RFK Jr. The Defender - Kelly Slater on Plastics and the Ocean

00:00:00.000 This is Kelly Slater, my hero, who is the greatest surfer in world history.

00:00:05.000 He's 11 times legitimately, 11 times world champion, and does a lot of other amazing things with his life.

00:00:11.000 And really, I wanted you on here because Kelly has been in a battle for basically his entire conscious life.

00:00:19.000 With a lot of the same villains that I've been fighting, the oil industry, the plastics industry, the Fanhul brothers in Florida, his home state, the big sugar industry down there.

00:00:32.000 And I wanted to talk to you about all that stuff.

00:00:35.000 Will you talk a little bit about the effect of clean water in the surf culture?

00:00:42.000 In the surf culture, yeah.

00:00:43.000 So, you know, I've said for a long time that we're kind of the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to surfing.

00:00:49.000 Surfers are in the ocean.

00:00:51.000 I mean, there's more ocean and water pollution things than we can even imagine.

00:00:57.000 Places like India, China.

00:01:00.000 It's an overwhelming task to even start to penetrate the pollution that's in the oceans.

00:01:06.000 The ocean, 75% of the earth, 70% of the earth, we don't access more than a very small percentage of that.

00:01:13.000 So the oceans are just filled with all the stuff, all the fishing debris.

00:01:19.000 And, you know, the fishing topic is a whole other thing.

00:01:22.000 Industrial fishing, commercial fishing is really, I would say, ruining the oceans.

00:01:28.000 I don't think there's anything wrong with somebody going and catching dinner.

00:01:31.000 On a line or throw on a net, but when you get into what commercial fishing is and that whole thing, that's another thing.

00:01:39.000 You know, you're not going to make any friends talking about it, but it's awful.

00:01:42.000 And from what I hear from fishermen, when they say dolphin safe for your tuna, that's not true.

00:01:47.000 They just tag that on the, they just stamp that on their cartons.

00:01:52.000 So I don't even know where to start with ocean.

00:01:56.000 There's so many scary pollutants out in the world, in the air, in the water.

00:02:01.000 People dump their oil and there's nothing to spill your gas.

00:02:05.000 If you have a leak in a boat, you know, once you're a mile or five miles or 20 miles offshore, you can dump certain or a limited number or anything you want in the ocean because, hey, it's just going to float down to the bottom.

00:02:17.000 You know, how much respect do we have for ourselves when we treat our earth that way?

00:02:23.000 It's the only earth we have.

00:02:24.000 There's some deep-seated belief that if you can't see it, that it doesn't affect you.

00:02:29.000 I think it's in the collective conscience and the psyche of everyone.

00:02:33.000 Luckily, there are people like yourself and the people you work with and great people around the world who are doing their best to educate, fix those situations, put them out there in the media and let it be known.

00:02:45.000 But we do have to find solutions for these things.

00:02:48.000 This year was the first year I've ever surfed anywhere.

00:02:50.000 I was in Bali.

00:02:52.000 The seasons were changing from dry to wet season and the wind changes and it starts to rain.

00:02:56.000 And all the rivers start to flood out.

00:02:58.000 And so all the garbage that's been thrown into these rivers all year long, or for six months, it starts flowing out in the ocean.

00:03:04.000 And it's the first time I've ever surfed anywhere where I couldn't surf because there was so much garbage I had to actually come in.

00:03:09.000 I literally could not surf.

00:03:10.000 There was such an amount of garbage in the surf line.

00:03:14.000 It's just heartbreaking.

00:03:16.000 We'll take a boat from Bali over to Zimbabwe or to Nusa Lumbagan or whatever.

00:03:21.000 We go through the channel between those islands and We actually had to slow the boat down to an idle speed just to go through some of the garbage which lodged out together in the middle of channel, you know, 10 miles from land.

00:03:37.000 And, you know, I don't know what the endgame is.

00:03:41.000 I really don't know what we're going to do.

00:03:44.000 All our food's filled with plastic if we're eating anything from the ocean.

00:03:49.000 There's poisoning of the food and water all over the place.

00:03:53.000 We're becoming so much more disconnected from nature and our natural order that it just really scares me for our kids and grandkids and the future of this planet.

00:04:05.000 50 years from now, I can't imagine what it'll be like.

00:04:07.000 I just can't even imagine if it keeps going this way.

00:04:10.000 Why do humans have the right to just this place up so bad?

00:04:15.000 I don't get it.

00:04:17.000 I just don't, I mean, I always say, what if ants and every other creature out there and whales and, you know, lions, what if all the other creatures that live on this planet all treated this place like we do?

00:04:29.000 What if they all had buildings and roads and cars, you know, relative to their size?

00:04:36.000 What if all the aphids that could cover the whole United States and two or three inches of aphids every year all had some kind of infrastructure they needed to build and take over and own and We're just so disconnected and people forget we are part of nature because that's what we have become through society and through business and all this stuff.

00:04:57.000 And we're all guilty.

00:04:58.000 I'm not pointing the finger here.

00:05:00.000 I'm part of this system.

00:05:01.000 I'm a human and I travel on planes and I build surfboards and clothing and I'm a consumer of plastics and things.

00:05:11.000 I do my best to limit what I have and to recycle what I can.

00:05:15.000 But then you hear In Hawaii, something like 90% of the recycling ends up just going in a landfill and doesn't get recycled because they don't have the infrastructure to deal with it.

00:05:25.000 I think we'd all be fine if we got rid of plastic.

00:05:27.000 I don't know why you go to the store and you see a perfectly good fruit that then is also wrapped in plastic when it has a covering around it, like a banana.

00:05:36.000 And there's some cellophane wrap and some foam.

00:05:39.000 It's just mind-boggling to me.

00:05:41.000 It's mind-boggling.

00:05:42.000 How do we come up with this stuff?

