Laird Hamilton

26:09I heard a general give a speech to like the graduating class and he was talking about making your bed you know in the military. They go oh we you know make your bed and he goes the reason why we have you make your bed is because it's task completion. You start by completing something that allows you to go to the next thing and complete it. So I think we are set up to be about. I know two big music stars both of whom even went in a hotel make their own bed every night. Guaranteed. It's not because you want the bed. It's just what it means. What it represents or something about. And it's a ritual too.

26:44It's like that's part of like brushing your teeth. I have my rituals like putting the dishes away in the kitchen in the morning. Like certain things that I do every single day. Every morning take a shower. I always shower before I go to bed. I can shower an hour before and then right before I go to sleep I always go shower. Like it's just like cold shower before sleep. No hot shower. Yeah. The reason why I think part of it is the cold shower jacks me up. I see. I get jacked up from the cold. The cold kind of wires me where the hot shower. If I take it in real hot then I also kind of I'll go into like a I'll get colder after.

27:16I see. Then the air is everything is colder when you go out the beds colder because that's my biggest sleeping thing is overeating. Do you sleep with the cold bed now or no? I have been but it's I think I broke them all. Like they don't I overheat them now so I gotta get that. I gotta get it new and but yeah I have a cold pad and I had a cold blanket but the blanket stop has stopped working even though I like that weight. Yeah. I get you weighted blanket. I do like that way. A cold weighted blanket the problem with a weighted blanket you get too hot. Yeah. But if you have a cold weighted blanket but that's that's the highest luxury I think you can have.

27:49You have cold weighted blankets this week with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting about that one that doesn't mimic nature. Yeah. Weighted blanket. Maybe it really does. Maybe it's like we're like childhood being. Yeah. What is called swaddling. Well think about big fur too. Think about big animal stuff on top of you. Like stuffing yourself under leaves or whatever. Like I mean we probably that's probably where we felt the most safe too. So as you had some kind of armor over you because we didn't have thin sheets. I mean I think there was probably we were under animal skins and stuff like with some weight.

28:25You got some big animal skin on you. There's some load on that. You know we didn't have nice down back then. And if you're in the tropics then you have the opposite right. You have the opposite. You have the. You have. You have. Trying to cool off. Yeah. Because we were we've been that way the longest right. All those things that we without modern comforts. Yeah. We were wild for the longest period. Yeah. Like that. And you can expect because we had for 200 years or one or two generations. We have DNA that you know holds information for 14 generations. You know when you're talking about one or two.

29:05The dominant part of it you know is all that other stuff. And like tune with nature. Exactly. Because you weren't in tune with nature. You would not survive. So that forced everybody actually to have a certain relationship with it. Yeah. And it seems like as soon as we get a little bit away. The further away we get the more issues we have. And then we go back to it and they're like oh you need to be outside. You know I had a neighbor nice lady walk by and she's like I really want to go the next level of my health. And I just was like I think we were loading a dumpster with a bunch of trees I've been cutting in my yard.

29:37And she's like I really want to go the next level of my health. I go well how you sleeping? How's your hydration? Like what kind of movement you got? Like I mean like everybody wants to go the next level. How about just deal with the foundation? Because if you're not sleeping you're not hydrating you're not active. You're not doing these basic core things. There's nowhere to go. There's no supplement. There's no new exercise. And really there's none of that anyway without this. There's no shortcuts. There's no shortcut. No those could be like bonus. But that's all. And maybe enhance the work that you're doing.

30:11Like hey you're going to work harder and you're going to enhance it by using some hack or something like that. But I mean even if you think about heat and ice all we're doing is simulating environments that we were normally in. And in some ways now we're turbocharging it. Whereas before you wouldn't get to experience hot and cold on a daily basis. You'd have to go through seasons. It would take longer. Yeah we can condense it. That's right. Do you remember your first memory of riding a wave as a kid? I mean the truth is is that my first experience, you know, shoreline, little tiny kid probably could barely swim if could swim.

30:53Waves run up the beach on the sand and hit you and knock you and you roll in. And you're kind of playing on the edge of land and sea. I could swim early. My mom said I was literally crawled to the pool and go in and swim. Which could have been attributed because the way I was born on my mom had that, you know, that hair dryer over the stomach that made room in the for me. And when I was inside of her. So they had like a reverse hairdryer that was pulling on the abdomen. They created space for me to move. I don't know if there's really, you know, that in my swam early. But I swam or she said I swam.

31:28She said it was like kind of scary how early I swam. But when I was probably somewhere like three, maybe two and a half or three years old, they took me out on a surfboard on a and there was little tiny waves on in LaHina on Maui. And they pushed me onto a wave and I fell off and it was on a bed of urchins. And so I had both of my butt cheeks completely impaled with urchins as a little like, I think I still might have had diapers and stuff like. And so that was, you know, I said I had an early experience. Yeah. Like I just remember it like somehow like I got impaled, you know, as a young little kid.

32:08Like I think that was the beginning of my, I don't know, just the relationship between the ocean and and the severity of it, you know. I had respect for it right away. Oh yeah. Urchin respect. But yeah, so young. I mean, I was around the ocean from a little kid and my mom was a beat, you know, beach lover, beach go or my real father was a surfer. My step that was a surfer. So I shouldn't say real. I should say blood, blood father. But yeah, we were beach people like, you know, Southern California. Then take me to LaHina when I'm a little tiny kid. My mom's boyfriend surfed. Was surfing every day.

32:48So I was just around surfers and surfing in the water. How big was the surf culture globally at that time? Very small. There were people surfing in France and Australia and, you know, was it true? You would probably know the names of half of the people surfing. Well, let's just say all the best surfers in the world. There was only a handful, a couple handfuls of great surfers and everybody knew everybody. And surfing itself was the competition aspect of it was almost non -existent. And it was more of a rebel group, a group that was rebelling against Vietnam. You know, like bikers or something.

33:30Yeah. That was the beginning, but it was on the beginning of the first surf, apparel companies and then surf competition. Was it like dropping out of society to live a better life on the beach? Was that the idea? Absolutely. I mean, my mom's reason to take me to Hawaii as a child was escape the rat race. Was the 60s? It was Woodstock. It was like, you know, hey, you're going to get the car and get the job and do the thing or you're just going to rebel against the whole thing. So it was like a cultural revolution. And surfing was definitely at least my parents. They were on the tip of the spear.

34:08I mean, there's people in the 50s and stuff too, but the rils kind of surge in that culture, in the surf culture was that. And in that, when you were growing up, was it people were riding long boards? It was long boards and then the 60s, which was drug, like acid and board design. I would describe it as just like a, it was an explosion in creativity. So it was a crazy, what can we ride? Fiberglass came out, foam came out like all the same. Do you remember pre -fiberglass? Well, I can remember, you know, fiberglass was created way before that, but having foam and fiberglass in the surf industry and being able to start to play with board shapes and do all the stuff that they weren't able to do when they had wood.

35:01And there was no fins. So it was the long board, where the first fiber kind of fiberglass boards with foam, and then that allowed the short board revolution. So first it was wood boards. I wasn't burned yet. That's before your time. I came right when long boards and long boards made out of foam resin to the short board revolution. When did the fin get added? I'd probably 50s, late 50s, something like that. I would think, you know, right before I was born, probably, but but the fin was pretty primitive. Like it was a bit was one big fin. It was just one big. How do you ever read in the board without a fin?

35:37Yeah. What's out like? Amazing. Yeah, I like boards without fins. They're amazingly fast. So fins actually slow boards down, but they make them controllable. I see. So boards without fins, I mean, that's what all the ancient boards were like with no fins. Yeah, historically. Yeah, historically no fins. And then fins came out and that really changed the way because then the boards were. You could aim them. You could aim them. Yeah. And actually you could stay higher in the wave, but the irony is is that to ride a board, a finless board, you have to use the edge of the board, which changes the whole way you do it.

36:16And to really, the ultimate is to have both where you're riding the edge with the fin. That's where we evolved to. But first we had fin and we were using fin. Then we went back to using edge. And then the relationship between edge and fin is what that's where we are. I mean, now we're at something else because we're, you know, we're leaving the water. But or we're just riding fin. Now we're just riding fin. And boards are just to have the fin something to connect you to stand on. Yeah. Could you imagine something other than a board being the thing that connects to the fin? Well, you know, I don't.

36:54Yeah, I'm just wondering. Now, it's a question. Yeah. It's like the reason the boards look like they do is because of how they interact with the water. Yeah. So if their job stops being to interact with the water, do they need to look like what they look like? Yeah, they do look different now, but they still have it. They still do have an interaction with the water. So you still have that. Until you like for the first part. Yeah. And for during too, like if you make a mistake or something, they have to touch and go, but it's a little bit like if you think about the space shuttle and how much different that looks like than an airplane.

37:27Yeah. I mean, it looks like an airplane, but it really doesn't look like an airplane. Like you're looking at that. You're like, that doesn't look like an airplane. Well, they can't take off, right? They have to be launched and then they can fly once they're up to speed and they can land, but they're not great at taking off. So that's a little bit of what what happens when you don't need a board, right? And you're using a fin. You you lose some of the things that you need. You know, you still need to be able to land. When did it go from a longboard to shortboard? And what was the difference? Or you know, when I was real young, it was there was still kind of a combination of guys riding big longboards that were great.

38:10And then there was like a shortboard kind of revolution. And then there was everything between too, which was kind of like these hybrids that were like modern longboards. So they were kind of they they weren't like the old tankers. How would you describe the different people between the longboarders and the shortboarders right when the shortboards came out? Who did what and why? Well, you know, I would describe the the guys riding the old longboards as more traditional guys. Like they were just more like, you know, lawyers and school teachers and guys that surf, but they were they were they were a little more in the mainstream.

38:48And then the the shortboard guys, you know, or the group that was pushing that were a little bit more like the long -haired kind of hippie like rebelling against society. I'm not going to work into surf, but living to surf. Living to surf. And more like experimental. And of course there was there's always exceptions to every rule. So you always have some guys that are, but the in general the group that was a little more like on the creative side of it. There was really I mean, okay, now there's longboarding and shortboarding. This was traditional longboards. You know, the original ones before there were shortboards.

39:23That group was still existed. And then you had the new kind of revolutionary design and and and the different kind of surfing. And a big piece of the reason why there was a need for the new equipment was the kind of waves. Like the waves that they were trying to ride. These old big tankers didn't do it. Wouldn't work. So a big piece of it was out of necessity. Like other than being experimental, a lot of it was based on a need to be able to ride. Let's say pipeline. So you have pipeline, which is you know. The story of the first shortboard, you know, who did it first? I don't. I bet it happened something like, I broke the board, sanded the back end, footed a fin on it.

40:10Like it's going to be something like that. I don't think it's going to be so obvious where like then after somebody's going, oh yeah, we can do a shortboard and make it short. But I think it's going to happen more like by accident or maybe out of out of some young kid doesn't have the money and he's there's a broken board and he goes and gets a piece of it and you know, retro's a fin on it and patches it and then uses it and it's like the most amazing thing he's ever used because you know, you reduced half the drag. So I was saying he was freed up and went twice as fast as everybody and they were like, what is that?

40:42So I think some of it's out of that. I know, I mean, there's definitely guys that are knowledgeable about it. Who exactly did everything? I'm Sam George, for example, just knows everything. He's like, well, so and so did a such and such and a thing and you're like, okay, here we, you know, but yeah, so for me, I was around like all these guys, these men that were that were playing with it and because as a young kid, I was at pipeline that wave. Like there was a couple guy, there was like, which fan art still who should have been a professional baseball player and like he was an incredible lifeguard and but he would still ride his longboard at pipeline like he because the first guys that went out to pipeline rode longboards.

41:23Yeah, but and he could do stuff and pull it off. It wasn't the best equipment. Not even close. But it's what they were used to so they could use it in all different situations. That's right. That's right. I need pull it off. But when you had Jerry Lopez, you know, get a pintail, single fin and then all of a sudden, starting kind of playing and toying with the thing where other guys were on, you know, suicidal survival ride and then the other guys just relaxing, arching and standing inside of the wave. It was like, you know, that was the difference. But it came out of a need to, you know, solve a problem.

42:01Yeah. Like, hey, we got this issue. The wave is steep and curved and round and, you know, and these other, you know, the traditional places for longboarding, the longboards were actually probably better for those places. Right. And you look at someplace like Waikiki, you can't take a shortboard out there. You doesn't have enough power to push you where the longboard you could just ride forever. Right forever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy using one of Squarespace's best in -class templates.

42:44With a built in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins and menus. So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with fluid engines, a highly intuitive drag and drop editor. No coding or technical experience is required. Understand your site's performance with in -depth website analytics tools. Squarespace has everything you need to succeed online. Create a blog. Monetize a newsletter. Make a marketing portfolio. Launch an online store. The Squarespace app helps you run your business from anywhere. Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go.

43:35Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace .com slash tetra and get started today.

