Moral Compass
/By Phoebe Flanigan, produced by Out There Podcast
Released On June 16, 2022
Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.
WILLOW BELDEN: Imagine you’re out on a hike. It’s a beautiful day. There’s a gentle breeze. It’s warm, but not too hot.
You get to the top of a mountain, and you eat some chocolate, and you look around, and there’s this gorgeous panorama of mountains spread out in every direction.
You pull out your map to figure out what you’re looking at. But the map only shows the immediate vicinity. So, what do you do?
Lucky for us, there’s an app out there that can help. It’s called PeakVisor. PeakVisor is one of our sponsors this season. When you open up their app, it figures out where you are, and then it tells you all the mountains you’re looking at.
If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out Peak Visor in the app store. You just might love it.
(Out There theme music begins)
Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.
As the world reopens, many of us are returning to the things we used to love. Things we did before the pandemic. We’re traveling, we’re seeing loved ones, we’re going on adventures.
And every adventure is better with a great soundtrack.
Over the past seven years, Out There has been bringing you outdoor stories that help you make sense out of your life and your world.
Today, we’re launching a new season called Nature’s Nostalgia. Each episode, we’ll fuel your adventures with award-winning narratives and beloved fan favorites from the early days of Out There.
Today’s story is about a trip up Mt. Everest. But before we get to that, I have a favor to ask.
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And now, on to our story for today.
(introspective music begins)
This story is about how we make moral decisions — how we choose when to be compassionate and selfless. The story takes us up the tallest mountain in the world and brings us face to face with a decision that very literally affects the course of an entire life.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
(music fades out)
Our guest is a man named Myles Osborne. He’s a professor at the University of Colorado, and he’s also a world traveler and an outdoorsman. And as an outdoorsman, he does a lot of things that seem…risky. Crazy, even. He does these things because - well, frankly, because of FOMO: the fear of missing out.
MYLES OSBORNE: So, I have this sort of overwhelming terror that I’m suddenly going to die or, you know, get some horrible illness and I’ll look back and notice that I put off a load of things that I might have done earlier.
WILLOW: So, Myles has made a habit of not sitting around. And his approach on life — this fear of missing out — it’s served him well, for the most part. But a while back, something really conflicting happened to Myles. Something that pitted all of those life goals that he didn’t want to miss out on, against the life of a total stranger.
Reporter Phoebe Flanigan has the story. It’s a story about one of the hardest decisions mountaineers ever have to make — whether or not to save another human being.
PHOEBE FLANIGAN: As a rule, Myles Osborne doesn’t like to talk about himself. He dodges compliments. He cringes at the thought of posting personal updates on Facebook. And as a kid, he was … kind of a wimp.
MYLES: No, I was terrified as a child. There are many stories that my brothers and sister will not let me forget of going to swimming lessons and me holding on to the side of the pool and screaming.
PHOEBE: Myles grew up second-to-youngest of six in a small village on the south coast of England. His father was a navy man who spent much of the year traveling.
MYLES: So he would always be in foreign countries. You know, writing us postcards and sending things back to the school where we were. So we were all very aware that there was this wider world out there.
PHOEBE: As he got older, Myles became more and more curious about that world — the one that existed beyond the foggy coastline of his hometown. He wanted to see it for himself. So, at eighteen, he traveled to Namibia for three months. After that, he took on scuba diving. Then mountain climbing.
(tonal music begins, with sounds of foot steps)
He tackled Kilimanjaro, Rainier, Denali. And, in 2004, he set his sights on the mother of all summits: Mount Everest.
(foot steps end)
At the time, Myles was still pretty green as a climber. And he didn’t have much money. (He was just starting grad school). So he planned to go the low-budget route. But low budget on Everest still means twenty thousand dollars.
Myles spent the next two years working odd jobs — on top of his studies — to scrape together the cash. Even so, he barely saved up enough.
MYLES: When I left the US, I think I had — I remember the number. I think I had 82 bucks in my bank account.
PHOEBE: So — no money to spare. And a tough mountain ahead of him.
