Show Notes

• Connected to the ocean
• Growing up in Hawaii
• What drives Laird?
• Surfing Teahupoo in Tahiti
• The ultimate game of improv
• Is there mastery within surfing?
• Fear and death
• Laird’s entry into the plant-based food business
• Extreme Performance Training (XPT)
• The power and beauty of nature

Connect With Laird Hamilton

✩ Website – https://lairdhamilton.com/
✩ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/lairdhamilton
✩ X – https://x.com/LairdLife
✩ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/LairdLife

Summary

Laird Hamilton is a big wave surfer and a pioneer in the world of action water sports. Over the last decade, Laird has transcended from surfing to become an international fitness icon and nutrition expert. He is Co-Founder and Chief Innovator of Laird Superfood, and the author of several books.Laird shares what it’s like to ride a massive wave, and what drives him to push boundaries and innovate – both personally and in his businesses.

Full Transcript

Brian  
Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field, so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. Laird Hamilton is best known as a big wave surfer and a pioneer in the world of action water sports. Over the last decade, Laird has transcended from surfing to become an international fitness icon and nutrition expert. He is co-founder and chief innovator of our sponsor for today’s show, Laird Super Food, and he has also partnered with his wife, former professional volleyball player Gabby Reece, to create Extreme Performance Training. XPT is a unique and powerful fitness training and lifestyle program featuring unique water workouts, performance breathing, recovery methods, and high intensity and endurance training for people of all fitness levels and backgrounds. Laird is the author of several books, including “Force of Nature” and “Life Rider.” He was also a contributing editor for Men’s Journal. Has appeared in a number of feature films and surfing documentaries, and has appeared on numerous television shows, including Oprah’s Master Class, Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes, Chelsea Handler, and Conan O’Brien. He continually pushes the limits and expands possibilities in every area of life, and it’s truly an honor to have him on the show. Aloha, Laird, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Laird
I appreciate it. After that introduction, I think it’s done. I can leave now.

Brian
Well, it’s great to have you. I could have gone on and on, but there are so many other things that I want to talk about. Laird, you’ve pushed physical, mental and even environmental boundaries with bold death defying feats for, basically, your entire life. I’ve watched numerous videos of you surfing in preparation for the show, and I have to tell you, my heart raced every time, and my palms were sweating. Actually, they’re sweating a little bit just talking about it. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to surf some of the waves that you’ve tackled. Now, some who see what you do would call you a thrill seeker or an adrenaline junkie. Some would call you a pioneer or a maverick or a trailblazer, and some would say you’re absolutely crazy for the number of times and the ways in which you’ve risked your life surfing. Now some would simply call you water man for the relationship you’ve had with the oceans, that immense, ever moving force of nature that covers more than 70% of the planet’s surface and holds more mystery, depth and power than any place on Earth, as you well know. How do you describe your lifetime of surfing big waves and the deep connection that you’ve developed with the ocean?

Laird
It would transcend into the spiritual at some point. But my relationship with the ocean started at a very young age, and I don’t really ever know a time that I was ever not connected to the ocean. I think that that for me personally, it’s been my greatest university, my greatest school and it’s where I’ve had my scariest moments, my most joyous moments, other than on land with my family. But the ocean itself has just been a teacher for me and continues to be a teacher. If you think about nature and you think about creation, the ocean is the largest piece of that, and it’s the most alive piece; they say water has memory. I know personally, just with my experiences in the water, how it has a cognitive ability that has… there’s almost an awareness that happens. But all this comes from time. I think that the amount of time that I’ve spent in the water and looking at the water, and with all that you still don’t know, it’s still a mystery. I think that’s part of the intrigue. No two waves are the same. No two rides are the same. It’s always kind of a new experience. I think that’s what keeps me continuing to pursue certain accomplishments or just certain experiences in the ocean.

Brian
The thing that really strikes me is how vast the ocean is and most people don’t have an appreciation for that. I’m a diver and so our family dives. We’ve experienced the ocean very differently than you have but the thing that always… it’s awe inspiring – I don’t know how else to put it – going underneath the surface of the water. What I tell people is, there’s a whole world that God created beneath the surface of the water that most people don’t get to see. With your having grown up near the water, having surfed your entire life, you certainly have an appreciation for that.

Laird
When you think about all the… first of all, the creatures that live in the ocean, all the different animals and species and all the plants and all of these different jellyfish, it’s beyond almost your capacity, your comprehension. It just goes beyond your understanding. And I think for me personally, it’s the place that I’ve felt the smallest. I felt pretty small on some giant mountains, but nothing like being in the ocean. You feel small but yet you feel like you’re part of something. You just feel, I don’t know… I think with that long standing relationship since I was a child, I feel like I have to be near it. I have to be near it. I have to see it. I can only go so long without being near it. I get too far inland, I feel like my gills are drying up, I’m like, okay, I need to at least see it and be near it, and it’s an ongoing… my wife, Gabby, says it’s the only woman she’ll share me with. [Laughter.] She’s like, well, Laird’s going to see his girlfriend, and somebody looks at her like, what do you mean? And she’s like, the ocean, the waves.

