A Surfing Memoir in Progress with Sam George

Tyler: [00:01:00] Hello and welcome to the Swell Season Surf Podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Brewer. If you grew up reading surf magazines from the eighties onto the mid aughts, you know this guest name and enthusiasm for surfing. If you started around the mid aughts, you're most familiar with one of his largest documentary titles, riding Giants.

He's been declared by some as one of the most traveled surfers in history, logging around 695 spots and [00:02:00] counting that he has surfed in his lifetime he was Surfer Magazine's executive editor from 2000 to 2005. I am of course talking about the legendary Sam George.

Sam is perhaps one of surfing's most enthusiastic ambassadors and foremost authorities on surf history. My brother and I grew up reading both Sam's and his brother Matt's work for years. Their, mythologizing of the sport inspired countless surfers onto their own adventures. Their dedication to surfing is nearly unmatched.

Sam has released his latest book, child of Storms, a surfing memoir in Progress has just released with DeAngelo Publishing, and he is here in New York in the flesh in a Rockefeller Center studio. And I'm so fucking stoked to have him here. I'm such a nerd right now and I'm nerding out. [00:03:00] So Sam, welcome to Swell Season.

Thanks for coming here. No, no, this

Sam: is fantastic. You know, you mentioned, uh, yeah, I've surfed when I counted them up. Yeah. Took me a while. I've surfed 695 distinct surf breaks. So you can imagine my dedication to this sport has taken me to many exotic places all around the world. Yeah. But no place quite as exotic as Rockefeller Center.

I could have never dreamed when I first learned how to surf 1967 in Hawaii at Waikiki that my path would someday lead me to Rockefeller Center. So this is a real treat for me. Seriously. You made

Tyler: it to the rock baby. Yeah, I'm here. You've made it to the rock. Yeah.

Sam: And it's great.

Tyler: So how's the podcast tour going, by the way?

And, uh, welcome to the bottom of the barrel of podcasts,

Sam: looking at the sumptuous surroundings here. I'd hardly call it the bottom. I've only done a few, but because of where I'm currently living, I don't get very good cell service. Yeah. So I've had to do them in my car. Oh. Um, you know, on the fly looking for coverage, [00:04:00] you know, so this is plush.

Tyler: Oh, man. Yeah. This

Sam: is great.

Tyler: So nice to be doing it in person too. I find it. Oh,

Sam: yeah. Yeah.

Tyler: It's, it's different, you know, it's a little bit easier to engage in some ways than when it is digitally sometimes. No, of course. You know, course. Yeah, of course. Um, I have to be honest, like, because I'm such a nerd when it comes to surfing, I was quite intimidated of interviewing you because, not because you're intimidating, but because of the amount of topics I feel like I want to cover with you and discuss with you.

It's just so overwhelming and like. Your breadth of knowledge and the numerous experiences you had, the number of places and people you have had the fortune to have known is just staggering. Like, it's, it's crazy. And I'm, I was really struggling with a place to start because I was just like, you know, it's like when the dog catches the fire, you know, the fire truck, you know, I was just like, I don't know what to do.

Like, I have like the guy here and I'm like, where do I even fucking [00:05:00] start?

Sam: Well, you can work on some of the obscure things. You'll work on some of the little known things. So if you want, I mean, that's, it's fine with me because it's, to me, the, the, the surfing life.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, the thing about it for me has been that I always felt that being a surfer was a, an exceptional state of being.

Mm-hmm. Even from a little kid, I just thought there was something really special about it. And so to dedicate your life to that, uh, I never, you know, there's bumper stickers you've seen that say Surfing ruined my life. Yeah. I, I, I feel so sad for the people that have that on their cars and stuff, because I think living a surfing life is actually a very valid, wonderful way to live your life because it can encompass so much.

Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, a lot of people associate it with that selfish burning desire to catch their next wave. Right. But there's so much more to it. Uh, you know, and so that's why I, I, maybe that's why I [00:06:00] didn't just go in one direction, but that I, I wanted to, I. Take in all the surfing world and all that was in it.

And so that was what I did.

Tyler: Well, I always felt like I feel lucky to have grown up viewing the world through a surfing lens, and that's how I, I see it. Like, I don't see surfing as just as one activity or the thing you do in the ocean. It's like you look at everything and see surfing through it. It's, it's kind of funny, like I look at products and I look at, oh yeah.

All these things. And I'm like, oh, how can I certify that? Or how can I make this like surf centric in a, some way? But, but also obviously convey a different message too. Like I find surfing can be quite fluid in that respect, you know? Well, certainly

Sam: it, it certainly it can because I mean, it, you, you know, you don't have to work too hard to come up with the wave analogy Yeah.

Of life. Yeah. I mean it's, you know, we are like waves, just, you know, we're waves moving through a medium and, and you know, we'll, we're born [00:07:00] in a storm. We, we live our life. We, we finish our trajectory, we crash onto some far shore and then we're gone and we disappear, but we're absorbed back into the medium.

So it, you know, I, I see where you're coming from because it, there's such a easy analogy between life and waves and so yeah, when you tune into that and you tune into the pursuit of waves, the relationship with waves, the understanding of waves, you know, you're. You're connecting with that?

Tyler: Well, I always felt surfing was kind of like a gateway drug to many things.

You know? Like it can lead you to surf, it can lead you to, um, you know, action. It can lead you to, uh, science, it can lead you to so many different places. You know, it it,

Sam: you know what, that's a really good point. And I, I haven't had many people bring that up to me. And that's a really good point. 'cause the one thing I was gonna say is baseball teaches you nothing about culture.

Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. You don't learn anything about foreign cultures. Mm-hmm. [00:08:00] When with baseball, even though baseball's played all over the world, football, or I'm gonna say soccer.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Great. The biggest, most largest participation sport in the world. It doesn't teach you anything about those cultures.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, because it's structured. Exactly. It teaches you about that sport. But, you know, surfing, whether it's just going up and down the coast, like a trip to Cape Hatteras or a trip to the Maldives, you know, you, you, you have to immerse yourself in that culture to experience it. So yeah. It, it does open you up to a lot of other things that a lot of sports don't.

Tyler: Exactly. It's, it's a, well, like it's those, they're sports, right? Like they're all sports. They're not lifestyles. And that's where surfing, I think. Uh, is interesting is how it evolved as more of a lifestyle as opposed to just a sport. You know, it's become so much more, right? Like everyone, you have surfing chefs, you have surfing this, whoops, sorry.

You have all these things, you know, that surfing can encompass. It's [00:09:00] not so regimented and limited, which I find, uh, I mean for me it's a godsend, you know? It's, and for many people, I'm sure it's like, I mean, here in Rockaway, right? Uh, surfing in Rockaway, you have a lot of kids who grow up out there and for a while, like a lot of the kids who grew up in there and the project housing never got to even go in the water, right?

Yeah. They weren't encouraged. They didn't teach 'em to swim. And some of them now, like, we have these great programs, like, uh, LA Ruba is one of them where they take a lot of these kids, teaches them, teach them how to swim, teach 'em how to surf. And some of these kids lives have changed and the trajectory has changed, and they've, you know, instead of just following this one routine, they've been able to explore and learn so much more about the world than they would've had they not surfed.

Sam: Sure. You know? No, it's, it's, it's true. You know? That's true. And the, you know, the, the fact is it, it almost forces a certain lifestyle on you because you can't do it whenever you want.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, it's not like other sports where you can do it whenever [00:10:00] you want. I mean, okay. You have to have a decent winter ski season.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: But you can just ride the lift up and do as many runs as you want. But surfing's different. You have to tune into the natural cycle. Yeah. So it, it really lends itself to developing some kind of lifestyle, whether you're one of those surfing dropouts that is living on a little island in the menti.

Mm-hmm. You know, and eating rice and dried fish, or whether you've incorporated being there for that d patrol on Rockaway before you have to head into the city to work. Exactly. That's still a surfing lifestyle. You know, surf a surfing lifestyle doesn't mean you're surfing all the time. It means you've incorporated it into your life.

Tyler: Exactly. I love that.

Sam: And so there's many, many ways to have a surfing lifestyle, you know? Uh, but that's what makes it so unique, because you can't do it whenever you want.

Tyler: And it's, I have this analogy for particularly, and, and this is interesting 'cause like, uh, reading and, and obviously, um, listening to these other podcasts you've done, like, you know, you grew up a good portion of your, your [00:11:00] childhood surfing in San Francisco, where you one, you, you live far from the beach, and two, it was cold and the conditions are really difficult.

Like Yeah. Demanding. I'd say demanding. You know, and, and I always thought like there was a bit of a connection with that in like, surfing here in New York because it's like, you can't just go and plan your surfs even, like you have to be on it. Yeah. And you have to be ready to go. And you're also like in an environment that does, it's not very conducive for surfing in many ways, you know?

Um. But I always, like in east coast surfers to hunter and gatherers and West Coast is agricultural, you know, west coast, you can plan your surfs. You, you know, the swells coming two weeks away now with surf line, right? Yeah. Here we are, like feast or famine, like, oh, there's swell. Yeah. Fucking let's gorge.

You know? That's right. No, you have to. Yeah.

Sam: No, no. That was, that was, and it, it also, those years, uh, you know, I, I grew up surfing in Hawaii. Yeah. And even then, [00:12:00] people think not everybody in Hawaii lives at the beach. Yeah. I mean, I didn't live at the beach in Hawaii. Mm-hmm. I lived in a place called Halawa Heights.

I could see the ocean.

Tyler: Yeah. I

Sam: could see swells on an outer reef. I could see when the surf was up.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: But I didn't live by the beach. I could only surf on the weekends. So, um, so yeah, I mean, it was a long time in my surfing life before I actually lived where I could ride my bike to the beach and that's all I ever wanted.

That was, that was the pinnacle of my ambition. Yeah. To just be able to ride my bike down to the beach and surf. And I rode my bike down to beach and surf about 10 days ago. Um, but what I'm getting at was that that led to this sort of dynamic that you went out no matter what. Yeah. Like you went surfing no matter what.

You didn't have a choice. You couldn't say no exactly, because you only got that one chance, like on, primarily on the weekends. And that certainly instilled a certain amount of. Drive.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know that surfers that I knew that grew up at the beach part of like a local [00:13:00] crew. Mm-hmm. Uh, they were, they were hot surfers even when they were young.

And the older guys were giving them all this Yeah. You know, attention and they were getting good boards and stuff. A lot of them stopped surfing. Well, that they got a lot of it when they were younger. Yeah. And it was almost like, it was almost like too much too soon. And believe me, I wish I would've got it too soon.

I wouldn't, you know, those days have taken the bus across the bay and across the city. Yeah. To get to the surf. At the time, I would've traded that for anything. But now that I look back on it, it really did instill in me a really deep appreciation

Tyler: for surfing. Well, deprivation can create that appreciation.

You know, you're, you're kind of deprived and, and so you think about it so much you obsess over it when you're not doing it. Whereas if you can surf every day, you grew up in San Diego, like you're, you don't take, you take it for granted and you don't think about it as much as maybe, uh, someone here in New York or [00:14:00] like me, my brother and I, we, we lived an hour from the beach.

We had to depend on rides to get, there was no even public transport where we lived in Long Island and, you know, so what'd we do? Fucking spend an hour on the toilet reading surf magazines. Yeah. Watching VHS cassettes over and over, obsessing over every little bit and becoming like an encyclopedia of surf knowledge because you just, you needed that fix somehow, you know?

Yeah.

Sam: And you know, those, like you, you know, the, the surfers growing up on the beach in San Diego, you know, very dedicated and Yeah. You know, uh, just in a different way.

Tyler: Totally.

Sam: But I think that if you could put them in another sort of environment, in another scenario, they might go, wow, I was maybe taking it for granted a little bit.

You know, it's,

Tyler: it's also like the cultural appreciation. I think they, they can sometimes take for granted that all these shapers and all these great people are around them. And same like in [00:15:00] Australia, where, and, and so we've had like, you know, you'll, you're gonna be going to pilgrim a little bit and you'll meet Chris, but you're gonna see like surfers here.

I find just obsess over surfing a little bit more and obsess over the culture and the history and are more enthusiastic about it almost in some ways. No,

Sam: I, I tell people, I go, you know where the passion surfing's passion lives Texas. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Texas, the Gulf, I mean, I went there actually, I was honored to cut the ribbon at the Texas, uh, surf museum opening some years ago.

Oh. Way. Uh, 'cause I've done a fair amount of surfing in Texas. One of my best friends is from Texas to surfer and. He was a, uh, became a prominent surf photographer in the eighties, Mr. Medic Jimmy Medico. Yeah.

Tyler: Former guests as well. Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

Sam: That was a fantastic book.

Tyler: Oh,

Sam: I loved it. Fantastic book.

But what I mean was that you go there and you realize that's where, that's where the passion for surfing lives is Texas. Yeah. Or someplace where they don't get good surf all the time.

Tyler: Baltic sea [00:16:00] surfers, but,

Sam: but surfing culture.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: That, that aspect of surfing culture, it, it, it actually makes up the majority of their surfing experience much more than actual surfing, the physical act of surfing.

So, uh, you know, there, there's, there's a lot of great ways to be a surfer.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: We, uh, we, we, you know, traditionally, and I'll admit even all the years of working at the magazines just 'cause the, the, of the dynamics between, you know, coverage of the sport and, uh, you know, the, the institutions that existed at the time, you know, we've taken a pretty narrow look at what surfing is.

Yeah. You know, a very narrow look. And uh, you know, it's one of the greatest things that I've seen in all my time in surfing is how surf culture, when you think about it, you know, what is culture, right. A lot of people think that culture, you have to look back to find what culture is. Culture is now. Yeah.

Culture is what it is today. And if you look at it surfing culture today, it's closer to the original root and heart of serving [00:17:00] culture than it's ever been. And that's when everybody serves, you know, if you go back and I've got a number of old Yeah. Volumes, right. Uh, from missionaries in the, you know, 18th to 19th century.

