Kenton Cool: Lessons in Leadership From a 16-Time Everest Summiteer

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It's hard enough reaching the summit of Mount Everest one time. Today's guest has reached the summit 16 times. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Kenton Kuhl. Kenton is one of the world's leading high-altitude climbers and avid adventurers. In addition to Mount Everest, He's completed the Seven Summits, which are the highest mountains on each of the seven traditional continents. Kenton also works with corporate clients on leadership and team performance. In today's conversation, we explore the world of high-altitude climbing and how we can apply the principles of what it takes to stand on the top of the world to what you do in your work and in your daily life. So let's get started with Kenton Christensen.

Cool.

I want to go back to 22-year-old Kenton Cool. You're climbing a cliff face in North Wales. So what happened back then?

Well, it was all a bit of a blur. I didn't really want to be there. It was one of those— in the UK we say a bit of a meh day. It was drizzly, it was a bit overcast, my stoke wasn't massively high to go climbing, but there was a certain amount of peer pressure and some friends were going into the slate quarries in North Wales, and the slate normally drives really quickly, but it's a very specific form of climbing. And I went there rather begrudgingly, 29th of June, 1996. Not as— it's kind of ingrained on my memory quite well. And a friend of mine got on a relatively hard route. If there's climbers listening, it was given a UK grade of E5, about 5.12 for any American climbers out there. And Richard started climbing next door, so I said, okay, I'll jump on this route next door. And my heart wasn't really in it. It's also, you know, E5. I got on it, I didn't get very far, and I broke a hold. So literally the hold I was clinging to broke off from the cliff face. Uh, I didn't have any protection in, it was relatively easy climbing to that stage. I hit the floor and the world as I knew it essentially changed overnight. Um, uh, I suffered a bilateral calcaneum fracture, which means I essentially shattered both my heel bones. So the bone that sticks out from the back of your— if you think of the skeleton foot, the bone that sits out the back The prognosis was super bad. I think realistically, looking back on it, I probably spun into depression, uh, because everything I knew at the time was at least related to climbing. You know, my social life, my community, my, you know, what I did was all climbing focused, and it looked like that was going to be taken away from me. That was pretty crushing. It really was.

That was almost 30 years ago. What would your 50-year-old self say to that 22-year-old, given all the wisdom that you've gained over the past 28 years? How do you reflect back on that?

I think the really big thing is, is you are your own person and peer pressure can sometimes be a positive thing. It can make you elevate your performance beyond what you think is possible. At the same time, you know, we need to understand what is positive and what is negative peer pressure. And there was no peer pressure that day. Nobody was telling me that I should do this or should do that. What I should have done is just listened to my inner voice. And gone to the cafe and drunk coffee or eaten croissants or gone to the pub, you know, or whatever, or go for a run, you know, whatever it may have been, rather than go half-heartedly into something which actually has serious consequences. Because I think anything that we do, we should do it to the very best of our ability, whether it's personal or professional decision-making. If we're in, we're in. And climbing is one of those things. And certainly for me at the time, an E5 climb, I didn't get up to the hard bit. I needed to have been in and focused. And what I did, I listened to external forces and I allowed those to cloud my decision-making. And if there's anything I've learned in my career since is your decision-making, and you know, at times of critical moments, needs to be clear.. And it doesn't need to be influenced by anybody other than yourself. Yes, collect all the information from those around you, assimilate it, you know, collect as much as you can, but ultimately it's your decision. And if you're not in, you're not in. It's as simple as that. And that day back in 1996, I shouldn't have been in. So my learning is you're in or you're out. There's no in between.

As you're guiding people up Everest or to other places around the world. How do you make that decision? A go/no-go decision? How do you listen to what the body's telling me? Like, man, I'm really tired, or is it just my mind is telling me my body's tired, but my body's got a lot more fire in it if I could just get the mind working? How do you think about the tension between the body giving out or the mind giving out? No-go decisions.