Now, experienced climbers will tell you that Everest isn’t actually the most technical climb. But that doesn’t make it safe. You’ve probably read news stories about lives lost on the mountain. On average, seven climbers die each season. That’s less than one percent of the people who actually attempt the mountain, but still — over the years, almost 300 people have lost their lives trying to get to the top. THREE HUNDRED!
As a side note, many of their bodies remain on the mountain. It makes sense — they’re often too difficult to remove. But still, it’s a grim reminder to any who might follow in their footsteps — that this is a dangerous place.
(music fades out)
Myles knew all this. But he says, he wasn’t really afraid.
MYLES: There’s always, you know, of course, anything can go wrong. But we’re talking about four or five hundred climbers or something on the mountain. By the numbers, the odds of something going wrong are still quite small. So there are risks, but I think that they are mitigated by being smart. And, you know, if you’re going to be unlucky you’re going to be unlucky. And there’s nothing that you can really do about that anyway.
(tonal music begins)
PHOEBE: What Myles didn’t consider was that it might not be his OWN life on the line. As it turns out, the hardest thing he had to do on Everest involved making a decision about the life of ANOTHER climber.
It’s the kind of choice that many of us face on a smaller scale in our daily lives. Do you drive past the stranded motorist, or stop and help? But on Mount Everest, the stakes are much higher. And whatever you choose — you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your life.
(music fades out)
In late March of 2006, Myles began his journey. He planned to climb Everest from the north. And when he arrived in Tibet, the landscape blew him away.
(subtle, insect-like sounds begin, followed by soft drum sounds)
MYLES: You know, the thing that I will never forget about Tibet is the scale of it. You have these extraordinary mountains in the background that are so much larger than anything that you can imagine. And then the plateau just stretches out for as far as you can see. This huge, flat expanse of dusty land. That was — it just felt bigger than anything I’d ever seen before.
(drums end)
PHOEBE: The basecamp in Tibet sits right beneath Everest’s north face, on a wide, gravel plateau — about two miles long by half a mile wide.
(low sound of wind whistling)
It’s like a moonscape — rocky and barren. There are no trees there, few plants. In fact the only real color around comes from man-made signs and tents. The prayer flags forever flapping in the wind.
MYLES: It’s not so much the temperature, but it’s the wind that really, that you notice. It’s just this constant thing in the back of your ears and in your head that you are always hearing the wind. And it’s not particularly unsettling. It’s almost sort of comforting that there is this sort of natural factor out beyond sort of a stillness perhaps.
And you can, you can see — once you get to basecamp and you ’re looking at the top of Everest, you can see this huge, you know, couple of kilometer plume coming off the peak. Which is the wind coming across the summit at sort of, you know, maybe 150-200 miles an hour. And that’s got to drop before you go to the top. But it’s a reminder that you are really treading somewhere you shouldn’t be for a very short window each season.
PHOEBE: A very short window.
(wind fades out)
What Myles is saying is that there are only a few days out of the year when it’s possible to get to the top of Mount Everest. The peak is so high that it actually protrudes into the stratosphere, and most of the year, the summit is whipped by hurricane-force winds. Winds that could kill a climber in minutes.
It’s only during a weeklong period on either end of monsoon season that winds on Everest’s summit die down enough for climbers to take their shot at standing on the roof of the world.
Myles spent the first few days in Tibet at basecamp — drinking water, eating a lot, adjusting to the altitude. He was preparing to set out with a small team, led by world-famous American mountaineer Dan Mazur. And spirits were high.
MYLES: People are excited. There are very few people who are there who have not put in significant amounts of effort. You’re healthy, not injured, you’ve made it there, so in some ways you’ve done the bit that you really were worried was gonna stop you.
(clanking, metallic sounds begin)
PHOEBE: Soon, they started climbing — making trips up to the first camp, dropping gear, coming back down, resting. Always taking two steps forward, one step back.
(foreboding, tonal music begins, along with footsteps)
MYLES: And just trying to run this fine line between getting your body used to the altitude but not spending so much time high on the mountain that you start not sleeping and losing muscle mass and getting weaker.
(footsteps end)
There’s a kind of a fine balance that has to be struck there.
PHOEBE: Myles says he was finding that balance. But as three weeks dragged into four, then five, he began to worry.
