Laird Hamilton

This episode delves into the unique physical training and philosophical outlook of Laird Hamilton, exploring his innovative underwater workout routines and perspectives on life, fear, and pushing physical limits.

1. Laird Hamilton's training regimen is both physically demanding and mentally challenging, involving underwater exercises with weights.
2. The training methods are rooted in traditional practices of divers and surfers, emphasizing breath control and endurance.
3. Hamilton discusses the psychological impact of intense training, including overcoming fear and the body's instinctual responses.
4. The conversation spans the history and evolution of surfing and board design, showing Hamilton's deep connection to the sport.
5. The episode also explores broader themes of resilience, the importance of task completion, and the transfer of skills and knowledge between different sports and aspects of life.

1. Underwater Training and Breath Control

Laird Hamilton describes his unique underwater workout, "15s," which combines weight training with breath-holding and swimming. This method not only builds physical strength but also mental fortitude.

• Laird Hamilton: "It's a combination of weight training, breath holding, and swimming that really tests your limits."

2. The Origins of Underwater Workouts

The history of underwater training is explored, tracing back to divers and surfers who used rock running as a way to improve their breath-holding capabilities.

• Laird Hamilton: "Rock running and underwater training have roots in traditional diving and surfing practices."

3. Psychological Aspects of Intense Training

Discusses the mental challenges faced during rigorous training, such as overcoming fear and the body's natural panic responses.

• Laird Hamilton: "Training underwater teaches you to control fear and panic, pushing past your body's instinctual responses."

4. Evolution of Surfing and Board Design

Hamilton reflects on the history of surfing, including changes in board design and how these influenced his approach to big-wave surfing.

• Laird Hamilton: "The evolution of surfboard design, from longboards to thrusters, has drastically changed surfing."

5. Life Lessons from Sports

The conversation shifts to broader lessons learned from sports, emphasizing task completion, resilience, and personal growth.

• Laird Hamilton: "Sports, especially intense physical activities, teach valuable life lessons about resilience and completing tasks."

1. Embrace Physical Challenges: Regularly engage in activities that push your physical limits, similar to Hamilton's underwater training.
2. Practice Breath Control: Incorporate breath-holding exercises into your routine to improve mental focus and physical endurance.
3. Overcome Fear: Step out of your comfort zone and confront fears to build mental strength.
4. Innovate and Adapt: Be open to experimenting with new techniques and equipment in your training or hobbies.
5. Complete Tasks: Start your day with a simple, completed task to build momentum for bigger challenges.
6. Learn from Different Disciplines: Draw lessons and inspiration from various sports and activities to enhance your primary interests.
7. Reflect on Personal Growth: Regularly assess how challenges have contributed to your development and resilience.
8. Stay Hydrated and Rested: Prioritize hydration and sufficient sleep to support recovery and performance.
9. Embrace Nature: Spend time in natural settings, like the ocean or mountains, to reconnect and rejuvenate.

Laird Hamilton is an action water sports pioneer. The big wave surfing legend revolutionized the sport with his invention of tow-in surfing, stand-up paddling, and foilboard surfing. Laird is an inventor, author, occasional fashion and action-sports model, fitness and nutrition expert, husband and father. He is the co-founder and Chief Innovator of Laird Superfood, which makes plant-based, better-for-you food products. He and his wife, Gabby Reece, co-founded Extreme Performance Training (XPT), a fitness program integrating his underwater resistance workouts, performance-focused breathing, advanced recovery methods, and high-intensity and endurance training.

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Laird Hamilton, Rick Rubin

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Laird Hamilton

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Laird Hamilton

So today's full workout was a drill called 15. The premise is 15 jumps, ammo box swim, their back. So the, you know, carry the weight, swim and back. And the ammo box is still. You hold the dumbbell at your chest.

Yeah. And swim across the pool. That's right. So you're free. How heavy is a dumbbell?

I mean, I'm doing it, I call it light. Right now I'm using a 30 pound dumbbell. But if you were to stop swimming, you would sink to the bottom immediately. You're kind of sinking if you don't vigorously swim. It's pulling you down.

I call it 15s because there's 15 jumps and then there's a their back ammo box incorporated. And so like, the first set is 15 jumps, ammo, their back, no breath. And the jump, it will be with like 30 same weight, one single 30. Yeah. So it's.

Rick Rubin

You sink to the bottom, the reese. You know, the reach, the single arm. So it's like the ammo box swim. Yeah. But you're doing it vertically.

Laird Hamilton

So you're jumping with the weight and then swimming with the free arm until you come up and get air and then you switch hands and you land. Much harder doing it with one weight than two because when we used to do it with two weights, you could use both arms evenly. When you have free hand, it's pretty nice. Like, that's a lot of power that you get out of your. Out of your having a free hand.

Rick Rubin

So you alternate hands every jump? Yeah. So when you jump, you stroke and the stroke hand comes round down to where the weight is right by your belly button. So you hold the weight, you go down 14ft. Yep.

You jump. Yep. You can only jump maybe eight of those. And then you stroke with the free. One big stroke.

Laird Hamilton

A big jump and a big stroke gets you there. Gulping air, breath. Yep. And then you sink again. Yep.

And exhale before you hit the surface. Right. So letting all the air out before you hit the surface. So all you're doing is inhaling and then when you free fall on the way back down, that's when you switch your hand and then you land, you squat and you have to jump. I mean, if you don't jump hard enough, you can't make it.

You can't make it. And then you end up stroking, struggling, which burns up oxygen, which makes it so you can't do very many, very many reps. So that's the basis of the drill, the swim and the jump. And then we break it up. So I started.

But I started the drill with what I thought was six different combinations. So the first one is 15 jumps. Swim in there and swim back. After the 15 jumps, you're pretty winded. Winded.

Rick Rubin

Before you hold it, the first ammo box, which is crazy. And then you breath hold the whole time. No breathing on the ammo. So you. So you swim there and back, no breathing, right.

Laird Hamilton

But it gets worse, because. So it starts with 15 jumps. You swim there, back, right, with a breath hold. That's the first set. The next set is you swim there, you do 15 jumps, you swim back again.

Always. The swims are always. And you're always carrying the 30. Always carrying, always holding your breath. And you're always holding your breath.

The next one is their back, 15 jumps. So that's the first three. Then we go into five jumps, swim there, ten jumps, swim back. Then we do ten jumps, swim there, five jumps, swim back, and then we do a five jump, swim across, five jump, swim back, five jump. So always 15.

So I thought the six sets was all there was in that combination. And then my friend said, well, actually, no, there's two more. And I'm like, well, what two are those? And he goes, well, there's the swim there, do ten and then swim back and do five, starting on the other side before you come home. So then you swim over, do the five or ten, and then come back and do the five or ten.

So that was two more that I didn't know. And then all of a sudden, we discovered two more. What were those? Those were. Those were.

So we've gone from six. We thought it was six, then it went to eight. There can't be any more combinations of five and ten and a swim back. The other one was, do five, swim their back, do ten, do ten, swim their back, and do five. So there's.

So there ends up being ten. It's a ten combination. So that's why I call it 15s. But it's ten different variations of 15, which is 15 jumps and a swim back. Yeah.

And that's the drill. And that works. It sounds like that doesn't get easier over time. It doesn't. And actually, even when you add weight, and unless you add so much weight that you make it almost impossible, but even when you add weight, it ends up that the weight makes you fall faster and the lighter weight actually makes you fall slower, so the downtime's longer with the lighter weight.

So there's a line there where kind of light isn't really easier because you think, well, lighter would be easier. But because you fall slower, it's not easier because it extends the. Do you ever lose track of count completely? You get completely lightheaded doing this stuff. That means it's good.

Like, in my opinion, I go, if you lose track like we do, like, when it's really cold, like this winter, we were swimming in 52 degree water. We were doing breath hold, swim their backs, and we would lose count every single time. And all we did was ten laps. Yeah, all we were doing was ten laps. You're like, ten their backs.

And no matter what, at the end, at seven or eight or nine, you're like, am I at 06:00 a.m.. I? At seven, did I do eight? Was that nine? And so is the rule always you.

Rick Rubin

Take the lower number. Yeah, you always take the lower number. You have to do the extra one. You do because you don't want to fall short. Yeah.

Laird Hamilton

You don't mind going one over. Going extra is okay, but missing one is impossible. That's a no go, which you knew that already because you said, oh, you. Go for the low one. I can imagine.

Rick Rubin

I know. I've been. I've seen how you work. I know how you think, but. So you don't want to cut yourself short, but you do.

Laird Hamilton

It's almost uncanny. And the 15s is more confusing because it's obviously, there's ten different variations. So at some point during ten variations, you're gonna forget either during one of them. Like, how many? Like, today, at one point, I was there, I'm like, was that nine or was that ten?

Like, or was that seven? Like, I just. And I probably ended up doing 16 or 17 or 18 because I just lost track during it or lost track of what one is next. I mean, at a certain point, we're almost writing those things down and checking them, because you just can't. You also seem very wide awake.

Rick Rubin

And I remember when we used to do the pool workouts not long after, I would often get the feeling of needing to go to sleep. Yeah. It wasn't sore? No, it wasn't beat up. You felt good.

Laird Hamilton

Yeah. Yeah. Just like, I need to sleep now. Well, I think it's because the oxygen deprivation, I think when you're low in oxygen, when you're oxygen deprived, and when you've done enough oxygen deprivation, I think that you just have to recover. I think it's like muscles, because you're taking the.

Probably pulling oxygen out of your bones. I go, yeah. Any available oxygen when you're going to the wall is getting pulled from everywhere it can in the body. And so at some point, it's like, okay, cool, you're done. Go sleep and recover.

Rick Rubin

Tell me the history of pool training from the beginning. I mean, the original concept came from the rock running, something surfers would do. I think rock running originally originated from diving, from fishermen. I see. And they would take stones out in the canoe, and when they would go to the bottom to dive, they would just ride a rock down, because then you would eliminate all the energy it.

Takes to swim down. So then your downtime was increased. All of a sudden, you could be down. And then the black coral divers on Maui, in the early days of black coral diving, they would ride stones down because they were going so deep, and you just couldn't. By the time you swam down there, all of a sudden you had half the downtime and then the energy that you burned.