Brian
Well, I have some sense of how much Gabby means to you and also how much the ocean means to you, so that’s a pretty fierce competition for both Abby and the ocean.

Laird
Yeah. Well, of course, you can never compare your love for your partner and your family, but as just an individual, as just a person, the ocean itself, I’m just connected to it in a way sometimes that I think that I don’t fully understand. I don’t think I can comprehend, really, the full depth of the connection that I have. As we learn, we learn how it affects your chemistry of your body. There are too many benefits, and we’re too connected to it. The oxygen that we breathe comes out of the ocean. There are so many beautiful things about the water. But again, for me, pursuing, riding giant waves, and just riding waves in general, there’s something magic about the act of riding; energy that’s traveling through water. And the ocean provides that opportunity to experience this somewhat unique thing that I don’t know if there’s anything quite like it that we get to do here on the earth. I always talk about life is an opportunity to experience being, that we have an opportunity to experience things when we’re living. And I think to not take advantage of that is a critical mistake that we can make. I know there’s danger, and there are certain things that… but I always say living is a dangerous game. Just being alive is dangerous. You can walk outside and can get hit by a car, struck by lightning, whatever. There are a million ways to die. I always say dying is easy, living is hard, but what we are required to do is try to experience things. I think the ocean has taught me that so many experiences that I’ve had in the ocean have actually led me to pursue other experiences on land as well. I don’t know if I could ever express enough of how what the ocean has meant to me and my life and the lessons that I’ve learned and the experiences that I’ve had.

Brian
Hopefully through the show, you’ll be able to share some of those lessons, we’ll certainly look for that. Laird, you’re regarded by those in the surfing community as the all time best of the best at big wave surfing. But you didn’t earn that title by winning a bunch of contests, right? I looked and tried to [find] the list of all the contests that Laird won, and I’m sure there have been some. But how did you become so well known, not just in the surfing community, but more universally, the more you surfed?

Laird
As a child growing up, my father was a… [what] we call free surfing. Surfing is a unique sport in that it’s a lifestyle, but you can make a profession out of surfing without being in competition because there is an aspect that’s more like art and music – that is, it can be self-expression. I grew up watching at a stage when surfing, in general, had two directions. There were people that, what we called, free surfed. And then there were people that were surfing in competitions, and that was really divided almost in half. Maybe it was almost more people free surfing, because before competition surfing started, everybody was just free surfing and then they created a format for competition. But growing up and watching this kind of system, I realized that for me, personally, I thought that if I could ride the biggest waves in the world – and this is my thinking as a young child, obviously, kind of the arrogance of youth, I would describe it as – I thought if I was the best at riding the biggest wave, then I would be considered the best. And so that was really my pursuit, other than I was drawn to riding big waves. My stature is something that I actually benefit from being in bigger surf, because of the the horsepower that the waves have and that size can be a benefit. Where, in some aspects of surfing size is not, it can be more almost gymnastic like. I look at myself as more like a downhill skier. I thought, listen, I like riding giant waves, if I can ride the biggest waves in the world, and when I say the best I mean the best I can ride them. If it’s comparable to other people I always felt like it’s a little bit like an artist or a musician; the audience determines whether they like your music or they like your art instead of a group of experts. And so I think that was my pursuit as a young child, I was drawn to that. I watched competition. I watched my father surf in competitions. As a child, it was confusing. I think that brought out the worst in me, as far as putting me in a competitive thing against another man because I always thought it was man against man versus man in nature, so I went for the man in nature approach. That was kind of the basis. But a lot of my notoriety has come through innovation stuff. We created a technique to ride the biggest waves in the world, and that since has developed into creating places like the famous wave in Portugal, where they were riding giant waves, and other big waves in the world where the waves are too large to be caught manually. So we developed that technique. Then I was involved in stand up paddling, and then foil – I windsurf professionally – then we started foil surfing. We were at the forefront of that innovation. We were involved in kiting in the very beginning, kite surfing. And so I’ve been involved in some innovations of disciplines within these water sports that have also brought a lot of notoriety that way. And then I’ve done some other endurance stuff that has also brought… I’ve been at this for a long time, and I think, as Gabby and I speak about, because we weren’t in structured systems, we weren’t in a professional league where you were going to be on TV and you were going to be in a certain amount of exposure, we had to be creative and create our own exposure through doing feats. For me personally, I never went about trying to do a feat to get exposure. I was just doing what I considered feats for my own personal drive, my own personal kind of desire. Then it was just a matter of there was exposure from that that ended up being beneficial to earn a living. A lot of it came out of… I tell my children pursue something that you love to the fullest and the success will be a by-product. The financial success can be a by-product of genuine pursuit. Some people’s pursuit is to have financial success. For me, I think it was just pursue your passion, pursue the thing that you’re interested in, that you love and believe in, and then there can be some success from that just by default.