00:05:45.000 You know, in this country, we subsidize trash disposals, so there's no incentive for the producers to even put that garbage into the stream of commerce to remove it.

00:05:55.000 In Europe, the person who puts a box into the stream of commerce, the company that does that has to show that it has reclaimed it, or it has to pay for its disposal.

00:06:08.000 In our country, the taxpayer pays for it, and that's why You know, they don't really have landfills in Europe, and in our country, the fresh hills of landfill is the highest point on the East Coast of North America because it's like all the worst pollution.

00:06:23.000 It's always about a subsidy, about a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his cost of production.

00:06:35.000 And, you know, it's possible if we rationalize the market to encourage people, to reward people For doing good things and punish them for doing bad things, for waste, for inefficiency, for pollution, that we could clean up the planet very quickly.

00:06:52.000 But I think we need to make that happen.

00:06:55.000 You know, I had a friend, she's my physio, does some massage on me and trains me in the gym, lives here in Hawaii.

00:07:05.000 She moved here, she had worked with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar At the Lakers and a few people around Hollywood and lived in LA and she went, you know, the air quality is not good here.

00:07:18.000 The life's not super great because all the traffic and all these people and it makes you a little bit crazy.

00:07:24.000 And so she moved to Hawaii like 30 years, 25 years ago.

00:07:28.000 She came here for the air quality.

00:07:30.000 Well, fast forward to 2017.

00:07:33.000 Her neighbor told her one day he was going to spray some plants outside.

00:07:37.000 He just wanted to let her know.

00:07:38.000 And she's like, okay.

00:07:40.000 So he mixes this, some kind of plant killer with paint thinner.

00:07:45.000 He puts on a hazmat suit and goes and is spraying everything around his yard and stuff.

00:07:51.000 And the wind is blowing straight into her house.

00:07:54.000 She comes home and she said, she's like, Kelly, it looked like a cloud of smoke going into my house.

00:08:01.000 And this guy who told me he was going to do a little spraying to kill some plants around his yard is wearing a hazmat suit with a full breather.

00:08:07.000 And he's like an 85 year old guy.

00:08:10.000 You know, he might not know, given the benefit of the doubt, he might not have known how bad it would affect people over there, but he knew in his immediate proximity how bad it was.

00:08:20.000 Her husband's dealing with cancer behind his eye that they found at like stage three or four.

00:08:27.000 She had a brain fog and a brain injury.

00:08:30.000 She came very close to dying.

00:08:33.000 This is just one person's situation on one pollutant in one neighborhood that happened.

00:08:38.000 You know, I was part of the legal team that's Monsanto, or Glyphosate, but Monsanto, and you think of Kauai as one of the most kind of pristine, you know, Eden-like place, but Kauai is the pilot testing island for all of Monsanto's pesticides.

00:08:59.000 The people on that island are some of the most contaminated people in the country.

00:09:04.000 Yeah, they have that here on Oahu.

00:09:06.000 They have it on Molokai.

00:09:07.000 I think the Big Island is the only place that doesn't have it, possibly.

00:09:11.000 Yeah, it's awful.

00:09:14.000 It's just awful.

00:09:16.000 You know, and even a topic like that, you know, because how many people have Roundup in their garage?

00:09:21.000 I would bet half the people in America do to spray something in their yard.

00:09:26.000 No one realizes the harm that can be done from these things.

00:09:30.000 And then the effect on The migration of butterflies, monarch butterflies, for instance, that eat the milkweed and that's all getting sprayed on the side of the freeways and stuff.

00:09:47.000 Fukushima.

00:09:48.000 What are we going to do about Fukushima?

00:09:50.000 I have no idea.

00:09:52.000 The scientists have no idea what they're going to do about Fukushima.

00:09:54.000 That thing's 10 years old now, and the millions of gallons of water that are flowing full of radioactive waste into the ocean every single day.

00:10:05.000 It's mind-boggling.

00:10:06.000 You could never even know.

00:10:08.000 No one even has any idea how much is going into the ocean, and that's been happening for 10 years.

00:10:14.000 And they don't know the effects of that.

00:10:16.000 They don't know that if dilution in the whole of the Pacific could handle the infinite amount of radioactivity that's going in there.

00:10:25.000 The only way they know to cool it, they don't know how to shut it down.

00:10:28.000 It's kind of melting into the earth, last I heard.

00:10:30.000 I mean, that thing alone is the biggest man-made catastrophe that's maybe ever happened, and no one talks about it.

00:10:36.000 And that scares me.

00:10:38.000 I have some friends that go across the ocean in boats, and they said that They were taking water samples every 20 miles or something, the whole length of that journey to test that.

00:10:48.000 And I didn't hear the results on that, but it's obviously a concern.

00:10:52.000 And you would think it would dilute as it goes out, but over an infinite amount of years, that's going to get less and less diluted and just build up in certain areas.

00:11:02.000 I have a clothing company called Outer Known, and it was formed for two reasons.

00:11:07.000 One was to look after the people who build our clothes and know that we're not using any kind of slave labor, that people get a fair living wage.

00:11:16.000 So the social compliance was number one to me, and a close sort of second, right, with it was the environmental concerns of our supply chain.

00:11:24.000 A lot of people would have no idea that in China there are literally blue rivers from the denim industry.

00:11:31.000 Yeah, I mean, you would know that.

00:11:33.000 You would know a lot more about that than I do, but I... I wouldn't let our company make denim until we could figure out a factory that could make it without polluting the waterways at all, which we found in Vietnam. 1.00

00:11:46.000 And I think because of the awareness and education around it, we're seeing more and more people who are, you know, the average person, I think on some level, if it's available to them, if there's people out there making that infrastructure, they will do it.

00:12:03.000 You know, if you have that recycling bin and you have that bin, well, you know, the average person, oh, that's easy enough.