Laird Hamilton

So they would ride stones, and then divers and surfers would run with stones in the summertime. So that was like a summer time. To train to be able to do it. Yeah, to stay down longer. To stay down longer and be under oxygen deprivation and still work.

Rick Rubin

Do we know the effects of the pressure of being underwater? Well, first of all, like, if you get the bends, you go into a hyperbaric chamber to make up for the. To put pressure so that you can get the air out. I mean, we know that the pressurization is like the ultimate compression, where at a nice level, it's ultimate compression. So it's protective in a way.

Laird Hamilton

Well, circulation, huge circulation, I think, and I don't know the science, but I've been led to believe that your lymphatic system can get flushed out in like an hour of being in water that would normally take you 24 hours because the blood movement is like, what compression wear. Like, they, I think they ban compression where in professional cycling, because it was. Such an advantage, like blood dope. Don't get tired, guys. Don't get tired.

Then it kind of ruins the whole idea behind competition. If you're. No one's getting tired, it's like, when does it become interesting? So that's why people, when they're hungover, they love to go swim, and you come back and you feel kind of refreshed. So I think there's a bunch of benefits.

I mean, other than just negative ion absorption, other things. I think the pressurization, now, when you go really deep, there's some crazy things with, like the dive tables where you're only allowed to go down. So, you know, they have these tables talking about how long you can be at certain depths, for how long and how often. And I knew a portuguese guy on Maui that blew all of the dive table. Like, the navy came to meet the guy because he would go every single day for 8 hours a day, tank after tank, for days and weeks.

And they said it was like, technically, they didn't even believe it. They said it was impossible. You couldn't do that. And I think one of the side effects that he had was very severe arthritis was one of the negative things. But I think we can endure a lot more of that pressure.

But down deep is definitely something that, that's hard on us. I think once we go below a certain atmosphere, I think there's benefits. It's like hyperbaric chamber. When you go in there, you get all the benefits of that oxygenation. But once you start getting below the third atmosphere, the fourth, and you get down there where stuff starts to get squeezed, I think that can be.

I mean, that's why you have to go slow on the way up. One of the things I remember interesting about having weights underwater is you seem to have more control of the weight underwater. Well, it's lighter, too. You lose, like about 30%, I think, of the, of the load when it's underwater. But you definitely the stabilization, I mean, that's why your body responds so nicely.

Like when you take somebody, especially for if you've been hurt and you're coming out of recovery and you got something wrong with your knee or your hip, you know, out of the water, your body doesn't want to go into certain positions. It's protective. When you get in the water, the body feels comfortable. Cause it's stabilized. So that water almost holds you up, which allows you to be more comfortable, which lets the body go into positions that you.

That's why it works so well for that. Like when you're coming off of a knee or a hip or something. I also remember right in the beginning having to get past the feeling of holding weights underwater. Your brain goes insane. Your brain says, we're drowning.

Yeah. Now I remember the feeling because I'm holding dumbbells, I'm underwater. I can put the dumbbells down anytime I want. But the mind is saying you're being held under. You have cement shoes on.

Yeah. Took a while to pass that feeling of DNA level. You don't want weight on you, pulling you underwater. No. Yeah.

It is interesting that because you watch people go through that, especially when they've never experienced pool training. They come in there, you give them some weights. And they'll have the weights in their hand, and they're literally either trying to swim with weights in their hand or just completely freak out, like, pat and like. And then tell them, hey, all you have to do is just set them down. Even though they hear that and they know that, it's like you've attached it to them and they're stuck with it.

It's like they have it in there. You'll see it in their face. They'll have the weight in their hand, and you'll look, and they'll look at you like, what am I gonna do? You. And the headlights cannot let go.

Like, I can't. How do I. I'm being held. I'm being held against my will. And you're like, well, no, you just set them down on the ground like, it's okay.

So. And I think that's where a lot of the transformation happens, too, is once you start to be able to override that primal instinct and with conscious, like, hey, I have time. I can set the weights on the ground. I'll be able to jump to the surface and get air. Once you start to get that part in your head, you know, I always.

The word that comes up for me is submission. Submitting, like, I. And I see that throughout other aspects of life in general, is just to submit. Like, you gain time. You gain something when you submit, when you're able to just let go.

Let go and just be okay. Take me. Do what you're gonna kind of. That kind of mentality, like, do what you're gonna do with me. You gain an incredible amount of time, but nothing brings that out like the water does.

Rick Rubin

I stub too. Yeah. I always talk about primal fears that we have that are in our DNA, that are affecting our kind of the primal part of our brain that has nothing to do. You can say all the things you want, but when you think about animals, you being eaten, falling off of high things, being burned, drowning, frozen, I mean, this is stuff that it seems like your unconscious isn't going to rely on your intelligence to make you make it. It's like, you know what?

Laird Hamilton

I don't trust that you can make a good enough decision. I'm going to put you into this mode of freak out so that you get yourself out of the situation, whether it's jump out of the ice or hyperventilate. You see people when they get in the ice, and it's interesting. One of the side effects of being really scared is you get cold. And so, like, we'll be in a warm swimming pool.

Like a warm swimming pool. People are there, and all of a sudden, you see somebody's got the shivers. Yeah. And they're like. They're shivering like they've been in an ice tub.

And you're like, well, it's not cold, but the fear gets him into that, which, again, I don't know if it just gets, you know, gets him to get out, ultimately, like, get out of this environment, it's dangerous. It's probably a protective thing as well. Yeah. Besides telling you to get out, something good is probably happening in your body. And by the way, it seems like that's always the case.

The way it reacts to anything that's. Anytime it's endangered, you get all great hormones, and the body does all these great things. Whenever it's put in threat, you know, it's like, if I could think of another way to get these benefits, I would, but there really isn't. It's like rose bushes blossom when you prune them. They don't want to be pruned, but the way they flower is when you cut them.

And it's the same with us that when we're stressed, whatever that is, whether it's your oxygen or, I mean, what is working out? Working out is stressing the system. What is fasting stressing the system? These are all the stresses that. That we benefit from.

Rick Rubin

We recover stronger after stressing. Yeah, yeah. It started with the rocks at the bottom of the. It started with stone, the stone carrying, and then. Have you ever done that?

Laird Hamilton

Absolutely. What point in your life did you do that? In my teens, I started in my teens, we didn't do it a lot. Cause we didn't have a great environment for it to have clear water. Like, we're on Kauai, where I grew up.

You know, the rivers, it's usually murky, hard to see, not fun. It's not a great drill when you can't see. Yeah. If you're in the Caribbean and it's crystal clear and you can get a stone run along the bottom, typically in. Places without waves, probably.

Yeah, yeah. Cause that's stirring up the bottom, and if there's waves, you're probably riding them. But that was a summertime thing. That was usually summertime. The surf's down.

It's a way to prepare yourself for the winter. And again, diver, you know, divers, using it to improve breath hold, length of breath hold. And so that's where it started. Pool training, and then weight vest. So then I built a pool thinking, hey, I'm going to do some breath holds type stuff.

And weight vests were another. That was the original kind of concept, which was put a weight vest on and then see how long you can tread, like, as a weight is. Be better at staying at the surface. That had its own kind of set of problem and fears. Well, because you couldn't take the rate jacket off, so then you'd be right next to the edge, so you could just reach out and grab the side of the pool and you missed it.

Rick Rubin

You'd be scared. Yeah. And you sink down. But the psychology behind it and the vest put a lot of pressure on your breathing because it was velcroed on. I mean, we still have new versions of that now that are not so restrictive, that have, like, a suspenders with these weight things.

I tried the weight belt at one point, but I didn't like it as much as the ones that you could put down. Yeah. I mean, you're free with all your limbs because you're not holding them. That kind of was the basis. And I built the pool, and then it just was a process of elimination.

Laird Hamilton

Like, I think I had an epiphany one night. I had a vision about when you're a kid, because everything we were doing was swimming based, right. So everything was on the surface. And I always call it horizontal, because everything in the pool when you're swimming is horizontal. So everything's on a flat plane.

One night, and it just. Something popped in my head, and I thought about when you're a kid, how much you love to go in a shallow pool and jump up and down and come out of the water and get a breath and then go back under and come up, and you could do that for hours. Like, that was. And that's when I had a. I had a little light go off in my head.

Like, hey, what if we could jump? And then that's when the weight. The dumbbells came in, and once we got a dumbbell in our hand or in the water, that kind of opened. I remember being around when that happened because before that, we were using heavy weights. Yep.

Rick Rubin

And swimming. That's right. And you said, I had a dream. Yeah. We need lighter weights.

Heavy enough to pull us down, but light enough where we could jump to the top. Yeah. And get in there and breathe and get into these rhythms. Right. The horizontal stuff, I mean, it became like yoga.

One breath per move. That's right, that's right. The breath relationship to the movement, that's something that is very controlled by the water because I don't care it doesn't. You don't have to implement it. The water implements it, because you can't breathe under.

Laird Hamilton

You can only breathe at the top, so you're only breathing when you're getting yourself out of the water. Also from that lymphatic massage standpoint going down. Oh, yeah. And coming up. Oh, yeah.

Rick Rubin

Pressurized, depressurized, pressurized over and over. Yeah. I remember the first time doing it, like, trying to get to ten and then getting to the point where we got to 100. I couldn't believe seeing these incremental improvements. Yeah, well, the dumbbell also, too, even before the jumping started, just allowed us think.

Laird Hamilton

I always just thought dumbbell is just a rock with a handle. You know, it's, in a way, it's like rocks here are so cumbersome, and you had to kind of hold them with both hands and move where the dumbbell, you could just hold it in one hand and you. And that relationship between those two things, when you think about the best way to describe it is weightlifting meets swimming. It's just a hybrid between the two. You've taken swimming and all the benefits that you have, and then you, you put them together.

But, you know, the beginning when we were first doing it, it seemed like every week there was some new exercise or new. I remember, and I think you were there that day. But the one move, the single armed one that you swim up, I watched my daughter, little Reese, just struggle her way to the top and put the. It was a little weight, but it was like. So she went down and picked it up and jumped and swam.

And I looked at that and I went, wow, that's a move. That's why we call it the Reese. We call it the Reese because. But, yeah, there was a lot of moves that came out of that. But once we started going vertical and combined vertical and horizontal, that, I mean, the jumping part is the, was the part that really changed a lot of the stuff because the legs are use so much more oxygen.

