StarTalk Radio - Big Wave Physics with Kai Lenny

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

What is the biggest wave in the solar system? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore the science of big waves with professional big wave surfer Kai Lenny.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/big-wave-physics-with-kai-lenny/Thanks to our Patrons Pepper Horton, annie brown, Lance Cardwell, Natalie waugh, firestorm960, and Daryl Spencer for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: Alohamansurfer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

If you ask every surfer, basically every top performing surfer, guess what? They're watching every space shuttle launch because they're so into the stuff that is created to make these rockets go to space and help us survive in space. Everyone's just waiting for anything new that was created to trickle down to us so that we could use it. And maybe it'll be that silver bullet to allow us to ride the waves better or the wind better dude you could shoot my surfboard into space and it can re-enter without burning up welcome to star talk your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide star talk begins right now Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm your host, and I got my co-host, Chuck Knight. Chuck, baby. What's up, Neil? All right, Chuck, an actor, comedian, and... But more importantly, he's my host, my co-host. All right.

Gary O'Reilly, thanks to the UK for creating you and for lending you to us, your former soccer pro and game announcer, and we got you as my other co-host for this. So thanks for coming in. You're welcome and making this happen now you put together this show so tell me what you and all right producers so what do you got for us today all right we have a guest born in hawaii little hint of a clue there given the name kai which i do believe in haw in Hawaiian language is the sea, rode his first wave aged four.

20-something years later, he's a red ball athlete, eight-time stand-up paddle world champion, if I'm not mistaking, the youngest ever surfer hall of fame inductee in 2019. In 2020, Chuck, you'll love this, he won the Toen Surfing Challenge at Nazaré, Portugal. Wow. You know that place?

Well, you know, it just doesn't get any bigger than that. What? Is that right? What? Yeah, Neil. You see what I did there? Yeah, I mean, these are liquid avalanches. These aren't waves. These are monsters of the deep.

He's a windsurfer. Paddle boarder, we know. Windsurfer, kitesurfer, wing foiler. He is considered by those that know the ultimate water man. Wait, with 70-foot liquid avalanches and our guest is still alive? Yeah.

He's that good. And just to add another facet to this rather incredible diamond, he's also an environmental campaigner who does not mind each cleanup himself. That's because he don't want to surf into a mat of plastic. I know, but he gets down there and he cleans up himself. So he's proper. So having said all of that, Kai Lenny.

Kai, thank you, dude, for coming on to StarTalk. Oh, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here with you guys. And, you know, I got so many questions for you guys. No, no, no, no.

It's the way, no. That's a different show if you want to ask me questions. We got questions for you. And not every day we get somebody like you on the show. So what is this?

I hear that the ocean is like a battery pack for you. What does that mean? You know, I think just the ocean for me is like kind of what keeps me going. It definitely, I think beyond having, you know, my family and my kids, it's kind of my purpose. I wake up every morning and I just have this drive and longing to get in the water and experiment and, uh, ultimately ride the biggest waves I can find. So it calls to the ocean calls to you. It's a calling for sure. Um,

and you know, one of my favorite big waves in the world is 15 minutes down the road here on Maui. And it's called, you know, the world knows it by the name jaws, but in Hawaiian it's called pay. Ahi,

which means the beacon or to be called because it calls people from all around the world. And it called me since I was a little kid. I think one of my earliest memories alive was being on the cliff watching my heroes surf this gigantic wave. So what better place to have been born to become a product of my environment I am today than having Mount Everest sort of in your backyard. Speaking of little kids, what's a safe age for big wave? I mean, you're a big wave surfer. I mean, how's that? Of course, you got to graduate to that.

But I'm saying, how young would it be or could you be? And somebody say, get on out there, kid, go ahead and get your first big wave? Well, you know, I always thought, you know, surfing is kind of like this activity or water sports in general are these activities that are kind of outside of society's bubble. I feel like the rules change. You know, you could have, you know, all the money in the world, all the opportunity in the world. But at the same time, you know, there's a different pecking order out in the water. There's like a different kind of like, it's very tribal, I would say. And I mean that in the most positive way, you know, you kind of go back on our ancestral tendencies. And when I first surfed, Jaws was with Laird Hamilton and Dave

Colamo when I was 16 years old. And back then, I thought that was like young. I was probably like the second youngest person to ever go out to surf these like proper big waves because it's sort of like a line in the sand where you could surf a giant wave, maybe on the outer reefs here. That could be a 30-foot face. But as soon as you go to a place like Jaws or Paiahi, all of a sudden, it's like a completely different energy level. I would say there's like five or six big waves I know around

the world that have sort of this next level energy that, you know, it's, I don't know how you could measure it, but it's, you can feel it in the air. You know how energy can't be, you know, created or destroyed. You know, it starts with the sun, it goes to the atmosphere, the wind, and it goes into the ocean. And then when these waves explode, this energy gets released and you don't know what it transforms into necessarily, but it almost feels like it goes into yourself. But nowadays, kids are starting to start these giant waves at like 12, 13 years old. And I'm like thinking to myself, are they even strong enough? Can their limbs handle getting pulled out? And it's actually been quite remarkable and eye-opening

how big of waves they can not only ride because they got the skill set, but how they can survive and they come up smiling. And I'm like, maybe this generation's just built completely different. But wait, so you're ready to sit on the porch and say, young whippersnappers coming up. Yeah. I remember my day. At 30 years old, that's what I'm thinking. I'm like, oh, my gosh, these guys are next level.

I mean, guys and girls, you should see these little kids that are, you know, they're going to be leading the sport into the future, big wave riding. And it's really exciting. You know, I think part of, you know, being a big wave rider of any kind is it's kind of like you can come in really hot for a couple of years and you could be amazing. really hot for a couple of years and you could be amazing, but to be able to sustain, you know, the long career through big waves is really difficult just because, you know, it's life and death sometimes. It's, you know, it doesn't happen every single day. So you don't have the opportunity to necessarily practice. You kind of get flung in from a flat summer into an apocalyptic winter. And, you know, while the rest of the world's, you know, kind of bummed that it's going to be like an El Nino winter, all the big wave surfers are rejoicing because that means bigger waves and more consistent big waves.

