Laird Hamilton: The Wild Life of Surfing’s Greatest Innovator | E166

25:12Laird Hamilton:And I like that form of learning. I have one daughter that just all homeschooled, graduated on her own, has been traveling and doing a bunch of stuff in the world. Like she's been to 32 countries in the last. I have another daughter that graduated from USC in a technical field, LIDAR, and has a job, got a job six months out of graduation and has been in the career for eight years now and excels in that environment. So I don't think there's any, you know, I don't think there's any one way. I think it's just given the person, their unique individual personality and their interest. I'm a believer that, you know, I always have a saying, you know, all is possible for the believers.

25:57Laird Hamilton:So let's start there and just what are you interested in? How can we get you more exposed to that and learn, you know, find something that you really enjoy doing or that you're inspired by because that will continue to drive you in the low spots. Like when you're not wanting to do it or you've done it, you know, and it becomes monotonous. If you have passion for it, you're going to go the extra and survive the doldrums, you know. The history of surfing, most people might think it started in Hawaii, California, but it's actually the ancient Polynesians that started in the 12th century. Yeah. Yeah.

26:41But I don't know who thought that up.

26:44Laird Hamilton:I think I don't know if they were influenced and where they saw it or what it came from. I think I mean, listen, surfing really came from an understanding of the ocean and it came from a necessity of being able to navigate the ocean's waves and how to get in and out of the ocean when there is waves for trade, for fishing, for whatever was going on. and I think it was just a byproduct of that. I think when you're out in the middle of the ocean and you have giant seas, you learn how to surf the waves and then you learn how to surf the waves coming into shore and learning how to navigate and get out of the waves.

27:19Laird Hamilton:So I think it makes sense to me that it would just have evolved from the greatest navigators, you know, the Polynesians who were the greatest navigators that we know in modern time. They were navigating by the stars and could find little islands in the middle of a giant ocean without longitude or latitude and knew how to read the ocean's texture and knew where islands were just by looking at the water movement. They had such a relationship with the ocean that it makes sense that that group who had the greatest relationship with the ocean that we know of would create this activity of riding waves.

28:03Laird Hamilton:I mean, it just makes sense to me. You started when you were two and a half, roughly. Most three-year-olds are catching big balls or hopping on one foot. You're in the ocean on a surfboard. At what point in your childhood did you say to yourself, I'm an incredible surfer? I don't think that ever happened. I never say, I think it was, I always wanted to be great. so I never said I never thought I was great I always wanted to be great and there's a difference between thinking you're great and wanting to be great I think I may never think I'm great even no matter what I think that's part of a that would be a I look at that as a I may have done great things, but I don't think I'm, I think I'm always trying to, I'm, I'm always behind.

29:00Laird Hamilton:It's a little bit of the setup. It's like a self-deprecating philosophy or something where I feel like I'm out of shape. I'm, you know, I could do better. And even at this point when, you know, certain aspects of surfing have already, I've already kind of stopped those disciplines because of interest really. I'm more interested in what I haven't done, But that's where the inspiration comes from is just the belief that you can, you know. I like the concept and I've realized that I like an elusive goal. I like a goal that's elusive, just a summit that always moves. You arrive and then all of a sudden the summit moves.

29:42Laird Hamilton:And then you arrive and the summit moves. And so then you're always moving towards the summit and you're never, you know, sitting back on your laurels going, yeah, that was, I made it to the summit. Like, no, there's no, there's no, it's about the journey and the continued journey and the continued pursuit. And I think for me, once I lose a pursuit of it, then I'm done. It's like, you know, time to go to the next place. Like, you know, throw the dirt on the hole, you know. Most people in the surfing world think you're the all-time GOAT, greatest of all time. Do you think today you have been and still are a great surfer?

30:25I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think so. Who's the GOAT? I don't think there is a GOAT. So many talented surfers. Kai Lenny doing crazy stuff. Yeah. Garrett McNamara, Pioneer. We'll talk about him in a few minutes.