The Everest go/no-go is predominantly weather and condition based. It's not necessarily based on how we're, physically feeling unless we are sort of sick. And when I say sick, you know, we've got a gastric or bacterial gut infection or something like that, because that can be utterly debilitating. It can crush you. But yeah, I think as you said then, you know, the American ultra athlete David Goggins, I don't know if you come across him, or maybe your audience has come across him. He's a huge advocate that we only touch upon maximum 40% of what we have physically in our tank. And Everest is exactly the same. So when, when we say we're tired, if we can unlock the potential within us, we're not even halfway there. So the key thing on Everest is that go/no-go is pretty much information-based, predominantly the weather. If you look back historically on the disasters on Everest, especially '96, the learnings that have come from that, one of the biggest things is information technology, the weather. And if the weather's looking good, if the conditions are looking good, then that will influence our go/no-go. And the other really important thing is Everest is— this is going to sound really ridiculous— Everest is a cliché term, bit of a walk in the park until the last day. And that's not dumbing down everything up to Camp 4, which is 8,000 meters. Everything up to that point is relatively in hand. You know, it feels quite comfortable. I'm not worried as a professional mountain guide. We've got a great team around us. Then all of a sudden we have to make that final go/no-go. It's Yeah, it's a little bit like, you know, Michael Collins, who was in the lunar orbiter when he had to make the decision, you know, the go/no-go when they separated and Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin go down. These are— there's constant decisions along the way. Go/no-go, go/no-go. You can eject almost at any time. You can turn around and come back. On Everest, the final go/no-go is at 8,000 meters. And as soon as we make that decision, we are essentially pretty heavily committed logistically, mentally, physically to a certain extent. And everything from that point forward is logic, is logical decision making. And we talked earlier about intuition, and certainly as a mountain guide, sometimes just in the pit of your stomach, you get this feeling that something's not quite right. The Exception to that, I believe, is Everest, because when you get to Everest, when you start getting high on summit day, the sun starts to come up, you know, you're 8,500 meters above sea level. And let's put that into context. That's pretty much where airliners fly, and that's where we're trying to operate. And I'm trying to work and look after my team and also the individual client that has paid me to successfully guide him or her up. And let's not forget back down. That mountain, all those decisions after that, no, go, no-go is logic. And the only things I'm really worried about, I call it binary thinking. And I talk about it a lot to organizations. When you have time-critical decisions that you're trying to make, you need to simplify everything. You've got to get rid of the noise. You've got to get rid of the clutter. I'm not concerned about my tax return. I'm not even concerned about my two young children that live with me here in the Cotswolds or my beautiful wife. I'm concerned about, I think it's five things. It's physical, mental state of the team. That's the Sherpa team, the client, and also myself. The time of day— time is super critical. You know, we have a deadline, we call it turnaround time. I think it could be called a deadline of 1 o'clock, regardless where we are, we're turning around. How much oxygen we have in our supplementary tanks of oxygen that we use, the underfoot conditions, and then the overhead conditions, i.e., the weather. They are the only things I am concerned about. Because even with the supplementary oxygen on Everest, you're starving your brain of oxygen. And by doing so, one of the first things that's affected is, is rational thought process, our ability to make decisions. The irony never fails to amuse me. Arguably one of the most dangerous work environments in the world. There is no rescue. You know, you are totally responsible for the consequences of your actions. You can't get a helicopter up there to whisk you off the side of the mountain. So everything needs to be pinpoint accurate. And at the same time, I can't think properly. I literally cannot think properly. And that's where binary thinking comes into its own. Strip away everything apart from the things that hold relevance to the decision-making in the moment. And those things are all logic. There's no room for emotion.

But then we've got this thing called summit fever. Let's go back to 1996. So I think a lot of people are familiar with it from Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air. We had a guide, and this was at the early, early days of guiding on Mount Everest, and they were taking a client. This was the client's second opportunity to get to the summit. They were so close. I gotta get this guy to the top. And I mean, I would imagine emotion came into that perhaps. I mean, obviously you would know, not me, but how do you think about that? And this is not placing blame or anything, but just looking back on that situation, how do you think about decision-making, summit fever, people have paid you money to get them to the top. I want to go to the top, even if you think maybe they shouldn't. Although I know you, I think you may have 100% success rate, I thank God, getting people to the summit. How do you think about that?

