Big Wave Physics with Kai Lenny

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 like use it and maybe it'll be that silver bullet to allow us to ride the waves better or the wind better.

• 0:28Chuck Nice?

  Dude, you could shoot my surfboard into space and it can re-enter without burning up.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm your host and I got my co-host Chuck Nice. 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. Well, thanks to UK for creating you and for lending you to us. You're former soccer pro and and game announcer and we got you for as my other co-host for this. So thanks for coming in.

• 1:24Gary O'Reilly?

  You're welcome.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And making this happen. Now you put together this show. So tell me what you and an edited crack team of producers. So what do you got for us today?

• 1:33Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. We have a guest born in Hawaii. Little hint of a clue there. Given the name Kai, which I do believe in Hawaiian language is the sea, rode his first wave aged four. Twenty something years later, he's a Red Bull athlete, eight-time stand-up paddle world champion, if I'm not mistaken, the youngest ever. Surfer Hall of Fame in Dacty.

• 2:00Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 2:00Gary O'Reilly?

  In twenty nineteen. In twenty twenty, Chuck, you'll love this. He won the Towin Surfing Challenge at Nazaré, Portugal. You know, you know that place?

• 2:08Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, it just doesn't get any bigger than that. What?

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right?

• 2:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  You see what I did there?

• 2:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I mean, these are, these are liquid avalanches. These aren't waves. These are monsters of the deep. Uh, he's a windsurfer, paddleboarder, we know. Windsurfer, kite surfer, wing foiler. He is considered by those that know the ultimate water man.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, with seventy foot li- liquid avalanches? And our guest is still alive?

• 2:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Really? He's that good. And, and, and, and just to, just to add another facet to this rather incredible diamond. He's also an environmental campaigner who does not mind each cleanup himself.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's because he don't, he don't want to surf into a, a mat of plastic.

• 2:54Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, but he gets, he gets down there and he cleans up himself. So he's, he's, he's proper.

• 2:58Chuck Nice?

  Fantastic.

• 2:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So, mate, having said all of that, Kai Lenny.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kai, thank you, dude, for, for coming on to StarTalk.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Oh, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here with you guys. And, uh, you know, I got so many questions for you guys.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, that, no, no, it's, no, that's a different show if you want to ask me a question. We got questions for you. And not every day we get, we don't get somebody like you on the show. So what is this? I hear that the ocean is like a battery pack for you? What, what does that mean?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, I think just the ocean for me is like, kind of what keeps me going. Um, 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.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it calls to you, the ocean calls to you.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  It's, it's a calling for sure. Um, and, you know, one of my favorite big waves in the world is fifteen minutes down the road here on Maui. And it's called, uh, you know, the world knows it by the name Jaws, but in Hawaiian it's called Pe'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, you know, a little kid. I think one of my earliest memories, uh, alive was being on the cliff, watching my heroes surf this gigantic wave. So, you know, what better place to have been born, uh, to become a product of my environment I am today? Than having Mount Everest sort of in your backyard.

• 4:29Chuck Nice?

  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? Does some, 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.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Because there'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 base. But as soon as you go to a place like Jaws or Peahie, 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.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  But nowadays, kids are starting to surf 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, how big a 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.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Wait, wait, so, so you're, you're ready to sit on the porch and say, these young whippersnappers coming up?

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:53Chuck Nice?

  I remember in my day.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  At 30 years old, that's what I'm thinking. I'm like, 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. Um, and it's really exciting, you know? I think part of, you know, being a big wave rider of any kind is it's, it's kind of like, you can come in really hot for a couple of years, um, 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.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Um, 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, um, bombed 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.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you said you're 15 minutes from a big, 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, you would, you would die.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  You'd just start snowboarding, right?

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  And I thought, you know, my biggest inspiration for big waves was, uh, snowboarding because it got to the point where, you know, you can ride a big wave, you can go straight, you can ride inside these giant barrels. Um, but I wanted to, what's the next level? And that's doing big aerials on big waves. And if someone like Travis Rice, um, one of the legends of snowboarding, can go to Alaska and do, you know, an 80 foot jump and do three rotations, two rotations, um, why can't I do it on a big wave? And I actually ended up going to Alaska a couple of weeks ago, um, 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, um, riding

• 9:03Speaker 00

  big waves. Big waves, like, oh, it's only a 50 to 60, 80, 70 foot wave on the face. There's, these mountains are 2,000 vertical feet and you have vastes 500 foot cliffs, avalanches coming behind you that'll bury you. You can't swim up.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're in a position to throw some physics at what it is you do. Do you think much about the physics of, of your rotations and your speed and the waves themselves?