Tyler: Yeah. Oh, the Calvinists.

Sam: Yeah. And a lot of them, they always say there's a re there's a theme where they talk about when the surface, when the waves are running high, everyone, entire villages empty out. Men, women and children, royalty. Commoners, although they royalties just like today had their own spots.

Yeah. But everyone went out and surfed together. And that's really what we're seeing now. You see so many more adults taking up surfing. Yes. Of course. The best thing to happen in surfing is the increase and the boom in women surfing. Yes. And kids learning and surf clubs and surf schools and, you know, all these things that are flourishing right now.

It's bringing, I think, surfing back to the heart of its culture. And so that I think is one of the neatest, the [00:18:00] neatest things that have happened in surfing. It's, I tried to explain it. I, I, last year I went to this really neat surf festival in Portugal, it's called Norte Surf Festival. Yeah. And they wanted me to speak about surf culture.

And one of the things I explained, because there surf schools are huge.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Matter of fact, at at this, at the beach, at Montesinos, in, in Porto, there's like eight surf schools on the beach. Yeah. And I said, this is so great to see, because when you really think about it for the last, like I'd say almost, let's say 30 years, at least.

Surfing has been telling us what it wants. Mm-hmm. You know, it, it told us what it wanted and it did what it wanted. Yeah. We tried to make it like a big professional sport. Mm-hmm. We tried to make it all about danger waves. We tried to make it all about big waves. We tried to make it all about competition.

And you know what? All of those areas are tiny little niches. Okay. What surfing said was, we want [00:19:00] longboards.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: We want everyone to be able to go out in whatever surf they can find and have a good time. We don't want everyone to have to go to the Menti. Mm-hmm. We want people to enjoy their surf at the end of their street.

We want more women to surf. We want more kids to surf. We don't think you have to learn as an 8-year-old to call yourself a hardcore surfer. Yeah. You can be a 40-year-old hedge fund manager and be very hardcore. So basically what's happened surfing said, Hey, you guys the magazine? Yeah. That's all very nice what you're doing and the media.

Oh, that's, yeah, that's great, but we're gonna do what we want. And that's what surfing did. It did what it wanted.

Tyler: Well, I, I feel like there's this great democratization in surfing that happened over the last 25 years. Um, you know, for most of my, uh, you know, youthful grommet hood of surfing, it always felt like.

The magazines and the industry dictated what surfing was to us. And we would look at the magazines and we'd see all the surfers and the styles and we'd be like, oh, that's what we need to do. And look, and over time [00:20:00] as, as technology and everything has become cheaper, more affordable, and everyone can now, uh, publish their own videos and magazines and websites and do put their own spin on surfing, it's now it went from a top down structure.

Now it's like a bottom up structure where there are all these variations on surf culture all over the world now. Like you got guys in Turkey and they have their own, they've taken that surf culture, but made it kind of their own. You have the Basque guys, like they've put their own colors and culture into surfing with food and all these other things, and Ireland and all these places.

Great Lakes where surfing shouldn't thrive. But it does. And I love the idea that, that those are the, that's where surfing's at and not. Centralized in behind the orange curtain as Tom Kern once called it. Yeah. Um, you know, it's like become much more of a bottom up kind of thing as opposed to top down.

Sam: Well this, [00:21:00] this is actually a perfect segue to my, to

Tyler: your

Sam: book, my memoir in Progress, which all listeners,

Tyler: I have to admit, I did not have a copy yet, so I haven't read it and I forgot to read one,

Sam: so

Tyler: my apologies. Yeah,

Sam: I can, I can, I'll, I could show you the cover. Yeah. No, but what I was gonna say is it's a, it's a great segue because a lot of what I wrote about in the book deals with a lot of the things you were just talking about.

Um, whether it's cultural or just my own perception growing up. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, people, I, I've over, you know, people have asked me, well, you know, growing up, like, you know, a lot of people you think, okay, you want your, for example, you want your father's approval or you want your peer group's approval, right?

And I said, no, no. For me, growing up, I only wanted surfer magazine's approval. No. That was it. I, I dedicated my young life. I wanted to be the surfer that Surfer Magazine was telling me I should be. Mm-hmm. And that led me to some pretty, you know, wild places. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's why I got up at five in the morning to ride the bus [00:22:00] across the bay and get on the 38th, you know, Geary bust to the beach.

Mm-hmm. And if it was too big to get out, I'd hitchhike down to Pacifica, try to get out there because I wanted to be the surfer that surfer was telling me I should be. So I, I felt that, I felt that I. I guess you'd say pressure

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: To, to, to win that approval as much as anybody, you know, especially when I was younger.

And there's a lot of the, a lot of the chapters in the book deal with that. It's that same thing. I mean, there's a chapter called Me, my Dad in Sunset Beach. And it's, I mean, you can get the book and read about it, but basically the theme is feeling my father's disapproval. Mm. Even if I didn't consciously realize how much it was affecting my life going forward.

And just to give you a hint, when I was the editor of Surfer, because of something that happened to me and my dad in 1967, I went to a sports performance [00:23:00] hypnotherapist. Whoa. To sort of surreptitiously, uh, because I wanted to get to the bottom of this panic feeling I would get when I got caught inside in big waves, not surfing.

Big waves. I liked surfing. Big waves. Yeah. But I would, I would get these feelings of panic when I'd get caught inside. And I, I needed after all those years of surfing, you know, I needed help with that. So that's a theme I was dealing with was, you know, my father's disapproval as opposed to surfer magazine's, disapproval.

I got surfers approval. Yeah, yeah. I became the editor became, exactly. And I worked there for years before that too. Yeah, exactly. Associate editor, managing editor. But yeah, so I got surfers approval. So there's chapters that deal with a theme like that, but within the surfing scope, um. There's another, there's another story about my relationship with my mother.

Uh,

Tyler: I wanted to dive into this. Yeah. Because I interviewed your brother and I, you know, we talked about your, his relationship, [00:24:00] uh, to your dad and I, I tried to get info about your mother out, and he didn't really give up a lot. And I feel like that part was missing from the story. And I was really curious what you, because it feels like particularly him and, and in his book and the way he talked, like it, it was a lot about his dad.

Your dad. But yeah, your mother wasn't mentioned as much and I'm curious like what your relationship li was like with your mother and, and, and what happened, if you don't mind me asking.

Sam: Well, you know, it's interesting because writing, uh, I mean, I've written a lot about surfing. Yeah. You know, about surfing.

I haven't written all that much about myself. I would put myself in a lot of the stories I wrote about, oh yes, you did. But only to provide perspective. Of course. Yeah. On what was happening.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Not on me. Not on my know. Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. It was more on what was happening. Writing about my relationship with my mother.

I know it sounds like a cliche, but it was really difficult.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Because [00:25:00] I actually uncovered a lot of feelings and emotions that I had never really articulated before. So in a way it was sort of an exhilarating experience writing this book. After all these years. But the thing about, you know, my parents got divorced.

How old were you guys? We were, I was like, you know, I was 11. You know. So

Tyler: you were still in Hawaii around that time? Time, or where were you? No, we

Sam: just, we, we, we didn't know the marriage was already falling apart. We didn't know, for some crazy reason, my parents decided, well, we just won't tell the kids we're getting divorced.

Okay. You can imagine that. So that when we moved to Hawaii, when my dad was in the Navy and when he got stationed in Hawaii, my mom didn't come. Wow. And we kind of went, well, where, where's mom? You know? I mean, we sailed over on the Lurling to Hawaii and mom wasn't there. Well, she's staying behind because of her job.

She was a school teacher. So our, it was a weird thing to have your family break up and have nobody tell you it was breaking up. The other thing that I think, you know, Matt may have had trouble talking about was that one of the reasons it broke up is 'cause my mother was an [00:26:00] alcoholic. Mm-hmm. And the chapter I wrote about my mom, it, the, it starts out, I said, I wrote when I was 12 years old, I didn't know my mother was an alcoholic.

I thought she was insane. Because when you're a kid that age, you don't know. How do you explain the mood swings and the, and the, and the personality changes? And how do you, how do you explain all that if you don't understand? Because I mean, I grew up in a Navy family. Yeah. All adults drank. That's all they did.

And it was, it was

Tyler: a different time too, by the way, where, where alcoholism wasn't

Sam: No

Tyler: as talked about or diction and No, you were seen as defective as opposed to, I didn't even know the word. Yeah, exactly. All I knew was

Sam: that IES were like bums that, you know, slept on benches in movies. So I didn't know. And it made it really difficult to reconcile that.

And I talked a little bit about in the book about, uh, we would have to go back. My mother [00:27:00]settled in Ohio of all places where my father's family was from. I guess she was trying to establish herself there as they battled it out for custody. And I would, so I, we had to go back from Hawaii. Imagine you're a, yeah, you've totally stoked on surfing.

You just can't get nothing. And every summer you gotta go spend it in Ohio. Oh, so you,

Tyler: you were the proto airborne kid, basically. Remember the movie Airborne from the nineties? Yeah, we had, yeah, you were, that was you, me and

Sam: Matt and my sister. We had to fly home by ourselves minus the rollerblading. Yeah, we had to, we had to fly back there.

Uh, standby of course. And spend the summer at least like half the summer in Ohio. It was a, so, anyway, but the point, the point I'm getting at was that I, I didn't know my mother was an alcoholic. I, I thought she was insane and we used to have to drive in the car with her. And so when you've driven with an alcoholic, all I could think of was that my mother was trying to kill us.

Was that her? Mindset was, if I can't have you, no one [00:28:00] can. So I'm just rolling the dice on in the car and, uh, I might be giving away sort of a, a pretty, uh, pretty poignant moment in the book.

Tyler: They're still gonna buy it because they wanna read it. Yeah. You know,

Sam: but this is getting to that point about, about identity and approval, especially for Surfer Magazine.

When we would drive with my mother, which was terrifying, I would get in the wheel well behind her seat, and I would turn my back to the seat and I would lay out an issue of Surfer Magazine on the back seat. I'd bring my face down really close to it so I could, I couldn't see anything else but the image, it, any page was fine.

I knew every page by heart. Yeah. So I didn't even, it could be dark and it didn't matter because what I was thinking of when I die this night, I want my last sight to be surfing. And, and when I die tonight, I wanna die a surfer. And that, that's where my head was. And that's what surfer meant to me. I mean, that's, [00:29:00] that's the bond that I created between me and Surfer Magazine, uh, on this one night where we like hit the edge of a bridge.

And, you know, Matt grabbed holy shit. Oh no. Matt was three years old. He, he, I mean, three, he was like, I was 11. He was eight and a half. He sat in the passenger, he grabbed the steering wheel once and kept us from going into a river. And I still remember the, I still have the issue. Wow. I have the very issue that I was looking at that night.

Um. It was the big issue, big summer issue in 1968, Corky Carroll on the cover, the big summer issue. Uh, so yeah, that's what surfer meant to me. And that's what, that's how strongly I identified with my, that was my identity that I created. Obviously, it took me many, many years to realize that I created that identity out of that family trauma.

Wow. You know, that, that my family was breaking up. It wasn't my fault, you know, it's their, that's their, I kept thinking that's their business. I'm a surfer. Yeah. I didn't choose, I didn't choose my dad over my mom. I chose Hawaii over [00:30:00] Ohio. Mm-hmm. That's what a surfer would do.

Tyler: So it was like a protective bubble for for you.

Yeah, exactly. Basically it allowed you to not have to deal with what was in front of you.

Sam: Exactly. And the thing was, when I, when I finally wrote that and I showed a, a first draft to my oldest best friend, and he read that, he goes, Sam, you don't need to know anything else about the path you took then to read that chapter about your mom and it, and it goes on there.

It it, there's a lot in that chapter. But he said that you created that identity as a response to that family trauma. It's so clear to see why you never strayed from the path, because I've never stepped off the path.

Tyler: Wow. It's interesting, like how. Surfing can provide that when you're young. Um, I remember, you know, for me, uh, and, and now as a, as an adult, like I know I was going through depression and, and dealing with other things, uh, that I, you know, when you're a kid, you don't know.[00:31:00]

And surfing was a way for me to protect myself also. And not just from my depression, but also the other kids in high school where everyone's looking for identity when you're a teenager. Right. And surfing gave me, and I was like the only fucking surfer in my school and I was made fun of for surfing, but it gave me this identity that I didn't have to look for.

I didn't have to be a goth, I didn't have to be all these things. I just knew I was a surfer and I also viewed myself above them all too, to a certain extent, which can be good and and bad, but it's great for that self self-esteem. Mostly good. Yeah. You know what, it helps, you know, and mostly, and also gave me social fluidity amongst the groups because it wasn't like I was pinned down into one thing so I could hang with the hippies.

I could hang with the jocks, I could hang with all those people because of that. And it's funny, like, and my parents were divorced too, and surfing the first day my brother and I surfed actually was the day that my mom moved out and my dad took us to [00:32:00] Montauk to surf. And it's funny, like how that has been such a protective bubble for me as well.

And I, I, I really appreciate you sharing that. Yeah. Well, it

Sam: can, it can be, you know, it, it. It can be, you know, it can

Tyler: be also be an avoidance too. Well, no, it can and, and, you

Sam: know, and, and also the obsessive side of surfing Yeah. Can be a detriment if you don't integrate it into a functional lifestyle.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Like, like anything else that you become obsessive about. Um, but it, it, you know, that sense of identity I think is, especially when you're young, it's, uh, and, and speaking just like yourself. I mean, when I moved my high school there, I was the only surfer. Luckily I met one of my best friends, Jeff Chamberlain.

Yeah. He was a year above me. He had just started surfing. They tried, he and his brother had tried it that summer Nice. Before school started. And they saw me, I'd go to class with my surfer magazine 'cause I'd have that in every single textbook, you know, hidden. So I, and he saw the [00:33:00]magazine and he, he threw himself completely into the surfing lifestyle.