Uh, we have learned from the mistakes of in the past, uh, '96 obviously being something which was seared into the memory, I suppose, of guides and climbing outfits that came afterwards. But for me, the key thing is communication and setting out what the goal is. From the very first moment that I meet my clients on Everest, you know, we sit down and I generally ask the same question, you know, what is it that you're looking for from this relationship? And the answer is almost always the same. Well, you're arguably the most experienced Everest leader guide there's ever been. I want you to take me to the top of Everest. But actually what that individual wants me to do is bring them back through the front door. And that's my job. And if along the way we have a fantastic time and lots of fun and we climb mountains, hopefully Everest, and we come back as friends with our 10 fingers and 10 toes, then that's a success. But it doesn't matter if we get up and down Everest really, because my contract, for want of a better word, is to bring that individual back to their families, back through the door. Because I think it was Ed Viesturs, the American climber, once said, getting to the top is optional, but getting back down is mandatory. In addition, I spend a lot of time working with my clients before we even think about going to Everest. I've engaged for maybe over 2, 3 years, and we built up a relationship, a trust relationship, whereby if we have to make a tough decision, then we all know why. And it's not second-guessing, you know, somebody's not knocking on my door with a lawsuit saying, well, you said you'd get me to the top of Everest. We've gone past that. Now we've got to this stage whereby— and this is the difficulty, because my understanding is that Rob Hall also had a very good relationship with Doug Hanson, which is why he was so keen to get into the top. So you know what exactly happened that day, we're never fully going to find out. But by building these relationships, I make it mandatory that I get to be introduced to the boyfriend, the girlfriend, the wife, the husband, whoever it may be. I know the families. And I've made a promise to the family that I'll bring the individual home. And I've made a promise to my own family that I will be here, that Daddy will be here, you know, making out like 25th of May, I will come through the front door, you know, with bunch of flowers for my wife and prayer flags or whatever trinkets or presents I bought back from Nepal for the children. And we have a week or so off together as a family before I get back into work. I never want to lose that. And although, you know, we talk about binary thinking and emotions got no place, I think if your logic decisions are done in such a way whereby you know that you've got to come through the front door. That is the non-negotiable in everything that you do. So the decisions that you're making are based upon that goal, not necessarily based upon getting to the summit. And by doing so, that turnaround decision, if you have to make it, is going to be that much easier because it's a difficult decision. If you hit the 'we're go' button, and you get high on the mountain and then you've got to turn the client around or the team around to mentally regroup after that, because chances are you're going to come all the way back down the mountain. You've got to regroup, you know, restructure, get logistics back in place and go again. Very few people are capable of going again, which means that when you do go and you hit the go button, the execution needs to be pretty much seamless. Because most people won't have a second bite at the cherry.

So communication, this binary thinking, taking the emotion out of it. Ed Viester's quote, getting to the top is optional, getting back to the bottom is mandatory.

And it's setting the goal. All parties, all stakeholders need to know what the end goal is because if there's confusion, what, you know, and what you're trying to head for, you know, either with a client, with the Sherpa team, or, you know, let's face it, you know, it doesn't matter what service industry or what you're doing in terms of profession. If you're bringing teams together, the high-performing teams, the team ultimately needs to know what the end goal is. Individuals might be working on different aspects of that project, but they need to be attuned to what the end goal is. And if that's not communicated, then you're going to get a load of world-class individuals just heading off in different directions and it becomes a bit of a disaster zone. And Everest is no different. You've got to set the goal, communicate that goal, and keep readdressing it because that goal may shift. Over time. I mean, in terms of coming back through the front door, that, you know, that never shifts. But, you know, things do change a little bit as we meander along the journey. You know, little micro projects might come up, or opportunities that you're not expecting might come up. So you might need to pivot, but that end goal needs to be communicated, and everybody ultimately needs to be heading in that general direction.

