Reaching New Heights for Cancer Research

Speaker 1:

Welcome to TD Cowen Insights, a space that brings leading thinkers together to share insights and ideas shaping the world around us. Join us as we converse with the top minds who are influencing our global sectors.

Yaron Werber:

Thank you for joining us for another exciting episode in our Biotech Decoded podcast series. I'm Yaron Werber, senior biotechnology analyst at TD Cowen. I'm super excited to be joined today by Luke Timmerman in this episode, Reaching New Heights for Cancer Research, to discuss how a passion for the outdoors and mountaineering has inspired many to take on new challenges and catalyzed a whole new fundraising movement for cancer research, poverty, and soon sickle cell disease as part of his Timmerman Traverse expeditions. Luke is an award-winning biotech journalist who's been covering the sector for 20 plus years. Before founding The Timmerman Report, a biotech publication, Luke was a reporter at The Seattle Times, Bloomberg News and Economy. Luke has won many awards and accolades in his career, and his first book, Hood: Trailblazer of the Genomics Age, was called a must read by Forbes. Luke is a very well known leader in fundraising for cancer research, poverty, and soon sickle cell disease.

His Timmerman Traverse tracks have raised nine million so far, and now span three events each year. Luke is an accomplished mountaineer and summited Mount Everest on May 22nd, 2018. Luke, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to see you. We really appreciate it. Super, super excited about this podcast given that the trip we just did, so I definitely want to connect on that again and sort of relive some of those memories.

Luke Timmerman:

Thanks for having me, Yaron. It's great to see you back at work, no longer in the tent.

Yaron Werber:

I actually prefer being in the tent to be honest with you.

Luke Timmerman:

Me too, but that's unusual, I guess.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, yeah. We'll talk about Kelly and the Timmerman Traverse, but right after that traverse, you actually did a tag along, a tag on to it, and you went to Mount Stanley and Margarita Peak in Uganda with a small group of highly experienced sort of mountaineers and trekkers. How was that trek and maybe what attracted you to go there?

Luke Timmerman:

Yeah, it was amazing. It was like something out of an animated movie. I don't know if you're old enough to remember, Yaron, the old cartoon, The Land Before Time where dinosaurs are roaming the landscape. This is the Rwenzori Mountains of Western Uganda. It culminates in Mount Stanley or Margarita Peak on Mount Stanley, third-highest peak in Africa, 16,700 feet. I heard about this from a mountain guide who I've known for many years who was creating a personal or private expedition for really experienced mountaineers because this is really hard terrain. Really rugged, muddy, rocky, slippery, lots of up and down along the way. It's eight days through the jungle and then up through higher elevations. It was spectacular, and I did it as a lark. It was a personal trip just on the tail end of the Kilimanjaro campaign because as you know, I put a lot of work into these things and I just wanted to do something fun that was just personal at the end.

Yaron Werber:

When you're comparing it to Kili, Kili has the two highest peaks in Africa. Well, I guess there's one and there's a lot more rural cross. This is the third-highest peak, yet it seems that this is harder terrain. Can you talk about that?

Luke Timmerman:

Yeah, very much so, because as you know, being on Kilimanjaro, it's a seven-day program and you're really, for the most part, on steady dirt trail. There's points where you have to step up. There's points where you do a little bit of rock scrambling, so a little bit of hands for balance and holds, but for the most part, you're moving steadily uphill on terra firma. And this was just a really remote place. Very few people ever go here, deep into the jungle. It's along the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. There's some geopolitical concern along the border too, you have to be aware of. But like I said, slippery, muddy, slippery terrain. Again, older listeners to this show may remember the film Romancing the Stone. Have you ever seen this one where there's this giant mudslide at the beginning? We joked on the trail that one of us, if we didn't watch our step carefully, we could end up falling down the mountain like Kathleen Turner.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. Oh my God. It's one of my favorite movies growing up. I think it was filmed in Columbia, that one.

Luke Timmerman:

I don't know, but I need to go back and watch it after having been to the Rwenzori's.

Yaron Werber:

Let's take a step back and what sparked your passion in the outdoors and mountaineering, and you really have accomplished so much already. There's still a few more things I imagine you want to accomplish, but we'll talk about that as well.