It's one of the major influences on my life. But, but yeah, there was me and then there was Jeff and, and his brother Brad. And that was it. So we didn't have a peer group. Yeah. So I think when you don't have a peer group to associate with that identity of being a surfer becomes even more important.

Totally. And it, it's pretty, I it's pretty interesting because over the years I've always sort of, I'm not gonna say resented, but I'll always rankled at my eventual peers. Mm-hmm. That thought that somehow surfing was limiting. Mm-hmm. Like it was intellectually limiting. Mm-hmm. Or it was socially limiting.

And I thought, well, no. Only if you let it be. Only if you make it that way. You know, I think surfing, like I said, I think it's an exceptional state of existence, you know? And, but what you do with it, that's, that's up to you. But that's why I always thought, I don't think that my I identity and my identity based lifestyle was in any way a detriment.

I've had all sorts of [00:34:00] wonderful experiences, all, you know, coming from that space and not just all surfing. I mean, I've worked in film, I've done commercial work. Yeah, I did. I've done a lot of other sports. Mm-hmm. You know, uh, during that time I never just surfed. I mean, you know, I, I did triathlons and paddleboard racing.

Yes. And, and, uh, you know, uh, mountain biking and rock climbing and you doing a lot of other sports, apparently

Tyler: snowboarding. SI

Sam: don't know if you read that article.

Tyler: No. But I heard about you going, hanging out with Jerry Lopez and making yourself a coop. No, no. That

Sam: was so bad. I, I can't even explain that.

I'm not a co snowboarder. I'm an enthusiastic intermediate, but for some reason under his scrutiny, I forgot how to snowboard

Tyler: you. You got performance anxiety. No, I, it happens to all men. I know.

Sam: I forgot. Exactly. You know, but I forgot how to snowboard. It was so embarrassing. It was so embarrassing. And in front of Jerry Lopez, of all people.

That's the worst, you know? No, I know. It was, thank God.

Tyler: He's super cool and mellow.

Sam: Not as mellow as you think, though. I mean, I love him. [00:35:00] He's a wonder. No, we love, I, I love the man, but not as male as you would think. You know, I get to the bottom of a run and, and I'm sitting there and I go, God. He goes, okay, that was better.

But then he leans over and he goes, now wipe your nose. I have to, I had Jerry Lopez tell me that at my age. Yeah, that was better. Now wipe your nose. Yeah. That was

Tyler: bad. Well, he didn't tell you to wipe your ass. No,

Sam: that's true. So, yeah. No, I, I'm a, I'm a decent snowboarder, but no, I did a lot of other sports.

Yeah. But it all came from a surfing place. And so, and you know, I don't, I don't compare when I use the term exceptional.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: I use the word exceptional now and then in its literal term, not a lot of people think exceptional means better than. Yeah, no, it means the exception.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: And when I look at my surfing life and my surfing path and stuff.

In many ways I am the exception. Yeah. And so I don't, I don't judge other people on their surfing path.

Tyler: Mm. Uh,

Sam: unless it's selfish.

Tyler: Yeah. And,

Sam: and of course, asshole [00:36:00] locals, of course. You know, I, I, I, I can't abide by that or any of that. I don't like selfishness. Uh, I don't like that selfish, my wave. I don't like the resentment of of beginners.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: But the thing is, is that for me, it's, it's that feeling of that surfing is an exceptional way to live, and it's an exceptional state. Mm-hmm. And so when, when you actually believe that it lets surfing, it really opens up the horizon for, for how it can be a positive thing in your life.

Tyler: I wanna, I wanna read to you, uh, a quote that I read to your brother, actually, because I think this resonates with what you guys do with surfing and how you tell surfing story.

Um, it's a, it's a quote from Joseph Campbell.

I love, love Joe. Who doesn't love a little Joseph Campbell, you know? Yeah.

Tyler: Come on. Yeah, of course. So, if you live with the myths [00:37:00] in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations, and they cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life as well as, uh, life in relation to the myth.

And I feel like both of you and your brother,

I I, I love that quote.

Tyler: Right.

No, I love that quote. Yeah, exactly.

Tyler: And, and that's kind of what you did, right? Like everything to me growing up, surfing took on this mythology thanks to you, your brother, Matt Warsaw and so many other surfers and Surfer magazine, you know, particularly, and, and

Sam: surfing.

I worked for eight years and years, years surfing. No, no, no, no. Slight there. No slight there. No

Tyler: surfing, you know, all, all of them right? Like surfing lends itself really well to mythology. And I think like it allowed me to view what I was doing with surfing as like a hero's journey and allowed you to kind of see what you're doing as something [00:38:00] more noble, uh, or a journey as opposed to just going through life.

And I, I love that you guys. We're able to help instill that. I think, uh, the magazines were really important for that and really helped a lot.

Sam: You know, it, it's really interesting that you said that because one of the chapters in the book, it all comes back to the book. Yeah. Actually, on that snowboard trip, Jerry goes, oh, you have a book coming out.

What's it about? I had to think for about a full minute and I said, it's all about me, Jerry. Yeah. It's all about me. It's all me this time. It's all, it's all about me. One of the chapters in the book deals with my relationship with John Milius, the famous writer, director, uh, best known in the surfing circles for having Big Wednesday directed and written Big Wednesday, but

Tyler: Apocalypse Now, which is also, well, of course,

Sam: well, we're also showing the film tonight.

Oh. Called Hollywood Don't Surf. So you can imagine into that, can imagine where you got that quote, although I'm not allowed to mention that in public. '

Tyler: cause it's it's technically not released. It's not being seen. Private screening.

Sam: We're not Yeah. Private screening amongst friends.

Tyler: Yes.

Sam: [00:39:00] But the point, one of the points I make when you look at, at John's life, John Milius and his relationship with surfing and what he was trying to imbue.

Big Wednesday with which Yes. Ultimately, well, not ultimately he failed, but ultimately he found redemption. And one of the things I brought up, it's a word you just used, the term you just used, John truly believed there was something noble about surfing.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: And I think, and I don't care who you are, I think if you surf deep down somewhere in there, you think that too, there's something noble about it.

It, I mean, it may be that it's in, its not original form, but in the form that we identify as modern surfing, which is Yeah. Hawaiian surfing in the 17th, 18th, 19th century. They called it the sport of kings. Yeah. There's something noble about riding a wave to shore. And I think that every surfer somewhere down deep believes that they, they honestly don't completely believe that it's a trivial waste of time.

They don't believe it's, I [00:40:00] mean, I love to skateboard, but it's not the same as skateboarding.

Tyler: Yeah. You

Sam: know, I mean, there, it's not the same as doing triathlons. I mean, all those are great things, but there's something noble about riding waves. And, and John tried to, he really, he really believed that. And he tried to, you know, he tried to express that in Big Wednesday.

And like I said, there's a, there's a chapter in the book about John and my relationship with him, uh, especially after he experienced the, you know, debilitating stroke.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Um. That deals with that topic. Exactly. So,

Tyler: well, to quote Tarantino, this movie is too good for surfers.

Sam: And I interviewed, I interviewed, I know.

That's where it comes from, the quote, you know. No, no. But first he said, fucking surfers fucking surf. Well, he hated them growing up, but fucking surfers, they

Tyler: don't deserve this movie. Well, the beauty of that movie, again, is like the surfing's the vehicle, but it's not the story really. Yeah. It's the other things that, that go on [00:41:00] in that, uh, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a coming of age story.

It's a, it know, a youth against establishment story. It's the youth becoming establishment story. It's, you know, it it, and this is like with your, your, your, your movie Hollywood Don't Surf, which unfortunately I've not been able to see. Nobody has really since the Camp film Festival, and I've wanted to.

Yeah. But it's like, I've always felt whenever the surf, whenever there's a Hollywood surf movie and they make it about surfing itself, it sucks. And when there's a movie where surfing is the vehicle for something else, it's so much better. And I've always felt that's what Hollywood gets wrong, is they get caught down in the weeds of surfing as opposed to just using surfing to tell a better story.

Because that surfing is just the lens through to see life.

Sam: Well, that's true, but, but Hollywood has never got it right.

Tyler: Uh, you, you disagree with Matt Warshaw about the, the penguin surf Move, surf Up, up.

Sam: No, no, no. Surfs up, which is the most [00:42:00] successful Hollywood surf movie financially ever.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Um, that's the closest, actually I think the best surf movie ever made is Ride the Wild Surf.

Really? Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. American inter seeing that when you think about it, yes, there's corny green screen, but when you look at what the theme is, it's Howie's coming to Hawaii and trying to compete at Y Mea Bay and get the biggest wave of the day on a one day event.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: On the biggest day of the year.

That is so much like the Eddie I Cow contest. Mm-hmm. And it's about these, you know, three guys from the mainland coming there and trying to do that. It's actually a really good, it's a really good surf movie.

Tyler: I, I remember seeing that as a kid on tv. Yeah. And, and I was like, what the fuck is, I was like 14 and I was on HBOI was like, what is this?

This is amazing. Like, I know. It was so accurate. Like everything from the Halley's getting roughed up from the locals to earning, earning respect and Yeah. And

Sam: super corny. Yeah. But that's okay. Well, you know, one of the reasons it worked is because they actually bought that the [00:43:00] year before.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: They bought a bunch of footage from like Bruce Brown and Bud Brown and, you know, and, and, uh, gra uh, uh, the surf filmmakers of the time.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: And then they match their actors

Tyler: Exactly. To the surfing and, and the, the clothing they were wearing, like someone's got Oh, no, that was easy. Yeah, no. So

Sam: I mean, you know, the green screen stuff is absurd, but the surfing in it is really great. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, Jody played by Fabian, he's his surfer double is Mickey Dora, and you see Mickey Doris surfing Y Mea really good.

Yeah. Really well. But no, that, that movie has come the closest, even though people de ride it because it is so corny.

Tyler: I respectfully disagree and feel that North Shore is my goat.

Sam: No, no. North Shore was a great, it was great, but it, it did ultimately fail.

Tyler: I heard a rumor that you and your brother had a slight hand in the movie.

No, no, no. At all.

Sam: Well, except that I married the actors that played well, that

Tyler: too Keani. But Brian King, or AK Turtle was telling me, he's like, oh, the George Brothers were [00:44:00] trying to get involved. It's when he used to live here.

Sam: That was weird. That was way, that was, that was before my, not before my time, but No, no.

I went to the premier to mock it just like every other surfer. Did you have to remember when those movies came out, surfers weren't ready for nostalgia?

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Like when Big Wednesday came out, like in 78. I mean,

Tyler: we were too young of a sport. No, no

Sam: one wanted to, no one even hardly rode Longboards then.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: They didn't want that. Even when North Shore came out, they weren't ready to laugh at themselves. Yeah. You know, even though the story is very. Is is very accurate. It's karate

Tyler: kid.

Sam: Well, and also think about this, you know, one of the most derided movies was My Brother Matt's movie in God's Hands. Oh yeah.

Which was not his fault that it was incoherently edited, but think about the theme. Yeah. It was toe in surfing versus paddling. Mm-hmm. And it starred the, some of the best big wave surfers in the world doing their own acting and surfing.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You think Well, and it had the best action footage of any Hollywood surf movie.

Absolutely. You know, so there have been good attempts, but surfers have never been [00:45:00] ready really to accept it until years later. 'cause now people look at, at North Shore and they just go, oh gosh, you know, AKI and, and uh, and Page, they're so funny in that movie and, you know, uh, it's great, you know, but at the time it was like, oh God, it's embarrassing.

Have you? And one of my best friends is Matt Adler, who played Rick Kane. He's the best. Yeah. Great guy. Good. You know, really good surfer. One of the greatest guys in, uh, so yeah, the, the, the whole history of, of Hollywood and surfing movies is, is pretty fascinating. And that's why, you know, working with the executive producer Greg McGilvery.

Tyler: Yeah. We

Sam: made a movie about it and it premiered at the canned film festival. And there was, and you only

Tyler: had eight months to make it,

Sam: and we had to make it within the year. And there's, 'cause I had to work hard, but I'll tell you one thing where we saved a lot of time, we didn't have to pay a researcher.

That's true. I knew where all the footage existed. But the great thing about. Once again, there's a chapter in the book about the Can Festival premiere and it [00:46:00] ties in with my parents actually, and my Really? Yeah. It ties in with my parents. 'cause we used to live in Cannes. Oh. And when, when my dad got sta he was on a ship, the USS Boston, and he got stationed in the Mediterranean.

Wow. And he didn't wanna leave us at home. So my mom and I, and my brother and sister, we sailed on a ship and we lived in France. That's

Tyler: crazy.

Sam: And so we lived in Cannes. So to return to Cannes with a film was pretty epic, I have to admit.

Tyler: Have you ever seen the movie Breath? The Tim Winton one? No,

Sam: I have not seen it.

I've heard about it and read

Tyler: about it. You should see it. Yeah. Like, I feel like the three quarters of the movie gets surfing so fucking good. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it goes in a direction you did not see. And I did not like that direction. 'cause it was like, what the fuck? Well, let's, you know, let, let's, I don't wanna ruin it for listeners, but just,

Sam: you know, we just gotta face it.

I mean, but you know what? You can't blame surfing for that. Oh no, no, no. Like for example, [00:47:00] in, in Hollywood, don't surf. I had the great privilege of interviewing Steven Spielberg. Yes. Who? And I have Steven Spielberg telling us surf story you got, that's pretty unique. But after the interview was done, you know, and he, he gave us a little more time than we thought he would give us.

Mm-hmm. He's a very busy man. Yeah, I just had to ask him. I said, well, Mr. Spielberg, before you go, can I just ask you, what do you think is the greatest sports movie ever made? Because he was saying, now look, it's really hard to do a movie about sports.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: I said, what do you think is the greatest sports movie, in your opinion?

