Larsen Ice Shelf Expedition | Rodrigo Jordan | Talks at Google

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Evan Wittenberg. I work in the Leadership Development Group here at Google and it's my pleasure today to bring my good friend Rodrigo Hordan to Google to talk to you about some of his experiences leading and forming high performance teams in very extreme conditions. Rodrigo was the leader of the first successful Chilean and as it turns out, South American expeditions ever to Everest and K2. He also recently took a team up Mount Lotse, which is the fourth highest mountain in the world. So three of four so far. You can ask him about why he hasn't done Kachenjunga yet, if you're interested. Rodrigo's a civil and industrial Engineer, earned his PhD in Organizational Administration from Oxford University, and he's a lecturer in innovation processes and management at University Cattolica in Santiago, Chile. It's interesting to walk around Chile with Rodrigo because everybody's always stopping him for autographs. Part of that is because of his mountaineering fame. He also ran the largest television station in Chile for a couple years. And so he's well known. His face has been all over. He was recently elected, well, a couple years ago elected chairman of the Chilean national foundation for the Alleviation of Poverty, appointed by the President. And he's just re upped for his second term in that role. And his company, Vertical, also has its own foundation to do training in leadership and team building for school children in Chile. Among his other accomplishments, he led an unsupported 400 kilometer crossing of Antarctica, which they allocated 65 days of food through uncharted territory. They got there in 64 days. Luckily, he's, as I said, recently gone up Mount Lotse. And in January 2008, Rodrigo's going to lead a or join a National Geographic team to explore the Larsen Ice Shelf, which maybe he'll talk a little bit about, to check for pollution and global warming issues on the side of Antarctica that most people don't ever go to. I think I've said enough about Rodrigo, so now let's introduce him.

Rodrigo, thank you. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. Thank you very much. I will stick to my hour and probably Talk only for 40 minutes and leave it 20 minutes for questions and answers. And after that. But rather than giving you a formal lecture on topics or contents, just let me go through one of my latest experiences as a mountain climber in which I myself learned a pretty good lesson of how leading teams in very harsh environments, in a very demanding environment, with high goals at stake. So without further problems, just let me share with you, however, that to a certain extent, Evan was talking about my curriculum. Just want to say that I've been lucky and I'm pretty honored and thankful that I had a chance throughout my life to be working in different worlds, not only in the corporate world or in the social work. I. I have a chance to be able, until today to work in those four different types of environments. I do work in academia. I teach at Universia Catholic, as Evan was saying, and we do run programs for universities. We had a problem with Workman School of Business, with Harvard, that they come down in Chile, and I do leadership classes in Chile and do some research about them. I do have my own business, so I know a little bit about business, but my main relation with business is that we run a company that supports group development in the corporate world. As Evan was saying, I'm chairman, I'm honored to chair the biggest NGO for the elevation of poverty in Chile. And of course, what I'm going to talk about is mountaineering and sports. But the only reason I'm mentioning this is that even we're going to see pictures of mountaineering and mountains. My conclusions of my main issues that I'm going to highlight today come from all of these worlds, not only from the mountaineering. What I've learned here has been applied to these different worlds. And of course, what I've learned here has been applied to sports as well. And for that I just need to introduce you in order to explain this latest experience on Lotse, the fourth highest piece in the Himalayas, to introduce you to one of my first mountaineering expeditions in 1992 to Mount Everest. This is a team formed by seven Chilean climbers and three Sherpas. And we were climbing a very difficult route up Mount Everest. We had failed twice years before, in 86 and 89, but in 1992, we finally were able to succeed on climbing Mount Everest. And as I say, by very difficult route. The route we took up is the east face and it's only been climbed twice by a group of Americans and by ourselves. This is the last picture or the previous to last picture of the expedition. My mate Cristian Garcia Widoro had reached the summit and he took this picture of me reaching the summit of Mount Everest. Just want to start with this because the usual question one gets from people who are not mountaineers is what do you feel when you get to the summit? If it's a grand sense of achievement, and I must confess to you, an anticlimax, you don't feel anything when you get to the summit. The reason for that is one, you're extremely tired. Extremely tired. It's been a hell of an effort to get up there. We've been 60 days in the expedition, and the last day of climb takes you maybe 12 to 15 hours to get there. Of course, you're climbing under very stressful conditions. Lack of oxygen. Don't want to go into details, but a way to explain it is to say that you have a third of the oxygen you have at common level, so your brain is not working very well. Third, you're scared, very scared, because you need to get down from here. And most of the accidents in mountaineering happen as you climb down. Statistics in the US in Europe will show you that around 80 to 85% of