I think we all have our own Everest in our life. For you, it's figuratively, literally Mount Everest. The highest mountain in the world. Other people, it might not be a mountain. In my case, it's not Everest, it's Mount Rainier, which I've climbed a few times. It's absolutely gorgeous. So the first time I climbed it was in 2004, and this ties in with what you were just talking about. So my goal going into that climb was, it's the summit, baby. Okay? I wanna get to the top. I'm gonna get there. I'm gonna hold the ice ax over my head. I conquered this baby. So I get to the true summit. Get back. I'm standing on the lip again, and I will never forget this. I'm looking down and I was absolutely dead tired. And I said, they're gonna have to call a helicopter. There's no way I'm gonna be able to make it back down from here. I am so tired. And of course, no helicopter's coming to pick me up. So I found a way. I got to the bottom. Well, this was a quick trip, so it was just basically an up and a down. And no time to enjoy the scenery. And so I said to myself, look, if I'm ever going to do this again, it's not going to be about the summit. It's going to be about the experience. And so I went 4 years later for the next trip. I did a different route, which was on another side of the mountain, much less traveled, and it was a 4-day trip instead of just a 1-night up and down. And my whole goal was not to get to the summit. It was simply to absolutely enjoy every step of the way, to enjoy the camaraderie of the team, the guides, to learn as much as I can, just to absorb the whole environment and the atmosphere. And then I also told myself, I said, if I do make it to the top, I'm not gonna stand up there with the ice ax over my head. Instead, I'm gonna take a knee out of respect and appreciation for just being in a position to be able to even do this and be out and have this kind of health to be able to do this. And so, Every trip that I've done since then, instead of raising the axe, if I get to the top, I literally just take a knee. Summit is just icing on the cake, but if we can appreciate every step along the way, that's the true beauty of it.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, and I love that taking a knee rather than sort of the celebration. You mentioned in there, you know, conquering was the, the whole thing. You're going to conquer Mount Rainier. I think it was, I think it's attributed to Edmund Hillary We never conquer the mountain, you know, we merely conquer ourselves. And I think that is very true. And if we keep things into perspective that, you know, long after we are gone, that those mountains are still gonna be there, the roots are still gonna be there regardless whether we are or not. And yes, it's a cliché, but it is about the journey and the destination is almost arbitrary because once you achieve the goal, what next? And if you are super goal-oriented, then that bar gets raised higher and higher and higher and higher and higher. And at some stage, you're going to fail to reach the goal. And if you are simply goal-focused and you fail to reach it, well, then what happens? Now, then the wheels really fall off because then you've not enjoyed the journey. Now, perhaps you made enemies along the way. Yeah, you consider it a failure rather than a stepping stone. And you've got very little to show for it. Yes, I realize that people, you know, buy into my services with the objective of trying to get to the top. But as you said, it's the icing on top of the cake. What I like to try to deliver is, you know, this amazing time, this amazing adventure. And we travel around the world before we get to Everest. We climb in South America, climb in a European Alps, you know, maybe we climb in other parts of the Himalayas, be it Pakistan or India. You know, I like to think that is all part of the journey. And ultimately the destination is coming through the front door. And if you can do that and finish as friends, you can't help but have a good time. There's something that's brought you together, and it doesn't matter if it is Everest or if it is, you know, a metaphorical Everest or a work project. You have something in common before you get there. And if you can enjoy what you're doing with your work colleagues, with your friends— so say you're doing a— we, you know, we have park runs in the UK, we have Couch to 5Ks, and it's a way that people try to get fit. Well, if you do that with a cohort of individuals and you're all striving, trying to do the same thing, and you're there Saturday morning in the wind or the rain or whatever it is, and you're, you're trying to do your couch to 5K, you're gonna have a good time regardless. And that's winning right there. And that's what life's all about. Because if people hadn't noticed, you know, we only get one shot at this wonderful thing called life. And yeah, we're gonna make mistakes along the way, but ultimately we're here to have fun. And if we're not having fun, well, we're probably gonna look back on our deathbeds and go, you know what, perhaps I was a little bit too goal-focused.

I know you're really close to the people of Nepal, and I know your main Sherpa partner you are super close to. So tell me about the relationship between you and your, your Sherpa partner.

Dorje Gelgen Sherpa. And Dorje, I first came across, I think the first photographic evidence that we've got of Dorje and I together is 2007, and he's in the background of my summit photograph on Everest. It wasn't until a couple of years later that we actually started working together, and he's become my go-to. Uh, we've summited K2 together. We've summited Cho Oyu and Manaslu. And then we summited Everest, I don't know, 12, 13 times together, something like that. He's actually got 21 summits of Everest now to my paltry 16. He's fantastic. He's unbelievable. I mean, I always feel really embarrassed when people say, wow, you climbed Everest all these times. You take all these amazing people up and down Everest and you, you know, you have phenomenal success rate. It's not me. Is Dorje and his team. That's what makes it possible. I will be forever internally grateful for everything he's done for me.

Let's go back 10 years. So climbing mountains, you have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, and you were taking part in what's called the Triple Crown of Everest. So tell me what the Triple Crown is and then tell me about the lowest of lows.

