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May 1, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender
46:53
Kelly Slater on Plastics and the Ocean

Kelly Slater, with 11 world championships is considered the greatest surfer in the world. Kelly discusses water pollution, waves, and winning in this special Earth Day episode. Slater has championed many important causes in his life as a passionate activist. To learn how you can improve waterways visit: www.waterkeeper.org or www.surfrider.org

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This is Kelly Slater, my hero, who is the greatest surfer in world history.
He's 11 times legitimately, 11 times world champion, and does a lot of other amazing things with his life.
And really, I wanted you on here because Kelly has been in a battle for basically his entire conscious life.
With a lot of the same villains that I've been fighting, the oil industry, the plastics industry, the Fanhul brothers in Florida, his home state, the big sugar industry down there.
And I wanted to talk to you about all that stuff.
Will you talk a little bit about the effect of clean water in the surf culture?
In the surf culture, yeah.
So, you know, I've said for a long time that we're kind of the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to surfing.
Surfers are in the ocean.
I mean, there's more ocean and water pollution things than we can even imagine.
Places like India, China.
It's an overwhelming task to even start to penetrate the pollution that's in the oceans.
The ocean, 75% of the earth, 70% of the earth, we don't access more than a very small percentage of that.
So the oceans are just filled with all the stuff, all the fishing debris.
And, you know, the fishing topic is a whole other thing.
Industrial fishing, commercial fishing is really, I would say, ruining the oceans.
I don't think there's anything wrong with somebody going and catching dinner.
On a line or throw on a net, but when you get into what commercial fishing is and that whole thing, that's another thing.
You know, you're not going to make any friends talking about it, but it's awful.
And from what I hear from fishermen, when they say dolphin safe for your tuna, that's not true.
They just tag that on the, they just stamp that on their cartons.
So I don't even know where to start with ocean.
There's so many scary pollutants out in the world, in the air, in the water.
People dump their oil and there's nothing to spill your gas.
If you have a leak in a boat, you know, once you're a mile or five miles or 20 miles offshore, you can dump certain or a limited number or anything you want in the ocean because, hey, it's just going to float down to the bottom.
You know, how much respect do we have for ourselves when we treat our earth that way?
It's the only earth we have.
There's some deep-seated belief that if you can't see it, that it doesn't affect you.
I think it's in the collective conscience and the psyche of everyone.
Luckily, there are people like yourself and the people you work with and great people around the world who are doing their best to educate, fix those situations, put them out there in the media and let it be known.
But we do have to find solutions for these things.
This year was the first year I've ever surfed anywhere.
I was in Bali.
The seasons were changing from dry to wet season and the wind changes and it starts to rain.
And all the rivers start to flood out.
And so all the garbage that's been thrown into these rivers all year long, or for six months, it starts flowing out in the ocean.
And it's the first time I've ever surfed anywhere where I couldn't surf because there was so much garbage I had to actually come in.
I literally could not surf.
There was such an amount of garbage in the surf line.
It's just heartbreaking.
We'll take a boat from Bali over to Zimbabwe or to Nusa Lumbagan or whatever.
We go through the channel between those islands and We actually had to slow the boat down to an idle speed just to go through some of the garbage which lodged out together in the middle of channel, you know, 10 miles from land.
And, you know, I don't know what the endgame is.
I really don't know what we're going to do.
All our food's filled with plastic if we're eating anything from the ocean.
There's poisoning of the food and water all over the place.
We're becoming so much more disconnected from nature and our natural order that it just really scares me for our kids and grandkids and the future of this planet.
50 years from now, I can't imagine what it'll be like.
I just can't even imagine if it keeps going this way.
Why do humans have the right to just this place up so bad?
I don't get it.
I just don't, I mean, I always say, what if ants and every other creature out there and whales and, you know, lions, what if all the other creatures that live on this planet all treated this place like we do?
What if they all had buildings and roads and cars, you know, relative to their size?
What if all the aphids that could cover the whole United States and two or three inches of aphids every year all had some kind of infrastructure they needed to build and take over and own and We're just so disconnected and people forget we are part of nature because that's what we have become through society and through business and all this stuff.
And we're all guilty.
I'm not pointing the finger here.
I'm part of this system.
I'm a human and I travel on planes and I build surfboards and clothing and I'm a consumer of plastics and things.
I do my best to limit what I have and to recycle what I can.
