I'm doing my 13th startup right now. When Virgil Abloh came into Louis Vuitton, I had dinner with him. I'm on the board at Dr. Martens. I get some band that adopts me and it's the Beastie Boys. Primitive Reddit, definitely. I was never leaving a comment from Mark Gonzalez in the 80s. Seven billion people with a password problem being shocked and like, 'All right, what am I going to do?' And that your local water treatment plant runs on Windows 95. Radio Shack people. We just wanted to make stuff. Like, if I tell you this is art, well, now you can't mess with it. Drain a pool. Skate it. One, two, three.
So, we got — so, I'm working with Lou on this stuff. So, he's getting involved with the podcast. So, he's been anti-podcast guy, but we'll reel them in.
Oh, we should talk about that.
Yeah, I know. He's like, it's a cool platform. It's so much fun we can do. It's kind of like a zen. All right. So, hey, I'm Trevor. Welcome to the GoPro podcast where we push creativity and collaboration. We're live here at Nemo Design World Headquarters, an operating design facility. It's bustling. These people are working their asses off. Look at them all cranking it out. So, we got a big launch from Mattel today. So, everybody's kind of out celebrating. So, my guest today is someone that I've been anxious to sit down and talk to because again, Lou has so much respect for you and I've had some interactions with you over the years, but it's been super inspiring to get to it. And I did steal something that you did. It's like a CC'd email. I've been using this platform and at the end it says 'talks amongst yourselves.' I stole that from you. No, I'll take it. I'll admit it.
And then, and again in this episode we're going to go deep on this collaboration leadership. Ian's had the opportunity to do — he's just a masterclass. He's done entrepreneurship. He's worked with the big brands. The music thing we're going to talk about the Beastie Boys. Going over to Apple, Beats by Dre. There's so many sidebars that we can go down. Let's see how much we can actually get done in an hour. And again, as you started — as we started our conversation here today, again, here's this kid that skated in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
And none of that slowed you down. You still were able to go ahead even if you were a skater and a new dad. So, congratulations.
Thank you, man. I don't think I would have done any of it without having the kid, to be honest. But, who knows?
That reality maybe is playing out somewhere else. Town.
She is a partner in a venture fund called Wisdom Ventures.
All right. Well, good for you. You got one out the gate. And then, there's a few more in the hopper.
Yeah. Yeah. More daughters. You know, I've had three different parenting experiences. So, there, check.
Yeah. I got all that experience down. We'll kind of play with this. So, where did you grow up?
And then started snowboarding — or I guess everybody wanted to be a skater.
Where did you start snowboarding?
So there was like — you're still making boards. It wasn't quite there. And then there was a shot of Caballero on this plastic yellow — you started snowboarding in '80?
No, I was snowboarding. Like there was —
But what were you snowboarding? I don't know. Were there even — I started skating. I started snowboarding in like —
I don't — '80, '85, and then I was going — there was boards like Burton was making boards and Sims was starting, but you couldn't get them. I got Sels but I didn't have the Dale Berrt liners. Like I think it's so interesting with the internet and it's like you kind of podge things together.
What's interesting for us skating in Syracuse was like my buddy Ronnie would go down to Clearwater to skate and he would skate with Alan Gelfand and Mike McGill. So what we would learn is ollies and we didn't think about it as like this, you know, transformative trick, but it's this guy Alan Gelfand that kind of came back. So he'd come back at Easter time. We'd all try to learn ollies and then we'd go to contest, you know, you get a Zen and you kind of go to Buffalo or you go to Rhode Island for a contest and then they were doing different tricks, had different equipment, just a different approach, right?
Yeah. So much more regional, right?
Because I remember for us like we remember seeing like an ollie on the street in probably Transworld in whatever year it would have been somewhere in the middle of the 80s and like I couldn't even tell you what it was. I thought it might have been an acid drop, right? Like or just like a pressure drop because I'm like, how would you even do that? You know, I didn't understand the physics of it yet.
