00:03
Finn-Olaf Jones
Eckersberg's painting of the three arches in the Colosseum — it's kind of unusual because it is three different views and he basically changed the perspective on all three of them.

00:14
Finn-Olaf Jones
The sun is behind one of the walls there and it's actually the same kind of light you'd get if you put your hand in front of your eyes, and blocked out the sun on a very sunny day. There is this glare, and it's very modern.

00:24
Finn-Olaf Jones
I don't know, he took a sort of psychological view to light. It's very much an impressionistic psychological reaction to seeing the sun like that.

00:32
Finn-Olaf Jones
This is exactly what it's like growing up on a midsummer night in Denmark. You have this blue, blue, blue light and then suddenly goes dark for a few seconds and then it all comes back.

00:39
Finn-Olaf Jones
Eckersberg was afterall the teacher of the generation that taught the generation of Northern Lights painters. It's almost like you fall in love with the shy girl in the class and nobody else knows that she's really cool. There's a certain genius there that this reawakened for me.

00:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the National Gallery of Denmark and the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Finn-Olaf Jones, a Danish businessman and writer based in Pacific Palisades, California. Welcome, Finn-Olaf.

01:25
Finn-Olaf Jones
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

01:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We're happy to have you. We're at your house in Pacific Palisades in Southern California, and we are surrounded by some quite exquisite art on your walls, including some Danish art pieces that I know are very special to you. Please tell us about them and how you acquired them.

01:46
Finn-Olaf Jones
What warms my heart is when someone with your background likes what's up on the walls. Usually people come in here and say, well, what is all this crazy stuff? But my father, I was very lucky. I had this American dad who had an incredible eye for paintings. He was from Minnesota and he married a Danish woman.

02:03
Finn-Olaf Jones
And the funny thing is, the Danish side of the family, my mother's side of the family, probably weren't that interested in Danish art. I don't think they knew much about it. They were farmers. And my father comes over to Denmark as a 30-year-old journalist. And he goes down to Stevns, a remote province south of Copenhagen, and they say, well, we're arranging a wedding here, so you need to get out of here, and they send him as far away from Stevns as possible. They send him all the way up to Skagen.

02:31
Finn-Olaf Jones
And so he goes up there. He knows very little about Denmark. He knows very little Danish, but he has this incredible eye. He always did, my father. It wasn't just for paintings, it was also for books and playwrights. He had incredible taste.

02:45
Finn-Olaf Jones
But he goes up there and he sees all these Danish Northern Lights painters and he goes, wow, this is really something pretty special. And he meets this old lady. He's staying at the great hotel up there where they all hung out, Brøndum's Hotel. And he meets this older lady who speaks a little bit of English. Well, young man, do you like paintings? And it's like, yes, well, come on over and have a look at my house.

03:08
Finn-Olaf Jones
And she took him out to the laden, the garage behind, and he sees these piles and piles of Danish Northern Lights paintings. And he says, well, I'm about to get married to this Danish woman. I'm going to have a lot of blank walls in my house in Wayzata, Minnesota, which is where they moved. And so he said, I better get a few things. And so he selected, I don't know, about 20 paintings from this woman.

03:32
Finn-Olaf Jones
Turns out that it was the daughter of Anna and Michael Ancher, who was quite old at the time, single. And he ends up buying these masterpieces. And I remember he went back to Stevns and said, Well, you know, I have a nice surprise for you.

03:48
Finn-Olaf Jones
And I remember the story was they all looked at him and was like, Why did you get all that crap? You don't really need all that. And he brought this all back to Wayzata, Minnesota. He had a lot of really great paintings, and he hung them up all over there. And in the years to come, the Northern Lights painters became quite popular, and people would come from Denmark and visit, and they'd say, what the hell are you doing with these? These are national treasures. But he bought them for a song.

04:12
Finn-Olaf Jones
And, luckily, growing up with this, I didn't necessarily inherit a lot of stuff from him, but in terms of paintings, I got his taste. And so I started buying Northern Lights paintings of my own, and started getting various genres of Danish paintings through Bruun Rasmussen and other sources. And so I was just lucky to have grown up with this guy with incredible taste who wasn't even Danish. I mean, the Danes always looked at him and said in the beginning, you're mad and in the end, wow, you really had a good eye.

04:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Incredible story. And now the art is here in your house in Pacific Palisades, which is quite amazing. What's it like having these paintings on your walls and being able to look at them every day? It's like being in a museum, in a way.

