- Our first guests had the entire world talking last week
after becoming the first people to accomplish
what everyone thought was impossible.
Take a look.
- An incredible record-setting climb,
a story we've been following from the start.
- Kevin Jorgensen and Tommy Caldwell
entered the record books on Wednesday,
the first to free climb the Dawn Wall
of Yosemite's El Capitan.
- We're at the base of the Captain.
- Today's the day.
Piece of cake.
[singing] - I was left
To my device
- There's this crazy arctic windstorm
happening today.
- It's easy to get frustrated,
because you'll feel totally fine
and then your foot will just unexpectedly pop off.
The pitch of the day was 15,
which is the second hardest pitch on the wall.
Tommy totally crushed it.
It was the smoothest I've ever seen him climb.
- It takes 14 little micro-handed foot moves
to get across that face.
- He's got this right hand hold that's just three fingers wide
and a total razor.
- Everything has to click,
and everything has to be done absolutely perfectly.
- Whoa!
[cheering]
- That's pretty intense.
- You know, thoughts crossed my mind
that I should just throw in the towel
and support Tommy to the top,
but it's been six years and hundreds of days,
and I really want to do this thing.
I'd been picturing what it was gonna be like
to climb that last ten feet to the summit,
and I remember grabbing the very top
and just pausing for a minute, making sure it was real,
and then the cheers erupted.
[people cheering]
- In their first sit-down interview,
please welcome Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgensen.
I, like the entire world, was watching you
try to accomplish it,
and I just thought, "Why?"
[laughter]
- I think I got to quote Johnny Cash:
"If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough."
For me, it was-- it was a family thing.
I started doing it from the time I was a little kid.
My dad was a mountain guide, so I grew up in the mountains,
and it's kind of what I knew.
- Have you always wanted to do that as well?
- Well, with this project specifically,
I saw a short film featuring Tommy,
so I just gave him a call.
I'm like, "I think he needs a partner."
- So you didn't really know each other.
- We had met briefly,
but we didn't know each other well.
- Now, what's a typical day like?
What time do you wake up,
and how long do you climb
before you stop and pitch a tent?
- On this wall, we wanted to climb when it was cold
because the friction, when you grab
those tiny, little holes, is way better.
So we kind of wake up leisurely and drink coffee in the sun
and watch the-- watch the sun rise,
and we'd have these really nice mornings,
and then in the evenings,
it would get really tense with our trying to accomplish
the pitch that we needed to do that day.
- Yeah, exactly.
- And I understand at night you would drink whiskey
and watch Netflix.
- A bit of that.
- That was our New Year's Eve party.
- Oh, I see. - Yeah.
- 'Cause I was gonna say, "You can't drink whiskey
every night and then climb a mountain."
- [laughs]
- Just a little bit of whiskey.
- The tiniest bit.
- You can't put a price on morale.
- Yeah.
So what's the scariest moment that you had up there?
- We had some really cold days, or cold nights,
where all the water from the top of El Capitan
would freeze to the wall,
and then when the sun would hit,
we had a little bit of ice fall,
so that was sometimes scary.
The ice chunks would come off and kind of whiz by us.
I don't think it was actually super dangerous, though.
- Um...
[laughter]
There's nothing about this that wasn't super dangerous.
And I have to say, please explain.
So when you were a kid, how did you cut your finger off?
What happened?
- So when I was, like, 21 years old,
I cut it off with a table saw,
and it was this crazy moment in my life,
because I wanted nothing more to be a full-time climber.
I just wanted to travel the world and climb.
I was living out of a car.
And then I chopped off my finger,
and I was like, "Oh, man, this could be over."
But while I was in the hospital, a doctor came up to me,
and he kind of said the same thing to me.
He was like, "You should really think about
what else you want to do with your life."
- That's crazy.
Not only did you do it, you did it with--
I mean, accomplishing something that a doctor says
you're not gonna be able to do in your lifetime,
much less that kind of accomplishment--
Amazing. Amazing, right?
[cheers and applause]
Well, I'm gonna give you something.
Next time you're up on a mountain
and you are watching something on Netflix or anything,
I have a couple of baskets for you.
I have a five-year subscription to Netflix.
I have whiskey. I have--
[cheers and applause]
I have my book.
[speaking indistinctly]
You'll love it.