Did you say the

Tyler: natural

Sam: Well, I love the natural. I thought maybe the natural, I thought Raging Bull probably. Right, right, right. Or somewhere up there likes me about, uh, Lou Gehrig. Yeah. And he goes, oh, that's easy. He goes, bad news bears.

Tyler: He's

Sam: dead on. No, he said, bad news Bears. It is great characters. Yeah.

Great character. Totally believable. Great plot. He goes, great. Greatest sports film ever made So

Tyler: hard to

Sam: argue. Yeah. But he's saying, look, it's really hard to make a movie about sports, even if it's [00:48:00] boxing or football. Yeah. So imagine trying to make a movie about something as esoteric as surfing. You can't blame 'em, and you can't blame people for continuing to try.

No. And and in the movie, and you know, in, in how I write about it, of course I have nothing but a, a reverence for the whole canon of Hollywood surf movies. Yeah. You know, because if if nothing else, there were a lot of fun to watch. Absolutely.

Tyler: Especially now looking back, you know? Yeah. Looking back when, at the time when you thought they were trying to be serious about it or, you know, took it themselves seriously, it was hard.

But now you look back with. Nostalgia, kitch and, and,

Sam: and, and there's some great scenes.

Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. You know, and

Sam: they all capture a slight

Tyler: essence Yeah.

Sam: To it,

Tyler: you know, I mean,

Sam: Gidget is the original of course. And Gidget is right on, like when you go back and watch Gidget. Mm-hmm. I think I've called Gidget the, the, the best.

Well, it's the most successful celluloid surf movie. Yeah. In adjusted dollars. [00:49:00] Uh, but when you watch it for all the corny green screen, it, it's kind of right on, you know, even though they really changed the end of it.

Tyler: Yeah. '

Sam: cause the book book fantastic.

Tyler: The Yeah.

Sam: But they changed the end of it, you know, to fit the sensibilities of the time.

Um, but yeah, there's some wonderful moments in all those movies. So I wanna ask

Tyler: then, like, going back to mythology then, what is it about surfing, uh, for you and, and what do you think it is that makes it so perfect for this type of storytelling compared to other sports and activities? You know, like, I feel like surfing lends itself well to hero's journeys and, and all of these things that Joseph Campbell has written about.

And, you know, it's almost like larger than life stories, you know, the. You know, you look back at Greg Noles wave of 69 or you know, the, the, the, the, you know, the old surfing crew in the fifties, the knights around, you know, the table, you know? Sure. And all of these things, like what is it about [00:50:00] surfing that lends itself to that?

Why, why is it so good for that compared to like a baseball or whatever, where it feels like all the stories are kind of the same.

Sam: Well, and, and you know, let's face it, in a lot of ball sports, there's, there they've myth mythologized a lot of ball sports. Um, I'm just using those as an example. Yeah. You know, but when you really think about it, there's a guy standing on the mound in baggy pants wearing a little cap, and he's throwing a ball at you and you're trying to hit it with a bat.

Tyler: Mm-hmm.

Sam: That's it.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know? Yes. You can mythologize how well each of those people do that.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: But it can't compare to paddling out into the ocean, to face some, a power greater than anything else on earth. Even in the smallest wave, you know, that power generated from a massive storm on the other side of the world.

You know, the massive low pressure [00:51:00] system and the swells march out. Let's face it, they march toward us like battalions. Mm-hmm. I don't care if it's a two foot wave in Montauk or, you know, you know, second light Florida, that wave has come from the heart of a massive storm, and you're out there waiting for it.

Waiting, waiting. You think you've prepared. And it only appears once you have one chance, that wave only will break once. Totally unique. And the idea of doing that in all of its complexities around the world, how could you not mythologize that? You know? It, it's, it's so much bigger than almost anything else you'll really do.

Yeah. You know, I mean Okay. Mountaineering might come close.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, and it's much more dangerous because it's not a fluid medium. Yeah. Yeah. But let's face it, Everest isn't going anywhere. Yeah. You can go right up the path that everyone else went up. Well, you can pay for it now

Tyler: too, also.

Sam: Yeah. And the weather might be harder.

And it, and you know, like I said, it's much more dangerous. Um, and yet it's not quite the same as, [00:52:00] as that ocean, let's face it. We live on an ocean planet, you know, so I think that's, that's one of the reasons why I think that it's, it's easy to mythologize, you know, what surfers do, especially when you, when it's something like the first day they ever surfed Waimea Bay.

Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. When, when, you know, yes. That's, you know, the first people to try to climb Everest. Or K two.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: There was a really good chance that they were gonna die.

Tyler: Right.

Sam: The surfers the first time didn't, they didnt know clue. I mean, they didn't know. They didn't know that they were gonna be okay.

Mickey Moz was like 15 years old going over the falls, you know, on his balsa wood Malibu board and came up, whoa, that was heavy. You know, like that, that's not gonna happen on K two. You only get one chance. But still, there was just something mighty about it and something dramatic. And so stories like that, stories like discoveries, fantastic surf.

Yeah. Um, you know, stories of, of, you know, epic competitive wins or, you know, all of [00:53:00]those, they just lend themselves to that, to mythology.

Tyler: And Hawaiian culture, I think is, you know, it's the foundation of it all. And mythology is so important to Hawaiian culture.

Sam: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Even if you don't know it.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, the, the Hawaiians did not have a written language. It was all storytelling. Mm-hmm. And when you go back and when they eventually had Hawaiians translate and put down in Hawaiian some of these legends. Yeah. And then at, in the late part of the 19th century, uh, some really involved, uh, ethnologists, they started translating it into English.

Mm-hmm. The legends, many, many different legends in lore.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Were surrounding, you know, were, were involving surfing because it was a storytelling culture. And you know, that kind of storytelling lends itself to creating myths.

Tyler: Exactly.

Sam: That and the fact, if you look at myths, uh, and if we wanna sort of use the Greek myths as an example, [00:54:00] surfers do what they do naked.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, they do it in loin cloths. Yeah. So right there, you know, it, you don't wear those baggy pants like baseball players or like goofy shorts, like basketball players. Or pads. Or pads. Like you need pads, God come on on. And a helmet and, and now they have visors. You can't even see the look in your enemy's eyes.

I know. You know, but no, we do it naked in loincloth. Even if we're wearing full wetsuits underneath, still naked, we're in our

Tyler: loincloths and we're pissing on our suits. Dammit. That's true.

Sam: So, yeah. So that lends itself to the, to the myth also. So, and I've surfed with, I've surfed with naked surf cultures.

Yes. Matter of fact, there's a chapter in the book about that. Yes. And a photo, which is one of the most, uh, sort of, if any, if any of the chapters in the book really explain my sensibility and my It's surfing

Tyler: Naked.

Sam: Well, I have surfed Naked, I've surfed Naked with Tom Curran three time World champion.

That's a whole nother story that's not in the

Tyler: book. Uh, go on. No, no, no, no, no, no. We're segueing into that [00:55:00] one. Here. We can segue into that one

Sam: there. Tom. It's shrinkage. Don't judge me. No, the water, it was cold. It was cold too. No, but I, if there's an, if there was a, if there was an experience that really crystallizes my sensibility about how special.

Surfing is, it was about this experience of surfing. Yeah. With naked African villagers who had hardly ever seen a white person and had never seen another surfer,

Tyler: nor a circumcised. And they were,

Sam: there's a funny story about that. I didn't write about that, but they laughed a lot. Okay. Yeah, they laughed at me a lot.

So that was, you know, you just reminded me of that. I didn't even write, I didn't put that in there, but it was, that was pretty funny when they were rolling. What

Tyler: the

Sam: fuck is that? Yeah. Yeah. Like, huh. So, but what I'm, what I'm getting to was, was that these kids had their own complete surf culture. Yeah. They didn't, they surfed recreationally.

They'd never seen a surfboard. They'd [00:56:00] hardly ever seen a white, a white person. And they, they had their whole surfing trip down at their little spot. That's awesome. And I got to share that stoke with these kids who, who had, they knew nothing of surf culture from the outside. They had their own. And yet we shared it like we'd grown up together.

And it made me realize there's an intrinsic joy in surfing that just really, if you can, if you can identify that joy in it. That's the key to a long surfing life really is to, to it. Because when, because I got to share it in its purest form. Mm-hmm. You know, like it's

Tyler: still down.

Sam: No, totally pure. Like they've never seen a surfer, you know,

Tyler: yet they surf, which is so cool.

Cool. Hold on. Surfers,

Sam: they have their, they have their little tamoo hand car belly boards, and they rode these interesting rafts that they actually put three logs together, kinda like it was called goffy wood. It was like balsa. They put 'em [00:57:00] together, they put a little foot thing for their feet. They had little paddles and they scarfed rocker Wow.

In the front of it. So that might not pearl. They had the whole thing down. I was with Randy Rare at the time, who was the most inventor. God well traveled surfer in the world, and he put together the ball, the balsa blanks and shaped them aboard.

Tyler: No way out of it.

Sam: Yeah. That's

Tyler: epic.

Sam: I went back, I went back to that, to the village a number three times.

And at one time I brought, uh, I brought a whole big container box of soft top surfboards

Tyler: for you. And they're like, what the hell is this? This is crap. Well, no, but my friends were saying,

Sam: come on, those soft tops, they rash you like crazy. Those kids are naked. I go, are you kidding? They're paddling out on wood.

No, splintery wood. They're not gonna be afraid of a soft top.

Tyler: Uh, there are knots in that wood too, by the, the way they're

Sam: splinters. Yeah. So anyway, but that, that experience, uh, I think that explains better than anything else. Why I might feel, the way I feel about surfing and a surfing life was that experience.

Tyler: The cliche, [00:58:00] only a surfer knows the feeling.

Sam: Yeah, yeah.

Tyler: Sorry.

Sam: No, no, that's okay. That's like the, that's like I, I wrote their version of that for Quicksilver, their Quicksilver edition where I, the taglines was The Rod can last forever.

Tyler: I love it. It's better than Surfers a fortune.

Sam: You

Tyler: can't, you can't, you can't blame them.

No, no, no. I mean, dude, I bought a lot, I bought a lot of Surfers of Fortune stuff. Don't worry.

Sam: I did a lot of, I did a lot of copywriting for some of those companies. So,

Tyler: um, you recently were, when you were talking to David Lee Scales in the Surf PL podcast, which listeners, I do recommend you listen to that one too, if you enjoy hearing Sam here.

Like that's a great interview as well. Um, but, uh, you know that in the end all you said that in the end, that's all that's left of us are stories. And I really loved that quote. I really loved what you said there and from the outside it, it feels like as if your main mission in life has been to [00:59:00] chase after and create these stories, it seems, and I wanted to ask like, do you think there is a sacrifice that you have had to make to chase and create these stories?

And what would you say are these sacrifices you've had to make for surfing?

Sam: I wouldn't have thought about it actually. I haven't thought about it this way till recently because I. I've been married a number of times.

Tyler: Do you mind if I ask How many, by the way,

Sam: in America,

Tyler: globally, let's go globally, but in America, four.

Yeah.

Sam: Globally. Um, and three times, um, those wives surfed with me. Yeah. But because of that, maybe it, it, I don't, blinded me might be a too harsh a term, but it didn't, it, it made it to where I didn't really see that in all those relationships. [01:00:00] Try as I, as I might, and also try as hard as I could to include them in what I did.

Mm-hmm. I never gave them the feeling that they were the absolute most important thing in my life. Hmm. You know, I used to think that I did, I thought I did by, by including them and by sharing the surfing life with them. And I thought I did by, you know, by supporting them and whatever they did.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: But what I didn't realize it in, and once again, there's a chapter in my book that deals with this

Tyler: listeners.

Yeah. Don't forget to buy. Yeah. That's Y 800. Yeah,

Sam: that's right. DeAngelo publications.com. Uh, but what I, I really didn't realize till only recently was how that may have been, the reason why I had multiple marriages is because. I, they, they never completely thought that they would ever take the place in me, that, that, that they would never be [01:01:00] the absolute most important thing in my life.

And I deeply regret that. You know? So that was one of the sacrifices, I guess you could say. But it wasn't a sacrifice 'cause I wasn't consciously making it. No. A sacrifice has to be something you give up for something else. I never gave up anything, you know, I lived exactly the way I wanted to live. And, and if it meant, you know, if it meant, for example, when my, when my ex-wife, Caroline, when she wanted to move from San Clemente to Oakland to go to grad school, okay, let's go, you know, I love the Bay Area.

I'll, I'll, mm-hmm. I'll, as long as I can ride my bike to the beach, I'll be fine. Uh, that was a sacrifice I chose to make. But, so what a, a, a deeper thing, A deeper, I don't know, liability to that totally immersed surfing life was not being able to make them feel like I was, like they were the most important thing in my life.

Tyler: It's interesting because I, it's something I think a lot of us, especially people, no, I think [01:02:00] a lot of surfers deal with this conflict. I've always wanted to do a book or, uh, a movie or something about, uh, how you balance your passion and the people you love, because I find that to be a real tension. And it's been a tension in my life.

Like. My wife always, uh, had viewed surfing as my mistress. Or she would always comment like, oh, you love surfing more than me. You know? And, and it took me years before I could say, no, I love you more than surfing, honestly. Like, and this is, I'm embarrassed and ashamed almost in some ways that it took me a while to really commit to that.

Like it was always surfing is still, yeah. Still had some hold over me and then it took a lot of incidences and a lot of, uh, work to understand that nah, like surfing's great, but she is everything to me. Yeah. And I, it took a while to do that and it [01:03:00] took a lot of work and it's really hard to balance those two because, especially surfing, because it's, and here in New York where you have to drop everything 'cause you can miss it within an hour.

'cause that wind switches so fast. Yeah. And it's tied fuck shit up. And, you know, I've lost numerous girlfriends because of that and, and, and I've pissed off numerous friends and business opportunities because of that. Um, it is funny. Like that is a very difficult tension to, to hold.

