized from being at the high altitude nepal and then they just pushed really hard in the first couple weeks we all thought like this exhibition's going to take two or three months for sure we get there the you know pose and generally the first of january um and on january 12th i think it is john and i are going up on a rotation up the mountain to get to camp one maybe sleep tonight at camp two and i'm up at camp one um john's a little bit behind me and i'm sitting down there with nims and just the two of us some of his guys are behind him you know he's waiting you know this group group of them going up and we're shooting the [ __ ] and they got a lot of stuff with them and i'm like kind of like you guys what's up man like you guys going for the summit and he's kind of like nah we're just you know we're trying to get maybe we'll see if we get up to camp three camp four you know like kind of like like playing it playing it cool um but like he's like yeah we'll see we'll see um and you know honestly there's there's been you know this is a shame that always gets this way there's been some criticism oh they didn't tell people what they were doing or this that and the other thing but like my take on that their whole situation is like mad respect like they they pushed it they were there they were there early there was a small weather window and they took some significant risk and ultimately there was a couple other nepalese teams that they colluded with ming magee who's a world-class amazing climber but these guys of course they they they they have historically the nepalese sherpa nems isn't a sherpa but the rest of them are sherpas um they have historically been a part of other people's expeditions right so the europeans get all their glory yeah they're the they're always behind the person right you know and it's amazing and nims has had hugely positive influence on this which is you know allowing there to be more access to nepalese funded expeditions that aren't part of a european or western portion of the expeditions and like i said those guys that i that i named before you know mingman tenzing you know ming mcdavid like these guys like these guys are just world-class world-class climbers like the benton there's nobody better than those guys straight up and they went for it and on january 16th um a team of ten nepalese so six on nims's team three on ming mcgene's team and one um on on a separate team sona sherpa they all made the summit of k2 and claimed um that you know quote unquote the last great prize in mountaineering um and it made headlines across the world yeah i think skullneck wrote uh i think new york times um it was amazing like really truly incredible and the way they did it was after all these years of people spending 90 days over there and getting nowhere like these dudes were there for three weeks and you know they got the weather but they went for it and they pushed it and they made it to the top and like they were singing the nepalese national anthem carrying the flag on the summit like it's a it's a proud moment and it's crazy to think in all the history of of mount of heil to mountaineering there had never been a nepalese only first ascent of a mountain um and so for these guys to claim this really iconic ascent and will forever be in the history books um was amazing now but they got [ __ ] for not communicating approp again there's it seems like there's a lot of this there's this unfortunately and it just it's it really that's why to me i just lean into the positive there's we could deconstruct the whole thing of did they tell the other people about the route after we can get into some of their stuff you want but like at the end of the day like they got to the summit january 16th 2021 10 nepalese summited k2 and became the world first in this ridiculously dangerous obscenely hard climb and in the middle dead of winter like they did it no one can ever take that away from them and like i'm certainly not going to sit here and cast stones like they did an incredible job now john and i are on the mountain at this point because we had spent a night at camp 2 acclimatizing we were in no position to climb we'd if we if we wanted to we were not ready to go for the summit we needed a couple more weeks to acclimatize get our body get our camps higher stock etc and we're descending down the mountain so this route is ridiculously steep it's a mix of ice and rock and snow um and it's just it's basically eight thousand feet straight up what's called the abusive spur so you're basically on this direct ridgeline so you can almost see not the summit but you can see way high up on the route is that where you're in that video that i saw that's with one of the qr codes where you're going up and it's just like a sheer face and you have the ropes yeah exactly exactly and one of the things that was again we all took this risk on which was collectively there was there was some new ropes placed on this route but there's obviously old ropes from years past but years past no one had been k2 in winter since a year and a half or year and a half before that and summer and so a lot of the sections because it was so complicated and so cold and so difficult to fix ropes we actually clipped into old ropes which is like a you know kind of cardinal sin in the world of pile to mountaineering because these ropes get beat up over time and they're afraid and whatever was so difficult to fix the route that there was a lot of clipping into old ropes that may or may not i mean there was a lot of risk being risky being taken and you know when i think back on it i think sometimes i think what the heck was i thinking but you know eyes wide open we took that risk on um and so john and i are descending down that day again not trying to weight the ropes with all of our weight we're actually usually would just like zip down on a rappel like on going down because you trust your full weight to the anchors the ropes we're actually like down climbing we're clipped into the ropes but we're down climbing so just to not like if a rope were to break or something like that we might still be able to catch ourselves kind of if that makes sense moving more slowly and we can see some friends up above in the route there's a spanish guy sergey mingote his climbing partner jp moore um tamara longers you know they're above us we can you can see so much on the route and we finally descend back to what's called advanced base camp so that's where the fixed ropes ends and it's about a three mile walk back to base camp and we um we we don't know if the net we actually haven't heard yet that the nepalese have summited and john and i there's we're all decided since we're colluding to be on an open radio channel and so all the different teams just like have a radio channel that we can all communicate instead of being all different including the nepalese yeah everyone although obviously sometimes john and i would switch to our own just if we weren't trying to like crosstalk everyone but there was a central channel that everyone could be on and we would hear like talking between you know if we could reach anyone based on but it's really common if you're really high and the wind is blowing and they the batteries die so not everyone is always just in perfect radio communication right but we had that but john and i for whatever reason we said we get back down to vase base camp there's been a lot of chatter on the radio throughout that whole day we just decided let's turn our radios off just to like enjoy the peace and calm of this walk this three-mile glacier walk back to camp so we get back into camp and as we're walking back that takes a couple hours we get back down to camp again we had seen the climbers up above us when we were going we get back down to camp and all of a sudden there's all these banging of pots and pans like a celebration and nims is base camp manager the nepalese team base camp manager was like they summoned it they summoned it they're up there right now it's 5 p.m at night like they did it and john and i like look at each other and again like for me like people always ask you must been so frustrated you're trying to get this world first whatever like honestly of course there's some general competition and we all wanted to be the first or whatever but like there was no better people to get this summit these were the guys that were the most deserving the most talented the best like they deserved so we were just like wow heck yeah like wow they pulled it off and in style like let's just hope they get down safe you know and so like there's this momentary hive like they did it the nepalese summit banging pots and pans and literally one minute later there's a pakistani military official there um it's called a liaison officer who's kind of like overseeing base camp to make sure like no one's like polluting the area it's also in a military you're in a military zone that you're right on the afghanistan border you're on some kind of like intense sort of border areas and so it's just kind of like making sure nothing weird is going on just literally lives in base camp and just kind of like hangs out and he steps out of his uh tent and he's like sergi just fell he's dead and we were like like literally like in one minute like the nepalese summited sergi just fell like he's dead um and john and i were like no that can't be like we just saw him he was just right up above us like that was a couple hours ago whatever and it turns out just a few minutes after john and i had turned off our radio to walk back just above us um no one knows exactly what happened whether it was a rope that broke or more than likely he was climbing a section unroped and slipped but sergey mangote was literally one of the best best climbers in the world you know hit this moment he was you know seven mountains in to setting the speed record of the fourteen eight thousand meter peaks like dams but with no supplemental oxygen truly truly a world-class um guy and just an amazing guy literally our tents were right beside each other in base camp i'd see him every single morning chat with him and just in an instant like the both the triumph of k2 and the just the unrelenting danger of k2 boom in sharp focus and he's dead um it bears noting that in summer there's been i'm going to get the numbers exactly right but you know 350-ish successful summits of this mountain um but it's claimed 85 lives again give or take those numbers but essentially there's a 25 fatality rate on k2 summits per that and that's in summer and morocco how does that mesh with everest oh everest is like two percent or something like that three percent so i mean everest is very dangerous but it's yeah i mean k2 is widely considered the most dangerous mountain in the world in the best of circumstances but it was a crazy thing because like the nepalese on a summit push at the top of the mountain are there and they're safe and sergey mingote again also one of the best climbers in the world on a on basically back to base camp makes us you know just right boom small air boom he falls juxtaposition of those two things and the fact that you had just seen him yeah i mean we've just been right there um and so obviously that hit all of us heavy and there was just this there was this interesting um dual energy in base camp at this moment the the nepalese success rightfully so was such a big deal globally but particularly in central asia in pakistan in in in nepal etc that the they were as they should have been treated like kings the the head of the pakistani military shows up in a helicopter to fly them out of there and to throw celebrations for them at the like military palace or whatever these 10 nepalese are getting you know festivals in the streets of kathmandu you know it's an incredible celebration this i will never forget the same moment that that helicopter landed with the pakistani military general um i helped carry sergi's buddy body which was wrapped up in a sleeping bag into a helicopter right beside it and so there was just this like dual right thing happening in this moment the dark and the light yeah um it was really intense and you know i i've had proximity to some other you know deaths and things on on everest and some other places i've climbed but a little bit further detached like not like people i was like oh there was a guy in another team where someone passed on this day or when i summoned it in 2016 my first ever suscept people had died that day but not when anybody in hawaii had ever known you know i'd seen a dead body like frozen but had been up there for 10 years but this was like this is a guy i was hanging out with like just the other day and like boom like