But then you hear In Hawaii, something like 90% of the recycling ends up just going in a landfill and doesn't get recycled because they don't have the infrastructure to deal with it.
I think we'd all be fine if we got rid of plastic.
I don't know why you go to the store and you see a perfectly good fruit that then is also wrapped in plastic when it has a covering around it, like a banana.
And there's some cellophane wrap and some foam.
It's just mind-boggling to me.
It's mind-boggling.
How do we come up with this stuff?
You know, in this country, we subsidize trash disposals, so there's no incentive for the producers to even put that garbage into the stream of commerce to remove it.
In Europe, the person who puts a box into the stream of commerce, the company that does that has to show that it has reclaimed it, or it has to pay for its disposal.
In our country, the taxpayer pays for it, and that's why You know, they don't really have landfills in Europe, and in our country, the fresh hills of landfill is the highest point on the East Coast of North America because it's like all the worst pollution.
It's always about a subsidy, about a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his cost of production.
And, you know, it's possible if we rationalize the market to encourage people, to reward people For doing good things and punish them for doing bad things, for waste, for inefficiency, for pollution, that we could clean up the planet very quickly.
But I think we need to make that happen.
You know, I had a friend, she's my physio, does some massage on me and trains me in the gym, lives here in Hawaii.
She moved here, she had worked with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar At the Lakers and a few people around Hollywood and lived in LA and she went, you know, the air quality is not good here.
The life's not super great because all the traffic and all these people and it makes you a little bit crazy.
And so she moved to Hawaii like 30 years, 25 years ago.
She came here for the air quality.
Well, fast forward to 2017.
Her neighbor told her one day he was going to spray some plants outside.
He just wanted to let her know.
And she's like, okay.
So he mixes this, some kind of plant killer with paint thinner.
He puts on a hazmat suit and goes and is spraying everything around his yard and stuff.
And the wind is blowing straight into her house.
She comes home and she said, she's like, Kelly, it looked like a cloud of smoke going into my house.
And this guy who told me he was going to do a little spraying to kill some plants around his yard is wearing a hazmat suit with a full breather.
And he's like an 85 year old guy.
You know, he might not know, given the benefit of the doubt, he might not have known how bad it would affect people over there, but he knew in his immediate proximity how bad it was.
Her husband's dealing with cancer behind his eye that they found at like stage three or four.
She had a brain fog and a brain injury.
She came very close to dying.
This is just one person's situation on one pollutant in one neighborhood that happened.
You know, I was part of the legal team that's Monsanto, or Glyphosate, but Monsanto, and you think of Kauai as one of the most kind of pristine, you know, Eden-like place, but Kauai is the pilot testing island for all of Monsanto's pesticides.
The people on that island are some of the most contaminated people in the country.
Yeah, they have that here on Oahu.
They have it on Molokai.
I think the Big Island is the only place that doesn't have it, possibly.
Yeah, it's awful.
It's just awful.
You know, and even a topic like that, you know, because how many people have Roundup in their garage?
I would bet half the people in America do to spray something in their yard.
No one realizes the harm that can be done from these things.
And then the effect on The migration of butterflies, monarch butterflies, for instance, that eat the milkweed and that's all getting sprayed on the side of the freeways and stuff.
Fukushima.
What are we going to do about Fukushima?
I have no idea.
The scientists have no idea what they're going to do about Fukushima.
That thing's 10 years old now, and the millions of gallons of water that are flowing full of radioactive waste into the ocean every single day.
It's mind-boggling.
You could never even know.
No one even has any idea how much is going into the ocean, and that's been happening for 10 years.
And they don't know the effects of that.
They don't know that if dilution in the whole of the Pacific could handle the infinite amount of radioactivity that's going in there.
The only way they know to cool it, they don't know how to shut it down.
It's kind of melting into the earth, last I heard.
I mean, that thing alone is the biggest man-made catastrophe that's maybe ever happened, and no one talks about it.
And that scares me.
I have some friends that go across the ocean in boats, and they said that They were taking water samples every 20 miles or something, the whole length of that journey to test that.
And I didn't hear the results on that, but it's obviously a concern.
And you would think it would dilute as it goes out, but over an infinite amount of years, that's going to get less and less diluted and just build up in certain areas.
I have a clothing company called Outer Known, and it was formed for two reasons.
One was to look after the people who build our clothes and know that we're not using any kind of slave labor, that people get a fair living wage.