Sam: I think. I, no, it is, you know, my, my, my partner, I came to that awareness about 10 years ago, which has led me to beginning a, a new relationship.

Well, not new now, it's about, yeah. Eight or nine years, but with a wonderful woman and I could present myself better and more honestly. Yeah. Now it, I would say it helps that she's a hardcore surfer herself. You know, who, who learned as an adult. So she's only 15 years into her surfing path. [01:04:00] Yeah. I'm 58 into mine, but I'm better, I'm better prepared to show up for her.

Yeah. I'm better. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just, I'm better equipped to be there for her and to let her know that I'm there for her no matter what. One of the things that works out, and the reason why it works for us is because we surfed separate surf spots. Mm-hmm. Okay. Where we live, there's a number of surf spots in West Malibu.

I surf one of them. Yeah. She has her spot. I don't surf her spot. She doesn't surf my spot. It's close enough to where I could literally wave at her.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: But, and occasionally I'll paddle up and sit and watch her surf and hoot at her. Then I paddle back to my surf spot. I think that's why it works so well between us.

You know?

Tyler: See, I felt, it's funny, like my wife doesn't surf. Yeah. She doesn't even swim. Yeah. And she, I love her be in one way. What she does is she puts surfing in perspective for me sometimes because she doesn't surf. She kind of [01:05:00] like, looks at me as ridiculous sometimes when it comes to surfing or when I get really excited if I'm like, I remember like getting all excited meeting Kelly Slater and she'd just be like.

He's just a fucking guy. Like he's short, he's five seven. Like, come on, like you're way better looking. You know, like it was for her, she was not impressed. And I would, you know, put so many surfers, particularly on a pedestal and hero worship, and she would knock them down in front of me. And it was the best thing though because it, it allowed me not to take surfing as seriously in some ways.

Yeah. And it pushed me to develop a balance, I think. And I think that kind of helped too for some surfers.

Sam: Well, you know, the key, the key to, the key to really making surfing work in your life is to share,

Tyler: yeah.

Sam: Is to share it. Um, it sounds kind of simple, but just sharing a surf session, even with strangers, [01:06:00] it lets you, it sort of lets you put surfing in perspective, but not in an, like, it doesn't have to be an adversarial thing.

No.

Sam: But if you can really integrate, sharing, surfing it, it really changes how you feel about it. But it also can change the relationship you have with others. Yeah. Because it doesn't become that selfish thing that separates you from other people because you're giving it, you're giving that away, you're giving it, you're sharing it.

Um, you know, one time I got called when I was the editor surfer, and. A magazine in a, it was in Australia and they were doing a story where they were asking people what was the great, what was your greatest ride? Mm-hmm. It was the best ride you ever had. And I thought about it and I said, you know, the greatest ride I ever had when I was working at Surfer, we had this wonderful publisher named court over.

Mm-hmm. And literally on a four day weekend, he suddenly died. [01:07:00] He, he died of a, a, a respiratory illness, I think. And it was really shocking to all of us. Well, they had a gathering on the beach in San Clemente where we all gathered and they were gonna paddle out, scatter his ashes. And so I went down and I brought my tandem board because I thought, well, someone might not have a board and wanna go out and participate.

So it was at T Street in San Clemente, which was his favorite surf spot. And I'm gonna finish this story and I want you to make sure I'm not telling this in any sort of self-aggrandizing way. No, no.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: So anyway, I'm getting ready to paddle out and court's wife and their pastor come over to me and they said, you know, Sam Court was just starting to teach our daughter how to surf and she's never ridden a wave and she would love to be able to go out there and sit in the circle with everyone when they scatter her dad's ashes.

Would you take her out? I said, of course I would. Of course, [01:08:00] she was about eight or nine. So she came over, got her on the board. Now T Street this day was, I call it three to five foot. Yeah, there were waves. Yeah. And T Street, which is one of the worst surf spots in the world. It caps over kind of peels, and then it, it can kind of pound in the shore break.

Mm-hmm. So I waited and waited and waited. 'cause the last thing I wanted with all these people were gathered on the beach getting ready to come out. The last thing I wanted was to get her blasted in the shore break. So I get out, I get out to the peak and there's a bunch of guys out there surfing and they're looking in the beach.

I said, guys, this is a memorial for our friend court. This is his daughter. Uh, and I said, you know, I said to her, you know how important surfing was to your dad? And she said, yeah, no, I know. I said, do you wanna feel that? Do you wanna feel what your dad felt when he rode waves? And she goes, oh yeah. So I said, Hey guys, this is his daughter.

Will you gimme the next set that comes in? And they all said, [01:09:00] sure. So it came in and I did a lot of tandem surfing, so I was pretty confident. So we catch this great little four foot wave and we start trimming in. She stands up, I'm holding her, and she starts hooting. Mm-hmm. So I was thinking about that.

It's her dad's funeral and she's hooting. She's having this moment of joy sharing what her father loved, you know, and I got carried away with the experience. So I did one turn. Did another turn. Did another turn, and then, oh my God, I'm in the shore break on a 12 foot board, and she's on the front. I got a hand on a wetsuit.

The wave starts to dump. I'm just going, oh my God, in front of all these people, straightened out, straighten out. I, I had to straighten out. I straightened out. I kept the nose up, but the whitewater exploded behind me and shot me off to the left. So I counter banked to try to keep it from going over, and she flew off the [01:10:00] board, but I had her by the wetsuit.

So I swung her back. She hit the rail of the board and straightened it out.

Tyler: Wow.

Sam: I got her back and we rode up onto the beach and then she ran up into her mother's arms. Everyone was cheering and my heart, I was horrified. I walked up the beach over as far away as I could get, and my good friend, bill Sharp, you know, bill Sharp, legendary Bill Sharp, he comes up and he goes, Sam, I've seen you surf all over the world.

That was the greatest exhibition of your surfing skill I have ever seen that you did not kill that girl in the shore break. And I'm making fun of it. But the point was, and that's why I said, guys, how could that not be the greatest ride of my life that I gave that little girl a moment of joy? At her father's funeral.

And you know what the Ozzy said, ah, fuck Sam. Of course, of course. That's what he got from you forget it. They didn't want to know that they wanted to talk about AKA with Tom Curran or something. They didn't wanna know about it. Love. But I said, you what? How could that not be my greatest [01:11:00] ride? So that's what I mean, sharing it in any way you can is the important, the most important thing.

And I guess I've always felt that way. Why else would I have gone into working for the surf magazines instead of working for Quicksilver?

Tyler: It's interesting, like when you speak of sharing, like, uh, you know, I grew up with an older brother, uh, much like your younger brother grew up with you and uh, and he definitely influenced me to start surfing.

And, uh, it was the relationship we built off surfing that really shaped my perception of what it is. And I was then curious, like how crucial was your relationship with your brother Matt, and how you guys shared surfing together, and what was that dynamic like?

Sam: It was kind of interesting 'cause when we moved to California, you know, I was, I turned 14 that summer, so Matt was like 12.

Mm-hmm. And surfing was really hard, you know, like I said, taking the bus, [01:12:00] you know, surfing Ocean Beach. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, I mean we surfed Santa Cruz, we surfed all those spots. It wasn't easy. So Matt basically took a hiatus. He probably didn't surf for like. Four years of really formative years.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: I eventually ended up going to college in San Luis Obispo, which is on California Central Coast.

Yeah. And Matt eventually moved down with me and we lived together and that's when he started surfing in earnest. He was, he was such a good surfer. Yeah. I mean, he was so na, such a natural. Um, so for quite a few years there, you know, we experienced that surfing life together. Uh, but it wasn't, it never was like we weren't, people looked at us like the Salmon Match show.

Yeah. And it was in certain ways, right. It's how

Tyler: it looks from the outside. No, it's how look, and it was in

Sam: many ways, I mean, you know, we were sponsored and we, we traveled and you

Tyler: hustled together.

Sam: A lot of it. Yeah. We hustled together and, you know, then we, we, like, we used to commentate surf contests together.

Mm-hmm. [01:13:00] So it was that way. But, but that, that period before we sort of, I don't wanna go say separate ways, but I moved down south and I started going to work at Surfing Magazine and Matt still lived in Santa Barbara and then he started working at, uh, writing for surfer. And so we were sort of intrinsically linked, but we didn't spend every day together surfing together.

I mean, we shared a lot of amazing surfing experience together over the years. But, you know, we sort of had our own parallel paths.

Tyler: Hmm.

Sam: And it was kind of great that way because it meant that we never were competitive with each other. We never felt it for a second.

Tyler: Not even when you were at surfing, he was at surfer.

No, we loved it. You guys didn't do pranks on each other? No, never.

Sam: We we're, we're not the pranking types. Well, but yeah. But you didn't get coarsed by your,

Tyler: your coworkers like No, no, we didn't. I always hear the stories of like, all the pranks between the two magazines. No, there were those pranks, but I didn't, I didn't,

Sam: I didn't, uh, I didn't partake in any of those.

No. Matt and I never felt competitive because we were totally different.

Tyler: Yeah. You

Sam: know, we, we, [01:14:00] we, we had a totally different approach, his writing style, the kind of stories he did. Yeah. I could have never done what he did, you know, never, you know, he, he, when you look at the contents and the stories in his book, which is like 35 years of his published work, like I said, in, he was embedded long before the term was invented.

Mm-hmm. I mean, he did things, and especially the profiles that he would write, I would, I could never have done those because, you know, deep down, I will say that's the reason why I never could say I call myself a journalist, because deep down, to be honest, I felt I was way more interesting than any of the people I would talk to or write about.

So I just thought, you know, where Matt, you know, he, he really got into it with people. Yeah. Really intimate. And in some ca times, it, it was to his detriment afterwards because they shared such intimate parts of their life with him knowing he was doing a story about them. Yeah. And then they'd, he'd run it and write it, [01:15:00] and then they'd get upset, like, well, I didn't know you were gonna say that, dude.

He goes, you, you knew what I was doing. So, because we had different styles, and plus also I did a lot of editorial work, like Yeah. You know, I, I wrote captions and I wrote titles and subtitles, and I wrote ad copy and I edited other people's articles. Matthew was just a journalist writing his stories. So we were, we had a, we had different paths.

They were parallel, but they never crossed. We, we were never competitive.

Tyler: Were you guy, would you describe your relationship as really close though? As brothers? Oh yeah. No, of course. Yeah.

Sam: No, no. Very close. Incredibly close. How important? Sometimes too close. Especially as an older brother, I mean, you're a younger brother.

Tyler: Yes.

Sam: When you're a, when you're an older brother, sometimes having your younger brother look up to you, it can be a burden.

Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. It can

Sam: be a burden sometimes.

Tyler: Do you think he was really looking up to you a lot? I do. Yeah. No, I

Sam: do. I do. You know, uh, how did you

Tyler: handle that pressure

Sam: then? I, I, I guess I just sort of, I sort of [01:16:00] shrugged it off.

There were a few times when I had to, you know, say, look, Matt, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm too, we're too close in age for me to be a father figure here. You and I are, you know, are brothers here, you know, and yeah, we, we haven't always approved of all of our life choices and everything we've done, but we never, you know, there was never any resentment.

I mean, there's just the natural dynamic between brothers. What did you, because we had two step, we had two younger stepbrothers too that were very influential and big figures in our lives. And so Really? Yeah, we had that.

Tyler: I, I didn't know about the step younger stepbrothers. Yeah. We had stepbrothers. How, what's the age difference with them in the us?

Everyone

Sam: was about two and a half years younger than me. You know? Did they surf? They surf, but they weren't surfers. They could surf. Yeah. You know, but they weren't surfers per se. I mean, uh, both very interesting guys. And, uh, I mean, you know, we, they, they came into our lives when they were very young. My dad adopted them.

Tyler: Wow. Wow.

Sam: So, um, you know, he married their mother and then eventually adopted them. That marriage didn't last very long. My dad, my dad and I share a legacy there. [01:17:00] Uh, but yeah, Matt and I being, you know, having been there from the beginning Yeah, extremely close and still extremely close. I mean,

Tyler: what did you think when he, uh, decided to, uh, try out for the Navy seals?

I was,

Sam: that was more traumatic for me than for him. No, seriously. It was, it was. Listeners, I gotta

Tyler: give a little, can you give you our listeners a little context here about how that came about In

Sam: my, in my brother's early thirties and he was incredibly accomplished as a writer. Yeah. He was a model. He was Mr.

Lagerfeld, he was a photographer

Tyler: and a great narrator. By the way. His a good narrator is awesome,

Sam: but in this pointless attempt to win the approval of my father, he who served in the Navy his whole life. Mm-hmm. He was an aviator during World War ii. In the latter years, latter part of the war there. He decides he wants to become a Navy seal, you know, in his thirties, which that doesn't happen.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Somehow he got [01:18:00] an exemption to try out trying out. Yeah. You don't just try out for the Navy field. Of course. Yeah. First you have to join the Navy.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Then you have to try out, to try out.

Tyler: Right.

Sam: Uh, he got an exemption. My father's best friend actually was, uh, he eventually became the undersecretary of the Navy.

So he had a little pull and at the time he was the CO of, uh, you know, the Coronado Naval Air Base. So Matt decides he's gonna try out to try out to be a Navy seal. Uh, it was so bewildering. Uh, I think it was way more traumatic for me than for him.

Tyler: Do you think he was trying to prove something to dad? Of course he was.

Sam: Totally. And my dad did. My dad honestly didn't understand it. He didn't care. Like, why the hell do I care what he does? You know, how's that? But no, Matt was trying to prove something. But to his credit. Immediately he realized, okay, I can't do this. Yeah. You know, when he told me, he goes, they show you a movie of what Navy Seals do.

And he goes deep down I realized, I, I, I can't do that. This was a [01:19:00] mistake, you know? Um, he did well though. He tried out. He, he got past one of the hurdles. Uh, he did really well in the physical.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Um, he told me this story. They do this thing, it's a way that they cut down 50% of the tryouts. They have you swim across a pool and the last person that gets across each time is kicked out.

