Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1571 - Emily Harrington
Uploaded: 2020-11-27T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1571 - Emily Harrington' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1571 - Emily Harrington' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1571 - Emily Harrington

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Emily.
Hi.
What's happening?
How are you?
You seem very normal, and that's what always stuns me about people who do
insane things.
Like they're just, like Alex Honnold, I've met him a few times, had him on the
show a
couple times.
Super normal guy, but does what you do.
Yeah.
I would argue Alex isn't as normal as me.
Oh, really?
How so?
I don't know.
You've met him.
I think he's normal.
He's pretty normal.
He's very mellow.
What he does is exponentially more dangerous than what I do, I would argue.
Because there's no ropes at all.
He doesn't use ropes.
I do use ropes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Listen, it's dangerous.
What you do is dangerous.
We'll get there.
Yeah.
Tell people what you did, because it's pretty crazy.
So, I did what's called free climbing.
I free climbed a route on El Capitan, which is a 3,200 foot cliff in Yosemite
National Park,
and I did it in under 24 hours.
That is a long way to go.
Yeah.
3,200 and...
It's something.
3,200 feet is what I say.
I think it might just be like a little more than that.
When you're halfway there, Emily Harrington becomes the first woman to scale El
Capitan via its notoriously difficult Golden Gate route.
Why is that route more difficult?
Well, okay, so...
Is it route or route?
I don't think it really matters.
I say route.
Yeah, it should.
So, essentially, El Cap is this giant cliff face.
And there's hundreds of routes up El Cap, different pathways you can take.
And right now, there's currently only like 15 ways to get up it via free
climbing.
Free climbing being using only your hands and feet to ascend and a rope in case
you fall.
And I chose the route called Golden Gate, which is more difficult than the
route Freerider,
which people are very familiar with because that's the route that Alex Honnold
free soloed,
meaning he climbed it without a rope.
Yeah, that seems insane.
So, you're less insane than him.
Oh, yeah.
Definitely less insane than him.
Alex is a dear friend of mine, but there are some things I don't understand
about him.
Yeah, I don't know if he understands those things about him.
No.
I mean, I have an enormous amount of respect for him, but what he does is truly
remarkable.
You bonked your head while you're doing it, too, huh?
I could see the mark on your forehead.
Yeah, you can see the scar.
Yeah, and that's actually the second time I hit my head trying to do this.
Last year, I had a really bad fall.
Wound up in the hospital, full concussion, the whole thing.
This time, it was slightly less serious, but maybe more dramatic because it
happened like
way higher up on the wall.
Oof.
How high were you up?
2,800 feet, I'd say.
Like, almost to the top.
It was a whole...
It was very dramatic.
What happened?
So, the day was actually going really well.
I've been trying to do this for a few years now.
Probably, I would say, three years I've been working towards this goal.
And I'd actually done the route in 2015 over the course of six days.
And I really wanted to do the same route in 24 hours.
Can I stop you there?
When you do it over six days, do you sleep on the route?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's how most people climb El Cap.
They sleep on the wall.
It takes like five to seven days or so.
That seems more sketchy.
It's different because there's a lot more logistics involved, right?
Like, imagine you have to live in the vertical world for days on end.
So, think about everything you do from when you wake up to when you go to bed.
Including pooing.
Oh, yeah.
You have to poo vertically?
Yeah.
We use wag bags or little plastic bags.
And you go in that bag and then you put it in another bag and...
And then carry it with you?
So, you carry your poo for seven days?
You put it in another bag and then you like hang it below everything and you
take it up
with you.
And then you like, you take it...
Yeah, you don't leave it, obviously.
Oh, no, I would imagine.
Stuff it in the crack up there.
Is that someone pooing?
No, that's just someone hanging out.
Oh.
That's like how you do it when you live on the wall.
So, you have that ledge.
Like the Michael Jackson song.
What?
Living on the wall.
Yeah.
Know that song?
No.
You know?
I'm not familiar.
It's a famous song.
So, you sleep in that thing.
I would get zero sleep.
I don't like sleep when I'm near the edge of my bed.
I get nervous.
It's amazing how exhausted you are at the end of the day and how used to the
whole...
Like how used to it you get.
You just adjust.
The human body is like...
Like humans are really remarkable in their ability to like adapt to things.
And so, it's pretty cool how...
Yeah, it's really scary at first.
But then, the more you do it, the more you're just like, okay, well, this is
kind of normal.
Are you...
When you're sleeping in that thing, are you fully harnessed in and strapped in?
You sleep in a harness and you just usually have like a loose like rope or sling
or something
attached to the anchor point.
So, like if you roll out...
You know, if you're one of those people that like rolls out of bed at night,
then...
Yikes!
You don't fall to your death.
Can you imagine?
No.
They're just the feeling of like waking up swinging, hanging from your harness.
That guy's not a harness.
He's...
So, he has actually...
See how he has that sling around his waist?
No.
That's just like...
That little rope?
Yeah.
That's like last resort.
Like...
That's Tommy Caldwell.
He...
Tommy Caldwell.
You're a psycho.
He free climbed perhaps the hardest big wall in the world.
Also on El Cap called the Dawn Wall.
And he was up there for 17 days.
So, you'd imagine 17 days like...
Look at all his stuff.
That's like...
He's like a homeless person up there.
Yeah.
There's a lot of stuff.