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, I, you know, I was never really good in math at school. I think I had so much energy sitting down wasn't kind of my calling, um, and, and looking at numbers. But when I really got into what I'm doing now today, um, it's funny how, um, 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, uh, I'd love to hear what, what your thoughts are on all of that.

• 10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, 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, in 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.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the water didn't transfer until you get to the shoreline, where the energy has to go somewhere. Where's it gonna 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.

• 11:28Chuck Nice?

  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?

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 11:42Chuck Nice?

  Because all at once, that all that energy is now slammed up to the shelf. But now it boom, has to go somewhere, so it goes up and over.

• 11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, goes up, Rick, 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.

• 12:07Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so it raises it higher against gravity. That's what it's doing. That's the power to do that.

• 12:12Gary O'Reilly?

  So Carl, when you, 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?

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I like that.

• 12:23Gary O'Reilly?

  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 gonna do this? Because you've got to give me artistry and stay alive.

• 12:33Chuck Nice?

  Will the wave influence your decision?

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so another way to say it is, are your, are your, is your performance bespoke to each wave?

• 12:42Speaker 00

  You know, it's, well, 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.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  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 in 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 gonna be a chop going across the face. I'll know that's a trick I want to do at the beginning, if I have the opportunity, is a backside 360. And I'll be going left instead of right. And when I land, my board will, 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.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  The tricky part about big waves, or just waves in general, is it's, you can have a plan, but if you stick too much to it, you're gonna kind of like, it's like dancing with a partner. You're, if you're kind of trying to do your own thing and you're not kind of adjusting to that person, it's gonna look forced, it's gonna not look right, it's not gonna 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

• 14:54Speaker 00

  plane ride, and I'm also thinking about... I would want to do it. So having music as a trigger um 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.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You you're factoring so much in there, the the wind speed, uh the the knowledge of a storm far out at sea, how much energy is coming towards you. But surely the the tur- the the underwater terrain matters, right? If there's a slope change, that'll have a big effect on the wave, won't it?

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and and that's like, uh, it's a great point. Um, every wave that I travel to, I have a really good understanding of the spot. So like here at Jaws Peahie, um, the bathymetry is really unique.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, bathymetry, love it.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Oh, new word.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New word alert.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  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 gonna just unload. And that's why Hawaii's known as being one of the best big wave places on planet Earth, maybe one of the more consistent ones. Um, here, you know.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 mountain side as it enters the water, right? It's that the mountain continues all the way down. And so that's.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  It's that vertical mass.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, there it is.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  And there's the and just because we've like the 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. Um, 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. Um, but there's a lot of places,

• 17:27Speaker 00

  there's a lot of, you know, underwater conditions that it requires, like Jaws has a giant trench that travels way out to sea and, um, 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. I, 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, um, over time it turned into these boulders because they kept rolling. And on a big wipeout, when you fall out at Jaws, um, you can actually hear these dinosaur eggs, probably the size of an entire

• 18:10Speaker 00

  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 boom, boom. And, you know, you kind of bounce off those rocks sometimes, um, but luckily they're pretty round from kind of rolling around. Uh, but then there's all this, so 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

• 18:55Speaker 00

  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, um, milligrams and, or grams and when you pull it, um, it just blows your airbag up and you, brings you to the surface like a cork. But when the water's moving too fast above your head, you can't penetrate. So-

• 19:18Chuck Nice?

  You're bouncing off of the faster rushing water.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Exactly. And it's like if you tried to like dive into a river, you're gonna get swept across versus kind of traveling across the river.

• 19:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:44Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's insane. So now what are you, so, so what, wait, here, here's the deal, though. Mentally, I, the first time this happens to you, and you're, okay, used to five seconds, but now you're down for 30 seconds, 35 seconds. What is, what is the training that you have to go through to say, I'm not gonna die? Or do you just go, I'm gonna die? That's it.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  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 I, that you could ever paint. It was just these giant thunder cloud, lightning clouds moving at a, at a speed that looked like a time lapse. It was just going so quick and such a 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, the, there's no training for that. You kind of have to have, this is where like,

• 20:59Speaker 00

  you can do all 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 and you start praying to someone, anyone.