Tyler: Oh, he crushed that.

Sam: Well, no, here's how he did it, because he, you know, grew up in the water while everyone else is fighting and wrestling. Matt just waited, let him go, took a deep breath, swam along the bottom, came up on the other side. Never, no one ever touched him. And they had a hand on him and they said, good initiative, son.

Good initiative, you know. But, uh, when it came to getting shot out, a torpedoes up onto a beach or halo, parachute drops, you know, high altitude, low opening, he just went, no, that's not gonna be me. And luckily you wanna talk about mythology? Yeah. Apparently a broken ankle doing a skateboard demonstration in the seventies.[01:20:00]

Let him get out of serving his four years as a swee. Wow. Wow. Because they said, look, we, I know you tried to do something noble here, son, but you're 32 years old, you do not want four years, you know, swabbing as a swee. Yeah. We'll give you a discharge. So he basically got out after about six weeks. Oh,

perfect.

Sam: Yeah. So just enough to make him appreciate. Now how much, how much of that is myth? We'll never know because we weren't there. But I did put him on the bus at the recruiting station Wow. To send him off. So I know he joined the Navy. Uh, everything else might just be a myth.

Tyler: Are you saying your brother might have, uh, you know, kind of exaggerated?

Well, if he had e

Sam: here's the thing, if he had exaggerated, he would've made it, but chose not to. Right, right. You know? True. The fact that he got sent to like this detention squad, you know, because they have to immediately move you away so you don't infect people. Yes. That are actually gonna try out, they send him to some, you know, uh, you know, like, uh, basically [01:21:00] study hall until they skinny and potatoes until they, until they could ship him out.

Uh, yeah. That might be myth. But yeah, he joined the Navy and he tried out to try out to be a Navy Seal.

Tyler: Um, I wanted to talk about, uh, and you haven't talked about it in, in a lot of the podcasts, is your relationship to Tommy Kern, and I want to know like how you guys. Kind of came about and, and connected with him and what you saw in him to kind of help nurture.

Well, I what you, what you

Sam: really want is to find out why I surfed naked with him. No, I, I was leading to that, but I was, but I didn't wanna, I didn't wanna, you know, I figured you

might like Yeah,

Sam: no, but here's the thing. I, the only time I ever showed, I, I basically have had very little ambition in my life.

Yeah. Uh, I wasn't very ambitious, but the only time I was, when I decided I wanna surf Burleigh heads in Australia, that's all I wanted to surf. Um, I wanted to be, I wanted to be known as a surfer too, to be quite honest. Yeah. So, what I decided to do at a very late age, like 23, I decided I'm gonna join the Western Surfing [01:22:00] Association.

I'm gonna win, qualify and win, uh, to be able to go to the US championships. I'm gonna win the men's division. I'm gonna get sponsorship, and then I'm gonna be able to go to Australia and surf in the Australian surf contest. I came very, very close to making that. I ultimately, I did make it happen. Yeah. I came very close to winning the US championships, and I'm still pissed off about

Tyler: it.

You got screwed. I did. The guy dropped in on you in the outer banks, didn't it? And your west coast coast judges were, were, they weren't there, were missing, you know.

Sam: Yeah. Anyway, Tim Breyers was a good surfer. Don't begrudge anything, but I mean, come on. He dropped in on me twice. Um, but what I'm getting at is that surfing in the WSA that year, I met Tommy Curran.

I also met Willie Morris, another fan, one of my best friends. Fantastic California surfer. Mm-hmm. Willie was in the juniors, Tommy was in the boys division. And I met Tommy and his family, his, his mom, Janine, and his, uh, you know. His sister Anna and, uh, his brother Joe. And I'm sure you

Tyler: knew about his dad. Oh yeah, I

Sam: knew, I've known about his dad.

Uh, I think I'd read one little blurb about [01:23:00] Tommy in the, in the magazines about being a promising In the boys division. Yeah. And there was just something about meeting him and his family. Uh, there was a certain poignancy in, in that family that so much energy was focused on Tommy. Wow. And when I eventually moved from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara to work in a surf shop, then we were, I was living just down the street and Tommy, I had a car.

Matt had a car, and, uh, Tommy didn't, his mom took him everywhere to surf. Yeah. She was an ultra dedicated surf mom, almost fanatical. Wow. Wonderful woman. But really fanatical about getting Tommy to the surf. So we basically started taking Tommy surfing and then, uh, sort of a relationship sort of built up, you know, maybe we were like older brothers.

Mm-hmm. Uh, maybe in some ways we took the place of his father, who by that time was absent. [01:24:00] Um, Tommy was brilliant. Uh, he was brilliant in ways that most people had no idea of, had any idea how brilliant he was in certain areas, uh, musically, creatively savant, you know? Yes. In many ways. And. We actually got to be friends, dear friends in that way, even though I was so much older than him.

And we for a few years there, you know, we would take him surfing. Uh, and so we were a big part of his surfing life. And there's been times in interviews where he said that, you know, my brother and I were both his first sponsors, you know, 'cause we'd feed him on the way. Yeah. Uh, and so then when he started his ascent, by that time we were working at the magazines.

I was working for Surfing Matt for surfer, and we had the Tom Ke connection.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Uh, did we take advantage of it? Sometimes? Maybe a little. You know, Matthew? Matt, Matt did [01:25:00] the first big major profile in Tommy and shot this wonderful portrait of him and, uh, and

Tyler: amazing surf stories. It was in,

Sam: well, there was all that.

Yeah. Yeah. That came a little bit later. So. Yeah. But Tommy, we, we, we developed that relationship and it was pretty remarkable. Uh, and it, it, it carried on for, you know, many, many years. Um, we got to be really close with his first wife Marie. Mm-hmm. We traveled on, you know, on tour together. Yeah. When I'd be covering the tour or Matt would be covering the tour.

Uh, surfed a lot. I mean, you wanna talk about having a governor on your ego. Try traveling the world with Tom Curran. And later, Dave Parman are also one of the best surfers in the world. Those were the guys that I chose to travel and, you know, run with two of the best surfers in the world. You wanna just talk about feeling inadequately damn.

Every, every situation. But yeah, we, we, we developed a pretty close relationship that there was a time when we sort of didn't see all that much [01:26:00] of each other, but then he knew that all he had to do was call me.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: I got a call one day. He said, Hey, Sam. I go, Hey Tom, how you doing? What's up? He goes, no, nothing.

He goes, so how's the surf? And when, when Tom Kern says that, I go, is everything okay, Tom? What's up? What do you need? You know, what's going on? Yeah. How can I help? He goes, well, this was, he goes, uh, I'm, I'm getting married again. Mm-hmm. And I went, that's fantastic. You know, that's great. He goes, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm getting married and I'm getting married in, in Panama.

And I said, wow, that's, well, okay. That's, that's fantastic. He goes, well, I was wondering if, you know, maybe I'd like to ask you to be the best man.

Tyler: Oh.

Sam: And I went, oh, Tommy, I'm honored. I go, of course I will. I'll be there no matter what. I go, you know, of course. You're like, when's the wedding? When's the wedding?

He goes, it's Friday. I went, Tom, it's Wednesday. So off I went to LAX the next day. You know, so that [01:27:00] sort of showed, you know, that we had a re, we had a, we had a relationship like that and we, you know, we both. You know, went, kind of went separate ways in, uh, in more recent years. But I think he knows that if he ever needed something from me, all he has to do is call.

He's, and I've seen some of the best surfing in the world Absolutely. Firsthand, you know, close up.

Tyler: I, he's one of this, one of the people, like, they always say, not to meet your heroes. He's one of the few that I've met who I've just thought was, he lived up to it. You know, he lived up to it. Like, my expectations of him and how polite and, and even, and unapproachable.

Well, you know, kind of, I, I mean, I was really fortunate to do a, a live interview with him and Sonny Miller. Mm-hmm. And thank God I had Sonny, you know, to help grease the wheels a little bit. But his wit is just so on point. Oh no, he's, [01:28:00] he's really, he's, he's so sharp. Yeah. But I, it's just, he's, you know, some of the, you know, there are some surfers who I've been disappointed with over the years, disappointed with certain stances, the way they speak or how they behave.

He has not disappointed at all. He's always been kind of true to surfing and everything, and, and just he's, yeah. He lives up to, to my expectations of what he should be. No, no, he's,

Sam: yeah, he's, he's, he's an amazing, he's an amazing human being when you really think about it, you know?

Tyler: So, but there's this scene.

Sarge is surfing scrapbook five, I believe, and I'm about to nerd out.

Sam: Okay. Yeah. 'cause you, you've, you'll, you beat me with that. So Sarge never liked me.

Tyler: Well there's a lot of, a lot of things about Sarge we, we don't need to go into, but, um, but there's this one scene where you're in France and Tommy's in France, and it's one of the most hilarious commentary you're giving in the background.

And it's on [01:29:00] Kern riding his rick twin fin in very average beach break against Matt Hoy. Yeah,

Sam: no, I didn't.

Tyler: And he destroys him. But you were giving this great commentary and I was hoping you could satiate this, this need that I have of, what's the backstory there? What was going on? 'cause that is like one of my favorite Tom Kern stories.

It is, it's

Sam: pretty interesting. At, at the time I was writing these boards made by Dave Parmenter, which were ultra progressive, what we would now call mid lengths.

Tyler: The stub, the, the stub Vector. Yeah.

Sam: And they were fantastic. And they were, you know, now mid lengths are the thing.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: None of them have come close to what the Stu Vector was like all of 25 years ago.

Yeah. 27 years ago. So that year I had gone to France. I was gonna do some story about the pro tour or something. I brought my vector and Tommy was fascinated by it. And even though I was like 30 pounds heavier than him, he ripped on the thing of, of course he ripped on everything. Yeah. So he ripped on the board.

He was [01:30:00] going through a, he was a little disenchanted with competitive surfing at the time. Mm-hmm. And he had bought, he had recently been on the east coast in New Jersey. I'm pretty sure it was New Jersey. Yep.

Tyler: He was New Jersey. Right. And he

Sam: bought this rick twin fin made in 1970. They were horrible boards.

There's like five, four, had a huge transo tail with two big fins on the rail. They were horrible boards and they surfed horribly. But they were a step that needed to be taken back. Then they led to, you know, Mark Richards?

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: It led to the fish, which led to Mark Richards twin fin, which led to the thruster.

Yeah. So they were an important but horrible piece. Yeah. Yeah. So he bought this, this horrible Rick and he just had it with him. And I remember we were sitting there and I think it was Kinau was where the contest was. Yeah. And we were, he's getting ready to surf in the contest. And, and Tommy would always go like this.

Um, um, you know, uh, I think, [01:31:00] I think I wanna ride that Rick in my heat. I just went, what? He goes, yeah, I think I wanna ride it. I went, seriously? He goes, yeah, I really do. I go, okay. I go, but you know that the, that you can't let the judges know that till you're in the water. 'cause if they see you carrying it, they'll either stop you from riding it.

Wow. Because back then there was a rule you couldn't ride a board that made surfing easier. Yeah. Like you couldn't ride a, a. A long water, like a wider, flatter board that worked good in beach break.

Tyler: Yeah,

Sam: because it gave you too much of an advantage. No, honestly, that's

Tyler: so funny.

Sam: I go, if they see you, they'll know you're mocking them.

And so, okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get down there early, we're gonna cover the rick with a towel down by where you paddle out. And then when your heat's called, I'm gonna carry your two channel islands down. I'm gonna stick 'em in the sand. But when they call your heat to go out, whew, take the towel off and you'll paddle out on the rick.

Okay? So we pull that [01:32:00] off and he paddles out and Matt Hoy is looking, I'm going, what is he doing? What's going on here? Tommy takes off on the first wave, super smooth on this thing. Pumps down the line, does this great little snap at the end and straightens off. And Matt Hoy said, fuck that. Uh, it's, it's over.

He, he, he crushed him. Psychologically there was nothing he could do. Tommy rode like three waves and decisively won on the horrible Rick twin fin. Um. So it was pretty

Tyler: And he swapped boards with him at the end. No. Yeah. Yeah. I know, of course. 'cause Matt Hoy said, why not?

Sam: You had

Tyler: me at totally psyched him out.

You had me

Sam: at Rick. You know, so totally psyched him out. But one thing though, it was the pebble dropped in the pond that caused the ripple that had surfers start looking at what they call alternative Yeah. Boards. And Tommy did it again on the fireball fish.

Tyler: Mm-hmm.

Sam: In pumping waves in Sumatra. And

Tyler: then the skip fry, the

Sam: same thing he it.

But that rick twin fin, well actually [01:33:00] stuff Vector rick, twin fin. The rick twin fin really was that pebble that made people think, God, maybe I'll ride another board just for a new feeling. You know,

Tyler: we, we owe great debt to him because otherwise we'd probably all be still on glass slippers right now. No, no, we

Sam: wouldn't have, 'cause like I said earlier in this exhaustive podcast, surfing knew what it wanted the whole time.

It was, it wanted long boards, it wanted soft tops, it wanted wave storms and it wanted mid lengths. That's what it wanted. You know, those competitive boards. You know, here's a funny thing, here's a funny thing. Dave Parmenter, who was a really influential shaper. Yeah. As well as being, yeah. Once he was 14 in the, in the ratings, he would make conventional thrusters.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: But along the stringer, he would write the dimensions and then he'd write NCS and then Dave Parmer and a lot of surfers couldn't figure out what NCS was that the blank title? Was that the blank name? They couldn't figure out what. What, uh, what NCS [01:34:00] meant? It meant nervous, chaotic surfboard. Yeah.

Because in an interview with Mickey Dora, one time, they were asking him about what he felt about contemporary surfing and in the Mickey doorway, he goes, I'm not so impressed with this nervous, chaotic surfing that's going on. And we, Dave just thought that was so great.

