Welcome back to the show. We have a special guest today, whose name you already know,

who's surfing you already love, and also whom when interviewed, I think really gets asked

similar questions. So I'm hoping to cover some new ground here in today's conversation,

less about Rob's own career in surfing, and more about how and why

Rob Machado is who he is. You probably know that the Surf Rider Foundation supports Surf Splendor,

but you might not know that I've also been hosting a podcast for them, the Surf Rider podcast.

We've been doing it for about a year now, and our goal is really to tell the human stories

behind Surf Riders initiatives.

So whenever you see something published from Surf Rider, it is a headline, maybe some

statistics, there's data that can be really heady. But what you don't always see is that there

are real people who are affected by the real world implications of those environmental impacts.

So the goal with the Surf Rider podcast is to hear from those people about those impacts.

The dirtiest beach in America is in San, and it's been closed for over a thousand

consecutive days, and the mayor was, in fact, a competitive bodyboarder prior to becoming the mayor.

So I chatted with her to learn about how Imperial Beach became the dirtiest beach in America

and why so little is being done to resolve it.

So that was episode one.

And then episode two, Montauk is out on the far tip of New York. It has great surf, as you

probably know, but it's also had a massive increase in tourism and real estate development

in the past decade, which has created significant erosion issues and water table pollution issues.

So I chatted with residents and award-winning actor Liev Schreiber and his wife Taylor

about how their community has been impacted by those things.

...