So you said you're 15 minutes from a big wave location. So that means if we were to imprison you, we would just put you in Colorado or something, a landlocked state, and you would die. I probably, it would over, I would probably, my life cycle would be much shorter, but I'd probably find a mountain to tomahawk down, you know? Right. Oh, okay. You'd just start snowboarding, right? Yeah. All right. Yeah. And I thought, you know, my biggest inspiration for big waves was snowboarding because it got to the and do, you know, an 80 foot jump and do

three rotations, two rotations. Why can't I do it on a big wave? And I actually ended up going to Alaska a couple of weeks ago and actually experiencing with him what it's like. And I'd have to say being in the mountains to me is far scarier than actually riding big waves. Big waves, it's like, oh, it's only a 50 to 60, 80, 70 foot wave on the face. These mountains are 2,000 vertical feet and you have vastness, 500 foot cliffs, avalanches coming behind you that'll bury you. You can't swim up. So we're in a position to throw some physics at what it is you do. Do you think much about the physics of your rotations

and your speed and the waves themselves? Yeah, absolutely. I was never really good in math at school. I think I had so much energy sitting down wasn't kind of my calling and looking at numbers. But when I really got into what I'm doing now today, it's funny how a passion can bring out things that I wasn't necessarily good at, like the physics of things, trying to understand all the rotations. And then even like trying to predict these big waves, you end up sort of becoming a meteorologist, trying to read weather patterns and understand all these sort of things and, you know, the tides of the world and so on and so forth. But I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on all of that. I'll just set up the stage here, and then I know Gary and Chuck have questions. So in case the public doesn't know, a wave moving through the water is the speed of energy that has been deposited in the water at some earlier point. So water is

actually not moving at that speed. It is the energy of all the water molecules communicating the flow of that energy from one molecule to the next. So that's why, like you ever see a duck sitting up on a, you know, on the ocean, and then a wave just comes under the duck. The duck just goes up and down. That energy went under the duck and kept going. But the water didn't transfer until you get to the shoreline where the energy has to go somewhere. Where is it going to go? And if it's a really deep ocean, a tiny little wave in the deep ocean, measure up how much that energy is.

And as the shoreline gets shallower and shallower, that energy is still there, but it's not moving as much water. So it has to move the water higher. And you get bigger and bigger waves as the shoreline gets shallower and shallower. And now that is 100% of everything I know about what you do. Wow. But Neil, so Neil, is that why when you have a shelf off the shoreline, the waves get that much bigger at that place? Correct. Because all at once, all that energy is now slammed up to the shelf. But now it boom has to go somewhere.

So it goes up and over. Correct. Goes up. Because it was carrying that much more mass of water previously. And now if the water, if the shore is shallower, then the mass of water isn't available to it. So it's got to do something. The energy has to go somewhere. And so it raises it higher against gravity. That's what it's doing. That's the power to do that. So, Carl, when you get towed up, you're on one of these big waves,

do you know in advance what trick you're about to perform? Or do you have to make intuitive, on-the-spot calculations that go, you know what? This wave, this angle, this wind, I need to bring this trick. Or is there some of you pre-planned how you're going to do this? Because you've got to give me artistry. Will the wave influence your decision? Yeah. Another way to say it is, is your performance bespoke to each wave? You know, there's no two waves ever alike, even at a perfect spot. And a lot of these

places, the tricks or kind of the approach that I have really depends on the spot I'm traveling to. You know, for example, here in Hawaii, because we have no continental shelf and it just rises, the mountain rises from super deep water, I'll kind of find the right equipment to ride. So like, let's say if I'm getting towed into a wave, my board will be 13 pounds here. And I will be, you know, probably traveling at around, the wave itself will be going 25 to 30 miles an hour, depending on the amount of joules that the storm produced. So on the biggest days, we'll get 27,000, 30,000 joules. And then the wave will be like a big day out there is 20 feet at 20 seconds, which is kind of the swell interval and the sea height that it travels from 4,000 miles from the storm.

And, you know, I guess really having all that knowledge and knowing that there's like a 25 knot trade wind, there's going to be a chop going across the face. I'll know that trick I want to do at the beginning. If I have the opportunity, is it backside 360 and I'll be going left instead of right. And when I land my board, it'll be more of a 540 than a 360. So I'll be kind of landing on right again.

And that'll put me in the perfect position to drop in and hopefully pull into the barrel of these giant waves. The tricky part about big waves or just waves in general is you can have a plan, but if you stick too much to it, you're going to kind of like, it's like dancing with a partner. If you're kind of trying to do your own thing and you're not kind of adjusting to that person, it's going to look forced. It's going to not look right. It's not going to be fluid. So in the back of your head, I always have an arsenal of maneuvers or things I can do. And as it kind of comes without thinking, I just kind of like do, you know, it's like you don't think about walking, but you know that you have to put the next foot forward every time you step.

And it's kind of like that. So I spend a lot of time doing visualization. If I'm doing a long plane ride somewhere, you know, I'm just praying it's not my last plane ride. And I'm also thinking about how I'd want to do it. So having music as a trigger and trying to kind of place myself there and get my heart pumping to the point where I feel like my palms are sweating on an airplane. I feel like I'm there. You're factoring so much in there,

the wind speed, the knowledge of a storm far out at sea, how much energy is coming towards you. But surely the underwater terrain matters, right? If there's a slope change, that'll have a big effect on the wave, matters, right? If there's a slope change, that'll have a big effect on the wave, won't it? Yeah, and that's like, it's a great point. Every wave that I travel to, I have a really good understanding of the spot.