Brian
Well, you’re certainly the poster child for that. Not everybody who pursues their passion has that economic reward that comes along with it, but you’ve managed to do both. And I don’t know this for sure, but I get the sense that accolades aren’t super important to you, that being recognized by others isn’t what drives you. You talked about rather than being in a competition – man against man competition – that you’re really competing – I don’t think you said this – but probably against yourself, and then certainly against nature, against the forces and the waves and all of that. Tell me if I’m right about that. And then also, either way, you’re clearly driven to grow and to improve and certainly to conquer big waves. What drives you in surfing and then also, in life?

Laird
Well, those are large questions. I would say having accolades, I think it’s good to get appreciated. When you’ve spent a lifetime pursuing something, when you have blood, sweat and tears and broken bones in the pursuit of it, it is nice to be appreciated. I think that the appreciation from people you respect – your peers, your family – I think that, for me, is the important part. You can’t determine what somebody is going to think that is 1000 or 2000 miles away. If somebody does appreciate your work, if somebody says, hey, I saw your thing and really appreciated your work, that can be a nice compliment, but that’s not the pursuit, that’s not the challenge. People go, you conquered that wave. You don’t conquer waves, you can act in harmony with them. I would describe it more like surviving the wave; you survive the mountain, you survive the ocean. You can have moments of harmony in those environments when allowed to. So I think that is a piece of it. The challenge of trying to grow oneself and also to be able to compete with oneself, to be able to push oneself past what we think we’re capable of, to pursue things that you believe, dreams you’ve had… I can say, as a child, I had dreams to be a great water-man, a great surfer. I would lie if I didn’t say I had that from a very young age. That was something that I spent my life pursuing and I’ve gone through different stages in it where it became something that had all the… it’s still surfing, it’s still the ocean, it’s still all these things in beautiful environments. But when it becomes something different than for the love of it, or you’re doing because you have to, you change that. I have had to go through that process; why am I doing this, what does it mean to me? And then I go through the things; okay, well, you’re earning a living, and you have to do all these things to continue to do that. And then pretty soon, no matter what it is, it starts to become something that maybe it didn’t start out as and then you stop loving it. And I felt like, for me to stop loving surfing or stop loving being in the ocean, I would look at that as sinful, like, that would be crazy for me. But that could happen for you, depending on… I’ve had to go through stages where I’ve re-calibrated to remember that I do it because I love it. This is something that I love to do. And am I fortunate to be able to earn a living from it? Absolutely. But would I still be doing it if I was running an excavator or digging a ditch? Absolutely. I’ve been able to subsidize it and have the fortune to subsidize my love for it; it’s what I love to do. Then what I find that I really love is I enjoy doing what I haven’t done before. I get to a certain stage with a certain discipline, and I’m like, well, I’ve done that, and the only way to improve from that would be to have… in surfing, we have these unique things happen that where, once you have had a special day and a special wave and a giant [wave] everything comes together; the uniqueness of that moment, is so rare that you may never get one of those in your lifetime. I’ve had moments in surfing that there will never be another day like that. There won’t be another because the wind was perfect and I was in the right spot, and everything came together like a fine gem or something. So to continue pursuing that particular moment or discipline, it would only set you up for failure. You’d be miserable because you would never be able to get that again. So I find when I’m able to pursue a new pursuit within these disciplines that I’m able to recapture those moments. And I use an example, there’s a famous wave that I rode in Tahiti in the year 2000 and it kind of changed our perspective about what was rideable. We had been pursuing riding very large waves with this technique that we used to be towed on, first by Zodiacs with motors and then eventually with jet skis. That was allowing us to ride the biggest wave that had been ridden until then. I was able to ride a very defining wave that was impossible to ride any other way than this technique I used and that was the moment. But that wave, I’ll never have another moment. There’ll never be another first time that that happened. All that will leave. Now I use hydrofoils, I’m riding hydrofoils in waves. That was another kind of thing that we were involved in. The development of that has taken our world by wildfire. They’re everywhere. And so I have pursuits and other challenges within that, that are on the horizon, that are accomplishable. I think for me, I’ve found that if you don’t set up an impossible goal… it’s nice to have one that’s elusive, that can move so as you achieve, you can continue to pursue. I think for me, it’s always about the pursuit. I need something out in front of me to be pursuing. Without that it would take away motivation. It would stop me from being driven to wake up every day in the dark and train and take care of myself and do all the things I do. It wouldn’t stop me completely from doing it, but I wouldn’t be doing it with the vigor that I do when I have something that I’m pursuing, that I’m going to use all of this preparation for.