gone um and there was definitely a question in that moment is this expedition over like the world first is gone and sergi just died like but we had only been there for three weeks and we'd all planned to be there for three months like the whole winter basically and so i remember talking to jenna what was your memory of that that moment i mean it was just it was because the media was obviously showing showcasing so much about the celebration and the accomplishment which of course should have been like the focus right it was a hard reality because i'm sitting there you know knowing how gut-wrenching i mean i i met sergi i had many teas with him and meals and conversations throughout our time in base camp and it was just like a hugely positive humble gentle kind loving family man i mean really he was that's what he talked about his wife and his kids and um it was just it was hard it was the first time i mean certainly the first person i ever knew personally that had passed away on a mountain um and so and you know when colin's trying to figure out dr john should they stay should they not there was definitely moments where i wanted to raise my hand and be like just come home like what are you doing like just come home like it we're good and was that conversation when you were hacking it up with posner and the cinder block you know ice box or was it later when you kind of got further down it was later yeah we were back just a couple days yeah yeah something like you guys got home on the 13th or 14th and then this happened on the 16th so she had just gotten home like like it taken her two weeks yeah yeah yeah it hadn't been long like you basically just got back home but you were definitely home i remember talking to you you were at home when i called you on zappone i was just crying so hard you had to be like yeah like what am i doing yeah like sergey is dead in terms like are you sure i'm like we're sure like he's dead like you know i was just like and then yeah i remember something that sticks with me from that moment is like i said his tent was right beside mine in base camp literally right next to each other and i just remember waking up that morning and like that tense being packed down and that's gone his body's there it's just like this very like final final yeah i know he had three kids at home anyway so we do decide to stay i mean and ultimately like you can go back and forth about that decision but it was like we came here the expectation was being here for months it's been three weeks the net police crushed it so fast like it was just like had it been the end of february or something like that we'd all been there for two months and we were strung out and like all this kind of stuff and this happened had been like this is over someone just died these guys summoned at this peak but like it wasn't like that like it was like well uh you know like emotionally we all just like had planned to be there we had supplies to be there for a longer period of time and so we were like and if nothing else they just proved it was possible like they you're right like there's something about that again it's not like you know if your ego can let go of the world first like and again like for me it's like well i just want to challenge myself against this mountain so it's like and they just showed the whole world like it actually can be done they just did it and there's hypothetically some ropes up there now and like that like there's a way to do this so like john and i decide to stay um a couple people left but the majority of people stayed including um jp moore who was sergey's climbing partner um so sergey's climbing partner was a chilean guy by the name of j.p moore incredible guy um and i remember giving him a hug as we were loading that body in the helicopter and i just assumed he was getting on the helicopter like he was he was gonna gonna go home and he's like i think i'm gonna stay i'm gonna summit this mountain for sergey um and you know jp was also one of the as was sergi one of the purest climbers in the high altitude mountaineering world which is they were climbing with they were sharing the ropes with everyone else but other than that they were using no no no supporter support no one else was carrying anything for them ever even on the lower part of the mountain he was using no supplemental oxygen like the purists and he had done everest lotsy without suffering yeah he had a record forever of supplemental supplement oxygen he has this incredible climate of annapurna without supplement oxygen which is that and k2 are like kind of in parity for ridiculously stupidly dangerous risk taking mountains um and what ends up happening is after this there's a three two or three week long storm um and we get like really hunkered down in base camp like can't move kind of thing like just getting blasted things just sit in these tents yeah just kidding 12 hours just sit there all day long just like literally and what ended up happening is that like a nightmare jp decides to team up with this no part of it yeah it's really uncomfortable it's extremely uncomfortable and there's you know every morning the ice is like caked in the inside of your tent from your breath freezing it and then you sit up in this ice it's minus 30 and the ice just drops on your head inside of your like clothes it's and that's a base camp so the base camp of k2 in winter was the equivalent temperature minus 30 minus 40 of what the summit of everest normally is on a summit day in the summer so that's that's just and so usually you're tapping into that for a few hours on a summit push or something like that this is day in day out at base camp let alone looking at like we're seeing weather forecasts like oh 150 mile per hour winds 120 minus 120 wind chill stuff like that we're like watching the weather it's just like icicles yeah it's like that's a no-go that's a no-go we see it start trending back towards oh it's only minus 70. we might be able to go for it and it's now it's early february and we had dumped some actually spent a ton of time me dr john has spent a ton of time with jp because we actually kind of combined into one dining tent during this long wait when he and when sergey had passed away and so we had spent a lot of time with him over those couple of weeks and a bunch of the other climbers were in a different diet not that we didn't see people we spent like a ton of time like you know 15 hours a day in this tent with jp and this woman tamara who her climbing partner had left um and so the two of them decided to team up to to climb and sergi's honor so the weather window is approaching and the same thing of course everyone's looking at the same weather so everyone's thinking like well if we're going to go this is it again not climbing together not like oh we're going to leave at the same time and this but it's like pretty obvious like i'm going to go on this day you're going to go on this day like that's the way it's going to work out and a couple of climbers who didn't feel that's physically strong left on february 2nd to go to camp 1 for the night but john and i decided to kind of save our energy and to leave on the morning of february third and climb directly to camp two so there's usually four camps on cape town above advanced base camp but we all including following the nepalese lead they didn't use a camp four so they summoned it from camp three meaning way longer summit push and we're like well this weather window's so short it's middle winter this is probably too hard to set up camp for so let's you know use their blueprint now and only use where camp three is and then try to do a long push from there so we're analyzing all the weather and john and i think okay let's climb directly to camp two sleep there on the third of february go to camp three on the fourth and then the morning of the fifth was supposed to be like this clearing window and like i said clearing is in it's minus 60 with 50 mile per hour winds for like a half a day before just you know 100 miles per hour once again three push to summit yeah exactly um and so we're leaving we we middle of the night we're climbing um i remember right officers leave base camp a couple climbers pass us a guy named ali sabara who's uh like the michael jordan of pakistan he's like just a legendary climber in pakistan some he has a first ascent of nanga parbat in winter what's one of the first winter ascents that he did um and an icelandic guy named john snory and his son sajid they pass us on the lower mountain and john and i are just kind of plotting away and we get up just above advanced base camp we're just clipped into the ropes we're only like maybe 200 feet really up onto the route it's like starting to get steep but it's the very beginning of the route and dr john looks over at me he's been climbing in front of me i've been behind him by i don't know 10 feet or something like that and he looks back at me and he's just he's got a tear in his eyes and he's like i'm turning around man and i was like what like what and he's like i'm just there's just like an intuition that if i he says to me straight point blank he says if i keep going i feel i'm gonna die up there like i need to turn around and it was a very arresting moment of course um but john and i actually jenna facilitated a conversation in moab actually because we have been in moab where we have been living for that period time and you that's what you said to us you said let's have yeah so we john lives in colorado and he came out to moab to visit and this was at the time when colin was thinking about doing this project and i really i really wanted to call him to climb with someone who he felt really comfortable with who he knew who was familiar with as a climbing partner that they could both entrust in each other and trust in each other's individual decision making and so the first person that popped in my mind was dr john so dr john came out and kind of just sat down with colin and john and just said hey like i want to hear from both of you individually how you're thinking about this john if you're interested how we would go about making decisions and and it was a beautiful conversation around you know if if either one of them at any point in time felt like it wasn't the right decision to keep going they could leave the leave the expedition no harm no foul and it would be on the other person to decide if they wanted to choose to keep going and one of the things that was important that you said to us is jenna like jenner like really set us both down and said let's have all of the conversations about all the scenarios right now at sea level not in the heat of the moment and whatever decision we decide here whatever happens up on the mountain we're gonna know that we thought about this with completely lucid clear and i could remind them from seeing the sea level of what the decision was yeah and then there's there's sort of the intellectual exercise of doing that versus the reality of being in that moment and the pressure well you're just afraid right now we can push through like what is what is you know the difference between that gut instinct that's telling you this is wrong i need to back out versus like well this is a little scary but like let's just keep going you know and overcome that fear totally and i think you know i think that you know knowing that where that line is and we both knew how dangerous this mountain was even before sergey pass we're like this is a massive risk just going over there like we're risking our lives like for sure and there have been a lot of rock fall like i've been hit we've both gotten hit by rocks uh another climber got hit in the head by the rocks and split open like a huge like gash on his face like there's rocks like literally it sounds like dude it's all bad yeah it's just a bat like it's like flying past our head we'd be like do we like we'd yell at you rock me like jump out of the way and like on my drone flying past our head while rocking like and that would happen 50 times a day kind of thing i mean there's rocks i mean it's just it's very dangerous and um so when john looked at me with this tear in his eyes i went right back to this moment in moab where it was like we looked at each other as brothers and said this is not the moment on this mountain to say come on man you know suck it up like whatever it was just like it was heart-wrenching um yeah you mentioned there's there's a at the end of the chapter on this in the book the qr code i have a little video clip of this moment that i yeah it's filmed pretty powerful and video i'm crying but he says to me just very he says colin like dude i've been watching you for the last six weeks like