So like here at Jaws, Piahi, the bathymetry is really unique. Ooh, bathymetry, love it um bathymetry love it oh new words new word alert yep but the bathymetry of like just the contour so like um for example we don't have a continental shelf here in hawaii it just is deep water and that's the reason why um all of the uh the waves here um have so much force because you can basically guarantee that same energy coming from the storm is going to just unload and that's why hawaii is known as being one of the best big wave places on planet earth maybe one of the more consistent ones um here you know just to remind people the hawaiian islands are volcanic cones so they come

up from the bottom of the ocean so your your slope is you're right it's not the continental shelf it's just the the the the mountainside as it enters the water right it's that the mountain continues all the way down and so that's a vertical mass yes there it is and there's the and just because we've like the the island itself is constantly kind of breaking into the ocean It's a steeper mass. Yes, there it is. Very cool. And just because the island itself is constantly kind of breaking into the ocean. I mean, the big island of Hawaii, which is, you know, you could fit all the other islands into it. Maui was at one point the similar size. And you can just see daily that the cliff kind of is eroding away just from the salt. And it's almost like the volcanic rock is rusting

because we have this red dirt. So there's a lot of ledges along our coastline. And that kind of will take all that swell energy like you described earlier and will force the waves vertically, kind of ledge up. But the interesting thing is, is you'd think with all this coastline that these giant waves coming in

would actually be vertically taller everywhere. But there's a lot of places, there's a lot of underwater conditions that it requires. Jaws has a giant trench that travels way out to sea and it basically takes all that energy and it kind of sandwiches it in and it forces it into this kind of like, I would say track. And the track kind of comes in and now there's this perfect triangle of reef, not really reef, boulders. We call them dinosaur eggs

because what I believe happened is there was this big point, this big cliff that had eroded away and what was left was the bedrock. And over time, it turned into these boulders because they kept rolling. And on a big wipeout, when you fall out at Jaws,

you can actually hear these dinosaur eggs, probably the size of an entire living room, going clink, clink, clink. And your worst nightmare is you get caught between one of them. And you hear these big sounds, and the wave itself produces this violent sound, this percussion. But underwater, you can hear rock going,

clink, clink. And you kind of bounce off those rocks sometimes, but luckily they're pretty round from kind of rolling around. But then there's all this to these fingers there. And what gives you these long, long hold downs at this particular wave is that similar to this, if this is shallower and this is deeper, you can get stuck in these fingers and the water's traveling faster above you. So imagine letting go of a balloon inside and it floating and hitting the ceiling. The water's moving so much faster above your head and you're kind of in this spinning vortex that you try to come up and we have these inflation vests. So we're wearing these airbags under our wetsuits with CO2 canisters up to 35

milligrams or grams. And when you pull it, it just blows your airbag up and brings you to the surface like a cork. But when the water's moving too fast above your head, you can't penetrate. You're bouncing off of the faster rushing water. Exactly. And it's like if you try to dive into a river, you're going to get swept across versus kind of traveling across the river. Right. And so the hold downs can vary from, if you're lucky, five seconds underwater. And if you're unlucky, you could be under for well over a minute and you could be dragged

maybe three football fields. Wow. That's insane. Here's the deal though. Mentally, the first time this happens to you and you're used to five seconds, but now you're down for 30 seconds, 35 seconds. What is the training that you have to go through to say, I'm not going to die? Or do you just go, I'm going to die?

That's it. And the first time I fell when I was 16, I was like underwater. I'm like, well, I lived a good life. I'm dead. There's no way. And I opened my eyes and I saw like, it looked like the most violent scene that you could ever paint. It was just these giant thunder cloud, lightning clouds moving at a speed that looked like a time-lapse. It was just going so quick and such deep blue water. And you just felt like the whole ocean you're trapped under because in a second, you're

60 feet underwater. So you have to clear your ears immediately. Otherwise, you'll blow your eardrums out. And then it's like you feel the pressure all of a sudden on your lungs. And, you know, there's no training for that. You kind of have to have this is where like you can do all your homework. You can do everything possible, but you sort of have to have faith in yourself. your homework, you can do everything possible, but you sort of have to have faith in yourself. And I always believed that if you didn't, you know, if you didn't believe in a higher power, put yourself in that situation, you start praying to someone, anyone.

Kai, having described all of that, is that why you went into other events like paddleboarding? I mean, to be honest, my heroes before me, they did all these things. And I was heavily influenced. And this place on Maui is the mecca of big wave surfing, wind surfing. And a lot of these sports have been invented here. We know that ancient Hawaiians used to paddle on surfboards with canoe paddles, so stand-up paddling. But it was kind of rebirthed here by these legendary figures. And then, you know, a lot of things have been invented that have actually helped us kind of realize the potential of the ocean. Like kite surfing was created here. And most recently, and it's like, it's like a new old sport, you know, because the hydrofoils being invented for the military or by the military, you know, 100 years ago, it's been finally used now as personal use. And now that's a real sport that

has kind of forced everyone to learn physics or the understanding of fluid dynamics. And it's just, it's really cool now because when there's big waves, maybe five times a year that are in the exceptional range, let's say 50 to 60, 70 feet high, we have to be able to be entertained somehow, some other way. And what better way of understanding big waves that break along the shoreline than the swells that are out in the middle of the ocean? And so in the summertime, I'll take my hydrofoil board or my paddle board or whatever, and I'll go ride open ocean swells between the islands. Kai, with the wing foiling, how much difference is there between the physics that you're presented with as a big wave surfer and then this sort of inter-island foiling that you do? Oh, so like between the, like using the wing and then going like on the swells between islands yeah so there that is like it's funny because as a as a surfer your um your perspective is not is right where the wave breaks it's never beyond that and so you know when you're able to

like utilize these other kind of equipments or facets of equipment, you basically have the ability to see beyond just where the wave breaks. And with the wind, you know, as a surfer, you've always watched birds ride the ridge line of these swells and get all this energy from the updraft of the wind on these swells. And it's just beautiful. And with the wing, that was kind of always my dream is to ride along the crest of the wave like I was a bird. I mean, it's constant chase for flight. But the cool thing about the wing is you can be jumping and flying like a bird on the way out. And then you could be riding the swells from way out in the ocean in and then ride the breaking part of the wave

and have, you know, because you don't have surface tension of the board dragging across the water and you're kind of tapping into that energy source like a fish might or a dolphin, you know, below the surface, getting all this lifts from the front wing of this hydrofoil.