the accidents happen when you go down. So you need to be very careful. And for that matter, when you get to the summit, as I say, you're in a very tense situation and not thinking very well. And let me express and tell you a short story about this. I always carry with myself inside my down parka picture of my family to certain way to climb with them. And the whole point is to get into the summit and getting a picture with your family on the summit. And I forgot about it totally. Happily, you would say. Happily, you would say, my friend Christian, who climbed with me, remembered that I had the picture and asked me to take it out. And he took a picture of myself with my family on the summit. And people would generally say, oh, he's a nice guy, you know, he's wonderful. He remembers his family. That's sort of the comments one hears. But it was a big mistake and I'm going to explain why. This is the picture of my family, my wife and my two daughters, Sophia and Natalia. Natalia is actually sitting back there and that was great, and everything worked fine. But when you go back from an expedition, you've been away from home for two months, no contacts. This is back in 1992. So there's no cellular phones, no satellites, no anything, no Google, by the way, in 1992. So once you get back home, you have a really passionate encounter with your wife. And because of that passion, we have another child. My third daughter was born. Her name is Elisa. Of course, she's not in the picture and she's demanding her picture on top of Mount Everest. So I have to climb this thing again. So anyway, and you know, it's difficult because I've taken pictures of her on her own on other mountains, but, you know, she wants Mount Everest. There's nothing to it. So anyway. But what people generally don't realize about the expeditions is that once you go back, you have to trek back of these big mountains. And we use that time to really think about. And we were discussing this with a group of people today in Google. We use that time of trekking back to reflect on the experience on our daily work. We don't have that time. We don't do that. You know, we just want jump from one project to the other. And we don't really stand still for a while and reflect on what we've been doing. And we managed to do that and came out with several lessons on that expedition about the importance not only of technical skills. These are very, very good climbers. Very, very good technical climbers. But at the same time, they had. Happily or luckily, because we didn't think about it, they had lots of social skills. They knew how to work in teams. They had individual capabilities of leaders. We allocated leadership throughout the expedition depending on the time of what was going on the expedition. So we really took note of what had made this a successful team. And because of that, we approach a second mountain. This is K2, the second highest peak in the world, but known to everybody as a more deadly summit than Everest. I don't know the statistics today, but this is back in 1996, 10 years ago. And at that time, one out of 10 climbers on Everest would die. One out of three on K2 would die. All right, that was more or less. And one out of five expeditions on K2 would be successful. And the true meaning of success was going to the summit and coming down alive. Everybody in the expedition. So that's why we had gone to Everest. Although it's the highest. We'd gone to Everest first because it's quote, unquote, easier than K2. But now that we thought we had sort of came out with a good way of putting good teams to do this, meaning with that, we needed technical skills as well as social skills within the team. We put up this team and went up K2. And it worked very well because, as I say, on Everest, it took us three expeditions to get to the summit on K2. Only just the first one. And I would say you were good because on your first attempt you climbed K2. Well, to a certain extent, because all of the experience we've gained on Everest on three expeditions was applied to K2. One issue here, very important is, and I've always get this question is how do you select who's going to go to the summit at the end of the expeditions, probably all of you know that typical expedition of 9, 12, 12 climbers, only a bunch, three or four would go to the summit. And that's because your logistics works by building a pyramid of resources. So you have a big base camp and then you camp one, camp two, camp three, and you're putting less resources because it's difficult to get there. So the final camp is installed there for only three or four climbers to go to the summit. And this was something that I usually had in mind, that the final decision of who's going to the summit was back to me, the leader of the expedition, the boss. All right, so I've always been asked this question, how is it that you decide who's going to go to the summit? And the answer is very easy. The very end of the expedition, once you've established all the camps out of 30 days of work or 40 days of work, all whoever is in the better condition, physically and emotionally, will go to the summit and that way. But the one thing I want to point out is that I thought, and I work with the idea that myself as a boss, as a leader of the expedition had the responsibility of choosing that. That was part of my job, all right, Doing that. Actually, in this expedition on K2, I myself wasn't at the high level of other four. There were other four climbers that at that time were at the end of the K2 build up. They were in better shape than I was. And so I voted for them to go. And I didn't go to the summit. On the case of K2, I stayed at base camp. This is them at the summit, four of them. And this is all of ours back at base camp. Just to remind you, we have this motto that our base camp picture is the true summit picture. Because this is when