“I think the biggest attraction to all these people who have all the money in the world is that you can’t buy surfing ability. You can’t buy the pecking order.” Photos: The Plug
There are somewhere around five-million podcasts floating around the various streaming platforms these days. That is a lot, so it’s understandably hard to stand out. Justin Jay’s podcast, The Plug, does. In his most recent installment, Jay sits down with Kai Lenny.
The Plug isn’t only surf-related. It’s culture-related — entertainers, athletes, artists, and innovators have all sat down to talk with him, from Lenny and Nathan Florence to Stacy Peralta and Arto Saari. Jay’s got a way about him that makes people let him in, and the wide-ranging conversations get incredibly honest at times.
He’s worked with Hollywood stars like Alec Baldwin and Ethan Hawke, musicians like Outkast and Snoop. He has exceptional access to some of the world’s best at a staggering amount of different disciplines. His book, HI 1K, was created after spending a decade behind the scenes on the North Shore. Everyone seems to know him and everyone respects him. Which is why his podcast stand out. That mutual respect for the craft, whatever that craft is, is evident in every conversation.
“Kai Lenny is a professional big-wave surfer and one of the most respected watermen on the planet,” Jay writes about his recent podcast episode. “He’s mastered stand-up paddling, windsurfing, kitesurfing, and foiling — pushing the limits of what’s possible on waves of consequence.”
Lenny has done plenty to be proud of during his journey to the top of the waterman scene, and much of that is covered in this episode, along with some of his philanthropic endeavors and, perhaps most interestingly, his friendship with Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg.
“Over the course of his career, he’s won the SUP Race World Championship, the KSP Kiting World Championship, the Sunset Beach SUP Pro, and the Nazaré Tow Surfing Challenge,” Jay writes. “After the devastating fires in Maui in 2023, he founded the Positively Kai Foundation to help assist residents affected by the fires. So how did he strike up a friendship with one of the richest and most polarizing tech figures in the world? And what aspect of Mark Zuckerberg surprised him the most?”
Listen to find out the answer to that question and a whole lot more.