00:12:09.000 But we need more and more of those people.

00:12:11.000 So what I did recently, I'm not saying this to try to pat myself on the back.

00:12:17.000 It just came up while I was doing it.

00:12:19.000 I was doing a podcast, a Zoom thing with this class in Ocean City, Maryland.

00:12:22.000 And this teacher reached out to me and said, hey, will you do Zoom with us?

00:12:26.000 And I thought, yeah, great.

00:12:27.000 So I did it for like an hour with them.

00:12:29.000 And I played some music.

00:12:30.000 And I had a musician stay at my house.

00:12:31.000 And he played a song for him.

00:12:32.000 And then we started talking about beach cleanups.

00:12:34.000 And I told him this story.

00:12:36.000 They did this on their own.

00:12:37.000 This was just inadvertently.

00:12:38.000 I said, one time my girlfriend and I were walking on the beach in Florida.

00:12:42.000 And I really didn't see any garbage.

00:12:43.000 But I noticed a little something on the ground.

00:12:45.000 So I picked it up.

00:12:46.000 And we decided to see how much debris we could find on the beach over the course of two or three blocks.

00:12:52.000 Because it looked like a clean beach.

00:12:53.000 And we found so much stuff.

00:12:55.000 And so the kids took it upon themselves to go and do a beach cleanup with their teacher.

00:13:01.000 And now they've adopted this beach in Ocean City and somebody just donated $100 to the class the other day and the kids are all excited and proud of it.

00:13:10.000 And so it's planting these seeds.

00:13:12.000 So now, like you talk about that incentivizing.

00:13:14.000 And so like I think it's going to be on the people, you know, like a teacher in a class or some kid who's got a science project or something, you know, just any way where people can go, look, here's some problems.

00:13:27.000 We're going to need to solve them.

00:13:29.000 This could be a big, huge thing.

00:13:31.000 I mean, look, maybe somebody creates a crypto coin that goes crazy because people start collecting garbage and recycling.

00:13:38.000 I don't know, like use technology, use foresight, use the problems, come up with solutions.

00:13:45.000 So I'm really proud of this class because they just took it upon themselves.

00:13:48.000 They went, you know what, we're going to go down and clean this beach up.

00:13:50.000 And a bunch of them started playing music now and have bought ukuleles.

00:13:54.000 And so it's really, I think, our obligation as stewards of this planet is to just have fun with it, really.

00:14:07.000 It's easy to get caught up in How painful and scary and frightening this is for the future.

00:14:13.000 But I think that if you can have fun with it and go, hey, let's just do this and try this.

00:14:19.000 You know, now these kids are going to, you know, I would guess one or two of them is going to spend their whole life just working on a pollution problem, pollution solution.

00:14:29.000 And maybe all of them are going to remember that moment when their teacher took them down the beach and they cleaned up.

00:14:34.000 So I'm going to actually do another thing with them.

00:14:37.000 I meant to do it this weekend, but she and I couldn't organize it.

00:14:39.000 But I'm going to get back with that class and I'm going to donate a little money to them too so they can create little projects and just say, here's something where you guys go out and figure out how to use it for good.

00:14:50.000 It's not painful.

00:14:52.000 It's not like doing homework for these kids.

00:14:54.000 They actually, she said that all of them have been totally engaged and really enjoyed it and been doing it in their free time and talking about it and how fun it's been.

00:15:01.000 So I think it's presenting something that That is enjoyable for younger people.

00:15:07.000 And from that, they create a passion.

00:15:10.000 You know, one of the reasons I really love you is that you're a critical thinker.

00:15:17.000 You're not frightened to talk about things that are the challenge of orthodoxies.

00:15:24.000 And what do you think that that comes, some of that comes from your sport or from your background?

00:15:31.000 Where does that come from?

00:15:35.000 Irreverence.

00:15:35.000 I think that probably comes from a number of things, but basically family.

00:15:42.000 I was a middle child.

00:15:44.000 My parents didn't have a great marriage and eventually split up.

00:15:50.000 Alcoholism in the family and a lot of discourse, not so civil.

00:15:57.000 My dog's going crazy over here.

00:16:00.000 And I was always kind of the mediator.

00:16:03.000 I was a middle child, and I was always trying to sort of mediate.

00:16:05.000 So I was always trying to kind of see both sides, my mom's side and my dad's side.

00:16:09.000 But I also have always liked the challenge.

00:16:12.000 I had an older brother who really pushed me.

00:16:14.000 I surfed and did sports with him and his friends that were older and bigger and stronger than me and faster.

00:16:21.000 So I think that bled over into my thinking, too.

00:16:25.000 You know, I was probably...

00:16:27.000 Maybe it took a little bit after my grandfather.

00:16:30.000 He was really into numbers.

00:16:32.000 He was kind of a mathematician.

00:16:33.000 He was a contractor.

00:16:35.000 I've always liked math and understanding the English language and grammar.

00:16:41.000 I wasn't a big history buff so much in school.

00:16:45.000 I didn't love science, but those things I actually really enjoy now.

00:16:50.000 I like the idea of holding two different thoughts and challenging each of them.

00:16:56.000 And so by that, you generally will get people label you right away that you think something other than they do, which they believe is truth.

00:17:05.000 And that's not necessarily the truth.

00:17:07.000 The truth is that I'm fine to question this thing.

00:17:10.000 It may be right.

00:17:11.000 It may be wrong.

00:17:12.000 I'm happy to be shown what the truth about something is.

00:17:16.000 But I think that's learning and educating yourself.

00:17:20.000 And how has that impacted you during the last year, during the pandemic?

00:17:28.000 What's your life been like and what's your thinking about it like?

00:17:33.000 Well, my life's kind of settled down a bit throughout this whole thing.

00:17:39.000 So I've been sort of spending seasons in different places where normally I spend like 10, 12 weeks, sorry, 10 or 12 days, maybe two weeks in a certain place.