• 21:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Kai, having described all of that, is that why you went into other events like paddle boarding?

• 21:33Speaker 00

  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, windsurfing. And a lot of these sports have been invented here. We know that ancient Hawaiians used to paddle on surfboards with canoe paddles, so standard 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 realise 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,

• 22:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  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 like when there's those 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 summer, I'll take my hydrofoil board or my paddleboard or whatever and I'll go ride open ocean swells between the islands.

• 23:08Gary O'Reilly?

  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?

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Oh, so like between the, um, 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, um, equipment, you basically have the ability to see beyond just where the wave breaks. Uh, and with the wind, you know, as a surfer, you've always watched birds ride the, the ridge line of these swells and get all this energy from the updraft of the, uh, of the wind on these swells.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  And, and it's just beautiful. 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. Um, but the cool thing about like the wing is, you know, 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 lift from the front wing of this hydrofoil. Um, you know, you basically are able to kind of, my perspective on doing sports,

• 24:47Speaker 00

  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, 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. Um, and so, you know, that leads you to what's scarier than testing your skill by?

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Basically foiling across between open ocean islands and shark infested. You know, that's the trigger.

• 25:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, sure enough.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Basically going and surfing these swells and it's like playing a 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 hundred 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. It's meditated.

• 26:06Chuck Nice?

  What do you do in the bathtub?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Chuck. I mean, it's like I'm probably using my hand to create a wave and pushing that barrel.

• 26:19Chuck Nice?

  All right, so speaking of that's 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.

• 26:59Chuck Nice?

  You do your trick, but then you come right back down in the place where it is once again curling like over you. What is going on, man? Like that is, I mean, it's really crazy. It's just insane. What is, I mean, am I right when I'm seeing this? Is that what I'm seeing?

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. You're spot on. It is like skateboarding. The only difference is, is that ramp is ever-changing. And so, your decision-making of when you're gonna 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 gonna lose a lot of speed. You might wanna do that in order to set up for a barrel. But if you're trying to do an aerial, you would cut across mid-phase and you'd actually really load your fins up. So there'd be a lot of like pressure. You 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,

• 28:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Because speed is your friend. And the board kind of, or 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 back hand lower than your right hand, keeping your left hand high. So you kind of pendulum around or kind of, you know, 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... You know, in a single session, you might only get one or two tries.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  You know, unless you're at somewhere really perfect. Or if you go to the latest manmade waves of the world, which, you know, are in Waco, Texas. In, you know. Didn't we have Kelly Slater on? Doesn't he have one?

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He has one, yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  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, you know, I'd say sixty to seventy percent 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 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. Wow.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I always wondered. When I first saw surfing as a city kid, it was featured on ABC's Wide World of Sports.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and there, there are all the surfers just waiting 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.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  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 ten 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 go the first wave. And then the second wave is usually the best wave. Because there's not a, the water has been taken off the reef or the sandbank. And there's like, it's shallower, so the wave'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.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  You could, you know, 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 gonna let the second wave go, and then the third wave's gonna come and it's gonna be the one, and it's flat. It just didn't come in. It was only a two-wave set. You're like...

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ocean hates me.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  You know, if you're not in rhythm with the ocean, that is like, that is, that is just your worst sessions come when you're not in tune with the ocean. And the best surfers that have won the most championships are 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, what is he doing? A 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. You know, he has 11 world titles. It probably has happened to him seven of those world titles. And that's how he's won.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He is one with the ocean. He's Aquaman! In ways that others are not. That's what I'm saying.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  He's straight up one with the ocean, and you know, 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 happens. Yeah, cues, like the watercolor starts to change here from this kind of aqua blue to this turquoise. 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 here instead of the normal northeast trade wind. You really do have to have all of your senses on high alert, don't you? 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

• 33:21Speaker 00

  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 direction, like a swell at 225 is gonna 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 tide. He even knows like the time a swell will hit and because we have such a vast array of buoys in the Pacific,

• 34:05Speaker 00

  you can actually time when the biggest wave is going to come in. You could 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.