your expedition is successful. Everybody's back down safe. We've gone to the summit, but we're back down safe. And again, in this case, on our way back, we had this same time. This is longer even. It's about 10 days of hiking back to the tracks and the jeeps. We had the time to reflect on the expedition and we figured out lots of things. But we had established that to a certain extent, what has been done in expeditions before was the way of doing it. Building up these camps and putting up all the work and then finally deciding the very end of the expedition who is in better shape. And those would go to the summit and that decision would go back to the leader. We then decided, and Evan talked about this at my presentation is that we went to Antarctica. This is not Google Earth, by the way. Again, this is an old picture. It's a compound picture taken by satellites which we cleaned up of all the clouds. And so it's not a really true picture. You never get Antarctica as clean as this. We were going to climb. Well, not to climb, to do a traverse of the Ellsworth Mountains. These are the highest peaks in Antarctica and they are unexplored, or at least this side over here is unexplored. And to me, this was a great challenge. I had this discussion with my parents always that they had brought me into this world a little bit late. I would have loved to be a friend of Christopher Columbus or Hernan Cortez or any of the explorers. But now that everything is explored, this is a bit of land on the face of this earth that hasn't been explored. And so we devised an expedition that an airplane would throw us over there and we would hike up through these valleys, climb some peaks, do some scientific research on geology and ice, and do the whole traverse. For that case, we didn't have extra outside support. You get, you get in the Andes, you get the, what we call the arrieros, people on horses and mules that would take your gear. Or in Nepal, Sherpas would help you. In Antarctica, nobody will. So you have to take everything on a sled. In this case, it weighed about when we started the trip at about 150kg each of those sleds. Of course, temperatures are awfully low. The good thing about being on a very low temperature is that 40 degrees below zero is the same in the two scales in Celsius and Fahrenheit. So we didn't have to take care about which scale we were using. All right, so we just say it's 35 below, and that's more or less the same on both scales. We never had temperatures above freezing on the 60 days we were there. Never. The highest temperature was freezing point one day and we stripped off all our clothes to enjoy the day. And actually, this is what happens because you are pulling the sled, you're anyway sweating in your inner layers. And so when you take all your hats and everything, all of that sweat that you have on your face would froze up in contact with the cold air. But that's pretty good because it gets solid and then you can just shove it off from your face and sort of dry. And the other big issue is, of course, crevasses. Believe me, I've seen crevasses throughout the mountains. In the world. Never anything like the ones in Antarctica. Of course, you all are familiar now with, with Unconvenient Truth film by Al Gore. If you're interested in climate change, the width or the depth of the ice on Antarctica is 4km. There's 4km of ice in Antarctica. So if that moves and opens, you easily get a 1 km or a 1 mile crevasse. And of course a bus and a truck go in there. So they're huge, huge crevasses and we had to cross them. It was quite a challenge. And the good thing is this, this is unexplored terrain. None of these peaks are climbed, none of these valleys have been crossed. And so we're weaving through and going up different stages. And I want to share with you one specific case before we switch to Loze that changed my mind in how to lead high performance or exceptional teams. Because we didn't have maps, we made a decision to go into a valley that was closed at the end. Of course that was bad because if we cannot cross, we need to go back that valley, move across, and then come into the next valley in order to cross to where we're going. But that would meant using our resources, our supplies. So we have only 60 days of food and fuel and we need to get at the other end on those 60 days. So losing any day is critical. So we get here and we decided to stay for an extra day in order to explore the chances of crossing here. You can see it in the picture, but around here. And so we divide ourselves. There's four of us. Myself and Kiko would go to one end of the valley. We did go, came back, no results. The Norway cross. And the other two, Ernesto and Pablo, went and explored this notch over here. They climbed over here and saw to the other side and decided that. I'll tell you the story. They were coming back. I was sitting in the tent cooking a soup, and suddenly I see them coming. I was pretty distressed and, and frustrated that we haven't had to find a place. But Ernesto was coming with this face. And what did you get? They found some way across. And so I left what I was doing, took the picture, took my camera, took the picture of himself with this grin. And I say, how did it go? And he goes, very bad. There's no way across with that smile. Jesus, you're kidding me. Why are you smiling? And that was the big thing. There wasn't a way across. Well, that's what we thought. And he thought that, but he was smiling because he told me this Is fantastic place to be. What? Look, look. And this is amazing. He would show me a big glacier on top of a mountain and say, look, look at that. Don't you think it's like the sort of the cream of a lemon pie. I lost him. You know, you lose people in this. So anyway, but what happened then, and we spoke of this in the meeting we had this morning, he created an emotional environment