Tyler: Best.

Sam: Yeah. That he wrote down on the stringers though, those boards NCS.

So when he'd say, oh yeah, I got a load of NCS to bring down to the Glasser. Those were nervous, chaotic surfboards. We wouldn't have stayed on 'em very

Tyler: long. So I want to, uh, I brought some magazines in and there's this one, uh, you know, that has, and it's based, and you did like a series of these for Surfing Magazine.

Yeah. In the mid to late eighties. Um, this one is, you guys went to Costa Rica with Scott Farnsworth and Maddie Lou. Yeah. But the one I really wanted to kind of press you on was, there was another one you did to the Dr. With Laird Hamilton or the [01:35:00] Caribbean? No, you went to Trinidad. We went to, we went

Sam: Togo, we went, we went to a bunch of the different ads.

Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. And you first like, were these like the first advertorials?

Sam: No, there were advertorials in Surfer Magazine and Surfing Magazine in the sixties. True. It, it wa it was, no, it was no new thing,

Tyler: but it, it felt fresh and like, well,

Sam: because we disguised it more like, okay. It was way more disguised. You got Sam Safari here, right?

Yeah. Sorry. Here's, here's what's hilarious. Yeah.

Tyler: There we go.

Sam: Sam Safari. I think it at the end, I think. Yeah, I think so. Sorry. You don't even, you don't even know how all over that issue. I'm, I know. You don't even know I wrote half that whole issue, but, okay.

Tyler: Here's some safari. Okay. Listeners. Uh, yeah, there we go.

For the camera. Yeah, well

Sam: get to the rodeo. Get to the rodeo part. Yeah, but here's the thing. This is why it seems so fresh, because of a brilliant art director and our, you know, an editor and my contribution. There we go. Yeah. Between that we did this advertorial and we disguised it as a travel feature [01:36:00] and it won an award for travel writing.

What? Yeah, it won a, a Maggie, I think for travel writing when it was an advertorial article. That's hilarious. 'cause it's a great

Tyler: article. It it is, yeah. It's a great travel story. And it's also like, I love the Rauschenberg collage esque vibe to it. You know, it's, no, Dwight Smith was brilliant. It, it, it's so great.

Like all the brick or brack that you have in years, we worked hard on. That is so cool.

Sam: Yeah.

Tyler: Um,

Sam: it's, and there's. Getting back to the book. There's a really engaging chapter in the book about the rodeo, uh, segment of that.

Tyler: But I wanna know what it was like doing something like this with Laird before he was Laird.

Sam: Well, no, he was just becoming Laird at the time. Yeah. We did it. We did one of these advertorials where with a talented young Californian.

Tyler: Casey Curtis. Casey

Sam: Curtis, Danny Majado from Florida. Yeah. And his Laird ness. We went to the Caribbeans and it was, it was pretty amazing because he was just [01:37:00] becoming his Laird ness.

'cause he was just starting to bulk up and work out for his eventual role in North Shore.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: And uh, and he was, and I had met him once before when he was a little bit younger. Uh, but this is the first time we traveled together. Uh, and I was really impressed with him in many ways. Laird is, is is he's way smarter than he gets.

People give him credit for. Oh,

Tyler: he's super smart. Oh, he's very smart. Absolutely unschooled

Sam: because of going, growing up on Kauai. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but very smart, very sharp, uh, very accomplished in other areas. But he, he was so intensely masculine that it was almost hard to be around him. It's like, well, I, I, there there's a, there's an analogy from a Star Trek episode in the, in the sixties, but I, I can't go into it, it's too long.

But basically I'll winnow it down to the fact that just like pure oxygen is, is can be deadly. Mm-hmm. Pure masculinity without [01:38:00] any feminine side to it, can also be just as deadly to be around. Yeah. And layered at the time was just pure masculinity. Wow. You know, I mean, he wouldn't even let us carry our board bags to these little planes.

He had to carry them all. You like, no, I got 'em. You know, he had to carry them all. He named his biceps Pete and repeat. Okay. Like he was, he was relentlessly masculine. But at the same time, he showed the most incredible restraint that I can imagine. Even his little Danny Mel Haddo showed the most incredible bravado I've ever seen in surfing.

I don't know what it is about Floridian surfers, but all of them I know they protect their food. They hoard their food. They're protective of it. I don't know what it is. Is there a lack of food in Florida? But all of them that I knew would eat with their, like this. Danny Mojado was that way completely. He didn't want anybody coming near his plate.

He ate, like, tried to eat in secret. So anyway, we're having [01:39:00] this great session in Tobago. There's a little. You know, canteen on the beach. Danny Majado had got in early so he could get his chicken and rice down before anyone else could see it. So we're all there. He's hoarding his food. Laird comes walking by and just reaches on the plate, takes the chicken leg off the plate and just tears into it.

Danny Mal Majado looks at that. The, the rage in him is uncontrollable. He turns in his chair and he punches Laird.

Tyler: No. Yeah, he punched it. Shut up. Yeah, he punched him. He punched, yeah. And he's like a kid. He's a teenager. No, he's a teenager

Sam: and he probably weighed about 120. Laird at the time. Probably weighed 2 10, 6 2.

He punches Laird, and we all just went, oh my God. That's the greatest thing. Laird, of course, didn't hurt Laird. Yeah. But it shocked him. And lad grabbed him by the throat and I thought, oh my God, is he gonna, if he hits him, it's gonna, and of course, the article. And he, he just [01:40:00] grabbed him by the throat

Tyler: force, choked

Sam: him.

No, just held him. Didn't lift him off the ground. Yeah. Which I wish he would've. He just held him for one terrible moment, and then he just drops it and starts laughing and moves on. And, and Danny had a little, Dan, we just thought that was the bravest thing I've ever seen is a Dan Majado. Punch Laird Hamilton and Laird Hamilton did not punch him back.

He

Tyler: Wow. Showed that kind of restraint. Dude, that's one of the best stories

Sam: ever heard. You don't mess with an East coast, surfer's fried

Tyler: chicken. Doesn't matter if you're fucking Laird. No, not Laird. Doesn't matter. You don't mess with their chicken. This is my super food, Brad. No, I, I'm, you know, this is my super food.

Yeah, no, I know that. This is my creamer. Yeah.

Sam: I don't know if, I'm sure. Oh, there's a picture of it in the article. Yeah. We recreated it. No, because we could laugh about it afterwards. We recreated it. Yeah. If you had that issue, you'd read about it. But,

Tyler: so I wanna ask, um, you've been someone who's been surfing [01:41:00] for about 50 years, would you say?

58 years. 58 years. And you've gone through the meek grinder of the surf industry. And what I find absolutely amazing and compelling about you, and almost annoying too, to to be honest, is that you've re, you've remained relatively un jaded about surfing. And there's so many people. I grew up in the surf industry.

My family owns a surf shop, and so I always go to the shows and everyone is so fucking jaded about surfing. And you are not. And you are, you know, just constant optimism, constant positivity, and it, and it's something to strive for, which I really appreciate. And I wanna know, like first, like. What's the secret?

What has kept you positive and not being able to, not giving into some of those less or worse impulses to get [01:42:00] jaded?

Sam: Well, first of all, I, I think I would clarify, I never went through the grinder of the surf industry. All

Tyler: I've done, you are an editor of Surfer Magazine. You're getting, all I

Sam: did was tell surf stories,

Tyler: but you're hearing from advertisers, you're hearing stuff.

Sam: No, I'm not uhhuh. I made sure that I didn't No, seriously. I remember one time they asked me, well, you know, how do you, what, what's your relationship like with, you know, the, you know, with with, you know, Bob McKnight and, and, uh, you know,

Tyler: Ong and all of those? Yeah. No. And all the guys, you know? Yeah. And Gordon Merchant and all that talks that, yeah.

You

Sam: know, what, what's your, how much does that influence your editorial? I said, well, look, I remember one time I was in Laguna Beach and I was on the corner there by Main Street, and I was waiting to cross and a range and a a like a BMW pulled up and I looked over there and it was Bob Ignite. Yeah. And I, I sort of raised my hand.

I said, hi Bob. And he looked at me and he said, hi. And he drove on. I go, that's the only time I've ever interacted with Bob Ignite my entire career at the magazines. Wow. I never talked to them.

Tyler: [01:43:00] That's why no

Sam: one ever told me. I, I never did. All I did was do was tell stories. Um, so I think that of course, I didn't make any money, but that didn't matter.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Um. For example, when a, when a New Corp, you know, 'cause Surfer Magazine was owned by a corporation long before I went to work. There many

Tyler: different ones. It's well before

Sam: it was, yeah. It was called Better Living or something, and then it started Changing Hands. And I remember someone, orange County Register, Peterson, Matt, no.

Peterson and all

Tyler: of that. Well, that was Surfing Magazine. Yeah. Surfer Peterson. Bought surfer though too at one, or No, I thought Peterson did surfer well, no,

Sam: Peterson

Tyler: publishing at one point. Maybe

Sam: later. Yeah. In

Tyler: the nineties. Late nineties I thought

Sam: maybe May, maybe.

Tyler: Ah. But

Sam: anyway, when, I remember when I was working and they called me up, they're doing an article on the media and, and, uh, the Orange County Register or something.

They said, well, how, talk about what it's like now that you have a, you know, new corporate people and how does that affect your editorial decisions and all of this. And I said, you know what? I, it doesn't affect me in the slightest. I go, I don't care [01:44:00] who owns the holds, the pink slip. Mm-hmm. As long as I get to drive.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: I said, and that's, that's how it is. I don't, how do I come up with my editorial ideas? I go, I get up and I ride my bike to work. I ride along the coast, I ride into Capo Beach. I come in, I say hello to the team. Mm-hmm. I sit down and, and, and, or I said even before then, as I'm riding my bike, I look out at the water, I look at the waves as I'm riding by and I think to myself, Hmm.

I go, that's it.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: That's it. That's, that's how I come up with my ideas. I don't, no one tells me. So I never felt that pressure. Mm-hmm. Now, the advertising managers did, and the publisher did, but I was completely irresponsible at one point. When I was editor of Surfer, I had this fantastic managing editor named Ross Garrett, who's currently the CEO of Surfline.

He was fantastic.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Really good at accounting, uh, organization, all of that. I don't, I hadn't been there that long. And I went to the publishers. I said, look, I [01:45:00] want you to take a portion of my income and give it to Ross. Wow. And I'll do that. If I never have to know what a monthly actual is, I don't even wanna know.

I go, and if we can work that out, I'll be happy here, and I can, and I, and I'll stay and do the, I can do the work here. And that's what I did. And he balanced the budget. He was fantastic. So I could focus on storytelling. So I never, it was never a grinder the whole time. I've worked in this, you know, the magazine business and the documentary films, working with Stacey Proton, the Brilliant Stacey Proton, I will say, riding Giants.

That was his movie. Yeah. I worked on it with him. I, you know, all the movies I've worked on with him.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Uh, well, the, uh, I directed the, uh, ESPN's Hawaiian, the Legend of Video AI Cow. But working with the Brilliant Stacey Peralta, not one single day in all those years did I ever feel like I was going to work.

Tyler: But how do you, I mean, I think [01:46:00] even like all of us who grew up surfing, many of us have gotten jaded over time. You know, you new surfers come in and new trends and all these things. Like how do you keep yourself from falling into the trap of many surfers where they look back on the old days and complain about the new and Yeah.

What is that mindset?

Sam: Two things and, and these just off the top of my head, I could probably go deep into it, but I'll be, these are two of the things on the surface riding every kind of surfboard that's ever been made. Mm-hmm. And surfing in every possible way that you can surf, not limiting yourself in your perception of what surfing is.

And the two is staying in shape.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know what, what, what happens to a lot of surfers as they get older, that if they're undisciplined, they start getting outta shape, they can't paddle as well. Competitive, you know, having to compete for waves gets harder. Uh, they feel their skills.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, and the thing about it is, is [01:47:00] that evolving doesn't mean hanging on.

To what you thought you did well when you were 25. I know guys, that their course of, their whole thing of pride is I'm 65 years old and I still ride a five 11 and I just go, that's great. You ride it horribly and you catch a 10th of the waves you should be riding great. You still ride it, but you surf it horribly.

Mm-hmm. You're, you're, you don't even surf it the way a thruster is meant to be surfed, but they, they're hanging on and they think that that somehow means that the surfing, that they're as relevant as they were when they were younger, when in fact evolution is what is really what counts. And whether that means riding a mid-length

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: Or whether it means riding a standup. Right. Or whether it means surfing in a canoe.

Tyler: Mm-hmm.

Sam: You know, it, it's evolution and you just, you maintain that level of, of, of, of appreciation and satisfaction and you don't get that [01:48:00] feeling of that your best years were behind you. Yeah. I think that's probably one of the things is thinking your best years are behind me.

'cause I'll tell you this much, the surf has always been crowded.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You, I just did an article about it for the inertia. How old do you have to be to remember uncrowded surf And then, you know what it was? It was 71.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: If you're younger than 71, you don't remember what it was like uncrowded. Mm-hmm.

1974, my friend Jeff Chamber and I standing on the bluff at Steamer Lane from the point to the inside of the indicator not even taking into consideration cows. The beginner break. Yeah. 200 guys out. 1974, you know? Yeah. I mean, Kaiser's, when I surfed it in 68, if there were four guys out, you couldn't surf there.

It was too crowded, you know, you know. So the surf has always been crowded unless you traveled extensively or lived way in the north Yeah. Of both east and west coasts. Mm-hmm. And, uh, and, and remote areas in other countries, the surf has been crowded. So bitching about the crowds [01:49:00]Yeah. Don't tell me about it.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, you're not old enough to remember it. Uncrowded you think you did maybe because back then you were in, in the hierarchy Yeah. To where you may have got more waves. But the fact is, so I think it's that feeling of thinking that your best years are behind you. That really SAPs a lot of the joy.