43:55Do you think the maneuvering of the shortboard was inspired by skateboarding or skateboarding inspired by the maneuverability of the shortboard? Skateboarding from my understanding, which was surfer with our waves, they were like, there's no surf, it's flat, can we? What can we do? What can we do? How do we, oh, I got this land sport, it's just going to be surfing. It came from that. Surfing was obviously around because it was Hawaiians were doing that. Surfing the art of riding a wave was there, but it was board surfers with no surf. You're in Southern California and it's flat for a month and you're like, hey, what do you want to do?

44:42I got these roller skates. Let's gloom to a piece of wood. A lot of what they did early on in skateboarding was trying to simulate surfing. They were trying to surf. Then they started to realize, hey, we can do that you can't do in surfing. It's interesting, again, like I said, when you look at how surfing the longboards, you finless boards that you use your edge, and then we got fins, and then we use the fins, and then eventually evolved to using the fin and the edge, and you look at snowboarding, like skiing, and then how skiing influenced snowboarding because they had the technology of how to build a ski, so then they built a snowboard.

45:17But then through the development of the snowboards, they figured out this side cut that they put on skis, it's revolutionized skiing. It's like this whole give back thing, and so skateboarding ended up giving back to surfing through the aerial and acrobatic parts. Then you had young guys that were good surfers skating, and they were learning all these tricks because, first of all, it's a little bit like the pool, which is a great environment. It's because it's consistent. You can go there, and it's a nice stable, consistent thing that you can do things that you can't do out in the wild kind of thing.

45:53You go to a skateboard park, learn a trick, and then like, oh, okay, let me try it on a wave. It ends up giving back. It's like you trade, and you end up giving back. So skateboarding comes back in and gives back to surfing. First, skateboarding came from surfing, and then it comes back later and gives back to surfing. So you see that a lot. After a short board was the next revolution in surfing, wind surfing? Well, weightboarding too. It was like water skiing, but on a board. That's right. Again, surfers. Yeah. Summer time. Yeah. Board them. Lot of boredom involved. Get behind a boat. They're on a surfboard.

46:34They're behind the boat, and then we're riding on them. And then we're like, okay, well, this board's cool, but we don't need all this board. Let's try a little smaller board, and then pretty soon they're making board specifically for being behind a boat, because you have that power source. Yeah. So then you don't need. And it works on lakes. It works. That's right. Yeah. Have you ever done it? Yeah. Fun? Yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, I always like water skiing because of the speed and the power and the turning, but that also speaks to my kind of choices in the discipline, like insurfing, like big, big wave riding.

47:11It's more like downhill skiing and, you know, like racing. It's like downhill. Do you think the main difference is the speed aspect of it? Is that what draws you or is it something else? In big wave, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that the big, the speed is a reflection of the intensity. So I think that big waves and just the energy of the big waves, you know, I think, I think speed is the byproduct of liking that intensity. And then also for me being raised around, it was what I admired when I watched everything. And if you know, again, if you look at the disciplines and you think about acrobatic, you know, you think about skiing and it's acrobatic, that's one discipline.

47:52To more gymnastics, usually going slower. Yeah. You know, it's usually, it's not like a downhill course where it's full, wide open. I mean, if you crash during acrobatics, it's severe too, but it's just not quite, not quite like flying into offense at 80. And so big wave riding, you know, you have the smaller wave acrobatic aspect. And then you have big wave riding, which is more like full throttle, wide open. When you were a kid, how often was the opportunity for big wave riding, even just for you to see it as a kid? A lot. I saw like guys like Butch fan art still and Jose Angel and like Warren Harlow and I saw some of, I think the the bull was already gone by then, but I saw that generation, those big wave riders that were still riding giant long wards.

48:41The very first people that I would do it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe I was, I wasn't at the beginning of that, but I was definitely at the end. Like I saw that end of that first phase. I did those guys for me when I looked at them, they've looked to represent what I thought was man. Yeah, it was more inspirational. Like man, like man, like I'm like, that's an aspirational. And the people below the first group of short borders, because of my age and where they were at, they've seen more like older brothers. I see. So I looked at them like, yeah, but it wasn't the aspiration came from, you see the older brothers, and you're like, you know, and that next group was the ones that really capitalized on the board design and the smaller boards and being able to ride the smaller, more aggressive waves.

49:31The other guys would go out when it was just, you know, when they were calling for evacuation and stuff. And you'd see the guy going the other way. He'd be like, oh, who's that? That's Warren. He's going to go swim the sunset. You're like, but did you try every new thing when it came out? Yeah. Now, I think part of it was because when I was young, well, first of all, they didn't even have boogie boards when I was a kid. Like when I was a kid, there was no such thing as a boogie board. There were broken pieces of surfboards. And as it could be. That's body surfing. Yeah, and body surfing. And maybe you steal some photographers map, you know, those blow up mats, because blow up mats were, so anything that, I mean, any object that you could get your float, that could float, you know, and they barely needed to float because they could be on top of them.

50:12We used to laugh about McDonald's lunch trays. You know, you go get these lunch trays and you could use those as a hand plane and catch a wave and ride along with it. So I was used to that kind of whatever we didn't have any... Yeah, trying everything. Trying everything. I didn't think anything would. Yeah, I didn't have, I mean, I remember when my dad, Bill Hamilton, built me a board for, you know, that I got that I was like, when I was like six or something, I got a board that he made me. I think it was short live because usually, you know, I went through, you go through stuff kind of fast, especially when you're a, you know, when you're a destructor.

50:47So it just be like, break, next one, get that. And that discourages them too when you get the new president and you break it within five minutes. But my openness to be able to, to, because of just also what was available. Like I remember at one point, there was this guy, bunker speckles, who he was impoverished. He used to sleep under the crib in our front yard and then all of a sudden one day he was Clark Gable's step son and he's speckled sugar air and he just all of a sudden went from not a dollar to like a hundred million dollars. And that was 50 years ago. So it was at that point, he might as well have been whoever, right?

51:23And so he just got into like, had guys building prototypes. And so they were building the weirdest, craziest stuff. And then they would just be any rejects would be in the back of the chop and I could go take them. So I would, I wrote the weirdest, you know, air vetted down rail, weird thin, just the crazy things because first of all, that's all that was available. It was there. So I got, I got kind of introduced to all kinds of strange equipment. But that also gives you an opportunity to understand what's possible. That's true. Because otherwise you think, oh, sir, Ford looks like this. I know what it is.

51:59But when you see people are making all these different things. Yeah. And you know what works about them or what doesn't work about them. Even what doesn't work about them is really helpful to know. Very, very, very well, because inevitably there's always something that is, that does work. That just leaves you open for the next thing that comes along. So you're not, you're not going, hey, I don't know what it's mine. You're not close by it. I mean, listen, I can say I was riding one kind of board and then one day some guy showed up and I, and I was already been surfing for quite a while. I think I was maybe late teens, shows up on the island and he has this board called a thruster, which is a board with three fins.

52:38And he goes, oh, you want to try it? And I try it. And it's, it'd be like all of a sudden you went from like a model T to you have yourself a new sports car. Like it literally was just, and he gave it to me. He said, you can have it. Why would three fins make such a difference? Well, because of what it did was is that it reduced the drag, but it put fins on the sides, which allowed the boards and the way they were configured. It was kind of unweighting the board and then allowing the board to really be put on an edge where one fin would still stay in. So when you got really, when you really got laid over and you were on a hard edge, two of the fins would be completely out of the water.

53:28And normally that would just spin out. Normally you, but one of the fins would stay in the water, which allowed you to be a much more aggressive, like you could be so much more aggressive and it would just hold. And so that just totally revolutionized surfing, architectically. You remember when that was what year that was? Simon Anderson was the guy. Simon Anderson, an Australian guy came up with the concept of the, and who knows if it was him and somebody or, but he's credited with it. I think he did. It was his brain child. And I mean, that would have had to been 30 something years ago. Like probably that's how long it's been out a little bit.

54:05And that wouldn't change everything. Change everything. The whole thing. The whole thing. The whole thing. Like every single guy, I mean, right now we have a forfin revolution, but it's just kind of a, in a way, it's an offset of the three fin. Every professional surfer in the world uses a thruster or a forfin. Like they're still today. And like I said, when I got on that board and what I was able to do and then the guy was so nice, he goes, hey, you can have that board. And that was it. From then on, it was like put every board away. That's the only board you write. It's like, you know, and you had something that you really liked too.

54:35I had all single fins. There are Jerry Lopez was making a lot of them. They're built for pipeline. You know, Bill Hamilton was building them for me. I mean, one thing that I did from early on because of the nature of my relationship with equipment was my loyalty to was to the best thing. So I wouldn't just because I was writing my dad's was making me a board. I go, if somebody else comes on with better board, that's what I'm writing. I'm never going to let the equipment. Do it would never be a limitation? Never. I'm not going to be compromised it because of my loyalty to a brand or loyalty to my dad or I go because because that's the tool.

55:11Yeah. So if the tool can allow you to do a better job or do it the way you need to do it or want to do it, that was it. If it was better, it was better. And so, and I think that allowed me to kind of bounce along to, and I always made it clear to whoever I was working with, like, hey, listen, if something, and I could come back to them and say, hey, this is what they made and they could make one that looked like it and see if they can make a better one. But whoever made the best one was the, this is the tool that I used to do this thing that I do. I'm sorry. I'm using whatever one I can. Absolutely.

55:43When did wind become a factor? Well, the wind, so wind surfing was in created and then 70s, this in the 70s. So wind surfing was created in the 70s, but what happened is they, somebody took a wind surfer and stuck it on a surfboard, right? Wind surfing was influenced by surfing, but they didn't put it on a surfboard. They didn't put it on one that was like, they put it on like a little sailboat. That's right. Well, there was a board, but it was more like, it was more like, they put it on a board that looked like what the boards looked like in the 50s that they surfed on. It wasn't on surfboards that they were using in the 80s.

56:25And then sometime early 80s, they stuck one. And I think it was on Maui, I believe it had to do with Jerry Lopez, Mike Waltz, Matt Switzer, so with some of these guys. And Matt, who I know, Matt Switzer's dad was one of the co -inventors of wind surfing, the wind surfing shaft, the original. The original wind surfing was more like sailing on a board. That's right. Even though guys got on waves and they were surfers, they were influenced by the wind and they were influenced by surfing. I mean, the the suns of the guy, like Matt Switzer and my friend, Mike Waltz and some of these guys, they took those boards and pulled the keels out and sailed them on the little tiny waves and probably had the epiphany of like, wow, we can interact with the surf.

57:08But when they took the sail off that thing and stuck it on a surfboard, which I think the original one was a Jerry Lopez surfboard for pipeline, then you had yourself a new thing and I was exposed to that at that point. I would say in 85, 84, something like that, mid 80s, I was exposed to that. And when I saw that and I saw these guys sailing out and hitting waves and flying, I was like, that is something I want to do. Like that's a crazy thing. How many people in the world were doing it at that time? Oh, no, there was companies, right? Because wind surfing itself had regottas and there was a ton of wind surfers out there.

57:50But the core of the guys that were doing it in the surf in the waves, like it was all mostly, I want to say, I mean, there's probably little satellite groups around the world. But Maui was the focus. Yeah, also because of the wind. The wind. Maui had the best wind in the world. One of the best. I mean, okay, there's the gorge in Aruba. But Maui was the and the wind and the waves. Right? Right? So you had that and you had those guys that were all, like I said, were great wind surfers. They were all. And still today, if you drove in Maui, you used to find a bunch of wind surfers. But now, Kiting's in being influenced and now, winging.

58:27So they have wind. They have other wind disciplines. But windsurfing today, you still have it. So that's the beginning of that. I get exposed to that. I've been sailing for a year or two and some guy comes over from Maui. You know, I don't know if he heard about me sailing or heard something, but he came over to meet me. I sailed with him and he said, Hey, you got to come move to Maui. I'll put you on a wind surf team, like a racing team, because they were doing, they're using wind surfers to break speed records too. So there's a multiple discipline. There's like slalom sailing and you have Robbie Nash, one of the greatest wind surfers of all time, from Oahu, Kailua, which is a great wind surfing place, not quite Maui.

59:08I mean, he ended up moving to Maui just because Maui's a better spot. But and so there's been, there's already been that aspect. You know, you already have these disciplines of a lot of slalom was a big piece of it in the beginning, more like, yodding. It was rigada, like go race around the courts in the winter. And so then they had freestyle. So they had freestyle, which are they're doing tricks. And they were doing that all that stuff on those old, big giant, I call them dogs. And with no waves. And with no waves. Yeah, it was more like boating. Sailing. Yeah. It's sailing. And so then that whole wave writing thing comes along.

59:41And obviously the guys from Hawaii have a little bit of a lead on it. And so I ended up moving to Maui because of wind surfing. I was already in my 20s when I started. I saw some girl doing it at a beach where I surf. And I'm like, let me try that thing. I went out and you know, wind surfing is actually not that easy. And so I call it the thousand fall syndrome. You have to go out and you have to fall a thousand times. No matter who you are, you fall, you fall, you fall, you fall, you fall. And I'll say one day you get it and you're and then you and then after that, do you like that about it? The fact that it was hard to do.

