Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker 1: From Umbria to Tuscany.
00:00:04
Speaker 2: It really is beautiful to studying.
00:00:06
Speaker 3: Well great, I'm going to come and visit you. Then I'm going to love it. You're there, Come on, do you Palaria Daliana Pioglo.
00:00:18
Speaker 4: Love it?
00:00:20
Speaker 1: Hello, I'm mini driver. I've always loved Preust's questionnaire.
00:00:24
Speaker 3: It was originally an nineteenth century parlor game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing.
00:00:32
Speaker 1: The other player's true nature. In asking different people the same set of questions.
00:00:37
Speaker 5: You can make observations about which truths appear to be universal. And it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed if I asked these questions as conversation starters. So I adapted prus questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think are pertinent to a person's story. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster. And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience, or the most surprising, or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guests today are the professional big wave surfer Garrett McNamara and his wife Nicole. I was interested in hosting two people for the first time ever on my show.
00:01:52
Speaker 3: Because Garrett Nichole's relationship relies on a symbiosis that reaches far beyond the boundaries described by marriage. I'd met Garret on the Noltua of O Wahoo and Hawaii years ago, and I'd seen himself locally, which was in itself pretty astonishing, but nothing prepared me for watching the HBO documentary series The One Hundred Foot Wave that showed Garrett not only beating his own world record by surfing a hundred foot wave, but also figuring out a system with his wife Nicole that mitigated the deadliness of surfing Nazaree in Portugal.
00:02:24
Speaker 1: Something about watching Nicole up on the cliff side communicating.
00:02:28
Speaker 3: With water safety and with Garrett, who was way out in the water, really struck me about devotion and trust and what a rarefied expression of that their relationship is.
00:02:39
Speaker 1: It was a real pleasure to talk to both of them.
00:02:43
Speaker 3: I'm so grateful that you're here. I've never I've never had two people answering my questions before.
00:02:50
Speaker 1: It's absolutely thrilling.
00:02:51
Speaker 4: A really yeah, well that's exciting. I thought you just do it all the time, double people.
00:02:57
Speaker 3: Now.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: No, No, we're not Polly.
00:02:59
Speaker 3: We're not Polly any thing here.
00:03:01
Speaker 1: We're mostly singular. We're not adventurous in any way, shape or form.
00:03:04
Speaker 3: But I think if marriages are a beautiful version of symbiosis, your particular marriage, and I think mostly because Nicole was so in charge of you not dying in such a specific way for such a long time, you're even You're more symbiotic than any other married couple I've probably ever met. It's connected in a far more fundamental way than just ooh, I fancy you.
00:03:32
Speaker 1: Let's mend our lives together.
00:03:35
Speaker 6: Luckily, Luckily, we still love each other too far In love with each other.
00:03:42
Speaker 3: Well, I'm going to ask you my first question, when and where were you happiest?
00:03:48
Speaker 4: I guess for me the moment I met Garrett. That had to have been when I was most happiest. And I'm talking about like the very first conversation we ever had. It was the first time in my entire life that I ever felt that someone really truly saw me, my soul, who I was, because for a lot of my life, I never really felt like I fit in and I was just.
00:04:10
Speaker 2: Trying to fit in.
00:04:12
Speaker 4: But then when I met Garrett, like I felt that he really just immediately saw my inner gifts.
00:04:18
Speaker 1: Wow, why was that?
00:04:20
Speaker 2: We were in Puerto Rico.
00:04:23
Speaker 4: In Puerto Rico, I was there for a stand up paddle board competition because I was competitively stand up cattle board racing, and there was a race that weekend, and the friend I was staying with was a florist who was doing flowers for a charity event.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: Instead o'h come with me. I didn't want to go because I'm.
00:04:41
Speaker 4: A wallflower, but he insisted, so I went, and Garrett happened to be like the celebrity guest, but I didn't know why he was a celebrity guest. I was like, who is this guy? Garrett was there for surface healing and that's that.