00:17:50.000 Because of competition and traveling.

00:17:52.000 So instead, I spent the first two months of the year in Hawaii.

00:17:55.000 I spent three months in Australia.

00:17:57.000 I spent three months in California and then three months in Bali.

00:18:00.000 And I've been in Hawaii for five months.

00:18:02.000 So that's really been the whole cycle of COVID. As far as how it has shaped my thinking, there's been so many views out there on what is happening both scientifically, medically, politically, socially.

00:18:19.000 It has really shown a lot of division within society.

00:18:28.000 I think to a certain point, I've become almost a little bit hopeless that people can see eye to eye on things because there has been so much civil unrest around the world, but primarily in America.

00:18:44.000 Everyone seems to just disagree, and their sets of facts tend to be in line with their political affiliation.

00:18:54.000 So it seems harder now for people to be objective about things after the past year, if I'm just sort of looking at it from the outside.

00:19:05.000 That's how it appears to me.

00:19:07.000 I read a lot and I listen to a lot of things.

00:19:11.000 It's kind of turned me off.

00:19:12.000 The past year has kind of turned me off to social media somewhat because there is so much distrust between people.

00:19:20.000 There's so much disinformation and misinformation and everyone has a hair-trigger fuse emotionally.

00:19:30.000 You so quickly can get labeled or turned into the bad guy.

00:19:36.000 And this goes for sort of anybody and anything.

00:19:38.000 But it's been a weird and tough year for people.

00:19:42.000 I think people are highly stressed.

00:19:43.000 There's been financial issues.

00:19:45.000 There's been, obviously, people are dying.

00:19:48.000 There's just a lot of stress in society over a lot of things right now.

00:19:53.000 And I feel like it's made me a little more reclusive.

00:19:57.000 I comment on social media and stuff, but I'm kind of more reclusive.

00:20:00.000 I don't really post stuff anymore.

00:20:03.000 I'm kind of sitting back and watching.

00:20:06.000 I think all of us are, you know, mourning that loss of social discourse of sort of civil debate of what used to happen in the public sphere.

00:20:18.000 And there's increased polarization that is driven a lot, I think, by the algorithms on social media platforms, which is the way we communicate with each other.

00:20:31.000 And those platforms tend to reward us for confirmation bias.

00:20:35.000 For reinforcing views that people already have rather than challenging orthodoxies.

00:20:45.000 You know, the first time I met you, you and me and Al Merrick all got the Waterman of the Year Award from the Surf Industry Manufacturer Association.

00:20:56.000 I think it was in San Diego, although maybe it was in Santa Barbara.

00:21:01.000 I think he's up in Santa Barbara.

00:21:04.000 But he got up there.

00:21:05.000 We all had to give speeches.

00:21:08.000 And he got up there and he gave, you know, he just talked about God the whole time.

00:21:12.000 It was pretty amazing.

00:21:15.000 And then you got up there and your relationship with him was so charming and adorable and You know, the deference that you showed him and the kindness and respect.

00:21:27.000 That always stuck with me about you.

00:21:30.000 And Al Merrick, for those of you who don't know who he is, he's probably, would you say he's the best or most famous board shaper, at least in recent history.

00:21:45.000 Well, yeah, I think you look at the whole history of surfing and Al is definitely at the top.

00:21:51.000 His influence, both personally and professionally, on surfers throughout generations was probably unmatched.

00:21:59.000 You know, he's shaped for Tom Curran, who won amateur and then professional world titles.

00:22:05.000 I think Tom was probably The single most influential surfer on any generation during my lifetime.

00:22:12.000 And, you know, Al was highly responsible for that and Tom lived with him.

00:22:15.000 I spent periods of time living with Al myself and he shaped my boards for 20 years and most of my world title boards.

00:22:25.000 And he's just a really great human, just a really wonderful person to know.

00:22:31.000 What is the stamp that you've put on surfing?

00:22:34.000 I don't want to talk the whole time about surfing.

00:22:36.000 I actually did want to talk the whole time about surfing.

00:22:42.000 Is what you put on a kind of aerial?

00:22:47.000 Yeah.

00:22:49.000 Funny enough, my corporation is called Tailslide.

00:22:51.000 Which my ex-stepfather named because he started my corporation for me.

00:22:56.000 But when I was about 16 or so, 14 to 16, somewhere in there, we started doing what we call tail slides where you'd kind of do a carve and hit the lip of the wave, but then you'd slide the fins out.

00:23:07.000 And that became kind of my signature move.

00:23:10.000 That was what I was really known for.

00:23:11.000 And when I had my breakout win when I was 18 years old, that was kind of the maneuver I went to.

00:23:17.000 That was at Trestles.

00:23:18.000 That was a...

00:23:19.000 First or second week of my senior year of high school and I won my first big pro event and I signed my Quicksilver contract which lasted for 20 something 24 years 23 years I signed on the beach at that contest and I we made a movie that started there and all sorts of stuff so there's a real sort of big launch pad for me but the my style of surfing that was coming in then with not just mine it was our group of guys because there's a big group of us that were surfing together and There's now a movie called The Momentum Generation that

00:23:49.000 kind of outlines, documents what we were doing and our approach and our friendships.

00:23:56.000 And what we were basically trying to do is jump on tour and take surfing to a different level, which was beyond just the power surfing and tube riding.

00:24:07.000 It was not just on the face of a wave.

00:24:10.000 It was up in the air and it was doing rotations, 360s and 360s in the air and that kind of stuff.

00:24:17.000 So it was an evolutionary time in board design and the approach to surfing way.

00:24:24.000 So that kind of the start of my career.

00:24:27.000 I wonder why You call Tom Curran so important because he only won, I think he won two world champions.

00:24:35.000 Three, yeah.