You know, you basically are able to kind of, my perspective on doing sports, or if I have an idea for a sport, is if I had a kind of a spectrum of color, and I would look for the gray areas between them. And I'd be like, okay, I, my, the premise of this is I'm looking for something high performance in all conditions. And if I can find something super high performance, you know, and eventually I figure out that this one particular area, I'm not doing something high performance,

what could I create so that I could be doing something fast, exciting, basically trying to give me the adrenaline fix a big wave might give me. And so, you know, that leads you to what's scarier than testing your skill by basically foiling a cross between open ocean islands and shark infested.

You know, that's the trigger. But basically going and surfing these swells and it's like playing kind of a game of chess with the ocean because the swells are popping up. It's all local wind swell. It's not this long ground swell that is perfectly formed for a long time. It's this sort of like game of every 100 yards, maybe less, you know, even 20 yards, a wave is doing this and you're kind of hopping from one to the next.

And if you get in a rhythm with the ocean, it's sort of like being on a swing or pendulum and it just kind of takes you. Oh, interesting. What do you do in the bathtub? them with the ocean, it's sort of like being on a swing or pendulum and it just kind of takes you. What do you do in the bathtub? Chalk. I mean, it's like I'm probably using my hand to create a wave and putting that barrel.

Alright, so speaking of barrels and technique, so I just love watching surfing. Like, it's so poetic, you know? And I've noticed when you guys do tricks, and maybe I'm noticing wrong, you'll let me know. It looks as though, like a skateboarder,

you actually use the wave, like the face of the wave. You kind of surf down it to pick up speed, but then you surf back up it to do the trick. But then somehow you find, because the whole wave is continually curling, it doesn't care that you're there, but then somehow you find like the lip, you do your trick, but then you come right back down in the place where it is once again curling over you. What is going on, man? It's really crazy. It's just insane.

Am I right when I'm seeing this? Is that what I'm seeing? Oh, absolutely. You're spot on. It is like skateboarding. The only difference is that ramp is ever-changing. And so your decision-making of when you're going to hit that lip to catch air or to do a big turn, it all happens maybe a millisecond before you get there. So you kind of initiate your bottom turn.

If you go too far into the flats, you're going to lose a lot of speed. But you might want to do that in order to set up for a barrel. But if you're trying to do an aerial, you would cut across mid-face and you'd actually really load your fins up. So there'd be a lot of pressure. You'd pressure them so they'd be kind of preloaded. And as you're coming up, without forcing and trying to pull the board with you, you kind of allow the wave to push the board into the bottom of your feet. So the wave is kind of spitting you out. Absolutely.

The wave is like a dance, you know? The wave is in itself, you have to be, if you're so in tune and timed with the wave, you can, it basically is the one that's kind of helping you along. Like it's your dance partner it just it kind of gives you that that ability you know people always wonder how do you keep your board stuck to the bottom of your feet and sometimes it's utilizing wind that's going

into the wave and that kind of is like a glue to the bottom of your feet but most of the time it's hitting the lip at the right trajectory at the right speed, because speed is your friend. And the board starts leaving the water and the lip sort of taps the bottom of it. And it forces it into your feet and your momentum moving forward kind of grips into it. And as you rotate, it just comes down to where your eyes are drawn to, where you're looking, where your hand position is. So keeping your backhand lower than your right hand, keeping your left hand high. So you kind of pendulum around or kind of pirouette rather. So it's like a bunch of little things. And you can definitely drive yourself into insanity trying to figure it out because you go and try to put this to practice. And unless the wave is a good enough wave or gives you the opportunity,

in a single session, you might only get one or two tries. Unless you're at somewhere really perfect. Or if you go to the latest man-made waves of the world, which are in Waco, Texas, in, you know... Didn't we have Kelly Slater on? Doesn't he have one?

He has one, yeah. And it's the dream to be able to go someplace and practice a maneuver repeatedly and not be like waiting for the ocean to spit something out. And also, because that's the thing with surfing. It's not like, okay, it's your turn to go down the ramp. It's literally like surfing's tribal enough where I'd say 60% to 70% of the time

you're battling with other people to be positioned in the right spot to go down the wave. And you might have the best section of the entire day, but there could be somebody paddling out and in your way and drawing your eye or just being in simply in your way to hit it. So you're like, I think that's why surfers can get quite frustrated because it's this finite resource that doesn't happen all the time and everyone is like kind of battling over it. Wow. That's what I was wondering.

When I first saw surfing as a city kid, it was featured on ABC's Wide World of Sports. Yeah. And there are all the surfers just wading out there beyond the cresting of the wave. And they're just waiting for a wave to come. And I just thought, suppose you get like a crappy wave. Suppose.

Oh, you're so lost. It's sometimes, you know, because there's like usually the best waves of this, like a set of waves that come in. Most of the time there's three waves in a set. At certain spots there could be up to 10 waves in a set, which is the dream. But three waves in a set, first wave usually cleans the lineup. So you don't usually know the first wave. And then the second wave is usually the best wave because the water has been taken off the reef or the sandbank and it's shallower. So it's going to

stand vertically better and might barrel. And then there's always the risk that the third one's going to be the biggest wave. But at the same time, it could come in smaller. It's kind of that wild card one where you could do everything right, get the second wave of the set, be like, I got the sickest wave, and you could kick out and the third one was the better one.