04:55
Finn-Olaf Jones
Well, I'm not sure about a museum, but it's very comforting. I actually, you know, sit back here, and sometimes at night I'll look out and say, wow. I'm not sure how the Danish side of the family would think of it, but I'd say, Dad would be pretty happy to look at this stuff. I mean, so much of my taste was influenced by him.

05:09
Finn-Olaf Jones
The other thing is, you know, I have five kids running around here, and I like to think that they got a good art education, as I did, just being here with all this stuff. I mean, I'm lucky I have a lot of painter friends. So they come by once in a while and educate us a little bit about how this stuff gets made.

05:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I was about to say it sounds like it's very important to you. What does art mean to you? And what is good art in your opinion?

05:33
Finn-Olaf Jones
Totally subjective, right? I'm sure you've heard it a million times. You buy what you love, and don't be ashamed of your tastes, you know, high tastes, low tastes.

05:40
Finn-Olaf Jones
I can tell you a few years ago, I did a story for Forbes magazine on outsider artists, or in fact, I did a story about a very specific guy named Henry Darger. He had a janitor job in Chicago for 50 years. No one saw any of his art. He didn't have any friends. He didn't have any real associates. When he died, his landlord went up to his room and found 300 paintings by Darger up there.

06:05
Finn-Olaf Jones
And luckily, his landlord had an educated eye. He said, well, I can't just throw this stuff out. His wife said, you know, we've got to get rid of all this junk. And the landlord was like, no, no, no, there's something to this. We need to do something about this. So he started exhibiting this stuff. And now Henry Darger is the, you know, Gauguin of outsider art.

06:23
Finn-Olaf Jones
Well, 20 years ago, I went and interviewed the surviving landlord there, Kiyoko Lerner. And she was this very sweet Japanese-American woman. She told me the whole story about Darger, about discovering all this stuff. It's very exciting, really, because now Bowie has him, Madonna collects him.

06:42
Finn-Olaf Jones
And it was a very touching story. I mean, Darger painted according to this crazy story he had about a slave rebellion. It was seven sisters who were fighting the slave rebellion. And when they were undressed, they actually had penises. So people are like, what the hell was he thinking? He was a self taught artist.

06:58
Finn-Olaf Jones
And at the end of doing the story and interviewing Kiyoko, I said, Hey, you know, I'm kind of touched by all this. It's a great story. Is there any chance I could buy one of these off of you? And out of the goodness of her heart, she let me choose something and I got it from her.

07:11
Finn-Olaf Jones
And now all these years later, I tell all the kids if the house were ever to burn down, we get an earthquake, don't save the dog, don't save each other, get the Darger out because that's actually the most, you know, valuable thing we might ever own. But it was one of these things, truly, where he wasn't very well known when I did this story.

07:30
Finn-Olaf Jones
It was a business story about what happens when your tenant dies and you have all this junk that might or might not be valuable. Is it legally yours? Actually, it's being challenged right now because it turns out Darger had some cousins and various family members, you know, a little bit of a nefarious connection there, but they're all suing now the estate of the Lerners for these paintings. But it was one of these things that I bought totally out of pure love for this guy and his art.

08:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And let's turn the attention to you a little bit. I introduced you as a businessman and a writer. But, if you were to shortly introduce yourself to us and tell us who you are — who is Finn-Olaf Jones?

08:14
Finn-Olaf Jones
Well, a bum, a wandering vagabond. I have traveled a lot. I probably could live full time traveling. I was lucky to have grown up in Denmark and also Minnesota, very flat places, both of them. And living in such flat places created this great love of climbing and mountaineering. And I mean, even in a place as flat as Stevns, I was able to find a way to climb to the top point of the various castles and churches there. And I also have this great instinct for getting up to the top of things.

08:44
Finn-Olaf Jones
So probably one of the more interesting things I've done over the last 50 years is I've climbed everywhere. I've climbed pretty much every major mountain range in the world. I just came back from Antarctica, I climbed down there. And so that's probably my great passion. And I'm lucky I have five very sporty kids who share that passion. So now I'm able to climb a bit with them.

09:04
Finn-Olaf Jones
I have this weird thing, which was I spent 27 years climbing what's called the Seven Summits, the tallest mountain on each continent. And it wasn't really something I'd pre-planned or anything like that, but I'd met the first guy who did it, when I was 18. And he told me this whole story, he was quite the swashbuckling guy, and it never occurred to me that I would be following in his footsteps.