00:24:36.000 He won three world titles but I feel like Tom was kind of an underperformer and he kind of shied away from the limelight and having to focus on him.

00:24:45.000 He won world titles in 85 and 86 and then had a four-year layoff and then won again in 1990.

00:24:52.000 Oh yeah.

00:24:55.000 I remember he had to come back The ranks, because they wouldn't let him immediately qualify.

00:25:02.000 He got wild cards in all the events, but he's the only person to ever come from the trials, the early part of the events, or the wild cards, and win a world title.

00:25:12.000 So that's something that will never be matched again, I'm sure.

00:25:16.000 Number one, because it's hard to do.

00:25:18.000 Number two, though, the primary reason, actually, is because no one can get that many wild cards.

00:25:25.000 And get ahead.

00:25:27.000 And you used to be able to just surf through trials events and get into any event and you can't do that now.

00:25:31.000 So it won't happen again.

00:25:34.000 And probably in our lifetime, or at least with the way that the tour works now.

00:25:39.000 But Tom was just, he was a real blend of art and sport.

00:25:46.000 And I still don't think that that's ever been sort of Perfectly matched as Tom seemed to do it.

00:25:54.000 And I think Tom would probably disagree with me.

00:25:57.000 You know, number one, he's a really humble guy.

00:25:59.000 Number two, he's probably a little bit, you know, as many top people are in their fields, they're their own biggest critics.

00:26:07.000 And, you know, Tom has said things like his surfing had an expiration date and things, you know, because surfing was changing a lot at that time, the approach to surfing, the aerials and all that kind of stuff.

00:26:19.000 But I think he underperformed for his talent in a way, but at times he was completely untouchable and he had this just beautiful style and it looked like the way he rode a wave, it was like a dance and it was like a wave was meant to be ridden, like a wave traveled 5,000 miles to be ridden like Tom rode a wave.

00:26:41.000 And all the kids in the 80s just tried to copy his style and surf just like him and get a Channel Islands board and I'd come to California and I'd be like, oh my God, all the kids surf like Tom Crone out here.

00:26:51.000 So it was a really cool experience when I was young.

00:26:55.000 What's your favorite surf break?

00:26:58.000 My favorite surf break is probably cloud break in Fiji, which I haven't been able to get to for over a year.

00:27:05.000 Pipeline's right there.

00:27:07.000 Pipeline's been a real life changer for me.

00:27:09.000 I almost sort of built my life around Pipeline since I was a kid, and now I live right here.

00:27:16.000 I'm 400 yards from Pipeline right now, so...

00:27:21.000 How old were you when you first saw Pipeline?

00:27:24.000 I won Pipeline when I was 20 the first time, and the last time I won it, I think I was maybe 42, 41 or 42.

00:27:32.000 I'm 49 now.

00:27:33.000 You're the youngest person ever to win a world champion and the oldest, right?

00:27:39.000 Yeah.

00:27:41.000 And are you competing this year?

00:27:44.000 I started competing at Pipeline.

00:27:47.000 I didn't go to Australia because I got injured about A month and a half ago, and we were going to have to go and quarantine for two weeks.

00:27:53.000 And I got injured about five days or a week before we were supposed to go.

00:27:58.000 So I got into rehab and then thought maybe I'll get...

00:28:01.000 In Australia, they're doing four events.

00:28:03.000 They've run two now.

00:28:04.000 And my plan was to see how I feel and maybe go for the last two events.

00:28:08.000 But I'm not going to go.

00:28:09.000 So I'll miss the, you know, second through fifth event.

00:28:14.000 And then I will have...

00:28:17.000 Maybe three, maybe four events left to try and re-qualify for next year.

00:28:22.000 But after one event, I was in third place for the year to get going.

00:28:26.000 And then, yeah, I didn't get to go to the next two.

00:28:29.000 So, yeah, I'm still competing full-time as of now.

00:28:33.000 I haven't officially retired or anything, but I'm getting to that place.

00:28:37.000 And I'm considering next year.

00:28:41.000 I'll be 50.

00:28:43.000 I'm the oldest guy on tour by well over a decade at this point.

00:28:48.000 My older brother really wanted me to go to 50, and I was kind of hesitant, but it's starting to look like I'll make it there.

00:28:57.000 Have you ever surfed a tidal bore up a river?

00:29:02.000 I haven't, but there's one in Bordeaux I want to surf.

00:29:06.000 There's a bunch of them.

00:29:07.000 The biggest one in the world is in In China. 0.99

00:29:10.000 And then there's a, I've heard rumors that there might be one that gets that big in India.

00:29:17.000 There are a lot of them.

00:29:18.000 The first one that became famous was a Pororoca in Brazil, in the Amazon.

00:29:24.000 I actually was jumping on a flight to go there once from Australia and I pulled out because I was just, it was just too much of a mission to fly two days to get there and two days back to surf a couple days.

00:29:36.000 There's a couple in Sumatra.

00:29:38.000 There are more than you think.

00:29:40.000 There's one in Nova Scotia that's pretty good.

00:29:42.000 Alaska.

00:29:44.000 And basically what it is is on a full or even a new moon, I believe, when you have more drastic tides and certain times of the year when the sun and moon are in the right place to create more of an effect.

00:29:59.000 So it's a few days every month, but there are certain times of the year that are better.

00:30:04.000 But basically when the tides are the most extreme is when the water pulls out the river.

00:30:08.000 And then as the ocean starts to rush back up the river, it sends this sort of almost looks like a standing wave, but it just rolls and rolls and rolls for miles.

00:30:17.000 There used to be one on the Petticoatiac River.

00:30:21.000 One of our first water keepers was Petticoatiac Waterkeeper that's up in the Maritime Provinces.

00:30:30.000 And it comes in, it's fed by the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tides in the world, so it has a 50-foot tide.