you're on form right now he's just like you're climbing like he's like objectively friend a friend like you're climbing very well right now if you feel like you can go emotionally like you're ready like you can do this so he wasn't really was not trying to get me to back off he was just saying like something's not right for me man but i'm watching you and like you seem like you can do this like you sh if you want to go for it like go for it like i support you like 100 like go for it and it's so cold it's so freaking cold you stand still for five minutes and your fingers and toes start to freeze so it's not like hey let's sit here and discuss this for an hour it's like within one you know within a few minutes john's headed back down and i've decided to keep climbing up because you can't stand there and like debate it for into the ground and i'm alone on the mountain um everyone else had left before so i'm the lowest person on the mountain at this point and we john and i had been climbing um with two sherpas one by the name of ming temba and one by the main of excuse me um uh lok potemba and ming temba um and they had been a little bit higher on the mountain so i got on the radio with them and i said hey john's turning around i'm still gonna come up they're like okay we're near camp two uh we'll wait for you here and we'll we'll see you up here when you get there and so i end up um in camp two uh sharing a tent with ming temba and lok patemba uh who have been high on the mountain and you know i get into bed it's camp two that night and i'm tired and afraid and all the things but also kind of like okay like i am feeling good like i'm feeling great so i wake up the following morning and leave camp two um and i'm chatting with ming tembo and lok patemba and i'm just like i'm like all right well let's all meet up at camp three i'm thinking we're gonna like you know climb together or whatever but like you know i'm just gonna i'm just gonna head off now um and so i start climbing and the next six hours like quite honestly between cam 2 and cam 3 is the most dangerous part and that or arguably the most dangerous part of the entire route is this part called the black pyramid there's another part called the bottleneck near the summit that's also very dangerous but the black pyramid is probably the most technically complicated part of the mountain it's called mixed climbing so it's tons of rock exposed rock huge exposure seven eight thousand feet ice snow rock fall it's just a complex kind of section and very very steep and direct given how high you are you're at 20 3000 24 000 feet at this point and i had the best day of climbing in my entire life like just purely flow state tapped in just feeling it like i just like everything felt effortless i felt smooth i felt strong and i end up kind of just getting into my own rhythm i passed jp and tomorrow who had been a little bit higher where they were camping and i end up being all alone in the black pyramid by myself climbing up on k2 in winter and there's no one else above me on the mountain so i'm completely alone up there and i'm feeling great honestly um i don't i actually can't remember a time on a mountain anyways i can remember a time in antarctica tapping into the same sort of essence but like on a mountain that's like just like just felt in rhythm the fear wasn't there um you know following the the some of the fixed routes that have been fixed ropes that have been laid as well as some of these older ropes skipping into but just like was was in it and end up like way high up on the mountain approaching where i think cam 3 is but i've never been to camp three before at this point camp two is my highest on the acclimatization so i was on a new part of the mountain that i hadn't seen before and all of a sudden the fixed rope that had been that have been placed with anchors all of a sudden it just disappears like it it's buried into the under the ground and someone's thinking oh it's no drift i need to try to dig it out or something like that but i can't find like where the next section of the route goes and there's crevasses everywhere and when you're alone and you're not roped together and on a fixed rope like being alone on a glacier is super dangerous for the express reason of like usually a rope to a partner so if you were to fall into a crevasse someone else can like pull you out to walking around on a crevasse part of a mountain any mountain let alone 23 000 24 000 feet on k2 in winter by yourself is just like a [ __ ] terrible idea like this all-time bad idea and so um i kind of like what should i do what should i do i don't think i can sit here for that long because it's so cold but i really have anything else i can do and so i just sit down i sit down and i think okay i've got my radio i've got my stat phone like let me try to get in contact john's back in base camp at this point so i pull up my radio to call dr john and all of a sudden the wind hits my radio boom it goes blank radio's dead oh [ __ ] um and then i i send this text or i have this so i have my sat phone i try to get on my sat phone and to call jenna and sat phone same thing in the wind it's dead and the last thing i have is this little it's called a garmin inreach which can like send these like just like basic text message like type of thing and i get this cryptic text and it says i'm all alone up here i don't know where anyone is and i was planning to send like five follow-ups to that that goes out to jenna and then it dies oh i'm like uh okay like where where do you think you are pick up your radio call john call anyone no no replies so i'm like freaking out oh my god like what is happening where i have no idea where i mean i can see so different than everest the satellite tracker actually tracks pretty accurately on k2 for whatever reason i don't know if it's the the mountains in the way or something but the the tracker was pinging all over the place so i was like i actually couldn't get it and she can it looks like i might be over here i might be over there now i'm not responding the last text she gets from me is she can see because it geolocates when you send a text out it like gives you a lat launch position so she can see that position but it's me like somewhere ish on the route saying i'm all alone i don't know where anyone is i'm this like and maybe this is a dumb question but why didn't you for that particular push have somebody join you like why were you why did you make the decision to try to do that alone so like i said like when i left camp crazy yeah i left camp and you know i've been like chatting with ming temba and lok patemba and was like all right let's all leave and they're like oh we're just gonna like they were just like oh yeah we're coming in ten minutes like it was just like it was one of those things where it's like looking back obviously like there was some communication like i thought you would be this like loose group yeah like wear each other yeah and it's like such challenging terrain that you think like i might take a break this person's gonna catch up jp's higher like people are out like you know what i mean you just kind of assumed that that was what was gonna happen and so rather than like all standing around the corner it's so cold so standing around and waiting for five or ten minutes if someone's like oh i still need to grab this for my backpack whatever it's like oh i should just start walking to get myself warmed up so it's that that's why the decision that decision was made and again i just i had a good day like i climbed well i was climbing in flow and people were a little slower than me or whatever um on that day i mean there's plenty of days where i wasn't the fastest but that day i was the fastest and so i ended up just you know getting even more alone basically um and so that happens and i sit there for an hour and a half on my backpack trying to think what to do and i finally see a climber in the distance approaching in a bright yellow suit and i think oh that's or that's ming temba great so i wait another like half hour everyone's moving so slow you know you can see somebody for a long time before they approach because it's like every step is so hard earned and finally um figures approaching and i realized like oh it's not ming temba it's jp and i'm thinking like oh okay it's jp i wonder where tamara is because he had been climbing with her before and i had passed him he's you know he's he's again pure no supplemental auction nothing and he approaches me and we have this big warm embrace and i'm like what's going on like where's tamara like how are you feeling he's like usually i mean he literally is the strongest climber i've ever met my entire life and he's like my feet are pretty cold man but like i think we're looking back she she thinks she's gonna turn back and i'm gonna keep going um and i'm like well like camp 3 is somewhere right by here but i don't know where it is and he had never been on this part of k2 before neither of us this was new for both of us and he's like well i guess we need to climb this section unroped like we need to like climb this unroped or maybe we can figure something out but he was just like super determined and a credit where credit's due like i was i was kind of stopping my tracks having another partners like well we could rope together we could do something here that's a little bit you know basically a little bit safer but it was like all right like we're going to be stepping on the edge and you know again to fast forward the story but basically me him and then lockwood and ming temba caught up to us not that long after that and a slovenian guy named thomas thomas ratar all of us over the next 30 minutes or an hour or something like that time's a little bit wishy-washy in my brain on that moment climbed through this section unroped um and threw these glaciers to reach um which is just consequential i mean it's high consequence every step is like high consequence if you slip there no rope like you're flying down 8 000 feet like falling or crevassed you're you're in a bad spot but we think camp 3 is pretty close and it turns out it's only about 100 vertical feet from where we've been so like we get up over this next little sort of plateau and it's like oh wow like that's where it was so i was sitting just below camp two for like or camp three for several hours at this point but now the sun's going down now it's getting dark and my whole point was like i wanna get to camp three get inside my tent melt some water i'm gonna put on dry socks and really just resting for like three or four hours and then we're gonna climb through the night from camp three all the way to the summit push it's a way station it's not like camp three set up have a nice long sleep or anything like that it's just like a reset it's almost like i think about like an aid station or something like that and like an ultra event like you're like i'm gonna be here for a few hours make sure all my my gear is tightened up i have the bare bones that i need and that's where we're gonna go so we get inside our tent jp has this tiny little like basically a one-man tank barely fit two people inside of it there we have a three-man tent still very small we get inside and the sun's setting and we're thinking well other climbers some of people weren't quite as strong they must have turned around they must have turned around because it's dark now and we're trying to summit that night and we're coming from camp three we're thinking like well they must have turned around the one other person that was there at this point was ali sabara this pakistani guy that i mentioned before and he had been climbing this icelandic guy and he goes my son and john snorri they're not far behind and we're thinking these guys are super strong too spring okay they're coming but there must surely these ten other people that have been climbing some point in the black pyramid when it got dark have turned around like this is turned around for sure and then as we're trying to get the stove lit and trying to get things going i start hearing voices outside and i'm like what wow other people are arriving crazy like they're still pushing for it like i was just like really surprised because it just seemed like the margin of error at this point had like got expired kind of if you were still out there climbing and then i hear this kind of this rustling and people being like [ __ ] [ __ ] what do you have the tent do i look in your bag look at my bag it turned out 10 people arrived and there was confusion over who was carrying their various tents and it turns out they have no tents it's dark 24 000 feet on k2 in winter and there there's 10 people