So, you know, you start jumping. I mean, you look at most swimming, unless it's a sprint, there's no legs involved because legs aren't efficient for swimming and they burn air. But in our case, we want to burn the air. We're looking for ways to burn air quickly. And you can't beat the leg.

The leg movement. We don't get to jump as hard as we can in life. We don't. That's not a normal. It feels too dangerous.

Well, because landing, it's not the explosiveness going up, it's the landing, coming down that. And so when you. The water takes away that impact, which has negative. You know, it's good to have that impact for your body, but that allows you that explosiveness and the volume. I mean, if you jump and there's.

Rick Rubin

Resistance because you're pushing against the water when you're jumping, you're not just jumping your weight. You're jumping your weight against water. All of the water above you. No, it's true. It's true.

Laird Hamilton

Well, that's why the basketball guys go crazy. And you think about, like, if you did 100 jumps on hard ground as hard as you could, the next day you'd be broken, you'd be hurt where you can go there and jump 100 times and be like. And the next day. Feel better than ever. Feel better than ever.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that increased volume because you're not having the impact, all that lymphatic, even the. Even the water running up and down your body is really doing that lymphatic system as well. So, I mean, what do we always say?

Laird Hamilton

The proofs in the pudding. It's hard to explain how. What a feeling you get. And then you add the others. You know, you add the heat and the ice.

But in a way, it's. I mean, the water is controlled breathing rhythms, controlled breathing patterns in a way that you just can't be that precise. I mean, unless you're just watching a clock, then it's a whole different thing. You're not able to kind of be out of your. I mean, I had today, when I was jumping, I was doing.

They were saying something about when your eyes are closed, like your brain's in a different pattern. Like when you close your eyes. And I was doing some where when it gets really hard, you close your eyes. That environment, it's a unique thing because it's like somehow you have to submit, but then you have to aggress, but then you have to kind of relax at the same time. It's the weirdest thing.

It's like. And you can drown, and it feels like you're back in the womb. It's a very nurturing. It is peaceful environment in the water. It is.

Rick Rubin

Can't talk. It is. No. I told somebody one day, I remember just what you said. Brought that to my mind.

Laird Hamilton

Outer space is in your backyard. Wow. You know, because when you think about outer space. Yeah. There's no gravity.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. Right. There's no air. Like, it has some elements about it. Where you're in space, whatever you're in the space of water, but you're in space.

Laird Hamilton

You go there, and I think that just being in there, I mean, we play music, you know, we have those. And that. That is an amazing thing when you're in, especially when you're in, like, under duress, and then all of a sudden, you're kind of have this distraction. I mean, I call it task distraction. I call.

Some of these drills are really set up to distract you from how difficult. Like, if you had too much time to think about it, you'd be like, hey, just stop already. Why would I do this? But you're like, okay, I got to go here. I got to jump there.

Got to do they got to remember what the count is. And then you have something playing in the background, but it feels good. Like something about accomplishing a task. Our brains, like connecting the dots.

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So visit drinklmnt.com tetra and stay salty with element electrolytes. Lmnt I 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, 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. I know two big music stars, both of whom, even when 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.

Rick Rubin

It's like, yeah, 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.

Laird Hamilton

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. I see. Then the air's.

Everything's colder. When you go out, the bed's colder. Cause that's my biggest sleeping thing, is overheating. Do you sleep with a 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. I gotta get a new one.

But, yeah, I have a cold pad, and I had a cold blanket, but the blanket stopped. Has stopped working. Even though I like that weight, I get used. I do like that weight. A cold weighted blanket.

The problem with a weighted blanket, you get too hot. But if you have a cold weighted blanket, but that's the highest luxury, I think you can have cold weighted blanket to sleep with. Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting about that one that doesn't mimic nature?

Rick Rubin

A weighted blanket. Maybe it really does. Maybe it's like childhood being what it's called. Swaddling. Well, think about big fur, too.

Laird Hamilton

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, because 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, you 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. Want to be cool, trying to cool off. Yeah. Yeah.

Because we've been that way the longest. Right. All those things that we. Without modern comforts. Yeah.

We were wild for the longest period like that. And you can't expect, because we had for 200 years or one or two generations. We have DNA that holds information for 14 generations, and you're talking about one or two. The dominant part of it, you know, is all that other stuff in tune with nature. Exactly.

Rick Rubin

Because if you weren't in tune with nature, you would not survive. So that forced everybody, actually, to have a certain relationship with it. 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.

Laird Hamilton

And I just was like, I think we were loading a dumpster with a bunch of trees I've been cutting in my yard. And she's like, I really want to go to 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. There's no shortcuts. There's no shortcut. No. Those could be, like, bonus, bonus.

And maybe enhance the work that you're doing. Like, hey, you're gonna work harder, and you're gonna 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 turbo charging it. Whereas before, you wouldn't get to experience hot and cold on a daily basis.

Rick Rubin

You'd have to go through seasons. It would take longer. We can condense it. That's right. Do you remember your first memory of riding a wave as a kid?

Laird Hamilton

I mean, the truth is, is that my first experience, you know, shoreline, little, tiny kid, probably could barely swim if could swim. Waves 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 crawl to the pool and go in and swim, which could have been attributed because the way I was born, my mom had that, you know, that hairdryer over the stomach that made room for me when I was inside of her. So they had, like, a reverse hairdryer that was pulling on the abdomen, that created space for me to move.

I don't know if there's a relationship with that, and I swam early, but I swam. She said I swam. She 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, and there was little tiny waves in Lahaina 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, early experience. Yeah. Like, I just remember it.

Like, somehow, like, I got impaled, you know, as a young little kid. Like, 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. Like, 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 beach, you know, beach lover, beach goer. My real father was a surfer, my stepdad was a surfer, so. Or 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 Lahaina when I'm a little, tiny kid. My mom's boyfriend surfed, was surfing every day. So I was just around surfers and surfing in the water.

Rick Rubin

And how big was the surf culture globally at that time? Very small. There was people surfing in France and Australia and, you know, was it. You would have probably known 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.

Laird Hamilton

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, like bikers or something. Yeah, 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?

Rick Rubin

Was that the idea? Absolutely. I mean, my mom's reason to take me to Hawaii as a child was escape the rat race. Fifth was the sixties. It was Woodstock.

Laird Hamilton

It was like, you know, hey, you're gonna get the car and get the job and do the thing, or you're just gonna 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. I mean, there's people in the fifties and stuff, too, but the real kind of surge in, in that culture, in the surf culture was that it was. And in that, when you were growing up, was it, people were riding longboards.

It was longboards. And then the sixties, 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. Do you remember pre fiberglass?

Well, I can remember, you know, fiberglass was created way before that, but, 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 and there was no fins. So it was the long board where the first fiber, kind of fiberglass boards with foam, and then, and then that allowed the short board revolution. So first it was wood boards. I wasn't. That's before your time.

I came right when long boards and longboards made out of foam and resin to the short board revolution. When did the fin get added? Had probably fifties, late fifties, something like that, I would think, you know. Right, right before I was born, probably. But.

But the fin was pretty primitive. Like, if it was a bit, it. Was one big fin. It was just one big. Had you ever ridden a board without a fin?

Yeah. What's that 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 fin.

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 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. And 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 Finn.

Now we're just riding Finn, and boards are just to have the fin, something to connect, to. To stand on. Yeah. Could you imagine something other than a board being the thing that connects to the fin? Well, I don't.

Rick Rubin

I'm just wondering. It's a question mark. 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?

Laird Hamilton

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, 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. Yeah. 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 happens when you don't need a board. Right. And you're using a fin, you lose some of the things that you need. You know, you still need to be able to land. When did it go from long board to short board, and what was the difference?

When I was real young, there was still kind of a combination of guys riding big longboards that were great, and then there was like a short board 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 weren't like the old tankers. How would you describe the different people between the longboarders and the short boarders? Right.

Rick Rubin

When the short boards came out, who did what and why? Well, you know, I would describe 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.

Laird Hamilton

They were a little more in the mainstream, and then the short board guys, you know, or that 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. Living to serve 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 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 short boarding. This was traditional longboards, the original ones. Before there were short boards, that group still existed. And then you had the new kind of revolutionary design 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 just couldn'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 short board. Do you know who did it first? I don't. I bet it happened something like, guy broke the board, sanded the back end, foot, a fin on it.

Like, 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 short board and make it short. But I think it's gonna happen more like by accident or maybe out of some young kid doesn't have the money, and there's a broken board, and he goes and gets a piece of it and retros 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 reduced half the drag. So all of a sudden, he was freed up and went twice as fast as everybody, and they were like, what is that?

So I think some of it's out of that. I know. I mean, there's definitely guys that are knowledgeable about who exactly did every single one. Sam George, for example, just knows everything. You know, he's like, well, so and so did a such and such of the thing.

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, butch Van Archdale, 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. Yeah, 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. And he'd pull it off. But when you had Jerry Lopez, you know, get a pintail, single fin, and then all of a sudden start 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. Yeah. You know, 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 that for longboarding, the longboards work were actually probably better for those places, right?

When you look at some place like Waikiki, you can't take a shortboard out there. It doesn't have enough power to push you where the longboard, you could just ride forever. Ride forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Rick Rubin

Do you think the maneuvering of the short board was inspired by skateboarding, or was skateboarding inspired by the maneuverability of the shortboard? Skateboarding, from my understanding, which was surfers without waves, they were like, there's no surf. It's flat. You know, can't we. What can we do?

Laird Hamilton

What can we do? Like, how do we, you know, oh, I got this land sport. It's just gonna be just like surfing. And so it came from that. I mean, surfing was obviously around because it was.

Hawaiians were doing it. I mean, it's surfing. The art of riding a wave was there, but it was there. It was bored surfers with no surf. You're in southern California, and it's flat for a month, and you're like, hey, you know, what do you want to do?

I got these roller skates. Let's gloom to a piece of wood. And a lot of what they did early on in skateboarding was try to simulate surfing. They were trying to surf, and then they started to realize, hey, we can do other stuff that you can't do in surfing. It's interesting.

Again, like I said, when you look at how surfing, the long boards, finless boards, you used your edge, and then we got fins, and then we used the fins, and then eventually evolved to using the fin and the edge, and you look at snowboarding and, 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, but then through the development of snowboards, they figured out this side cut that they put on skis. It revolutionized skiing. It's like this whole give, give back thing. And so skateboarding ended up giving back to surfing through the aerial and acrobatic parts. So 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, it's a great environment.

