The Surfer's Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick

A molecular scientist with a PhD in marine conservation and sustainability from UC San Diego, Cliff Kapono devotes himself to putting his two greatest passions—science and surfing—into productive conversation. For Kapono, a Native Hawaiian from the Big Island, surfing necessitates meaningful, intimate care for one's environment and is a practice deeply embedded in the familial and social histories that informed his upbringing. Kapono currently serves as an ambassador for the Save the Waves Coalition, a nonprofit that protects surf ecosystems globally, and his environmental activism and study range from microbiome dynamics to coral health. In this episode, Kapono talks with show host Jamie Brisick about surfing as a means of combating trauma, finding one's identity, sublime connection, high-performance surf zones, commodification of the sacred, the nuances of inclusivity, and growing up in Hawaii.

Steve Olson honed his skateboarding expertise sneaking into swimming pools across Southern California while growing up in the 1970s. His skating was wedded to a surf-centric childhood at a time when the crossover between the two was at its height. Olson earned a sponsorship by Santa Cruz Skateboards in 1979 and quickly became notorious for introducing a punk rock aesthetic and cool defiance to the skate scene. He's also lived outside of surf-skate norms as an actor, artist, musician, and father, blending all those interests into a singular personality. In this episode, Olson sits down with Jamie Brisick to talk about their first encounters, his contemporary art practice, the art of trespassing, the surf-skate connection, cat-and-mouse thrills, his greatest moments on a skateboard, extreme individualism, and the memories that have stuck with him.

From one of surfing's most accomplished and recognizable families, Coco Ho was raised in the thick of the surf universe on the North Shore of Oahu. As a kid, she quickly gained notoriety as a high-performance surfer in her own right, winning multiple junior titles before eventually joining the Championship Tour while still a teenager, where she posted solid results and year-end rankings for over a decade. Since letting go of competition, she's gone on to design women's wear collections, put on twin-fin clinics, and started her female-centric board brand, while continuing to chase waves. In this episode, Ho and show host Jamie Brisick sit down to talk about her serendipitous thrust into competitive surfing, competing against her brother, friendship, winter on the North Shore, the inevitable overlap between passion and selfishness, functionality, confidence, and her biggest inspirations.

Dubbed "The Animal," Nat Young has spent nearly 60 years as one of surfing's most influential and esteemed figures. At the forefront of surfing's stylistic evolution during the 1960s, Young's victory at the 1966 World Championships in San Diego on his self-shaped "Magic Sam" helped cement Australia's place as a budding progenitor of high-performance surfing. In the decades since, he's maintained iconic status both in surf culture and in his native country, while writing numerous books, making films documenting the era of transformation he helped usher in, traveling the globe to both surfing and non-surfing locales, and continuing to surf—at a masterful level on all manner of craft—at the world-class points near his home. In this episode, Young talks with show host Jamie Brisick about his long and celebrated career, his biggest influences, and the translation of style across generations.

Two-time world champion John John Florence looms large in surfing's landscape. The eldest of three brothers, Florence grew up on the North Shore, where his mom took the family to the beach every day after school. He quickly made a name for himself as a kid, inching his way from bodyboarding the shorebreak to sitting center peak in the lineup at Pipe. His knowledge, talent, and skillset extends beyond the jersey—even beyond the surf, marked recently by his extended trips sailing the open ocean. A paradigm of the waterman's tradition, Florence sits down with show host Jamie Brisick in this episode to talk about the trajectory of his career, staying wholesome, his biggest inspirations, self-optimization, his proudest moments, his complicated relationship to competition, family, synchronicity, and what the future holds.