00:04:55
Speaker 3: Also, I love that you called yourself a wallflower and that your great friend is a florist.
00:04:59
Speaker 2: Yeah that makes me.
00:05:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a perfect friend for a wallflower. What about you, Garret?
00:05:05
Speaker 6: Well, definitely, when I saw her across the room, I just legst us. But I'll leave that one for Nicole because she answered it so well, and I would say career wise, the Barrel I got Jaws back in two thousand and three, and then my son Barrel was born.
00:05:25
Speaker 7: But that's a double edged sword.
00:05:27
Speaker 6: I was so happy, but at the same time, I was also very sad, and I felt that I just lost my one true love to this little baby.
00:05:40
Speaker 1: Is that, right in that moment, the.
00:05:43
Speaker 6: Woman I'd be looking for forever, dreaming about, and then all of a sudden, this little creature came in and took her away from me.
00:05:52
Speaker 2: Well, listen a true story. I had Barrel at home. She was ten pounds four point five kilo.
00:06:00
Speaker 3: I salute you, because I too had a ten pound baby that I tried to have at home and I couldn't do it. I did thirty seven hours and I had to go to the hospital.
00:06:10
Speaker 1: Okay, so you did it at home.
00:06:11
Speaker 3: You are a super human Okay, go on, But.
00:06:15
Speaker 2: So here, I just had this ten pound baby. I was split in.
00:06:20
Speaker 4: Half in half, and I look over and he's crying, like crying.
00:06:26
Speaker 2: I'm like, why are you crying? He's like, I've lost you. You're not going to scratch my head anymore.
00:06:31
Speaker 4: I'm like, my gosh, now I have to worry about your feelings.
00:06:37
Speaker 3: Oh, oh my god, get it together. May I bless you for admitting that? And I would punch you right through the screen if I could. Holy cow. Okay, So did you tell him to pull himself together and that it was going to be and just actually no, just pull yourself together.
00:06:54
Speaker 6: I believe what she said when she told me, don't worry, nothing's going to change, And then everything changed that minute. Of course, I don't know why I believed, or I already knew it was was going to change.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: That's why you were crying. Yeah.
00:07:11
Speaker 3: I also like that your too happy moments are barrels, like the barrel at Jaws and your baby barrel, who's not such a baby anymore. It was kind of a ripping surfer from everything I've seen. Wow, you do lose them in a way. It's a love affair that you can't that mother's son love is it's particular, but so is the love with your you know, with your lover.
00:07:34
Speaker 2: It's different, different type of love.
00:07:40
Speaker 1: Okay, So what would be your last meal?
00:07:43
Speaker 4: A perfectly grilled cheese with fresh fermented sour dough, like really special cheese cooked by Garrett because he makes the perfect grilled.
00:07:54
Speaker 7: Cheese sttt.
00:08:00
Speaker 2: And really just homemade tomato soup.
00:08:03
Speaker 1: To with the girl cheese sounds, and you know.
00:08:05
Speaker 2: The cheese has to like string across. Yeah, I did like string.
00:08:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, what about you, Garrett?
00:08:12
Speaker 6: I always go back to my childhood in Mexico and it would be rice, black beans, A nice small little grilled fish that you just pull off of the sand the granions.
00:08:23
Speaker 7: There's small little.
00:08:24
Speaker 6: Fish and you just throw on the barbat and the skin comes off a put little salt.
00:08:27
Speaker 7: Oh.
00:08:28
Speaker 2: We were on this like.
00:08:29
Speaker 4: Marriage newlywed game and they said, don't worry, no one's ever gotten all five right about their partner. First of all, he's the first person ever get all five right about me. And then I hardly got any right because one of them was what would his last meal be?
00:08:44
Speaker 2: So I put what I thought it would be. When this man puts rice and beans as his last meal, like who puts rice and beans?
00:08:54
Speaker 7: I love it, just rice and bean, but just to mix it up, been some fish.
00:09:01
Speaker 1: I love it well.
00:09:02
Speaker 2: In your last meal, Bee, you.