It's because it's consistent. Like, you can go there, and it's. It's a nice, stable, consistent thing that you can do things that you can't do out in the wild kind of thing. So you go to go to a skateboard park, learn a trick, and then like, oh, okay, let me try it on a wave. Right.

So it ends up giving back. You know, 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 short boards.

Rick Rubin

Was the next revolution in surfing, wind surfing? Well, wakeboarding, too. It was like water skiing, but on a board. That's right. Again, surfers.

Yeah. Summertime. Yeah. Boredom. A lot of boredom involved.

Laird Hamilton

Get it behind a boat. They're on a surfboard, they're behind the boat, and they're. And then we're riding on, 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.

And then pretty soon they're making boards specifically for being behind a boat because you have that power source. Yeah. So then you don't need. And it works in lakes, it works. That's right, yeah.

Rick Rubin

Have you ever done it? Yeah. Fun. Yeah. Yeah.

Laird Hamilton

I mean, it's. I always liked water skiing because of the. Of the speed and the power and the turning. But that's kind of. That also speaks to my kind of choices in the discipline.

Like in surfing, I like big, big wave riding. It'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?

Rick Rubin

Is that what draws you, or is. It something else in big wave running? 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.

Laird Hamilton

I think speed is just a 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 acrobatics, you know, you think about skiing and it's acrobatic. That's one discipline. More gymnastics, usually going slower.

You know, it's usually. It's not like a downhill course where it's full, wide open. I mean, if you crash doing acrobatics, it's severe too. But it's just not quite. Not quite like flying into a fence 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 Van Artsdale and Jose angel and like Warren Harlow. And I saw some of.

I think the bull was already gone by then. But I saw that generation, those big wave riders that were still riding giant longboards. The very first people to ever 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 that. I saw the end of that first phase. I did. Those guys, for me, when I looked at them, they 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 shortboarders, because of my age and where they were at, they seem 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, yeah. 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. The 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, you'd be like, oh, who's that? Well, that's Warren. He's gonna go swim the sunset.

Rick Rubin

You're like, what, did you try every new thing when it came out? Yeah. And 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.

Laird Hamilton

And as it was. And body surfing. Yeah, and body surfing. And maybe you steal some photographers mat. You know, those blow up mats.

Because blow up mats were so. Anything that. I mean, any object that you could just float. That could float, you know, and they barely needed to float because they could be on top of them. We 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, you know, ride along with the. So I was used to that kind of whatever. We didn't have any. Yeah. Trying everything.

Trying everything. I didn't. Making anything. Yeah, I didn't have, like. I mean, I remember when my.

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 lived. Cause usually I went through. He goes through stuff kind of fast, especially when you're, you know, when you're a destructor.

And so it'd just be like, break next one. Get that. And that discourages them, too, when they. When you get the new president and you break it within five minutes. But my openness to be able to because of just also what was available.

Like, I remember at one point, there was this guy, bunker Spreckles, who he was impoverished, used to sleep under the crib in our front yard. And then all of a sudden, one day, he was Clark Gable's stepson and his spreckels sugar air, and he just all of a sudden went from not a dollar to, like, $100 million. And that was 50 years ago. So it was at that point, he might as well have been whoever, right? And 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 shop, and I could go take them. So I would. I rode the weirdest, you know, air vented down rail, weird fin, just crazy things. Because first of all, that's all that was available was there. Yeah.

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, surfboard looks like this. I know what it is. But when you see people are making all these different things 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 well.

Cause 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 going, hey, I don't close minded. You're not closed minded. 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. And 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, and 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, technically. You remember round when that was what year that was? No, 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 brainchild. And, I mean, that would have had to been 30 something years ago. Like, probably that's how long it's been a little bit more.

Rick Rubin

Changed everything. Changed everything. Every whole thing. The whole thing. Changed the whole thing.

Laird Hamilton

Like, every single guy. I mean, right now we have a four fin 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 four fin. 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 ride. It's like, you know, and you had something that you really liked, too.

I had all single fins there. Jerry Lopez was making a lot of them. They were 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. Yeah. So I wouldn't. Just because I was riding, my dad was making me aboard. I go, if somebody else comes along with better board, that's what I'm writing.

I'm never gonna let the equipment. It would never be a limitation. Never. Right. I'm not gonna be compromised it because of my loyalty to a brand or loyalty to my dad.

Or, like, I go, because that's the tool. Yeah. So if the tool can allow you to do a better job. Yeah. Or do it the way you need to do it or want to do it.

Yeah, that was it. Yeah. If it was better, it was better. And so. And I think that allowed me to kind of bounce along, 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, you know.

Absolutely, yeah, yeah. When did wind become a factor? Well, the wind. So windsurfing wasn't created and then seventies. This in the seventies.

So windsurfing was created in the seventies. But what happened is they. Somebody took a windsurfer and stuck it on a surfboard. Right. Windsurfing 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. Yeah.

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 fifties that they surfed on. It wasn't on surfboards that they were using in the eighties. And then sometime early eighties, they stuck one. And I think it was on Maui.

I believe it had to do with Jerry Lopez, Mike Waltz, Matt Sweitzer. So some of these guys, and Matt, who I know, Matt Schweitzer's dad, was one of the co inventors of windsurfing. The windsurfer. The original. The original.

Rick Rubin

The original. Windsurfing was more like sailing. Yes. On a board. That's right.

Laird Hamilton

Even though guys got on waves and they were surfers, they were influenced by surfing. I mean, the sons of the guy like Matt Sweitzer and my friend Mike Waltz and some of these guys, they took those boards and pulled the keels out and sailed them onto little tiny waves and probably had the epiphany of like, wow, we can interact with the surf. But when they took the sail off that thing and stuck it on a surfboard, which I think the, 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 eighties, 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. But how many people in the world were doing it at that time? Oh, no, there was companies, right?

Because windsurfing itself had regattas and there was a ton of windsurfers out there. But 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, and 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 this. And the wind.

And the waves. Yeah, right. So you had that and you had those guys that were all, like I said, were great windsurfers. They were all. And still today, if you drove in Maui, you find a bunch of windsurfers.

But now kiting's in being influenced and now winging. Yeah. So they have. We have other wind disciplines, but. 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 windsurf team, like a racing team, because they were doing.

They were using windsurfers 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 windsurfers of all time, from Oahu, Kailua, which is a great windsurfing place. Not quite Maui.

I mean, he ended up moving to Maui just because Maui is 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 yachting. It was regatta, like go race around the courts in the winter. And so then they had freestyle. So they had freestyle, which were.

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.

Rick Rubin

Yeah, it was more like boating. Sailing. Yeah, it's sailing. And so then that whole wave riding thing comes along and obviously the guys from Hawaii have a little bit of a lead on it. And so I ended up moving to Maui because of windsurfing.

Laird Hamilton

I was already in my twenties when I started. I saw some girl doing it at a beach where I surf. And I'm like, oh, let me try that thing. I went out and, you know, windsurfing 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 all of a sudden, one day you get it and you're. And then you. And then after that.

Rick Rubin

Did you like that about it? The fact that it was hard to do. Did you like that? Let's just say I wasn't discouraged by that. Like, that didn't discourage me.

Laird Hamilton

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, if that guy can do it. And that person can do it, and they can do it. I know I can.

Rick Rubin

Or I can do it. I can do it no matter what. I could suck. But I know if they can, I can. And it's.

Laird Hamilton

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. And no matter. Cause sometimes we go so and so.

Duh, duh, duh. But listen, we only have two arms and two legs. Yeah. And two eyes and one brain. And, like, at the end of the day, we're not so different that we're gonna 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 gonna be the only person that can play a flute or a guitar or whatever, because sometimes we have a tendency to think, well, you know, we're gonna be the only ones that can do this now. We're not. If we can, they can.

So that's my mentality.

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Rick Rubin

I learned from you. First time I came to your gym, I couldn't do one push up. And you said, don't say you can't do it. Say you haven't done it yet. And with your help, I worked up to doing 100 push ups in a row.

You can train to do anything. Just because you can't now doesn't mean you can't. That's true. No, that's true. Well, and I think.

Laird Hamilton

But that just speaks to our barrier, that we create the barriers, right? Like, if you really want to, if you'd be surprised how much different than, oh, I wouldn't mind being able to do that. If you go in with that, like, I wouldn't mind being able to do that. Chances are you're probably not gonna do it very well if you're coming in bowing like, hey, man, I just. All I want to 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, windsurfing 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. That in surfing.

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. 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'd ever been. When I spent some years windsurfing and speed sailing, all of a sudden, then it was another animal.

Then 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 footsteps. I mean, I got a couple broken ankles to show for it, but I was used to footstraps, like, windsurfing made me footstrap friendly. So when I put footstraps on my big wave toe board and I got toed 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.

I know how to use the footstrap and be in the footstrap. So that was just the first, other than, like, the influence of equipment that the stuff that went. Because what happens is when, 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. Things fail, fail quickly.

And so, you know, and 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 windsurfer all of a sudden, you put that into the big wave board. It's a different board. The whole thing's a different animal. So things like that, right? Things like technique.

Rick Rubin

What about the idea of towing? Like, in a way, the sail is the motor? Well, that was the original influence for towing. Right. Because we were windsurfing.

Laird Hamilton

We're out at sea. We sail onto 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.

Rick Rubin

Physically not possible. Physically impossible. Not even remotely possible. Doesn't matter who and when and what. Never gonna be possible.

Laird Hamilton

But you're on a windsurfer. You're like, wow, it'd be amazing to be on this way without this sail. Cause 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, it's the. Very first time you ever towed?

First time we ever towed was summer day, north shore, Oahu, place called v land. So we were outside v land, which is on the north shore, and it was. And we were freeboarding. We were behind a boat, behind the zodiac, towing around summertime board. But there was a little swell and let go, being towed.

And I either was driving the boat and I towed buzzy or derek on a wave, or buzzy 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.

Rick Rubin

No, people, of course. Yeah, but people, because later on. Copying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, at the time you did it, you weren't copying.

Laird Hamilton

No, no. Never seen it. Didn't. Never thought of it, even as a. As a concept.