So the social compliance was number one to me, and a close sort of second, right, with it was the environmental concerns of our supply chain.
A lot of people would have no idea that in China there are literally blue rivers from the denim industry.
Yeah, I mean, you would know that.
You would know a lot more about that than I do, but I... I wouldn't let our company make denim until we could figure out a factory that could make it without polluting the waterways at all, which we found in Vietnam.
And I think because of the awareness and education around it, we're seeing more and more people who are, you know, the average person, I think on some level, if it's available to them, if there's people out there making that infrastructure, they will do it.
You know, if you have that recycling bin and you have that bin, well, you know, the average person, oh, that's easy enough.
But we need more and more of those people.
So what I did recently, I'm not saying this to try to pat myself on the back.
It just came up while I was doing it.
I was doing a podcast, a Zoom thing with this class in Ocean City, Maryland.
And this teacher reached out to me and said, hey, will you do Zoom with us?
And I thought, yeah, great.
So I did it for like an hour with them.
And I played some music.
And I had a musician stay at my house.
And he played a song for him.
And then we started talking about beach cleanups.
And I told him this story.
They did this on their own.
This was just inadvertently.
I said, one time my girlfriend and I were walking on the beach in Florida.
And I really didn't see any garbage.
But I noticed a little something on the ground.
So I picked it up.
And we decided to see how much debris we could find on the beach over the course of two or three blocks.
Because it looked like a clean beach.
And we found so much stuff.
And so the kids took it upon themselves to go and do a beach cleanup with their teacher.
And now they've adopted this beach in Ocean City and somebody just donated $100 to the class the other day and the kids are all excited and proud of it.
And so it's planting these seeds.
So now, like you talk about that incentivizing.
And so like I think it's going to be on the people, you know, like a teacher in a class or some kid who's got a science project or something, you know, just any way where people can go, look, here's some problems.
We're going to need to solve them.
This could be a big, huge thing.
I mean, look, maybe somebody creates a crypto coin that goes crazy because people start collecting garbage and recycling.
I don't know, like use technology, use foresight, use the problems, come up with solutions.
So I'm really proud of this class because they just took it upon themselves.
They went, you know what, we're going to go down and clean this beach up.
And a bunch of them started playing music now and have bought ukuleles.
And so it's really, I think, our obligation as stewards of this planet is to just have fun with it, really.
It's easy to get caught up in How painful and scary and frightening this is for the future.
But I think that if you can have fun with it and go, hey, let's just do this and try this.
You know, now these kids are going to, you know, I would guess one or two of them is going to spend their whole life just working on a pollution problem, pollution solution.
And maybe all of them are going to remember that moment when their teacher took them down the beach and they cleaned up.
So I'm going to actually do another thing with them.
I meant to do it this weekend, but she and I couldn't organize it.
But I'm going to get back with that class and I'm going to donate a little money to them too so they can create little projects and just say, here's something where you guys go out and figure out how to use it for good.
It's not painful.
It's not like doing homework for these kids.
They actually, she said that all of them have been totally engaged and really enjoyed it and been doing it in their free time and talking about it and how fun it's been.
So I think it's presenting something that That is enjoyable for younger people.
And from that, they create a passion.
You know, one of the reasons I really love you is that you're a critical thinker.
You're not frightened to talk about things that are the challenge of orthodoxies.
And what do you think that that comes, some of that comes from your sport or from your background?
Where does that come from?
Irreverence.
I think that probably comes from a number of things, but basically family.
I was a middle child.
My parents didn't have a great marriage and eventually split up.
Alcoholism in the family and a lot of discourse, not so civil.
My dog's going crazy over here.
And I was always kind of the mediator.
I was a middle child, and I was always trying to sort of mediate.
So I was always trying to kind of see both sides, my mom's side and my dad's side.
But I also have always liked the challenge.
I had an older brother who really pushed me.
I surfed and did sports with him and his friends that were older and bigger and stronger than me and faster.
So I think that bled over into my thinking, too.
You know, I was probably...
Maybe it took a little bit after my grandfather.
He was really into numbers.
He was kind of a mathematician.
He was a contractor.
I've always liked math and understanding the English language and grammar.
I wasn't a big history buff so much in school.
I didn't love science, but those things I actually really enjoy now.
I like the idea of holding two different thoughts and challenging each of them.
And so by that, you generally will get people label you right away that you think something other than they do, which they believe is truth.
