Endurance & Flow
how to ride the waves of 2025
I had to delete Instagram from my phone last week so I wouldn’t lose my mind. As if anxiety and mistrust in the algorithm wasn’t bad enough, my feed was full of established Hollywood filmmakers reposting OBVIOUSLY AI content of the LA fires. C’mon guys, do you really think a film crew is setting up dolly shots and close ups in the middle of a raging fire to capture 7 foot tall gorgeous firefighters lovingly caressing wild animals? Isabella Rossellini, an actress I admire and knew as a kid, posted an AI photo to her main feed of a pile of ash with a fully intact Oscar statuette. I counted at least 6 high profile CAA agents sharing her post to their stories, with a single “💔.”
If an industry who manufactures fantasy can’t think critically or tell the difference between reality and AI, how is anyone else supposed to? Then again, maybe my expectations for Hollywood are too high: I once was interrupted in the midst of a conversation about the Italian Renaissance (14th-16th century) by an executive at a major studio asking “when did that movie come out?”
We should expect misinformation to ramp up exponentially as technocrats and oligarchs kiss the ring of the incoming Oval Office, an administration whose agenda has been made very clear. Last week I predicted that Elon would be installed in a suite in the West Wing. Lee Zeldin, a man with no environmental experience who has been chosen to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, equated “clean air and water” with “America being first in AI.”
When shit gets gnarly (gnarly as in the overwhelming idiocy of the US and the state of the world,) the last thing we want to do is be paralyzed by fear.
One of my biggest fears is tsunamis, yet I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Another is getting caught in the line up surfing when a cleanup set comes—a bigger wave or set of big waves breaking further outside the line up than expected. The cleanup set “cleans” or wipes out the line up of surfers who are caught inside. I expect the first few months of 2025 to be a series of proverbial clean up sets. If I’m going to wipe out, I don’t want to panic before making it back up to the surface where I can breathe.
I’ve always admired athletes because their profession requires physical prowess, extreme focus and zero shortcuts (unlike Hollywood which is full of them, ahem Ozempic.) They have no time for fear. My friend, big wave surfer Nic Von Rupp who rides 86 foot/26 meter high waves at his home break Nazaré in Portugal, told me that, “fear is a barrier… if you are not overcoming that barrier you never will find a better version of yourself…surfing has taught me to face my fears.”
So here’s how I’m facing the cleanup sets that keep coming this year, with tips from some of the world’s best and bravest athletes in and out of the water…