1:00:15Did you like the thousand fall? Yeah, I wasn't discouraged by that. Yeah. Like that didn't discourage me. I was like, yeah, no problem. First of all, and I probably shouldn't be this way. But I see these people doing I go, well, fact I can do it. And that person can do it and they can do it. I know I can do it. I can do it. Like I like it. No matter what, I could suck. But I know if they can, I can kind of and it's again, it's back to I've come to learn that's true about everything that if somebody can do it, somebody else can do it. Like and no matter because we sometimes we go, oh, oh, so and so do do do do do.

1:00:47But you listen, we only have two arms and two legs and two eyes and one brain. And like at the end of the day, we're not so different that we're going to be able to do something that no one else can do. Now, you maybe you can do it first and maybe you can do it in a way that's different than anybody does it. Like music. But you're not the only person who can play a piano. And you're not going to be the only person they can play a flute or a guitar or whatever because sometimes we have a 10 G to think, well, you know, we're going to be the only ones that can do this. No, we're not. If we can, they can.

1:01:18So that's my mentality.

1:02:03I'm not going to be the only person who can play a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or перoya or a piano or a piano or a piano or a piano or lye call that fresh tetra.

1:02:43Out to her cheated to her junior hummingbird You know. There's a lot of people who dont think lucky that we create the barriers, right? Like if you really want to, if you'd be surprised how much different than it, then oh, I wouldn't mind being able to do that. If you're going with that, like I wouldn't mind being able to do that, Jen, sorry, you're probably not gonna do it very well. If you're coming in low, like, I mean, I just all I wanna do is that, that's the greatest thing. How do I do that? If you have the passion, you'd be surprised what comes, you know, in a way when surfing came out of nowhere, brought me to a place and taught me a bunch of things that actually was the basis for all this other stuff that I ended up doing after, right?

1:03:40The insurfing. So it ended up back to what I was saying before, how you do the one thing, you don't think that that has anything to do with this, but all of a sudden that comes back and you gives you to the thing that you're, the other thing that you did. What would be an example of something that came from windsurfing that benefited you later? Well, first of all, dealing with the speed, like when I got on a big wave, when I finally went the fastest I had ever been on a big wave, that was the fastest I had ever been. When I spent some years windsurfing and speed sailing, all of a sudden, then it was another animal.

1:04:16Then I was all of a sudden, I was used to going 35, 40 knots across the roughest water you've ever seen. So my reaction time, my speed acclimation was another animal. I was another animal. Then footstraps, all of a sudden now, I'm used to being in footstraps. I mean, I got a couple broken ankles to show for it, but I was used to footstraps. Like windsurfing made me footstrapped friendly. So when I put footstraps on my big wave toad board and I got toad in and I'm descending on waves bigger than I'd ever imagined. I could ride, all of a sudden, now I'm the speed, I'm good with the speed, because I'm used to the speed, I'm good with being attached to my board.

1:04:55I know how to use the footstraps and be in the footstraps. So that was just the first other than like the influence of equipment, that the stuff that went because what happens is with windsurfing, when you really go fast, you really find out if your fins work or not. All of a sudden you're like, oh, these fins suck. Fins fail. Fail, quickly. And so you know, then all of a sudden, all that information that you learned about materials, about shapes, about all this stuff that made you go fast on a windsurf or all of a sudden you put that into the big wave board, it's a different board. The whole thing's a different animal.

1:05:27So things like that, right? Things like technique, about the equipment. What happened to your if towing? Like in a way, the sail is the motor. Well, that's what, that was the original influence for towing, right? Because when you were windsurfing, we're out at sea, we sail on to a giant swell, which on a surfboard, you would never even look at that, because that would be a mile out from you and you wouldn't be able to catch it because it's not breaking. So it wouldn't even be in your brain. Not possible. Not possible. Yeah, not physically not possible. Physically impossible. Not even remotely possible.

1:06:00Doesn't matter who and when and what. Never gonna be possible. But you're on a windsurf, you're like, wow, it'd be amazing to be on this way without this sail because this sail is restrictive. It's cumbersome, it's big, it's affected by the wind. I can only go certain ways and do certain things. I'd love to just be here right now and just throw that sail away and be on my board. So when we started towing, when we figured out that you could do the first time you ever toad. First time we ever toad was summer day, North Shore of Wahoo, place called Vland. So we were outside Vland, which is on the North Shore, and it was, and we were free boarding.

1:06:35We were behind the Zodiac tone around, summertime board, but there was a little swell and let go, being toad. And I either was driving the boat and I towed Buzzier Derrick on a wave or a, Buzzie was driving and he towed me on. I think I let go and I went, oh, I can catch a wave. So no one had done this yet. This was a new thing. Not that we know it. No, of course. Yeah, but people, because later on after... We're copying it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the time you did it, you weren't copying it. No, no. Never seen it, never thought of it even as a concept. And if it wasn't for the sail experience, you might not have thought it.

1:07:13No, because I wouldn't, we wouldn't have the desire to go try to get ourselves early on those, because we had been on those. We've been going out and stormy, giant surf on the North Shore on our wind surfers and getting on these swells and just being like, man, that would be awesome. Didn't just not have this sail and just be able to ride this wave in. And so that, in the back of your head, you're thinking, oh man, it'd be great to not have to need that, but how do we get on the wave without that sail? And then we can throw the sail away and then try to go back and get it. That's not gonna happen.

1:07:41How long was it between the wind surfing and towing? Couple winners. Like short, like well, couple winners of wind surfing big wave, then the summer coming, where we've got toad on by the Zodiac. And we thought, huh, let's try that. And then as soon as we tried it that summer, so that very first swell of the winner, we implemented the towing and it worked unbelievable. Very first time, let go fly on the wave. And then after that, it was just like, that was just like a light went off. And that was just, from then on, we were just like, don't even talk to us. Now, it was either sometime in that first window, we had been invited to a big wave event, which was the premier big wave event at Waimebe, the Eddie I Cal Derrick Donor and myself were both invite ease.

1:08:30They hadn't had the event in seven years because the storms just hadn't been right, the conditions, and those were the winners that we had been wind surfing in giant surf out at sea. And so we had been riding huge surf, but the event could never happen. We go out, we're towing. The guys came on the jet ski from Waimebe and said, hey, the event's on, you guys got to be down in Waimebe. And Derrick and I looked at each other and we just said, well, we're not going anywhere. And please put Derrick yells, hey, make sure you put the Hawaiians, you know, put Hawaiians in. I'm like, yeah, put some people from Hawaii into that event to take our space.

1:09:10And then that was we never looked back. So they drove away and we were by ourselves like two miles out, just going round and round and round. And I'm going to be for the seven years leading up to that. You were hoping, maybe they'll do it this year. Hoping. And then when it comes, we got something better going on ourselves. We're good. We're doing our own thing. We're good. It's amazing. We're good. We're amazing. We're good. We're good. Wouldn't it have felt like going backwards? Couldn't. Couldn't even look, couldn't, couldn't. I believe that was not even like what? No, I, there's no way. There's no way.

1:09:43Not a thing at all. Not even close. What we were doing, that would be like, there's no way. Like that was his life completely. Like I had been doing some other stuff. So I was a little bored. And for him, there was no decision. For me, it was not even, I'm like, did you see what we're doing right now? Because, you know, I don't know if you, did you have you watched? That's a funny story. I don't know if you remember this story, but I have a story. You were out surfing at the bowl one day. And it wasn't like a particularly big day or anything. And you were working on some different tricks and stuff.

1:10:15And you did something unusual. And you said to someone in the water, did you just see that? She thought, like, look at what I did. And you were looking, my understanding is, you wanted to verify that it happened. Yes. Yes. You couldn't believe it happened. So if someone else could say, yeah, it happened, then you know what happened? Absolutely. That's half the reason why you want a friend with you because you're something's wrong with you. This isn't what you think it is. That you didn't do that or that wasn't what you thought it was. And so in a way, you're just looking for that. That's all the thing.

1:10:50And never is it like, well, did you see what I did? Like, come on, like that. You just want verification. Verification. Verification. Did I actually do what I think I do? Because it felt like that, but I didn't get to see it. Because I was doing it. So I was like, I didn't, you know, I didn't, I didn't, I mean, listen, when we were kids, I would be younger. That's why we were so enthralled by getting a picture or having something film. It was a, because it was, you never got to really proof of concept. You never, otherwise you didn't know. You were like, what, did I just, was it that? How does it feel?

1:11:26Was it as big as I thought? Was it, was it, was it like doing what I thought I was doing? Because it felt like I did this and that. But I don't know. So I'd like to see it. And so that's how for us, we started. Like that's why it was such a great, like, oh my gosh, a guy had a eight millimeter camera. I mean, it took three months for him to get the film back. The film back. And you know what, some of it was, you know, overexposed. But, but we got, and you were like, oh cool. Oh, yeah, well, that wasn't like, well, either you were disappointed because you thought it was great. Or maybe your mind made it up to be bigger than it actually was.

1:12:00That's what we used. That's a really interesting idea that we can't really trust our own understanding of things that we experience. Who knows? But we do get better at it. And I think when you've done it multiple times, then you start to go, if you've done it 10 times, 10 different things, and you had 10 different things, and you get confirmed 10 different times, about the 11th one, you're kind of like, you know what? I don't have verification, but I know that that felt exactly like those last 10 that I did get verified. Yeah. And it's the same with like, if you film yourself doing it, and you watch the film all the time and you get better based on that, you can make corrections.

1:12:39That's true. That's true. I remember at one point, my friend said I was doing something with my arms when I was a kid, and I was probably early teens or something like that. And I'm like, no, no, and he made a comment like, hey, you're, you know, you're helicoptering it. It looks, and I'm like, oh, and then the guy, some guy actually filmed us, and then I saw the thing and I go, oh my God, I'm doing the thing that he did. You wouldn't know. You wouldn't know. Because it's automatic. Automatic. Right. And you're not, and you don't get to observe it. I told people I go, when we were young, we were doing it, and then we captured it.

1:13:10Now what you're doing is capturing it. Yeah. Like when we were young, you have to have a photo, a nice photograph, or a film when you're, we were kids. It was amazing. Now it's a GoPro, and everybody's filming every single move. And actually that's what you're doing. You're doing is filming. Then it was like, you might get to see the thing in two months when they, you know, if everything goes well and, you know, the guy didn't blow it. In terms of getting better, it's great. In terms of having that feedback. Yeah. If you want to get good at something, you know, measure it. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true.

1:13:45I do believe that there is some value about not knowing too, and then mystery, that mystery of it, the mystery might make you less observant, like you, you, you, knowing how you look to be like, I'm gonna do this because I look, feel it more. It's a more than internal experience. Which, which may actually help the overall evolution. Like maybe because I think that, well, that seems more biological. That seems more like for sure. How we actually did do it. For sure. Okay, you had people observe it and say, but you weren't observing it yourself. Like when did we get a mirror, you know, and then when did we get a GoPro and we film every single thing we do and we see all the stuff?

1:14:27Because some of it I go, huh, okay, but like there is something to the mystery, right? To the mystery of it. Like you're, you're going off of how it feels to do it when you do it the best. Yeah. Like what I say, how it feels the best, maybe to you actually doing it the best way.

1:14:52Did you get to see a lot of surf movies growing up? I did. First of all, that was all there was other than, you know, you go to the beach and watch surfing, but that and that was the majority of the kind of the focus around the industry. Like that was, that was there was no, there was no world tour. There was no, I mean, there was surf or surfing, but those were magazines and they were cool, but surf movies were like that was the, that was the industry of surf. That's right. My mom was friends with some of the kind of the better surf film makers. So and then the new generation, I mean, obviously you have Bruce Brown and endless summer, you know, then you had, you had a group of Jim Freeman and McGilvery and Freeman films who those two guys, Freeman passed away in a helicopter crash and then McGilvery became the most successful IMAX guy after that because he never wanted to make surf films because he lost his partner.

1:15:52But those guys were like in my belief, those guys really made some of the best. What were some of theirs? Like saltwater wine, Pacific vibrations. I just know the ones that really impacted me, like five summer stories, you know, they had honk plan and I mean, as a kid, you go to the theater and big screen and just the whole. What is it about surf movies, though, it's like you can watch them forever. There's so many. Well, the majesty of the ocean. You know, it's like I've been blessed with a backdrop of what I do is a giant wave. I mean, if you hadn't had anybody there, you could go down and just watch a giant wave forever.

1:16:30It's like a fire. It's something about that movement and water and just the life of it. I mean, it's just something that's meditative, mesmerizing, entertaining, you know, scary and beautiful. I mean, just has all these emotional things that, you know, I mean, people go down to the beach and just watch waves break. It's pretty, I mean, if they're big and they're beautiful, like where's there to go? And for me, I feel like that was the thing that initially drew me to it to the beginning, was just the majesty of it. And then you start participating in it and then all of a sudden you get to be in the painting, not only observing it, now you get to be, you get to see it up close and see angles and see things that you don't get to see unless you're there.