30:41Laird Hamilton:Yeah. No, I don't think there's a GOAT. I don't think, I think that, I think it's, I think it's per, I think it's people's opinion that they just, that, and when you look at it, it's like art, what you, what art do you like? You can't say that so-and-so is the greatest painter because I don't like his paintings. And then you might love his paintings. And then I have another guy I like and you don't like. And I think that that's the, you know, I think that that's, for me, surfing is art. Like this is, this is, this is art. Like this is our self-expression, you know, I mean, we're, and we're always trying to box it and, you know, compartmentalize it and this big and that thing and this thing.

31:18Laird Hamilton:And I'm just like, it's, it's, this is, this is self-expression. This is just go express yourself, do what you do and to, you know, and, and let, and let people like it or not like it. And, and you know, that, that's the, I mean, what I've realized at this point is I, I just, I do it for myself. I do it for myself. Like I need it. Like I can just go and do it where no one can see me and I can get as much, if not more fulfillment from it than I can trying to present it and have it be presented. I mean, there's some of that you have to do because it's, you know, you, there's, you make, you can make money from it and you can feed your family and take care of your kids and all that stuff.

32:01Laird Hamilton:But I realized I could just do it in the dark. If I have me and a couple of friends, I can just do it right off the map, which, you know, it's not always productive for the, for the bigger picture. And so sometimes you have to, you know, participate in that. But after going through, you know, being a child, doing it alone, being lucky to have a picture every once in a while, there was no videos, no cell phone, no nothing. Maybe you got, if somebody shot some film of you and you got it back after they, you know, they processed it and you could show it on something, you could see it. That was months, years, whatever.

32:37Laird Hamilton:So that, so that part of it. So that, and then I, into the middle of my career where we were shooting everything. And every time you go out, you shoot, you're filming and you're shooting. And then what that does to the, to the, to the energy, what that does to the whole experience. And then kind of going away from that and then just having, you know, pursued some moments of just solitude with just friends in a remote place doing something, the thing you love. I mean, at the end for me, I'm like, okay, great. Like that's, I'm good. Like I can do that. That's, that's all I need. So, uh, which is beautiful.

33:17Let's talk about the popularity of surfing. There's 40 million surfers in the world, 2.5 million in the United States. What are the top three reasons people love surfing so much?

33:26Laird Hamilton:Top three? Top three. Number one, the relationship with the ocean. You're in the ocean. You're at the beach. I mean, surf locations in the ocean. I mean, they're normally beautiful places. the energy you get from being in that environment. There's, there's a, there's, you know, scientific data around, you know, absorption of energy, transfer of thing, like the whole, what the ocean does for you. Uh, and so the top three reasons, you know, like all in one that you get a relationship with the ocean, you're in the ocean. I mean, of course there is a difficulty about it that people like the challenge.

34:07Laird Hamilton:It's unique and different every time. Every wave is different even at the same place on the same day. Every single wave is a unique, different wave. And I think that, uh, I think the difficulty draws people to it as well. And especially I know guys that like hard things and it's hard. Like it's a surfing, it's not an easy thing. And most of the great surfers that you see, they started when they were three years old and they surfed their whole life. And so you see them, you're like, you know, they make it look easy. You know, the better people are at things, the easier they make it look. So I think the challenge of it, the location, the challenge, the uniqueness, you know, and then, and then there's no, you know, there's not a lot of rules.

34:47Laird Hamilton:I mean, there's a couple of etiquette rules when you're in the lineup and some people obey them and some people don't, but besides that, it's freedom. This is a very free place. You could just, you can surf however you want and no one's going, hey, you know, you got to surf like this or like that, or you got to do this or do that. I mean, we subject ourself to that, that constraint, but otherwise it's pretty freedom. It's pretty like, Just get your paint brush out and paint whatever you want. I hope you're enjoying this video so far. But before we jump back in, I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach a nice level of success in your life.

35:20Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including Google Lyft and Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than$15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey. And at this stage of my life, I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did. In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals. I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success.

35:52So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions. And if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right, now let's get back to the video. So I wake surf. Yep. We have a boat up in Coeur d 'Alene. We're going for the whole summer. Can't wait on Father's Day. Yep. Fun. Yeah. But I can surf. I'm not running into people. Yeah. So someone who doesn't surf on a regular wave, you see 30 people out there. They're all trying to catch the same wave.