that I, as a leader, wasn't creating. I was frustrated, I was to a certain extent angry because things weren't working as we decided we had to go back and everything. But he created this different environment. He was happy. We went to the tent that afternoon and he created this emotional environment in which, because he changed that, we were able to discuss in a sort of a lighter form and decided on a way across. And we invented a way to get across by using our climbing ropes to lower the sleds. So it's not a matter of having the more intelligent people, the more capable people. It's also a matter of having a good physical and emotional environment on which to work with those people, those decisions. And so even here, which is, you know, a very stressful environment because of his grinning, his smile, his happy go, lucky way of doing things, we manage a way across. And I just want to show you, Okay? We had to do this because, of course, this is Antarctica, and in summertime the sun is always up there. There's no night in summertime, but at some point, the sun would hide behind a mountain because we're in a range and you would be in shadow. And once you're in shadow, the temperature would plummet down to 40 below. And so we had to descend these stages, you know, build a terrace, descend everything to that terrace. Everybody gets down there, we fix again, ropes descend to the other terrace. So we had to do this. It took us about 10 hours to descend one of these faces, and suddenly we were in shadow. And because we're in shadow, as you see, we're in shadow, the design is over there. We have to rush down because we're really freezing ourselves. And so that's why we decided to throw the. The sleds, which was a bad idea because we were very lucky. There were no crevasses in this area. At least we couldn't see them. Hopefully there weren't, because we would have lost a sled. But we didn't. So we were very lucky. But we really need to run down and to get to the sunnies to put up our camp. But anyway, just to finish up this story, it did work. As Evan said, It took us 64 days out of 65 days of supplies. And we're happy because this is previous to the Unconvenient Truth. We brought all our garbage back. We didn't leave anything back in Antarctica. It's certainly the cleanest continent on the world, so might as well keep it that way. Because of that, and let me see if I can do this, We decided to go to Lotse. And this is. We're now back last year and wanted to show you my last experience. This is the fourth highest peak on the world. Probably none of you have ever heard about it. Anybody knew about Lhotse before? Few. Excellent. Well, people in jail don't do. Because this mountain over here is Mount Everest. So poor Lotse was born by the Big Brother, so nobody take care of it. And out of. I don't know. In this season, last season, 25 expeditions were on the Nepalese side. Out of those 25, 23 were climbing Everest. Only two, ourselves and a Czech expedition were climbing Lotse without taking into account. And on the Tibetan side, on the other side, there's another 25 exposure expeditions trying Everest. So it's 50 expeditions to Everest for two on Lotse. But we had climbed Everest twice. We've been there several times. So we decided might as well climb Lotse. We were doing this very quickly just to celebrate our master's 60th anniversary as a climber. He's 74 years of age and he's still climbing. So big expedition was put together. Lots of people went trekking up to Everest Base Camp. This is about 70 people that wanted to celebrate Claudio Lucero, as I say, our master. But only a few of us, 11 of us would remain to climb the peak. But this was all the people to check up. It's a total record of 70 Chileans on Everest Base Camp. So this is our base camp. I'm not going to go through the whole story, but just let you know about one thing. For the first time, I again changed what might be called a sort of a slight point of view, but a very important one. This is the picture I showed our president Michel Bachelet when we had a lecture at her office at her palace after we did the expedition. And if you see the channel, the Chilean expedition, quote unquote, includes all the Sherpas. And that's a learning that I've done through my years. When I first went to Everest, you know, Sherpas are great people, but they were also considered as some outsider providing you with a service for which you pay, and that's fine. It's a very good relation and it goes well. But still, you are differentiating the Chileans from the Sherpas. And you would say, who's the Chilean expeditions? Those who hold the Chilean passport. To put it in legal terms. In this time, for the first time, I decided, no, if we are going to be successful, and as we have been successful in other peaks, Sherpas have played a crucial role. Without them, we couldn't have climbed. So might as well consider them really as part of this team. And this is very important because I think companies today, today probably it's not the case of Google, but in general, you don't know where a company ends or starts and whoever belongs to that company or doesn't belong to the company, but adds value to the change of value of that company as part of the team. So I just want to stress that we include, for the first time, as formal part of the team, the Sherpas. This is our basecamp. Very quickly we worked up, we build up all the camps 1, 2 and 3. Camp 4 is going to be set up as we go for the summit. And the usual way of doing this is that four or five climbers would climb, set up Camp 4, and on that same day, another four or five climbers would stay on that camp, settled by the other four and go to the summit. So to a certain extent, four of us would prepare the final go for the other four. That's usually the case because you need people to go light. And this is myself and Claudio Lucero, the