MYLES: I wasn’t necessarily concerned about my physical shape, which I felt was fine. Not great, but fine. I was more, and what everybody obsesses about is: are you going to get an opportunity to go to the top of the mountain? Is the weather going to do what it needs to do?
By the time you get to May, it’s all anyone’s talking about. When’s the window going to be? You know, when are we going to be able to get to the top?
PHOEBE: So yeah, they were getting antsy. And meanwhile, something unnerving was going on: a lot of people were dying. By the end of the season, the mountain had claimed 11 lives — from altitude and illness and ice falls. It was the deadliest year in almost a decade. And as Myles and his team inched toward their own summit push, they kept hearing about death after death after death.
MYLES: We were pretty low budget and didn’t have much in the way of tech or radios and things like that, so you would hear stories, but we never knew quite what was going on.
PHOEBE: When you did hear about those sorts of things, do you remember what you thought?
MYLES: Yeah, you just think it won’t happen to you. It’s just, it’s funny, it’s one of those things — it’s obviously terrible that it’s happened, and you really feel for the people involved. But there’s also a sort of sense of gratitude that A) this hasn’t happened to you, and maybe on some level if the mountain is going to take a few people this year, maybe that’s it. Maybe it wasn’t you. Yeah, it’s kind of an odd mindset to be in.
(music ends)
PHOEBE: One death, in particular, sparked something of an international media storm that year. In mid-May, an English climber named David Sharp succumbed to cold and altitude sickness as he descended from a summit push. He took refuge in a cave. And remember how I said there were still about 300 bodies left on Everest? Sharp found himself next to one of those bodies — a dead climber known as Green Boots. And instead of being helped, he was abandoned there — allegedly left for dead, by almost 40 others on their way to the top.
The story that came out over the next few weeks turned out to be more complicated. Many of the climbers who passed David Sharp said they hadn’t seen him there, or they thought he was already dead. And some had tried to help.
But after the first reports about David Sharp’s death came out, people on the ground were outraged. Media pundits weighed in, asking whether Everest had become morally corrupt. And several big shots in the mountaineering world decried the behavior of the climbers who’d passed David Sharp as callous and horrifying.
To most of us down here at sea level, it does seem callous and horrifying. After all, how could anyone care more about getting to the top of a mountain than the life of another person?
But it’s not so cut and dried. And I’m going to unpack this for you a little bit, because to understand what happens next to Myles, you have to understand that there are actually a number of reasons why you might rationally pass a climber in distress.
(menacing music begins)
The first is self-preservation. Once you get above 25,000 feet, you’re in Everest’s “death zone.” At that altitude, your brain and heart begin to swell. And exposed flesh can freeze instantly.
(zapping sound)
The air is so thin that even with bottled oxygen, any movement is like “running on a treadmill while breathing through a straw.”
(sound of labored breath)
It’s hard enough to keep yourself alive — let alone someone else. And, as any first aid course will tell you, it’s not a good idea to help someone else if it puts your own life in danger. Because then you’ve just created another patient — not made things better.
(music fades out)
Another factor here is risk. Every climber who sets out to tackle Everest knows they’re taking on a substantial personal risk. David Sharp — the guy who was left for dead — had a particularly risky climb. He was attempting the mountain solo — without a climbing partner, sherpas, or even a radio. So, should his risk, and his costly rescue, really come at the expense of other teams — and guides who have their own clients that they’re busy trying to keep alive?
Suffice it to say, the moral territory is more complicated than it might first appear. But let’s get back to Myles.
(low booming sound)
By now it’s getting into late May. And Myles’ team has been on the mountain for nearly a month and a half. That’s pretty typical for Everest. But they were getting to the end of their supplies — and the end of the season.
Remember that window of time where the winds die down and you can actually get to the top of Everest? It was upon them, but coming to a close.
MYLES: This was probably the 20… I think it was the 25th of May. We were probably one of the only groups left on the mountain at that point. We had tried to go to the summit the week before. And we got driven back by weather at the high camp.
PHOEBE: It was six nights before the weather cleared up enough for them to take another stab at the top. That’s six nights just sitting in a tent — waiting, hoping.
By the time the weather did clear, nearly all of the other climbers on the mountain had packed up and gone home. As they prepared for their final push, Myles and his team knew that it would be their very last chance.