36:21How in the hell do people not run each other over and crash? All the time.

36:26Laird Hamilton:Every day, all day. They're running into each other and crashing into each other and falling and getting hit by boards. And I mean, that's just, you know, that's what a crowded lineup does, especially when it's not, when there's not a pecking order, you know, like in places that the surf is a lot more aggressive, where the consequences are greater, you have a pecking order in the lineup. So if you're out there, Laird Hamilton's out there, he's going first. I mean, normally, yeah. Yeah. One of the, whoever it is, like whoever, whoever's the, the, the, you know, there's going to be three or four guys that are like the, the best guys at that break that surf it all the time.

37:08Laird Hamilton:And there's going to, and there's a pecking order. And normally, you know, there's, there's like a, there's a top group that kind of takes, you know, they take turns amongst themselves. and then as you go down the ladder, then you're just waiting for the crumbs on the side. Like if you're a beginner and you're coming into a place like that or you're an intermediate surfer and you're trying to enter a lineup like Pipeline or Tail Hooper or Jaws. Malibu is what I'm talking about. Yeah, but Malibu is a little bit more free run because you have a ton of people are just learning how. Yeah. Of course, you're going to have three or four guys that know what they're doing and they're going to always catch everything if they're in the right spot.

37:44Laird Hamilton:They're going to catch all the waves. but more so at these other breaks. But yeah, you need a pecking order in the lineup. You do. Malibu has a problem because they don't really have a pecking order, so it's just a free-for-all. So everybody's just dropping in on everybody, and it's a little chaotic, and it ends up making it very difficult to surf because it's just people in the way. When you go out there, do people say, oh, my God, Laird Hamilton is here. I mean, you have everything, right? The thing about it, it's like Gabby talks about, if you're great at a sport, you don't go to your local field and go play with some guys where they can just talk smack and ask you questions.

38:28Laird Hamilton:You don't intertwine with them. And surfing's weird like that where you can be John John Florence or Kelly Slater or whoever, great surfer, and you paddle out. you're going to be with the beginners, the intermediate, and then the good guys. And you're all going to be like that. It's like Michael Jordan's not stepping on a basketball court and having some guy that's just learning how to play banging into him or in his way when he's going to go do a layup or something. So we have that. And so that could create hostility. You know, that can create a little, and or just an interaction of just that, you know, that normally you wouldn't have to deal with.

39:12Laird Hamilton:You wouldn't have to be dealing with, you know, dumb questions. I always say dumb questions deserve dumb answers. We're going to get into the details of big wave surfing, but for those people who don't know, what's the difference between regular surfing and big wave surfing? Well, a big wave riding is just when the level of discomfort is high enough that most of the people don't want to do it. Pretty much. What height is that, for example? It varies at what location. But as soon as the waves... I mean, it happens a lot sooner in California because they don't have consistently big surf. In Hawaii, it happens later.

39:49Laird Hamilton:So you could say in California, when the waves get 15 to 20 foot faces, then that probably is all of a sudden like that's going to be a bigger day and, you know, fearing, right? Most people are going to be fearing for themselves. And then when you go to Hawaii, that's more common. So you're going to need it to be, you know, 25 to 30 foot faces or, you know, and so on. But big is just when there's a level of discomfort that gets most people sitting on the side. That's how I look at it. Go back to the 1980s. Yeah. And you're with your buddy, Buzzy Kerbox, again. Yep. And you guys revolutionized the sport of surfing by inventing toe-in surfing.

40:39Yep.

40:40Laird Hamilton:Derek Doner, Buzzy Kerbox and myself playing around in the summertime, which usually I always say the greatest ideas come out of boredom. So we're bored. It's summertime. And Buzzy had a Zodiac, one of those Navy SEAL, like 16 foot with an outboard on it, like you see. And we're towing each other around with a, you know, like early wakeboarding. This is pre-wakeboarding. There really wasn't. Wakeboarding hadn't really started yet. We called it freeboarding. So freeboarding was pre-wakeboarding, which was just being towed behind a boat with a surfboard. And that happened, you know, I think they were doing it in the 50s or even before that.