Luke Timmerman:

Yeah. Where it starts, this is a pretty deep and philosophical kind of question actually, I was thinking about this a little bit. I think this comes back to where I grew up. I grew up in rural Wisconsin on a farm. Spent a lot of time as a kid doing chores outside, enduring cold weather, chopping wood, baling hay, carrying buckets of water and food for animals and all that sort of thing. I just became really comfortable with being outdoors and doing physical things. Now in Wisconsin, as you know, they don't have mountains, so that came much later. When I moved out to Seattle, I was in my late twenties and just had the itch to explore the beautiful natural environment climbing Mount Rainier, and that was 20 years ago. That's really how I got started in the mountains.

Yaron Werber:

And so Mount Rainier is hiking, but it's also got a mountaineering edge to it as you get to the top, whether it's snowshoeing or you put spikes on or you go through some of that snowy terrain. Am I correct? Can you talk about that?

Luke Timmerman:

Well, for sure. Mount Rainier is a serious mountaineering challenge. It draws people from all over the country for that reason. It's a 14,400 feet, heavily glaciated peak the last 4,000 feet. You're right, you begin with a hike from the highest trail head called Paradise. There's another one on the other side called Sunrise, but those are the two main ones. Starting at about a little under 5,000 feet. You're going to hike with regular hiking boots and then eventually get a couple thousand feet up, you transition to a snowfield. And so you have to change your footwear, perhaps use micro spikes, work your way up to kind of intermediary camp.

And from that point on, it's serious climbing with harness, rope, crampons, those sharp spikes that you attach to the bottom of your boots and an ice ax that you can use to arrest your fall if you were to fall down one of these sheer ice surfaces. It's a very different mountain experience than say, Kilimanjaro, what you just did.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. And so to go to Mount Rainier, what prep do you need to do beforehand? I imagine you don't want people putting on crampons for the first time going to Mount Rainier.

Luke Timmerman:

Correct. I think people do sometimes bite off more than they can chew. It's a very demanding climb. As you could gather, it's almost 10,000 net vertical feet, and that from where the hike begins, where the climb begins. And you do this typically at three days, not seven days. That provides greater time for acclimatization on say, Kilimanjaro. There's also the terrain, the footwork, that makes a big, big difference. You're also carrying heavier backpacks, heavier loads. There's no Tanzanian porter crew carrying some of the heavier things. All of your food, fuel, tents, bedding, sleeping bags, all that stuff that goes on your back. What I tend to recommend for people, I think for folks who really enjoy the outdoors, mountains, if you go to a place like Kilimanjaro and have a good experience with that hiking and you want to try glacier mountaineering with the tools of the trade that I just mentioned, Mount Baker is a good choice in Washington state. It's shorter than Mount Rainier, so it's about 10,700 feet. It's a good place to start.

Yaron Werber:

Awesome. When you're thinking about your treks, which one has been your favorite so far?

Luke Timmerman:

Yeah, there's so many, but I've really enjoyed my trips to Denali, the highest peak in North America up in Alaska, 20,300 feet, and Vincent, the highest peak in Antarctica, which is a little over 16,000. Now, very few people obviously go to Antarctica, so that is just a really pristine, beautiful, in many ways untouched natural environment. And Denali, I don't know, I just had a great group of guys on that trip a little over 10 years ago, and it was a really big challenge at the time that I wasn't sure if I could do it or not. There was some element of the comradery, the physical challenge, the natural beauty. Denali is sort of like what I described with Mount Rainier, but a couple other notches above in terms of just sheer difficulty. Those are a couple of my favorites, and maybe I just am a glutton for punishment. I like extreme cold.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah.

Luke Timmerman:

20 below zero.

Yaron Werber:

I think it's hard to imagine unless people really watch what these treks are about. And you have crampons, you have equipment, you're fully suited up. Usually these elevations, obviously you're not having oxygen, you have ropes that you're tied to, you're carrying an ax, and in many ways you're climbing up using all four extremities. There's no stairs, and it's not a 12 degree or an 18 degree incline. It's much steeper. How do you train for that?

Luke Timmerman:

Good question. It helps to carry a heavy backpack uphill. That's a good place to start, or as in the military, they call it rucking. That right there is going to build up some of the core stability muscles, but also hips, thighs, calves, engaging your whole body really in moving weight uphill. That's a good place to start. Running is also really good. Baseline cardiovascular fitness is important. I'd say it's necessary, but not sufficient. There are plenty of people, stories that have been told of excellent endurance athletes, cyclists or marathon runners who don't do well at altitude. There's some amount of practice, I would say, at elevation that is a really good gauge as to how someone will do. If you remember my standard intake for you and others on that team, I would ask, well, what's the highest elevation you've been to and how did you feel up there? If you've been to Colorado and hiked a little bit in the Rockies and felt okay, it's usually a pretty good sign.