00:09:04
Speaker 3: Know it's always been In England on a Sunday, you have a roast lunch and lunch starts at one and it usually ends at around four, and it's like family and you eat it's a roast piece of meat. I would only eat it if there was chicken, and there's all the different vegetables and these sauces in the gravy and the and my mum would make everything, and she taught us all to make it.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: Well, that's what I put us his.
00:09:29
Speaker 7: Last That's what that's my favorite.
00:09:31
Speaker 2: His actual last one would be.
00:09:34
Speaker 6: But nowadays, as I've traveled a bit, I probably would go for don Angie's Lasagna in New York City.
00:09:42
Speaker 2: Oh really, God, have you been there?
00:09:46
Speaker 7: No, I haven't been in Italy. I've still got a New York That's true.
00:09:51
Speaker 3: You would don't say that. Let's say that out loud in Italy. Okay, I got to check that out next time.
00:09:56
Speaker 1: I'm in New York.
00:10:11
Speaker 3: What person, place, or experience most altered your life beyond meeting each other?
00:10:17
Speaker 4: I think probably the birth of Fay, my last baby. I ended up getting COVID at nine months pregnant and it was very bad, and then my liver ended up shutting down and I got this super rare liver condition. So I went to a Chinese medicine specialist and I ended up drinking six ounces of castor oil and having her at home.
00:10:45
Speaker 2: So her name.
00:10:46
Speaker 4: Fe It's Fie, it's faith in Portuguese. Then it's also spelled fi, so it's iron on the periodic table elopments and just the total like faith I had to have in my own body and in her. And yeah, it just really gave me the most strength and courage to listen to my intuition and listen to my body.
00:11:11
Speaker 3: Did your faith come from previously having had a really solid connection with yourself?
00:11:17
Speaker 4: It must have, And I still had to gather it from somewhere.
00:11:21
Speaker 2: It was already in me because I just pulled up the courage.
00:11:24
Speaker 4: But this just really solidified the confidence in my body and knowing my intuition, like listening.
00:11:34
Speaker 3: God it's so incredibly hard, particularly when it's against the kind of a medical wall to really listen. That must have been very challenging.
00:11:43
Speaker 2: It was. It was the most challenging time of my life.
00:11:47
Speaker 3: Wow, that's incredible. And do you feel like that trust that you put in yourself as that carried over into your life post FAE?
00:11:55
Speaker 2: For sure.
00:11:56
Speaker 4: It's like we're so powerful as humans were constantly distracted by external things. Do you have to remind yourself tap into your center?
00:12:05
Speaker 3: I think that's the thing most people. I think we're lost to the distraction and knowing how to come back and get centered, whether it's literally getting up out of your chair and stepping outside to look at the sky and trees. We've definitely, as we've become connected over the internet, become disconnected from ourselves.
00:12:24
Speaker 1: That's wild.
00:12:25
Speaker 3: That's amazing that you that you found that strength and Garrett, did you just observe her doing this?
00:12:31
Speaker 7: It was a lot.
00:12:32
Speaker 6: It was up and downs, and I just had to believe the whole time. I believe I knew in my gut, in my heart that everything was going to be fine.
00:12:41
Speaker 3: Do you think that that connection because the way in which and again I've only watched your guy's relationship on the one hundred foot wave. But you've sure got a sense of the extraordinary connection between the two of you when you're standing on the cliff and Garrett's out in the water. Do you feel that that, I mean, you have have an incredibly connected relationship beyond being on the walkies. When you're on the cliff and in the water, do you feel that that connection between you was in play while you were surfing out there and Nicole was on the walkies?
00:13:15
Speaker 6: Our life we just connected always is twenty four to seven through sixty five.
00:13:21
Speaker 7: The first question before that was the person? What was the question that I didn't answer.
00:13:25
Speaker 3: Oh, what person, place, or experience most altered your life?
00:13:28
Speaker 6: I would say my mom for moving me to Hawaii so I could be become a professional surfer. In my whole life up in a surfer because my mom moved to Sawaii, So I think her for that. And then recently my buddy Eric, he's been helping me with going deep and finding out a lot of trauma and stuff that I've experienced.