old master, sort of reviewing the route. This is the route. Base camp is over here. This is also, by the way, the route shared with Mount Everest. Camp one, Camp two, Camp three. And then the Everesters would cross to the south Cole and climb Everest. And we, the Lotso, would go to this place over here, it's called the yellow band, and climb directly up and put Camp 4 here. So all of this is the same route as Mount Everest. And this is the big learning. And I was sharing with some of you this morning the same story. How do you choose who's going to go to the summit? The first thing you're expecting, and it always happened by the end of the expedition. Not everybody is in physical condition to go. Somebody might have an injury, somebody might have a cold, somebody might. I don't know. And so I sent the doctor to check around the climbers and he came back to me and said, rodrigo, everybody is in fine condition. Oops. All right, that's Fine, that's what you want. And then I went to talk to each of them because sometimes people don't want to go. You know, it's funny because when you are back in home preparing the expedition, everybody you know, is sort of alpha male type. They are all strong enough and everybody's going to go to the summit and everybody's sure that the leader is going to select them and so they go everywhere. I'm going to go to the summit after two months. In these expeditions, when you get cold, you get tired, you see other people die. It's stressful. This generosity shows up. It's amazing. Why don't you go? How could I take your place? It's something incredible. So I went and talked to them. And again, to my surprise, everybody wanted to go, me included. I thought I was in physical shape to go and I wanted to go. So there's 11 of us. And so here comes the story. How does the leader decide who's going to go? Easy, Somebody would say it's the matter of choosing whoever is best at that moment in the best condition to go. But who is best? Do I take the experienced climbers, two or three, and just one younger climber who is stronger that would secure the summit? Or should I turn around and do it? Maybe two young climbers and two experienced climbers? Or just take one experienced climbers and three very strong younger climbers. There is one woman on the expedition and I know that if I take her to the summit, that's great marketing issues back in Chile, because you need the money from sponsors. So that would be snow, Chilean woman up one of these peaks. So there's lots of considerations. Who are and which is the best way of doing this. It's not necessarily that you know about it because there's no single answer to that. So what I did, I came back and throw it to the team. It's a very mature team. Very good. Look, we have a problem here. I don't know who the best people are to take to the summit. And I gave the same considerations. Everyone able to go, and it's very difficult to choose out of US 11. So why don't we discuss this and say, well, it's very easy, you decide. Didn't you want to be the boss? Didn't you want to be the leader of this? And we'll follow your decision. That's what they say. I say no, because I'm sure that if we think out of it, we can select. Imagine I'm still in the old paradigm. We can select really the best four or five people. I put it to the table. And it took a long period of time, but suddenly another idea came out and said, look, why don't we take an extra tent up there? And if we take an extra tent. And Ernesto raised the hand. The guy was the green before said, I can take the extra tent, but it's not so heavy. And if we could slip three in each tent rather than two, that makes nine rather than four. We're still short of two. And then somebody raises their hand. You said that the Sherpas are part of this team. Yes. Well, four of them want to go as well. So it's 15 of us that want to go. All right. So these things start to grow up and suddenly out of everybody, and this is very important, there is a great author in the United States who speaks about adaptive problems. And adaptive problems are those problems in which there is no single solution. And the best solution is quote, unquote, hidden within the team. It's not that anybody knows about it. Technical problems are solved by one very capable technical people. But adaptive problems are, you know, as I say, hidden among the group. So we came out. I'm going to make this short. They came out with something totally new that really broke a paradigm in mountaineering. Everybody's going to go, the 15 of us, in two consecutive days. That's what we're going to do to change this. It's pretty uncomfortable to a certain extent because you need to grow through processes and ways you never. You haven't done before. And this I see an issue here in Google. You're a very nobody company. You're doing great, lots of things. But watch it, because it's now how many years? Eight, nine. So you. 12 times. You're going to be an old company and you might start building up paradigms that's going to be difficult to change. And changing those paradigms sometimes requires from you to go through very uncomfortable situations. Just to make a metaphor, we decided that sleeping bags would be pitched on the camps and you would use whatever sleeping bag is there, not personal sleeping bags. But now it's 60 days. So every sleeping bag has a tag on it. And so you're going to go into somebody else's sleeping bag who hasn't showered for 60 days. And that's pretty uncomfortable, believe me. All right, so we managed to do this and started. And I just want to very quickly. I was to lead the first team. I'm here in Camp 3, Kiko's team. The other seven are back in Camp 2 and we're moving in tandem. I'm going to go to Camp 4, they're going to go to Camp 3. We're going to go to the summit. They're going to go Camp 4, meet at Camp 4 and then go down. However, a