Now just imagine that for a moment. You’ve spent years — literally YEARS — preparing for this trip. You’ve poured all of the money, all the time that you don’t really have into getting here. This is your one shot at that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Imagine how much hope, and anxiety, and fear, is riding on it.
(ethereal music begins)
Finally, they got their chance. At 11:30 p.m. on the night of May 25th, Myles and his team set out. The skies were clear, the air thin and brilliantly cold. So cold that every few minutes Myles had to check to make sure his oxygen mask and regulator hadn’t frozen.
They climbed through the night, carefully stepping across a narrow ridge that dropped off thousands of feet on either side.
And then, they stumbled across something awful.
(music becomes sinister)
A human body, frozen to the mountain.
MYLES: It’s quite a creepy thing seeing these things, because if you’re not – you know, you’re on this knife edge ridge at four in the morning, and it’s dark, and you’re climbing in this head lamp, and you have this little bubble of light about yourself. And as someone who’s a big fan of horror movies, I’m absolutely convinced these people are just going to pop up and start walking around.
PHOEBE: They later found out that this was the body of David Sharp — that British climber whose death had caused such an outcry earlier that season. And no — he didn’t pop up and start walking around. But as it would turn out, Myles’ fear of a horror-movie scenario wasn’t actually so far from the truth.
Myles and his team passed the body of David Sharp. They worked up a sweat scaling the boulders of the first step. And climbed on into the dawn.
MYLES: It’s, by Everest standards, it’s a warm, beautiful morning.
PHOEBE: A balmy, six degrees below zero..
MYLES: It’s pretty still, the sun’s starting to come up...
PHOEBE: But something was about to happen.
MYLES: And so, it was just as the dawn was breaking, and we came around a rock. And I could not believe that I was seeing what my eyes were telling me I was seeing.
(foreboding music begins)
PHOEBE: At first, it just looked like a piece of bright fabric.
MYLES: And so I thought, ‘You know, is it a bit of tent or something? Am I looking at something else?’
And then as you get closer you realize it’s a guy who’s actively in the process of removing his clothes as quickly as he can. And then you’re sure that something funky is going on. Because A) there can’t be a person here and B) if there was a person here, why would they be removing their clothes at 8,700 meters on Everest?
And he says, you know, we approach this guy and he goes, “I bet you’re surprised to see me here.” And it was quite an extraordinary statement, because it was tremendously prescient — it was true — and it was also sort of the last coherent thing that he said for the next couple of hours. Because it was almost sort of a window of clarity into this cloud that was in his mind.
PHOEBE: The man was shivering uncontrollably, but didn’t want to keep his gloves or hat on. His head jerked and bobbed. His eyes darted about, unfocused. And his fingers were waxy and opaque, like long candlesticks. That’s something that happens when you have severe frostbite.
As Myles and his team gathered around, the man began speaking — incoherently — about getting onto a boat.
MYLES: And then he starts trying to pull himself off the ridge, which drops, you know, ten thousand feet into Nepal.
PHOEBE: The man they’d discovered was Australian climber Lincoln Hall. Hall had been incapacitated by exhaustion and altitude sickness the night before, and declared dead by his team after hours of attempted rescue. His wife and kids back in Australia had already gotten the phone call — that her husband, their father, was gone.
MYLES: I think the sun had probably woken him up. Because the sun had just hit the ridge there. He obviously had just kind of sat up within the last few minutes. And quite honestly, I think if it was another few minutes later, he wouldn’t have been there either. Because he spent the first hour that we were with him trying to get himself off the ridge, down the side. And I think if we’d been there a few minutes later, I think he probably would have achieved that, and we would have just kind of walked past and never known he was there.
(music fades out)
PHOEBE: So, just hours from the summit, with the peak literally within eyeshot, Myles and his team were confronted with the same horrible decision put before so many other climbers that season. Do they stay and help this guy — a man who’s clearly delusional, who might die anyway from exposure and frostbite?
(music begins)
Or do they forge ahead — to finish this thing they’ve set out to do? To get to the top of this mountain.