00:13:48
Speaker 3: Do you think as the way it's got bigger and bigger that you were chasing was that trying to balance out something else that was going on in your life or was it a response to trauma? Do you think like the bigger the way, the more you were dealing or not dealing with stuff.
00:14:02
Speaker 6: You know, While I was going through it, it was just I felt it was what I loved to do, and I wasn't really afraid anymore and I just had fun. But then after diving deep, I found out that I think it was just trying to feel because I shut my feelings down for most of my life, and maybe I didn't feel so I was out there, no problem. Yeah, and maybe I was trying to feel, so let bring it on. So I don't know that I've come to terms.
00:14:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's amazing.
00:14:31
Speaker 3: I love that I'm making any kind of comparison between us, But the twenty years that I've been surfing in the way that I serve it is the purest connection to feeling, apart from when I was having my son, Like it really is the other place in my life where I have felt the most. So without wanting to draw any equivalency really between us, that makes perfect sense and feels really right that it be in the water and it is on those waves that one feels the most whatever that is, whether it's helping unlock things that are really difficult or balancing those things out. So what relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for.
00:15:20
Speaker 7: You right here, right now?
00:15:24
Speaker 2: Well what type of love?
00:15:25
Speaker 3: Well, what type of love like? What resonates for you? I mean any kind of love, like what's one that comes to mind that is a distillation and a definition of love.
00:15:36
Speaker 6: Warm and just energy and just ah, just this beautiful feeling that you can't really describe, and holding your lover, your best friend and just wanting to disappear into them and become one and then become this ball of energy, love and light and just perfect harmony.
00:15:58
Speaker 1: That's very intense.
00:15:59
Speaker 3: But you are in the right place and thank god your marriage to Nicole. Do you feel that way about the ocean or do you feel great love for the ocean or is it a very different relationship just because your interaction with the ocean is on such a level that all of us, like, there's a fraction of people that could understand it the way that you do.
00:16:20
Speaker 6: I have this crazy, amazing ability to kind of just put yesterday behind me so I can be up here in the mounds and think to myself, I'll be fine if I don't go back in the ocean and don't catch waves again. And then when I do go back in the ocean, I'm paddling out and I'm looking at a perfect wave and I'm.
00:16:38
Speaker 7: Just captivated in just.
00:16:42
Speaker 6: Just like spiritual, beautiful, so happy, just paling and thinking thank you, thank you, thank you, love you, and just paddling out and just seeing my friends and just having the best time in my life. And that moment, I'm thinking, how could I ever think that I could not do this ever again?
00:16:58
Speaker 7: How can I ever think that I can be comfortabor on that?
00:17:00
Speaker 1: Wow?
00:17:02
Speaker 3: So there's a real immediacy with your connection to things. Like if you're in the mountains, you're in the mountains, but when you're in the ocean, you're in the ocean.
00:17:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, what if I e Nica?
00:17:11
Speaker 4: I think it would probably be the love that a mother has for their child, like the love people have for babies. Like when you have a baby and you walk down the street, almost everybody can't help but smile, even if they're having a bad day and they see a smiling baby, like they immediately smile. So if we could see everyone around us as the little versions of themselves, Like if we could.
00:17:33
Speaker 2: Transfer that love to everyone, we.
00:17:36
Speaker 4: All just like love each other unconditionally through the good and the bad and the flaws and the jealousy.
00:17:41
Speaker 2: And this and that.
00:17:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, if we could be connected to that part of ourselves all the time and not I suppose that ego, I guess that's the piece that steps in.
00:17:52
Speaker 1: But you're right. I wonder about tribalism.
00:17:54
Speaker 3: Though I don't know that that's ego, but the way in which people feel that their tribe is better than another person's tribe, that the people who understand them and that they connect with that there will always be that feeling of even though we love our children. Maybe it's also recently just seeing so much of how if a child is a part of a different tribe, people are saying that it counts less.