1:17:14So it's the beauty of it's what drew you in. Absolutely. And the terror. The terror, like the, how important do you think experiencing beauty is for us? I mean, I'm being like, it's like, you know, what is a beautiful woman due to a man? Like how important. Like everything we do is based around that, right? You know, why do we try to achieve, you know, to attract beauty, to do it beautifully, to like, I mean, look at nature, look at a sunrise, look at a sunset, look at creation, look at all the animals, look at the flowers, look, I mean, it's just, and being in these beautiful places, you know, you live in beautiful places.

1:17:54Beautiful places. By no accident. Very inspiring. Again, I think away from our biology, I think we're meant to be part of it is is that when you're in a beautiful place and you're looking at something, when you're looking at beauty, you leave yourself behind and you find, you don't need anything and you don't want anything. And nothing else is important. You're just an observer. It's not about you. It's about what you're observing. So in a way, it seems like that's the whole idea behind, you know, what meditation and being a monk and all these things is about, right? It's about you separating from you and just being part of, I mean, listen, a desert is beautiful.

1:18:37A rock mountain is beautiful. The truth is is that man makes beautiful things but when he doesn't try to make beautiful things, then there is no beauty. But nature, you cannot compete with nature. Nothing that man creates. Beautiful as Paris and the Louvre and St. Peter, a different competition. I mean, we're going to Yosemite. I mean, it's all good. Like, and why is it beautiful to us? Like that's another question. Do why are these things be, why is a desert beautiful to us? Why is a mountain beautiful to us? Like that's a bigger question. I think it contains some mystery because that why is like, it is mysterious.

1:19:17That's right. Why do the rocks and monument valley have the effect that they do when you see them? I believe that that has to do with because it's a physical representation of God. Yeah. Because it's a physical reputation of the grandmaster, of the creator of grand knowledge, of grand information of the all -knowing, all, you know, like that's what it is. So when you look at it, you're like, oh, because you say, oh, you can't see it. I go, I can see it. Have you looked? It's a reminder. It's a reminder. That there's something, there's some intelligence, there's some superior design that in a way takes us out of our position of importance.

1:20:01I mean, when I'm in the ocean and I'm in some giants, I'm in a giant surf. I'm not thinking about myself. Except maybe when I'm in front of one and it's going to break up my head, I'm like, wow, I might die right now. But I'm not ever in that thing in a way. I'm not thinking about yesterday, I'm not thinking about tomorrow, I'm not thinking about my, you know, like what I did or didn't do, I'm just right where I am. And I might be thinking about what I need to do to maybe survive, you know, but it's pretty immediate. It's pretty present and immediate. Interesting you spent so much of your life waiting for big waves.

1:20:40And I remember one morning in the gym and you were leaving the next day to go to Chopu and you were pen -sive. For someone who's been waiting for something to happen, it wasn't like party time. Here we go, it's happening. You were very serious, very quiet. And I asked you what's going to happen when you get there. And you said, I'm going to go out in a little boat. And I'm going to sit with my friend and we're going to watch the wave and we're going to watch the wave for about a half hour. Because a half hour is the shortest the mount I can watch it. I know what I have to do. And then I jump in the water and I go.

1:21:14And I said, well, why wouldn't you watch the wave for an hour? And you said, if I watched the wave for an hour, I would never get out of the boat. Oh yeah, anxiety. I don't want to watch. I don't want to watch long enough to know what's happening. To know what to do. Yeah, I want to watch. But anything beyond that. Now, and you would get to what could go wrong? Absolutely. You know why? Because I can't do anything about it. I think that's the part. I'm not participating. And then that just was like a self -destructive position. I just get there and grind myself apart and don't. I never have been able to.

1:21:48I'd rather not see it. I'll turn my head and go, like, don't show me. Don't let me sit there and watch it. I'll overthink it. There's nothing good that comes out of that. Other than just the initial assessment. OK, let's understand what the wave's what the day is. So you're not like, oh my goodness. I didn't realize that every 10 minutes, a giant wave comes, like from that place and not that play. So the least amount you can know to know what you need to know. That's right. And then take action. That's right. That's right. Yeah, especially going into environments and situations that you don't have high volumes of experience.

1:22:23When you're going to a spot, you've written 1 ,000 times and the consequences are low and all those things. Then it's just you don't even. It's not even something to think about. But as you get into these situations, that you have less exposure to less volume and the consequences are higher. And ultimately, you're going to assess as you're in it too. I mean, we always did that, especially in the early days when we were at JAWS on Maui at Piahi. We would always work our way in. You know, we had a few sayings. We call ourselves the shoulder soldiers, right? Well, the shoulder of the wave is the safest spot.

1:23:00So we would start off and just catch one on the edge and just be like, OK, let's feel the water. Let's see the thing. Like, no ego, no like, hey, watch what I could do. And just walk over and get yourself crushed. Like, we had no problem being like, and I could see guys go in and just do stuff. And I'd be like, wow, that's an interesting way to approach it. I would never, I could never approach it that way. But that was something we would go about. Certain things that we did that we... Tell me the story of first seeing JAWS. I heard it from far away and we had been talking... You heard the crash.

1:23:34I could hear the crash from miles away. Like Piahi, the word Piahi, which is the Hawaiian name for JAWS, means the beacon to be called. So it calls you. You hear... And then you're either drawn to it or you run like... But the sound is different than other waves sound. It's a deep... Like, sounds like mortar fire in the distance. Sounds like a war. Like sounds like... Like low tone... Wow. Big power. You can just... You know, like boulders are moving kind of thing. But far away. Far away. But the fact that it's miles away and you can hear it tells you something about it. Something large, something severe.

1:24:15So we had... And it had a reputation on Maui when I moved there for windsurfing. And I had moved to Maui being a surfer, needing to surf, and then coming to a windy place at the surf was usually pretty messed up. But there was another really good wave on the other side of the island. That was a really good wave, but it was just very infrequent, Honolulu Bay, which I would go to and surf to kind of fulfill if I didn't fly to Oahu and try to surf pipeline. Maui's a big island to get surf. You have to drive a lot. At the hot of wind, mostly the wind, a lot of the spots are completely destroyed. So you're there to win surf.

1:24:52And then you hear about this wave. It's not like you can... It's on the road. You just drive down. It's like five, six miles into a pineapple field. You got to know which roads to go on and which places to get to. To even be able to get to a spot where you can actually see it. So my friend, Jerry Lopez, who built a lot of my boards, who was the king of pipeline, the master of that wave, and built my boards. I've known him since I was a child. He used to let me stay at his house. How's the mentor? Mentor. Like an older brother. Like an older brother, but definitely crazy good. Crazy, beautiful, like make boards for me.

1:25:30Let me stay at his house, like very supportive of me my entire life, since I was a little kid. Right? His house was at pipeline. And he lived on on as well, which was kind of ironic. So, and he was involved with the wind surfers with the first boards, and he windsurfed. And so... I didn't know he was into windsurfing. Into windsurfing. Yeah, yeah. So he tells us about that wave, and he says, yeah, they called it that... They called it domes, because there was a dome house, but then that burned down, so they couldn't call it domes anymore. So then they called it the Adam Blaster. But he said that it gets giant, and some people may have paddled out or somebody, but no one surfed it.

1:26:08It's a way that just sits there, and it's giant, and it's pretty. It's so rugged, giant cliff, you have to hike down... Not surfable. Come by boat, yeah. Not a surf spot. Yeah, not a surf spot. Like, maybe you could go and surf it, but it's not a surf spot. Like, it's not a place people surf. Whether they surf that are not, is beside the point. It's a little bit like towing. Did they tow or not tow? We don't know. But we went there, no one was surfing it. We didn't see anybody surfing it. We saw it dig. Were your first thoughts? How perfect. Like doable or not automatically? Not doable. Not automatic doable.

1:26:44What a giant perfect wave. Oh, I see. Don't know if we can be ridden. Right. And I think we saw it, and I don't know if we already were towing, but there was like a correlation between we had already been towing, and we saw it. Have you never seen a wave ridden that looked like that? No. And nowhere in the world. Not even close. I mean, there was giant waves that were ridden. Yeah, yeah. But not like that. But not like that. Maybe. Only in those surf movies when I was a kid. Yes. Because they had cartoons in the surf movies with little tiny guys riding giant waves. Yeah. It was like that. Like that.

1:27:18Okay, cartoon wave. Cartoon. Yeah. Full cartoon. Yeah. And that was cartoon wave from two miles away on a cliff. Nevermind, throw somebody out there and see that they look like they look more like a mosquito than they do like somebody that ride the wave. Like beyond like this, not not in the game of what's people you do. Yes. I mean, why may I as giant into beautiful wave, sunset, beach, okay? Yes. You know, Vregnal World, Macau, 1969, but this is a different thing. This is just a different creature. You could just see the way the speed of the wave, the shape of the wave. Different magnitude difference.

1:27:51More than the next step. Okay. More than next step. Not a big day at a good spot. No. Just a whole different animal. Whole different animal. This is a speed. Yeah. And just the whole setup on a cliff where it is, how it is. It's like everything about it makes it look like. That's not exactly an imitation. Yeah. Like there's not like a sand beach in front where you can go down there and stand and go like, hey, I'm maybe all out of love. There's no sand anywhere in sight. For miles. Yeah. And sand is like Boulder Beach. That's all the sand there is. Boulder Beach on a cliff in front of a thing. So if you're lucky enough to make it back to land.

1:28:26You might not make it back up the cliff. And definitely not with everything intact. Yes. Like you'll be a broken board, whatever. So we see it. And I'm living with, I have a friend, Mike Waltz, who is the, who's best friend, his dad and then it went surfing. He's a phenomenal wind surfer. And it's just a stud of a guy. I do work with, he's just a great friend and he'd been windsurfing. And we had all kind of heard about the same time. And I'm not sure exactly the time frame, but sometime in that same winner or within the winners, they windsurfed up from Hukipa, which was about six miles away. So they tacked their way up to the spot.

1:29:08And they either got on a wave or got a couple of waves or something like that. And then they went back home and and then that was like, okay, while we could go there and do that, but you had to hit six miles. And if you've something breaks, you're done because you're, it's all cliff all the way back. And there's nothing about it that made it like something that you'd be reoccurring. And so I was able to on a small day, because I, now I was interested. Now we were like, hey, we're interested. Like let's see it. Let's go look every time the surf's big. We're going down there and see what the swell's doing.

1:29:38We're starting to become interested in just observing the spot. Conditions are beautiful. On one day, small, I took my board, walked down the cliff, paddled out, caught a couple of waves, small waves, but I just did just to kind of, I just stand the place. Proceed slowly, observe that. Step by step. Take your time. Things been here a long time. Probably going to be here after we're gone. So, you know, go do that and then catch a couple of waves. And then, and I don't, I think that was even before towing or towing just happened right within that same time. But we're doing towing on a walk. We're not even on the island.

1:30:17And we don't have the equipment there. But we do towing. And then we're like, and we've been doing towing for a little while in Waahua. We're like, oh yeah, okay. Now we got to go bring this towing to go to this spot. Because then we come by boat. And initially towing, it was pre -Jetsky. We didn't have, I think there was one model of Jetsky out. We didn't have them. We use Zodiacs, which were a lot more cumbersome. So, that, that was the initial thing that we were using, which means that you had to be ready to drive a Zodiac with an outboard motor in front of a giant wave. Try to pick your friend up without running him over.

1:30:51Try not to flip over when you go over the top. I mean, we just had a bunch of things that Zodiacs were not the ideal machine. Not close. No. But closer than nothing. Yes. Much. Yes, yes. Yes. Closer than nothing, but not ideal. And then we bring the boat there. And then I think I get approached by, because we're starting to tow, and they hear and I get approached by Bruce Brown, endless summer. Yeah. And he's doing endless summer, too. Wow. And he says, heard you doing this thing called towing, what's the thing? I go, well, my fee is a brand new Jetsky. Perfect. They go great. So perfect. Here's our first machine.

1:31:31So we get our very first machine. Wow. And we have that at Jaws. After the test run, do you ever go on smaller days before bigger days? I mean, I understand there. I think we go there early and it's big. I don't want to, like, on a day where we're like, we're going there and we're scared. Yeah. We're we're scared. We don't know if we're going to die. Yeah. When you're going to do it. Is there any version of you going there and deciding not to do it? Could that happen? Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, we're going there with the, we're not sure if we can do it. Yeah. We're not sure. We're going there with a question.

1:32:09That's right. We want to answer the question. We definitely aren't going there. We're going to. We're not, because we don't know what we're going to do. Yeah. And we have no idea what our equipment is going to work. I mean, we have no flotations. We don't know what's going to happen. Yeah. On that way, we don't know if our boards are going to work. We don't know if the things are going to, we don't know any of it. We're just completely coming in, you know, like explorers. Like we're coming in like, okay, like, you know, I'm going to fall off the edge of the world. Like am I going to just disappear and then into the abyss and never come up like I'm like what's.