Brian
What is that impossible goal for you right now?

Laird
Well, it’s not impossible, but we are able to ride giant waves at sea, and so the potential of what that offers is something that is really unique. It will be done; if it’s not done by us, it’ll be done by someone in the future. But to be able to go and ride giant waves at sea is a frontier, because the ocean is very large and it has its complications. How are you going to get there? When do you get there? How are you going to be there? How are you going to be able to keep track of all of your teammates and how can you do it safely and all of that. The complexity of that actually offers the challenge. There’s a challenge within that because of the difficulty of where, how, all of those things. I’ve been pursuing big [waves] and I like tangible achievements, like, big is big is big. This not so ambiguous. It’s less opinionated or judgmental. It’s like, no, that’s a giant wave. It doesn’t matter who’s looking at it, they’ll be like, that’s a giant wave. I just had my 60th year last year. I’m 61 now, but I had my 60th year last year and wanted to do something monumental during the year of the my 60th year on the earth, and I was able to ride the longest wave that I had ever ridden. I wanted to do something. I didn’t know if it was ride a 60 foot wave or ride something that I hadn’t done yet. I was able to ride a ten minute long wave, which was, for me, the longest wave I’ve ever ridden, and I only go with that. I don’t know if maybe somebody else has ridden a longer one. But for me, personally, I was able to do that, which is nice when you’ve been surfing for 50 years or more, 55 years, and you’re able to do something you haven’t done. That’s a beautiful thing, and I continue to want to try to do that.

Brian
Well, one thing that struck me as you were talking was the the uniqueness of every wave; you said you won’t be able to ride that particular wave again. And you’re right, literally, every single wave that you ride, you won’t be able to ride again. It’s not like skiing; if you’re not satisfied with the jump distance or your time, you go back to the top of the mountain and you ski down again. Or snowboarding, where, if you don’t land the – I don’t know what they’re up to – 1080s or whatever it is that they’re spinning on boards, if you don’t get it, then you go up and you do it again and again and again. It really is a unique once in a lifetime experience. You probably do have waves that are similar, but maybe that opportunity to ride for ten minutes, or maybe that wave in Tahiti that you were able to ride, you could spend the rest of your life in Tahiti waiting for it, and it’s never going to come because of the nature of the ocean.

Laird
I think that it’s the ultimate game of improv. When you think about it, there’s an improvisational aspect to surfing that can capture your attention. When people get drawn to surfing and they get taken by the surf bug, or however you want to describe it, I think part of it is this improvisation. Everything’s different every time. Like I said, no two waves are the same at the same place, on the same day and no two rides the same. There are similar aspects to rides, and similar things happen, but no two rides are the same. Every wave, the texture, the thing, there’s just… I think that in itself, keeps us enamored by it. As a species I think that’s one of the things that we’re always looking for. We’re always looking for the next thing, we’re always in pursuit of something unique, it’s like built into us. We’re always looking for the next thing, so within surfing, I think that’s a beautiful thing that also makes it very difficult to master. There’s a level of skill that you need, I don’t know if there is mastery. I would question if there even is mastery within surfing. I think that you can get to a level of consistency and a certain level of performance, but when you say mastery, it’s like, it’s hard to have mastery when things are always different. There’s something about that. I think you’re always challenged. I think the challenge is always there, even when you have those days when you feel like there’s nothing you can do wrong. There still is a level of, I wouldn’t say, cautiousness, but just the awareness that it takes because you just don’t know what it’s going to throw at you, especially when it’s big. When there’s a consequence on the line, everything is magnified. I think that’s why I was always drawn to that aspect of the ocean, it really forces you to be present and completely engaged. There is no room for any kind of drifting and any outside distraction, because you’ll pay if you’re distracted. These lessons come quickly in that environment. I think that uniqueness, that difficulty, all those things, and then you magnify it when it gets more intense, for me, that’s why I’ve enjoyed that part of it.