couple of issues arose. That's the way to Camp 4. And as you see as we cross the yellow band, the guys from M. Everest would go to the south Cole and we would go up. This is a picture taking from Camp 2 to Camp 3. And this is the route up the yellow band. We're going up. This is the morning of the previous day of our summit attempt. We're going to go and camp here. And tomorrow we're going to go to the summit. Everest people are doing a transport of loads to the south cold. So it's lots of people in the route. This is a telephoto of that same situation. All right, so myself, I'm around here with my group of eight and the rest of the people are only Everest Sherpas and climbers taking loads to Camp 4. But I want you to concentrate on this black dot here. That's the evening before we received a report on radio that something or somebody had fallen from a high Czechs. The Czechs are going ahead of us to try and attempt Lotse. Just two of them. So we don't know. And that's the report I get from Kiko. We don't know if it's because we can't see from down there. If it's somebody in a human being or a tent or a bag or a. I don't know. I've realized now this morning as I am climbing here that it is a person which I presume of course dead because he had taken a fall the evening before 700 meters and after that spent the whole night at this is 7,800, that's what, 25,000ft, 30 degrees below his day. However, as I am climbing here, one of the Sherpas is just right behind me and he suddenly touches my elbow and say they call leader in Sherpa is Barasab. So you start calling your bosses here in Google as Barazaps. That's their names. Barasab. So he pats my shoulder. Barasab. Barasab Alaib Alaib. And he's indicating me that this person is alive, actually breathing. And there's silence in the morning so we could hear his breathing. So we ran across and put a system of ropes and get down to him. And certainly it was one of the Czech climbers We knew him because he had been drinking tea with us a couple of weeks before at Base Camp. His name is Pavle and he's nearly dead. Total agony. His totally unconscious, frostbitten arms and legs and everything. But he still has a pulse and he's still breathing. So we decided we're going to move the body up to the root up here in order for our doctor to examine him. And as you can see, the other groups just keep on moving up to Mount Everest. Only few people, ourselves and a few Sherpa stop to help the Czech climber. It took us about an hour and a half to, with ropes and everything to take him back to the route. This is in Spanish, but I'll try to translate. You and Tashin Lacqua, carry on. Thanks. Thanks for all your effort. We have a problem. He took a fall. He survived the night, but he's dying. What shall we do? We're talking to Base Camp. The problem is it's just a dead body. It took us an hour and a half to take him back to the root. The only chance is to put him inside the sleeping bag and take him down. The decision is in among us three, the doctor, Ernesto. And the doctor says we need to take him down all right. That, by the way, risking all our chances of getting to the summit because we're going to use our time and, and resources and physical strength to take him down. Sadly, all the exercise was fruitless because he died anyway. It was bound to happen. So what you do is you put, put them, put him inside sleeping bag, just put him out of the route and just wait. You need. It's going to take four or five days to get instructions from Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, from his family to decide what we're going to do with him. This is now six o' clock in the afternoon. We're very, very late. But even though we decided that first team to turn ourselves around and rush up to Camp 4, which we arrived very late at 6, 6 o' clock in the afternoon rather than at midday, at noon. And we want to do that because you have the whole afternoon to eat, rest and go to the summit at sort of 10 o' clock at night. As we arrived late, we had dinner. We went to bed at 10 o' clock and only slept for a couple of hours and left at midnight. The next picture, this is what we're trying to do. The next picture is from Everest taking to Lotsen, taken two years before. And we'll show you. This is the gully that we need to climb on the last day. That's why lots seldom climb. Because this is a technical climb. This is 8,000 meters. And you're going up here. And what you want is to have a lot of ice on the gully so your crampons can kick the ice very properly. And so we call this the Chilean luck. Chilean luck. It was awful. It was powder snow. So we had to use our auxiliary ropes that we take with us and fix them throughout the climb. And we ran out of rope at about here. And we had to take another decision. And by gain by now the instrument is totally there. We gather and we decide among ourselves. Do we go on or do we go back. It's not a leader's choice. It's a matter of. Of a team. This is at night, using still the fixed rope. Of course, we always have. And this is something very useful. Somebody like Claudio, very mature, knowledgeable, senior climber down at Base camp in a very calm environment to which we could talk and share decisions and processes. All right. And he's down at the radio. This is already early morning. This is our last rope that we're fixing. And from then on we're going up without fixed ropes. Still rope among ourselves, but with no fixed ropes. How far are you from the summit? We're in the gully. No ropes. We're going to go just with our ice axes. Good luck, my friend, Good luck. The next time we talk is probably, if God allows, going to be from the summit. Over and out. Nesto is filming now from the summit of Lotsen. Well done, Rodrigo. That's Claudio from Base Camp. I cannot say the words he's doing. It's this formal meeting, but he's using appropriate words. We're