Rick Rubin

And if it wasn't for the sail experience, you might not have thought it. No, 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'd been going out in stormy giant surf on the north shore, on our windsurfers, and getting on these swells and just being like, man, it would be awesome to 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?

Laird Hamilton

And then we can throw the sail away and then try to go back and get it. Like, that's not gonna happen. How long was it between the windsurfing and towing? Couple winters, like. Like, short couple.

Short. Like, well, a couple winners of windsurfing big waves. Then the summer coming where we got towed on by the Zodia, and we thought, huh? Let's try that. And then as soon.

Cause we tried it that summer. So that very first swell of the winter, 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 it was just.

From then on, we were just like, don't even talk to us. No, 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 Waimea Bay. The Eddie Aikau, Derek doner, and myself were both invitees. They hadn't had the event in seven years because the storms just hadn't been right.

The conditions. And those were the winters that we had been windsurfing in giant surf out at sea. And so we had been riding huge surf, but they just. The event could never happen. We go out, we're towing.

The guys came on the jet skis from Waimea and said, hey, the event's on. You guys got to be down in Waimea. And Derek and I looked at each other, and we just said, well, we're not going anywhere. And please put. Derek 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 for. To take our space. Yeah. And then that was. We never looked back.

So they drove away, and then we were by ourselves, like, 2 miles out, just going round and round. And probably 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.

Rick Rubin

We're doing our own thing. We're good. It's amazing. We're good. We're amazing.

Laird Hamilton

We're good. Would it have felt like going backwards? Couldn't. Couldn't even look. Couldn't, couldn't.

We was not even like, what? No, I not wasting at all. 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, it was no decision. For me, it was not even. I'm like, did you see what we're doing right now?

I don't know if you. Did you have you watched? Because 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.

Rick Rubin

And you were working on some different tricks and stuff, and 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.

Laird Hamilton

Yes. Because 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 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. And never is it, like, oh, 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.

I mean, listen, when we were kids, we were younger. That's why we were so enthralled by getting a picture or having something filmed. It was amazing 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 wasn't that. How does it feel? Was it as big as I thought? Was it.

Was I doing what I thought I was doing? Because it felt like I did this and that. Yeah, but I don't know. So I'd like to see it. And so that's how, for us, we started.

Like, that's that's why it was such a great, like, oh, my gosh, a guy had a eight millimeter camera, and, 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're like, oh, cool. Oh, yeah. Well, that wasn't why either. You were disappointed because you thought it was great. Or maybe your mind made it up to be bigger than it actually was.

Yeah, that's what we. 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 ten times, ten different things, and you had ten different things and you get confirmed ten 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 ten 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. That'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 helicoptering. It looks. And I'm like, and then the guy, some guy actually filmed us.

And then I saw the thing and I go, oh, my. I'm doing the thing. Yeah, but you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know. Cause 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. Now what you're doing is capturing it.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. Like when we were young, to have a photo, a nice photograph or a film when 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.

Laird Hamilton

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. In terms of getting better. Yeah. 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. I do believe that there is some value about not knowing, too, and the mystery, that the mystery of it.

The mystery might make you less observant, like you knowing how you look to be like, I'm going to do this. Because then look, feel it more. It's a more internal experience, which may actually help the overall evolution. Like, maybe because. Because I think that.

Well, that seems more biological. That seems more like how we actually did do it for sure. Okay. You had people observe it and say, hey, hey, did. But you weren't observing it yourself.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. Like, when did we get a mirror? You know, and then when do we get a gopro and we film every single thing we do and we see all the stuff because some of it I go, huh, okay. But there is something to the mystery, right? To the mystery of it.

Laird Hamilton

Like, you're absolutely. You're going off of how it feels to do it when you do it the best. Yep. Like, what? I say how it feels the best may lead to you actually doing it the best way.

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Rick Rubin

Did 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.

Laird Hamilton

Like, that was. That was. There was no. There was no world tour. There was no.

I mean, there was surfer surfing, but those were magazines, and they were cool. But surf movies were like, that was. 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 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 McGillivray 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. Cause he lost his partner. But 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 playing 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.

Rick Rubin

There's so much. 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 didn't have anybody there, you could go down and just watch a giant wave for ever. It's like a fire. It's something about that movement and water and just the.

Laird Hamilton

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. So it's the beauty of. It's what drew you in.

Absolutely. And the terror. Yeah, the terror like that. How important do you think experiencing beauty is for us? I mean, it's like, you know, what does a beautiful woman do to a man?

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, beautiful. Places, by no accident. Very inspiring. Again, I think away from our biology, I think we're meant to be.

Part of it 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 becoming part of.

I mean, listen, a desert is beautiful. A rock mountain is beautiful. The truth is, is that man makes beautiful things. But when he doesn't try to make beautiful things, then. Then there is no beauty but nature.

You cannot compete with nature. Nothing that man create. As beautiful as Paris and the Louvre and St. Peter. Different competition.

I mean, we go to Yosemite. I mean, it's all good. Like, and why is it beautiful to us? Like, that's another question. Why are these things?

Why is a desert beautiful to us? Why is a mountain beautiful to us? Like, that's a bigger question. It contains some mystery, because that why is like. It is mysterious.

That's right. Why do the rocks in 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, because it's a physical reputation of the grand master, 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, you 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. I mean, when I'm in the ocean and I'm in some giant surface, I'm not thinking about myself, except maybe when I'm in front of one and it's gonna break up my head, I'm like, wow, I might die right now, but I'm not ever. And when I'm in it and 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, and I remember one morning in the gym, and you were leaving the next day to go to Cho Phu, and you were pensive.

Rick Rubin

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 gonna sit with my friend and we're gonna watch the wave.

And we're gonna watch wave for about a half hour, because a half hour is the shortest amount I can watch it and know what I have to do. And then I jump in the water and I go. And I said, well, why wouldn't you watch the wave for an hour? And you said, if I watched away for an hour, I would never get out of the boat. Oh, yeah.

Laird Hamilton

Anxiety. I don't wanna watch. I don't wanna. I wanna watch long enough to know. What'S to know what to do.

Rick Rubin

Yeah, I want to watch anything beyond that. And you would get to what could go wrong? Absolutely. You know why? Because I can't do anything about it.

Laird Hamilton

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. I'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. Okay.

No, let's understand what the wave, what the day is. So you're not like, oh, my goodness, I didn't realize that every ten minutes, a giant wave comes, you know, like, from that place and not that place. Like, so the least amount you can know. To know what you need to know. That's right.

Rick Rubin

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. Like when you're going to a spot you've ridden a thousand times and the consequences are low and all those things, then it's just, you don't even.

Laird Hamilton

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 Pahi. We would always work our way in. You know, we had a few sayings.

We called ourselves the shoulder soldiers, right where the shoulder of the wave is the safest spot. So we would start off and just catch one on the edge and just be like, okay, let's feel the water. Let's see the thing, like, no ego, no, like, hey, watch what I could do and just, you know, walk over and get yourself crushed. Like, we had no, 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.

I 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.

You're either drawn to it or you run like that. But the sound is different than other wave sound. It's a deep, like, sounds like mortar fire in the distance. Sounds like a war. Like, sounds like.

Like low tone, big power. You can just. You, you know, like boulders are moving. Kind of thing, but far away. Far away.

Miles away. But the fact that it's miles away and you can hear it tells you something about it. Something large, something severe. So we had, you know, 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, that 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 is a big island. To get surf, you have to drive a lot. A lot of wind. Mostly the wind.

A lot of the spots are completely, you know, destroyed. So you're there to windsurf, and. And then you. You hear about this wave. It's not like you get on the road.

You just drive down. It's like, you know, five, 6 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, you know, the. The master of that wave and built my boards.

I known him since I was a child. He used to, you know, let me stay at his house. Mentor. Mentor. Yeah, like an older brother.

Yeah, like an older brother. But definitely. Definitely. Great. Crazy good.

Yeah, crazy beautiful. Like, make boards for me, let me stay at his house. Like, very supportive of me my entire life since I was little kid. Right. You know, his house was at pipeline, so.

And he lived on Maui as well, which was kind of ironic, so. And he was involved with the windsurfers, with the first boards, and he windsurfed. And so I didn't know he was into wind surfing. Into wind surfing. Yeah, yeah.

So he tells us about that wave, and he says, yeah, they call 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 atom blaster. But he said that it gets giant, and some people may have paddled out or somebody, but no one surfs it. It's a way that this.

It's 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 surfboy. 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 surfed it or not is beside the point. It's a little bit like towing. Did they tow or not, tower? We don't know, but we went there. No one was surfing it.

We didn't see anybody surfing it. We saw it big. What were your first thoughts? How perfect. Like, doable or not automatically?

Not doable. Not automatic. Doable. What? A giant, perfect wave.

Rick Rubin

Oh, I see. Don't know if it 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. Had 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, yeah. But maybe in cartoons, but not like this.

Laird Hamilton

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. Okay.

Rick Rubin

Cartoon wave. Cartoon. Yeah, full cartoon. Yeah. And that was cartoon wave from 2 miles away on a cliff.

Laird Hamilton

Never mind. Throw somebody out there and see that they look like. They look more like a mosquito than they do. Like somebody to ride the wave. Like, beyond.

Like, just not in the game of what people you do. Yes. I mean, I may as giant. It's a beautiful wave. Sunset beach.

Okay. You know, Greg no rode Makaha, 1969, but this is a different thing. This is just a different creature. You can just see the way, the speed of the wave, the shape of the wave. Different.

Rick Rubin

Magnitude different. More than the next step. Okay. More than next step. Not a big day at a good spot.

Laird Hamilton

No, just a whole different angle. Whole different. This is the 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 invitation. Like, there's not, like a sand beach in front where you can go down there and stand and go like, hey, maybe I'll paddle out. There's no sand. Yeah.

Anywhere in sight for miles. Yeah. Yeah. And sand is like Boulder beach. That's all the sand there is.

Like Boulder beach on a cliff in front of a thing with. So if you. If you're lucky enough to make it. Back to land, you might not make it back up the cliff. And definitely not with everything intact.

Rick Rubin

Yes. Like, you'll be broken, bored, whatever. So we see it, and I'm living with. I have a friend, Mike Waltz, who is the. Who's best friend.