Brian
Well, I’d like to ask you more about what that looks like in the extreme. I want to talk about fear and death. The first reason I want to talk about it is because you write about it extensively in your book. I read your latest book, “Life Rider,” which is a great book. I like the book. I loved your stories. I also like Gabby injecting commentary; it was interesting to hear her talk about you and how some things were consistent and her take on things were a little bit different. I really appreciated that. The first chapter is about fear and death. The second reason that I want to talk about it, which I think is obvious – you’ve alluded to it – is that in the world of extreme surfing, the stakes are literally life or death. I wonder how this factors into riding a wave that’s 80 or 100 feet, or some of the other things that might be more dangerous because of the conditions even though the waves aren’t as big. What are you thinking about and feeling as you prepare to catch a monster wave? If you could describe – especially for those who have never surfed. And full disclosure, I was in Hawaii and tried to get on a surfboard, and it didn’t go that well. I was taking a lesson with two of our kids. Our kids, they bounced right on the boards and they did great, and I was trying the whole time just to get on the board. So I have no appreciation for any of what you’re doing, other than I know it’s extremely difficult. I will never come close to mastering it, and that’s not a goal of mine, thankfully. What are you feeling as you’re preparing to do that and also share what it feels like. Because this is amazing to me, to be completely surrounded by water – water beneath you, water behind you, and towering above you. Those great photos that you have of you; you’re not a pebble, but you’re not super big compared to everything that’s behind you and beneath you and around you. What does that feel like as you’re riding that massive wave?

Laird
Describing a feeling is like describing a color. I think there are difficulties within that other than you are undistracted, there’s a level of presence, people talk about being in the moment. They talk about flow state where you’re kind of detached from self, you’re in the act of doing it. I have a hard time watching giant waves but once I’m in them I lose the anxiety that I have from observing them. I feel like observing them makes me kind of anxious. I don’t like to watch unless I’m really tired at the end of the day and I’ve been surfing all in them all day, then maybe I’ll go watch them. But just to observe them before I’m going to be in them, I don’t like that. I don’t like to do that. I like to be in them, because the action that it takes to be in them keeps me not thinking about anything else except that. You’re focused on the action that you need to do while you’re there, the presence of mind that you need. The truth is, there’s a stillness in it. There’s a stillness in the ride when you’re on it, unless, of course, you crash, then the stillness ends abruptly and then you’re in the chaos. But in the act of riding a giant wave, I don’t know of anything… going fast, maybe in Formula One or in a fighter jet, doing things like that, maybe downhill, giant slalom, Super G, where you’re going 80 [mph], or something that has that kind of intensity that just keeps you present. You’re in the moment, they talk about being in the moment, the pursuit of that results in your appreciation for just, I would say, being alive. But also, there’s something that you get from coming through that, that makes you feel, I would say, worthy. I feel a sense of I’ve done something worth being here, being alive. I feel like I’ve accomplished something. Very few things make you feel so accomplished; maybe surviving parenting or surviving a relationship, being in a relationship, like maybe some of those things. I describe it as the selfish part, but just the individual part of you, the other piece of you… I feel like there are these different pieces of ourselves and there’s a selfish, ego driven, kind of identity driven [part] – like, this is what I’m going to do – that disregards everything else including food and whatever. You just disregard everything while you’re in the pursuit of this. There’s a meditative aspect to it – when you see a giant wave and you’re going to ride it; like you see it approaching and you’re in a position that you’re going to get on – the way that you made a decision to do it. It’s an interesting moment when you’ve observed this thing and it’s alive – because it’s alive and it’s moving, it’s as a personality – and then you make the decision that you’re going to ride it. That level of commitment is… we spent a lot of time cliff jumping. We like cliff jumping. I’ve jumped off a lot of really high things in my life. That kind of defining moment… you don’t kind of jump off a cliff, you either jump or you don’t jump. Big waves are like that. There’s a really defining… (Brian: like jumping out of a plane.) yeah, exactly. You don’t kind of jump. You either jump or you don’t jump. And so I think that there’s something about that commitment where you’ve decided, I’m going to ride, I’m going to go on this one, and then you commit to it. There’s that moment of clarity, you don’t want any congestion in that. You don’t want any kind of apprehension, you don’t have any doubt. All of those things never end up helping very much; if anything, they hurt you. But you’ve decided, you make the move, and then you go. And then depending on if you’re paddling into it, or you’re getting towed into it, whatever way you’re getting into it, and you catch it, and then you’re so focused. The demand to accomplish, the demand on the system, the body, is so high and all encompassing. There are very few things that you experience in your life, if any, that are like that, you just don’t, because they’re just… I have friends that are in the military, that have been in a lot of battles, and maybe it’s in those moments like, thank you to the Lord that I’m not getting shot at or shooting at anybody. But I think there is a similarity to any of these extreme activities that people are doing, no matter what. Whenever there’s a certain level of consequence, I think the demand on the system is to be aware and to be able to do everything you need to do. There’s this aspect to it where you slow down everything so that you can make good decisions, and if you understand about creating slow motion, you do that through speeding up your perception. That’s how you slow things down. So this perception is sped up in order to slow down. That’s how you make slow motion film. You speed it up, and then you can make slow motion. So your perception is sped up, which speeding up your perception is so enthralling, so amazing. Then you have to live with that too, we call it post traumatic. If you ride giant waves and you are on the edge, then you’ll have to come down off of that. I think anything that is like that, the longer, the higher the demand, and the longer sustained the demand is, the bigger the come down is off of that intensity, just the demand on the system. If you’re in fight or flight for days, weeks, months, years you’re going to have a big come down off of that, that the system is just going to need to recover. So we have all of those aspects in the pursuit and in the activity of riding those giant waves.