saying from the summit that everything is thanks to him. Of course, that's the Chilean flag. And we thank here everybody, you know, Sherpas, the people, our families, sponsors and everybody. Now this change of paradigm meant another difficult issue. This, that we couldn't celebrate in all our previous expeditions. We will go to the summit and once you get there, you rush down and that's it. Now we couldn't do that because another group is going up, especially me as leader of the expedition. This is back at Camp 4. This is Ernesto and he's back to the camera. Myself. And that's Kiko and Misael from the other group. And so we're sharing information and everything. So tense was I that rather than going back to camp Trios plan I'd stay to Camp 4. Just. Just didn't go down because I wanted to be as near the action as I could. As they went up, they were in much better shape than we were because they had arrived in proper time at Camp 4. So they had proper dinner rest and actually they left before us at 10 o' clock at night. This is the only woman in our expeditions called Maria Paz Ibarra, using her oxygen to the summit. As I say, they were in better timing, but in ways worst climate. Now wind is starting to build up. There's only a three day window of good weather in the whole year to climb these peaks. That happens on May 15th, more or less. So if you lose that window, you lose the mountain, basically. And so the window is closing. That's why you see the flakes of snow with the wind. Just to let you know, this is a close up zoom telephoto taken from Everest the year before when we were preparing this expedition. The summit is actually a nice mushroom. So you don't climb to the actual tip of the mountain because that mushroom could just break and fall down and you would fall 3,000 meters into Tibet. All right, so you step on this rock ledge here, only about 4 or 5 meters from the summit. However, these guys are so crazy that when they stood there, they tied a rope around one of them called Gabriel. And he crawled all the way to the summit and extended his hand and touched the tip of the peak. That's because in Chile if we didn't do that, they would go back and. No, no, you didn't read the summit. It's only two minutes. No, no, no, no. You know, we know our fellow Chilean, so we needed to do that. And so he touched the very tip of the summit. So at least one of us really did reach the the summit. That's the rock ledge. This is a picture of Everest taken from Lotse. And you can see it's great weather, but lots of wind and that wind builds up and then you cannot climb. This was Everest. People from Everest were late. We climbed the peak of Lotse. They didn't climb Everest and they went to Everest on the next few days. It's been the worst Everest season, apart from the one in 1996. Last one, it was awful because they went anyway. Although the window of good weather has passed by. This is last picture taken from the summit looking down towards the galley. These are the crampons of Kiko. And you see the people going down. We climbed down to Camp 4. We met Camp 3, Camp 2. Four days later we're back safe at the base camp. This is the whole team. As I Say, this is a true summit picture. Just want to share with you again, the Sherpas are within the team. We're not excluding them. They're part of the team. This is their Silda Pertemba. I've been friend of his for 15 years. And of course, the happiest man is Claudio, who didn't go to the summit, but all of us are to a certain extent, his students. So that's it. That's. I want to share with you. Thank you very much for your time.

I think we'll take questions for a couple minutes and also Rodrigo will stay around afterwards if you have any personal questions, but any questions from the group for Rodrigo about this experience or building the teams for this or what he's learned over time.

So I've read a lot of books about mountaineering, and one of the common themes, especially in Western climbers, is the ego and summit fever. Can you speak to that?

Well, the thing is, what is happening nowadays, especially on Mount Everest, not lots of it on Mount Everest, is that you're having what is called the commercial expeditions in which people would sign up. They're not climbers in terms of being climbers in an historical way. They've been climbers since they were 17. It's just, I don't know, a CEO of a big company, good money, and they want to leave the experience of being in high altitude peak. And on the other hand, companies can provide you with that service. They charge you maybe $80,000 or $90,000 for a trip, and they will provide everything. And so if you've paid that, you've taken two months out of whatever else you're doing, you really want to go to the summit. And it takes some time to learn that the courage to turn around maybe 300 meters from the summit when you see bad weather coming in. Because these people are not, sorry to say this proper mountaineering said of the whole thing. They would push and push and push to go to the summit. That's what the summit fever is all about. And it's difficult for a provider of the service. You know, if somebody had paid you 80,000 or $90,000 to say, no, we're not going because of the bad way. You know, it's a tricky way of doing this. But that's happening mainly on Mount Everest, not on the other peaks on the Himalayas. And that is carrying. And as I say, this season was very bad on Mount Everest because the window of good weather came earlier than everybody expected on the 10th. And so they were not ready and they pushed the summit anyways, because they need to provide. The contract specifies we are going to give you a reasonable chance of attempting the summit. That's what you're buying. And so you need to provide for that. And actually, you shouldn't have left Base Camp with that kind of weather, but that's how you do it. Yeah.