Laird Hamilton

Dad invented windsurfing. He's a phenomenal windsurfer. And it's just a stud of a guy I 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 timeframe, but sometime in that same winter, or within the winters, they windsurfed up from Hukipa, which was about 6 miles away. So they tacked their way up to the spot, and they either got on a wave or got a couple waves or something like that, and then they went back home, and then that was like, okay, wow. We could go there and do that, but that you had to tack 6 miles, and if 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.

We'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 waves, small waves. But I just to kind of experience the whole thing. Proceed slowly.

Observe 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 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 tow in on Oahu. We're not even on the island, and we don't have the equipment there, but we do toe in, and then we're like.

And we've been doing tow in for a little while. And while we're like, oh, yeah, okay, now we got to go bring this toe in to go to this spot, because then we come by boat. Yeah. And initially tow in, it was pre jet ski. We didn't have.

I think there was one model of jet ski 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.

Try 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.

Rick Rubin

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.

Laird Hamilton

And they hear. And I get approached by Bruce Brown, endless summer. And he's doing endless summer two. Wow. And he says, heard you're doing this thing called toe in.

Da da da. What's the thing? I go, well, my fee is a brand new jet ski. Perfect. They go, great.

So perfect. Here's our first machine. So we get our very first machine. Wow. And we have that at Jaws after the test run.

Rick Rubin

Do you ever go on smaller days before? Bigger days? I mean, I think we go there. I think we go there early, and it's big. Like, on a day where we're like, we're going there, and we're scared.

Laird Hamilton

We're scared. We don't know if we're gonna die. 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. We're not sure.

Rick Rubin

You're going there with a question. That's right. We want to answer the question. Answer the question. Right.

Laird Hamilton

We definitely aren't going there. We're gonna. No, we're not, because we don't know what we're gonna do, and we have no idea what. How our equipment's gonna work. I mean, we have no flotations, and we don't know what's gonna happen.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. On that way, we don't know if our boards are gonna work. We don't know if the things are gonna. We don't know any of it. We're just completely coming in, you know, like explorers.

Laird Hamilton

Like, we're coming in, like, okay. Like, you know, am I gonna fall off the edge of the world? Like, am I gonna just disappear and then into the abyss and never come up? Like, I'm like, what? How many people in the crew?

Well, the original crew was buzzy and Derek and I. Those the three of us. We were the three on the north shore of Oahu. But once I came to Maui, I had my. My boys over, the group of guys, Mike.

I had Mike Waltz, who was the wind surf. 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 buzzy and I, or if it was buzzy.

And then we started pulling guys in. We had Brett Lickle, we had Dave Kalama. We started, and. I don't know. I don't know.

Rick Rubin

We still only had one ski. Yeah, but we had a zodiac, too. And you go out with both. Yeah, yeah, I see. Yeah, well.

Laird Hamilton

Cause we had the mama 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 Oahu, because the wind is just not the same there. So you come there, and now we have the wind element, because this is a wind factory combined with the giant wave, which makes it a whole different animal. When 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.

Rick Rubin

Because it's a storm. Yeah, yeah. You're in a storm, essentially, and the. Faster you go, the bigger a small bump is. So if you're going slow bumps aren't even an issue.

Laird Hamilton

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?

Like, 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 waves. It's just everything's big, magnified. All those things are exaggerated.

Rick Rubin

But definitely the bumpy part's interesting because I think of 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.

Laird Hamilton

It slide with a bunch of rocks on it. I see. So now you go to chopu, like in Tahiti. Yeah. And that thing is, it stretches the bumps out.

Right. So you have a different animal, but Piahi, you know, Nazare mavericks. I mean, these other bigger. Bumpy, 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 there, 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 the downhill course, you never leave the ground. You come down the downhill course at 60 or 80, you hit a knoll. All of a sudden, you're in the air flying.

And 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 probably becomes one of the biggest challenges in riding a wave, is dealing with the texture of the face. That's why we have arrived with foils, because you're not affected by that texture. It has its other own, its issues, but now you're not completely at the mercy of the texture. Okay, so now you've gone to jaws a few times.

Yep. And then what's the first time where it's, like, ridiculously big? Probably that first season. Yeah. 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 had ridden? Yes. Yeah.

Rick Rubin

It was already bigger than anything you rode, and it hadn't. Yeah. But I had towed in on the north shore of Oahu, so I had ridden some big waves there. Yeah. And I had also ridden some.

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.

Laird Hamilton

But now it's big 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. All of a sudden it's a different wave.

Completely different wave. Or you have completely straight west, completely different wave. So 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'd 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. What happened at pipeline? Well, the sand moves a lot there. I see. So once the sand all goes away and it's back to the reef, then.

No, the reef is exactly the same. That bottom's not changing. That bottom is going to be like that for another hundreds, thousands, 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.

Rick Rubin

The storm angles have shifted over time. It seems that way. Wow, that's interesting. It seems that way that we. Because of the.

Laird Hamilton

Because I imagine that they're always shifting. Yeah. But I do believe the amount of. Time that we've been watching it. Yeah.

It's shifting well, like, for example, this last season we had a very unique characteristic swell pattern that came through for like three weeks. That was, that was a severe west swell angle. And the last time we saw anything remotely like that was in the eighties, 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 eighties. Like not saying.

Somebody else said, oh, yeah, I haven't seen that since the eighties. And I was like, yeah, that's true because. Exactly, yeah, we don't know those patterns because those patterns for us are, those things are like, that could be a week ago, right? That was a week ago and it changed. But we're thinking, wow, that's been my lifetime.

But you know, we were fortunate when we were writing Piahi at the beginning, writing jaws for that first like ten to twelve years, that window of time, if you go back archival ly and look at that, and I'm not saying that just because we were riding it and all that. I'm saying that the amount of big surf that happened, we haven't seen that since then. Yeah. Like in the last 20 something years, we have not even remotely seen that kind of volume of big surf per winter. Like now we're seeing a couple of swells.

There was like every week, every other week. Like it was literally like a machine. So, 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 fascination also, too, but that's also affects the waiting, affects the anticipation, the disappointment. Like this season, for example, they were forecasting a powerful El Nino for us, that means lots of giant surf. Yeah. Three, four swells done shut off.

Like January 15. Like turned off like a light switch, like nothing. Zero, gone. We're like, what happened to powerful El Nino? And 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 very little, you know, especially when it comes to the, 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.

Rick Rubin

Like that with something like jaws, you have that experience. Finally you get to write it. When it's crazy big, you 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.

Laird Hamilton

I got distracted from it and started being concerned about what people were doing and, you know, endangering themselves, endangering other people. You understood how dangerous it was. Yeah. 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. We don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. When it stops being fun, like, what is it that made it stop being fun? And I could say, well, 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 way of like, yeah, yeah, I did this.

Well, the only thing I didn't do was really do something stupid. I mean, I shouldn't say I did a lot of stupid things. I've done more than one, but I. 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 happen.

The truth is, what happened was, well, first of all, the. We were filming everything we were doing by the end, and that stopped being fun. It became every time there was a giant work or something because I was distracted. Do we have the boat guys? Do we have the thing?

Do you get the cameraman? Do the cameraman. Got the thing. Okay, I'll get. We got the, like, all of that stuff.

And all I want to do is surf. But then I'm, like, trying to organize that, and then everything you're doing is being. Being documented and it's part. Okay, it's for your work. It's for this.

It's the whole thing. So then I say, and again, be careful. My mom used to say, be careful what you asked for, the way God punishes you. Is he giving you what he asked for? But I said, you know what?

It'd be nice to have a special day. Undocumented. Right? Lead to an unforecasted swell. 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, but making another place off of the airport down by Spreckelsville, 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.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. A couple miles offshore, giant shore break. Yeah. IFR, which means no helicopter, because we 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.

Laird Hamilton

Convince these other guys to come out with me, Brett and John Denny and Sierra Emery, who's since drove off a cliff on purpose, but 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 tourniquet his leg 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 gonna allow the technique of being towed in with a board once it got to this next. Next thing. Yeah.

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. And when. I don't mean bullshit, but I mean, like, I'm over.

Rick Rubin

You had an epiphany. There's some new thing to do. Well, and also, I'm. I realize that I'm not gonna. If it really does do something that I'm waiting my whole life to do, as this guy's pursuing, trying to ride giant surf.

Yeah. I'm not gonna be able to do it with these things, so 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 a.

Laird Hamilton

Well, the first time probably planted the seed. I rode on a giant hydrofoil boat, inner island in Hawaii, called sea flight. And it was a boat that had big turbines on it and it lifted up on hydrofoils and flew across the water and I rode on it as a child. It was called sea flight. So as a child, fly on this thing.

The thing somewhere back in my. Deep in my brain was this seed, right? And then cut to, again, summertime boredom. My friend Brett goes, hey, there's a thing. This guy's got this hydrofoil device in his garage up in Pukalani on Maui and, you know, it's a seed or something.

I go, well, can you get it? He goes yeah, let me see. And he. The guy goes sure. So he let us borrow it.

So we took it and did it. Have a chair or something? Chair. You sit down and you strap. I thought it was for handicap.

I thought it was a handicap device. I go to, 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 scare 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 first you get towed. Towed behind the boat.

Behind our. So it'd be like water skiing except you're sitting in a chair and you're floating above the water. Yeah, on a stilt. On a stick stilt. Yep, on a foil.

Yeah, on a foil. On a stilt you're sitting on. And. And the guys who can do it, do it well, they could do backflips 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 that somebody had designed that had a foil on it. From the fifties or forties or.

Cause hydrofoils have been around militarily and also in the water world for a long time and 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 10ft standing.

And we're like, we can stand on this thing, guaranteed. So, so, so we. So we just. So I know would 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. Yeah, like, there weren't thousands.

Rick Rubin

It was one guy who had an idea and made a hobby thing, but. Yeah, but he was selling them. He was selling them to people and convincing them that people to ride them, and people were riding them. And 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.

Laird Hamilton

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 won't hurt it, but we're gonna. We're gonna 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 did it unscrew. How did. 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. Yeah. 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 wake board, and we made a plywood pyramid out 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. Cause we figured the chair offered leverage against the foil, so we needed leverage. And the only way we could do that is 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. Then he brings you 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 amazing.

Rick Rubin

How long ago was this? How long ago was that? Probably right around that same time. A late eighties or early nineties. Early nineties.

A long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Early nineties. I didn't realize you've been messing around with foils that long. That long?