Brian
It’s fascinating to listen to you talk about it. I think our listeners and viewers will agree that we can feel at least some of those feels, definitely not the same as being out there like you’re doing, but the way you describe it certainly helps us to have some appreciation for that. One of the things that I think is really cool is – you mentioned some of your innovations, – the innovations that you’ve created around your love for surfing, and also brands and products and businesses that you’ve built around you that reflect your lifestyle. I want to ask you about a couple of them, and the first is a business; I happen to be a customer and a huge proponent of Laird Super Food. I don’t know how long I’ve been using the performance mushrooms, but my son actually introduced me to the turmeric creamer. I think that was the first one and then performance mushrooms. And so this is what I put in my coffee every day, and have for years. I really appreciate that. How did you get into the plant-based food business?

Laird
Well, honestly, it came completely authentically. It was a recipe. The original formula was a recipe that I was making for myself. It started with my love for coffee, and then wanting to use coffee – everybody uses coffee I would say – for energy – I wanted to try to maximize that. I wanted to maximize that kind of use so I made a recipe myself that I would share with my friends. I had been exposed to a lot of different aspects of coffee stuff – there was ghee in espresso and then there was bulletproof, putting coconut oil in coffee – I had been around a lot of that and had been drinking coffee for… I call it one of my French habits, since I was in my early 20s. I had a recipe that I made that I would share with friends. Then one of my friends was somebody that I was working on another business project with, and he was a startup business guy. I gave him my recipe and all the ratios and stuff, and he made a sample, a powdered sample, of my original recipe. And I think probably the third rendition of that recipe ended up being what we know now as Sweet and Creamy, it’s one of the creamers. I love turmeric, and in Hawaii it’s called ‘olena, which has been used in Hawaii for hundreds of years, it’s in the ginger family. So I’m a big proponent of turmeric. I use the turmeric creamer every morning. But we just started building from my original recipe, and then started using a similar philosophy around what Gabby and I believe in, which is, for me, it needs to be functional. It’s all about function. Coming out of a recipe, the whole thing about using these creamers is so you time-release the caffeine, you could sustain energy,you don’t get a crash, and then you can absorb other nutrients. Because the fat works really well to absorb other things like turmeric. That was the base of the philosophy of it. And then, okay, needs to taste good, because people won’t use it if it doesn’t taste good. And then it needs to be affordable and presented in a way that people can get it. The truth is, those powders are very functional, easy to use, easy to store, easy to carry. You can make it stronger or weaker. There are just so many things about it. That’s kind of the basis of the foundation of the project. We started selling the original one online. We started to sell them online, and they started to get traction. Then we just expanded out from there and started creating the mushroom blends and then the greens and the reds and all the coffees infused with adaptogens. We just expanded with the same philosophy that we were using in our own life.

Brian
That’s a great success story. The company went public in 2020, I think, and so hopefully that’s been great for you and your team. I will say that the performance mushrooms don’t taste quite as good as some of the other ones like the turmeric cream; it’s a little earthy but I’m good with it. And I’m serious, I have it every day with my coffee, and have for years and will continue to, so I appreciate that.

Laird
I’ll teach you a little trick. Something that works really good is cacao, it’s really good with the mushroom. Something about the mushrooms has a multi-aspect when you use mocha with the mushroom. That actually works very, very well. I drink crazy things. Gabby always says I would drink dirt if I thought it was going to be healthy so don’t use me as a flavor [expert] but I do like the using cacao with the performance mushroom, that works very well.

Brian
That’s a great suggestion. Some people who have tried the performance mushrooms with just black coffee suggest that I drink dirt every morning like you. I’m totally okay with it, because it’s more about health. But if there’s a way to enhance the flavor too, then I know you and I both agree that that’s certainly okay. One of your newest companies, Laird, is XPT, and you tout Extreme Performance Training as a – and I’m quoting – “holistic approach that pushes people to become the most versatile and resilient human being possible.” What’s the origin of that company? How can we all benefit from your approach to wellness with XPT?