41:20Laird Hamilton:And so we were playing around and there was a little swell, some little waves. And I'm not sure how it was, but either I whipped one of those guys on or I got whipped on. But a light bulb went off in our head that we could get pulled onto waves and ride waves. And that we had had an issue with a kind of a barrier that was stopping us from being able to catch bigger waves in the wintertime. And we had been windsurfing on big waves, so we had already been able to be on them with power. So we knew that there was a kind of a merger of, and so we implemented that technique the next winter. Explain what it is, though.

42:03Like, how do you, like, what does toe-in mean for the people that don't know?

42:06Laird Hamilton:Yeah, it's a little bit like the space shuttle and gets on the back of a 747 and the 747 takes off and then at a certain speed, the space shuttle can fly. So it's exactly like that. You're getting pulled behind the boat. The boat positions you or now the jet ski, because that's a much better device. Now the jet ski positions you onto the wave. And so now you're on your surfboard. The driver puts you in position and then you let go and then you can ride the wave because now you're already on it. And now you can surf the wave and then the guy can get out of the wave so he doesn't either get in your way or get, you know, destroyed himself.

42:45Laird Hamilton:So, and that technique really just revolutionized big wave riding because we have a ceiling in big wave riding due to the size of the board and the speed in which you can manually paddle yourself makes it so at a certain size. and also in a certain conditions with it's windy and bumpy that that size comes sooner but at a certain size of wave you're just it's physically impossible to match the speed and be able to make the wave I mean that that kind of barrier is being trying to pushed at certain times but you need such ideal conditions so you might have a day that's the best day in 20 years you can push the barrier of how big somebody can physically paddle into.

43:32Laird Hamilton:And then you might not see that again for 20 or 30 years. So you're not able to kind of get into these bigger waves where with towing in, you can be pulled onto most anything. And there's actually another barrier after that I, that I kind of experienced. And there's another barrier, which is that the boards themselves become almost physically impossible to ride waves at a certain height. And that's where the desire to foil started actually. Okay, we'll get into foiling in a minute. But of course, there was Jaws 40 to 50 feet. Yep. And then Nazareh officials, they knew there were big waves there.

44:11Yep. No one could surf them. They contacted Garrett McNamara.

44:15Laird Hamilton:Yep. They went out there and they said, holy shit, look at these waves. Some, you know, 70, 100 foot waves. How did Nazareh change the game? It's a spectacle. You know, it's right on the shore. You can see it. It's gotten a lot of attention. So that, I mean, like everything, exposure changes the game, right? I mean, Nazarene's been there for a long time and been killing fishermen in boats. And they got a church out there that they pray to all the guys that have drowned over the years that were out in their boats and maybe the engine broke and the waves came and killed them because they weren't, you know, swimmers or they didn't have flotation devices or whatever.

44:52Laird Hamilton:So, but the spectacle, and it's in Europe. So they, you know, in Portugal, they, they, they likes the attention. Portugal likes, it's good for tourism, promote the spot, you know, promote Nazare. Um, so it's gotten a lot of attention that, that way. Um, I mean, I have mixed feelings about Nazare. I mean, as far as, uh, you know, as a surfer, as a big wave rider, if you talk to most great big wave surfers, Nazare is not an ideal big wave for surfing. It's just not. And without toe-in, it would be, you know, there'd be good days there, but it would be on the smaller days when the waves are closer to the shore.

45:35Laird Hamilton:But as far as, you know, it does a unique thing. It has an interesting, you know, bottom topography. So it makes the wave double up and takes two waves and turns them in for a moment, and then it dissipates. And so there's some things about it that, you know, it's not as far as a performance big wave. You can't compare it to Mavericks. You can't compare it to Piaji, which is Jaws. I mean, these are dynamic big wave surfing waves. Nazare is kind of a feet wave, I would call it. Like not feet, but in a feet, like you've done a feet. And they're going for this Guinness World Record thing that I've always been against since the very beginning, only because I think it's impossible to measure a wave truly.