Laird Hamilton

Yeah. Early nineties, I would say. A long time. Like, we've been doing. We've been playing with foils more than 20 years.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. Like, so did that. Wrote it. We're having fun. It was cool, flat water.

Laird Hamilton

And then we went, and we were tired of driving to the other side of the island when the water was flat. And so we went. And we went to where there was 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.

And we realized that you could tap into the energy of the wave with. The foil, which 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, 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 fin underwater be able to be pulled by the waves? Energy? Like, how would that even. How would. You know?

You wouldn't know. But we knew quick. As soon as you let go and you went like that, we went, oh, my, we can ride away with it. And then once we did that, you know, we had, like I said, dave Kalama, Mike Waltz Rush, Randall, Mark Angula. I had a good group of guys that were excited because we had a little core group.

And you get excited, it's like a band. You're like, oh, man, that song. 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 windsurfers.

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. I think my record was, like, eight boards in a day. Broke eight boards in half in a day. I think my other buddy broke eight and six.

I mean, we were breaking board, but we had that kind of thing going with each other. 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. So we just would. We had people go online and buy the parts and stuff, and 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 g ten that we could bolt to our existing fuselages, and that changed the way our rigs rode. You know, we could handle the speed.

Rick Rubin

How different is getting towed versus riding a wave? When you're being towed, the water is neutral 99% of the time, even if there's a little wind blowing or whatever. So 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.

Laird Hamilton

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 where, like, behind a boat, you can keep the boats going 24.

Okay, go 24. Stay at 24, where you're gonna be on a wave, and you're gonna go 35, and you're gonna 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 with 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, it's gonna fall out of the sky. So. And then you've tried a bunch of different shapes.

Yeah, yeah. We kept trying a bunch of shit and trying things that we liked 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 were some of the breakthroughs along the way? I mean, the height of the strut.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. 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's better or worse.

Laird Hamilton

Higher's better, really? Even though you get to a point. Point of diminishing return. I see. Which is it becomes too much leverage.

So then you get too much leverage, which isn't great. 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. Either 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. It means you can drive through a 48 inch pothole and not bottom out. Yeah, yeah. So it's the same kind of thing where when you have that bigger mast, you can go. And 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? 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 it, 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 offshore by ourselves, and a giant wave hit me and drove me with my rig. My. And my foil rig was heavy way down into the darkness. And I was attached to a sea anchor 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 it, Paulo. This is a real, like, this is it. 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 seat 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. No. So what I did was, as I didn't use my legs at all, because the boots don't work, and 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. Yes. 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 Piahi because it was getting so much attention and 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, and we didn't even think about small waves. 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 windsurfing, we were amongst the first five or ten guys in the world to kite. So we were. I was in a core group of.

Rick Rubin

Guys, and kite surfing is where you're on the board and there's a sail up in the air with a string. And there's a kite in the distance, and it's like. And I mean, we were early on, like, the 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. Broke my ankle. So I'm like, yeah, we can't do this on land.

Laird Hamilton

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 we, and the boards that really helped us launch that whole thing. It changed into wakeboarding were our big wave 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, and then he'd launch it.

And then 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 how it was. And we would go down the coast on Maui from the hukipa and just do, like, a death run and then end up at, like, the airport. If you didn't crash somewhere along the way out at sea, hopefully not, because you'd be way offshore.

And that's never fun. And the kites didn't relaunch. They were literally, if they hit the water, there was over. So 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 I went, we were kite foiling. They were air rams initially, which, 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.

Cause he was making them for, like, some blow up catamaran or some crappy thing. I'm like, relaunchable kite. Get that thing. So I married the foiling with the kite initially, and I kite foiled, and I go, you know what? This is gonna be a discipline.

Yeah, no doubt. But I'm not that interested in it. I wanna ride waves. I'm a surfer. That's my front.

But it's going to be its own thing. Come to, we're riding all winter, towing in every time there's a big swell. Working on, you know, riding giants. Waves with foils. Come to foiling's birth in kiting explodes.

So the guys are kiting, foiling, all of a sudden, breaking world record stuff. But. But foiling all starts in kiting. And then that's when the first foil companies, where they have money for R and D and they're paying guys to, because they're selling production stuff and they're doing the whole thing. Right.

They're running business. They have, they have clients. 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.

Rick Rubin

The only reason you were on the foil was to manage the giant wave because the regular surfboard couldn't do it anymore. Yes. And the irony is that it can ride a wave that doesn't, that you couldn't even surf it 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 the wave that doesn't even break.

Laird Hamilton

Then you could ride wind swells, and you could ride little tiny waves that don't break for miles. I mean, you just, 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. So now you're just holding the kite right next to you on a foil board.

Right. And so then that's because the foils are so. Have you tried this shit? Yeah. What's that like?

Fun. Yeah, I mean, it. Coming from windsurfing and kiting, it's a little. And I mean, I've seen some. I saw the world champion in Chacama 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 and, I mean, what he was doing was amazing. But as a. As somebody who is a wave rider. Yeah, I.

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. You 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.

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. Right. So.

So that leads us to that. Now, this expansion of what foils are, that's the frontier. Right. Is all of these places. When did this happen?

It's happened over the last ten years. We're towing in the big waves and that obviously has, you know, there's nobody that wants to do that, really. I mean, yeah, there's not a business. There's not a. No, you're not making these for like, the group.

The amount of people. It's 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 so totally suited for that.

The 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.

Strapped in or not. I could use some foot straps. I just. Tell me about when did the foot straps go away and why? And what's the difference?

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. Whereas before you had to be strapped.

In, you had to be booted in to deal with the leverage. Just with the leverage. And that had to do with the way the foil was lifting and what it was doing, you know, 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, because they can become more stable. And, you know, it's. It's a little bit like whenever you come into a sport, after the equipment evolves, it's always easier to learn.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. Like, if you tried to learn how to snowboard with the very first snowboard that they learned, no one would. Nearly impossible. Nearly impossible. You try to learn with the first skateboard.

Laird Hamilton

Yeah. The three best surfers in the whole thing could do it and no one else. Like, it's not skateboarding until they built the tire. You know, you get a urethane tire, a nice truck that changes everything. So same thing with the.

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 initially, and I looked at like, oh, that looks cool.

But I was kind of like, okay, you know, I'm focused on the big wave. I'm not, you know, might be good, but. And then a guy came to visit me who had been, 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.

You know, you can sell it to me, but it's not leaving. It's not leaving my house. Like, I'm not letting this go. And he's like, well, it's only one I got. I go, yeah, but you built this one so you can build another one.

You're a professional. So then, now, all of a sudden, foils are the shapes, the sizes, the materials. Everything's evolving. And so we move into where we are right now, which is we have an enormous, like, spectrum of disciplines and environments that we can do. Like some of the fastest sails in the world.

I mean, first of all, everything's on hydrofoil. 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 in surfing, is big wave riding. That's the top.

And then also distance, right? So distance, there becomes some other things. Speed, distance, size, like, I like those things. Those things are. And usually there's some relationship.

But 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 foils now, without a doubt, can't even compare. Now it's expanded places because normally the saturation of surfers and locations, we're pretty.

Rick Rubin

Tapped out with the waves. We only have so many waves and we have a lot more surfers. And so, you know, you go to a spot and there's 100 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.

Laird Hamilton

So it opens up our universe, which we need. Yeah, we need. We need more options, especially, as, you know, I view 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 going to places and riding waves for six or seven minutes, eight minutes.

And the average surfing wave is 10 seconds, maybe 20. Had a long one. So now you're compounding the amount of riding time you're getting captured. So now on one surf trip. Foiling trip.

Yeah. You could spend more time going fast on your vehicle, on your board than if you were to combine all of the rides of your life before this. Yes, if I did, 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.

Your view to your ability because now we're able to. We're now we're looking at wave energy differently because I always describe surfers as wave readers. Yeah, like, great. You can stand up and you can rip, but. But more impressive is you can look at a wave and know what it's gonna do.

That's the thing that takes all the time. Never mind. You can. 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, I'll see the guy take off, and before he gets to his feet, I go, that guy's gonna get donuts. And she goes. And then he goes down 10ft and gets hit by the wave. And she's like, how'd you know that? And I go, well, I could just tell by his movement, his speed, what the wave was doing that it was gonna break on his head or, you know, somebody's gonna make it.

I mean, and there's always a surprise. Yeah, you're like, I thought that guy was gonna make it, but I 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 riding 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 dis 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. Right. It's like hearing music and knowing how. Following it can go. Where it can go.

Yeah, yeah. It's an enticing thing that keeps you inspired. Right. So. Cause what are we trying to do is just stay inspired.

And how do you stay inspired if, you know, if you have one day in your lifetime that you're never gonna get another one, like, unless you have another day in your lifetime that you're never getting another one, like, 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. And the guarantee of that has 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 gonna have a hard time walking. Because you'll be doing it so much. I'm gonna have. My legs are gonna be sore.

I'm gonna blow out before there stops being anything to do. I'm gonna. I'm gonna blow up. And over the course of your life, how often has that been the case? I mean, I.

Not a lot. I stand. I work. I mean, I work. That's what you work towards.

You. You seek that there could 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, and you have to. But it has to also.

Why, too. You have to have the right. I just honestly believe if your intentions are genuine and you stay, that you're gonna be blessed. Like you're. It's gonna.

That you're gonna be. The universe is gonna provide you with the thing you need. Yeah. As long as you stay true to your. You know, and it's.

And you're in. Your intention is pure. Pure. I still get it because I have a group of friends that I'm able to do it with, so I get it through that. Yeah.

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 gonna do. I do enjoy the camaraderie.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. Because I want to share in it. It'd be like if you had the most delicious meal ever. Yeah. And you were by yourself, it would be great.

Yeah. But I'd rather sit with more fun, with four friends talking about how great. It is and enjoying it. Yeah. Right.

Laird Hamilton

So. So I think there's. There's that to it. And. And sometimes you doubt it.

Like, it. You doubt that that's true. Right? You. You can doubt that that there is a reward, but.

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.

We're getting to do. Look, it's like, because we're so caught up and always trying to do, do, do, get, 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.

Rick Rubin

How 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?

Laird Hamilton

We go to this great place called Mike Wiggly's, and it's, like, the premier austrian guy that started a helicopter. Best food, best area, you know? So we went there, and I was sitting at dinner. We had just had 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 dawn ness, and 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. Mister. Wow. I go, hi, mister Wildman, or, hey, Don, my name's Laird.