You know like the homeless people at those little camps?
That is a...
He's a maniac.
That's a crazy person.
Look at him.
Checking his fingernails.
Yeah.
You see he's also...
He's also actually missing a finger, which is pretty rare for an elite level
rock climber.
Oh, wow.
What happened to his finger?
I believe it was a table saw accident.
Home improvement accident.
Oh!
And so he's using everything but his index.
Yeah.
He kind of climbs...
He kind of climbs like this and uses the little...
The nub?
The nub.
He's...
Yeah.
Definitely...
Tommy's one of my true heroes.
Ultimate climbing hero.
You have a...
That is a very small click, right?
Yeah.
Of savage psychos that are willing to climb.
Yeah.
Gigantic mountain faces.
Yeah.
It's a relatively small group.
I mean...
It's growing...
Climbing is definitely growing in popularity.
But it definitely used to be like a little bit...
Like a small little community.
And I think we still feel that way.
Is there a danger in the climbing world?
Or not a danger.
A concern, I should say.
Of people who are seeing people like Alex Honnold and yourself become famous
and get all this attention from these very dangerous climbs.
And they want to perhaps accelerate their progress and jump right in and try to
do some really risky things.
I mean, I could see that being a danger, especially with like what Alex does,
climbing without a rope.
I would still argue that what I do is a relatively safe form of climbing.
I climb with a rope.
When I fall, the rope catches me.
It's super safe.
When I fall, the rope catches me.
Free climbing, I'll cap in a day.
What I just did.
I definitely cut some corners and took more risk.
But that's an achievement that not many people have done or really strive to do.
And so I think for the most part, climbing is actually a very controlled, very
safe activity.
And you can make it as dangerous as you want it to be.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
I understand what you're saying.
So if you're a person like Alex that's deciding, you know, he maps these routes,
he does them with ropes, and then he's like, I can do this.
Yes.
And Alex is so unique in a way.
And I think anyone that watches the movie Free Solo, anyone that talks to Alex
understands that what he does is, it's so well thought out and it's so well
planned.
And every single decision he makes is very calculated.
And I think that that's just, and I think that that's a testament to what
climbing is truly about.
Like we're not, like we're not out to go feel an adrenaline rush when we go
climbing.
Like if you're feeling adrenaline, it essentially means like you messed up,
like something's wrong.
And climbing is very much more about like the movement and the challenge and
the mental challenge of all of it than going out and like trying to get a
thrill.
How did you get involved in this?
I started climbing when I was 10 years old.
I was at, I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and my parents used to take me to the
Boulder Reservoir, this lake.
Me and my cousins.
Do you have a Subaru?
I did have a Subaru.
Everyone in Boulder has a Subaru.
I got a Subaru for my 16th birthday.
That's like 70% of the cars out there.
Green Subaru.
These are so practical.
They work in the snow.
Yeah.
I had it for years.
So anyway, my parents took me to the lake and they had this little festival
there.
And I grew up, I'm an only child.
I grew up with my two cousins who were boys.
And we were just like super competitive with each other all the time.
Like all I wanted to do was be better than them at like literally anything.
It didn't matter what it was.
So we were at this lake and they had a little festival with one of those tower,
rock towers, you know, the ones that they let the kids climb on.
And we all tried to climb the wall.
And I just remember it was like, well, I have to go to the top because they
went to the top.
And, you know, there was like no other option.
But the interesting thing that happened when I was climbing was it was just
this feeling of like, oh, this is what I'm meant to do.
Like it was like I just felt like I belonged up there.
And I remember the feeling so vividly even now, 23 years later.
It was like I was scared, but I kind of liked it.
And I just really, I got down and I was like, Dad, I want to go climbing.
Like that's what I want to do.
I want to quit everything else.
I was a gymnast.
I played soccer.
I was a ski racer.
I was like, I don't want to do, I don't want to do any of that anymore.
I just want to climb.
Why?
What about climbing?
Like canceled all those other things out in your interests?
I think part of it was because I was good at it.
And I like kind of knew that I was good at it.
Like I could feel like I felt I was strong from gymnastics.
I had a lot of body awareness.
Like it just felt like something that I could be good at.
And I really enjoyed just the like feeling of being up high, the feeling of the
exposure.
And I really enjoyed the process of like solving it.
Like I loved that cerebral, like how am I going to get to the top?
Like how am I going to solve this puzzle?
So what was the course of progression?
You started out, did you start out just climbing small things with friends?
And then did you eventually get a coach?
Like how did you get into like serious hardcore climbing?
I was among the first generation of kids, climbers who started out in a
climbing gym.
So like in an artificial setting.
Like a lot of people before me started, you know, in Yosemite, outdoors, like
in the mountains.
But I grew up like in the 90s and that was sort of like the beginning of
climbing gyms.
And so I started in a gym on plastic and my dad took me to the local climbing
gym in Boulder.
It's called the Boulder Rock Club.
And he enrolled me in like a kids class.
And they sort of noticed a little bit of talent, I think, in me.
And they invited me to join their junior climbing team.
Like there's junior climbing teams.
Now every gym in the country has a junior climbing team.
Is there a benefit to learning on plastic first?
I mean, I think access for one.
Like if you live in a place where there's no rocks, it's pretty easy to go
still go climbing.
You could go to the gym.
That said, it's very much become its own discipline, gym climbing