00:30:38.000 And it comes in like a funnel, and it creates a wave that goes 60 miles up the river, so you can literally fight it.

00:30:45.000 They dammed the river back in the 70s.

00:30:49.000 Wow.

00:30:50.000 And one of the first huge victories we got in Canada was we got them to take down that dam.

00:30:56.000 But it had changed the configuration of the river, and the river is now restoring itself.

00:31:02.000 And I always told the community up there, which is a very, very tight French-Canadian community, that when the title war comes back, which they're now starting to see, that I would come up and surf with them.

00:31:16.000 I wonder if...

00:31:18.000 Is that on Nova Scotia, or is that...

00:31:21.000 Where is that?

00:31:22.000 No, it's in...

00:31:25.000 It's near, it's north of Halifax.

00:31:29.000 Okay.

00:31:31.000 New Brunswick.

00:31:32.000 It's in New Brunswick.

00:31:33.000 Okay.

00:31:34.000 Yeah, New Brunswick.

00:31:35.000 Okay.

00:31:36.000 I think Tom Curran's probably surfed.

00:31:38.000 Well, he has surfed one in Nova Scotia for sure.

00:31:41.000 I don't know if...

00:31:42.000 I have a friend up there, like a business partner friend who surfs and knows all the waves up there and stuff, and he sends me pictures of surfing a tidal bore up there.

00:31:51.000 The one he surfs is not very big, but it goes for really long waves.

00:31:55.000 Yeah.

00:31:56.000 What do you think the world record is for riding a wave?

00:31:59.000 It must be...

00:32:00.000 Oh, the one, the Pororoca one in Brazil, I think somebody rode for like 45 minutes or something.

00:32:09.000 Yeah, you can Google it and find out.

00:32:10.000 But yeah, it's really far.

00:32:12.000 But I don't know.

00:32:14.000 I wonder if somebody went with one of the foil boards now.

00:32:18.000 They could probably ride indefinitely, like, you know, over an hour, I would think.

00:32:25.000 Speaking of foil boards, what's your relationship with Laird Hamilton?

00:32:30.000 I've known Laird since I was a kid, and I see him here and there, and we're on...

00:32:35.000 Pretty good terms.

00:32:36.000 I just don't see him a whole lot.

00:32:37.000 But he lives in Kauai and Malibu each half of the year.

00:32:40.000 And I was living in Malibu.

00:32:42.000 I trained at his house a few times with him and Gabby.

00:32:45.000 Haven't done any training with him over here in Hawaii.

00:32:48.000 But, you know, he does the ice baths and the hot saunas and the weights underwater.

00:32:52.000 So it's really low impact on the joints and stuff.

00:32:55.000 Laird, he's an animal.

00:32:58.000 He really set the stage for toe surfing and riding big waves.

00:33:02.000 And he's kind of like a Superman of toe surfing.

00:33:06.000 But he can ride waves at any capacity.

00:33:09.000 He's a great longboarder, stand-up paddler, big wave surfer, everything you can think of.

00:33:14.000 My sister made that documentary about him.

00:33:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:33:19.000 She goes over to Gabby and his house and does the ice baths and all that stuff. 0.61

00:33:25.000 Yeah.

00:33:25.000 But he's kind of an interesting character because he never went in the contest, right?

00:33:29.000 He's got these extraordinary talents, but he was never interested in going to competitions.

00:33:35.000 Yeah, you know, I wouldn't have considered Laird a great highest level small wave surfer, competition guy.

00:33:44.000 But anything in big waves, he probably would have won had he competed.

00:33:49.000 You know, he didn't compete in the Eddie Aikau when he was invited.

00:33:53.000 Yeah, he would choose Jaws over that just to go toe and free surf.

00:33:57.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:33:58.000 Competition didn't appeal to him for whatever reason.

00:34:01.000 So yeah, he never...

00:34:03.000 He never was put in that place like you got to prove yourself there.

00:34:05.000 He kind of made his own path.

00:34:08.000 Do you see Jack Johnson out there?

00:34:11.000 I see Jack a lot.

00:34:12.000 He lives 20 doors down from me.

00:34:14.000 And do you guys ever play music together?

00:34:18.000 We learned how to play music together and we play occasionally.

00:34:21.000 Once in a blue moon, if I go to concert, he'll invite me up for a song too.

00:34:25.000 But it sounds super corny.

00:34:27.000 But when we were teenagers, when I first met Jack and we His dad's best friend, who's basically become my godfather, he had this Martin guitar and he taught us all how to play guitar on that guitar.

00:34:39.000 Myself and Jack and Rob Machado and a whole bunch of our friends all learned to play on that guitar that he bought for five bucks at a flea market.

00:34:46.000 We used to go down to the beach and he would bring down his songbook and we'd literally make a bonfire and learn how to play like an Eagle song or a Van Morrison song or whatever.

00:34:54.000 That's really how Jack got into music, but a bunch of us did too.

00:34:59.000 But that's how it started for Jack.

00:35:01.000 I think you can hear all that influence in his songwriting and his nice melodies and great lyrics.

00:35:08.000 And you mainly play the ukulele these days?

00:35:13.000 No, I play guitar and ukulele.

00:35:16.000 I always have a few hanging around here on the walls.

00:35:20.000 There's a ukulele and a guitar over there.

00:35:25.000 I've got a ukulele and a guitar and then two more guitars sitting in the corner.

00:35:29.000 So I've I've got a nice little run of instruments, but I generally, I play guitar more than ukulele, but I love them both.

00:35:37.000 I started playing the ukulele in about 2001 or 2002.

00:35:43.000 I was real close with Eddie Vedder at the time, and he had just written his ukulele album, so I wanted to learn how to play the song.

00:35:51.000 So I got an ukulele and kind of worked the songs out.

00:35:55.000 I think it's a great instrument.

00:35:56.000 And it's great for little kids.

