Everest: The Longest Line of Selfish Egotists on Earth

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

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

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

Malcolm Collins: Climbing.

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

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

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

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

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

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you have a less than 10 percent probability of not undergoing