But as time goes on, people I think do develop a little more adaptive tolerance for the low oxygen environment and altitude. Long way of saying practice hiking at elevation.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. And cardiovascular for sure. Being at altitude, I've never been Achilles, 19,340 at the peak, and we started just under five, and I think the highest I've been is probably in Mexico City or in the Rockies or in Montana, in Wyoming, Jackson Hole. But I think I looked it up, they were talking about seven, 8,000. I biked a lot at Aspen back in the days when it was doing triathlons, but that was 10, 14 years ago. The altitude component presented many challenges that we sort of anticipated. We all did pretty well. We all felt decent, but it impacts your sleep, it impacts digestion. Half the time, I remember my brain was functioning at fraction capacity. I was holding things and everything was laid out, and I couldn't find the thing.

That's a challenge of its own, giving yourself pep talks a lot, right?

Luke Timmerman:

The mental part.

Yaron Werber:

The mental part, and to the extent that if I ever doubted the mental to the physical axis, I think on this trip it became very apparent. And I think physically this trip wasn't necessarily that hard, but it was putting it all together was probably a little bit harder than I thought. As you're even talking about going to higher altitudes, how do you adjust?

Luke Timmerman:

Well, this mental part is really important. At high altitude, all of your systems are under stress at once. You alluded to this, your respiratory, your circulatory, your digestive, your neurological system, everything is under stress. And your body's trying to adapt to the circumstance in a lot of different ways at whole systems level and that can take a toll on you mentally. It's very easy to get into that negative self-talk or the inner critic that people sometimes talk about.

This is one of my strengths. I don't really let that get into my head. I give myself those pep talks like you allude to like, okay, I have trained properly to be here. Maybe what I just need to do is take a deep breath, calm down, take a sip of water if I'm experiencing say, a headache or a digestive issue. Actually, there's a term for this that one of my mountain guide friends calls it tolerance for adversity is a really important skill for doing well in the mountains. Stay calm, don't panic, give yourself whatever you need, whether that's the internal pep talk, or maybe you just need to get up and walk around a little bit and have a snack to calm yourself and let your body do what it's trying to do, which is adapt to that challenging environment.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. I think that there's a saying in backpacking, to your point, I think it's called welcome to suck type thing. There's another one of let go of the desire. A lot of times you have a desire to change music or desire to change clothing, and one of the things I definitely notice is to simplify and just let it ride because the mood will change. When you're struggling, will get better in 30 minutes. When you're hurting, it'll go away. And not to futs too much, just kind of be comfortable being uncomfortable, endure the suck, and then you will get to the other side. And the other side is wonderful again. And really that mental gymnastics is critical.

Luke Timmerman:

Absolutely right. This is what it takes to do hard things in general. Yeah. Embrace the suck is one way to put it.

Yaron Werber:

When you're thinking about your treks, which one has been the most challenging for you and which one has been the most fulfilling?

Luke Timmerman:

Well, most challenging for sure is Mount Everest. There's a lot of misperceptions about the mountain. We could go on for a whole podcast about that, but it's 29,030 feet, and the oxygen level there at the summit is about one third of what it is at sea level. And so take everything that we were just talking about in terms of the physical challenge and then that mental component. And keep in mind that this expedition is two months long. It takes that long to acclimatize. Your body's under all this stress, and it takes a toll over time, especially when you're trying to sleep at night and you're gasping for air as I was at different times. Everest, by far the most challenging. Really proud to be able to have done that. And it's probably also the most fulfilling. I made some good friendships, Eric Murphy of Alpine Sense being one of them, who you know, and it changed my life for the better.

It propelled me to do all these other expeditions that came later. I discovered a whole set of capabilities in myself that I didn't realize were there. I was capable of a lot more than I realized, and I've just continually pushed myself to do these things ever since.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, give us an example. What kind of capabilities are you talking about? I imagine it's mental and physical.

Luke Timmerman:

It's mental, it's physical in climbing the mountain itself. I had a lot of climbing experience prior to Everest having done Denali and Aconcagua. The proper prerequisites and experience were there, but I still had doubt. How am I going to perform up there at 8,000 meters in the death zone? I was able to do that and do it in pretty good style in retrospect, without a whole lot of extra challenges. But beyond that, if you remember, this was tied into a fundraising campaign with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. That's how these climbing campaigns for a cause began. That gave me the extra motivation. I thought if I commit myself to climb Mount Everest and raise a bunch of money for cancer research at a great institution in my backyard, this will excite the biotech community and they'll want to donate to this campaign. And so the campaign was really successful too. My initial goal was 175,000, it ended up raising 340,000.