But then it's a risk. It's 50-50. A lot of times you can be like, okay, it's my turn. Everyone knows it. I'm going to let the second wave go. And then the third wave is going to come in. It's going to be the one. And it's flat. It just didn't come in.

It was only a two-wave set. The ocean hates me. If you're not in rhythm with the ocean, that is just your worst sessions come when you're not in tune with the ocean. your worst sessions come when you're not in tune with the ocean and the best surfers that have won the most championships of the Kelly Slaters of our sport. Essentially, you know, he has the ability. He almost looks like people think from the land that he's willing the ocean

bending the ocean to his will. You know, he's like, he can paddle over here and people are, what is he doing? Wave hasn't broken there all day. And then all of a sudden he'll get the 10 point ride and he'll win the world championship.

That has happened to him. He has 11 world titles. It probably has happened to him seven of those world titles. That's how he's won. He has won with the ocean. He's Aquaman. He straight up won with the ocean and I think his trick is he's been doing it so long

and he's so knowledgeable, he can read. Because the ocean always gives you kind of triggers, little signs. Like before a big swell hits. Cues. Yeah, cues. Like the watercolor starts to change here from this kind of aqua blue to this turquoise. Oh, it's really down to fine detail. Really big details.

And then you start, the wind sometimes even shifts when a big swell comes in. It'll hear instead of the normal northeast. You really do have to have all of your senses on high alert. Exactly. Because it'll turn like the wind might turn a little more easterly. And it's just because of the disturbance of that storm. And the storm usually gets drawn or it follows the swells pretty far. So it's changing kind of the wind patterns around us. So it's all these little cues. And it's even like we have all, as a surfer,

you're always looking for indicator waves. So you look down the coastline and you look for waves that might pop up and give you kind of a hint. Like, oh, okay, a set is coming or, oh, a westerly directions, like a swell at 225 is going to come in, or this set is 235 degrees. You know, you're kind of like, you're taking in little cues and Kelly's so good at that. He knows the tithe. He even knows like the time a swell

will hit. And because we have such a vast array of buoys in the Pacific, you can actually time when the biggest wave is going to come in. You can be like, okay, at 1.15, the set of the day is going to come in because that's when the buoy reading was highest and that's when there was like the most consistency. Yeah, but I thought you guys were just out there twiddling your thumbs. Wow, look at this. I mean, yeah.

Some people are so in tune, they don't even know that they're doing this. Right, right. They became instinctive. So, you know enough, based on this conversation at least, that I've learned that you make your own equipment. Is that because you know more than the people who made the commercial equipment, and so you have to improve upon it. Is that what's going on? I think I have the ability and the advantage that I'm able to ride conditions that most people can't. And I have the feedback in my head. And I usually try to translate that feedback to the master shapers that I've worked with or the designers of my sails, my kites, my wings, and then the hydrofoils and all that. And I've gone to trying to translate this,

trying to translate a color to somebody who's never seen color before. You know, it's like this, it's always on the tip of your tongue. It's like indescribable. And so, you know, I'm always going to the factory or like kind of our factory is an old pineapple mill here in the jungle of Maui with, ironically, some of the highest technology of the surfing industry. All aerospace, basically stuff that kind of trickles down to us normal people, we take and we try to use it to make our equipment better. And so, yeah, a lot of my best ideas for how I'm going to ride waves and win has come from just epiphanies out in the water where it's like, how did I not see this? It almost took me 15 years of trying to work up the ladder of one particular sport. And then all of a sudden, you know, you see the light and it just comes so clear. And you're like,

I have to go in immediately and write this down or I have to go straight to the people that I work with to try to translate this. And I'd say I have the ability to actually do it all myself, but it's really nice working with people who are so focused on this one sort of skill set to make either the boards, the hydrofoils or the kites. And, you know, it's pretty cool. So the boards are water resistant. Is that correct?

Well, the board, usually the boards are foam core. So for the longest time, it's been polyurethane cores. And then it's really transitioned a lot. I would say 50% into EPS core. And now everyone's starting to kind of lean towards kind of environmentally friendly foam that's made out of sea algae, made out of sort of different stuff that if it was to be outside, it's fiberglass or carbon fiber shell because it really like it's the boards are like basically a crap soft on the inside and hard on the outside um but then you don't want too stiff

of a board too strong of a board you want flex in it so the art form is taking the fibers and basically being able to layer the board in such a way that the board is going to like dampen and bend and absorb the sea chop or the water and give you sort of like suspension. So it's more like a reed, the way reeds are designed. They blow with the wind, they bend, they don't break. Yeah, exactly. And if you're here in Hawaii and you watch a 70, 80 foot palm tree, a coconut tree swaying in the wind, they're so strong, but they have give to them and they kind of absorb.

So it's like finding that fine line of not too much give to the point where it's going to break, but then, you know, stiff enough that you can have like, you know, you can translate your body mechanics and energy into that board and then into the water.

Are there any natural water repellent solutions for your equipment? As opposed to the high-tech stuff that we hear and see a lot about? Well, so back in the old days, you know, the Hawaiians would, you know, Hawaiians really, you know, everything they did was in line was kind of the, I wouldn't say the gods, but kind of their, their idea of being so one with nature. And so they would go to the top of the mountain to where the koa tree was, for example, and they'd cut down the koa tree, they'd carve the board from within the koa tree, or they might carve a canoe. And in order to seal it, they would use some sort of oils um i know nowadays we use a lot of linseed oil to kind of seal wood yeah and so um i don't know the

exact uh oil that they would use but it's basically they'd rub the oil across the the wood and it would just seal it just enough so water would kind of absorb it it would repel as well um and and so that was like kind of the natural way of sort of doing that and that's kind of like the the core of surfing is first body surfing and then second would be riding one of these kind of traditional boards because it really connects you directly to it and there's both sides of the spectrum you know there's no better feeling than just riding the kind of one of the, you know, Elias it's called, which is kind of a shorter wood board that's really thin, maybe an inch and a half thick. And that is like, it brings you down to the spiritual side of surfing, kind of the, it connects you with nature in such a personal level