00:18:16
Speaker 1: But you're right, if we could see it as our own child exactly.
00:18:34
Speaker 3: In your life, can you tell me something that has grown out of a personal disaster?
00:18:39
Speaker 2: A lot of things.
00:18:41
Speaker 1: I think it's useful because things.
00:18:43
Speaker 3: Grow out of shit.
00:18:46
Speaker 2: Our marriage.
00:18:47
Speaker 3: Okay, so what was the personal disaster that grew your marriage?
00:18:50
Speaker 4: Well, when I met Garrett, I had been married for thirteen days, are you kidding?
00:18:56
Speaker 3: Okay, you'd been married thirteen days on the day that you met in Puerto Rico as the wallflower.
00:19:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. The most irresponsible thing I've ever done is run away with Karen Wow, I mean discirl.
00:19:12
Speaker 6: When she was four years old. She would set up school at her house for all the neighbors. She's a school teacher. She'd make school at home in her living.
00:19:19
Speaker 2: She was a very responsible person. I still ask what that's what she play?
00:19:25
Speaker 1: Yeah?
00:19:26
Speaker 3: Wow, Where were you living and where did you run away to?
00:19:30
Speaker 2: I was in four Lauderdale. I was a teacher for three years. We hadn't a home. We just lived out of our bag and travel around the world. We both left our lives.
00:19:39
Speaker 1: I think most people have had relationships that don't work out.
00:19:42
Speaker 3: Heartbreak, a bit of this, a lot of that. But the thing that I've noticed that is over time made it better is when if somebody left me and they ended up with somebody else, the fact that they stayed together and loved each other and built a life and had which happened once is actually the thing that made it more manageable, and it turned back into love eventually because it was clearly right.
00:20:09
Speaker 1: It was clearly the.
00:20:10
Speaker 3: Right thing to do at the time, it was the most agonizing, awful moment. But when something is true, it's true, and it's very difficult, I think, to be able to see that in the moment, like, particularly if you're really getting up and leaving. Was that just an instinct of a commitment that do you just know, like this doesn't make any sense, but this is right.
00:20:31
Speaker 4: Well, it was almost like it was a force outside of ourselves. It was almost like we didn't have any even say in what was happening.
00:20:39
Speaker 2: It just kind of was like this vortex of energy that just.
00:20:45
Speaker 4: It was like the universe was doing it all on its own and we were just simply like these characters following the script kind of.
00:20:54
Speaker 2: And yeah, it was very out of body.
00:20:57
Speaker 4: And I always say that, like, you can have two just such beautiful people, but that doesn't mean that them together puts them in the highest version of themselves, you know, because I look back on my other partner and yeah, he was my best friend, but I wasn't going to become the woman.
00:21:18
Speaker 2: I am now.
00:21:19
Speaker 4: If I would have gone on that other path, I don't feel I would have ever reached my fullest potential.
00:21:26
Speaker 3: Was your explanation to him, I can only describe that I feel with every fiber of my body that I'm supposed to be with this other man.
00:21:34
Speaker 1: Was that how you explained it to him?
00:21:36
Speaker 4: It was the most destructive, hardest, most uncomfortable, the amount of pain caused, and yeah, just it's horrific.
00:21:47
Speaker 2: But at the same time, like what.
00:21:51
Speaker 4: Us together, of what we're able to accomplish, is so much greater than anything else. And I almost feel like, at the moment, you know, it's it seemed like a super selfish decision, you know, oh, well, we just love each other, so let's cause all this destruction. But I feel like it was a power higher than us that brought us together, because together we were able to do so much and accomplish so much that we wouldn't have had if we weren't together.
00:22:19
Speaker 6: All the projects that we're doing to do good and to give back and to be contributors to this planet. Everything we do, we do it for the greater good, and we were always just working on giving back however we can, wherever we can, whenever we can, and we would not be where we are today if we were still back in our lo our lives. Yeah.
00:22:46
Speaker 1: Wow, I think honesty is the way through, even if it's painful. I really do.