now outside with no tents oh my god how does that happen like i mean do a post-mortem and like i said it's like not really in this like i i really i haven't talked about then i wrote a chapter about this on the book but in the year plus after this like i've really taught not spoken publicly much about this whole situation because it's just been such a heartbreaker for me uh i think i'm finally ready to kind of talk about it a little bit more but it they made a mistake i mean there's good point fingers at a million different people but the the the long story short is they arrived at camp three with no tents no tents so a guy pops his head into my tent and he's like he's like hey man like we're out here like we have no tents like can we come inside and like well of course i'm not gonna like let these guys like freeze like out there in this tents like by themselves and so i let um as many people as can fit into my tent before i know it there's seven people inside of my tent seven people in a three-man tent three men tents really a two-man tent like and like yeah they're very liberal with how many people can get in these yeah especially yeah so you get this huge gear backpacks like ice axe i mean the whole deal and now a sudden there's seven people inside my tent and i am in like a fetal position and i can't even get down to my boots to unzip my boots and put on dry socks we're having a hard time like there's not enough stoves not enough water like it's just like the wheels are like falling off and then the other tent across from me was ali said partisan he had been in my tent waiting for john snory but they their tent had arrived and the same thing happened so now there's r210s and that was like a a two-person tent right so jp's was even smaller there's any there's three tents now there's jp's like tiny tiny tiny like it's like a base like a mummy sack little tent and tamara ends up coming and joining him then there's this other tent the two three man tents basically now each of them have six seven people like inside of them and have to think really hard to get the exact but seven ish seven there's almost eight in mine because there's like seven in mind they're like one guy sitting in the vestibule on the snow but at least a little bit out of the wind like it's like dire situation and i get on the radio um and so i wore my radio back up inside my tent on the stove i warm the battery back up and i can get it working again and i call down to john and explain the situation and john i mean i love that guy's one of my you know just my soul soul family um but he has this like calm demeanor like he's just a very calm optimistic positive guy and he i'm like like i'm like bro this is [ __ ] like this is a bad situation he's like colin i know you're going through a tough spot but like he's just like really trying to calm me down like doing it's like he's like you still have a shot to go for the summit like the weather's gonna hold but you need to leave soon like and i'm like i don't think you know how bad this is then i went on the open channel on the radio and i said um i said this is a bad situation like people are gonna die out here i think people are gonna die out here i'm saying this i know that everyone like can hear me like people are up here without tents like i'm like this is a bad like a bad deal and please tell me you called jenna yeah leaving jenna hanging with that text message well i didn't hear from him right away but i did reach out to john so john was back in base camp and i was like john you gotta get some information like i'm at the end of the road right now like this is not good i i need some calm and luckily he is exactly as calm and described like very calming and very reassuring and he had heard from colin on the radio so i still hadn't heard from colin at this point until just after this yeah and so i did you know i reached i reached out to jenna um on the sat phone in this moment as well so i got that go back and going um and like i said i've been yelling i've been yelling and through this radio like i was i was like this is a bad deal was a weird thing because it's like of course there's not a one percent of me that was like leave these guys outside you know they messed up like of course i mean that's just like that's just like common human ethic like of course you need to be coming inside but it's also clear it's very obvious that eight people crammed in my tent before i'm trying to put a summit push together for k2 in winter is like the worst case scenario in terms of my own preparation like no rest no sleep no not proper hydration not like all the things that i had like planned to do were like very yeah things are not lining up optimally no um and so i you know i called to jenna i mean i called home i called to jenna um and uh yeah interesting to hear tell me tell me what you remember from that moment yeah i mean he sounded distressed like quite distressed and i asked him where he was so i actually at this point knew that he was at camp three in a tent um but my memory i just remember you saying i mean you were upset crying um and you you just said i am trying to make a decision on if i should continue going up or not or if i should call it and stop here and you know colin calls me in in a lot of critical moments on everest in different situations and asked me for my opinion and in this specific instance i really didn't have a good read on the situation like that that last cryptic test text message was less i'd heard from him i couldn't communicate fluidly with anyone on the mountain and i i really didn't have like a gut feeling i was just i felt kind of like removed from the situation which in other situations i felt very connected and very intuitively tapped in and this i just i didn't really know and so i i mean i think i said colin i don't have a good read on this one and i trust you and i need you to make this decision and and now is the time like the time had been taking on and i knew what the projected departure time was if he was going to actually make a summit attempt and it was ticking on and it was beyond the time at which yeah you were basically gone you're basically saying remember you said trust your intuition but you also said but whatever you need to do you actually need to make a decision right now like the yeah you're gonna miss you're gonna walk into a storm if you like don't leave soon basically yeah and i think in more of like a heightened way it was like make the decision now like make the call like i need you to actually make this call like i can't see what you're seeing right now but one thing that's interesting reflecting just when you said we've had this other intense moment there's like five other calls that like went into my head like the first day in antarctica that moment on occur with the food my first everest descent when i got caught out in a massive storm like i've called jenna from some really rough spots and most of the time if not every other time she has helped me prob like reminded me like you're the guy who does hard things like you can do this like go inside of yourself tap into your inner strength power i mean she has pushed me in environments that are implicitly risky and challenging like she hasn't been like the no i definitely am not the one who always had you ever told him like no you need to pull the plug like definitively like that's my gut um that's a good question or was it always a dig deeper i actually think it's mostly ben you can do this i believe in you or a problem solved like uh like hey if you're gonna do this here like let's talk about the like let's think about that right so it's funny you know i've i've i've shared those other not this story but other stories people and they're like oh my partner would have told me to just come home yeah you know crazy yeah why are you living up there in the first place you didn't sleep yeah really dangerous and you're not gonna do what everyone else does which is then take another break at camp two you're gonna push straight through like this doesn't it sounds like a bad deal you know but to jenna was like i remember just saying like i don't have a read on this but you got to make a call trust your intuition so then there's two tents everyone's crammed in there so i can talk to everyone in there but there's also the other tent like we just you know verbally we can talk to each other because they're right next to each other and i'm kind of thinking like what do you what's everyone doing you know kind of taking the temperature check of everyone and there's a collective like we're going for it like for the most part there was a couple people i mean but like most people were like oh yeah this is fine this isn't that big of a deal we weren't really gonna sleep here anyways like just all the justifications why this with no tents at camp three like wasn't really still made sense that's significant in k2 in winter um and you know a lot of people were like oh well you know i always thought this was i thought this was a little bit of an interesting calculus but a lot of people were like well the nepalese took this long to summit from here and then was 15 or 16 hours or something like that and they're gauging their time based off this in the back of my mind i'm thinking with david sherpa is the strongest human being i have ever met and it took him 16 hours like i would never put myself in that category let alone meet some of these other people like you know maybe someone like a jp but he's climbing without supplemental oxygen or something like that you're just going like people were like oh so you know 15 16 hours we're still within the thing and i'm like okay but you know it's interesting calculus but there was a collective we're going for it and ali sapara someone who again i've really admired from a long time from afar and then became friends on this trip and he'd summoned nanga parpat and winter at first ascent was talking with him was like what what's what's your guys's call like i kind of was tuning everyone else out but like this guy like dialed dialed of all dialed has made a first ascent in winter in pakistan like what's your read on this and he was like dude we're going like we are for sure going colin climb with us like we're gonna make the summit man i'm like you got here before all of us you're climbing so strong like let's go like let's go and he's just saying this he's like most cheery optimistic smiling like joy-filled human and even in this intense moment like his enjoy this joy was was infectious like just kind of like he's like this i know this feels bad but you know the expeditions they always get hard at some point and this is the moment where you got to kind of like push through and i end up closing my eyes i'm going like okay i got to make this decision i gotta make it soon but i gotta check in with myself and i'm lying in a fetal position basically he's crammed in the edge of my tent i closed my eyes and i don't really know how long i closed the eyes for but it was a significant period of time released from memory and i just went deep inside of myself and my intuition my gut voice was loud and clear can you hear me yeah i can hear you i decided not to go up it was like you got to get home to jenna and jack jack's my dog you you got to get home to jenna and jack i just like feeling that mantra was kind of building up inside of me i was like whoa like my voice is telling me to turn around and before i express that out loud to anybody else i did i kind of went through the check in my brain which was like okay but now play this out if you're quitting right now and these guys are going now imagine them getting to the summit being successful and we're all gonna be back down in base camp like three days later it's an ego check and you're the only one pulling out right as opposed to a split in the group right like going like i literally did this i like actually visualized in this kind of meditative whatever deep moment looking inward moment i looked inside on something i was like well of course you want everyone to be safe here you want everyone to succeed i'm not i'm not it's not my personality like cheer against somebody's like whatever especially the stakes being so high so i'm like okay so picture that they go you weren't whatever badass enough to leave the tent you turn around and two days later these guys make the summit to you know all this global acclaim in the mountaineering community for this amazing second ascent of k2 and winter and all this kind of stuff and like you were right there you were climbing well your body's strong you can do it john your pro climbing partner is telling you you can do it yeah exactly simple as that