because it's, there's something about it that does feel like true to riding waves but then there's the other side of the spectrum which is pushing the high performance side of everything and it's like what could we take that you know modern science is created and apply it to this and how far can we go and so you know i basically if you ask every surfer that is trying like basically every um performing surfer, guess what? They're watching every space shuttle launch because they're so into the stuff that is created to make these rockets go to space and help us survive in space. Everyone's just waiting for anything new that was created to trickle down to us so that we could like use it and maybe it'll be that silver bullet to allow us to ride the waves better or the wind better dude you could

shoot my surfboard into space and it can re-enter without burning up that's right so kai um we know you are environmentally friendly and you will do your own beach cleanup along with a lot of other people how do you balance that kind of removal of plastic out of the ocean? And with all the high tech stuff, equipments and sealants that can come on a board or other surfing equipment, how do you kind of keep that out of the equation? Yeah, it's really ironic, you know, that you want to keep the ocean clean and pristine. And yet we're riding boards that are made of this kind of toxic foam that, you know, won't dissolve in the ocean for a thousand years. Or just, you know, plastic in general. Everything you get shipped nowadays is full of plastic. You know, it's wrapped in it. And, you know, I noticed kind of when we had the,

or when the tsunami in 2011 hit Japan, you know, at the time I was still in my teens. It's the Fukushima. The Fukushima disaster. That was a real eye-opener. Because obviously, you know, since growing up on an island, you're really impacted by sort of everything because it doesn't get hidden. It's like you go to the beach and you're really impacted by sort of everything because it doesn't

get hidden. It's like you go to the beach and you're going to see trash. Or even if there's trash on the street here, there's nowhere to go. You're on an island in the middle of the Pacific. And the great gyre in the Pacific turned into the great garbage patch. And after that giant tsunami, all that trash or all this stuff that came from Japan got stuck in the gyre. So even today, I'm finding stuff along the beach that has Japanese emblems on Japanese writing. And you're like, this has been out in the ocean that long, and it's not even broken down. The most common thing, color you're going to see a plastic in the ocean is white and blue because the red, the brighter colors tend to

be eaten by fish or chipped away as the sun sort of hits it and kind of breaks down enough into small microplastics. Fish will absorb that and eat it. And, you know, I've had a lot of friends who've gotten severe mercury poisoning in places they shouldn't have gotten it. And a lot of people are kind of equating it to the fact that the fish are eating a lot of these plastics and, you know, generations of these fish are kind of like metabolizing it and it's turning into sort of a cancerous thing. You know, basically when we do these giant beach cleanups, it's like if you had a teaspoon and you're trying to empty your bathtub while the faucet's on. It looks good. It feels good. You're doing your part locally. The turtles aren't going to get caught in it and stuff. And

fish hopefully aren't going to keep eating it. But that's the last place it ends up. And so trying to figure out how to turn off the faucet, you know, it's always like, I feel like when you're trying to preach to somebody or you're trying to kind of like tell somebody what they can't do and what they should do, it's like people want to rebel from that. I don't want to be like told what I'm doing. You know, I want to have that sort of freedom. And one of the solutions that we've sort of come up with is, at least endemically, but eventually, hopefully, mainstream is without necessarily changing the way people live, changing the products that they're using, and sort of not having them realize that it's changed. So I've been working with this company, Atlantic Packaging,

that's located on the East Coast. It's the single largest family American-owned packaging company. And I mean, they wrap everything in plastic, but they have this initiative right now that we're working on called the New Earth Project. And it's really cool because they're trying to make packaging that is out of sustainable things. So basically, cardboards, papers, mushroom fungi, trying to use something like that to make it just as affordable as plastic so that people will, you know, companies aren't going to lose millions and millions of dollars, billions maybe, on packaging alone to try to ship their products.

And you give them things because everyone wants to do the right thing. But shareholders, bottom lines, you know, you kind of got to play the game. And so all the boards that I'm getting now that are shipped around the world are, you know, wrapped in packaging that is sustainable. are wrapped in packaging that is sustainable. And literally, if it ended up in the ocean, a turtle could live off of the mushroom package. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

That's very cool. All right. But honestly, that is the key. The key is to make it so that you're not asking people to change their behavior. You change the products that are already a part of their behavior. So electric cars do that. We're still driving the same car and everything. It's just that you're plugging it into the wall. There is some carbon footprint there.

Yeah. But the only thing you're changing is you're not stopping at a gas station to put gas in your car. So you're not really asking people to do something that different. The change is in the wall outlet. So, Kai, I don't know if you know, but the New York Aquarium just fished out of the ocean. It's very first plastic fish that evolved as a plastic. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't have doubted it of the ocean. It's very first plastic fish that it evolved as a plastic. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't have doubted it for a second.

Because every time... It's made entirely of plastic. That piece. It evolved to survive in the plastic world. My brother and I will go fishing off of our wing foil boards. So we'll have kind of a hand line off of our harness

and we'll go out and we know where kind of a hand line off of our harness and we'll go out and we know where kind of the holes are for, I guess what people know is like GTs or in Hawaii, they're Aluas. They're these really like, you know, they're kind of scarier fishes than sharks. Ironically, they're bullets underwater. But if you do bring them out, a lot of times you look in the stomach, there's plastic in it. And I'm like, if it's breaking down, you know, it's going into their cell. Well, everything is, you know, they say you are what you eat, but everything is what it eats. I mean, I don't doubt that nature will be able to figure out a way to just eat plastic and it'll become a force. And it'll be like metabolized and it'll be like perfectly fine for everything else because where nature always finds a way we just might be destroyed

before then we'll all be long dead by time nature gets around to that and then everything will reset again exactly so kai just to land this plane um do you have any questions for me you know i have a lot of questions but i'm gonna keep it down to couple. I'm looking for the biggest surfable wave on a planet, ideally in our solar system. But if it's at least within the local galaxy, I need basically light speed soon so we can go surf other planets. Okay, so here's the thing. Okay, so here's the thing. Earth is the only object in our entire solar system that has surface water. And you're surfing water.