1:32:43How many people in the crew? Well, the original crew was Busy and Derek and I. That was the three of us. We were the three on the North Shore of a Wahoo. But once I came to Maui, I had my, my boys over my group of guys. Like I had Mike Waltz, who was the wind surf. But on the day that you went, there were three of you in the water. I think the very first time I think we went with one boat and there was probably three of us. I don't know if it was Derek and Busy and I are if it was Busy and then we started pulling guys in. We got, you know, we had Brett, Lickle, we had, you know, we had Dave Kalama.

1:33:18I mean, we started and I don't know. I don't know. You still only had one. Yeah. Yeah. But we had a zodiac too. And you go out with both. Yeah. I see. Yeah. Well, because we had the momma ship that we would run with. I see. As well. And the one thing about the one little caveat that we had at that place is that that's also on the windiest place in the world. So we're on the wind factory. So now we have wind as a big element that we never had on the North Shore of a Wahoo because the wind is just not the same there. So you come there and now we have the wind element. Yeah. Because this is a wind factory combined with the giant wave, which makes it a whole other another animal.

1:33:57When you're going fast on the board for someone who hasn't done it, what are the things that you wouldn't expect? Well, first of all, how much you feel the surface. If there's any bump or anything like how you're going to fly out of the water. And the fast, it's a storm. Yeah. You're in a storm essentially. And the fast you go the bigger a small bump is. So if you're going slow, bumps aren't even an issue, but when you go fast, little bumps become big bumps, right? So speed increases the roughness. And then also how difficult it is to turn when you're going fast. And then where do you turn? Like you have a giant wave and it's like, where do you turn?

1:34:39Like if you go to the bottom of the wave, you're going to be destroyed. So you have to turn on the face of the wave. So there's some things happening that are like they do on little ways. It's just everything's big, magnified. All those things are exaggerated, but definitely the bumpy parts. Interesting because I think a wave being so smooth, you know, like sliding down a slide. Yeah. When it is, it's beautiful, but when it does it like that, no. In fact, it's like sliding down. It's slide with a bunch of rocks on it. I see. So now you go to Chopu, like into heady. And that thing is, it stretches the bumps out, right?

1:35:15So you have a different animal, but Piahi, you know, Nazare Mavericks. I mean, these other bigger bumpy, bumpy, even when they're smooth. So like at certain days they're smoother because speed also makes smooth rough. Yeah. The faster you go, the, it's like if you go slow down a bumpy road, you're always, you, you follow the terrain. You go fast on a bumpy road. Pretty soon you're getting air. Flying. You're flying, you know? I always use the analogy of downhill skiing when you see guys that, that if you go slow down a downhill course, you never leave the ground. You come down the, out downhill course at 60 or 80, you hit a no all, but said you're in the air flying.

1:35:57And so that's a big piece of it too, is being able to control that as you're going and then set a turn and do a whole thing that there's like a whole art to that. That's, that probably becomes one of the biggest challenges in riding a wave, is dealing with the texture of the face. That's why, why we have arrived with foils because you're not affected by that, that texture. It has its other own issues, but you now you're not completely at the mercy of the texture. Okay. So now you've gone to draws a few times. Yeah. And then what's the first time where it's like ridiculously big? Probably that first season.

1:36:34Yeah. I mean, it got ridiculously big quick, because it was already ridiculous big when it was small. Like so it was already ridiculously big when it was small. Before it was ridiculously big, would it have been the biggest waves you'd ridden? Yes. Yeah. It was already bigger than anything you rode and it hadn't, but I had towed in on the North Shore of Wahuas. I had ridden some big waves there. Yeah. And I had also ridden some big. But not as big as this and not with wind. Exactly. And not this kind of velocity, just the speed of this wave and the way the wave broke. It broke like a very aggressive little wave.

1:37:10But now it's because a lot of the bigger waves get in deeper water and they just move slower. They just have a different, I mean, they always move faster, the bigger they are. But a lot of the ones that break in deeper water just have a different movement to them. This was acting like a small, aggressive wave, but it was giant. So then you had that combination that really made it a lot more challenging. How much do waves change over time? What changes is the generation of the swell, where the swell angles are coming from, which makes the wave completely different. So if you now, like if your predominance, swell direction was northwest and then all of a sudden you just, you don't have northwest, you have north, well, it's a different way, completely different way, or you have completely straight west, completely different way.

1:37:54So all those angles, and when we go through season, sometimes you'll see that the predominant storm production angle completely changes. And normally where they be coming out of the northwest, all of a sudden they're super west or they're more out of the north. And that makes the wave completely different. The bottom topography and that stuff doesn't change at all unless a place like pipeline where the sand moves and comes in and fills in and does stuff. Do that happen at pipeline? Do the sand moves a lot there? I see. So once the sand all goes away and it's back to the reef, then the reef is exactly the same.

1:38:29That bottom's not changing. That bottom's going to be like that for another, you know, hundreds, thousands of, you know, thousands of years. But swell angles and where the storms are being generated because of the way the weather patterns are, that's what changes all the time. And there are certain predominant angles that have evolved like where that most of the storm angles have shifted over time. It seems that way. Wow. It's interesting. It seems that way that we, because of the, because I imagine that they're always shifting. Yeah. But I do believe the amount of time that we've been watching it.

1:39:04Yeah. It's shifting. Well, like for example, this last season we had a very uncharacteristic swell pattern that came through for like three weeks. That was that, that was a severe, West swell angle. And the last time we saw anything remotely like that was in the 80s, like where we had West winds for weeks on end with this severe West angle. We haven't had that kind of condition since the 80s. Like not to end somebody else said, oh, yeah, I haven't seen that since the 80s. And I was like, yeah, that's true. Because we, exactly. We don't know those patterns because those patterns for us are those things are like, that could be what a week ago.

1:39:42Right. That was a week ago. It changed, but we're thinking, wow, that's my lifetime. But you know, we were fortunate when we were writing Pia, he at the beginning, writing jaws for that first like 10 to 12 years. That window of time, if you go back archivaly and look at that. And I'm not saying that just because we were writing it and all that. I'm saying that the amount of big surf that happened, we haven't seen that since it. Like in the last 20 something years, we have not even remotely seen that kind of volume of big surf per winner. Like now we're seeing a couple of swells. Oh, there was like every week, every other week, like it was literally like a machine.

1:40:20So, you know, those kind of things happen. We don't know what, I mean, temperature, you know, there's just so many. Variables, the jet stream, there's all these things. But so all of that stuff is kind of a mystery. I mean, I think that's part of the chastination also too, but that's also affects the weighting, affects the anticipation, the disappointment. Like this season, for example, they were forecasting a powerful El Niño. For us, that means lots of giant surf. Yeah. Three force wells done shut off like January 15th, like turned off like a light switch, like nothing zero gone. We're like, what happened to powerful El Niño?

1:40:57And that's with all the expert forecasters with archival. I mean, we're just shooting in the dark when it comes to that. We know very little if that. We know, especially when it comes to that stuff, like when it comes to the behavior of the patterns of, you know, I would say the emotions of our earth. I think that's part of the mystery. That's part of the fascination. That's part of the allure. That's part when you get what you, when you get something special. You'll never get it again like that with something like jaws. You have that experience. Finally, you get to write it when it's crazy big.

1:41:31You get to do it a lot. Is there a time when it's like, okay, I've done that. That happened once the settlers came or should I say once the people came and started putting pressure on the spot, I got distracted from it and started being concerned about what people were doing and, you know, endangering themselves, endangering other people. If you understood how dangerous it was, and people saw you do it and then think, oh, if he could do it, I'll do it. Yeah, which is true. Yeah. But it wasn't always true. Yeah. Yeah. And it didn't necessarily have to be true for you. No. You know, who knows? We don't know.

1:42:10We don't know. Yeah. Yeah. When it stops being fun, like what is it that made it stop being fun? And like it's a wall everybody coming, that could be part of it. Maybe I couldn't get any more out of it that I was trying to get out of it with the consequences. There could be some kind of like. Yeah. I did this a lot of time. Well, the only thing I didn't do was really do something stupid. I mean, I shouldn't say that. I did a lot of stupid things. I've done more than one. But I could say, but part of it's that too. Like maybe the only thing you hadn't done is just have, you know, more bad shit happened.

1:42:40The truth is what happened was, well, first of all, the, we were filming everything we were doing by the end. And that's not being fun. It became every time there was a giant swell work. Or something. Just because I was distracted. Do we have the boat guys? Do we have the thing? Do you get the camera man? Do the camera man got the thing? Okay, okay. We got the, like all of that stuff and all I wanted to do was surf. But then I'm like touring that organized us up. And then everything you're doing is being documented. And it's part okay for your work. It's for this. It's the whole thing. So then I say, and again, be careful.

1:43:15And my mom used to say, be careful what you asked for. The way God punishes you. Does he give you a ask for it? But I said, you know what? It'd be nice to have a special day undocumented, right? Lead to an unforgastance. Well, storm generation, uncharacteristically close to the island chain. In a position that normally it's, they don't go. So the forecasts are inefficient because they're used to forecasting from a spot and tell you the whole thing. So they don't really have a forecast for it. We start. Jaws is out of control. Bad angle. And the energy is completely just making jaws terrible because the angle that the swell is coming from is making it completely just terrible.

1:43:59But making another place off of the airport down my spread goes, will as good as it could ever be. So we go there. And to this day, I still, I don't think we've ever ridden or seen anything bigger to this day. No cameras. Yeah. Couple miles off short. Yeah. Giant short break. Yeah. IFR, which means no helicopter because we were had a helicopter friend. My friend Don was going to fly and see my friend Dave Kalama, who's my toe partner, had a hurt ankle or injured. So he couldn't come with me. Convince these other guys to come out with me. Brett and John Denny and Sierra, Emory, who's since drove off a clip on purpose.

1:44:44But convince them to come out with me. And it was as big as we've ever seen ever. Anything. My friend Brett was injured to the point where I had to turn a kid is laid with my wetsuit and put give his floatation swim naked, get the jet ski, get him, call the ambulance crash land on the beach naked in front of a bunch of people, put him in an ambulance. And then I went back out again. But and that's when I realized, but the truth is I realized that on that day, at that point, that there was a limitation to our boards. That the boards themselves were not going to allow the technique of being totally in with the board.

1:45:23Once it got to this next, next thing, which we might not see in my lifetime. Yes. We may or may not. Yes. You couldn't descend. You got past the point of where the equipment could hold up under the conditions. Yes. And that changed my life forever. Like at that point, I was like, this thing over there is bullshit. I mean, I don't mean bullshit, but I mean, like, I'm open. You had an epiphany. There's some new thing to do. Well, and also, I realized that I'm not going to, if it really does do some thing that I'm waiting my whole life to do as this guy's pursuing, tried and you write, giant surf, I'm not going to be able to do it with these things.

1:46:02So I need to figure out what it is. Yeah. Which we had already been playing with the foils. What was your first time you ever saw anything on them? Well, the first time probably planted the seed, I rode on a giant hydrophoil boat in an island in Hawaii called SeaFlight. And it was a boat that had big turbines on it, and it lifted up on hydrophoils and flew across the water. And I rode on it as a child. Yeah. It was called SeaFlight. Yeah. So as a child, fly on this thing, the thing somewhere in back in my deep in my brain was this, the seed. Right. And then cut to, again, summertime, boredom. My friend Brett goes, hey, there's a thing this, this guy's got this hydrophoil device in his garage up in Pukalani on now.

1:46:51And you know, it's a seed or something. I go, well, can you get it? And he goes, yeah, let me see any, like I go, sure. So he let us borrow it. So we took it. And, uh, do you have a chair or something? A chair. You sit down and you start, I thought it was for handicap. Yeah. I thought it was a handicap device. I go, it's for handicap, but it wasn't. It was the way the thing was set up. You strapped yourself to a seat, and I called it the scared chair. And then you just get pummeled, right? You'd fly along and we'd smash our face. I'm like, we're surfers. So the very food you get towed behind the boat, behind our seat.

1:47:21So it'd be like water skiing, except you're sitting in the chair and you're floating above the water. Yeah. On a stilt. On a stilt. Yep. On a foil. Yeah. On a foil. Yeah. On a stilt. You're sitting on. And the guys who can do it do it well, they could do back flips and they ride along behind the boat and do a bunch of crazy stuff. That's the name of that. That original one was called an air chair. Air chair. The air chair. It was called the air chair. And it came originally from a set of water skis, it's somebody had designed that had a foil on it from the 50s or 40s or because hydrofoils have been around militarily and also in the water world for a long time.

1:47:57And so got that that first day. I'm like, well, we don't sit down. We sat down three times, smashed our face and then we started trying to stand on it. So we got undid ourselves off the chair and then stuck our feet in the thing and stood behind the chair and got up and went like 10 feet standing and we're like. We can stand on this thing guaranteed. So. So we. Just I know, you think there were thousands of air chairs in the world? Millions hundreds maybe. Yeah, I don't know how many he's made. He made at that time. Like there weren't thousands. It was one guy who had an idea and made a hobby thing.