MYLES: At this point it’s Dan and Andrew and Jangbu and myself. And Dan and Jangbu have both been to the summit. And so there’s a conversation initially there of Dan, who says, “Well, do you guys want to just go up there and meet us down, and we’ll all go down together?”
PHOEBE: That might seem like a logical solution: let the guys who have already been to the summit help the man in distress … and the team members who haven’t can go ahead on their own. But after some conversation, they decided that just wasn’t safe — to leave this guy with just two other climbers. After all, he was actively trying to pull himself over a cliff.
So Myles’ team agreed to stay. All of them. At least until help could arrive. They anchored Hall to the snow, to prevent him from pulling himself over the ridge. And gave him hot drinks, food, oxygen.
MYLES: And then there was sort of a waiting period.
(music fades out)
Because of the way the north ridge is, and it’s so flat, the only way to move somebody who isn’t ambulatory is with 10-12 guys. We didn’t have that, clearly. So we had sent a radio message down to the high camp. Which we thought had gone through. Again, because we were low budget, we didn’t really have radios that worked, and the batteries died.
PHOEBE: Their message had gotten through — and a group of sherpas were on the way up. But with the radio dead, Myles and his team didn’t know that. And they couldn’t go anywhere until they were sure someone was coming.
Half an hour went by. Then forty-five minutes. And then, out of nowhere, two other climbers appeared. They approached, moving at a fast clip. Myles’ team hailed them — but they said they didn’t speak English, and continued on.
Later, it would turn out, they did speak English.
Myles doesn’t want to villainize these guys. And he says that they probably had their own, totally rational reasons for doing what they did. Still, it was surprising. To watch them move on toward the summit. While he sat there, waiting — his window of opportunity shrinking by the minute.
MYLES: Because it’s such a beautiful day, because we’re up there early. We’re strong. We have oxygen. You know, even a one, two, three-hour delay, probably would have been okay. But by the time we’re up there for three, becoming four, and eventually five hours, and it’s probably 11 in the morning, we know that we’re too late in the day to go up there.
PHOEBE: Too late in the day. Too late for them to make it to the top and back down again before the weather turned.
MYLES: It’s pretty devastating. And I think anyone in that situation, you — you’re angry, and you’re upset, and you’re frustrated. And you don’t perhaps have the sense of clarity that comes after a day or two, in which you look at the situation rationally, and it’s the only choice. There’s absolutely no other option.
PHOEBE: So yeah, when Myles talks about it now, he says there was no other option but to stay and help this climber — even though it meant his team would never get to the top of Mount Everest.
But of course, there had been another option — the option the climbers who’d passed them that morning chose. The options the climbers who’d passed David Sharp, just two weeks earlier, had taken. The option to get to the top.
I got curious about this. How is it that Myles and his team could feel that there was no other option but to save Lincoln Hall, while so many other climbers felt just the opposite — that there was no other option but to leave a distressed climber behind?
JOE ARVAI: It's a question that I don’t know that I have a single answer to.
PHOEBE: This is Joe Arvai. He’s a professor at the University of Michigan. And he studies the psychology of risk and decision-making. He also happens to be a mountain climber himself.
I called him up to see how science answers that question: why would some people stop to help, while others walk on by? Are some of us just innately better human beings — or is there another explanation?
Arvai says the crux of the matter is that our minds don’t always see choices as choices. A climber who passes another person in distress might be making some kind of a logical calculation about their behavior — but most of the time, this isn’t really some belabored decision at all.
ARVAI: What we see in the brain is this kind of balance between what we call System One, which is our emotional response to a stimulus, and System Two, which is a much more rational response.
PHOEBE: And that balancing act happens kind of intuitively.
It’s like this — imagine that the decision-making part of your brain is a teeter-totter. The left side of the teeter-totter, that’s where you put your System One input — your emotions, your feelings, your gut instincts. The right side of the teeter-totter — that’s where you put System Two data. Facts and figures, pros and cons, stuff that’s maybe a little more abstract.
Normally, when you’re just comfortably going about your day to day life, the fulcrum of that teeter-totter is right near the middle. So any emotional input you have around a decision, it’s balanced out with logical data.