09:25
Finn-Olaf Jones
I just finished that project of climbing the Seven Summits. And in fact, I did Everest twice. I actually did it once in 2000. I didn't get to the top, but I summitted two years ago. And I actually looked it up. I said, how many Danes have done this? I believe there have been one or two who have done it. I'm left-handed, so maybe I'm the first left-handed Dane to do it. I don't think there's much of a distinction.

09:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I will ask you more about that later. Tell us what you did for a living before you did travel writing.

09:51
Finn-Olaf Jones
Well, first of all, I never did travel writing as a living. I love travel writing, and I write for great magazines and newspapers, but unfortunately they can't afford to pay anyone too much. So, the travel writing might cover the electric bills, I'm not sure.

10:04
Finn-Olaf Jones
I spent 15 years in the corporate world and I started in advertising and worked at McCann Erickson in New York, one of the great old firms. And from there I went and got an MBA at INSEAD in France. And that sort of launched me into the business world and I worked for MGM United Artists in Paris, doing distribution deals and dealing with all the new media that was coming up around the world, which was fascinating.

10:29
Finn-Olaf Jones
I dealt a lot with the Russians back then, sort of the original Russian oligarchs. And that was very interesting. And I ended up at Discovery Communications in Washington, D.C. doing business development for them.

10:42
Finn-Olaf Jones
But all this time, I'd been climbing and writing. I actually was published by that time in National Geographic, I did a story for them. And at Discovery, they thought of me as sort of the suit, the guy who crunched all the numbers and all that. I presented something to the board around the year 2000.

10:58
Finn-Olaf Jones
And they said, oh, Finn, that's great. Where do you see yourself career-wise here at Discovery? And I suppose the right thing would be to say, well, I see myself being, you know, a business development guy forever and ever.

11:07
Finn-Olaf Jones
But I said, you know, every year National Geographic sends a team to Mount Everest and we've never sent anyone there. I said, why don't you let me do an expedition to Mount Everest and we'll film it and photograph it and write about it? They looked at me like, who the hell is this crazy suit? But luckily by that time I'd had a pretty sizable portfolio of travel and climbing articles. So they looked at that, and said, okay, well, fine, we'll send you on your way.

11:32
Finn-Olaf Jones
They gave me a little budget and I went down there with all their exotic cameras and filmed and spent three months on Mount Everest in the year 2000. It turns out that was a very monumental year because, there'd just been a terrible tragedy up there the year before, a guy named Michael Matthews had disappeared up in the mountain.

11:49
Finn-Olaf Jones
There's a lot of renewed interest in him, by the way, because it turns out his brother married Pippa Middleton, so Michael Matthews was actually the brother-in-law to the future queen of England. But at the time he was pretty unknown. But he had died tragically up there, probably because he'd had a faulty oxygen bottle, one that had been cheaply recycled by a guy who was also a big drug dealer in England.

12:11
Finn-Olaf Jones
And that drug dealer, a guy named Henry Todd, was the guy whose permit I was climbing on. I didn't know it at the time. He was the cheap guy and I had a very small budget, so I was climbing on his permit. I didn't have anything to do with him other than that, but lo and behold, I found out the story about Michael Matthews.

12:27
Finn-Olaf Jones
I found out about the fake oxygen bottles and I realized, oh my God, half the bottles up here are faulty oxygen bottles, badly refitted and are malfunctioning really badly up high. So I broke that story originally and there was hell to pay because it turned out Henry Todd found out that I knew about all this and he attacked me and, you know, punched me out and it was very dramatic and I had been up to camp three by that time.

12:48
Finn-Olaf Jones
I was totally climatized. I was ready to climb to the top. I'd been at this point where I could see the summit of Everest. I said, I'm going to be there next week. And instead, once it was discovered that Henry Todd, not only was he a big drug dealer, but he also was under indictment for manslaughter in England.

13:02
Finn-Olaf Jones
So, it was a crazy story. The next day after this attack, a military helicopter from Nepalese Air Force landed in the middle of basecamp, which at the time was not a very normal thing. It's like, "Finn Jones of Discovery, you come with us!" And I got on the helicopter, went down, that was the end of my trip.

13:19
Finn-Olaf Jones
And Henry Todd got thrown out of. There was a huge repercussion after that. But I broke the story. I came back to Discovery. I thought, Oh God, they're going to be like, Jesus, Finn, you really screwed that one up. But it's like, that was great, Finn. We got more views than, you know, I was doing stuff online. We're Top 10. What else do you want to do?