1:48:37But yeah, but he was selling him. Yeah, he was selling him to people and convincing him that people to ride him and people were riding him. At that point, I don't know how many he had sold, but there weren't tons of it. And this one was sitting in a garage that had spider webs on it. Like the guy had bought it and didn't wrote it once and never used it. And so we were like, get that thing. I said, ask this guy if we can borrow it and we won't hurt it, but we're going to try to modify it. So the guy said, okay, cool, but you know, you can't hurt it. So we're like, okay, so we took the foil out of it and.

1:49:10Did it unscrew? How did it? It had an insert. So it came up in the chair. So the top of the foil shoved up into the seat and had a screw underneath the like between the seat and the top. Screwed it down to hold the thing in a slot. So we undid the screw, we popped the thing out and I'm like, okay, now we have to figure out how to make a board that we can make a slot. So we took a wakeboard and we made a plywood pyramid of multiple layers of plywood that we made a slot out of. And we shoved the thing up there and screwed the thing into it. And then we mounted snowboard boots, stiff snowboard boots in the front and back.

1:49:47Because we figured the chair offered leverage against the foil. So we needed leverage and the only way we could do that was take our ankles out of it. Because our ankles were too supple. We had snowboard boots and binding again back to you go snowboarding, you think it doesn't have anything to do and then it comes, you bring it back. We boot in, we clip on and we can stand on it and we can fly behind the boat. We're jamming around, standing on a foil. And as soon as you stand up and you feel it, you're like, oh, okay, this sensation is beyond amaze. How long ago was this? How long ago was that?

1:50:24Probably right around that same time, a late 80s, early 90s, early 90s. A long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Early 90s. I didn't realize we've been messing around with foils that long. That long. Yeah, early 90s, I would say a long time. Like we've been doing, we've been playing with foils for more than 20 years. Yeah, like, so did that, rode it. We're having fun, it was cool, flat water. And then we went and we were tired of driving to the other side of the island when the water was flat. So we went and we went to where they were surf. And so we started towing around. And then like towing, all of a sudden, let go and fly along and all of a sudden ride in the waves energy with the foil.

1:51:01And we realized that you could tap into the energy of the wave with the foil. But you'd have no way of knowing because up until now, you've always been on the surface. Always. The relationship between the board on the surface. Gravity. Yeah. Yeah. So your board's not touching the water, you can't surf. That's right. You just don't know how would the thing underwater cutting along? How would the thin underwater be able to be pulled by the waves energy? Like how would that even? How would you know? You wouldn't know, but it knew quick as soon as you let go and you went like that. We went, oh my, we can ride away with it.

1:51:39And then once we did that, you know, we had, like I said, Dave Colama, Mike Waltz, Rand Rush Randall, Mark and Gula, I had a good group of guys that were excited because we had a little core group and you get excited. Of course. It's like a band. Of course. We're like, cool man, that's all. Yeah, okay. And then we get hyped up and we meet each other at the beach. And, you know, I remember at one point we were all learning how to do front flips on wind surfers. Like somebody said, we heard about some guy did one by accident or something. And then we're like, oh, you can do a front flip. So we went down.

1:52:07I think my record was like eight boards in a day, broke eight boards in half in a day. I think our other buddy broke eight and six. I mean, we were breaking board, but we had that kind of thing going with each other. Yeah. Everybody got hyped up, started buying the foils from the chair guy. First of all, I called the chair guy up and I go, hey, listen, we're standing on these things. They're amazing. He goes, if you are, we're going to sue you. He goes, liability. Somebody's going to break their neck. I go, okay, whatever. Like, so we just would, we had people go online and buy the parts and stuff.

1:52:38And then we would make, and then, you know, and then we started making, building boards specifically to hold the foils. We started chopping the tops off and welding plates on and making all these prototypes. I mean, everything was a prototype. One of the big breakthroughs we have is Kalama's uncle or somebody had a naval engineer. And he created this one wing out of G10 that we could bolt to our existing fuselages. And that changed the way our rigs rode, you know, we could handle the speed. How different is getting toad versus riding a wave? When you're being toad, the water is neutral. Yeah. 99 % of the time.

1:53:15I mean, if there's a little wind blowing or whatever. So you're, you're flying through neutral environment. When you're riding a wave, you're harnessing the energy of a wave. Which is energy going through the water. So the amount of pressure that's on the wings and the foil and how it's affecting the thing is much greater. Like you can get away with stuff on flat water towing that you can't. And there's other things too. You need, you need things like you need to be able to slow down without stalling. So you need like a lower stall speed. We're like behind a boat. You can keep the boats going 24.

1:53:51Okay, go 24 or stay at 24. Where you're going to be on a wave and you're going to go 35 and you're going to go 15. And so you need this bigger range of what is the equipment that you need to be able to do that? To control the stall speed. You need better shapes, better shaped foils, better wings, wings that fly that have better lift ratios. Like better, you know, like an airplane. You need like certain airplanes if they get below a certain, if the wing isn't big enough and the shape isn't right, they get below 150 knots. No, there's going to fall out of the sky. And then you've tried a bunch of different shapes.

1:54:26Yeah, yeah. We kept trying them. And trying things that we like and trying sizes, sizes, shapes. Any surprises along the way? Like where something works that you didn't think would work or would find something? What was some of the breakthroughs along the way? I mean, the height of the strut. So the height of the strut was a big, that was a big factor because that increased the sweet spot. Right? So it'd be like a higher, better or worse? Higher is better. Really? Even though you get to a point of diminishing returns, which is it becomes too much leverage. Yeah. So then you get too much leverage, which isn't great.

1:55:02Yeah. But it's like a big tennis racket where you have a bigger sweet spot. So imagine if your board doesn't touch and the foil doesn't come out of the water, that's great. Right? But if you have a short strut, which is the piece between the two, then the board can touch soon or the foil will come out. And neither one of those are a disaster. So technically I describe it like travel in a vehicle. It has bigger travel. Like when you go to the Baja 1000, the guys have like 48 inches of travel. But it means you can drive through a 48 inch bottle and not bottom out. Yeah. So it's the same kind of thing where when you have that bigger mass, you can go.

1:55:40And especially when you're going down bigger surf and you're going fast. So we started to play with all of that position, foil shape. Was anyone else in the world doing this? No. Yeah. And I imagine if anyone saw what you were doing, they would just think they're crazy. They did. They thought we were crazy. And on top of that, we were crazy because we're booted in. We had snowboard boots on. So you imagine. And that was another thing that affected my pool training and stuff too. Because I had a situation where I got, I was with a friend and we were way off shore by ourselves. And a giant wave hit me and drove me with my rig.

1:56:15And my foil rig was heavy way down into the darkness. And I was attached to a seanker with boots on for real. Like, you know that old cement boots? Yeah. This was the real cement boot. Yeah. And I was at the bottom of the ocean connected to the board with my boots on in the darkness. And I was thinking, this is a problem. Yeah. This is a real, like this could be it. And so I reached down and got the, I had quick releases. So we weren't completely flying by the sea of our pants. And I got released. But I still had boots on. And I still had to get to the top. And you don't swim well with boots. So what I did was as I didn't use my legs at all because the boots don't work.

1:56:55And I just used my arms. But through that process, I learned that you use a lot less oxygen with your arms. And so my breath hold time expanded. So I had more because you weren't using your legs to swim to the top. Yes. So came up, got it, had the whole, but so there were some things like that. Kind of, I had that revelation about it, foiling, started to foil. Kind of lost the interest at going to P .A .H .E. because it was getting so much attention and it had so much draw to it. And then after that, I just completely focused every single winner, foiling in all the biggest surf we could. Like our whole thing.

1:57:36And we didn't even think about small ways. We were only towing in giant surf foiling. That was our whole use of it. Foiling through the exposure of stuff that we're doing all of a sudden starts to get some traction. And I had done this early on when we foiled, which is I, because I was involved in kiting, because I was involved in wind surfing. We were amongst the first five or ten guys in the world to kite. So we were, I was in a core group of guys. And kite surfing is where you're on the board and there's a sail up in the air. With a string. With a string. And there's a kite in the distance.

1:58:07And it's like, and I mean, we were early on like this stuff we were doing. First we did it on land and I ended up getting pulled up into some high tension wires and fell from the sky. I broke my ankle. So I'm like, yeah, we can't do this on land. We got to do this on the ocean. And then we would do stuff like, you'd be on your board in the water with your board. And the boards that really helped us launch that whole thing, it changed into wakeboarding were our big way boards because they went fast. They had foot straps. So they were perfect. So the guy would be on the beach with the kite. You'd be in the water.

1:58:37And then he'd launch it. And in literally, it would be like, there's a rope on a bull. And they open the gate and you're holding onto the rope on the bull. And you just, if you let go, the bull runs away or if you crash, you're done. And so that was that was it. And we would go down the coast on Maui from the Hukipa. And just do like a death run. And then end up in like the airport. If you didn't crash somewhere along the way, out at sea, hopefully not. Because you'd be way out of shore. And that's never fun. And the kites didn't relaunch. They were literally if they hit the water, there was over.

1:59:10So you had to keep the kite in the air, not crash. And just hold on for your life. So that was early kiting like in the initial stages of it. And in that, as we started to kite, we were foiling too. So we were kite foiling. There were air rams initially, which are the ones that guys jump off the mountain with. That the air goes in and makes the shape. They weren't relaunchable yet. We had heard about a guy in France who had built the relaunchable ones, the blow up ones. And I knew a French guy and I said, hey, when you go there, bring those kites back. Because he was making them for like some blow up, cat him ran or some crap.

1:59:42The thing I'm like relaunchable kite, get that thing. So I married the foiling with the kite initially. And I kite for it and I go, you know what? This is going to be a discipline. No doubt. But I'm not that interested in it. I want to ride waves. Yeah. I'm a surfer. Yeah. And that's my front. But it's going to be its own thing. Yeah. Come to, we're riding all winter, towing in every time there's a big swell, working on, you know, riding giant waves with foils. Come to foiling's birth in kiting explodes. So the guys are kiting, foiling all of a sudden, breaking world records stuff. But there, but foiling happens, all starts in kiting.

2:00:19And then that's when the first foil companies where they have money for R &D and they're paying guys to, because they're selling production stuff and they're doing a whole thing, right? They're running business, they have clients, they have, so that starts that part of the industry, of the foil industry, which ends up influencing small wave foiling. Normally what happens is you start in the small waves and you go small, medium, large, you get the big waves. We were in the big waves because we were, so in a way, we went, we ended up. The only reason you were on the foil was to manage the giant waves.

2:00:55Because the regular surfboard couldn't do it anymore. Yes. And the irony is that it can ride away the dozen that you couldn't even surf at so small. Wow. That's the irony. In the pursuit of the fastest, you know, roughest, biggest that you can do is that the result is that same instrument is the one that can ride away the dozen even break. Then you can ride wind swells and you can ride little tiny waves that don't break for miles. It just expanded. So all of a sudden this whole universe just expands and you have companies starting from Kiting that move into, you know, now you have winging, which is Kiting without strings.

2:01:32So now you're just holding the kite right next to you on a foil board. Right. And then that's because the foils are so... So we tried that. Yeah. What's that like? Fun. Yeah. Coming from wind surfing and Kiting, it's a little, and I've seen some, I saw the world champion in Chakama because we go to Peru for one of the longest waves in the world. That's our summertime kind of routine and he was down there. I mean, what he was doing was amazing, but as somebody who is a wave rider, wind always seems so restrictive, even though it allows you to do these other things, you're not free. Yes. You're being led a little bit.

2:02:09You have to hold onto it and it's behind you and... You have a motor. Yeah. Yeah. And in so being, yeah, there's a bunch of things you can do, but there is something restrictive. It's like having a dog on a leash. Yeah. Like when you have a dog on a leash, you have to kind of... Like you can't just run that way and you can't go any direction you want and do anything you want. And there's something freedom about having nothing in your hands that surfing is. Yeah. Right. So that leads us to that now, the expansion of what foils are. That's the frontier, right? Is all of these places... When did this happen?

2:02:39It's happened over the last 10 years. We're towing in the big waves and that obviously has... There's nobody that wants to do that really. There's not a business. There's not a... No. You're not making these for... The amount of people is kind of like big wave riding. The amount of participants doesn't justify any kind of company or anything. So you have the kiting aspect, then wing -dinging, which is the wing, like the kite without strings that you're holding onto that's a blow -up. That's just easier to deal with. You just pump it up, you grab it, you have your foil board. Electric. So electric becomes it, which made sense that there was going to be some electric device because it's just totally suited for that.

2:03:23The guy who built that was in engineering school. He saw one of our videos that had foiling in it and changed his whole thing into learning how to design that and started a company called Lift, which builds the one of the better electric. He's the first electric foil builder and one of the better ones, which I use to train as well, really good for flat water, good for your legs, and you can go really fast on them. So it's really good for reactive... So, in strap to the speed? No. I could use some foot straps. I just don't know. When did the foot straps go away and why and what's the difference?