Think about it like this. You’re walking past a doughnut shop, and you think, ‘Man, those doughnuts look good. I want one right now. But, I’m also trying to cut back on doughnuts, because logically I know they’re bad for me.’ So the teeter-totter wobbles, lands on the data side, and you walk on by.
Okay, now imagine that you’re walking past that doughnut shop again — but this time you’re under a bit of stress. You haven’t had lunch, and you’re getting hangry. Or maybe you’re upset about something at work. Now what do you do? That emotional end of the teeter-totter takes on some extra weight, doesn’t it?
When you’re under really stressful conditions, like, you know, climbing a mountain in life-or-death circumstances, it’s not just that the emotional, System One end of the teeter-totter takes on extra weight — it’s like the whole fulcrum of that teeter-totter has moved. And suddenly it’s going to take a lot more data for you to make a rational decision, rather than an emotional one.
Essentially, when you’re really stressed out, emotions win.
ARVAI: I think there’s, for a lot of people who are climbing, this kind of summit or plummet attitude. It’s what you’re there to do. I mean, you’re not there to get a tan. You’re not there to drink coffee in the tents with the sherpas. You’re not there to listen to the weather reports. You’re there to summit. And I think that’s what happens in the mountains — that, even though you may be confronted with data, like seeing someone in distress, that visceral pull is just so powerful that you just can’t beat it back.
PHOEBE: Okay — so our brain makes these decisions intuitively. And when we’re under a lot of stress, our intuition is weighted toward making an emotional choice. For mountain climbers, that often means following through on that desire to get to the top.
But that emotional drive can be overwhelmed — by strong data. And maybe that’s what happened to Myles and his team. Yes — they wanted the summit, as badly as anyone else. Yes — they were under stress, and their mental teeter-totter was weighted towards making an emotional decision to summit. But there was enough data there to tip the scales. Data that said, “Hey — this guy’s alive, he’s in distress, and if you don’t step in to help him, you’re going to watch him die. Right now. Right in front of you. And it’s going to be your fault.”
Those people who passed by that morning and DIDN’T stop to help? Maybe they didn’t have that same sort of immediate data input to tip their teeter-totter. After all, Myles’ team was already there, helping. Maybe Lincoln Hall didn’t need more people.
(rhythmic music begins)
But no matter how we arrive at our decisions, there’s always a need, after the fact, to find the logic in our actions. To rationalize them. To make sense, somehow, of a choice that’s often more intuitive than sensical.
ARVAI: So people will tell themselves stories that justify their position. And the more they’re able to tell that story to themselves, the easier it becomes to deal with that feeling of dissonance. So, you know, the story that I think a lot of climbers tell themselves in a situation following a David Sharp or a Lincoln hall experience is: ‘There’s nothing I could have done.’
MYLES: As human beings, we tend to convince ourselves of certain things, and then we look for the evidence to back up the point that we want to make. And so, you know, had we walked past Lincoln Hall, I would be telling you a story of how, “Hey we checked on this guy, and he was fine, and he was redoing his gear, and we kept going, and I didn’t realize anything was going on.” Whereas the reality of it was that clearly something was a problem here.
And when I spoke to a bunch of the guys who had walked past David Sharp a couple of weeks ago, and I would speak to them in the months following the expedition, every one of them had a perfectly rational reason for why they had walked past a guy in distress. Eight or nine different reasons. Distinctly different reasons. So I think you do something and then you look for reasons why you did it.
(music ends)
Because otherwise, how could you continue to realize and to know that you had deliberately permitted the life of another to be lost because of your selfish endeavor? That’s not something people can live with.
PHOEBE: Lincoln Hall made it down off the mountain that day. The sherpas came and half carried, half walked him to a medical tent farther down the slopes. He lost the tips of his fingers and a toe to frostbite. But everyone got to the bottom alive.
And Myles? He’s still making sense of the whole thing.
MYLES: It’s not a story that I really told, I guess, a huge amount after it happened. And probably never in as much depth as you and I are discussing it at the moment either.
PHOEBE: What’s the, when you did, when it did ever come up, what was the question that people always asked?
MYLES: Oh, they just want to know if you got to the top or not. It’s really that simple. Which again is not something that I think climbing is really about, to be honest.