13:34
Finn-Olaf Jones
So I started doing production for Discovery. It was a dream job. And then, weirdly enough, I managed to sell a couple of scripts here in Hollywood. I worked for MGM United Artists for years. I never submitted a script to anyone. But I got a couple of scripts optioned here. So I said, well, that was easy. And so I said, well, why don't we move to LA, you know?

13:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow.

13:52
Finn-Olaf Jones
My wife, you know, had two kids at the time, a couple of pets. We all got into a big moving van and drove out here and rented a house, actually not so far away here in the Palisades. And I never sold another script again. I didn't do anything in the movies, but we started doing real estate stuff. And Kris and I both seemed to have a pretty good read on buying properties.

14:09
Finn-Olaf Jones
We started doing that in Washington, DC. And here we saw a lot of great opportunities. We started buying multi-family housing here — apartments — which is what we still do. And so now we have apartment buildings all over the country. But that's how the bread and butter is made, is through apartment buildings.

14:29
Finn-Olaf Jones
But yeah, I still write. It's what I prefer doing. Frankly, even if they didn't pay me, I'd just probably still do it because it is a great passion of mine. And I get a big kick out of meeting all these interesting odd people. I don't just do travel writing. I do a lot of design stuff. I used to write a lot for Architectural Digest. I do business stuff. I basically do whatever my editors want. But yeah, writing is my passion. I've been very lucky. I get to write a lot about Denmark over the years.

14:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And talking about that, you did grow up there in Stevns.

14:56
Finn-Olaf Jones
I grew up in Stevns when it was really backward. I mean, Stevns was, as I think the expression was, in English, "It's where the crows went out to turn around." That was how remote it was. That was the local expression. And, you know, we had outhouses. There was very little indoor plumbing. And it was a pretty isolated spot, despite the fact that you could see the lights of Copenhagen on the other side of the bay there. Some of my neighbors had never been to Copenhagen, I remember. Yeah, it was odd.

15:24
Finn-Olaf Jones
I mean, my grandfather, who was this wonderful man, very accomplished, very hardworking. He was a member of Parliament. So he would go back and forth between Copenhagen and his place in Stevns and he married this very urban woman. Her father had been head of the Serum Institut and had been head of the World Health Organization. He was actually one of the last people to see the Tsar of Russia alive. He'd been out there on a mercy mission.

15:51
Finn-Olaf Jones
My grandmother thought she'd been stuck out in the wilds, furthest place away from her beloved Copenhagen. But it's only 60 kilometers away. But it seemed sort of unreachable. And you know there's this thing, the Stevns Å, which is about as wide as maybe a coffee table in some places, but it really does form this kind of weird border there.

16:11
Finn-Olaf Jones
And the old legend was, if a ruler of Denmark crossed Stevns Åen, they would die because Stevns is run by the Klinte kongen, the Chalk King. And the ruler of Denmark was not allowed to go on to the Chalk King's kingdom. I still would get that odd feeling when I cross this little river down by Køge. You cross it, you realize, oh my god, I'm in this other country.

16:35
Finn-Olaf Jones
I mean, she always wanted to get back to Copenhagen. And I was very lucky because I could usually talk her into, when I was a kid, to like, Hey, let's go to spend the day in Copenhagen. We'd have great times.

16:45
Finn-Olaf Jones
But yeah, Stevns has kind of found its way in the world now because they had the cliffs there of Stevns, the chalk cliffs, which it turns out is one of the few places in the world where you can see that black line where the meteor hits Earth, you know, off the coast of Mexico, some 60 million years ago and probably destroyed the dinosaurs.

17:04
Finn-Olaf Jones
I believe it's the only place where you can see it. And it was only in the 1970s that you had some American geologist who went by there and was looking at this thing. It's like, oh my God, is this possible? That black line, is this the mythical line where the meteor hit? And he took some samples from it and he found some isotopes in there that only could have come from outer space. And so in the '70s all that was discovered. Now the cliffs, Stevns Klint, is a world heritage site. And suddenly everybody's coming to Stevns. It's good. It's a beautiful, odd place.

17:35
Finn-Olaf Jones
You know, it's where the Danish National Ballet, Elvehøj, takes place. I don't know if you know the story of Elvehøj, but these old stenaldergrave, these old Stone Age helix there in the flat landscape, when the mist rises around them, you have this sort of white mist that goes up about waist high around these grave mounds.

17:53
Finn-Olaf Jones
And the legend is that these Elve girls are dancing around the grave mounds. And it's kind of a haunted landscape. And it has stayed with me, oddly enough. I mean, when I was living there, I thought it was a boring place at the end of the world. But I've grown to appreciate it over the years, and I still have a lot of friends there. I go back and visit quite a lot.

18:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And how did a young boy from Stevns become this world adventurer who wanted to climb mountains and travel the world and experience other cultures?

18:25
Finn-Olaf Jones
Well, I was lucky, first of all, to have a father who was very much a wandering man himself and curious about the world. And I was also very lucky to have all these books around me. I mean, my education was basically his 30,000 books. He was a book fanatic. He was a third generation book collector.

18:44
Finn-Olaf Jones
And when you grow up with all these books, I mean, they're absolutely everywhere, especially if there's no WiFi and very limited TV. So you reach for these books left and right. And the funny thing is, I've always said shelving is destiny when you're a kid because you're gonna read whatever you can get your hands on.

19:00
Finn-Olaf Jones
When you're a little kid, you're going to reach for the bottom shelves. Whatever's on the bottom shelf, that's where you're gonna be learning. And the bottom shelves of our house are all the mountaineering books. Dad had so many mountaineering books. I mean he had books on everything.

19:13
Finn-Olaf Jones
He wasn't particularly interested in mountaineering. It just so happened that mountaineering books tend to be pretty big coffee table type books. And so when I was a little kid crawling around there, those were the only books I could reach. And so I would study these books and study the pictures.

19:27
Finn-Olaf Jones
And I would say probably by the time I was 10 or 11, I knew the routes up most major mountains of the world. I was very well versed scholastically, without ever having seen any of these big mountains, exactly how to get up them. And later when I started working, I was able to afford to go on these expeditions. I started soloing a lot of things.

19:47
Finn-Olaf Jones
And luckily I could sell my stories. In the beginning, only for technical mountaineering magazines in England and stuff. But as the expeditions grew bigger and probably as they grew more tragic, you know, the worse the mountain story, the more magazines wanted them. Nobody wants to read about a happy, easy mountaineering thing.

20:06
Finn-Olaf Jones
I mean, the climb I just had up Everest was one of the most pleasant, wonderful, easy, climbs I've ever had. And I actually wrote the whole story up for The New York Times. I said, the real story here is how great technology has gotten, that you have the perfect oxygen mask. But it's the only story I've ever had spiked by The Times, because they said, you know, Finn, you know, this is, nothing much happens here. I was like, no, it was a perfect climb. Now had someone died, that there'd been some tragedy, that would have been a great story.

20:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Tragedy sells.

20:35
Finn-Olaf Jones
Tragedy sells.

20:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How do you feel sitting quietly on the chair right now? Are you longing to get up and move?

20:42
Finn-Olaf Jones
Not at all, I'm with you guys, I'm having a great time.

20:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Good. I know that you love mountaineering and you've talked a little bit about it now. Which mountains have you climbed and what does it feel like to stand on the top of a mountain that you just climbed? For instance, when you made it almost nine kilometers off the summit of Everest. Isn't that true?

21:05
Finn-Olaf Jones
Yeah, it's about right, yeah. Well, thank you for asking. It depends on the mountain. I'm surrounded by mountains here and I climb a lot here. I have a whole group. There's a lot of 14ers, 14,000 foot mountains, which in America, that's sort of a big cut off point, they don't get much taller than 14,000 here. But it's tall enough that you can feel the altitude. 14,000 is about the height of the Matterhorn in Europe.

21:26
Finn-Olaf Jones
So I climb a lot here. And those are fun day excursions or two day excursions. It's the expedition climbing that I really love, where you're out for a week or two weeks or, in the case of Everest, a couple months. And I would say, climbing is one of these things that you never ask why you do it.

21:46
Finn-Olaf Jones
I mean, most of the climbers I know, they take it for granted, like, yes, we like climbing. And I can't really say why people do it. I have a theory that maybe when we were all wandering around foraging and we were in tribes, you needed that guy who was going to be saying, okay, I'm going to go up that mountain there and we're going to see where the next green spot is or where I see wildlife that we can hunt, you know, next year.

22:08
Finn-Olaf Jones
And maybe one out of a hundred people have that explorer gene or the climbing gene in them, the scout gene, as we call it. And I think a lot of my fellow climbers have that same kind of scout gene. And so we don't ever really ask why we want to get up to these high points.

22:21
Finn-Olaf Jones
I mean, even living in Stevns and I also lived a lot in Minnesota, I always wanted to climb the tallest tree. It was almost an instinct. But something like Everest was truly epic because I'd failed 22 years ago and it had haunted me. It was one of the few mountains I climbed that I couldn't get up.