And that's not necessarily the truth.
The truth is that I'm fine to question this thing.
It may be right.
It may be wrong.
I'm happy to be shown what the truth about something is.
But I think that's learning and educating yourself.
And how has that impacted you during the last year, during the pandemic?
What's your life been like and what's your thinking about it like?
Well, my life's kind of settled down a bit throughout this whole thing.
So I've been sort of spending seasons in different places where normally I spend like 10, 12 weeks, sorry, 10 or 12 days, maybe two weeks in a certain place.
Because of competition and traveling.
So instead, I spent the first two months of the year in Hawaii.
I spent three months in Australia.
I spent three months in California and then three months in Bali.
And I've been in Hawaii for five months.
So that's really been the whole cycle of COVID. As far as how it has shaped my thinking, there's been so many views out there on what is happening both scientifically, medically, politically, socially.
It has really shown a lot of division within society.
I think to a certain point, I've become almost a little bit hopeless that people can see eye to eye on things because there has been so much civil unrest around the world, but primarily in America.
Everyone seems to just disagree, and their sets of facts tend to be in line with their political affiliation.
So it seems harder now for people to be objective about things after the past year, if I'm just sort of looking at it from the outside.
That's how it appears to me.
I read a lot and I listen to a lot of things.
It's kind of turned me off.
The past year has kind of turned me off to social media somewhat because there is so much distrust between people.
There's so much disinformation and misinformation and everyone has a hair-trigger fuse emotionally.
You so quickly can get labeled or turned into the bad guy.
And this goes for sort of anybody and anything.
But it's been a weird and tough year for people.
I think people are highly stressed.
There's been financial issues.
There's been, obviously, people are dying.
There's just a lot of stress in society over a lot of things right now.
And I feel like it's made me a little more reclusive.
I comment on social media and stuff, but I'm kind of more reclusive.
I don't really post stuff anymore.
I'm kind of sitting back and watching.
I think all of us are, you know, mourning that loss of social discourse of sort of civil debate of what used to happen in the public sphere.
And there's increased polarization that is driven a lot, I think, by the algorithms on social media platforms, which is the way we communicate with each other.
And those platforms tend to reward us for confirmation bias.
For reinforcing views that people already have rather than challenging orthodoxies.
You know, the first time I met you, you and me and Al Merrick all got the Waterman of the Year Award from the Surf Industry Manufacturer Association.
I think it was in San Diego, although maybe it was in Santa Barbara.
I think he's up in Santa Barbara.
But he got up there.
We all had to give speeches.
And he got up there and he gave, you know, he just talked about God the whole time.
It was pretty amazing.
And then you got up there and your relationship with him was so charming and adorable and You know, the deference that you showed him and the kindness and respect.
That always stuck with me about you.
And Al Merrick, for those of you who don't know who he is, he's probably, would you say he's the best or most famous board shaper, at least in recent history.
Well, yeah, I think you look at the whole history of surfing and Al is definitely at the top.
His influence, both personally and professionally, on surfers throughout generations was probably unmatched.
You know, he's shaped for Tom Curran, who won amateur and then professional world titles.
I think Tom was probably The single most influential surfer on any generation during my lifetime.
And, you know, Al was highly responsible for that and Tom lived with him.
I spent periods of time living with Al myself and he shaped my boards for 20 years and most of my world title boards.
And he's just a really great human, just a really wonderful person to know.
What is the stamp that you've put on surfing?
I don't want to talk the whole time about surfing.
I actually did want to talk the whole time about surfing.
Is what you put on a kind of aerial?
Yeah.
Funny enough, my corporation is called Tailslide.
Which my ex-stepfather named because he started my corporation for me.
But when I was about 16 or so, 14 to 16, somewhere in there, we started doing what we call tail slides where you'd kind of do a carve and hit the lip of the wave, but then you'd slide the fins out.
And that became kind of my signature move.
That was what I was really known for.
And when I had my breakout win when I was 18 years old, that was kind of the maneuver I went to.
That was at Trestles.
That was a...
First or second week of my senior year of high school and I won my first big pro event and I signed my Quicksilver contract which lasted for 20 something 24 years 23 years I signed on the beach at that contest and I we made a movie that started there and all sorts of stuff so there's a real sort of big launch pad for me but the my style of surfing that was coming in then with not just mine it was our group of guys because there's a big group of us that were surfing together and There's now a movie called The Momentum Generation that
kind of outlines, documents what we were doing and our approach and our friendships.