Yaron Werber:

Wow.

Luke Timmerman:

And so I've been coming back home and being in one piece and no frostbite on the fingers and everything else. It was just a big success and got me thinking about, well, I couldn't really climb a higher mountain at that point, but I could raise even more money for cancer research. And the way was going to be through organizing these teams like the one that you were just a part of. 20 people approaching a more trackable mountain and enticing in a very attractive mountain, but something that would be challenging, but doable for a lot of people who are newer to the sport. Beginners, let's say. It's really worked out beautifully having five million dollar campaigns at this point.

Yaron Werber:

That was my next question. That was the genesis of the Timmerman Trek, it was Everest.

Luke Timmerman:

Correct.

Yaron Werber:

Timmerman traverses, I should say. What's success, because you've done them very successfully. I mean, for the audience, look is incredible. You've raised nine million so far. You do two traverses a year. I don't want to take your thunder. Usually one Achilles, you supplement, the second one might be like a presidential traverse in Washington. Now you're going to do Mount Rainier, which I think you might've done before. I could be wrong. With the traverse you've done, Everest base as well in the past, which sometimes you've alternated with Kili. And that's actually on my next bucket list now for next year. There's early signs that my wife is interested, and now you've got to launch another one for sickle cell.

You've done for cancer research, for Life Science Cares, for poverty as well and now for sickle cell. There's a secret to running a successful campaign 'cause it's not easy. What is that? And leading such a group up a mountain.

Luke Timmerman:

Yeah. Well, thanks for summarizing a lot of these different campaigns as they've branched out. Really excited about the various partner organizations that I'm working with. In terms of running a successful campaign, I definitely need to get great players on the team. It's a recruiting effort first and foremost, finding people who have a combination of love for the outdoors, a passion for the cause, whether that be cancer research or fighting poverty in the United States, or as you alluded to is a new one for sickle cell disease. Some basic physical fitness, some desire for adventure, passion for the cause. But I also look for a really diverse group of people to put together in a curated fashion.

And I mean that in many ways. There's race, ethnicity, gender, all that stuff that's readily apparent on the surface, but there's also people just doing interesting different kinds of work. I like having people on the team who are a hardcore wet lab biologist next to somebody who's an MD who is more an expert in designing trials. And that person might be able to talk to an AI or data-driven kind of person. And so the sum total of this group of 20 or so people is just a fascinating group of people working on different aspects of the industry. And so we all have something in common. We have something to contribute, and as a result, I think people form really lasting wonderful friendships.

Yaron Werber:

And maybe for the audience that is not familiar with the Timmerman Traverse, maybe tell us a little bit about the three different charities, so to speak, or the institution you've raised for. And this is a group of biotech professionals, right? Maybe talk about that a little bit too.

Luke Timmerman:

Yes. I mean, this builds off of my whole history in journalism as a biotech journalist for 20 years. I get to know a lot of interesting people doing interesting things and startups and midsize companies, private to public. It starts there. The first cause was cancer research, started with Fred Hutch. And this last campaign I switched over to Damon Ronan Cancer Research Foundation, which is, for those not familiar, it's a national organization that supports postdoctoral fellows and early career faculty who are some of the best and brightest young scientists all over the country. And so I think that's a really great way to have an impact on the field of cancer. They have this long and illustrious track record of supporting people who went on to win Nobel Prizes and entered the National Academy of Sciences, and they were just ahead of the curve on a lot of big trends by betting on bright and courageous young scientists.

Very excited to work with Damon Ronan on this last campaign. And in the future, Life Science Cares. I think a lot of listeners probably know about LSC at this point, but it organizes the biotech community in geographic hubs, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Philadelphia, and New York. It brings together all of the people in these clusters to do volunteer work and support local nonprofits fighting poverty. That concludes everything from basic needs like food and shelter to education and job training programs. It's a really well-organized soup to nuts organization that is working to break the cycle of poverty here in the US and now preparing for the fourth expedition for that group this coming summer. And then the third one, the newest challenge that I'm taking on is with Sickle Forward, and that is an organization founded by a researcher at University of South Carolina who has partners in West Africa starting in the nation of Mali.