22:39
Finn-Olaf Jones
And yeah, I've had a lot of setbacks, but I'd always stick around and climb it later. I mean, Aconcagua, which was the first really big mountain I ever climbed, I had to rescue someone off the summit there. I was on this thing called the Canaletta and there was this guy who had sort of loose crampons and was obviously altitude sick.

22:53
Finn-Olaf Jones
And I remember thinking, God, I can't just leave this guy. If this guy dies, I mean, I had already seen another guy die. If this guy dies and I go to the summit, I'm going to feel really badly. So I had to climb down with this guy, arm in arm. It was awful. I was so exhausted, I was going to die, I thought.

23:10
Finn-Olaf Jones
I got to the bottom. I was like, well, that was it. And I said, I'm not going to do this again. I spent three or four days there. The weather was horrible. I climbed up anyway. The gods rewarded me by parting the clouds and I managed to get to the summit.

23:22
Finn-Olaf Jones
And so I've always been able to get back up there, but Everest was the one I couldn't get back up on because it takes like three months to climb it. And I had all these kids and Discovery had paid for it back then. I couldn't really afford to do it on my own. And so, it haunted me.

23:36
Finn-Olaf Jones
Actually for 22 years, I had dreams constantly about Everest. I've had hundreds of dreams. Always the same dream. The theme was all the same. Oh, you saw the summit. That last bit was so easy. It'd be dreams like, oh, there's a kiosk, there's an ice cream kiosk on the way. There's a nice highway overpass that you can climb. It was always like that last bit was really easy.

23:55
Finn-Olaf Jones
What the hell, you gotta get back up there. I mean, it really was one of these messages. It was a monkey on my back. And finally, two years ago, I found out, well, you know, you don't have to spend three months up there, you can rent these oxygen tents. And here in the Pacific Palisades, I set up an oxygen tent pre-acclimatized to 22,000 feet.

24:13
Finn-Olaf Jones
You still got altitude sickness, but the nice thing is when you get altitude sickness here in these oxygen tanks, you could just unzip the tent and go down and have a Coke and recover. So I went to Everest and I managed to do it in 17 days, which was fantastic. And, by the way, that last bit was really easy. My dreams were right.

24:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What about the ice cream store?

24:33
Finn-Olaf Jones
The ice cream store…

24:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It wasn't there?

24:36
Finn-Olaf Jones
But there were all sorts of other great things along the way. And I have to say, when I passed the high point I'd done 22 years ago, I said, I'm definitely going to make this. I felt great. I thought, Jesus, I'm 22 years older than I was back then. I was probably one of the oldest guys on the mountain that year. And I felt fantastic and I felt really strong. I said, there's no doubt I'm going up there. 

24:57
Finn-Olaf Jones
And I was very lucky. I had this wonderful sherpa I was climbing with, Nima. And Nima and I started pretty early that last night. We had oxygen rigs on and we got up to this point called the balcony. And there was a little group ahead of us and they'd stopped at the balcony.

25:13
Finn-Olaf Jones
We weren't tired, we passed them, and suddenly I had that summit pyramid above me there in the darkness. It was 2 am and Everest was just looming there. It was all dark. There was not another soul on there and it was one of the most mesmerizing things I've ever seen.

25:30
Finn-Olaf Jones
I mean, I've been up on big mountains before, but there's something about that was almost holy. And when I got up to the very top there, the sun was rising, all the winds of Asia, it was very strong wind blowing at us. And I had this moment, maybe a 30-second gap. I mean, usually I can pretty much account for second by second. I had about a 30-second lapse up there where I didn't really know what happened. My computer screen went completely blank.

25:56
Finn-Olaf Jones
And it was one of these weirdly divine moments. I got up to the top, I thought, oh, I'm going to be terrified. I'm going to have to figure out how to get back down. That's always a bit intimidating. Instead, I had this incredibly sort of sublime, fantastic moment I haven't had on any other mountain up there.

26:11
Finn-Olaf Jones
And I think back at it, well, what was that 30 seconds? What was the deal, that blank spot there? But it was sort of this contemplation. I hate to sound corny about it, of eternity, of knowing that the next step you can possibly take is into the void.

26:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, well, you talk about death and how you saved somebody, and I can imagine you've had near death experiences. What makes you go on an expedition like that? Is there something spiritual about it? Do you learn something about yourself on a deeper level?