2:04:00So the foot strap, the boot went away once the foils became less sensitive and more efficient. As the design increased and the shapes got to a point where they were highly efficient, that allowed... The board could be stable without you being strapped in. Yeah. Before you had to be strapped in. You had to be booted in to deal with the leverage. Yeah. And that had to do with the way the foil was lifting and what it was doing. Because as the wings evolve and the shapes evolve, they become more efficient, which makes them less reactive and less leverage and everything about them become more stable.

2:04:42It's a little bit like, whenever you come into a sport after the equipment evolves, it's always easier to learn. Like if you tried to learn how to snowboard with the very first snowboard that they learned, no one would be really impossible. You tried to learn with the first skateboard. Yeah, the three best surfers and the whole thing could do it and no one else. Like it's not skateboarding until they built the tire. You get a year of the entire and nice truck, that changes everything. So the same thing with the foils. As the foils, all of a sudden we are able to get rid of our boot. Yeah. And actually, a guy came to visit me because my nephew put a foil on a stand -up board.

2:05:17Initially, and I looked at that, I thought that was cool, but I was kind of like, okay, I'm focused on the big wave. I might be good, but then a guy came to visit me who had one of the foil companies, and he brought a stand -up paddle, foil board. And I went and took it out. I rode one wave. I said, well, I'm going to take this from you or you can sell it to me. But it's not leaving my house. It's not leaving my house. Like, I'm not letting this go. And he's like, well, that's only what I got. And I go, yeah, but you built this one. So you can build another way. You're professional. So then now all of a sudden, foils are the shapes, the sizes, the materials, everything's evolving.

2:05:55And so we move into where we are right now, which is we have an enormous spectrum of disciplines and environments that we can do. Like, some of the fastest sales in the world, I mean, first of all, everything's unhydrophobic. You watch America's Cup, you watch all these sailboats, everything's flying on blades. Right? But in foiling specifically for us, the pinnacle, just like I felt like insurfing is big weight running. That's the top. And then also distance. Right? So distant, there becomes some other thing. Speed, distance, size. Like, I like those things. Those things are, and usually there's some relationship.

2:06:37But you can ride very small waves. You can ride wind swell. You have electric. You have multiple wind powered ones. You have stand -up paddling ones. You have prone paddling ones for surfing. So little lay down ones or stand -up ones. So we have like six or seven disciplines within foiling. All different kinds of foils, sizes, shapes, and companies. And so those all the areas where surf is expanding the most in the foils now. Without a doubt. I can't even compare. Now it's expanded places. Because normally the saturation of surfers and locations, we're pretty tapped out. We only have so many waves.

2:07:15And we have a lot more surfers. And so you go to a spot and there's a hundred people out at every spot that's any good. Now all of a sudden a spot that isn't even a surf spot is a foil spot. And it wouldn't be a spot unless there was foiling. So it opens up our universe, which we need. Yeah. We need more options, especially as you know, I have more people participating. But it also opens up things that we haven't done. Which is really that's something that's more interesting even for me is being able to do things in an environment. And in locations that you've never experienced. You know, now we're writing, you know, we're going to places and writing ways for six or seven minutes, eight minutes.

2:07:59And the average surfing wave is ten seconds, maybe twenty at a long one. So now you're compounding the amount of writing time you're getting. So now on one surf trip, foiling trip. You could spend more time going fast on your vehicle, on your board. Yeah. Then if you were to combine all of the rides of your life before this. Yes. If we weren't doing it, I wouldn't believe it was possible. Imagine how much better you get with all that time. And you're also in a way you're expanding your view to your ability. Because now we're looking at wave energy differently. Because I always describe surfers as wave readers.

2:08:43Yeah. Like, great you can stand up and you can rip. But more impressive is you can look at a wave and know what it's going to do. That's the thing that takes all the time. Never mind you know how to stand up and you can jam around. Can you look at a wave and understand where it's moving and how it's moving. It's like, I'll go to the beach with Gabby sometimes and I'll be at a surf spot. And I'll go see the guy take off and before he gets to his feet, I go, that guy's going to get donuts. And she goes, and then he goes down 10 feet and gets hit by the wave and she's like, how do you know that? And I go, well, I could just tell by his movement, his speed, what the wave was doing that it was going to break on his head.

2:09:15Or you know somebody's going to make it. And there's always a surprise. Yeah. You're like, I thought that guy was going to make it but it pulled it off. But that's where it takes the time. And now we're looking at waves. We're watching waves earlier that we wouldn't even have considered. Because we're seeing them before they break because that's when we're writing them. And they're doing a lot of downwind stuff too, where they're getting on the foil and they're able to just fly from one wave to the next to the next to the next and just fly and connect the dots and put those pieces together, which again takes that reading and that judgment, which is really probably the enticing thing of it.

2:09:51Right. It's like hearing music and knowing how. Where can go? Where can go. Yeah. Yeah. It's an enticing thing that keeps you inspired, right? Because what are we trying to do is just stay inspired. And how do you stay inspired if you have one day in your lifetime that you're never going to get another one like unless you have another day in your lifetime that you're never getting another one. Over the course of your life of surfing, where are you in the excitement of what you're about to do? The sureness of the experience, like I know I'm going to what I'm going to do and I'm going to get to do it.

2:10:30And the guarantee of that is never been any higher because normally there's just too many variables and the moments are too short and too few to have that kind of thing. So I know coming into it, I know that no matter what's going to happen, I'm going to get to I'm going to have a hard time walking. Because you'll be doing it so much. I'm going to have my legs are going to be sore. I'm going to blow out before there stops being anything to do. I'm going to blow out. And over the course of your life, how often is that in the case? I mean, not a lot. I stand on high work. I mean, I work. That's what you work towards.

2:11:01You seek that. There can be years and years in a row where you don't have that. I have to be careful how you say it. But in a way, it's like there is a reward or there is a blessing for dedication. Yes. But you have to stay dedicated. Yes. But it has to also why too. You have to have the right. I just honestly believe if you're in tensions or genuine and you state that you're going to be blessed. It's going to be, the universe is going to provide you with the thing you need. As long as you stay true to your, you know, and your intention is pure. Your intention is pure. I still get it because I have a group of friends that I'm able to do it with.

2:11:41So I get it through that. But I don't, like I made a joke the other day. I was talking about, you know, just if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, does it actually fall? And I'm like, yes, it does. I can tell you what it falls. You don't need anybody to see it. And I speak to, on my side, like, I don't need anybody to know. I don't need anybody to see. I know what I'm going to do. I do enjoy the camaraderie because I want to share in it. It'd be like if you had the most delicious meal ever. And you were by yourself. It would be great. But I'd rather see it more fun with four friends talking about how great it is.

2:12:19And enjoying it. Right. So I think there's that to it. And sometimes you doubt it. You doubt that that's true. You can doubt that there is a reward. But it seems to happen every time. You don't even know it's happening. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, look what's going on. Look what's happening. Look what's, look what we're getting to do. Look, it's like, because we're so caught up and always trying to do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And then all of a sudden, but you don't realize sometimes it just comes right around the corner. And then it's just like think, you know, it's like, it's working.

2:12:54How did you, it's working? How did you meet Don Wildman? Somebody invited me on a helicopter snowboarding trip to Canada. And it was with Jerry Lopez. It was a friend of his. A guy named Tom Flager. And he said, hey, you want to come helicopter snowboarding with us? We go to this great place called Mike Wigglies. And it's like the premier Austrian guy that started the helicopter, best food, best air. You know, I saw he went there and I was sitting at dinner. We had just finished a great day of riding. And somebody said, see that guy over there at that table? And it was Don sitting at the table with his gray, just his doneness.

2:13:34And he was sitting there and they're like, you really need to meet that guy. So I walked over and I said, hello. And I think somebody told me his name is Mr. Wildman or Hey Don. My name's Laird, nice to meet you. Hey, how's it going? You know, he was, and he had a big smile. And I was like, you could feel his energy. And it was like, okay, great to meet you. Nice to meet you. And then I left and didn't see him and no, no word. And then like three years later, I'm with Gabby. We're in Malibu. I walk into a restaurant in Malibu and Don's sitting at the restaurant. And I said, hey, what are you doing?

2:14:20He goes, I live right down the road. And I go, I just move right down the road. And then that was it. That was like the, you know, come over and you know, taught me how to bike. And I taught him how to foil. How much older was he that knew? Don was what he was 30 years old. Yeah, yeah, 30. 30 years older. He'd be like, what he'd be like 90 something right now. I think, you know, he'd be like 92. So something like that, 32. How would you describe him? Well, he'd be a barrenuckle fighter. Like, when you look at, first of all, when you look at Don, you're like, this is a barrenuckle fighter. Like, this guy would fight barrenuckles.

2:15:01Like, anytime, any place, no problem. That's your feeling you get. Like, you just feel like, like a bear. Like, this is a bear. And it just beyond enthusiastic, beyond open, beyond interested. You seem to love life more than anybody. I love it. Love it. Love living. And enjoy it. Enjoy. Professional. Yeah. Professional enjoyer. I mean, listen, I always use the story. He'd come over to my house. We'd make a mistake. He'd be eating. And he'd say, this is the best steak I've ever had. Four days later, I'd invite him over to my house. I'd make a steak. He's like, this is the best steak I've ever had.

2:15:41It was always the best steak I ever had. And he would, he was open in a way, like, to music. I would, I always laugh because I'd like, you couldn't invite him on, on anything that he wouldn't go on. Unless he just had some other thing tied up. Hey, Don, I'm going to go, you know, jump out of a plane without a parachute. Sounds fun. Let's go. Like, it didn't matter what you said. Didn't matter what you said. Which one you wanted. I mean, one time we're at Chopu. Yeah. He's into Heatie. Chopu. And Don doesn't really surf. Like, I mean, he surfs a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He doesn't surf. He's sitting in the boat.

2:16:13He doesn't chopu surf. No. And not even remotely near chopu surf. Heak, after about 40 minutes or an hour of me towing, he, I come up on the boat. He goes, he waves me and comes up. He goes, I think I'm ready for one. I looked at him. I go, hey, Don, I love you. Yes. You are not ready for one. He goes, I'm not. I go, you're not. He goes, okay, good.

2:16:42So, you know, there was a lot of those. There was a lot of those. But him and I had a crazy, beautiful relationship. And I had a lot of incredible trips with Don. Tell me about the race across America. Oh, God. Well, first of all, Don was a professional sufferer. Like, he could suffer like, prefer than anybody. Very few in the world I've ever seen that could suffer so well. Actually, after being uncomfortable for a long time, he would actually get better. Like, he would get, he would start to do better. He didn't do worse. It wasn't like, he suffered for two days. He would start to excel. But his endurance thing started with the Iron Man, right?

2:17:27So, he sold his company and turned into an Iron Man guy. I guess he's made bragged about he was going to start doing triathlons or something like that. And then his boys said, well, they just said in Forbes or something, you're going to do triathlons. And so, you're going to be a real jerk if you don't start. So, he just started doing Iron Man. So, I think he started when he was 50. And he did an Iron Man. Like, every year for 10 years or 12 years in a row and never missed. I think he got second. And then finally won his age division or something. Always second or winning or second. So, he obviously loves endurance stuff.

2:18:00So, he suckered me into, into, I suckered him. And we would always sucker each other into certain things. But this was a suffering. He suckered me into it. And I was like, I didn't want to do it. Because it was, part of my reason why I didn't want to do it. I don't like the formality of it. I don't like, event, like the competition. Yeah, I just don't like the thing. I don't mind doing something brutal. Yeah. And I don't mind going with other people and trying to beat people and brutal things. Yeah. I just didn't want to participate in like a structured thing. And he goes, you know, we'll do this.

2:18:28There's this thing called the Race Across America. And I've done it once before. And I think we could do really well. I got a team of us. I think you're good. I got this other guy, Timmy C, who's the bass player for Rage. And I got this other friend, this other guy, Jason, who's the next football quarterback. And I go, I think we could just really, you know, we could hammer him. And this is a bike race where the other racers in it are all professional bike racers. That's right. Yeah. These are professional bike racers. But Don has it in his mind. He understands he goes, oh, you're VO2 max. You're guys ability to suffer.

2:19:00We're in. I go, okay, I'll do it. But my contingent is that we have to paddle to the start. Which is a 24 hour paddle. And it's from Malibu to ocean side. So Malibu to ocean side, but we're going to relay it. Like we're going to do the bike race. So it's not going to be completely bad. It's just you're not going to paddle consecutively, but we're going to relay all the way down there. To get to the race. To get to the race. Yeah. Which I don't think the racers appreciated that. But we weren't, it wasn't about them. It was about us. We went. That's what made it fun for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

2:19:32I'm like, okay, I'll do it. But I want to do the, I want to paddle for, I want to do it. Because I was doing these things called paddle and pedals. Oh, okay. And so I had gotten dawn to do one with me and Hawaii. I took dawn on this one where we did, we biked across every island and paddle across every channel in Hawaii in five days. We would 500 miles. And he said it was worse than any, he said it was worse than 10 iron man. But that was, I think he's making me feel good. So you either biked if it was land. Yeah. Or paddled if it was water. Yeah. Across the entire chain of Hawaii. From the southernmost point to the northernmost point, every island, every channel.