And I think Dorje had a role Oh, he had a massive role in that. Yeah. So the, the Triple Crown, it didn't really exist. It was something which I kind of, for want of a better word, invented. I'd always in the back of my mind had this idea that it might be fun to link up the 3 mountains that make up the Everest, what's known as the Everest horseshoe. So it's Mount Nuptse, Mount Lhotse, and Everest herself. So it's the 19th highest, the 4th highest, and the highest mountain. And they bound this beautiful valley called the Western Khumbu. Each mountain's got its own nuances and it's beautiful. Um, and the opportunity came about I might be able to climb all three, and this is what I did. I left to try to climb Nuptse, and I did this without Dorje because Dorje was busy putting logistics in place on Everest for me. I climbed Nuptse up and down without oxygen with an amazing Spaniard guy from Catalonia, actually, a little specific about that. Alex Tritton, uh, who's become a very big name over in Spain. So I climbed Nuptse with Alex, then Dorje, bless him, came around the Western Couloir and met up with me because I was exhausted and helped me back to Camp 2 on Everest. So we didn't return to base camp. I then climbed Everest over the next 2 or 3 days, and we dropped down, and we were about to climb the last mountain of Lhotse, and we had the high camp, and we got involved with trying to look after a Taiwanese man who had got into trouble through high altitude cerebral and high altitude pulmonary edema. So acute mountain sickness, swelling of the brain, fluid on the lungs. And as the day became evening, became night, it became very apparent that Mr. Lee, the Taiwanese man, wasn't in a good shape. He'd been up there for 3 or 4 days. His team weren't totally transparent with the situation that everybody was in. Otherwise, I think we could have got him out. Sooner. And Dorje is Buddhist, you know, they don't really dig death. Well, they do, but, and, but there's no need for us both to be involved. So I asked Dorje to leave the tent where I was with Mr. Lee. Uh, there wasn't really room in there anyway. Mr. Lee was in and out of consciousness. Um, we were injecting him with dexamethasone, like a steroid-based drug, uh, which is used for, um, acute mountain sickness. And I needed Dorje fit and strong because I didn't know what was going to transpire through the night. So there's no point both of us being up. So anyway, so I packed Dorje off to his tent and then I spent the night with Mr. Lee trying to keep him alive and ultimately failed. And he died in my arms in the early hours of the morning. And it deeply, deeply affected me. I knew death hovers around mountains. I knew what we do in the big mountains has an inherent danger, but to be so close to it, to literally have it, um, in your lap is a big shock, big wake-up call to the fragility that is life, you know, to what we do. And I was ready to throw it all in. I was on the radio to my logistical provider asking me, you know, what I wanted to do. And I said, oh, you know, I'm just gonna come down. This is not for me what climbing is about. It's meant to be a joyous celebration, not necessarily. And I was very I thought Mr. Lee had been hung out to dry a little bit by his own logistical team. And I was quite bitter about that. And then there was a crunch, crunch, crunch outside the tent. This is quite early in the morning and the zipper went and in comes this big smiley face and it's Georgie. And Georgie looks at me, he looks at Mr. Lee, and Mr. Lee was quite a big dude. And it's like seeing the devastation, there's vomit in the tent and there's like, it's just, it's horrible. And, He's like, oh, KC, everybody calls me KC. He goes, oh, KC, you know, what do you want to do? I'm like, Dorje, you know, this is, this is, this is really shit. You know, I don't think I can go on. I think we should just go down and, you know, it's not right. And he looks at Mr. Lee, he looks at me and looks at Mr. Lee and goes, no, Kenton die. You know, die is Nepalese slang for brother, you know, big brother. Hey, Kenton die. You know, he's dead. Nothing we can do is gonna bring him back to life. So maybe we should just climb. Maybe we should climb for him. And he looks at me and he goes, and also I've always wanted to climb Lhotse. Never climbed it. Yeah, let's climb it together today. You and me, come on. And it's just what I needed. I, it really was. Because I think if I turned my back on that situation and come back down, um, I think it would've been very hard to get back into the saddle, so to speak. Um, I just took a long time. In fact, I still don't think I'm over it. And it was a really cool thing to then regroup, work out what we needed to do in the moment, and then climb Lhotse. And we climbed it really fast. Uh, we were using supplementary oxygen. And as I say, Dorje's a, he's a legend, he's a hero. He's always like 30, 40, 50 meters in front of me. He's like the carrot. And like, Dorje, just slow down, slow down. He's like, no, come on, come on, move, move. We need to move. We move. And we got to the summit of Lhotse and it's an amazing summit and the view of Everest is amazing, but we couldn't see it because the clouds had rolled in and they started to snow and we ended up having to descend in a bit of a storm. And I just remember getting back down to base camp and not quite being able to assimilate what had just happened climbing the three peaks, let alone work out the whole Mr. Lee thing, which as I said, I still struggle with today. But the only reason why the Triple Crown ever got done was, was because of Georgie and his infectious energy and enthusiasm for life. And it's such a telling thing. Now, when he said, you know, Kenton, he's dead, there's nothing we can do. There's a finality to that. There's no negotiation with that. And I think it takes a special human being like Georgie to then be able to communicate that in a passionate way whereby when he's dead, let's get on with what the goal was, what the vision is. And we can mourn about that afterwards. But right now, it has no impact on what we want to do. And I know that sounds quite callous. But it's so true. And I think we can overlay that anecdotal story on so much, you know, when we get No matter what it is, we get hiccups in whatever it is that we're doing, or something goes wrong. Yeah, it happened. Learn from it. Yes, but move on. Don't necessarily dwell on the situation. And I was about to dive into a pit of despair, self-pity. It wasn't me that died. You know, self-pity for myself. And it took somebody as astute as Georgie His English is pretty damn good, but it's not his first language. But we're so attuned with one another, he knew exactly what he needed to do to pick me up and to get me back out. I needed to kick up the backside, and he did exactly that. And then subsequently, Mr. Lee's family got in contact with me, and it was like this lovely interaction that we had. And ultimately, his body got brought back down by a team of Sherpas. I wasn't involved with that. His own logistical team, I think, sorted that in the But it was a double-edged sword. On one hand, you've got this amazing sense of achievement, and there's a bit selfish, um, Triple Crown's never been repeated in the manner that I did it, despite numerous attempts. At the same time, I can't think of it without a tinge of sadness for somebody that ultimately perhaps shouldn't have died in the mountains. Um, anyway, I hope Mr. Lee found some peace and I'm glad to have held his hand, I suppose, while he passed away.