But the effort there is to improve newborn screening of sickle cell. Once children are identified as carriers, or actually they have sickle cell disease, they can then be put on prophylactic antibiotics or antimalarials. They can make generic hydroxyurea available to them. You can really improve these children's outlook on life, their outcomes with some pretty low cost and practical interventions. We're teaming up with Ted Love, the chairman of Bio, and this physician scientist in South Carolina by the name of Alan Anderson. We're co-chairing this one, I'm very excited. This is still very much in its infancy, but that will be a Kilimanjaro expedition in September.

Yaron Werber:

I want to talk about the Timmerman Report. I mean, you're very well known in the industry, I would say at this point, having been a reporter for a long period of time, obviously these expeditions, which get an amazing amount of attention, which is really terrific. And you founded the Timmerman Report in early 2015. What is the report? How often do you write? What do you write about? Maybe talk a little bit about who's the viewership as well.

Luke Timmerman:

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it has been a little over nine years since striking out on my own and starting my own subscription publication. This was even before Substack, so I had to cobble together some of the tools to figure out how to sell subscriptions online. But basically I have been covering the biotech industry as a journalist for 20 plus years. And at that time, my thought was that if I could offer a low-priced subscription and cover the most interesting people and emerging trends in startups, then I would have a nice little niche for myself. I really enjoy learning about the science and the enabling technologies that are driving so much of the innovation that you and I both see happening every day.

It's a real privilege. I write two or three articles a week on average and have since layered in the podcast. You might want to ask about that too. I do a podcast as well, but it gives me a front row seat, the journalism does, to ask some of the smartest people in the world a lot of basic questions about what they do and why. And I just find it endlessly fascinating. The products too. As I think as time has gone on, I've seen products that come through this gauntlet of R&D that really are making a much bigger impact on patients' lives and a whole bunch of diseases. Cancer for sure, but others too. And that's just really rewarding when you get to talk to people with the entrepreneurial glimmer in the eye and they're starting out, they have an idea and they're going to encounter all kinds of difficulties.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah.

Luke Timmerman:

Come back to some of the themes we talked about earlier, and then they make it and then they come through at the end with a product that really improves people's lives. I mean, that is a real privilege to witness and chronicle.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. It's one of the coolest things is being involved with a company from preclinical to getting a drug to market. Right. It's really fantastic. I mean, for me it by far was Sovaldi. It was the coolest journey. Can you talk about the long run, the podcast and where can someone find it?

Luke Timmerman:

Oh yeah. My podcast is on Apple podcasts and Spotify and other apps that people use. These are hour long interviews with, I call them biotech newsmakers. Basically it can be scientific entrepreneurs from academia to entrepreneurs at biotech companies to venture capitalists, people who are working on some fascinating aspect of the current scientific enterprise, whether it be cancer drug or Alzheimer's diagnostics or treatments for rare disease, cell gene therapy. I cover a lot of ground, and the format I like to follow is I ask a lot about people's early formative experiences, even growing up, going to school, kind of what influenced them on their life journey to this juncture where they latched onto a really exciting scientific concept and won't let go until they figure out how to do it. I find that personal journey really interesting, and people say a lot of revealing things when you ask them just some basic questions about who they are and where they come from and why they do what they do.

Yaron Werber:

And so you have a very extensive network in biotech at this point. Which areas of biotech or the industry are you most interested in? And you're looking at a lot of early stage technology, let's say science. What sort of most promising in your view?

Luke Timmerman:

Yeah. I think that the basic biology has gotten so much better understood. Our pace of learning has really accelerated. I mean, I'm old enough to remember, and I think you are too, when the human genome project was the brand new thing. And now we can sequence all these genomes and gather all this other omic information, biology becoming more of an information science. There's that coupled with all these tools that are improving imaging, structural biology, our understanding of the targets and how to interact with them. And then you have all this computing power from just raw computing power in the cloud. The ability to crunch through all this new kind of data on biology is just way, way beyond where it was when I started. Points the way, I think, toward a lot more rational drug discovery of small molecules, of biologics, even the cell and gene therapies. I'm really bullish long-term that we're going to get better at clinical trial development, higher probabilities of success, hopefully faster, cheaper development timeframes.