and still i'll be honest i was i felt and i haven't felt this way really in in this high-tech high-stakes situation i felt at peace like i really like that i just there was actually this full relaxation of my muscles and my in my being in this fetal position where i just went like oh like i feel like i could breathe for the first time i was like i'm not going and i i i say to the other guys there i say to ali i said i'm not going and no one tried no like you know there'd been a little bit of like come on man like let's go whatever but once that they knew like i was like i'm not going and they were like all right like we're leaving like we're going and and then you gotta get back down by yourself without anyone else yeah so i so the following i i said i'm gonna but i'm gonna stay here until morning because february fifth morning's supposed to be great weather so like i'm not gonna try to move at night you people are gonna leave this tent's gonna be more empty um lockpotemba who i had been climbing with still says to me well like i want to climb even though him and i were supposed to you know he was helping support my climb he asked me he said well do you mind if i still go and i was like dude like of course like he actually made the summit was going to be the only person to have ever submitted k2 four times he submitted three times before in summer he watched his you know fellow nepalese just summit in winter and all this and he was like he was still motivated and people were going like people were like we're going and i was like i'm not going and it was a long night it was a hard night people left and a bunch of masks broke actually in the next few hours people that were using supplemental oxygen not everyone but a bunch including loch batemba um oxygen masks failed from the cold because i mean again this is a temperature that like no one's ever really climbing in it's not like this stuff's not you know you think it's you know it's tested to minus 40 but it's different than minus 70 or whatever who knows but several peoples including sajid sappara who is ali sabara's 21 year old son he had a failure of his oxygen mask and so a bunch of people um had to turn around in the next three or so three to five hours because of some technical difficulties and some people started getting too cold and and some people did turn around um but the the strongest amongst the group which was jp ali zappara and john snorri kept climbing they kept climbing towards the summit and so the sun comes up i don't know exactly what time sunrise 7 a.m 8 a.m something like that and i finally get outside of my tent some people have returned different stories whatever but people had gone for it there's some people with some like little bits of frostbite and things like that but you know not everyone had kept going for the summit and they'd said well those three are still up there weather might be turning i don't know when we last saw them maybe they're turning around it's unclear but like they're still going for it and so i remember like well i was like well i'm going back down and i talked to some other folks and wish them well and i talked to my friend the bulgarian climber atanas and he had gone out that night and he had gotten tripped up and he turned around and i said well i'll see you back down at base camp like you know what what a crazy thing we all just experienced the weather's pretty good right now let's all get down safely clip every rope and i'll see you in base camp and we'll you know have a have a tea and a beer maybe or something like that and just like you know kind of relive what a crazy moment this was but just kind of like you know save positive vibes and some blessings yeah kind of count our blessings and it was actually a really beautiful moment there was like such a clear calm like one few is clear because of the summit push moment so it's clear calm i took these pictures with atana standing there and i decide and i start climbing down and i'm climbing down um similar you know sequence the way i had climbed up in front of other people i left camp before everyone else and so i'm climbing down um by myself and i get back down towards camp two and i hear a bunch of like chatter like on the radio but it's in uh so urdu and the sherpa nepalese language they actually are able to understand one another even though it's different obviously language and dialects they can communicate pretty well but the the staff in the base camp is mostly pakistani and then up on the mountains mostly nepalese um the mix of both but mostly i hear a bunch of chatter obviously i can't like understand it and understand any of it and i get back down to camp two i'm waiting for a little bit and i see ming temba and he looks at me and he's like oh something something's very wrong some things like happen and he says uh atanos just fell and i was like really i was just with him he's like i think so but i'm not sure there's a lot of crosstalk on the radio it's a little bit unclear but we're hearing something is not right he's like get down safe and i'm like now i'm like so locked and i'm actually starting to say out loud to myself i'm like i've got to get home to jenna and jack i've got to get home to jenna i'm like saying it out loud of every single rope i'm clipping and now i'm down to this lower part of the mountain between camp 2 and advanced base camp where you can see all the way down the route and i'm alone and i'm descending and i'm trying to again kind of down climb because i'm on some of these old frayed ropes and my nerves are just completely shot at this point i'm just saying focus focus i actually in my in my head i remember telling myself he must have misheard atanos didn't fall he must have missed her i'm like that's i told myself that just folding up antanas was not doing a summit push he was going from three to two exactly he was descending just after me like i had left camp just with him before that he had he had been coming everyone with that point is now coming down there's a three that are still up on the mountain but everyone else is like it's over their summit push they've tried they haven't you know whatever and they're coming down now a lot of people went but the masks failed or whatever and now people are coming back down the mountain and i remember i remember just telling myself i must have misheard that like there's no that that didn't happen like just a full that's i'm just in denial i mean just in full denial retrospectively and i get back down to camp one and i called john on the radio and um i say to him um hey i'm at camp one um i'm gonna just send the last section to advanced base camp and that's the section sergey had fallen and died and he was like just be careful but his voice was like just calm dead calm like not alarm like if he had known something i was like oh yeah it must have been a mistake because like his he's not saying anything to me like everything's fine he was like he was like hey man like you're probably hungry like i'll walk out on the glacier between advanced base camp and like bring you like you know some warm water and some soup or something like that like just get down this next section by yourself and like i'll be there to like walk back to base camp with you and uh i um i'm just standing about halfway about around the spot actually where john had turned around before halfway between advanced base camp in camp one all of a sudden i hear these helicopter rotors i'm like helicopter that's not usually a great time like in these mountains in this in this moment in time and i'm looking up i'm looking up up up i'm looking everywhere up for a helicopter because you look up for a helicopter and i realized it's nowhere to be found but i looked then i looked down the route and there's a helicopter hovering just off the ground you know several hundred feet below me and i look at there and i see a splayed out body on the ground just backpack sprawl to the side body on the ground in a really unnatural position and i look up and i can just see where his body has fallen from way up on the route all the way back down um falling from oh my god you felt the route is so direct that you fall from camp three around camp three you literally end up at the bottom of the ropes right where i'm climbing towards and i look down a little bit further and there's actually his mitten is on the route right in front of me and i pick it up how did you not see him fall past you then it's just where i was on camp two there's like some sort of like cliffs the edges where you can't see the whole route but then when you get back to camp two it opens up on this big icy face it's like it's easy for me to picture my mind probably hard to picture it so he was just looking at the ropes versus looking yeah like when he came so um but then in that moment like it was off it's like there's no denying this i'm looking at a dead body on the ground right below me where i'm climbing towards and his mitten i had just been with him and i was just really breaking down um obviously it was like i gotta get home to jenna and jack i gotta get home to jen and jack because this last part is super super consequential still and then i got myself back down off of the ropes and i'm still alone and um i recorded a little bit of this just so i could remember this intense moment but just a really really big breakdown obviously for me and just crying and i couldn't believe it what had happened and it was horrible and what's playing out um horrifically on the other side of this is that john dr john even though he's talking to me calmly on the radio atanos girlfriend shiny um had actually been in base camp just like jenna she had been in base camp with us and she had stayed on for the entirety of the expedition and my mind immediately went there because i'm picturing like it's such a parallel experience like my wife jenna has just been with me in base camp yeah jenny had come to support him yeah it makes me emotional like really emotional because it just she was such a beautiful supporter and he was just so lively and funny and like um of course my heart just like completely went out to her like imagining what it would have been like for me to be there and have the same news it's just ah just like unimaginable and he didn't fall trying to push to the summit it was like okay we're pulling the plug on the dangerous part turning around and then you realize like there is no safe and peace to any of this and john i mean john has just been a hero in my life in so many ways but he in this moment experienced maybe some of the most intense trauma that any of us experience on this mountain even though he wasn't on the mountain which is he being the only person in base camp at this point um you know english native english speaker at this point yeah he hears over the radio and he's talking with the cook staff and the liaison officer and understanding this accident had happened he's checking his tracker and sees that autonomous satellite tracker went goes from slowly going down to like just a straight line all the way down to the bottom of this mountain it's like pretty clear that he's fallen really far and so he has to go in and tell shenny and say hey shani atanas fell and he's likely dead and so he was with her even when he was talking about the radio he was with her for about four hours while they're retrieving the body and then he makes the choice to not tell you because he's like i just need colin to be calm and exactly get back down exactly and then when he and he's also communicating with me so john is holding this like really intense space for these you know partners of collin and of course atanas who's passed away and then he did walk out and meet me on the glacier and i just kind of fell into his arms like crying and i'm like i'm so glad we're both safe like uh you know i might kind of confuse because he doesn't say anything i'm like you heard about ottanos right and he's like yes like of course i just didn't want to tell you and he's like and furthermore they grabbed the body from the bottom of the mount where i saw the helicopter took his body and then it's really hard to get helicopters in and out and nepal there's more helicopters you can like get them more easily but in pakistan it's all controlled by the military airspace so the helicopters will only come in like a really basically every body retrieval or like a really heightened like circumstance you can't just be like oh tomorrow let me call a helicopter nepal you can do that and pakistan you can't do that yeah and so not only did he have to tell sheny but he actually had to get sheny pack up all of her stuff and with othnos's body inside of the helicopter he