00:35:58.000 One more little quick story.

00:36:00.000 I was at a school called La Paz.

00:36:04.000 It's an international school in Costa Rica, in the north of Costa Rica, near Tamarindo.

00:36:09.000 And they grow chickens, and they plant gardens, and they teach kids all the things you actually need in life.

00:36:16.000 There was a class I went in and played ukulele with, and there was 30 kids in there all with their own ukulele playing.

00:36:21.000 And it was really special.

00:36:24.000 They wrote me a song, so it's cool.

00:36:27.000 That is great.

00:36:28.000 Let me tell you the real reason that I invited you on here, because you've been promising me for many years that I could come to a surf ranch.

00:36:38.000 And that will make me a hero to my kids.

00:36:41.000 Just tell us about Surf Ranch.

00:36:43.000 Surf Ranch, for those of you who don't know, it is the biggest, best surf wave in the world, right?

00:36:51.000 It's the best wave.

00:36:53.000 What would you call it?

00:36:55.000 It's a half mile long canal with a train that goes next to it.

00:36:59.000 Yeah, I'll explain it.

00:37:02.000 Yeah, it's a man-made wave.

00:37:04.000 We studied and developed technology for about 10 years before we built the property out.

00:37:11.000 It's an ex-water ski lake and my partner In the business who helped me develop the whole thing, he was an ex-pro water skier.

00:37:21.000 And so he knew about these properties that were basically defunct now and not being used.

00:37:25.000 And he went, well, this one's nowhere near the surf.

00:37:29.000 No one will suspect we're building it.

00:37:32.000 We have access to water, power.

00:37:35.000 We have all the property we need.

00:37:37.000 The value is good.

00:37:38.000 No one wants the thing, essentially, because there's actually a water ski lake right next to it.

00:37:45.000 Literally, The two properties are side by side in the same kind of footing.

00:37:49.000 And there's one there that was a viable business.

00:37:54.000 And so this property was going to sit there, but it already had a house on it and some storage and some of the very few essentials that we needed.

00:38:03.000 So we bought that property and then started to build.

00:38:06.000 And essentially what we came up with was we have a foil.

00:38:10.000 It's essentially like How would you describe it?

00:38:14.000 It's the most inefficient ship hull or boat hull you can make.

00:38:18.000 So, you know, a boat hull just gets to a planing as soon as possible and alleviates all that stress on the engine, right?

00:38:26.000 And makes it efficient, kind of glides above the water.

00:38:29.000 This thing's intended to do the opposite and to push water in an efficient way. 0.62

00:38:34.000 It pushes water as efficiently as possible into a perfect line that comes off with a wave.

00:38:40.000 And it was a really brilliant design developed by a guy named Adam Fincham, who was a USC professor.

00:38:46.000 When this first happened, one of my partners in the business was Bob McKnight, who I think you've met Bob before, but he was the president and CEO of Quicksilver.

00:38:54.000 He was a USC alumni, and he had sort of deep connections into the school through funding and stuff.

00:39:01.000 And he said, why don't you go there and meet some of these professors and talk to them and So we did that.

00:39:07.000 Me and my partner or two went in there.

00:39:09.000 I think Noah, my manager at the wave company.

00:39:13.000 And I know there's a couple of us went in and talked to these old professors there.

00:39:17.000 And then Adam was the younger of the three that we talked to.

00:39:20.000 And the older two kind of debated how the energy of wave gets transmitted from one thing to another or what type of wave we're looking for.

00:39:29.000 And we went through this whole process of You know, do you want a Kelvin subcritical wave or do you want a critical wave?

00:39:35.000 You know, how do you create this?

00:39:36.000 And that's all the scientific jargon for what surfers call wind swells or ground swells.

00:39:42.000 The groundswell is kind of a misnomer, but the groundswell is essentially a swell that's been created far away by a lot of wind over a long period of time.

00:39:51.000 And now it's gone through the ocean and groomed in these perfect lines that we call corduroy.

00:39:55.000 When they get near the shore and you're up on a hill, you know, if you're in Malibu or Palisades and you look out and there's just corduroy to their eyes.

00:40:01.000 And that's what we long for in surfing.

00:40:04.000 So those are groundswells.

00:40:05.000 But what they are is they're basically called solitons or solitary waves or in the critical realm.

00:40:13.000 Those are waves that basically can travel unlimited distances and hardly lose any energy.

00:40:20.000 They will lose energy because obviously the Earth's a globe and it's curved so as it goes it spreads out you know it emanates from a sort of single point and eventually the swell lines if they were left on their own to go around and around the Earth a million times that there would be no energy left in them but they run into a to land somewhere and start breaking.

00:40:41.000 So Adam We actually ran out of money.

00:40:44.000 Adam started to work for us, but then we ran out of money.

00:40:47.000 And it was sort of a godsend because he started studying and going back in the books and trying to figure out, okay, how can I describe the energy of a wave?

00:40:55.000 And then how can I turn that into a mechanism of some sort or a curve?

00:41:02.000 And essentially, that's what he found.

00:41:03.000 There was some sort of a mathematical law which described the energy of a wave.

00:41:09.000 And this was in the 1800s.

00:41:12.000 And he found it in a book and then that could correlate exactly to a shape that could create that wave.

00:41:21.000 So that's what we did.

00:41:22.000 That's a long version, but basically he made this foil that has a certain shape on the front edge of it and it pushes through the water and right off the front edge.

00:41:31.000 So you have the foil.

00:41:32.000 Let's say you're looking straight down on it with a drone like this.

00:41:35.000 The foil is going this way and it's pushing a swell that it looks like it's The line of the swell is coming off at a certain angle.

00:41:43.000 So it sort of looks like it's going that way, but the swell is moving this way.

00:41:46.000 It's moving off at an angle, sort of 45 degrees to the foil.