None of the moons? None of the moons. Well, so the moon Titan of Saturn has oceans of liquid methane. So that is liquid. Not the right liquid. Not the right liquid. There are several moons that have water oceans beneath a frozen surface. moons that have water oceans beneath a frozen surface. And so...

And it does get tidal stressing to it, but the surfaces are all completely frozen over. And you get some ice geysers where the water punches through, freezes on the way out,

and then you get these sort of ice geyser, ice volcanoes. Like Enceladus. Right, right, exactly. But right now, Earth is the best you got. That's all you got. Yeah, I figure in our solar system, you know, it was just really watching that film Interstellar and seeing

those waves that, you know... Oh, you got spoiled. Those are black hole waves, dude. Okay? So we send you got spoiled. Those are black hole waves, dude. Okay. So we send you down there. You can surf this like tidal wave for a black hole, near a black hole. But your time slows down and all the people waiting for you up at the spaceship, you live 15 minutes and they live 20 years. Nobody's waiting for your ass to surf that wave.

Totally. No, totally. I mean, I was like, that is the most surfable wave I've ever seen. I don't know how one of the characters died because I'm like, it's easy. You just would ride it. And as you get to the top, I can understand he probably got flicked a thousand extra feet above that thing, you know, with all that weed at the top. But last 10 feet, you got to duck through it, and then you'll just pop out the other side. You said it's easy because

your name is Kai Lenny. That's why it's easy. True, true. Who's talking here? But, you know, another thing, too, is, like, we're constantly trying to find other big waves around the world, because, like, there can't only be five of these gigantic places,

you know, where everything sort of lines up. I don't tend to believe that because I feel like... So like Nazare, for example, there has to be so many other big waves around the world. And for example, Nazare is in Europe. It's in Portugal. It's in sort of the backyard of Western civilization. And it was only surfed 13 years ago when it was big. People sort of discovered it.

And you're like, this place, this mythical place, has been around for as long as humans have ever known. But before there at Nazareth, it was considered a death sentence and not a place that you would go right away. But that has me always thinking, I'm on constantly on Google Earth trying to find places to surf. But if the image of, you know, you can't see below the surface, right? From the on the Google images.

Not on Google, but you have we have the means of doing that, though. But yeah. Yeah. So it's like trying to obviously if you could see the right position, the bitometry and stuff, like, I guess on Google Earth, unless a photo is taken of a place with a wave, you kind of don't understand a wave could actually be breaking there. It sounds like what you really want to do is ask yourself, and we do this in physics all the time, given everything that, given all these parameters that are creating this effect. Yeah. How do I increase that effect? All right.

What do I have to change about the wind, the direction, the water, the elevation, all of this? So what would be really cool is if you folk just asked yourself, how do I maximize a wave on this earth? How do I maximize a wave on this earth? Then get a whole bunch of money together and create the surfing environment and have a wave generating thing that's out there or have a wave, find some way to maximize it.

You get a 100-foot wave. That's what we want, the mythical 100-foot wave. That's the dream. I don't see why you can't just put in the equations what will maximize it and then build it. Just build it. Why wait for

nature to come together with weird configurations? Do it. Kelly Slater's wave pool is probably the tallest man-made wave that it's like surfable. We talked about that in one of our episodes, didn't we? We did. Yeah, we did. Yeah. And that whole project was like, I think somewhere 60 to 70 million. And they got away. That was, I mean, they were inventing sort of the technology now that it's a little more established. I've been the one, I'm like in Kelly's ear. I'm in all those people's ears

constantly. I'm like, you guys, we need at least a 30 foot face wave because if you had that, you would like that way of change the landscape of surfing. If you had a 30 foot wave, we would completely reinvent how we ride a big wave because now all of a sudden you have something to train on and yes five days a year completely not waiting random for random nature to give you something that might be good but this is exactly about manipulating how to create bigger waves um in the ocean uh you know not geo storm engineering or anything like that. Don't worry. Getting to the swell height. Yeah, not Bond villain.

Right, right, right. The last thing I really would talk about is the swell height. So the biggest swell I think ever recorded was by Ireland and it was like a 70 or 80 foot tall swell.

And that was like a big deal. And to me, I was thinking I could ride that on a hydrofoil. You know, that's probably, I mean, to get out there is kind of the hard part because there's probably like, you know, millions of breaking giant swells, you know, that it's a constant chaos. But you totally could ride one of those on a foil and probably be less dangerous than going to, say, a place like Nazare. But there's this guy that I got linked up with who created a drone.

And he was an ocean scientist, oceanographer. And he created a drone that sends a signal and bounces off the water. Oh. And he went to – I'll have to send you the link to one of his videos. It's funny because sometimes, you know, like social media and all that, there could be videos that are so big and like people get so many views. And then there's these other videos that get like 400 views. And it's something that's so mind-blowing to me, at least, you know, he made this drone, went to Nazare and he was bouncing a signal off of the water to see the swell light. Because Nazare,

I would say out of all the big waves in the world, is the most unique that I've been to in that there's a 10,000 foot trench that goes all the way to the sand on one side. And then there is basically on the other side, this sand point, this ancient kind of lighthouse is sitting on top of. And it's like the swell energy is going the opposite direction. It gets stuck in the trench and it wraps back in. And one side of the beach, so Praia de Norte is where the wave breaks and the south side of that beach,

it could be like a ripple. I'm not even joking, a ripple. And on the other side, it could be 80 foot waves. And you're like, it doesn't make sense, but it does because it's 10,000 feet of water there. And then 50 feet of water over here. So he flew the drone out over and he wasn't even trying to record people riding waves. He just wanted to test his drone.