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and I thought you guys were just out there twiddling your thumbs waiting.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Wow, look at this. I mean, yeah. Some people are so in tune, they don't even know that they're doing this.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. They became instinctive. So you, 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?

• 34:45Speaker 00

  I think I have the ability and the advantage that I'm able to ride conditions that most people can't and I can, 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, you know, my sails, my kites, my wings, and then the hydrofoils and all that. And I've gone to in 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

• 35:25Speaker 00

  an old pineapple mill here in the jungle of Maui with ironically some of the highest technology of the surfing industry. You know, all aerospace, basically stuff that kind of trickles down to, you know, us normal people, we, we take and we try to like use it to make our equipment better. And so, yeah, like a lot of my best ideas for how I'm going to ride waves and when 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,

• 36:08Speaker 00

  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, it's pretty cool.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  So the board, the boards are water resistant, is that correct?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Well, the boards, usually the bores are foam core. So for the longest time, it's been polyurethane cores. And then it's, it's really transitioned a lot, I would say 50% into EPS core. And, you know, 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. Cause it really like, it's, the boards are like a, basically a crap. Soft on the inside and hard on the outside.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  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, and, and give you sort of like suspension.

• 37:33Chuck Nice?

  So it's more like a, more like a reed, the way reeds are designed, they, they blow with the wind, they bend, they don't break.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And if you're here in Hawaii and you watch the, you know, a palm, a 70, 80 foot palm tree, a coconut tree sway 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.

• 38:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Are there any natural water repellent solutions for your equipment?

• 38:09Gary O'Reilly?

  As opposed to the high-tech stuff that you we hear and see a lot about?

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Well, so back in the old days, you know, you would, the Hawaiians would, you know, Hawaiians really, you know, everything was, 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 coat tree was, for example. And they'd cut down the coat tree, they'd carve the board from within the coat tree, or they might carve a canoe. And in order to seal it, they would use some sort of oils. I know nowadays we use a lot of linseed oil to kind of seal wood. And so I don't know the exact oil that they would use,

• 38:55Speaker 00

  but it's basically they'd rub the oil across the wood and it would just seal it just enough. So water would kind of absorb it, it would repel as well. 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,

• 39:38Speaker 00

  it connects you with nature in such a personal level, because it's, it, 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 creative, 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 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,

• 40:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:31Chuck Nice?

  Dude, you could shoot my surfboard into space and it can re-enter without burning up.

• 40:38Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 40:53Gary O'Reilly?

  So Kai, 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?

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really ironic, you know, that you want to keep the ocean clean and pristine and yet we're riding boars 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. It's, and, and you know, I noticed a 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 and

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the Fukushima.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  The Fukushima disaster. That was, 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 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, you know, the great gyre in the Pacific turned into the great garbage patch. And after that giant tsunami, all that trash or all the stuff that came from Japan got stuck in the gyre. So even today. I'm finding stuff along the beach that is, you know, has Japanese emblems on Japanese writing.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  And, and you're like, this has been out in the ocean that long, you know? And it's not even broken down. Um, the most common thing, color you're gonna see at 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.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  And it's turning into sort of a cancerous thing, um, you know, uh. Basically, when we do these giant beach cleanups, it's like if you had a teaspoon and you're trying to like, empty your bathtub while the faucet's on. It's like, it looks good, it feels good, you know, you're doing your part locally. You know, the turtles aren't gonna get caught in it and stuff and, you know, fish hopefully aren't gonna keep eating it, but that's like 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, like, I don't want to be like told what I'm doing, you know? I want to have that sort of freedom.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  And one of the solutions that we've sort of come up with is, um, you know, at least, uh, 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, um, been working with this company, um, Atlantic Packaging, that's located on the East Coast. It's the single. Uh, largest, um, you know, family, American owned, um, packaging company. And I mean, they wrap everything in plastic, but they have this initiative right now that we're working on called a new earth project.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  And it's really cool because they're trying to make packaging that is, um, out of sustainable things. Um, so basically cardboard, papers, um, mushroom fungi, uh, 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 the stuff because everyone wants to do the right thing, but shareholders, bottom lines. You know, you kind of got to play the game. And so are all the boards that I'm getting now that are shipped around the world are, you know, wrapped in packaging that is sustainable.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Um, and you know, literally if it ended up in the ocean, like a turtle could live off of the mushroom packaging.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pretty cool. Yeah.

