What Everyone Can Learn From Mount Everest, With Ben Ayers

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ben Ayers has devoted his life to the Himalaya. If that conjures images in your mind of stone-faced mountaineers risking life and limb in pursuit of glory on the world’s highest peaks, you’ve got the wrong guy. Ben knows those guys and gals, but his experiences in these mountains are decidedly more down to Earth. In fact, despite living half the year in Kathmandu for decades, he’s never even tried to climb the world’s most famous peak. And it’s the ideas and insights he’s gathered exploring the region’s lesser known (and safer) mountains, while paying careful attention Everest’s impact on his adopted community, that make Ben such an interesting guy to talk to—that, and the fact that he’ll be reporting for Outside from Everest Base Camp throughout what promises to be one of the most eventful climbing seasons in recent memory.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the outside podcast with Paddyo.
0:11.5	All the expeditions are kind of leaving Kathmandu now-ish.
0:14.2	Like this week is a busy week for me trying to meet everybody before they head out.
0:17.6	I'm trying to like make the comparison to maybe like the plot of Mighty Ducks too.
0:22.2	Who are the underdogs?
0:23.5	And then who's the team that's all super slick?
0:25.9	I think it's more like the ski race and better off dead.
0:29.9	It's 100% pure.
0:31.6	Yeah.
0:32.4	What's the street value of this mountain?
0:34.4	You know, that's actually an applicable question for Everest.
0:37.4	What is the street value of Mount Everest?
0:39.0	All of human naturely, the best and the worst of humanity, is crammed onto a glacier for two
0:45.0	months.
0:45.9	It's like the most stories per square inch of anywhere I can imagine in the world.
0:50.1	The year is 1999. world.
0:58.4	The year is 1993.
1:04.2	I am nine years old and obsessed with a new TV show called Sequest, the plot of which is basically Star Trek, but in the depths of the ocean.
1:07.9	It stars Roy Shider.
1:09.4	You know the dude from Jaws who shoots the air tank and blows the
1:12.6	shark up as Captain Nathan Bridger and a talking dolphin named Darwin? I love this show so much I pledge to
1:22.5	become a marine biologist and as such I convince my mom to bring me to the dolphin show at the zoo.
	...

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