And what we were basically trying to do is jump on tour and take surfing to a different level, which was beyond just the power surfing and tube riding.
It was not just on the face of a wave.
It was up in the air and it was doing rotations, 360s and 360s in the air and that kind of stuff.
So it was an evolutionary time in board design and the approach to surfing way.
So that kind of the start of my career.
I wonder why You call Tom Curran so important because he only won, I think he won two world champions.
Three, yeah.
He won three world titles but I feel like Tom was kind of an underperformer and he kind of shied away from the limelight and having to focus on him.
He won world titles in 85 and 86 and then had a four-year layoff and then won again in 1990.
Oh yeah.
I remember he had to come back The ranks, because they wouldn't let him immediately qualify.
He got wild cards in all the events, but he's the only person to ever come from the trials, the early part of the events, or the wild cards, and win a world title.
So that's something that will never be matched again, I'm sure.
Number one, because it's hard to do.
Number two, though, the primary reason, actually, is because no one can get that many wild cards.
And get ahead.
And you used to be able to just surf through trials events and get into any event and you can't do that now.
So it won't happen again.
And probably in our lifetime, or at least with the way that the tour works now.
But Tom was just, he was a real blend of art and sport.
And I still don't think that that's ever been sort of Perfectly matched as Tom seemed to do it.
And I think Tom would probably disagree with me.
You know, number one, he's a really humble guy.
Number two, he's probably a little bit, you know, as many top people are in their fields, they're their own biggest critics.
And, you know, Tom has said things like his surfing had an expiration date and things, you know, because surfing was changing a lot at that time, the approach to surfing, the aerials and all that kind of stuff.
But I think he underperformed for his talent in a way, but at times he was completely untouchable and he had this just beautiful style and it looked like the way he rode a wave, it was like a dance and it was like a wave was meant to be ridden, like a wave traveled 5,000 miles to be ridden like Tom rode a wave.
And all the kids in the 80s just tried to copy his style and surf just like him and get a Channel Islands board and I'd come to California and I'd be like, oh my God, all the kids surf like Tom Crone out here.
So it was a really cool experience when I was young.
What's your favorite surf break?
My favorite surf break is probably cloud break in Fiji, which I haven't been able to get to for over a year.
Pipeline's right there.
Pipeline's been a real life changer for me.
I almost sort of built my life around Pipeline since I was a kid, and now I live right here.
I'm 400 yards from Pipeline right now, so...
How old were you when you first saw Pipeline?
I won Pipeline when I was 20 the first time, and the last time I won it, I think I was maybe 42, 41 or 42.
I'm 49 now.
You're the youngest person ever to win a world champion and the oldest, right?
Yeah.
And are you competing this year?
I started competing at Pipeline.
I didn't go to Australia because I got injured about A month and a half ago, and we were going to have to go and quarantine for two weeks.
And I got injured about five days or a week before we were supposed to go.
So I got into rehab and then thought maybe I'll get...
In Australia, they're doing four events.
They've run two now.
And my plan was to see how I feel and maybe go for the last two events.
But I'm not going to go.
So I'll miss the, you know, second through fifth event.
And then I will have...
Maybe three, maybe four events left to try and re-qualify for next year.
But after one event, I was in third place for the year to get going.
And then, yeah, I didn't get to go to the next two.
So, yeah, I'm still competing full-time as of now.
I haven't officially retired or anything, but I'm getting to that place.
And I'm considering next year.
I'll be 50.
I'm the oldest guy on tour by well over a decade at this point.
My older brother really wanted me to go to 50, and I was kind of hesitant, but it's starting to look like I'll make it there.
Have you ever surfed a tidal bore up a river?
I haven't, but there's one in Bordeaux I want to surf.
There's a bunch of them.
The biggest one in the world is in In China.
And then there's a, I've heard rumors that there might be one that gets that big in India.
There are a lot of them.
The first one that became famous was a Pororoca in Brazil, in the Amazon.
I actually was jumping on a flight to go there once from Australia and I pulled out because I was just, it was just too much of a mission to fly two days to get there and two days back to surf a couple days.
There's a couple in Sumatra.
There are more than you think.
There's one in Nova Scotia that's pretty good.
Alaska.
And basically what it is is on a full or even a new moon, I believe, when you have more drastic tides and certain times of the year when the sun and moon are in the right place to create more of an effect.