Nice to meet you. And, 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. 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? He goes, I live right down the road. And I go, I just moved 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. And how much older was he that. Knew Don was what, he was? 30 years old. 30, yeah, 30 years older.

He'd be like, would he be, like, 90 something right now? I think he'd be like, 92, so something like that. 32. How would you describe him? Well, he.

Bare knuckle fighter. Like, I mean, when you look at. First of all, when you look at Don, you're like, this is a bare knuckle fighter. Like, this guy would fight bare knuckles, like, 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. And just beyond enthusiastic, beyond open, beyond interesting.

Rick Rubin

He seemed to love life more than anybody. Love it, love it, love living and enjoy it, enjoy. Professional. Professional enjoyer. I mean, listen, I always use this story.

Laird Hamilton

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 my house. I'd make a steak. He's like, this is the best steak I've ever had.

It 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 gonna 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 want to. I mean, one time we were at Chopu. Yeah, he's in Tahiti. Chopu.

And John doesn't really surf. Like, I mean, he surfs a little bit. He doesn't surf. He's sitting in the boat. He doesn't chopu surf?

No. And not even remotely near Chopu surf. He. After about 40 minutes or an hour of me towing, he. I come over by the boat, he go.

He waves me, come to me. 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.

So, you know, there was a lot of those. There was a lot of those. But him and I had a. Had a crazy, beautiful relationship, and I had a lot of incredible trips with Don. A lot of help.

Rick Rubin

Tell me about the race across America. Oh, God. Yeah. Well, first of all, Don was a professional sufferer. Like, he could suffer, like, better than anybody.

Laird Hamilton

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, hey, he suffered for two days. He was gonna. He would start to excel. But his endurance thing started with the Iron man. Right.

So he sold his company and turned into an Ironman guy. I guess he's made. Bragged about he was going to start doing triathlons or something like that. And then he. 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 Ironman, like, every year for ten years or twelve years in a row and never missed. I think he got second and then finally won his age division or something. Always second or. Or winning or second.

So he obviously loves endurance stuff. So he suckered me into. I suckered him in this. We would always sucker each other into certain things, but this was a suffering he suckered me into. 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 eventually, like this competition. Yeah, I just don't like the thing. I don't mind doing something brutal, and I don't mind going with other people and trying to beat people in brutal things. I just didn't want to participate in, like, a structured thing.

And he goes, you know, we'll do this. There'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 an ex football quarterback. And I go, I think we could just really, you know, we could hammer him. 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.

And. But Don has it in his mind, he understand, he goes, oh, you're vo two max. Your guys ability to suffer. We'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 hours paddle. And it's from Malibu to Oceanside, so. Malibu to Oceanside. But we're gonna relay it like we're gonna do the bike race. So it's.

It's not gonna be completely bad. It's just you're not gonna paddle consecutively, but we're gonna 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.

I'm like, okay, I'll do. I'll do it, but I want to do that. I want to paddle for. I want to do. Because I was doing these things called paddle and pedals.

And so I had gotten don to do one with me in Hawaii. I took Don on this one where we did, we biked across every island and paddled across every channel in Hawaii. In five days. We went 500 miles. And he said it was worse than any iron.

He said it was worse than ten Ironmans, but that was. I think he's making me feel good. So you either biked if it was land or paddled if it was water, across the entire chain of Hawaii, from. The southernmost point to the northernmost point point. Every island, every channel.

And so we had, like, the first bike was 125 miles, then we paddled for 35. The longest paddle was 22 and a half hours, but we did those consecutively. So anyway, before or 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 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.

Rick Rubin

He goes to race. Tell me what the race is first. The race is from Oceanside to Delaware. Oceanside, California to Delaware. Yes.

Across the entire country? Yeah. Bike only. Bike only. And how long does it take?

Laird Hamilton

Three or four days. Like. No, four days. Four or five. It's 24 hours a day.

24 hours a day. Somebody usually dies along. The thing is, run over by a truck or something like that. And Don had done before. He thought we had a really good chance to win.

Rick Rubin

Don was in his seventies at this time. Yeah, late seventies. Late seventies. You're a surfer? Yep.

We got a guy in rage against the machine and we have an injured football player. Yeah. An ex college football guy, but who's got a big vo. Two max going against professional bikers. Yeah.

Laird Hamilton

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. I mean, we were alternating, but we climbed, like, more than 75,000ft, 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 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. He 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. It was the hardest part.

Well, it would have been our weakness because we were bigger guys. And I remember at one point, there was another team that caught up to us and we had some weird stuff go on. Don hired a manager to help us manage the times and the whole thing to 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 da da da. And, like, the whole thing. And I kind of caught on to it. I was kind of. I'm like, dawn, this guy's sabotaging us.

Like, he's making us go in paces and doing things to break us. I go, this guy is. And then let, 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. Yeah. Then he's like, okay, he fired the guy. But there was like, the guy was doing stuff, like, you know, when you'd 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 and get in the van and go. But the van would be waiting, so you'd. And you'd be just grinding away, feeling nauseous, 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 hill climb after, so he would make you psychologically, he was doing some weird stuff, right? So I'm like, dawn, 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 it was the guy. I knew what he's doing.

And so as I went by, I just put my elbow out and hit the side mirror on the van, and it slapped on the front window. And the guy, like, 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. I mean, you're listening. You're at. You're up in Taos, New Mexico, at, you know, whatever, how many thousand feet breathing out.

It feels like you're breathing out of a straw and you're having to ride as hard as you can. And it was definitely a test of will, but dawn just felt better and better. And so we get to Herman, Missouri. The one guy passes my friend, then it's my turn, and I ride up alongside 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, Horizon dropped the guy and then trains with Jason. And then Jason was going. And then we were going to start rolling. 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. Broke his leg in Herman, Missouri. And I was behind in our van, and the guy passed us and just went right. And literally.

And I saw Jason go down. I thought Jason got run over. I thought he was dead. Like, I thought he was killed. And I was with cameraman, Officer Sweet and I, the three of us who are.

We're 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 couldn't do it. He was out.

We couldn't do it. I mean, we could have gone three guys. But Don was. It was all about winning. He didn't.

Don didn't care about the. Yeah, so it was all about. And we were on track to break the record at that point. And I mean, and everybody felt good, and we were rolling. And now we were in the flats.

We were 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 a bicycle and.

A car crash, a truck crashed, a minivan. The guy and the guy, you could see because what happens is people are driving 24 hours a day. And we were changing all the time that people get delirious. But the guy ran over our guy. And we were in head bed.

We were gonna. And I could see, by the way. Did that team end up winning? Yep. Yeah, it was amazing.

Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah. 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 a always been turned off by that stuff? Because it's like, I 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. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's hard enough when you're dealing with, like, lines and baskets and, like, it's hard enough when you're dealing with all these fixed things. You get weird stuff that goes on.

You're like, that was a weird call. That changed that whole game. Never mind how ambiguous, you know, art, music, food. Yeah. I don't think it's a good motivator.

Rick Rubin

I think it brings out the worst in people completely. Well, it brings out the worst in me. That's what I notice. I notice for me personally, I don't like who I am when I do. That just makes me so.

Laird Hamilton

I'm already too aggressive. I'm trying to learn how to navigate all of that energy. I'm like, how do I nurture that? But also, how do I productively use that? How do I productively?

Well, you know, how I do well, put me in these heavy situations, 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.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. Like, when we navigate surviving in nature with giant animals that could eat us that were a lot smarter and faster. Or maybe not smarter smarter, but maybe smarter. Maybe, 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.

Laird Hamilton

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. We were bummed about it, but then we went to New York and we paddled around the Statue of Liberty. Cause that was part of our paddle and pedal piece of it. But we were just too. Because Jason's leg was broken, we, the three of us, could have done it.

Yeah, but it defeated the purpose. Exactly. Yeah. So that 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 and the war, the things that he had been through, like, in his business, he always used to. I guess he. He said to me, I always tell 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. I 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 had 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 gonna be bad for him. So then he's like, 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. And then all of a sudden, like, two weeks in, he's, like, trying to get in a fight in the parking lot.

And then he's going to Vegas. He goes to Vegas with his. With his girl, and they don't leave the room for three days. And, you know, she's like, honey, you know, maybe we should just check your levels and just see what their, like, what they are. He goes, all right, sure.

Okay. He's almost 80 at this point. Yeah, I feel good, though. He goes, I'm good. Yeah.

She goes, well, let's just check them. Let's just check the level. And so the story is, she's at home, and the fax machine goes off because he still has a fax machine, 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? She goes, well, your testosterone's 1800.

They 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 a fight and, you know, like, she looked a little tired. Didn't you once go mountain climbing with him? Yeah. Tell me about that.

Oh, we've been in 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 tibia plateau and then had to be. I mean, he was like, humpty dumpty. Literally 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 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 his other leg that works on the other pedal. And he's pedaling and. But the other leg is obviously can't work, so it's on the side. And he literally is doing cardio. One legged bicycling with the crane.

Rick Rubin

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.

Laird Hamilton

Oh, I gotta do my cardio. Like, beyond obsessed. Beyond obsessed. What he would say if he didn't train, he would need. Yeah, try.

Rick Rubin

Tell me about the mountain climbing. So, no, he goes, hey, I want to go do Everest. And I said, okay. Like. Like, I'm the guy he sucks in.

Laird Hamilton

Like, I'll go, and then maybe I'm there, you know, he can help me. I can help him, whatever. Yeah. So he's like, hey, I want to do Everest. And 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. Yep. So we go, okay, let's go to Raniere. 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, the two of us. And I would say it's a gassy night, but it's beyond. It was beyond the point where it was just. 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, his youngest son's with us. I'm behind John. At one point, John's headlamp 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 ten or twelve people fell and they never found him. And I'm like, exactly, keep going.

So 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, making it to the bottom is. You know what the parking lot it's called at Rainier? Paradise.

There's a reason it's called paradise, because when you get back, you're glad that you're back. Anyway, we hike, we down climb, and we're about part way 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 that's brand new, I will pay you double of what this guy's 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. But that cured Don for about Everest.

He was good. He goes, I don't need to do Everest. And I'm like, I'm with you.

Rick Rubin

Um, temporal.

Temporal.