And one of the most impressive guys I ever met on the mountain was a British guy, who was extraordinarily modest. And he was there to be a part of that expedition and climb. And he made it an hour or two out of camp, heading towards the summit, and he thought, ‘You know, I’ve seen this, I’ve enjoyed this, this was great,’ and headed down perfectly happy. Because he had done what he set out to do. He had challenged himself against this peak. The summit was utterly irrelevant in it.
And in some ways, that was the most profound thing that I took home from that climb, was that it really is about the process, it’s not about whether or not you check a box on a list or not.
(introspective music begins)
PHOEBE: Most of us won’t ever go to Mount Everest. But we do make difficult decisions — all the time. Decisions that pit our self-oriented, emotional desires against the wellbeing of other people.
And the psychological mechanism behind those choices, that teeter-totter in our brain, it’s the same. The way we look back and craft stories to make sense of our decisions is the same.
So that kind of selfish or not-admirable thing that we did? It was all for the best. It was a learning experience. It was the only option.
And we do it when we make difficult but selfless decisions too — when we recycle even though the trash can’s closer. When we stop to help the injured biker over winning the race. Those choices also demand a narrative — however grand, or small.
Those stories help us to survive our decisions. And, maybe, to make better ones next time.
(music swells)
WILLOW: That was Phoebe Flanigan. She’s currently living in Portland and is working on a Gimlet Media show called Every Little Thing.
Myles Osborne is still in Colorado. And he and his wife just opened an animal sanctuary.
As for Lincoln Hall, he passed away in 2012 — of causes unrelated to his near-death experience on Mount Everest. You can read his version of events in the book he wrote. It’s called Dead Lucky.
(music fades out)
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please take 30 seconds and share the link with a friend! Seriously — pause the episode right now and go ahead and do that right now. We’re always eager for new listeners, and your recommendation is our best form of advertising.
Also, if you’re not already a patron, please consider becoming one. By supporting Out There, you will be making a very real difference in the future of this podcast.
Click the link in the episode description to become a patron today, or go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast.
Speaking of which, thank you so much to all of our current patrons, including Joe Cupps, Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, and Deb and Vince Garcia. You all are the best.
(upbeat music starts)
Coming up next time on Out There: I’m going to share a story about something that happened to me quite a few years ago. It involves a big mountain bike race.
(clapping and biking sounds)
FEMALE VOICE: Woo! Look at that smile.
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: How you doing?
WILLOW: Good.
FIRST FEMALE VOICE: Do you need some water? What do you need?
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: I also, because I’m a mom, I brought you apple sauce, in case nothing here looked good.
WILLOW: Woah! It’s baby applesauce.
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: Toddler.
(laugher)
WILLOW: I got toddler applesauce! How do you eat this?
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: Suck on it. (laughter) Please put that in your episode.
(ambient sounds fade out)
WILLOW: Tune in on July 7 to hear that story. The story has plenty of light-hearted moments, but it also takes a close look at success — and what happens when we’re laser focused on a goal that might not end up serving us in the long run.
(music fades out)
So, we’ve been hearing about Mt. Everest today. And I was curious whether PeakVisor — the app I told you about at the start of the show — would work there. Like, could I stand on top of Mt. Everest and use PeakVisor?
So I emailed them and asked. And they wrote back right away.
They told me that yes — PeakVisor would work just fine from the top of Mt. Everest. And in fact, they said a lot of people use their app during Everest Basecamp Treks. Because you don’t have to have cell phone reception to use the app. You just need to be able to turn on your phone.
Now, they did say that it might not be super convenient to use a phone at the top of Mt. Everest, because it’s really cold and really windy, etc. But hypothetically, it would work.
If you’d like your own personal mountain guide — in the Himalayas or anywhere else in the world — check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.
(Out There theme music begins)
Today’s story about Myles Osborne first aired in 2017. The piece was reported and produced by Phoebe Flanigan and edited by me, Willow Belden. Sound design by Chema Flores. You can find Chema on soundcloud — he’s little weather. And a special thank you to Alan Arnette of the all-things-Everest website, alanarnette.com.
Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.
Have a beautiful day, and we’ll see you in three weeks.
(theme music swells, then ends)