Laird
Well, that started, again, authentically. We have a pool and heat and ice that we’ve been doing for quite a long time at our home. We have friends that come up and people that do a lot of that kind of program. We’ve developed it over years with friends. We take turns being guinea pigs, and we try stuff and implement different modalities that we learn. So that company came out of just a thing that we were doing at our house. In fact, today, just this morning, I finished with a group of friends that came up that we pool train, and we did some assault bikes in the heat, we do breath work. XPT, the motto is “breathe, move and recover.” A lot of the training that we do – I’ve experienced this – really undermined some of our health and our performance, we beat ourselves up pretty good working out; it’s not working in and so approaching it a little more creatively. Again, I think some of my boredom has a tendency to lead me away from doing things that are too monotonous. I also want to do things that are supporting my performance. And so the pool training itself is kind of the most unique aspect of what we do. We do a lot of heat and ice, a lot of thermal regulation stuff, because we know how beneficial that is on our systems. We do a lot of breath work, because we know how beneficial that stuff is. Then the pool stuff is kind of a marriage between weight lifting and swimming, something that’s very unique in that it grew out of something that we did growing up, that the Hawaiians and other Polynesians had been doing, and a lot of divers. You swim down, take stones and you run along the bottom. You do that in the summertime for training; you’ll swim, grab a stone, run along as the bottom as long as you can. And so I took that and expanded that into a whole different level of that concept, where we have all these different drills that we do that make you better at swimming. A lot of this stuff was based on preparing for riding big surf. A lot of the breath work and the asphyxia training and all that stuff really started out of the fitness thing. So, again, XPT really came… We had one of Gabby’s friends that she played volleyball with, that we’ve worked with for a long time, come over and like, you got to do something with this; she started XPT. We started doing experiences, and expanded from there and that, again, that just grew out of what we were naturally doing, what we still do. If I talk about being authentic, we use super food every day. I have a house full of it. We’re doing XPT every day. These are just lifestyle things that we’ve learned over years of experience,. I feel like there are so many things you can do in your life and so many choices, you might as well choose the ones that you’re doing. We’re fortunate that being in shape and doing is part of our work too. But the way I tell people, being in shape and being healthy is part of everybody’s work, because you’re alive and you’re a human on Earth. There’s nobody that it doesn’t benefit, and it’s just how you can do it. We try to make it lifestyle based. We incorporate it, but people really enjoy it. They learn a lot from it, whether they just learn stuff about their breathing, whether they learn about the benefits of thermal regulating, whether they learn about the the walls of their fear in the pool. The thing the water in the pool really brings out – and the cold does it too – these environments bring out emotion in people. We always talk about the barrier of your mind, and how to move that, and not to compare that with anyone else but just your own. Again, back to your own personal thing, what I try to do in my own pursuits is who’s your biggest competition – yourself – let everybody worry about themselves. It seems like that’s enough of a problem. If we all just did that, I think it would be a better world, and people would feel and be better too, because it’s just about, in a way, self-improvement, self-belief. My mom had a great saying when I was a child. She said, if you can’t be true to yourself, you can’t be true to anyone else. And so I use that as a basis for some of the philosophies that that go into any business or any company, whether it’s Laird Super Food or it’s XPT or some other hard goods thing, or whatever it is, I try to approach it that way. Is it authentic? Do you use it, do you feel good about it, will you give it to your kids? Will you give it to your grandparents? All those things, right? I think that all those things go into it, because you could do a lot of things, there’s no end to the things you can do so you might as well find something… I tell that to my girls, my daughters. I talk to them, it’s like, find your thing that really impassions you, and whether you have to do another job to subsidize it, or whether you get to have it be your job. I just think that if you really do pursue it – you may subsidize it in the beginning and at times along the way – it will become your job at the end of the day somehow in that pursuit, if you pursue it wholeheartedly with all your passion. I go listen, if you’ve gotten really good at balancing a chair on your head, you’d probably have a job, because people would pay you to come and walk around and balance a chair on your head, so at the end, it’s like, pursue it. I’m fortunate, and people could say, easy for me to say, because that’s what I’ve done. But the way I grew up, I could easily have not had… any time along the way I could have been derailed and turned and not continued to pursue it.

Brian
Well, sure, I think it’s easy for people to say, oh, look at you, easy for you to say, you’ve done those things, but that overnight success story has taken like, 40 years, right? You didn’t do something 40 years ago, and you’re still living off that thing. You’re constantly growing, constantly evolving, constantly innovating. What I love – and I really enjoyed hearing you talk about XPT, because it sounds like a total fitness and wellness system – about everything that’s permeated through our conversation is the authenticity. You’re actually using all of these products that you’ve developed – and by the way, their products today – because you were using them right in the beginning, and that’s how they got developed in the first place. Then the other thing is the intentionality. You’re clearly very intentional about how you live your life. The things that happen to you are not accidental, because you’re moving in a certain direction, and you attract things that are consistent with your lifestyle, with your beliefs, with the people that you surround yourself with. That’s a great model, not just for your daughters and for your wife, but for everybody who’s able to learn about you. Laird, as you know, our show is called LifeExcellence and I wonder, what does excellence mean to you?