Well, I think there's so many important lessons in there, and one of which is that he didn't die alone and that you were there for his final moments. And the last thing he knew, let's assume he had some consciousness at the end there, that he knew that there was someone there who cared about him. So I think the fact that you gave up your time and spent your time with him in those final moments, I'm sure gave him great peace. And so I'm sure that was some great, great solace to him and to his family to know that he didn't die alone.

Yeah, well, I appreciate those words. And yeah, I think you're probably right. I mean, he did regain consciousness momentarily during the night. And yeah, I think if it was role reversal, God forbid, it would be nice to know that somebody is there for you.

I want to dig into your thinking a little bit more here too. So I was talking to one of my colleagues this morning, Greg, and he was wondering about like the inner dialogue. So when you're in these precarious situations, when you're really tired, what are you saying to yourself? Do you have any mantras that you repeat to yourself?

But I do have a mantra, and that mantra is that it, whatever it is, will always end. Because you and I, Steve, and probably most of our listeners, we're in this lovely situation whereby we can pick and choose what we do to a certain extent. And we are in control. But certainly when in climbing, or perhaps you're training, or even running a marathon or whatever it is, the pain that you are enduring in the moment, or the uncomfortableness, or the cold, or the heat, or whatever it may be, at some stage, it's going to end.. And I constantly repeat that to myself. It will end. And by knowing that, it makes the uncomfortable event that you're doing, the pain, the physical pain, or the cold, or the, and whatever's making it uncomfortable, it makes it tolerable. Because if you think about, God, yeah, this really hurts. You're running a marathon, it really sucks in there, or you are on the ergo or on the bike, or you're doing pull-ups or whatever, and it's really hurting. Just think what it's gonna feel like when you stop. It's gonna feel like amazing cuz that pain's gonna ebb away and you're gonna feel a million dollars. And it's the same on Everest or climbing mountains. It could be day after day after day where the longer you are uncomfortable for, the more pleasurable the stop is. And that's my mantra. It will always end, whether it's in an hour, a day, a week, a month, whatever, it's gonna end. I at least think that's very powerful.

So do you sometimes say to yourself, man, this pain feels good?