So it's a few days every month, but there are certain times of the year that are better.
But basically when the tides are the most extreme is when the water pulls out the river.
And then as the ocean starts to rush back up the river, it sends this sort of almost looks like a standing wave, but it just rolls and rolls and rolls for miles.
There used to be one on the Petticoatiac River.
One of our first water keepers was Petticoatiac Waterkeeper that's up in the Maritime Provinces.
And it comes in, it's fed by the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tides in the world, so it has a 50-foot tide.
And it comes in like a funnel, and it creates a wave that goes 60 miles up the river, so you can literally fight it.
They dammed the river back in the 70s.
Wow.
And one of the first huge victories we got in Canada was we got them to take down that dam.
But it had changed the configuration of the river, and the river is now restoring itself.
And I always told the community up there, which is a very, very tight French-Canadian community, that when the title war comes back, which they're now starting to see, that I would come up and surf with them.
I wonder if...
Is that on Nova Scotia, or is that...
Where is that?
No, it's in...
It's near, it's north of Halifax.
Okay.
New Brunswick.
It's in New Brunswick.
Okay.
Yeah, New Brunswick.
Okay.
I think Tom Curran's probably surfed.
Well, he has surfed one in Nova Scotia for sure.
I don't know if...
I have a friend up there, like a business partner friend who surfs and knows all the waves up there and stuff, and he sends me pictures of surfing a tidal bore up there.
The one he surfs is not very big, but it goes for really long waves.
Yeah.
What do you think the world record is for riding a wave?
It must be...
Oh, the one, the Pororoca one in Brazil, I think somebody rode for like 45 minutes or something.
Yeah, you can Google it and find out.
But yeah, it's really far.
But I don't know.
I wonder if somebody went with one of the foil boards now.
They could probably ride indefinitely, like, you know, over an hour, I would think.
Speaking of foil boards, what's your relationship with Laird Hamilton?
I've known Laird since I was a kid, and I see him here and there, and we're on...
Pretty good terms.
I just don't see him a whole lot.
But he lives in Kauai and Malibu each half of the year.
And I was living in Malibu.
I trained at his house a few times with him and Gabby.
Haven't done any training with him over here in Hawaii.
But, you know, he does the ice baths and the hot saunas and the weights underwater.
So it's really low impact on the joints and stuff.
Laird, he's an animal.
He really set the stage for toe surfing and riding big waves.
And he's kind of like a Superman of toe surfing.
But he can ride waves at any capacity.
He's a great longboarder, stand-up paddler, big wave surfer, everything you can think of.
My sister made that documentary about him.
Oh, yeah.
She goes over to Gabby and his house and does the ice baths and all that stuff.
Yeah.
But he's kind of an interesting character because he never went in the contest, right?
He's got these extraordinary talents, but he was never interested in going to competitions.
Yeah, you know, I wouldn't have considered Laird a great highest level small wave surfer, competition guy.
But anything in big waves, he probably would have won had he competed.
You know, he didn't compete in the Eddie Aikau when he was invited.
Yeah, he would choose Jaws over that just to go toe and free surf.
Yeah, I don't know.
Competition didn't appeal to him for whatever reason.
So yeah, he never...
He never was put in that place like you got to prove yourself there.
He kind of made his own path.
Do you see Jack Johnson out there?
I see Jack a lot.
He lives 20 doors down from me.
And do you guys ever play music together?
We learned how to play music together and we play occasionally.
Once in a blue moon, if I go to concert, he'll invite me up for a song too.
But it sounds super corny.
But when we were teenagers, when I first met Jack and we His dad's best friend, who's basically become my godfather, he had this Martin guitar and he taught us all how to play guitar on that guitar.
Myself and Jack and Rob Machado and a whole bunch of our friends all learned to play on that guitar that he bought for five bucks at a flea market.
We used to go down to the beach and he would bring down his songbook and we'd literally make a bonfire and learn how to play like an Eagle song or a Van Morrison song or whatever.
That's really how Jack got into music, but a bunch of us did too.
But that's how it started for Jack.
I think you can hear all that influence in his songwriting and his nice melodies and great lyrics.
And you mainly play the ukulele these days?
No, I play guitar and ukulele.
I always have a few hanging around here on the walls.
There's a ukulele and a guitar over there.
I've got a ukulele and a guitar and then two more guitars sitting in the corner.