Tyler: Have you ever been disenchanted with surfing in your life?

Sam: Well, here's the thing. There have been things about surfing that have disenchanted with me. The, the main primary one is asshole localism.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: You know, I've, I've had to fight against it my whole life up until just very recently. Um, that, that, that makes you just wanna go fucking surfers, you know? Come on.

You know, uh, that, that part, that, that's the depressing aspect of surfing, you know? Uh, and I, and I've had to experience a lot of it firsthand because I always moved around. And I was never of a place.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: I always [01:50:00] had to work my way into the lineup. And, and so I've experienced a lot about it. A lot of it.

And that part to me, that that takes something so beautiful and it ruins it. So yeah. That, that's, but you know, I made choices to never surf those places

Tyler: and luckily that sort of stuff has been fading out more and more. Yeah. It has, you know? Yeah. It has been there. It's

Sam: aging

Tyler: out in many ways, you know?

Yeah. It's

Sam: aging out. But, you know, I made, we made conscious choices, you know, on the central coast there's some of the, there's one of the best waves on the entire West coast full on asshole locals, and I just made a decision, I'm not surfing there. We, we, we migrated north and surfed, you know, rumble, uh, you know, inconsistent, you know, closed out beach break, but, or at least we could surf there.

Yeah. And not have to experience that. I made the choice to do that. And I'd say about 20 years ago, maybe even more, I decided, I made a conscious decision. I said, I'm not surfing anywhere that's contested. I'm not surfing any spot that that's contested, which rules out a lot of surf spots.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: I mean, I stopped, [01:51:00] stopped surfing the North Shore at least 20 years ago.

Oh yeah. Well, no, because it's can see that and some people though, some people still do it.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: But I just decided, no, I don't. I'm, I've had enough of that. I, I'm, I'm not surfing any contested breaks any, I'm never gonna surf a break ever again where someone resents my presence. Love that, you

Tyler: know? Yeah. I mean, I always just, and that

Sam: keeps you fresh and excited.

I always just

Tyler: go down the beach away from the crowds. Yeah. I'll surf a lesser wave just to, just to not feel that pressure, you know? Well, I can,

Sam: you know, I can say that after years of Rcon and Lower Trestles, ah, I surf two of the most hyper competitive surf spots in the world. Yeah. And I worked hard at it to work my way up the ladder.

But those spots weren't the spots. Well, there were locals there that, you know, would give you some crap, but it wasn't the same as, you know, like Oxnard or Wil not a Bay or Exactly, you know, cactus in, in South Australia. Oh, gosh. Anywhere on

Tyler: Kauai. You know, I mean, does bring me to this, I mean, uh, have you seen the Surfer yet?

Sam: No, I haven't. I'm curious. And I, I also, I don't want to

Tyler: Oh,

Sam: yeah, no, I don't want to. I, I, I've read [01:52:00] reviews of it. I don't like bizarre movies. Okay. I don't, I, I like, I like, I like stories like The Odyssey by Homer. Mm-hmm. They've got a very simple structure, challenge, solution outcome. That's, that's my template.

Those are the stories I like. I don't like bizarre, challenging, weird stories. And this looks a little weird to me,

Tyler: you know? So my brother has a, had a question for you. He wanted me to ask. Yeah. Um, is your hair real? Is my hair real? My executive listeners, he's got beautiful hair. This is Randy. He's always had beautiful hair.

Randy Rare coined it. So jealous of your hair.

Sam: Randy Rare coined this term. He calls it executive blonde, you know, and I said, you know what, I like that. You know what? I don't know. 'cause my brother Matt, he's bald, you know, as an egg.

Tyler: Yeah, I know. Well, you know, that was

Sam: his own fault though, just because he started getting a little thin on top.

He got panicked and he shaved it

Tyler: and then he, once he shaved, it's like, no, no. It's all for, yeah. It's hard to 'cause the in-between phase is too, too unbearable. You [01:53:00] know?

Sam: I don't know. I I, my dad always used to look at me and go, man, you hit the genetic jackpot.

Tyler: Serious. I mean, I just sitting. Well, no, but sitting here, I was so

Sam: lucky though, because growing up I didn't have a lot of the things that make being a young teenager or kid, you know.

I never had braces. I never had cavities, I never had allergies. I never had acne. You know, I didn't have any of that growing up, you know, and, and you've age always a lot. Hair, fine. Wine, hair. I always had a lot of hair, you know. So, uh.

Tyler: Yeah. Can, can I just like rub my hand through your hair right now? It's so nice.

There is a

Sam: guy that writes like comments on Stab or Beach Grit, and his, his handle is Sam George's hair. And, come on. Seriously, I, here's the thing, did you notice how in the nineties all the young hot surfers started going bald? Yeah. You know what I thought, you know, I thought it was sponsors caps. I always wore visors my hair.

Like a field in the sun. In the spray. It could breathe. There you go. When they started wearing caps and wearing them. So they pinched their ears down. Yes. Wearing them backwards. You look at those guys, look at the [01:54:00] momentum generation. Yeah. I think only Rob Machado, who's, let's face it, you wanna talk about hair?

Tyler: Yeah,

Sam: that's, I think he's the only one left with hair. That's true. I'm, I'm trying to think of Pat O'Connell,

Tyler: Conan

Sam: Hayes, Kelly, maybe Shane. Dorian

Tyler: Ross Malloy. Chris Malloy maybe. And Dan. They, well, no, they

Sam: transferred

Tyler: the hair to their chins. True. True. And that got

Sam: scary. Yeah, that got scary. No, but think about the, look at the litany of the guys I just described.

True from the Momentum movie that all went bald. So struck and taps listens.

Tyler: Don't wear your hats backwards. Wear visors. Let your hair

Sam: breathe. You go back and, you know, here's the thing. You look at surfers today, like if you look at a lineup of top surfers in 1972, they all had beautiful hair,

Tyler: long hair, long beautiful

Sam: hair there.

Tyler: Terry Fitz had a gorgeous Oh, come on. No. Had a lot.

Sam: If you go back and look at like the surfer pole or the, the surfer ratings or those North Shore stories. Not a single one of them was bald. Mm. So there's something interesting there. I mean, I'm [01:55:00] don't mean to be facetious now. No, no, no. It really, I would really like to do some kind of study to see what the difference was.

We

Tyler: should look at that. It's pretty fascinating. That would be Okay. Here's the, that would be really interesting. You take

Sam: the surfers of the same age. Yeah. From five summer stories. 1972.

Tyler: Yeah.

Sam: And you compare them to the guys momentum

Tyler: in momentum. Momentum, yeah.

Sam: And you look at them, let's give it like a 10 years or whatever.

I don't know. It's a weird thing.

Tyler: I love that. We should do a I I'll, I'll get involved with that study. That would be fun.

Sam: I mean, come on. The beach boys said bushy, bushy blonde hair dudes. I bet we

Tyler: can get like, uh, you know, one of these uh, hair club for men to sponsor too. That would

Sam: be interesting. Or Rogan Rogan would be, you know.

Yeah. That might be it. Or

Tyler: hymns. What is it? You know? No, I know, I

Sam: know, I know. We can laugh about it, but it is interesting that you look at momentum guys,

Tyler: what happened. I love it. You know. Um, I wanna ask one final question. I had so many and I No, I know. We could go on. So bummed. I can't even get to these 'cause I am so I'm [01:56:00] like, there was so much, but it's just, are you optimistic about surfing's present and future?

Sam: Oh God yes. Like I said, surfing is in a wonderful place right now. It's in a great place. You know, I mean, think about it. There's, like I said before, surfing. It knew what it wanted. It knew where it wanted to go. And, and surfing is taking us there and it's where. There's a much broader appreciation and participation and joy in surfing.

Mm. You know, like I, that you know, the story about surfing with the, with the African kids and sharing that intrinsic joy. There's something wonderful about surfing and I think, you know, I don't agree with anyone that says, oh, surf culture is dead because more people do it. You know, or it's being commercialized.

Well, you know what that means that you weren't old enough. It's been there to see those claral hair dye ads in the sixties about dying your hair blonde with claral. You know, I think surfing's in a wonderful place, you know, and I think the, uh, you know, [01:57:00] the spectrum, you know, now the spectrum, the, the big wave riding and travel surfing and surfing resorts and surf schools and

Tyler: foam surfing and foam board, all this stuff and, and, and river surfing.

Yeah. And

Sam: surfing around the world. It's, it's, it's so much bigger and broader and more wonderful than it's ever been. And I really think that all you have to do is. Look at the surf media, which of course includes podcasts. Mm-hmm. And websites and Instagram and YouTube. And you look at that spectrum of the surf media and see how diverse and wonderful it is, how can you possibly be jaded?

I mean, when you see Dylan Graves, you know, riding weird waves, river waves or Ben Gravy riding, you know, uh, fairy waves, ory waves. Or you see, you know, Nathan Florence surfing, super scary, horrifying slabs. Or you see the women's surfers of Byron of Byron and Queens and, and you, and you see all this going on and you realize you're, it's not something that's going on without you, [01:58:00]you're part of all of it.

It's part of all of us. It's not, it's not something that's going on without us. Yeah. I don't serve slabs. Never want to, you know, I don't think anyone should. But it's wonderful. It's going on. And I'm a part of it because I'm a part of the whole thing. And I think that's why, that's what it takes to really have a positive attitude.

Because it's like, I did a, I did a magazine article. It was a surfer, a a yearly big issue. Mm-hmm. And we put a 6-year-old Nathan Fletcher on the cover, and Florence, I'm sorry, Nathan Fletcher. Nathan, Nathan Florence got you there on the cover. That was good though. Yes. And it said, the ti, the theme of that issue was surfing forever.

Because the point I made was, when are you gonna quit? When do you plan on quitting? 'cause if you don't plan on quitting, that means you're gonna surf forever.

Tyler: Mm-hmm.

Sam: And so the point is, well, you better be ready to do that. And the key to that is realizing that you're a part of all of it. And that's that.

I think that's the key to staying un jaded and excited. [01:59:00] 'cause it gives you the ability to, to just love it all. And that's what it takes.

Tyler: I would say surfing is this wonderful smorgasburg now smorgasburg of, of different subcultures to indulge in, you know, you could go finless and friction free, you can go soft top, you can go, you could do whatever you want and it's accepted.

Whereas I, I don't know about you, but for me growing up in like the eighties and nineties, like you had to have a certain type of board and it fits such a narrow Oh yeah, yeah. Perspective. And it's blossomed, you know, but that's what I mean.

Sam: And you're the, the, the key is understanding that you're a part of it all.

Yeah. And it's all a part of you. And that, and that's the key to a, to a long and happy surfing life.

Tyler: I also really enjoy how you talk about surfing as this somewhat conscious entity where it wants, it's saying it wants to go in this direction. It's almost, I'm a Star Wars nerd, so it's like you're talking about the force to me, you know, it's like, yeah, well surfing is, you know, it's surfing is, yeah.

Sam: You know, surfing is, [02:00:00] and surf culture is, it is what it is now today. And to think that somehow it should be the way it was, that that's disaster.

Tyler: I think a lot of people hold on to the exclusivity that they liked that came with surfing at a certain time period, you know? Yeah. But you know what it, and that's, they

Sam: were the kooks Yeah.

Compared to the guys from the 1940s. Exactly. You know, there was always someone surfing before you. Mm-hmm. You know,

Tyler: and there'll be plenty after, plenty after.

Sam: And you know, the, you know what, the key to the also is that the fact that the waves will never stop, they have never stopped

Tyler: to quote Jeff Booth's.

Sta there will always be waves. I,

Sam: I kind of go back a little bit further to Duke Con Moku who said, Hey bro, why worry? There always gonna be another wave. There you go. I think that's a good place to end it. Ah, we'll, we'll, we'll end it on a quote from the Duke.

Tyler: So, uh, Sam, where can our listeners get your incredible book and where can they find you?

Sam: Well, the, the easiest way, I guess would be to go to my Instagram page. Mm-hmm. Which I started to promote the book [02:01:00] it, the Instagram is Sam George Surf, and then there's a link there you can click on to order the book. It's called Child of Storms. Child of Storms,

Tyler: a surfing

Sam: memoir in progress. Mm-hmm.

Because it's not just still going, it's not, it's still going surfing forever. Yeah. It's, it's being published by DeAngelo Publications, a great small it imprint. They've got a number of different imprints, uh, in there, sort of stable. And, uh, they did a fantastic job publishing the book. And, you know, it's, it's, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm happy with it and I'm really proud of it.

You know, I'm proud of the effort. It took, I'm proud of the demands it made of me and you know, I'm, uh, you know, it reminds me of the end of, uh, endless Summer where Bruce Brown goes. Well that's, there's my film. I hope you enjoyed it. So I'm gonna say, here's my book. I hope you enjoy it.

Tyler: I love that. Well, listeners, go check it out.

Uh, I'm gonna definitely get myself a copy and I'm really excited to read it and, uh, God, like Sam, this has truly been indulgent for [02:02:00] me. Thank you. That's good. I really have enjoyed it very much. Me too.

Sam: It was fantastic.

Tyler: And, uh, I just got a quick give, a quick shout out to Christian Teel from Pilgrim Surf and Supply, who helped coordinate this and connect us.

Uh, really appreciated. He's always great. So listeners always go down and support Pilgrim. Uh, and, uh, gotta give a quick shout out to Joe, our engineer here, who's always making us sound good and keeping my levels low enough even though I talk really loud.

Sam: Oh, I get pretty excited myself. So,

Tyler: and, um, yeah, and gotta thank Rockefeller Center here for hosting us in the studio.

And, uh, of course, don't forget to hit like, and subscribe and, uh, go follow at swell season surf radio on Instagram. And uh, we'll see you all down the line soon. Sam, thank you so much.

Sam: It was my pleasure. Believe me. A lot of fun.

Tyler: Incredible. Thank you guys. Cheers.

Sam: [02:03:00] You.