And I'm sure you remember that sequence of McGill doing the McTwist for the first time. Like there was a motor drive and then you could look at it. Not that I could pull off a McTwist, but you could go — like kids now. Like I worked with Shaun White when he was snowboarding and I remember sitting down with him as a 13-year-old playing a video because he's still young. He hadn't seen a whole bunch of stuff. So we're like, 'Hey, look at this.' And he's like — it's literally like a computer. Just next morning we go out. First try.
First try. First try. Because video changed how fast everything progressed, obviously.
Yeah. And then so you started skating obviously and it's still part of your DNA and it's a great part.
Still skating. I built a ramp last summer on the farm.
Absolutely. All right. Yeah. And is there progression in your skills?
No, I've been getting steadily worse at skateboarding for 25 years. Worse every year.
Every year. I noticed — if I think when I had the cast, I noticed as we age, it's just inevitable. You get less bone density. And I was skating here at Newberg frontside ollie, knee slide. Great maneuver. And then snap. Leg breaks. Dude, it should not have gone, but I was like —
It snapped. No, I mean it's true. I have so many injuries now. Like it's crazy. I work out every morning and I've got to like work through them. I've got like this meniscus thing in my left knee and then I dislocated my shoulder mountain biking last fall and it's just like it's the reach behind, right?
Right. So I do overhead squats every morning. It hurts every day. I'm like, wow, this sucks. My knee hurts, my shoulder hurts. And then, you know, and I work through by like the 30th rep, I'm like, 'All right, I'm ready.' And then I can start my workout.
But I'm sure you've heard that clip with Seinfeld like he's like on his coffee show and he's like, 'Yeah, I came. I saw these skateboarders. They'll do all right.' You know, watching them try to hit a rail. Because again, you fail 90% of the time. And I think that's the DNA that action sports teaches you of like just having grit to —
I mean, this is literally my TED talk. And this is not a joke. Because it's like it's on my to-do list and like now they've said yes so I actually have to do it. But just to — I don't mind previewing it, which is like the theme is like becoming good at failure. Because I realized, you know, I used to have the only vert ramp in LA. I took over Tom Char's ramp, long story. So I had that ramp, I was the steward of that ramp is the best way to put it. I put some money into rebuilding it and resurfacing it. And then you — I rented the little guest house that was in front of it and I kept it in good working order. So if you watch Vans Propeller, the ramp that Hosoi and Grasso and Cab and everyone are skating is that ramp at that moment. And but what you realize watching pros skate in your backyard is the number one thing they are better at than you is falling. And I think to the Seinfeld thing, you know, like being — if you can be, you know, 10 foot above an 11-foot ramp and you're upside down and you're coming in and you're making that split-second decision of are you going to put your trucks down just under or your wheels down just under coping or you going to kick your board away and knee slide and walk back up the ladder and try it again. Like once you're there and fearless, no one can mess with you. Like you're unstoppable. Because you can try anything now.
And I think there's something like that in life. I realize, you know, I've been in France for 10 years and it's a very risk-averse culture and like they really teach risk aversion in schools. It's really interesting and they'll — they do not want to take a risk. They will dot every i and cross every t and that keeps them away from risk. And I realize like how comfortable I am with failure and I think it is a bit of a superpower. If you're not scared of failing and you know, I think if you — or maybe you just feel like you have a long way to fall so you don't have to worry about it, like that next ladder down is not so bad, then you really can attempt a lot of things fearlessly. And I definitely think that skateboarding teaches that.
Absolutely. And I don't know if you noticed too, even on all the productions in Hollywood, it's a lot of action sports guys.
There's just something to the —
It's going to change. You've got to adjust and adapt. In reality, on a photo shoot or video shoot, it's actually slower than actually having to in a split second, am I going to bail and go to knee slide or not? And so it conditions you to make decisions a lot quicker and just be comfortable with the journey as opposed to like is it perfect or not?