had to say hey shiny i need you to get inside of this helicopter because otherwise you have to walk out for seven days man um just brutal and so that's the space he's holding and it's just i mean it's so still hard for me to talk about but it was a huge tragedy and that's not even the biggest tragedy of this whole thing um which is again it's been a long story at this point so i won't belabor it but long story short no one ever you know it's getting into the evening the later evening and i'm back in base camp and then three or four hours later other people kind of start filtering back off the mountain um everyone's so exhausted and tired from this push and all that stuff and everyone's like has anyone heard from jp has anyone heard from ali has everyone heard from john and ollie's son is waiting at camp three everyone's abandoning camp three at this point are coming down because the weather's coming in just like expected it's the following afternoon evening the weather's kicking up it's getting dark again no one's heard from them no one's heard from them sajid this 21 year old whose dad is like this famous world cast climber taking him under his wing taking his son out to these mountains hasn't heard from him we're hearing on the radio i'm staying here i'm waiting for him staying here i'm waiting for him and long story short jp ali and john snorri never returned that night and they also died um pushing through this mountain bush on the summit push and it's still their bodies were found six months later in the summer season um but they're still unclear what happened they were all spread apart looks like they froze doesn't look like it was a fall unclear if they made it to the summit or didn't make it to the summit but the net result is you know 15 or so people went over there to attempt to climb k2 in winter and five dim didn't come back um atana sergi jp john and ali between the five of them they had 15 kids um and it's i mean like i said it's been a year and a half and it's still hard to to really fathom and really think about the tragedy and the loss and also there's um you know i've done some therapy i've done some work to kind of process a lot of this and one thing that's was interesting for me that was kind of put into my mind by someone who i was working with was to kind of go through this i want some visualizations back into that tent back in that decision-making process and you know following my intuition and all this which certainly saved my life was understanding the difference between trauma and grief i guess i've kind of put them in the same bucket in my mind but fortunately um fortunately it's not even the right word but just the the truth of my my mental health at this point is that the the trauma the sort of ptsd the waking up in the middle of the night afraid is not prevalent in in my experience in recovering from you know assimilating this into my life but the grief is immense this the i find myself crying and deep sadness around you know losing these incredible incredible friends and people who i just admired and people who were just right there in that moment and then certainly replaying back that the the shiny moment of that with imagining jenna being that person imagining that being you know our story um and how close um that could have been but how is that not traumatic of course it's traumatic yeah yeah i don't especially the more that you you know could foresee how it could have been you and then also traumatic for you jenna you know to be a participant and sort of an observer of all of this like how does that with a year and a half of perspective on this like how does that shape how you think about these things and assess risk like do you really need to keep doing this you know is there is there more to be learned from pushing to the next peak or is it time to assimilate what you've already learned and you know find a different way to you know grow and share yeah i mean for me i don't i don't know if colin's ever showed us on the podca podcast before but when i was 17 i lost my high school boyfriend in a motorcycle accident and that was an earth-shattering experience for me you know the person you're in love with and yes i was young but in love with and think you're doing life with to just all of a sudden be ripped from your from your life and heart is devastating dramatic all of the hard words um and then to be in a relationship with another speaker right what's going on there yeah yeah i mean i i probably chose it and right my own way um but i think you know more so i think colin and well i'll say you know i compartmentalized for sure i've definitely gotten good at that coping mechanism call it whatever you want um but i do think that there's been a level of learning and trust and talking about intuition and gut that has certainly begun to play more heavily in decision making and i also sometimes lean on the probably wishful thinking of that loss happened to beam once in my life surely the universe is not going to teach me that lesson again which i know is a compartmentalizing methodology right that's like uh did you ever read the world according to garp yeah so it's like the plane hits the house and they're like we're good now right nothing like that's ever gonna happen again like i'll buy the house right exactly yeah i mean no i mean i will say we you know and we can talk about this after but we we did choose shortly after that to go back and colin was going to kind of go out there and climb again i had chosen not to to climb everest but it's a it's an interesting thing i mean we certainly i think in this moment in time right now today are focused on creating a family and thinking about some you know other goals that we have that aren't so risk oriented um but yeah i mean i'd love to hear i mean i want to clarify i was saying about trauma before not to say the entire experience was deeply traumatic and there's deep like trauma in there um was trying to express was that i haven't had that kind of ptsd kind of shiver from this experience um that i know is experienced by many people who experience trauma in all sorts of ways but the trauma and certainly the sadness and the grief is you know deeply prevalent and very much still on the surface in my day-to-day life um but also what jenna said is is interesting um and uh there is a chapter in the book about this so i'll give away the whole story certainly and probably not time for tell a whole nother long story but two months later we went back we went to nepal um and posner was on that expedition what you talked about at length on your podcast and the frightening things we experienced and this avalanche we all get hit by and i was there with jenna and jenna made the decision to kind of surprise the heck out of all of us and actually attempt to climb everest herself and so two months later um after this k2 experience we find ourselves back on a mountain back at 8 000 meters back climbing and now i'm doing so with the person that's the most important person to me on the entire planet which is jenna and i'll you know let you read that in the book to get the whole the whole story there it's a powerful story and it's one of the most impressive things i've experienced alongside of jenna um and her courage and her strength but there's also a piece of it that's to me about twofold if that experience in k2 had been my last time climbing i think that'd be really hard for me because i would've been like wow i took this all the way up to the edge and then that was it and i just like walked away from it at that point do i need to go back and try to climb k2 in winter probably not um but i'm also glad that that's not the last expedition i went on not the last memory the last memory that i have is standing on top of the world with my wife like and having this incredibly triumphant moment and carrying the flags of the five guys who passed and honoring them up there on those mountains i think for me um as a sort of a closing thought anyways on this story people have asked me a lot like are you afraid of dying are you afraid of dying are you trying to die you have a death wish like you're so a risk taker you know whatever way someone frames that question and i've thought a lot about that and i think my kind of response to that is the last thing i want to do is die my launcher i want to get back home to jenna and jack hopefully soon we'll have a family and there's jenna jack and a little little new soul in our family and i think that will of course have its own lasting shift and impact and i embrace that moment when that moment comes um but my biggest fear is not living right like my biggest fear is actually not living and i've come to think of the world of i think of sort of human experience our experience in life on this scale of one to ten ten being like the highest highs that we experience and one being the lowest lows and i think too often we are often stuck in four to six in like this zone of comfortable complacency in this zone of like eh like good enough right like go to a job it's fine but i don't love it like have this relationship with my partner it's fine but it's not it doesn't like light me i just like it just stuck sort of in the middle and i think in our modern society it's so easy to live between four and six um it really is like there's enough modern conveniences that generally have a lot of people have access to not every person but a lot of people have access to certain things that allow people to be you know as some level of comfort um and when i think back on my tens all of my tents you know even from my expeditions from my personal life from business successes whatever they're all built on the back of ones like getting the sponsorship like we talked about at the top of this conversation for our first expedition was such an amazing moment when we finally broke through and and got it not just columbia with the other sort of businesses that we got involved whatever but it was because of the thousand doors that slammed in our face like before that right getting to the other side of antarctica alone was this deeply personal insightful journey and ultimately a 10 when i completed this crossing and set this record blah blah blah but not because there weren't so many ones along the way and so when i think about that i think about like i said i'm not i'm i don't want to die but i'm more afraid of not living not afraid afraid of of living a life between only four and six and do we need to be in four and six sometimes of course we need to recover there we need to build from there we need to be stable it's not like i'm just trying to have only peak experiences on the you know pendulum swing of life but i do think the full tapestry of life is a beautiful thing and even when i think back on that k2 expedition it's such a horrible tragedy and i it tears me apart inside every single day and i also in some strange way i'm glad that i went on that expedition yeah and the tens have to be earned by the willingness to grapple with the ones right for sure you don't get the tens without the ones or at least accepting the the risk or the possibility of them right the like putting your heart and soul into something that you deeply care about knowing hey this might not work this yeah i might fail with this but like i'm out here trying right that feels like a great place to end this podcast and we're inching up to up to like three hours at this point but but we can't just like slide over the fact that like jenna jennings we had this like expansive 90-minute story about k2 and then at the end be like oh by the way like like so i have to hear about that experience and what that was like and if it measured up to your expectations of of what it would be like like my only experience of what that might be like is from having these types of conversations or watching documentaries or whatever and i have an idea but what was the reality of like that yeah um so a little bit of background just to lay the foundation i like i said before was not into mountaineering do not really even consider myself an athlete certainly had not like dove into the literature or watched all the movies or dreamed about it as a child um and so again it's been an interesting evolution because i remember when colin climbed in 2016 for the explorers grand slam world record project i of course was supportive of him doing it but i was like this is crazy do you really need to climb everest like that's such a you know risk-taking venture like i don't know if you really need to do that um but then of course i saw him be successful and have known many friends now to have summoned it over the years and taken that on and it started to become a