Yeah. I think if you can embrace the suck and make the suck somehow enjoyable, or you can, you know, push your middle finger or in this country, it'd be, you know, your two fingers up at the suck and almost turn it, roll reverse it. Then all of a sudden it becomes much, much more bearable and much more enjoyable. You almost turn it on its head. Now, of course, there's days that you go out there and it just feels bad. Cause everybody says to me, you must have the best job in the world. You're a professional mountaineer. A professional mountain guide, you're a ski guide, you're doing all these amazing things. God, you know, you know, some days you do go out there and you're just not firing on all four cylinders. And, you know, sometimes you can say, well, actually, I'm not into it. You can turn around. This is how we started this conversation earlier. But sometimes, you know, you're committed and you just got to go through it. And, you know, you're going through the motions a little bit and you think, God, you know, this is going to be a really long day, or my knee's hurting, or like, you know, I'm physically tired. And if you can invert that, and if you can almost play a game with your mind, and I'm not very good at articulating this, but I can almost feel myself playing the game. You kind of turn it on its head and you, you make the suck, you're almost teasing it. You're, you're tickling it in a way. You're, you're playing with it and you're okay, well, you can't actually hurt me. You think you can, but it's okay because, you know, you, the sock that is, you're gonna leave soon. You know, you might leave this evening or tomorrow morning or in a couple of hours, and then who's the champion? Well, it's not you anymore, is it? Yeah. And I, I play these silly little games with myself, and by turning something unpleasant into something beautiful, into something positive, is immense. And You know, you can be walking up the Western Couloir. One of the things that people don't realize on Everest, it gets really damn hot. The sun comes up, you're on top of the icefall now, and you've got like 3 or 4 hours to get to Camp 2 on Everest, and it becomes like the world's biggest reflector. There's no shade, there's no trees there, there's no tentage. It's like 1,000 degrees centigrade or so it feels, and the inside of your nose and your mouth being sunburnt, and it's awful. But just look where you are. You're in the Western Couloir of Everest. Very few people ever tread there. So just look around, just take it in for a moment. And there's that journey destination thing once again. If you're just fixated on getting into the top of Everest, you're gonna miss the delights of the Western Couloir. You're gonna totally step over the beauty of the icefall, the colors and the crystals as they catch the light bursting on the morning, or seeing your breath crystallize as you leave base camp and you're burning the juniper on the puja water and all of these little new senses, which makes the suck bearable. I can only imagine— well, I can't really imagine what it must feel like for somebody that's so goal-focused on Everest, because you're walking up the Western Coupé and honestly, Steve, it's like 40, 50 degrees. It's hideous. And if all you can do is look up at the top going, God, I want to be there, I need to be there, whereas just attuned to the crunch of your crampons on. Now listen to the conversation behind you, you know, to see the butterfly that's been caught on the updraft and the poor thing's not going to survive the night, and just taking the beauty for what it is. Because I'm lucky, I go back and see the Western Coombe year after year after year, but most people don't. And how many times have we said, God, I wish I just took an extra moment just to take XYZ in, you know, I wish I had an extra day that I could just really embrace what it was that we did. Well, hey, on expeditions, you've got almost as much time as you want. And for those that don't, just take a moment out to step off the path. It's like, I remember somebody said when I was getting married, going off on a little tangent, Steve, I was getting married and somebody told me, if you do nothing throughout the day, just take a moment to step away from what's going on. And view it from the sidelines and use that as your memory of the day. Because everything else is just, it's going at a million miles an hour. And I think that's true of almost everything we do. Take that step out, take that moment to focus on the moment because we're all so, what next? Okay, we've done that, what next? But what about the now? Because the now is where we are, you know, that's where we are engaged. Now I'm not engaged in tomorrow yet. That's tomorrow. I was engaged with yesterday, but right now I'm engaged with now. I'm talking to you. So, you know, I'm 100% engaged in this and it's the same on Everest. It's the same. Enjoy the beauty, enjoy the moment. And by doing so, the suck, it kind of evaporates.

So there's a quote here that I'm gonna mangle and it's something to the effect of one climbs, one sees, one's been to the top, and when you're at the top, you see things that people down below can't see. And then once you go back down, you're able to conduct yourself at the lower levels based on what you've seen up high. So that's the gist of it. And you've been to the top of the world 16 times and counting, probably going to be some more before you're done. As you think about standing on the roof of the world, has that changed how you conduct yourself at sea level?

I, I think the simple answer is yes, but it's very hard to bring back what we learn, uh, because I think we get bombarded. If we use sea level as a metaphor for everyday life, and if we use, uh, standing on the roof of the world, you know, as a metaphor for being on expedition. Yeah. There, there is a simplicity to expeditions. There is a simplicity to standing on the roof of the world. And I find it humbling. I find it motivating, invigorating, energizing, empowering, all these amazing things. It's life kind of stripped bare. And if we use Everest as an example, you kind of realize how insignificant we are. You know, you can be stood on top of the world and all you can see like all around you is mountains and it just goes on forever. And the view is, it is amazing. You know, you get the sunrise about half past 4 in the morning and it is just unbelievable. And the difficulty is how do we package that in a way and to be able to bring it back down whereby it's not going to be diluted and infected by everything else which is around us? Because let's face it, I do believe that society that we live in and the environments that we live in, in the cities or wherever, it's quite toxic and there's a lot going on trying to grab our attention. So the really difficult thing is bringing the learnings back and not letting them get diluted. I think I come back a very different person. And it certainly sort of speaks to my wife, she says it takes a few days for me to reintegrate. And I think that's a good thing. In fact, I would like that few days reintegration become a few weeks, become a few months. Because I think the individual that comes back from an expedition, I can only speak for myself, the individual that comes back from those expeditions has a slightly heightened sense of awareness of other people around you, because everybody that you're interacting with on an expedition, you need to interact in a way whereby it's holistic and it's generally in a way what's gonna benefit everybody. It's, it's trying to push everybody in the right direction. You know, generally everybody's there for, you know, pretty much the same reason, you know, to climb the mountains, to get back down, have a really good time.. And if we overlay that to everyday life, to being in the valley, everybody's just on different agendas. Everybody's running around as if, you know, the last breath relies on it and everybody's trying to chase the buck and everybody is trying to get one up on the Joneses and everybody wants a faster car or bigger house or, you know, a faster stream on their internet or whatever the hell it is. Ultimately, does that matter? I personally don't think it does. And expeditions or standing on the roof of the world, you kind of realize what really is important. And what is important, again, is only my opinion, is, you know, those immediately around you, your immediate community. And that's going to include your friends, and that's going to include your family and their well-being, you know, both physically and mentally. To an extent, everything else beyond that is somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't matter if you're running like an iPhone 14 or a, you know, you're driving a Lexus this or a Tesla that or Range Rover this, you know, it doesn't matter. You know, are those around you happy? Are they well? Are they physically well? And what can you do for them? How can we improve their lives? And this happens all the time on expeditions. You know, you're constantly on the lookout for those in your immediate sphere of influence. Because if Cook's not well on an expedition, well, that's going to impact everybody. If Georgie's under the weather, well, that's going to impact, you know, certainly me to an extent and the client. Or if your climbing partner is, you know, he's not great, well, that's going to impact you as well. So how can you make them better? And that's such a key learning. It really is. And, you know, I think we lose that a little bit in our everyday lives. And I hold my hand up, I come back from expeditions and I try to bring that back with me. I try really hard. Yeah, I don't think I fully succeeded.

