Damn, that guy's getting dragged through the mud in this article!

It was his destiny. Walk with me.

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Many moons ago I was shopping for Lotus Esprits. At the time, a used Lotus was achievable to your average pretender; there was a grad student in my vehicle design class who had one in fact. This is primarily due to the fact that Lotus Esprits are one of the least reliable vehicles known to humanity, as well as one of the hardest to fix and also subject to breakage in components that are irreplaceable. You learn this when you frequent message boards to determine why a late-model English exotic that originally went for $225k is on Craigslist for $12k, "needs work."

Exotic car forums were a strange beast back then. They were about two thirds poor nerds with no social life, about one third rich nerds with no social life. These nerds interfaced over objects of desire that one tenth possessed, one third could afford, and two thirds would never, ever, ever do so much as see outside of a trade show or cars'n'coffee parking lot convention.

There was, at the time, an "exotic car owner's pledge" floating about. "I own an expensive car" was a fraught enough social decision that a bizarre kabuki evolved around it. Several people said they had these terse sentences framed on their garage wall; several more carried them around in their wallets. This was before the "great recession" that made the rich richer, before the Bush tax cuts that made the rich richer, before the past 20 years that has made being a rich asshole entirely okay again but back then, people drew comfort from lines like "I solemnly swear i will always keep my exotic clean as a duty to those who can only afford to dream of owning one" and "I shall always engage any conversation about my car favorably, patiently and enthusiastically" and "I will never turn down the opportunity to let small children sit in the driver's seat or take them for a ride around the block." When I bought a Benelli TreK, a hyperexotic motorcycle that is one of six examples in North America, I referenced this pledge on Reddit. Everyone laughed at me because if you're a rich asshole now, flaunt it at everyone but then, there was a very real sense that if you didn't try to share your luck with others you were gonna turn the proles against everyone who could afford a Ferrari. An asshole in a Lambo becomes an asshole in every Lambo, despite the fact that the car is just a car.

Which is exactly what has come to pass. I drive an 18-year-old, twenty-five-thousand-dollar Schadenporsche and it's been keyed in the parking lot. Twenty minutes to pick up shampoo is fifteen hundred dollars worth of paint. Fifteen years ago hood ornaments became retractable, then ten years ago completely vanished. The "exotic car owner's pledge" has completely disappeared off the Internet and pretty much everyone who has ever washed their hands at the end of a day's work can safely assume thatany vehicle with "speed folds", to quote William Gibson, is owned and operated by a gaping asshole who deserves whatever petty violence you can commit against his toys unobserved.

Back to Colin O'Brady:

It’s clear O’Brady is a talented athlete who’s no stranger to epic challenges. A collegiate swimmer at Yale, he set out after graduation on a yearlong international trip at the age of 22, with money he’d saved painting houses. While carousing on a beach in Thailand his legs were severely burned by a flaming jump rope, he says, leaving him hospitalized for a month with second and third degree burns. In his book, he recounts doctors telling him he’d never walk the same again. Less than two years later he won the amateur division of the Chicago Triathlon. Eager to see how far his genetic gifts could take him, he quit his job as a commodities trader and spent the next six years as a professional triathlete.

You like that little "painting houses" bit in there? We call that "priming." What do you think - is a guy who "paints houses" really swimming for Yale? Do you know anyone - ANYONE - with the financial freedom to quit being a stock broker and run races for six.goddamn.years? Whaddayathink he drives? Whaddayathink his daddy drives? The power of priming: read this sentence again.

The next day, with 10 percent of the journey still remaining, O’Brady called for a helicopter and left to catch his flight.

One fine Sunday night backintheday a client bullied my Seattle company into getting hard drives to Dallas by 8am Monday. There were no commercial flights available. My boss got approval for me to hunt for a charter. The dispatcher told me my task was possible, but unlikely because no one wanted to get out of bed, and prices were likely to start at $50k each way. We authorized it, waited, and nobody took the bait. The drives never made it there. But we're talking $50k for some schlep to go from commercial airport to commercial airport at the last minute. This mutherfucker? Summoned a goddamn HELICOPTER in GREENLAND. I knew a guy who once missed a ferry to a wedding. He paid a floatplane pilot $5k to fly him 40 miles, dock to dock.

Priming: Nowhere in this article does money come up except here:

In other words, O’Brady stood to save $50,000 by waiting. “Definitely worth eating expedition rations for a couple more days,” adds Jones with a chuckle.

Chuckle. Chuckle chuckle. I mean, who wouldn't want to save $50k? Surely even people who can summon helicopters to the ice shelf from their sat phones so they aren't late for a meeting. Even Yale graduates who quit their jobs as commodities traders to spend six years training as triathletes wanna save scratch!

Millionaire adventure narcissists: they're just like us

“I felt pretty ashamed when Borge called me out on sending someone that didn't please him nor his guides,” Dansercoer says. “So suddenly I asked myself, hey, wait a moment, that's all fine to consult and pass on knowledge and hoping that the younger ones listen to you. But if they start to spoil—that's not good for me.”

Internet tells me it's about $40k to climb Everest. That buys a lot of tents. More importantly it buys an entire ecosystem of caddies who lead extraordinarily dangerous lives so that rich fucking tourists can pretend to be brave. 350 people tried in 2018 - That's $16m spent climbing the toughest mountain in the world. But you can't even brag about climbing Everest anymore - The list of people who have climbed Everest more than once is primarily brown people schlepping shit for yuppies so best go out there and get a tailor-made, corner-case record created for you to claim so that you can impress your father's friends at parties.

That's all these things are anymore. We talk about "adventure" but it's fundamentally rich people riching. They're made legitimate by magazines like National Geographic, but it's all Super Adventure Club bullshit and has been since Kipling. You either have patrons or you are a patron or you're the brown dude hauling oxygen tanks. That's it. That's the whole shebang.

What a dick for ruining those nice people's Greenland expedition, because he had a plane to catch.

Priming. Colin O'Grady is now a guy who ruined someone's vacation. He certainly isn't an archetypal rich adventure asshole. Most rich adventure assholes are humble men of the people and you, too, should aspire to be like them, should watch their journeys with admiration not jealousy.

I know a girl who quit her job and dropped out of life for two months because a berth opened up with one of her friends. She got to hit the Ross Ice Shelf and South Georgia Island. I told her I was jealous. She told me that if she'd had to pay to get on the boat it would have cost her $200k.

Come, normies, let us admire the derring-do of the adventurer class because they are just like us. And let us rest assured in the knowledge that should any of them let their mask slip, the rest will shun him and assure us yet again that only altruists invest millions in cultivating corner-case records nobody but other rich people care about. After all it's bad enough they can't park their Lambos on the street outside of certain zip codes; think of the horror if we stopped sympathizing with their performative recklessness.