So I've I've got a nice little run of instruments, but I generally, I play guitar more than ukulele, but I love them both.
I started playing the ukulele in about 2001 or 2002.
I was real close with Eddie Vedder at the time, and he had just written his ukulele album, so I wanted to learn how to play the song.
So I got an ukulele and kind of worked the songs out.
I think it's a great instrument.
And it's great for little kids.
One more little quick story.
I was at a school called La Paz.
It's an international school in Costa Rica, in the north of Costa Rica, near Tamarindo.
And they grow chickens, and they plant gardens, and they teach kids all the things you actually need in life.
There was a class I went in and played ukulele with, and there was 30 kids in there all with their own ukulele playing.
And it was really special.
They wrote me a song, so it's cool.
That is great.
Let me tell you the real reason that I invited you on here, because you've been promising me for many years that I could come to a surf ranch.
And that will make me a hero to my kids.
Just tell us about Surf Ranch.
Surf Ranch, for those of you who don't know, it is the biggest, best surf wave in the world, right?
It's the best wave.
What would you call it?
It's a half mile long canal with a train that goes next to it.
Yeah, I'll explain it.
Yeah, it's a man-made wave.
We studied and developed technology for about 10 years before we built the property out.
It's an ex-water ski lake and my partner In the business who helped me develop the whole thing, he was an ex-pro water skier.
And so he knew about these properties that were basically defunct now and not being used.
And he went, well, this one's nowhere near the surf.
No one will suspect we're building it.
We have access to water, power.
We have all the property we need.
The value is good.
No one wants the thing, essentially, because there's actually a water ski lake right next to it.
Literally, The two properties are side by side in the same kind of footing.
And there's one there that was a viable business.
And so this property was going to sit there, but it already had a house on it and some storage and some of the very few essentials that we needed.
So we bought that property and then started to build.
And essentially what we came up with was we have a foil.
It's essentially like How would you describe it?
It's the most inefficient ship hull or boat hull you can make.
So, you know, a boat hull just gets to a planing as soon as possible and alleviates all that stress on the engine, right?
And makes it efficient, kind of glides above the water.
This thing's intended to do the opposite and to push water in an efficient way.
It pushes water as efficiently as possible into a perfect line that comes off with a wave.
And it was a really brilliant design developed by a guy named Adam Fincham, who was a USC professor.
When this first happened, one of my partners in the business was Bob McKnight, who I think you've met Bob before, but he was the president and CEO of Quicksilver.
He was a USC alumni, and he had sort of deep connections into the school through funding and stuff.
And he said, why don't you go there and meet some of these professors and talk to them and So we did that.
Me and my partner or two went in there.
I think Noah, my manager at the wave company.
And I know there's a couple of us went in and talked to these old professors there.
And then Adam was the younger of the three that we talked to.
And the older two kind of debated how the energy of wave gets transmitted from one thing to another or what type of wave we're looking for.
And we went through this whole process of You know, do you want a Kelvin subcritical wave or do you want a critical wave?
You know, how do you create this?
And that's all the scientific jargon for what surfers call wind swells or ground swells.
The groundswell is kind of a misnomer, but the groundswell is essentially a swell that's been created far away by a lot of wind over a long period of time.
And now it's gone through the ocean and groomed in these perfect lines that we call corduroy.
When they get near the shore and you're up on a hill, you know, if you're in Malibu or Palisades and you look out and there's just corduroy to their eyes.
And that's what we long for in surfing.
So those are groundswells.
But what they are is they're basically called solitons or solitary waves or in the critical realm.
Those are waves that basically can travel unlimited distances and hardly lose any energy.
They will lose energy because obviously the Earth's a globe and it's curved so as it goes it spreads out you know it emanates from a sort of single point and eventually the swell lines if they were left on their own to go around and around the Earth a million times that there would be no energy left in them but they run into a to land somewhere and start breaking.
So Adam We actually ran out of money.
Adam started to work for us, but then we ran out of money.
And it was sort of a godsend because he started studying and going back in the books and trying to figure out, okay, how can I describe the energy of a wave?
And then how can I turn that into a mechanism of some sort or a curve?
And essentially, that's what he found.
There was some sort of a mathematical law which described the energy of a wave.
And this was in the 1800s.
And he found it in a book and then that could correlate exactly to a shape that could create that wave.
So that's what we did.
That's a long version, but basically he made this foil that has a certain shape on the front edge of it and it pushes through the water and right off the front edge.