Your perspective has been profound and it's great for you to literally be reflecting on this. I'd love to hear a little bit more, more about your internal dialogue, sort of the sports psychology behind it, because you are a collective, but you're also the individual. And I'd love to hear what's motivating you through those 60 days. Just what are you. What's that internal dialogue like?

If you allow me, I want to do a reflection on that because I've been thinking of that. I thought I had gone through a next level when I stopped battling for my personal desire of going to the summit, and especially because I had a chance to be successful as a leader. People would say to you, well, that's great. You allow somebody else to go, but you as a leader also receive some kind of recognition as well. Always remember the first expedition on Mount Everest. The two guys that received the knighthood from Queen Elizabeth were Edmund Hillary, who reached the summit, and the leader of the expeditions, John Hunt. And so to a certain extent, when I rid myself of the summit desire, I could counterbalance that by being the leader and still had that personal ego trip of. And for that matter, you need to make these decisions and you need to work. I was able, and this is. I'm very happy of that I was able to get rid of that. And saying that the leadership of the expedition, I'm the organizer, the manager in the sense that, you know, provide, but the leader who's taking the real decisions is the team itself. And I got rid of that. Once you get rid of that egos or that lack of humility, you really can do some incredible achievements. But it's taking 15 years to go through that process, really taking a long time.

So was the word can't in your vocabulary?

Well, no, the word can't is in terms of attempt. There's nothing you can't attempt. Not that you're going to be able to. We just to. We are going to. Didn't show you in the trip. But we're going to the western side of the peninsula of Antarctica where the breakup of the ice is heavily happening. It's the most critical place in the world where ice is melting and we're going to Go with kayaks. It's totally nuts, but we're attempting it. You know, the leader of the expedition is an American called John Master out of New York. His more crazy than I am, but we're going to try it. Keeping all the conceptions and the attitudes and trying not to run risks further than you can. So if it doesn't happen, bad luck. But it's nothing that you cannot attempt different of you cannot do.

I would like to hear a little bit more about the. When you choose a team, the technical skills are a little bit, I would say easier to identify. But how about the social part of it? How do you actually know that a team member is going to be fitting with the rest of the team and how do you make those decisions?

You're absolutely right. You can measure technical capabilities for a climber. Well, you can do it here. For a climber, you can measure how fast it does a knot or. Or how gracefully he climbs. But you don't know his humor. The only way we do it is to go on previous trips together. You won't take. This is a very mature team in terms of team development. So all these climbers have been with me throughout the years. Two day trips, five day trips, two weeks, one month. And gradually in more extreme conditions and. And throughout that process, you learn to learn about yourself and about the others. And it's not that you. The guy who is not able, you're not going to take him. It's only that you learn about him and about yourself. And so you're not going to push the weaknesses you have. You're going to know them and you're going to work around those weaknesses. The only thing is, as a team, you need not to have any weakness or an individual may have it, but as a team you don't. So if this guy is very good technically, but not on personal skills, he's not that good. Then you put somebody who. So as a team, you have all the. And the only way of doing that is working with them. We haven't been able to devise some kind of test that you can try on them before, but it's a very, very good question.

Hi.

What gives you the courage or continues to give you courage to take such big risks? I don't think it's courage the word. I think we are fascinating about the challenge of how to solve it. Evan was telling us why haven't we climbed Kanjanjunga, which is the third highest? When we went to Lotse, we went because I'm not being unhumble. Here we knew that we had a great chance to come climate in the usual way of four or five. We were doing it to celebrate Claudio Lucero. And that's why all of these people and the challenge was taking this huge group, not a light, you know, a whole celebration. But I don't want to go to Kanjanjunga because it's not challenging in the sense of thinking we know what to do, we know who Sherpa to call, we know what to train, we know what food to take. There's nothing to solve going to Kanjanjunga, nothing new going to Antarctica on kayaks. Everything is new going to Antarctica. As you saw the sleds, how going to build the sleds, how the food, how going to take this food. That's what really motivates me, discovering a way of doing these things, especially that haven't been done before. How can you do them? How can you attempt them? But it's not having or not having courage. On the the contrary, if you think about my history as a mountaineer, probably I've attempted, I don't know this, but more or less 400, 450 mountains, climbed 100 out of them. The other turn around, turn around, turn around. So chicken out most of the times. I'm alive, though.

Rodrigo, thank you so very much for your time with us today.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Rodrigo will stay up here to answer some questions. I'd like to thank Claire Carlson for helping to put this together and the AV team. And if you're interested in this series, you can sign up what is it? Leading Google on mailman. And you'll get the notices about these sessions. So thank you all very much for being here.