I wanna finish with 2 more quick things. So one is you have your own podcast called Cool Conversations. Yeah. So tell me about the podcast. I'd love to hear maybe 1 or 2 insights that you've learned from some of the really cool people that you've had on your show.

So in a nutshell, Cool Conversations came about out during lockdown. And the whole premise of a cool conversation is, say you and I in the bar, Steve, and I went to the bar to go and get a couple of drinks, and perhaps you started listening to the conversation on the table next door. What would that sound like? And that is called conversation. I'm never scripted. I do a little bit of research into my guests, but that's it. And it, you know, the conversation can go anywhere. And I've learned so, so much. I really have. And I think if there's going to be one thing that I would pull out is we often think that we go through things which are unique to us, and often we can bottle that up or perhaps be ashamed of it or not want to tell people. Whereas in reality, more of us go through these trials and tribulations than we actually think. No matter what it may be, you know, maybe we've experienced failure or something, or didn't manage to do this, or we've been in rehab for something or whatever. Whatever, you know, it could be something which, you know, we can consider to be a black mark on our books. Well, I mean, having met so many amazing people who have done amazing things despite adversity, and people understand, you know, people are willing to listen and to give empathy and to not necessarily give advice, but just to listen, allow you to share your own story, because I think we all have a unique story. And there should be a platform for that. And that's one of the reasons why we continue to do it and perhaps one of the reasons why you do this. So yeah, we're not all as unique as we think we are. We are in many ways, but at the same time, you know, sharing things and being open and honest is a very valuable trait. And that's possibly the most important thing I've learned from Cool Conversations.

Yeah. And I'm thrilled that I've got this platform to be able to have people like you to come on and share your story and your insights and your wisdom that you've learned over the years. So I appreciate that. And it is a great show. So I encourage everybody listening to this to make sure you subscribe to Cool Conversations. All right. Final thing is, anything else that you want to mention that we haven't talked about? Was there any burning question you wish I would've asked you?

I think the most important thing is just to put across, and I think we did touch upon it, you know, when I had my accident and we were talking about just be you. No, I, I think we have to go through life and to an extent we just don't have to give a damn about what people necessarily think of us. Genuinely, I think we need to be the person that we are supposed to be. And if I knew that at age 22, I wouldn't have all the metal in my legs, which I still currently do from when I fell off. Not that I regret it, because it opened up all sorts of opportunity which I wouldn't necessarily have had, and experiences. But I think being the person that we are genuinely meant to be is a really important thing. And don't be ashamed of that. You are you and nobody else is you and you are special because of it.

Terrific. And folks, if they want to connect with you, is it the website?

Would that be the best place? Super easy. There's only one Kenton Coole in the world, I think, with a funny name and it is C-O-O-L. And that is what I was christened with. That is my real name. Just stick it into any search engine. You can find me on Instagram or Twitter or the website.

Fantastic. Well, Kenton, this has been great. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on on all the success that you've had and the fact that you're still here and you're still crushing it. And I look forward to continuing to follow your adventures over the years.

Well, that's super kind. Thanks for having me on. And now I am off to the climbing wall.

For more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. For The Way Forward, I'm Steve Sandusky.

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