• 45:33Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's very cool.

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 45:36Chuck Nice?

  But honestly, that's, that is the key. The key is to make it so that, um, 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 where we're still driving the same car and everything like, it's just that you're plugging it into the wall. There is some carbon footprint there.

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Chuck Nice?

  But you're not stuck. The only thing you're changing is you're not stopping at a gas station to put gas in your car, you know? So you, you're not really asking people to do something that different. The, the changes in the, is in the wall outlet. So.

• 46:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kai, um, 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 it evolved as a plastic. I'm just kidding.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  I wouldn't have doubted it for a second. Because every time-

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's made entirely of plastic.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  My brother and I-

• 46:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It evolved to survive in the plastic, in this plastic world.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  My brother and I will go fishing off of our winged 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 the holes are for, I guess what people know is like GTs or in Hawaii, they're aluas. Um, there are these really like, you know, they're, they're kind of scarier fishes than sharks. Ironically, they're shooting bullets underwater. But if you do bring them out, um, 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.

• 47:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Well, everything is, you know, they say you are what you eat, but everything is what it eats.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  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 food.

• 47:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  And it'll be like metabolized and it'll be like perfectly fine for everything else. Cause where nature always finds a way, we just might be destroyed before then.

• 47:30Chuck Nice?

  We'll all be long dead by the time nature gets around to that.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  And then everything will reset again.

• 47:36Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kai, just to land this plane, um, do you have any questions for me?

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Neil, I have a lot of questions, but I'm gonna keep it down to a couple. I'm looking for the biggest surfable wave on a planet, ideally in our, uh, solar system. But if it's at least within the local galaxy, I need, I need basically light speed soon so we can go surf other planets and-

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, 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. So, uh, so it's-

• 48:18Speaker 00

  None of the moons?

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  None of the moons. Well, so the moon Titan of Saturn has oceans of liquid methane. So that's, is liquid.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Not the right liquid.

• 48:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The-

• 48:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There, um, there's several 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 that 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.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  In our solar system, you know, it was just really watching that film Interstellar and seeing those waves, uh, that, you know.

• 49:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah, you guys spoiled. Those are black hole waves, dude. Okay. So we send you down there. You can surf this, this like tidal wave, uh, 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.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Totally. No, totally. I mean, that, I was like, that is the most surfable wave I've ever seen.

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  I don't know how the, 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 gotta duck through it and then you'll just pop out the other side.

• 50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said it's easy because your name is Kai Lenny. That's why it's easy.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  True, true. I, yeah.

• 50:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's talking here? Yeah.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  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 Nazaré, for example, you know, there's like, there has to be so many other big waves around the world. And for example, Nazaré is. In Europe, it's in Portugal, like it's in sort of the backyard of Western civilization. And it was only surfed 13 years ago, like when it was big, like people sort of discovered it. And you're like, this place, this mythical place was kind of like, it's been around for as long as humans have ever known.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  But before there at Nazaré, it was considered, you know, a death sentence and not a place that you would go right away. But that has me always thinking like, 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, the, on the Google images.

• 51:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not on Google, but you have, we have the means of doing that though, but yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's like trying to, obviously if you could see the right position, the bit imagery 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.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 52:22Speaker 00

  That's what we want, the mythical hundred foot wave.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  That's the dream and.

• 52:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't see why you can't just.

• 52:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put in the equations what will maximize it. And then, and then build it. Just build it. Why wait for nature to come together with weird configurations? Do it.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Kelly Slater's wave pool is probably the tallest manmade wave that it's like surfable.

• 52:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we talked about that in one of our episodes, didn't we? Yeah, we did. Yeah, we did. Uh huh.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that, that whole project was like, I think somewhere sixty to seventy million. And they got a wave 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 thirty foot face wave because if you had that, you would like, that wave changed the landscape of surfing. If you had a thirty foot wave, we would completely reinvent how we ride a big wave. Because now all of a sudden you have something to train on.

• 53:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  Five days a year.

