Gabriel Basso shared the reasoning behind his ‘instantaneous decision’ to remove his Instagram account after encountering a photo of Mount Everest.
The star of The Night Agent, who portrays Peter Sutherland in the Netflix thriller, sat down with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday (February 3).
The late night host was curious about why Basso had chosen to delete his Instagram, a move that had not gone unnoticed by fans.
Basso, aged 31, explained that he had a realization after coming across a photo taken from the summit of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.
Importantly, the photo was not an AI-generated image in this case.
“I was doom-scrolling and I saw a picture from the top of Mount Everest. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is beautiful,'” Basso explained.
“And then I stopped and I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ Why do I now know what that looks like?
“And it p****d me off that that guy stepped over literal bodies to get up there to see that view, and now I was seeing it from my couch.
“And it bothered me that I had that image in my head now without any effort to earn that visual. And I was like, ‘Dude, screw this whole platform.’”
According to Ian Taylor Trekking, about 800 people attempt to scale Mount Everest, situated on the Nepal-China border, every year.
Rising over 29,000 feet above sea level, Everest is an extremely perilous challenge. Since records began, at least 300 individuals have died trying to reach the summit, as reported by the BBC.
The 26,000 feet mark on Everest is known as the death zone, due to the lack of sufficient oxygen for long-term human survival, making even the simplest tasks feel insurmountable.
Hillary Step Treks describes it as: “The body starts feeling numb… cells stop functioning and die cell by cell, minute by minute.”
There have been numerous reports of climbers witnessing dead bodies on Everest.
So, while the view from the peak may be breathtaking, the reality is stark and grim.
Considering this, Basso expressed that he ‘shouldn’t know’ what the top of Everest looks like, questioning, “Is that not insane to anyone else?”
Fallon noted that Basso couldn’t ‘unsee’ the view, to which Basso replied: “No. That’s what I’m saying. If you make it to the top of Mount Everest, that should be yours. He literally stepped over bodies of people. That’s all they wanted to see.
“And now I’m sitting there going, ‘Huh-huh,'” he reflected. “That’s whack.”
Basso concluded by saying he wants to ‘mind his own business.’
“That’s the non-consensual images on the Discover page. Stop showing me these things,” he mentioned.
Challenging him gently, Fallon asked if he’d ever watched a movie.
“Yeah, but I asked to see it. I pressed ‘play’ to see the movie,” Basso responded. “I didn’t ask to see that view. It was just shown to me.”
This serves as a reminder to consider what content you’re engaging with during your next scroll through social media.