2:20:07And so we had, like the first bike was 125 miles. Then we paddle for 35. The longest paddle was 22 and a half hours. But we did those contecually. So anyway, before after I'm not sure, but he's like perfect. Here we go, race across America. And so him and I were on a team. And, and then Timmy C and Jason were on the other team. And then we would, when we were really going, we would be like, 30 minutes. Everybody would go, I'd go 30 minutes as hard as I could. Then he'd go 30 minutes. And then he'd go 30 minutes. How long was the race? Tell me what the race is first. The race is from ocean side to Delaware.

2:20:40Ocean side, California to Delaware. Yes. Across the entire country. Yeah. Bike only. Bike only. And how long does it take? Three or four days. Like no, four or five days. It's 24 hours a day. 24 hours a day. 24 hours a day. Somebody usually dies along the thing. He'd run out of a truck or something like that. And Don had done it before. He thought we had a really good chance to win. And Don was in the 70s at this time. Yeah. Late 70s. Late 70s. Yeah. You're a surfer. Yeah. We got a guy and rage against the machine. Yep. And we have a injured football player. An ex -college football guy. But who's got a big VO2 max.

2:21:17Going against professional bikers. Yeah. We start. And there is a, I mean, obviously you have to go, there's a lot of hills. I think we climbed something crazy within the first two days. We climbed, I want to say, we were alternating, but we climbed more than 75 ,000 feet, right, of elevation between the four of us, which was a lot, a lot of elevation. And you're going day and night, so you're not sleeping. Yeah. And you're riding in a trailer and then you're getting in the bike and you're just doing like that. And you can't eat and you just feel terrible. And Don just loves that. So he thought it was great.

2:21:56He thought that was like a fun thing. And so we were leading the race when we got off the mountains. And technically the mountains would have been hard. It was the hardest part. Well, it would have been our weakness because we were bigger guys. Yeah. And I remember at one point there was another team that caught up to us. And we had some weird stuff going on. We Don hired a manager to help us manage the times and the whole thing, the somebody that had done it before. And he was undermining us the whole time. So he was actually trying to break us. And he kept saying, you know, this is Ram and Dada Dada and like the whole thing.

2:22:35And I kind of caught on to it. I was kind of like, Don, this guy is sabotaging us. Like he's making us go in paces and doing things to break us. I go, this guy is, and then like, take, lead us down the wrong road, like the navigation, like off. And you know, I mean, it was like, there was some stuff going on. And once Don finally realized that the guy was doing that, then he's like, okay, he fired the guy. But there was like, he, the guy was doing stuff like, you know, when you, you have to do a change. And so the guy would be on the bike ready to go. And then he'd start riding. And then once you passed his back tire, then he'd pull over, get in the van and go.

2:23:12But the van would be waiting. So you'd, and you'd be just grinding away, feeling not just not sleeping, can't eat. And you'd see the van, you'd think here it comes. And the guy would be like, just poising there. And then he'd just drive off and you'd have a big, go climb after. So he would, big, he was doing some weird stuff, right? So I'm like, Don, this guy's messing with us. He, the guy was waiting at the bottom of the hill. And I remember coming down a hill and the guy was sitting in the car. And I knew, was the guy knew what he was doing. And so as I went by, I just put my elbow out and hit the side mirror on the van.

2:23:45And it slapped on the front window. And the guy jumped out of his seat. It was right when Don, then right after that Don fired him, they sent him away. But we were leading the race. And we now we were in the flats, which means that we were really going to roll. And we all started feeling better. You know what I mean? You're listening to you're at Europe in Tolst, New Mexico at, you know, whatever, how many thousand feet breathing in it. It feels like you're breathing out of a straw. And you're having to ride as hard as you can. And there was definitely a test of, of will. But Don just felt better and better.

2:24:15And so we get to her and Missouri. The one guy passes my friend, then it's my turn. And I ride up along side the guy. And the guy says something like, this is what we do or whatever. Like, hey, surfer boy or something like that, which was probably not the thing to tell me at that particular time. And so I just left him and, you know, Verizon dropped the guy. And then changed with Jason. And then Jason was going, and then we were going to start rolling. And we were really good. That guy's escort vehicle passed us, went up and ran over Jason, hit him with the car and broke his leg. It's unbelievable.

2:24:55Broke his leg in Herman, Missouri. And I was behind in our van. And the guy passed us and just went right and literally ran. And I told Jason, go down. I thought Jason got run over. I thought he's dead. Like I thought he was killed. And I was with cameraman, officer sweet. And I had the three of us who are observers. We watched him hit the guy, went over there. Jason was on the ground, but only broken leg. Then that was it. Because he was out. We couldn't do it. I mean, we could have gone three guys. But Don, it was all about winning. He didn't, don't, don't, don't, don't, didn't care about the.

2:25:28Yeah. So it was all about, and we were on track to break the record at that point. And, and, I mean, and everybody felt good. And we were rolling. And now we're in the flats. We're in Herman, Missouri. Like everything from then on was just, we were going to be in the big spoke, big gear, just grinding away. And then the race officials called it a mutual collision. Because of bicycle and a car crash, a truck crash. A minivan. And the guy, and the guy you can see, because what happens is, people are driving 24 hours a day. And we were changing all the time. The people get delirious. But the guy ran over our guy and we were in headband.

2:26:04We were going to, and I could see by the way. Is that team end up winning? Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah. So for them to catch us. It turns out in these competitions, people cheat. Beyond. Beyond. Which, you know, maybe that's my thing, because I go back to the thing, because why does that, why have I always been turned off by that stuff? Yeah. Because it's like, I'd just seen it my whole life. I just go, I mean, and the winners win, but sometimes they don't win when they should. But they win when they, when they need, like, when they do. What's odd to me about a surf competition is, every wave is different.

2:26:37No, yeah. I mean, it's hard enough when you're dealing with lines and baskets and, like, it's hard enough when you're dealing with all these fixed things. Yeah. You get weird stuff that goes on. You're like, that was a weird call. Yeah. That's that, that changes that whole game. Never mind how ambiguous, you know, art, music, food. Yeah. I don't think it's a good motivator. I think it's, it brings out the worst in people. Completely. Yeah. Well, it brings out the worst in me. Yeah. That's what I notice. I notice for me personally, I don't like who I am when I do that. Like, I just makes me so, I'm already too aggressive.

2:27:14I'm trying to learn how to navigate all of that energy. Yeah. I'm like, how do I nurture that? And, but also, how do I productively use that? Yeah. You know, how do I productively, you know, you know, I do do well. Put me in these heavy situations. Yeah. Then I feel useful, worthy. I can actually have camaraderie with my guys. And if they do well and I do well, or we can work together to achieve this thing, that feels amazing. I'm like, that feels like, that feels like the human condition that really made us successful. Yeah. Like, when we had to navigate surviving in nature with giant animals that could eat us that were a lot smarter and faster, or maybe not smarter, maybe smarter, maybe smarter.

2:27:55Maybe. You know, that feels like the attitude that would make us successful. Not this, us against each other. That seems to never make us successful. That only makes us less successful, you know. But so, Don, so he got run over Jason, which ended up being a blessing because he ended up marrying my nanny and having a beautiful family. So, the end of the thing, maybe it was for that. Like, maybe we don't realize it. I mean, we were bummed about it, but then we went to New York and we paddled around the Statue of Liberty. Because that was part of our paddle and petal piece of it. Yeah. But we were just two because Jason's leg was broken.

2:28:28The three of us could have done it. Yeah, but it defeated the purpose. Exactly. So, Don lost the interest, but he was feeling like I just remember how strong he was and how well he did under that kind of pressure. Like, I mean, and I think obviously Korea, the war, the things that he had been through. Like, in his business, he always used to, I guess he said to me, he goes, always told the people, he goes, this isn't life or death. Yeah. Like, I know what life or death is. This is not life or death. Like, even though he, he definitely wouldn't, you know, stand down to anybody. Like, not even close.

2:29:06I remember the time he was on, he got on testosterone. His woman at the time was having some acne problems. And then she was like, that's weird. I never have that issue. And then she realized it was because he was using some kind of cream for testosterone that was getting on her and giving her acne. So then they're like, okay, we got to stop using that cream. And he's 70 something. So, you know, a little testosterone probably not going to be bad for him. So then he's like, okay, let me talk to somebody who I know. So he talks to our one friend and our one friend has a lot of experience. And he goes, here I'll set you up and he sets him up with the thing, a kit and whatever.

2:29:39And then all of a sudden, like, two weeks in, he's like trying to get in the fight and the parking lot. And then he's going to Vegas. He goes to Vegas with his girl and they don't leave the room for three days. And, you know, she's like, honey, you know, maybe she just checked your levels. And just seeing what they're like, what they are. He goes, oh, it's sure. Okay, he's almost there at this point. Yeah, I feel good though. He goes, I'm good. And she goes, well, let's just check them. Let's just check the levels. And so the story is she's at home and the facts machine goes off because he still has a fact machine.

2:30:10And gets the thing and all he said, she just started laughing. He's like, what is it, honey? She's like, I got the results back. He's like, what are they? And she goes, well, you're testosterone's 1800.

2:30:26They call our buddy and they say, hey, the things are 1800. He goes, don't worry, mine are 2000. Anyway, he toned it back a little bit. I think that helped because he was literally like wanting to get in the fight. And he looked a little tired. He knew once, go mountain climbing with him. Yeah, tell me about that. Oh, we've been in an avalanche. Don and I were in an avalanche. I was in an avalanche with Don. We've had a few things. I mean, I just, he got hit in the face with the board. He had the punctured lung, the time he had the punctured lung. Like, he had the time he crushed his tibio plateau and then had to be, I mean, he was like, um, he dumped me.

2:31:10Literally break, glue back together. One time he fell on his bicycle at his house in Utah on black ice and then broke his femur. And he was like laying on the black ice and the guys couldn't get to him because it was so slippery they couldn't even. But he gets home. He's got, he's got one of his legs is incapacitated. And every time he goes to the doctor, they just can't believe how fast he heals. So I go in the gym. He has his crutch on one of the pedals of the stationary bike. And then he's other leg that works on the other pedal and he's peddling. And, but the other leg is obviously can't work.

2:31:45So it's on the side and he literally is doing cardio. One leg, it bicycling with the crutch. With the cane on the other side. Yeah, crutch on one pedal. Crutch on one pedal with arms. Leg on the other side like that. Oh, I got to do my cardio. Like beyond obsessed. Beyond obsessed. What do you say if you didn't train? He wouldn't eat. Yeah, right. Tell me about the mountain climbing. So no, he goes, hey, I want to go do Everest. And I said, okay, like I'm the guy he sucks in. Yeah. I'll go and then maybe I'm there. You know, he helped me. I can help him whatever. Yeah. So he's like, hey, I want to do Everest.

2:32:21And I go, well, how about before you do Everest? Yeah. Let's just do a little hill. Yeah. Like Rainier, which is the longest endurance climb in North America after McKinley. But McKinley takes three weeks. Yeah. Like Rainier, you can go up there. You can hike up halfway, sleep the night, and then hike to the top and hike all the way back down. Yeah. So we go, okay, let's go to Rainier. So we go down. And his knees are hurting him. I think this is before he's got the double knee surgery. And we're going. And somehow they feed us burritos. They feed us bean and chicken burritos. And we're in a tent.

2:32:59The two of us. And I would say it's a gassy night. But it's beyond. It was beyond. It was beyond the point where it was that we didn't even care. We were like on the top of the glacier. Like, let's just, so we wake up early in the morning. We hike. We're going. I think Don's son, John, is youngest son with us. I'm behind John. At one point, John's head left falls into a crack. And John tries to get it. I'm like, John, you can't get it. You're not going to get it. And the guy in the front goes, hey, stay away from that crack. That's where 10 or 12 people fell and they never found them. And I'm like, exactly, keep going.

2:33:37So we go. We do the top. We come back down. And we're partway down. And when you are down climbing, the weight is seven times your body weight on your leg. The down pressure when you're, so down climbing is a lot harder. Everybody thinks it's about going up. It has nothing to do with going up. It's about coming down. That's why people have so much problem is they think the summit is the achievement. No. You looking at the bottom is the achievement. You know what the parking lot is called it, right near paradise. There's a reason it's called paradise is because when you get back, you're glad that you're back.

2:34:08You know, we height, we down climb and that we're about partway through. We're a little ways through. And somehow our other friend has talked the guide into carrying his pack. Don says to the guide, I will not only give you all of the hiking gear that I bought this brand new. I will pay you double of what this guy is going to pay you. Here's my pack. Here's my stuff. Take it. And so the guy ended up taking his stuff and carrying it down the hill. And then but that cured Don for about the Everest. He was good. He goes, I don't need to do Everest. And I'm like, I'm with you.

2:34:59And so the guy is going to be a little bit more careful. And then he's going to be a little bit more careful. And then he's going to be a little bit more careful. And then he's going to be a little bit more careful. And then he's going to be a little bit more careful.