00:41:50.000 And then we built a reef on the bottom.

00:41:51.000 And when you have the wave energy, a swell line, rise up any kind of a bottom contour to it.

00:42:00.000 Based on how deep the water is and the size of the swell, the amount of energy in it, at a certain depth, the wave will start to break.

00:42:06.000 So the surfers kind of understand Generally, if the water's about as deep as the wave is high and it drags for a certain amount of time, it'll break.

00:42:18.000 You can actually very specifically, scientifically identify what those numbers are.

00:42:24.000 And I think a wave will break in water that is quite a bit deeper than the height of the wave that's going to break.

00:42:32.000 But it needs to travel over a certain distance of rise first in the bottom contour in order for it to break.

00:42:39.000 So this is really a long way to say we made a wave off a foil that hits a reef that we made out of cement and it barrels.

00:42:48.000 And there's a barrel every time.

00:42:49.000 I mean, all of the videos I've seen of it, it's always barreling.

00:42:54.000 We generally don't show the less exciting wave, which is, we call it like a Malibu wave.

00:43:00.000 It just kind of comes in and rolls and it lasts for over a minute.

00:43:04.000 In fact, if you take off from the very beginning of it and ride it to the very end of the other end of the pool, which is I mean, the whole length of pool is 700 meters, but the wave doesn't, or 700 yards, but it doesn't break that whole length.

00:43:15.000 It needs maybe a couple hundred yards to get going, and then it stops 100 yards before the end, but the wave will keep going after the foil stops.

00:43:24.000 So that small wave, the smallest size wave will run, will break for about a minute and a half from start to finish.

00:43:31.000 The bigger, more exciting wave barrels every time, pretty much, at least in one or two of the sections it does.

00:43:38.000 The depth of the water changes over different parts of the reef that we built.

00:43:43.000 The middle section is somewhat shallow.

00:43:46.000 Both the ends are very shallow, and in between those transitions is a little bit deeper.

00:43:52.000 Deeper water lets the wave be a little bit softer and mushier.

00:43:55.000 It'll get a taller wave, but it won't be as hollow.

00:43:57.000 It stretches that energy up.

00:44:00.000 And as you get into shallower water, more abrupt rise from deep water up to a shallow ledge.

00:44:07.000 The wave doesn't get as tall, but it gets thicker and hollow.

00:44:11.000 So there's more energy compacted in a small area.

00:44:14.000 And how do people get to the surface?

00:44:18.000 Do you have to make reservations weeks in advance, months in advance?

00:44:23.000 Yeah, so I tried to...

00:44:25.000 As an owner, I get a certain number of days every year, and I just tried to book some days...

00:44:30.000 I called and asked when I could get a day or two.

00:44:33.000 I was hoping to get one in the beginning of May.

00:44:35.000 And they said, oh, well, we don't have anything open until the first week of July.

00:44:39.000 So, yeah, it's all booked out.

00:44:42.000 Especially in the summer, it gets really busy.

00:44:45.000 Plus, we have a contest.

00:44:46.000 It's usually in September, but I think it's going to be in June this year.

00:44:50.000 People just call up and book days, sometimes a year in advance, many, many months in advance.

00:44:55.000 Most of the year will be booked out, like, you know, six months in advance.

00:44:59.000 Through the summer is generally mostly booked out, but now we've opened it up to night sessions.

00:45:03.000 We do four hours at night also for anyone who's wanting to rent an extra part of the day or whatever.

00:45:10.000 Do you see the pipeline from your window?

00:45:13.000 If I walked outside with my computer, yeah.

00:45:16.000 I have a duplex.

00:45:17.000 The half I'm in, I can't see it, but in the other half, I can see it from sitting inside the house.

00:45:23.000 I'll show you my view.

00:45:24.000 I'll just show you what you do see here.

00:45:26.000 There's the beach there, as you can see.

00:45:29.000 Pipeline's just over this way, about 500-400 yards.

00:45:33.000 Wow.

00:45:34.000 You live in paradise.

00:45:35.000 I do.

00:45:36.000 And this is my...

00:45:37.000 My room is all filled with surfboards all up in the rafters and guitars on the wall.

00:45:45.000 Pretty easy life.

00:45:46.000 Pretty good life over here, man.

00:45:48.000 I can't complain at all.

00:45:49.000 I love it.

00:45:49.000 It's just really a blessing I was able to have a place here.

00:45:55.000 My wife, Cheryl, just got a... 1.00

00:45:59.000 Got a contract to direct a movie in Hawaii.

00:46:04.000 Oh yeah?

00:46:05.000 On Oahu.

00:46:07.000 Oh, nice.

00:46:08.000 We may be moving for a couple of months in the autumn, so I'll come up to the North Shore and see you.

00:46:15.000 Let me know.

00:46:17.000 Might have a house for you.

00:46:19.000 Oh, good.

00:46:20.000 I'll remember that.

00:46:21.000 It's seven kids in it because that's how many I got.

00:46:24.000 Oh, no.

00:46:24.000 There's only two bedrooms.

00:46:25.000 Hey, you know, you can sleep on the floor, but there's only two bedrooms.

00:46:30.000 That's plenty of room.

00:46:31.000 Yeah.

00:46:32.000 Thank you, Kelly.

00:46:34.000 Hey, thanks a lot.

00:46:35.000 Great to see you.

00:46:36.000 Yeah, really good to see you, too.

00:46:38.000 All right.

00:46:39.000 Let's catch up soon.

00:46:41.000 Kelly Slater, you're a great man.

00:46:43.000 Thank you so much for joining us on Earth Day.

00:46:46.000 Aloha!

00:46:47.000 I really enjoy talking to you.

00:46:49.000 I really appreciate it.

00:46:51.000 Keep fighting a good fight.

RFK Jr. The Defender - May 01, 2021

Kelly Slater on Plastics and the Ocean

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