So you have the foil.
Let's say you're looking straight down on it with a drone like this.
The foil is going this way and it's pushing a swell that it looks like it's The line of the swell is coming off at a certain angle.
So it sort of looks like it's going that way, but the swell is moving this way.
It's moving off at an angle, sort of 45 degrees to the foil.
And then we built a reef on the bottom.
And when you have the wave energy, a swell line, rise up any kind of a bottom contour to it.
Based on how deep the water is and the size of the swell, the amount of energy in it, at a certain depth, the wave will start to break.
So the surfers kind of understand Generally, if the water's about as deep as the wave is high and it drags for a certain amount of time, it'll break.
You can actually very specifically, scientifically identify what those numbers are.
And I think a wave will break in water that is quite a bit deeper than the height of the wave that's going to break.
But it needs to travel over a certain distance of rise first in the bottom contour in order for it to break.
So this is really a long way to say we made a wave off a foil that hits a reef that we made out of cement and it barrels.
And there's a barrel every time.
I mean, all of the videos I've seen of it, it's always barreling.
We generally don't show the less exciting wave, which is, we call it like a Malibu wave.
It just kind of comes in and rolls and it lasts for over a minute.
In fact, if you take off from the very beginning of it and ride it to the very end of the other end of the pool, which is I mean, the whole length of pool is 700 meters, but the wave doesn't, or 700 yards, but it doesn't break that whole length.
It needs maybe a couple hundred yards to get going, and then it stops 100 yards before the end, but the wave will keep going after the foil stops.
So that small wave, the smallest size wave will run, will break for about a minute and a half from start to finish.
The bigger, more exciting wave barrels every time, pretty much, at least in one or two of the sections it does.
The depth of the water changes over different parts of the reef that we built.
The middle section is somewhat shallow.
Both the ends are very shallow, and in between those transitions is a little bit deeper.
Deeper water lets the wave be a little bit softer and mushier.
It'll get a taller wave, but it won't be as hollow.
It stretches that energy up.
And as you get into shallower water, more abrupt rise from deep water up to a shallow ledge.
The wave doesn't get as tall, but it gets thicker and hollow.
So there's more energy compacted in a small area.
And how do people get to the surface?
Do you have to make reservations weeks in advance, months in advance?
Yeah, so I tried to...
As an owner, I get a certain number of days every year, and I just tried to book some days...
I called and asked when I could get a day or two.
I was hoping to get one in the beginning of May.
And they said, oh, well, we don't have anything open until the first week of July.
So, yeah, it's all booked out.
Especially in the summer, it gets really busy.
Plus, we have a contest.
It's usually in September, but I think it's going to be in June this year.
People just call up and book days, sometimes a year in advance, many, many months in advance.
Most of the year will be booked out, like, you know, six months in advance.
Through the summer is generally mostly booked out, but now we've opened it up to night sessions.
We do four hours at night also for anyone who's wanting to rent an extra part of the day or whatever.
Do you see the pipeline from your window?
If I walked outside with my computer, yeah.
I have a duplex.
The half I'm in, I can't see it, but in the other half, I can see it from sitting inside the house.
I'll show you my view.
I'll just show you what you do see here.
There's the beach there, as you can see.
Pipeline's just over this way, about 500-400 yards.
Wow.
You live in paradise.
I do.
And this is my...
My room is all filled with surfboards all up in the rafters and guitars on the wall.
Pretty easy life.
Pretty good life over here, man.
I can't complain at all.
I love it.
It's just really a blessing I was able to have a place here.
My wife, Cheryl, just got a...
Got a contract to direct a movie in Hawaii.
Oh yeah?
On Oahu.
Oh, nice.
We may be moving for a couple of months in the autumn, so I'll come up to the North Shore and see you.
Let me know.
Might have a house for you.
Oh, good.
I'll remember that.
It's seven kids in it because that's how many I got.
Oh, no.
There's only two bedrooms.
Hey, you know, you can sleep on the floor, but there's only two bedrooms.
That's plenty of room.
Yeah.
Thank you, Kelly.
Hey, thanks a lot.
Great to see you.
Yeah, really good to see you, too.
All right.
Let's catch up soon.
Kelly Slater, you're a great man.
Thank you so much for joining us on Earth Day.
Aloha!
I really enjoy talking to you.
I really appreciate it.
Keep fighting a good fight.
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