curiosity for me like am i capable can i do this is this something that even if it's not my big dream in the world is it something that i could actually take on and overcome and so we set out to climb from the north side and that was very specific which is the chinese side um i was terrified of the kumbu ice fall which is on the south side on the nepalese side and i was like there is no way that i'm climbing through the coombo i swimming calling can attest like i just was behemothly against climbing through the icebell it just seemed like russian roulette and it just wasn't of interest to me so our planned expedition had been on the north side from china of course in 2020 that got cancelled then fast forward to 2021 again i had called this off this k2 expedition happened and i was even more like mountains come on this is like ridiculous why you know this is i'm not willing to die out there i knew that in my heart like i'm not willing to put my life at risk i'm out and after k2 and colin said you know i need to get back out there i need to do this for my soul i said okay what do you want to do and he had said well i would like to go back over to everest and try this everest lotsy double world record project and i said okay i'll go i'll go to base camp because i really was interested in seeing the culture obviously experiencing the mountains and being over there with him um i don't know why coming off the k2 experience but like in my mind in my mind i was like i think i need to be there so um we went and we decided and he was going to climb from the nepalese side obviously to do the um everest lots he was from nepal so we go over there have a beautiful expedition into base camp i mean it was just stunning um poser's there singing with his guitar yeah yeah she was special videos really special and dr john was there obviously who had just been on k2 with colin so it kind of felt and it felt like how long were you there like i was like how long is how many concerts is poser playing there like is he just living there now yeah it was a long time there was a long expedition and there was some really weird weather that like slowed things down and like it ended it's usually six to eight weeks when i did it on the sports grand slam was three because it was also still an issue in the beginning it was a long expedition yeah it was very long um and you know this was april through may of that of 2021 to last year and um i'm like you know getting comfortable there like settling into base camp like understanding what this means like witnessing everyone's different energy and like why they want to go and how they want to do it and just kind of absorbing the environment which was really cool for me um but again i was like i'm not planning on climbing especially because of the ice ball so the kumbo ice fall base camp is nestled basically at the foot of the kumbo as well so it's literally the feature you can see like right in it's like this broken glacier with moving ice and snow 15 sherpas died in an avalanche there in 2014 there's a lot of deaths it's lower on the mountain so people think about the summit but it's like this really intense very it's when jenna says russian roulette it's because the ice is moving around so much that it's unpredictable and the route breaks and moves all the time so there literally is this sort of feeling of like what is the route kind of like can't control it and the route moves and shifts and like there's these ladders it's just it's like a part of the feature it seems sketchy honestly like i was always like i don't know like i don't need to do sketchy like i can do like clear-cut and like push my endurance but like that just felt like a risk i wasn't willing to take so then colin does a rotation up the mountain for his project comes back everything's great weather comes in everyone kind of gets grounded at base camp for a while a lot of people are moving on the mountain this is what early may ish and i was on an adjacent mountain permit so i could be at base camp i was on a nepsa permit and the route to everest and to nbc is the same up to camp two and i knew that but i was like again i don't really want to climb through the ice bowl um but at one point colin had said to me you know we're just having our hundredth t in base camp and just shooting the [ __ ] and colin says well why don't you just come up like in base camp you can't actually see the summit of everest because it's blocked by all the mountains around us you i mean you're like too close to the falls right yeah but you can't actually see the summit and colin you know i've i've seen photos from 2016's photos and all these stories have call and climbing previously and colin's like why don't you come up into the western come come up to camp too your permit allows you to climb to camp too you should come and i'm like no no yeah i don't want to do that and over the days passing sitting there being restless i don't know if you said something specific but i was like okay like okay i think i'll go and and keep in mind i had done a trekking expedition to lobuche east prior to this so i had some acclimatization obviously i'd been living at base camp which is what 17 000 feet and i actually felt really strong like i never had a headache never with stomach sick like i felt good but you weren't training specifically for everest no that was not no zero like no it's kind of nuts you're starting to think about doing this thing that you didn't even mentally prepare to do which now looking back was definitely the best way for me to do it 100 it was the incremental successes and kind of just put the the carrot a little further out versus saying like oh this is this big thing for you um but colin convinced me in some way but you were not to be clear her permanently allowed to go to camp two and she wasn't saying oh now i'm gonna sum it it was like hey let's go get you up to twenty one thousand feet you'll experience some of everest you'll be able to see the route like you know this kind of stuff um but yeah i mean look like i wouldn't necessarily recommend someone like climb you know jenna's put in put had put in the training in terms of the technical prospection to the thing she the year before so like that sort of stuff we had trained her up to be prepared to climb got canceled but then the last year the fitness she was like i'm not training and i mean i'll be the first one to attest that like she didn't train like she didn't like wasn't like training yeah um and then you got up to camp two yeah so i it was a tearful decision though for me because like i had said before like i was not super excited about going through the ice ball and i was honestly like afraid like very very afraid of it and it was one of those moments where i was like oh this is one of these limiting beliefs that i can choose to try to overcome right now or i can sit in base camp and be comfortable and see what happens and it really was a decision to say let's go up there and see see what happens and i think i climbed faster than i've ever climbed before because i was so frightened going through the ice ball i mean calling can probably a test it was actually a pretty quick transit from base camp up to camp one and we did push on to camp two in a single push which isn't common yeah it was like she's being very like i been around a lot of elite athletes and all things in my life whatever like jenna showed some like deep like badassery strength that was like just another level like her times going up the mountain like through from camp to camp like you know was on parody if not faster than most people who have been like training for years for this who are like fit men like whatever and like i have it's interesting like having lived with jenna over time 15 years all the things we've done like i've seen this side of jenna before in these like just like kind of like random spur like moments of just kind of like when she fixes her mind on like something like it's just like this like deep like you most of the time you're like man i'm good like whatever but then like when it's locked in it's like this latent endurance is just like right here i can like let it out like even postner was like me poser trained super hard for 18 months really crazy he's super fit whatever and like you know there was a couple of times when like jenna was like going like faster times of him on certain sections of the mountain he was like what is like what is happening adrenaline and fear um yeah but yeah i mean obviously my memory anyways was i went up higher on the mountain to a climate has a campfire and jenna's permit stopped at camp too so she was there for a couple days by herself then i came back down and i just remember jenna just having this like look on her eyes like i could see the mountain for the first time just enchanted i was i was like oh my god there it is like that's like the holy grail for so many people and it wasn't necessarily like the achievement that i was looking at it was it honestly is one of the most beautiful stunning places you will ever see it is incredible to see the magnificence um with your own eyes out there i mean you are just tiny little thing in these big huge behemoth mountains um so good all right so i'm just trying to understand so at some point you lock in on this idea of trying to summit but you got this permit problem exactly so i have this like twinkle in my eye at this point and i didn't even really fully realize it but colin is of course reflecting it back to me as my mirror and i think i say something like one day maybe i'll stop at mount everest from camp two and because i'm thinking like i have this permit issue obviously it's not even a thing i haven't packed for it i again have lost the training on it and so we climb back down to base camp and you could tell the pyramid story well first of all when we were packing for everest yeah jenna's 8 000 meter suit so it's like a full down suit that you wear at the summit the lower mountain you can get away without having the full full down suit but definitely above camp two you need like this full suit same thing i was wearing k2 whatever and i had said to jenna in our garage back home and i'm unpacking my k2 stuff here forever so i was like well do you want to just like bring it like just in case like you know you know if it gets cold or like just kind of like you know in the back of my mind and she was just like adamantly like why would i pack my down suit like i'm not climbing it's not climbing and so she left it i don't need that because she had bought she of course we got her all the stuff right previous for this climb so she didn't bring any i mean she brought the boots and like but most of the part didn't like have the stuff and so she's like one day one day and i was like one day like i don't know that like we're coming back here like yeah and even you were kind of like i don't know if i'm ever coming back here yeah want to start a family there's just like other pieces like other priorities and it's like but you're here and you're like doing amazingly well i think part of this thing is jenna's limiting beliefs but also the power and having proximity to something i think that there's something that's so in life jen and i sometimes call this life demystified if you see like that the story i told before you're around all these other people that are doing it it's suddenly that impossible thing suddenly seems totally accessible right yeah you know like any one of these people on mountain ever said anytime at their own dinner party on their respective corners of the world or like the person the man or woman who like summited everest but now you're staying there with like a couple hundred people and john who summoned a couple of times i have seven a couple of times posner's there like it's like i took posers very first mountain mount hood a couple years before and like jenna's watched tim train and they're really good friends like you know it's just like there's something that like shifts it's like you know i actually write in the book in a different context i write you know hang out with five million five millionaires you're likely to be the six hang out with five criminals you're likely to be the six it's sort of like you you you are you can assimilate i mean this is an extreme case of this but i think you just sort of like you were like huh yeah like maybe i can do this or maybe i want to do this uh i was like enchanted i really was i was like oh like i'm interested to see if there is a next step to take here the flip side of this of course being a terrible tragic disaster where oh yeah something goes horribly wrong and you're like why did i let her go up the mountain