Laird
Excellence for me is, I guess, the pursuit of trying to master oneself. I think that’s there’s an excellence in that, because I don’t think there ever is true mastery of oneself in its entirety, no matter who we are and what we’re doing. When I think about excellence I think about the whole thing; I look at life like a wheel with spokes. The spokes are all nice and have even tension, whether it’s your spiritual, your physical, your relationships, your personal pursuit, the thing is that there’s no loose spokes. I think that there’s always going to be a loose spoke and can you go adjust it when it’s loose, and keep the wheel rolling nice. I would describe that as excellence. I think that it’s so easy to get a loose spoke and I feel like excellence is the ability to continue to try to keep the spokes all nice and tensioned so the tire rolls evenly. I think that it’s easy for us to get off balance, that in the pursuit of a dream or a passion you can totally just neglect the other aspects of your life that are equally as important. It’s just they’re different and so sometimes that can be confusing. Maybe you get credit for all these other things but then over here there’s very little credit for trying to be a solid father. There’s very little credit for a woman to be a solid mother being there. There are areas where there’s not a lot of credit but those are equally as important, if not the most important, ironically, but they’re so important in keeping the tire rolling. And so I think that for me, excellence really is the pursuit to continue to try to tighten the loose spokes.

Brian
I appreciate that. That’s very well said, and I agree with everything, especially with what you said at the end about the things that are most important aren’t the things that we get trophies for, but those are clearly the most important things, and I know you certainly put those things at the forefront of your life. Finally, I just wanted to ask you about nature, because you wrote about nature. You obviously are connected to water, and I sense more broadly, to nature. You write about that, by the way, in your book “Life Rider.” How does that connection help you and why is it important for all of us to be, in your opinion, more aware of and connected to nature, especially in a world where technology, social media and other influences exist that pull us away from nature?

Laird
Well, we’re being denatured right now. For me, nature is creation, so if you believe in God and you’re a spiritual person, then you can see creation, the creator. Also to think that there’s not a creator, that this isn’t a part of creation when you look at nature, would be impossible. I don’t know how you could actually observe, truly observe nature, and then think that there wasn’t a grand architect, that there wasn’t some design in this system. People can figure that out when they do math and that’s just numbers, never mind when you look at nature. I think that first of all, just for your own health – let’s not even go spiritual, let’s just go for your own physical health – you need to be in the sunlight, you need to be walking barefoot, you need to be engaging in the environment just to be healthy. Regardless of whatever your beliefs, just for your physical needs we’re connected to nature. We breathe oxygen, what plants create. What we exhale, they inhale. Our interdependence on nature and our need for it… my personal relationship, I grew up in Hawaii, on the Garden Island, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world, but it also has a savage ocean and big sharks in the water and cliffs to fall off of. It’s not without danger. But the beauty of the place is so awe inspiring that it’s impossible to ignore. You just can’t ignore it. And so I’m a nature lover, nature fan, and have been my whole life just because of the environment that I grew up in. I grew up fishing and farming on this island that is so prolific. It’s one of the wettest places on earth. When you see that, how nature works and the depth of the aspects of ith, when you look at the volcanoes and how the islands are formed and then you look at the vegetation and the plants, and then you look at the ocean… I’ve been in some of the biggest, couple of the largest hurricanes that ever hit land. I was in hurricanes on the top of the mountain that had excess of 200 [mph] before the weather station blew away. I knew we had 180 mile an hour winds at my mom’s house. I’ve been through couple giant hurricanes. I’ve been in giant floods, huge. I was in a rain storm that had something like, unofficially, 65 inches in 24 hours. I watched seven hours of lightning where there was six to eight strikes every minute. This is for real. I’ve been in giant waves, and I’ve been trapped in waterfalls, in the rivers. The depth in which I’ve experienced the power and the beauty of nature… it’s, you’re part of it. It’s not there for us to use how we want. It’s there to support us and supply us. The whole thing’s alive. Let’s just go there. It’s alive. I’m always in awe of nature. I think that’s such a good perspective to have. I think nature brings that out of you. I think it’s important for people to go into nature. I solar gaze in the morning whenever I have access to the sunrise. I’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember; 20, 30 years or more. I’m always in the sun as much as I can because we know the science. We know what it does. It’s the source of life. You think about what cold is. Cold is nature, hot is nature, temperatures are nature. It’s all tied together in such a beautiful system, have to really appreciate it.

Brian
You’ve described it so eloquently, too. I appreciate that. Laird, this has been phenomenal. I really appreciate you making the time to be here today. This has been terrific. It’s been an honor to have you on the show. Mahalo, my friend.

Laird
Thank you and aloha. Thank you for having me.

Brian
Thanks for tuning in to LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Laird Hamilton on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me BrianBartes.com. Until next time dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.