46:28Laird Hamilton:It's just you're measuring a four-dimensional object with one dimension. It's like I always say that waves are like dogs. There's all different kinds of dogs. There's big dogs, friendly big dogs, and there's savage little dogs, you know, and there's pit bulls and Great Danes and all these. And waves have personalities more like that. So I look at them more like that. But again, I'm an anomaly. So explain to people what's happening beneath the water and how these big waves form. Well, they're usually in a perfect location to receive a giant swell from these big open ocean storms, these big huge storms that have high wind that generate these swells.

47:14Laird Hamilton:and there's a bottom topography that has a certain shape that allows them to come in. And usually they stick out. It's like an outcropping. It's a little point, but it's underwater. And so the waves will come. And depending on the shape of that point, it'll either be no good or it'll be a great wave. And most of them have a lot of—they're pretty similar, most of these big waves. They usually have a deep canyon next to them and then a big, I'd say it looks like a knoll. What happens a lot of the time is when you look at the land on the land, it's a mimic of what's in the water. So you look at the land, like you go to Nazarene, you see the point of Nazarene, and then you think about that under the water is that same point.

48:01Laird Hamilton:And so the waves come in, and as the water gets shallower, the waves rise up. And depending on how steep the water gets shallow is how fast the waves rise up. And so like in a place like Tahiti in Teahupo, which is one of the most famous big waves, or one of the most famous tube, which is a cylindrical wave in the world, is on a barrier reef. And the reef is at the perfect angle to absorb the energy of the swell. So it makes the wave stand up in the shortest distance possible, which results in the wave having a giant cavern in it, right? So if it was long and slopey, then the wave would stand up and march and march and then break.

48:39Laird Hamilton:A little bit more like Nazare has a longer shelf. And so the bottom topography dictates the shape of the wave and the way the wave breaks. What's the sound? Is there a sound when you're surfing of the wave? Is it deafening? What's interesting, and I've talked to my friends, Makua Rothman, other big wave riders and stuff, we don't hear anything. But there actually is a sound. But we don't hear anything when we're doing it. Now, like I can hear the wave like when I lived on Maui near Jaws. I could hear it from my house. I could hear like it sounded like mortar, like rumble in the distance. You could hear like almost like a thunder type of a thing.

49:24Laird Hamilton:So, you know, the bigger the surf is, the lower the decibel, the lower, the more of the rumble that you hear. uh and so yeah i mean you know that's that sound calls you if you're into surfing big waves when you hear that you're drawn to that to that energy and and uh but yeah the sound is deafening when you're observing but when you're doing it's it's almost like the sound uh and i talked to some friends that were like have been in gunfights and stuff and they said they don't even remember hearing anything. Like everything just, it's almost like hearing becomes unimportant for the, for what you need, unless somebody yells or something and then you'll, but otherwise hearing could just be a kind of a useless sense at that point.

50:16Laird Hamilton:Like not, you don't need it. So, and the body's only important, the body's only prioritizing what you need. So need the vision, you know, need the feel, need it. There's certain things that you need and the body prioritizes that. Uh, and so you'll just be like, so a lot of times we don't even have memory for good. We have patchy memory from rides and situations because if you succeed, then the body knows you did the right thing. So it doesn't need a perfect picture. When you fail, then you have a good memory of it. Usually when you crash or have an accident, the body has all full recollection of everything.

50:53Laird Hamilton:So to avoid that in the future, if you succeed, the body knows you know how to do the right thing. So it's okay having intermittent, you know, frame. It's like, okay, I'm good. I know you know what to do and you've done it. So we're just going to have a pretty minimal amount of memory. It's a dangerous sport. From the time you were a kid, you were getting rescued from these riptides almost on a daily basis. Your mom at one point said, She's surprised you made it to 20 years old. Tell us what happened. And you've broken nearly every bone in your body. I mean, every major bone. I'm not Travis Piston.

51:28I don't have quite the metal. But yeah, I have a lot of stitches, a lot of wounds, a lot of breaks. Thanks for listening to part one of my incredible interview with Laird Hamilton. Be sure to check out part two of my incredible interview with Laird.

51:58To be continued...