she didn't train for it so i mean that's you know so i will i will so i'll say the permits are real quick and then we'll get to the summit push um long story short we asked some people and in base camp can we pull this off and like can we get a permit and they're like they're like for next year it was like a permit for next year because there's like in the mountains yeah how would that even work and it's may 25th now because we're stuck in the storm and it's getting late usually the mountain is shut down by may 20 like everyone has climbed by them but there's this weird weather that like shuts the mountain down for a couple weeks really kind of un unseasonable and we're looking at a summit date on june for summoning everest in june is like almost never happened it's like literally almost never never happened just like way too late in the season the lower mountain starts to melt and sure enough i asked some some for actually dawa the same guy who had run some legit the logistics on k2 we had gone and talked to him and a couple days later we're in our camp for base camp and there's a helicopter landing here a helicopter outside of our tent at six o'clock in the morning and we hear a guy get out of the there's a helipad like kind of near where we are in base camp and a guy's like miss jenna miss jenna and there's like a nepalese voice yelling miss jenna we like poke our head out of the side of the tent and there's a guy carrying a briefcase but it's got like it's like with the tape of the ministry of tourism of nepal and he's like jenna's like uh i'm jenna and he's like he unc he cuts open this like this tape off this briefcase and opens it and he's like here's your everest permit how does that happen like obviously we had to you know pay you know a significant amount of money whatever but like basically some favor not favors it wasn't like we like broke any laws or anything like that but just like last minute to the right person at the right moment like hey this person's and they said it would here been the last everest permit ever issued the latest in a season ever and we leave the next and we live or stay issued on the mountain on the mountain right yeah what happens if you try to sum it without a permit oh i think oh really really bad yeah yeah yeah yeah i think you're like banned from nepal for 10 years you can't come into the other mountain it's like yeah it's not something um and anyways yeah you share your perspective but we went we basically went back up and as posner attested when he came here in camp two it was a horrible horrible incident i mean it was something that i had always worried about because when you're in base camp you hear all these avalanches falling around you all the time and obviously there was a devastating avalanche um disaster in 20 what was that 15 or 16. 15 was that oh yeah 15 years and then 16 was the all the sherpa was dying in the ice wall 14 14 and 15. sorry my dates are wrong um and i don't know i just like even in these environments i'm like i don't want to die in an avalanche i don't want to die at all but i definitely don't want to die in an avalanche and it's nerve-wracking i mean you're hearing these thunderous noises as you're walking around out there and you feel very small and insignificant and being back at camp 2 i actually felt like i was in a comfortable position i was like i feel good i've been here before i'm familiar with the environment i understand how things work at camp two and we go to bed and it had been very stormy i mean there was a ton of snowfall um but again i was like felt like i was like in routine at camp two and we went to bed that night relatively early probably like ten o'clock and midnight rolls around and there is just like a what sounds like a massive freight train barreling down and of course it happened so quickly but it was definitely the most frightening experience of my life i've never been in a situation where i actually felt like i was going to die this huge strong wind blew into the valley into the western comb through our camp through the camp next to us and it was essentially the plume of an avalanche and all the debris came down and um of course i didn't understand what was going on at the time but it was so cold up there i mean we were in our in my full down suit in my sleeping bag you know like i had probably this much of my skin showing um and i had tucked myself underneath um this other layer and it was the one time that colin and i had gone to bed head to toe because usually we would just sleep next to each other normal head to head and this avalanche comes down this thunderous noise and i all of a sudden like can't really breathe and it feels like there's an extra layer on top of my head and so i'm like yelling and shouting but i can't move i'm like pinned in my sleeping bag and yeah i wake up to her just screaming and her head is her head is in the upside mount where the the debris and the avalanche plume is hitting our tent and her head is like pinned under the edge of this tent and she's like just screaming and i sit up and i'm like oh my god it's an avalanche and i pull her head basically it was kind of like pushes the tent fabric off of me like it pushes all the snow and whatever was on the outside pulls me out and i am like shaking like a leaf like i have no idea really what's happened and colin says it's been an avalanche and i'm was just terrified i mean frankly the the worst feeling you could possibly imagine i mean when the tent was covering my face i i was like oh this is it this is the thing that i didn't want to have happen and now i'm experiencing it yeah and postner and doctor john are in the adjacent you know a couple tenths of side of us and yeah i get out after that because after passes and kind of like regroup and talk to folks and to be honest i was at that moment was like pretty like well well like we're definitely like kind of going back down dining tents were down this whole the camp next to us thank god no one was there they'd gone higher on the mountain those tents were completely flattened like it was a bad scene i mean it wasn't good and so how do you make this decision through this so like i don't know it doesn't make any sense rich this is all like insane you understand that right yes i said to jenna so i said in the morning i said all right so we'll just eat some breakfast and like we'll get out of here and i'll never forget this comment from jenna she's like yeah camp two [ __ ] sucks let's get out of here and i'm like yeah well this eat breakfast then we'll climb back down one more time so koombo ice fall and we'll go home she was like down i said camp 2 sucks let's get out of here and go up i was like if it's safe to go up let's go up you have to remember i'm like replaying all the things that i didn't want to have happen i think i'm going to die in the kumbu ice fall i just got hit by an avalanche like i'm like well i guess if it's safe to climb let's go up that seems like the for whatever reason safest decision and yeah i mean in the end it all ended up working out i mean we climbed to camp three spent a night there climbed to camp four spent some time in the death zone um and ultimately made a summit push and it was i mean the most beautiful majestic like insanely rewarding thing to actually stand on the summit of the top in the top of the world with with i mean it was pretty special the you said something before which that that definitely triggered my biggest emotion on this entire thing which is i have taken a lot of these risks obviously i'm on my own and through jenna's sort of deep support and partnership and camaraderie but i've been the one in harm's way for the most part right now you're responsible for her well-being and it's incumbent upon you when she says what do you mean when we're going down we're going up for you to be like are you sure about that like maybe that's not such a good idea and when you get above camp four and the deaths on the summit push essentially in i had an experience in 2016 where i was coming back down the mountain a woman wasn't climbing with her but i knew had fallen down on the ground her action mask wasn't working and she couldn't get up and people had said to me up high on the mountain you can't like pick somebody up or carry them but i always intellectualize that of like that seems like an exaggeration like surely if someone's in really bad shape you're not gonna like let them lie on the ground and die like you could do something i remember in 2016 seeing this woman who you know again acquaintance of mine um lying on the ground and like thinking to myself like can i pick her up right now you know we're at south summit twenty eight thousand seven hundred feet or whatever it is and being like no like i like and i got down on the ground and i was like you gotta get up and like talking her and like trying to get her back up we all they got her oxygen mask back on and she got her up moving again but there was this moment where i was like i can't do anything to help this person literally me my full strength coming down the mountain there's nothing i can do to like i can't carry this person back down and so i remember feeling that feeling and when we're leaving camp four with jenna and like being like whoa like i have actually been up here before and i have just been in an environment where people died around me on k2 and now i'm here in this situation where it's like my role to like protect jenna but also being like hey jenna like up in the death zone like if something goes wrong like obviously i'll do everything i possibly can to make sure to save you or whatever somewhere wrong but like really if i'm being honest there's not a whole lot either of us can do to help each other if something goes really wrong we actually have we know a husband and wife couple where the the woman passed away on the mountain in 2016 um and the husbands arrived so i don't know man i would say summoning mount everest with jenna was of all my expeditions obviously there's no world record or blah blah blah associated with jen and i summoning i think we're the fifth couple married couple or something like that um was the most beautiful incredible experience to share in like the highest ten of all tens you know to have that moment together but the vulnerability and the intensity of holding that space for jenna on that climb pushed my limits beyond what i kind of expected and also gave me a renewed not that i haven't had the highest level of respect for what jenna has done for me over the years but at even deeper reverence for what it's like to be jenna and get the phone call from the k210 or the antarctica this or the text message that says i'm alone and then have no response and like having held that space so often for me and to have the the flip side of that to be out there with you and feel that vulnerability and the lack of being able to control the situation and yeah the stakes and not for nothing to do it without really actually properly training it's a cherry on top and without that i mean yes you had the technical training the year prior and had the fitness then yeah it was surprising but to do it in maybe whimsical is a is too strong of a word but in a less than entirely way is impressive also perhaps a little bit uh unhinged maybe i'm glad it all worked out yeah and it's inspiring but i'm pretty good here at sea level yeah and i can get my head around the 12-hour walk and we'll keep it at that yeah let's uh yeah join us for the 12-hour walk on september 10th let's get skullnick to do it too let's get i'm sure he'll be down with it um yeah cool so the book comes out august book is out august 2nd 2nd um 12-hour walk and then 12hourwalk.com is where you can get information about the community piece yeah 12hourwalk.com come check it out you can sign up there um stay in touch with us we're like i said the our next everest is to inspire 10 million people to take the 12-hour walk so so join us join us for the walk you can do it any day but september 10th is going to be a big walk alone together kind of day to be accountable um and excited to have you and hopefully skolnik join us right on this adventure you can find colin at colin o'brady on all the social stuff and jenna how do people find you um i'm not the best at social stuff but at jenna b saw you throw some stuff up there yeah um cool all right i love you guys thank you so much yeah pleasure thanks for having me thank you awesome peace [Music] you

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 129,040

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition

Id: BajD0ES49Ic

Length: 198min 17sec (11897 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022