26:41
Finn-Olaf Jones
Yeah, absolutely. I always learn something about myself, and learn something about the world. I mean, death is around you. I mean, certainly I've passed a few dead bodies on Everest going up, and it's certainly a presence. I have to say, I always feel pretty secure on mountains.

27:00
Finn-Olaf Jones
And I realize there's a little bit of a poker game, or lottery game on Everest because you have to go through this thing called the icefall, which now has gotten very dangerous. The bottom part of Everest has a 2,000 foot glacier. And thanks to global warming, it is very unstable.

27:13
Finn-Olaf Jones
When I went up there 22 years ago — it was called the Khumbu Icefall — I could go through it in three hours. I went through it eight times. This time it took me eight hours to get through it. It was terrifying. I actually got stuck. You want to climb it at night because you don't want to be there when the ice melts.

27:28
Finn-Olaf Jones
Because you have these giant boulders, the size of houses, collapsing on you. More people die in the icefall than any place on Everest. And you basically just want to get out of there before the sun hits it and I thought I was in pretty good time. I thought, well, three hours, you know, I started at 11 pm. I was stuck in the icefall, when the sun rose at five.

27:47
Finn-Olaf Jones
That was one of the very first times in my climbing experience I said, I am not in control. Something random could happen. I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. Now, there was a group behind me and we got to a certain point, Nima and I, where the entire icefall behind us collapsed.

28:05
Finn-Olaf Jones
It was like a domino thing. It was enormous. It was like being right in the middle of a bomb or an earthquake. And there is an amazing snow dust and ice dust that comes up and you can't see a thing. And I realized there had been this group of eight of nine people right behind me.

28:19
Finn-Olaf Jones
I thought, oh damn, we're going to be doing a lot of digging. There's no way these guys got out of there. And we were on the radio with them, and I was never more happy to hear a voice in my life. Because it turns out that they had stopped to rest back there. I mean, they weren't quite as panicked as I was. I was like, let's get the hell out of this as fast as possible. They rested and thank God they did because they would have been right under that if they'd continued.

28:40
Finn-Olaf Jones
So it's one of these weird miracles. Usually I'm very careful with these things. I mean, it's a little bit like driving drunk, to tell you the truth. Not that I drive drunk, but sometimes you have to evaluate, okay, am I sober enough to drive? Am I sober enough to be in control? And mountaineering is very much that kind of discipline, because you have to get used to altitude sickness.

29:00
Finn-Olaf Jones
You have to sort of be able to judge yourself, do I stop here and rest, or can I go on? Am I able to make a rational choice? And I like to think, you know, after all these years, I've been able to do that pretty safely. But I'll never go through the icefall again.

29:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you see a connection between your passion for art and your passion for mountaineering?

29:21
Finn-Olaf Jones
Oh, that's an interesting question. Maybe. So much of mountaineering is visual, after all. And when you're up high, there's certain things you look at, you say, wow, I'll never be able to capture this in a photograph. You can probably only capture some of these things in paintings.

29:38
Finn-Olaf Jones
And you know, there have been so many great Alpine paintings. The American Romanticists did these incredible mountain paintings, but yeah, there are things you see on these that you couldn't capture, other than if you're a painter. I certainly wish I was. But yeah, there's probably this visual grandeur that are in both mediums.

30:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
If you were to pick a painting on your wall that's your favorite, which one would you pick and why?

30:08
Finn-Olaf Jones
Well, definitely Leif's, my son's paintings. I have a couple of them. And Leif has this incredible aesthetic that he has developed that is unlike anyone else's. It's not a derivative of anyone I can think of. I feel very passionate about his paintings.

30:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I put the labels on you that you are a Dane or an American Dane, but do you feel Danish or American, or how do you identify yourself?

30:36
Finn-Olaf Jones
You know, I probably feel like a citizen of the world. I've lived and worked everywhere. I mean, I've lived and worked on three continents now. In terms of the Danishness, often I will think in Danish. I speak a couple of different languages and probably the vocabulary is much more limited, but I find myself often thinking in Danish.

30:56
Finn-Olaf Jones
And when I read German stuff, for instance, I'll read in Danish because the translation is much better. You realize, oh, Germans do have a sense of humor. You just have to read it in Danish. You can't read it in English.

31:07
Finn-Olaf Jones
I would say a lot of my tastes and the traits I look for in people, I think have been very much informed by growing up partially in Denmark. And traveling a lot, especially in these very remote places, you are always going to meet a Dane. I've met Danes in the most remote places. I remember I once went to this very, very remote Amazonian village and of course there was this white backpacker back there. I knew before I even spoke to him that he was Danish.