I know people have been talking about this for a long time, hasn't really happened yet, but I still remain optimistic that the fundamental grounding that's been laid down these last 20 years is really, well, and it's ultimately going to feed into the artificial intelligence, right? We haven't quite figured out exactly how that's going to play out, but this is the essential grist for the mill that is going to go into the AI. The AI is going to learn from a much deeper and richer set of biological information than we've ever had before, when a lot of times people were taking stabs in the dark.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. Yeah. Let's go back to maybe where we started. I've been impressed and very happy about how much attention that trek has gotten for the cause and for people's imagination. And there's something about going into the wilderness that basically relates to everybody and people could identify it, and everybody has an itch somewhere in their psyche. It's a question whether that itch really grows and they really want to scratch it, or it just stays an itch. For people who are early in their mountaineering careers, what's the natural progression and what advice would you give them?

Luke Timmerman:

Well, you can start with just going on day hikes. Try not to bite off too much with too heavy of a backpack or multi-day, ambitious trips that sometimes scare people away. They have a bad experience, they get blisters, they don't want to come back.

Yaron Werber:

Right.

Luke Timmerman:

I would say start small, work your way up, find some friends, and get out there and do things, friends and family. I think there is something really, really powerful and even primal about going outside with a group of people and trying to achieve some kind of objective. In our modern world, we have to kind of conjure this and go up, well, Kilimanjaro, but in prehistoric times, you had to fend for food. And if you were lucky enough to kill an animal, you'd put it on your back and carry it back to camp, right? But you were doing that with a small band of friends. And so I think we get a lot of value as humans on trying to do something hard outside together. I think you see just how natural it is for people to flow into that state. It happens within minutes of being on the trail on a place like Kilimanjaro or Everest Base Camp or other beautiful places around the world.

Yaron Werber:

Let's move to my favorite part of these podcasts. To your point, it's a little personal touch and humor and really getting to know the guest. If you can summit one of the remaining 8,000 peaks that you didn't summit. This being obviously the tallest one. I think there's 14, right?

Luke Timmerman:

Correct.

Yaron Werber:

Which one would it be and why?

Luke Timmerman:

That's a really good question. I think about it, I actually last fall summited Manaslu, which is another 8,000 meter peak, eighth-highest moat in the world in Nepal.

Yaron Werber:

Wow.

Luke Timmerman:

That was a great experience and different than Everest because it was just a personal climb and there was no campaign attached to it. I like the idea of going to Pakistan, maybe not climbing K2, but there are neighboring peaks called Gasherbrum one and two or G1 and G2. It's a possibility. There's also a beautiful kind of pyramidal peak in Nepal called Makalu. Not to be confused with modest Lou, but Makalu is the fifth-highest mountain in the world, and it's pretty close to Everest and it's beautiful and great challenge. I might go there.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. G2 and G2 are the 11th and the 13th, right?

Luke Timmerman:

Yes, that's correct.

Yaron Werber:

K2 is one of the deadliest. I think there's only one more. I think Ana Porna is the deadliest, right, followed by K2?

Luke Timmerman:

Yes. Those two are the most hazardous, the highest fatality rates, which is not something my wife is very interested in, quite frankly.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah.

Luke Timmerman:

Probably not going to K2.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, yeah. What's the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you in your mountaineering? Because one of the things you learn on these trips, you got to know everybody and everybody's going to get embarrassed at some point.

Luke Timmerman:

There are many embarrassing moments, but I'll share one from this last trip on Manaslu, which listeners know. We said something earlier about your digestive system not feeling so well at all times. There was a moment about 20,000 feet last fall where let's say my control of my bowels was not at my absolute best. And so I realized I had a slight issue that I needed to deal with after completing this difficult climb, making it back to camp. And it turned out I had forgotten to pack a spare pair of underwear. I had my one pair that was not in great shape, but I did have two pair. This was a packing mistake. I had two pair of long johns. What I did, I improvised as you sometimes have to do when you're confronted with circumstances in the mountains, I cut off the legs on my spare pair of long johns so that I had a second pair of underwear.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah.

Luke Timmerman:

There you have it. Adapting to changing circumstances in the mountains.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. And it must have been cold up there too. This is not sunny and 83 degrees.

Luke Timmerman:

Yeah, yeah. But you can imagine I was a little embarrassed telling my guide, hey, I kind of need to grab something in my bag because I myself.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, yeah. Oh, I think this happens literally all the time. Literally all the time. Awesome, Luke. Thank you so much for joining us. It's really great to see you. We will follow very closely the next treks.

Luke Timmerman:

It's so much fun, and I'm glad to hear that you had a great experience your own and are thinking about your next set of adventures around the world.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. And if anybody's interested in Luke's adventures, definitely give it a thought. If you're active, I highly recommend them.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode of TD Cowen Insights.

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