Trekking Solo to the North and South Poles with Preet Chandi

January 20, 2026·32 min·2 clips

Preet Chandi watches the plane disappear, leaving her alone in Antarctica's vast white desert.

A small plane leaves Preet Chandi on the ice. She is alone in Antarctica with a 192-pound sled and miles of white ahead. That first turn stays with her. The South Pole expedition becomes the start of a polar life built on military medical work, hard training, and going back to the ice. By 37, she has three Antarctic expeditions behind her. The host handles the record talk lightly, noting that each trip brought a new Guinness World Record without letting the numbers take over. The roughest part is plain ugly. After an 18-hour push, Preet can barely move. She calls her partner and logistics company while sleep deprivation starts messing with her sense of reality. She thinks she is going backward. The next day, after sleep, she pushes for the pole with almost nothing left. Ten minutes of skiing means another break. Even finishing feels strange. People appear out of the sun, and she has to tell herself this is just what everyone sees there. The host calls that fear scary, then asks what still made Preet excited. The answer is quieter than the danger. Preet talks about opening the tent zipper in the morning just to look out at the sun, the space, and nobody else around. The awe and the suffering sit right next to each other. The conversation keeps coming back to one honest question: how does someone carry fear, exhaustion, and wonder into a place like that? The North Pole is next. Preet is training for a spring departure, raising funds through her PolarPreet profile, and taking another wild idea back onto the ice.

As heard by us

A grounded polar-expedition story about ambition, exhaustion, and staying functional when the margin disappears.

Preet Chandi's polar story is less a triumph reel than a look at risk management under brutal conditions. The episode starts with her first Antarctic drop-off, alone on the ice with a 192-pound sled, then tracks how that South Pole push grew into a career of three Antarctic…

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Why you'd press play

You want a polar story that stays concrete about the cost and the payoff.

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