Keala Kennelly grew up on Kauai in a geodesic dome built by her parents and began surfing at the age of five, a contemporary of the Irons brothers. Through the 1990s and early aughts, she was consistently ranked top ten on the World Tour and was the first woman to tow Teahupoo. She has since pursued successful careers in both acting and music. Kennelly's life has been also defined by her pushing both physical and social limitations, from her fighting for women's representation in heavy surf to her coming out during a time when that meant detrimental ramifications to her surfing career. In this episode, Kennelly talks with show host Jamie Brisick about being an early advocate for the LGBTQ+ surfing community, what it meant to be one of the few women in the lineup, how the attitudes have changed, losing her sponsors, giving up her spot on tour to work as an actress for David Milch, fighting for equal pay, and her invite to the Eddie, and her DJ career.

His father an olympic diver from Hungary, his mother a professional water skier, Brad Gerlach drew inspiration and drive from his parents' athletic accomplishments and competitive mentality. He gripped professional surfing by the horns in 1985, when, as a rookie on the tour, he took out the tour's major players to emerge victorious at that year's Stubby's Pro. Victories continued to color Gerlach's early career, culminating in his finishing second in the world in 1991. He eventually grew disillusioned with competitive surfing and focused his efforts on big-wave surfing and chasing swells around the globe, where he saw more fruitful possibilities for personal growth, self-expression, and freedom. He's also worked as an actor, teacher, founder, and coach. In this episode, Gerlach sits down with show host Jamie Brisick to talk about the road to realizing one's dreams, unlocking potential, his proudest year, Wave Ki and his fitness philosophy, and fame.

Surfer, artist, and filmmaker Thomas Campbell's unique perspective was informed by upbringing in Dana Point, California, his background as a skateboarder, and his experience serving as editor of Skateboarder magazine in the 1990s. His films The Seedling (1999), Sprout (2004), and The Present (2009), which function loosely as a trilogy, aestheticize surfing on the basis of its inherent capacity for playfulness, beauty, and style, standing in contrast to a society increasingly dominated by industry and consumption. Today, Campbell continues to work as a practicing filmmaker, artist, and producer, and is currently preparing for an upcoming solo exhibition at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. In this episode, Campbell sits down with show host Jamie Brisick to talk about the divergent cultural possibilities between surfing and skating, the importance of having a strong work ethic, being driven by curiosity, the surfing industrial complex, and finding creativity in quietude.

One of the shortboard revolution's seminal figures and a Pipeline pioneer, Jock Sutherland hails from a family of watermen: His mother swam the northern coast of the island of Molokai, a journey which she later detailed in her 1978 book, Paddling My Own. His father, a World War II navy officer, was a seasoned kayaker, fisherman, and surfer. Sutherland and his family moved to Hawaii from Long Beach, California in 1952, where he learned to surf on one of his father's old planks. He began riding for Greg Noll as a teenager, and went on to place second at both the 1965 Makaha International Junior Surfing Championships and the Ocean Beach World Contest in 1966. In 1967, he won the Duke Invitational. In 1969, he won Surfer magazine's Surfer of the Year award. In 1970, he left surfing to join the US Army at the height of Vietnam. At 74, surfing remains an integral part of Sutherland's day to day life. In this episode of Soundings, Sutherland sits down with show host Jamie Brisick to talk about turning points in surfing's evolution, living with Jeff Hakman in Maui, the psychedelic resurgence, why he enlisted in the Army, being incarcerated for drug smuggling, myth-busting, and Waimea's mechanics.

Journalist and author Michael Scott Moore's interest in piracy emerged from research conducted for his first novel, 2010's Sweetness and Blood, which traces the history and spread of surfing from pre-colonial Hawaii to the rest of the world. His interest in the issue spiked when a trial of ten Somali pirates began in Germany in 2010—the first time in 400 years that pirates had appeared in a European court. As the trial ran on, Moore became set on researching piracy outside the confines of a western judicial system, leading him to travel to Somalia in 2011, funded by a crisis reporting grant provided by the Pulitzer Foundation. In January of 2012, he was taken hostage by a local pirate group in Galkayo, and remained captive for more than two years. In this episode, Moore talks with show host Jamie Brisick about the devolution of hope into fatalism, the importance of remembering trauma, stoicism, his memoir The Desert and the Sea (2018), and learning to live with what you have.