31:32
Finn-Olaf Jones
We have this travel bug, all of us. I love meeting Danes all over the world. It's always pretty fun. And, you know, because it's such a small country, it's six degrees of — actually it's three degrees of separation. If you meet someone, chances are you're either related to them or you went to school with their brother or cousin and it's a very small world there despite the fact that we seem to be spread all over it.

31:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You've mentioned your five children proudly, understandably. Do they speak Danish, too? Have you taught them Danish?

31:59
Finn-Olaf Jones
No. And that's a very sore point because — here's the funny thing. I grew up in Minnesota and in Stevns. And my grandparents, who had a very big influence on me, I speak their language. It's very old fashioned Danish and people think it's really funny when I go to Denmark and try to speak Danish over there and they're like, oh my God, come over here, this guy talks just like my grandmother.

32:21
Finn-Olaf Jones
I mean, I grew up saying not "thou" — it wasn't a second person formal. It was third person. I grew up saying, "What would the postmaster like for dinner tonight?" So it was this very, very old-fashioned Danish.

32:34
Finn-Olaf Jones
And the American accent gets in the way. I said, well, I either have the choice of teaching my kids to speak my bad, old fashioned Danish, or they can learn another language altogether. So I said, let's clear that space for another language altogether. When they go to Denmark, they can pick up the language organically.

32:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What's your favorite Danish word, and please spell it for the non-Danish listeners?

32:58
Finn-Olaf Jones
Alright, but I actually have a very negative one, which is jante — Janteloven because it has been such a uniquely Danish idea. I've seen it spread all over the world now. And it was something I always thought was pretty funny because there is a certain endearing negativity, I would say, about Denmark that they pull you down a little bit.

33:20
Finn-Olaf Jones
Jante is spelled j-a-n-t-e. And I think it's destined to become just as famous as hyggelig already is. Because I think people are beginning to understand this whole concept of pulling people down, you know, the tall poppy syndrome. And I have kind of a funny story.

33:37
Finn-Olaf Jones
Several members of my family actually studied journalism in Denmark, and tried to have careers in journalism in Denmark. And you would have thought, when I started writing for The New York Times, well, they'd be very proud to have this family member who managed to get into The New York Times and all that.

33:50
Finn-Olaf Jones
Not at all. Not at all! After I'd written, you know, my 100th story for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, I got a letter from, I'm not going to say who it is, but a family member who liked to think of themselves as a journalist and really had not been a journalist, had written for very minor newsletters.

34:06
Finn-Olaf Jones
She wrote this whole thing saying, well, if they only knew what a horrible person you are, they would never let you write for them. I found it very amusing. I still have it. I still show it to the kids. It's in Danish. But it's like, I said, this is janteloven and it's kind of a funny thing.

34:20
Finn-Olaf Jones
I was finding it kind of just funny and endearing, but there is something about that that permeates Denmark a bit and I think you have to take it with a sense of humor as it was done. Jante was done as a humorous story or humorous book, but as you know, people are starting to take it a bit serious, but I've always found it kind of a funny thing.

34:40
Finn-Olaf Jones
And it's something, you know, growing up in Minnesota, that very much came with those Danish immigrants. There was a certain negativity that they all had that's still there. So, both in Denmark and Minnesota. If something is good, it's not bad, right? How was your wedding? Oh, it could have been worse. You know, I mean, that's a thing that permeates so much of Danish society, and I find it — I mean, you can let it down, but I find it kind of funny.

35:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That leads to my next question. Finish the sentence, Danes are so ______.

35:10
Finn-Olaf Jones
Creative. Danes never say, I can't do this. No, they will find a way to improvise if need be. It's not just great art and great design, but it's also getting through life. I see so many other people give up where the Danes like, no, no, of course we're going to get this right.

35:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My last question to you, where would you like to grow old? And I know it's far too early to think about it, but if you were to say where you want to be buried at this moment in your life, which spot would you choose?

35:41
Finn-Olaf Jones
Hmm. You know, probably a boat, because I like traveling, and I love sailing. And so anywhere really, but moving, somewhere moving, because I really do the journey.

35:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Are you ready to get up and move now?

35:56
Finn-Olaf Jones
Let's do it!

35:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate that you wanted to be part of Danish Originals. Thank you, Finn-Olaf.

36:05
Finn-Olaf Jones
That was a lot of fun.

36:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Finn-Olaf Jones chose C.W. Eckersberg's Udsigt gennem tre buer i Colosseums tredje stokværk or A View through Three Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum from 1815 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.