And he was bouncing the signal off the water. And the waves we don't go for and we miss were, he was recording 70 feet of vertical height off of these swells. And he has it mapped down to like, I think it's down to like a millimeter of accuracy with his drone. And I think the reason why it's possible for a place like that to get that big of waves is it's this wedge effect. You know, you have the trench waves. This is important data if you're going to try to do this perfectly, right? Yeah, so it's like the wave is coming in in the trench, the main predominant swell. And then the biggest waves at Nazare don't break the farthest out.

They actually break the closest in. So what happens is you're always looking for a wave where there's one wave coming this way, and it's basically a roadway. Another wave comes out of the north, and then it hits and it doubles up. So all that energy has to go somewhere, creates this rise. So I already think people have ridden 100-foot waves, maybe bigger, 120-foot waves, because the waves he was recording, it was not even a big day out there. And I'm like, people have had to have ridden taller waves, but we have yet to see.

Hopefully this winter, I can convince him to fly his drone when it's really big over one of the waves I ride. If the weather events get more dramatic, you'll be getting bigger waves for sure. Indeed, indeed. Hey, Neil, what were the biggest waves in all of time in the solar system? Well, you want it to be around when the moon formed.

The moon. So Earth was sitting there minding its own business in space orbiting the Earth and a Mars-sized protoplanet wayward wandered into the Earth, sideswiped us. Excuse me, bro. That's what it said.

Pardon me, excuse me. Excuse me, bro. So sorry. Sideswiped us, passed about 1% of Earth's crust into orbit around the Earth. So for a while there, Earth had a ring, okay? And that ring rapidly coalesced because if you're a big piece,

you have slightly more gravity than another piece. And so it'll win in the who wins the gravity and who attracts other small pieces contest and that accreting of the material became earth's moon now all evidence all theories of this formation say that the moon formed 20 times closer to earth than it is right now. Ooh. Ooh. Tidal forces go as the cube of a distance. Okay? So, Chuck, do you have a calculator? I can get one.

Take 20. Take 20. You got one? Yep. Multiply it by 20. Okay, that's easy. That would be 20 squared. That gets got one? Yep. Multiply it by 20. Okay, that's easy. That would be 20 squared. That gets you what?

400. Now, multiply by 20 again. What do you get? 8,000. 8,000. When the moon formed, it raised tides on Earth that were 8,000 times higher than today. That's insane. I can't even imagine. It must have been chaos around here. 8,000 times higher than today. I can't even imagine. It must have been chaos around here.

8,000 times higher. So, it sounds like you and your peeps want to go. We need a moon. We need the Death Star. But a Wade Star. It might be the Death Star for everyone that is by the wave the strength of tides is very sensitive to the distance

to the moon distance is a very sensitive indicator of the tides between any two bodies so if you want just when we invent time machines that So if you want just... When we invent time machines, that's where you want to go.

Okay? I kind of wonder if I've already been. Ooh. He's reincarnated. No. I wonder if I've already been because my future self made the time machine and I've already gone back in time.

Oh, right. You know what that reminds me of? During the science march back in what, 2020? No, no, 2017. It was during the science march on Washington. Someone had a sign that says, what do we want?

A time machine. When do we want it? It doesn't matter. It's true. It doesn't matter. Any time would be good. Any time works for a time machine yeah yeah i mean another way of that i mean talk about meeting the environment in a big wave

is um this one time i was down in patagonia with these two navy seals on a red bull trip and we were mountaineering and we were climbing two mountains i'd never been climbed before ironically one was named shark fin um because it looked like a giant shark fin but we were climbing two mountains I'd never been climbed before. Ironically, one was named Shark Fin because it looked like a giant shark fin. But we were walking and I felt like I was Frodo in the Fellowship of the Ring. It was just like this most crazy trip of my entire life. It was a defining moment, 2013. And I was walking across,

we were walking across this kind of mountain and there was this like glacial lake at the bottom and there was this massive glacier it's probably since receded i don't know yeah a mile but i was standing there and and and or we were walking and i looked down and all of a sudden i saw a piece of this ice fall into the water and it displaced all this water and And all of a sudden, this perfect wave on this little, like, I think it was like a sediment deposit underwater. It was like a mound, a sea mound. You know, like there's waves like Cortez Bank that break off California. It's like a sea mound makes giant waves.

This wave broke. And it was the most perfect wave ever. Glassy. There's no currents. Plus, when the glacier calves like that, it looks like it's almost in slow motion. And so you're not even thinking that there's much energy there until you watch it manifest as a wave

and you say, I better get my ass out of there if you're in some kind of rowboat. One last thought on that, though. The only thing, the cool thing about that whole experience was I was predicting that wave was 15 feet high and I thought maybe because in comparison to the side of the glacial wall, I'm like, that's a 50 foot wall. I asked our guide

that was from Patagonia down there. I'm like, how big is that glacial wall? Because we were going to go into ice climbing it later that day, like on the safer side. And he's like, that's 250 feet. that day, like on the safer side. And he's like, that's 250 feet. And I was like, okay. So that wave, by my rogue calculation, was around 50 feet tall.

Yeah. And it was the perfect wave. Probably one of the most perfect waves I've ever seen in my life. It barreled down to about like an inch. It just kept barreling. And the water is 32 degrees, just to remind, just to be clear. Yeah. Good wetsuits. No Hawaii, 70 degree, 55 degree. I get the

wind chill here in Hawaii, but you don't get the wind chill. Wind chill. Hawaiian wind chill. I feel so sorry for you. Spoiler, no one's going to give you any sympathy. Yeah, I don't need any. Good. That's the key. I don't need it. I don't need any. That's the key.

I don't need it. I don't need it, but thank you. All right, we got to call this quits again. Kai, Lenny, thanks for being on StarTalk. This has been StarTalk Sports Edition with Kai Lenny. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

Keep looking up.