00:22:51
Speaker 3: There's no point. It's a really amazing it's a really amazing story.
00:22:55
Speaker 2: Would that be the.
00:22:56
Speaker 3: Same answer to that question for you, Garret?
00:22:59
Speaker 2: Probably it's the most destruction for sure.
00:23:02
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, wiping out of Mavericks was definitely a destructule one, but it definitely learned a lot.
00:23:08
Speaker 7: Got the monkey off my back.
00:23:10
Speaker 6: I didn't have to surf every big waiver around the world anymore. I could actually enjoy being on the land after that.
00:23:17
Speaker 3: Will you just tell me about that way that Mavericks?
00:23:19
Speaker 6: When was that January seven, twenty sixteen, went out there for the wrong reasons?
00:23:25
Speaker 7: I was trying to get invited to the Mavericks.
00:23:28
Speaker 6: Contest, which I thought I should have had an invitation to without having to try to get in. I was like, what the hell, Okay, I'll go show them. So I went over there and did really well the first day and pretty much was invited almost after that first day, and then I had to go back again. I thought to make sure I get invited, And it's going out there for the wrong reasons, not for the love of it, you know, try and get in this contest for ego, ego and all the wrong things. And then my neck was sore. Nicole had six month old barrels. She wasn't going to travel with me.
00:24:00
Speaker 7: What am I doing? I shouldn't have went. I went. I paddled out.
00:24:04
Speaker 6: My neck was so sore that I had my inflation vest underneath my flotation. I pumped up the inflation pretty good so I could use as a pillow the rest of my neck when I'm padding around trying.
00:24:14
Speaker 7: To catch waves.
00:24:16
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Oh my god.
00:24:18
Speaker 6: I didn't listen to the science and went out there for the wrong reasons.
00:24:22
Speaker 7: But yeah, it was a blessing in disguise.
00:24:25
Speaker 3: What was the injury that you sustained?
00:24:27
Speaker 7: Paddle came down this way, didn't make it.
00:24:30
Speaker 6: When I hit, I skipped and skipped and skipped like a stone, and then the lip landed right on me a first hit. It shattered my shoulder into ten pieces. It shattered my head. My head was in nine pieces, and the shaft broke off. The head lodged itself in my pack, and then I had to go through a bunch away on the head with one arm. And then I got to the ambulance, and it was so painful, so so painful, cupuciating and then that pain. I never subsided for about six months. Yeah, and it was hard to love. Yeah, I've had injuries since that. I said, Okay, I'm gonna love this one. Broke my foot, all right, let's love this. Broke my wrist ninety nine point nine percent of it.
00:25:16
Speaker 7: I love the whole.
00:25:17
Speaker 6: Experience, except for the second day, when I started thinking about surfing and all these things, and it shouldn't happened. If So and So wasn't there filming, I wouldn't have done that. I told myself not to do anything for the cameras, only live my real life and let them film it. That the camera was there, and I went up to try and do a turn by the camera and Mark's still a camera.
00:25:37
Speaker 7: I'm trying to blame the camera. Yeah, it wasn't my fault. My father should have done anything different than I would have done.
00:25:46
Speaker 6: But I did love the whole experience after most of its afterwards.
00:25:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, you guys, it's been such a pleasure talking to you both.
00:25:56
Speaker 2: Thank you for having us.
00:25:57
Speaker 3: You're so welcome. It's so lovely to see you. Thank you so much, you guys.
00:26:01
Speaker 6: Thank you.
00:26:04
Speaker 3: Mini questions is hosted and written by Me, Mini Driver Executive produced by Me and Aaron Kaufman, with production support from Jennifer Bassett, Zoey Denkler and Ali Perry. The theme music is also by Me and additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay Addison, O'Day, Henry Driver, Lisa Castella, Anick Oppenheim, A, Nick Muller and Annette Wolfe, a w kPr, Will Pearson, Nicki Etoor, Morgan Levoy and mangesh Had Tiggadore