• 53:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely not waiting random for random nature to give you something that might be good.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  But this is exactly about manipulating how to create bigger waves in the ocean. Oh, you know, not geo storm engineering or anything like that. Don't worry.

• 53:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not Bond villain stuff. Yeah, not Bond villain. Right, right, right.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  The last, I mean, the last thing I really would talk about is that, is that the swell height. So the biggest swell I think ever recorded was by Ireland. And it was like a seventy or eighty foot tall swell. And that was like a big deal. And I, 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 Nazareth. But there's this guy that I got linked up with who created a drone and he was an ocean scientist, oceanographer.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  And he created a drone that sends a signal and bounces off the water. 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 of something that's so mind blowing to me at least, you know? He made this drone, went to Nazaré. And he was bouncing a signal off of the water to see the swell light. Cause Nazaré, 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, you know?

• 55:19Speaker 00

  This ancient kind of lighthouse is sitting on top of. And it's, 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 Pride 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. Cause this, you know, it's 10,000 feet of water there. And then, you know, 50 feet of water over here. But, 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.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Um, 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, um, and, 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. Um, you know, you have the trench wave.

• 56:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is important data if you're going to try to do this perfectly, right?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's like the wave is coming in, in the trench, the main predominant swell. And then the biggest waves at Nazaré don't break the farthest out. They actually break the closest in. So what happens is you, you're always looking for a wave where there's one wave coming this way. And it's basically a road wave. Uh, 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 hundred foot waves, maybe bigger hundred twenty foot waves. Cause the waves he was recording, it was not even a big day out there. And I'm like, dude, people have had to ridden taller waves, but we've yet to see.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Hopefully this winter, I can convince him to fly his drone when it's really big over one of the waves I ride.

• 57:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, if the weather, if the weather events get more dramatic, you'll be getting bigger waves for sure.

• 57:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Indeed, indeed.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Hey Neil, what were the biggest waves in all of time in the solar system?

• 57:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 wa- wa- wandered into the Earth. Side swiped us. Excuse me, bro. With, oh.

• 57:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it said. Pardon me, excuse me. Excuse me, bro. So sorry. Side swiped us, passed about one percent 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

• 58:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that the moon formed twenty 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? Uh, I can get one. Take twenty.

• 59:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take 20. You 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.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  That's, I can't even imagine. It must have been chaos around here.

• 59:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  8,000 times higher. So, it sounds like you and your peeps wanna go. If you had a time machine.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  We need the Death Star.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  But a wave star. It might be the Death Star for everyone that is by the wave.

• 59:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The strength of tides is very sensitive to the distance to the moon. The distance is a very sensitive indicator of the tides. Uh, tidal strength, and then between any two bodies. So that's, so if you want, just, just, when we invent time machines, that's where you wanna go, okay?

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  I, I kinda wonder if I've already been.

• 1:00:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. He's reincarnated.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  No. I wonder if I've already been because my future self made the time machine and I've already gone back in time.

• 1:00:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right. You know what that reminds me of? During the science march, back in what, 2020? No, 2017. 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, it doesn't matter.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  It's true. It doesn't matter. Any time would be good.

• 1:00:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any time works for a time machine. Yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, another wave that, I mean... Talk about meeting the environment in a big wave is 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 that had never been climbed before ironically one was named Sharkfin um 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 and 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

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  it's probably since receded I don't know 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 all of a sudden this perfect wave on this little like I think it was like a sediment deposit underwater it like 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

• 1:02:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus when the 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 doing some kind of rowboat

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  One last thought on that though the only thing the 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 end up ice climbing it later 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.

• 1:02:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  And it was the perfect way, probably one of the most perfect ways I've ever seen in my life. It barreled down to about like an inch. It just kept barreling.

• 1:02:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the water is 32 degrees, just to remind, just to be clear.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, good wet suits now.

• 1:03:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No Hawaii, 70 degree, 75 degree.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  I get the wind chill here in Hawaii, but you don't get the wind chill.

• 1:03:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hawaii wind chill. I feel so sorry for you.

• 1:03:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Spoiler, no one's gonna give you any sympathy.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't need any.

• 1:03:24Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's the key. I don't need it.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  I don't need it, but thank you.

• 1:03:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta 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.