I mean, I think there are so many things about skateboarding that — and it's hard to know, you know, sort of causation or correlation, right? Does skateboarding just attract these kind of people or what? But I think about like, you know, greatest music manager is John Silva, great skateboarder. Every time I would skate with John, I would be like, I have 11 more years of skating because John's 11 years older than me and in my 30s, we were skating twice a week together. And so, but I mean, I think there is — I think when I think of John as that example, it's not only the fearlessness which comes with it and like a no fear of failure which comes with it, but I think it's also there's a taste thing. I was just talking to someone this week and they were talking about how — what was it? Oh, I know what it was. I'm on the board at Dr. Martens and we were talking about something there and they were talking about predicting trends in the future and I sort of like, you know, when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail so you got to be careful of having too much mono vision but I was like, well I know how I would do that. I would just look at skateboarding still and like my whole life whatever the fashion in skateboarding is five years later it's the fashion everywhere else. Right? It'd be a super easy way to predict culture is to look at these guys as first movers. Now that skateboarding is in the Olympics, it might not be skateboarding anymore. I don't know. But it certainly has been for my whole life. And I feel really, really, really lucky to have been there because I think that then, you know, we're talking about living in the future earlier. I think then like I don't know, the world is not so surprising when you've already experienced pieces of it. It's annoying because the same people who made fun of you five years ago are now wearing what you wore then. But okay, that's just annoying.
Right. God, I just had flashbacks on just having the first pair of Vans and they're blue and I got called clown shoe guy.
Yeah, exactly right. I mean, I wore like long shorts in sixth grade and, you know, I just got made fun of.
And then it was my first taste of it. Like I really remember it really distinctly being then like 15 and looking at the same guys that made fun of me wearing basically the same thing I was wearing in sixth grade and I was like, hey wait — I see how this works. I think I kind of —
But you don't really know you're ahead of it really at that time. You just kind of — that's the other part of that grit. You just kind of go, I don't care what you think.
Yeah. Well you learn that fast.
I think that's something that'd be magical for all the young people even tuning in. It's like I think there's just this fake sense of what reality is when we're scrolling and it's always the perfected thing that's coming through and it's not really the case.
I think it's really important actually. I was having a conversation with a young woman yesterday who has a very cool project and she was sort of — she was doing this thing and I was trying to figure out like why I have an aversion to it, right? And it's like, oh well people don't — and like everyone does — and like these kind of sentences and I'm like what are you even talking about? Like who cares? You know who Sal Khan is? He started Khan Academy, which is like the — and I heard him speak on David Eagleman's podcast, which is a great podcast about brain science, recently. And he said Khan Academy is great for the 15% of people who are curious. And like that to me was — I was like wow. Because that's something that we kind of know in our lives that there are some people who are — for example I always say like astronomy is for people who are curious and astrology is for everyone else. You know what I mean? Like astronomy is for the people like, 'Wow, what is that? That's so interesting. Really? How does that work? What is that?' And then astrology is for the, 'Well, okay, planet guy, what about me?' Which like most people, right? And Sal Khan put a point on it. Oh, wow. It's 15% of people who are curious and 85% of people walking around us are NPCs.
And what's — and you bring it up too is there's all that information that's completely available that we didn't have to be able to learn anything and it's all out there, but I don't know if you know, society's evolved any faster, better or smarter.
I think that this is where the thing that Sal Khan said really — because the Khan Academy thing is really interesting because everyone has access to Khan Academy. Everyone does. So, you know, who actually goes and goes down those rabbit holes? Well, it's a certain kind of person. We know that. No matter who has access to it, it's only a certain kind of person that's attracted to it. You know, there's the Chris Rock bit about like, you know, people love not knowing stuff. He's like, 'I don't know that stuff.' You know, like people love not knowing stuff, right?
Well, yeah, I think for a lot of people, but then we all know people that are just like naturally incredibly curious and that is I think another superpower. Fearlessness, curiousness.
And okay with it not knowing what's actually going to happen or what the end answer is.
I mean that to me — you know, that was the Socrates Operation Ivy connection. You know, I mean, well, it's always been. I realized it when I — I don't know. I think I might have been in like first year of college when I read The Last Days of Socrates and I realized that like, you know, the Operation Ivy line, 'All I know is that I don't know nothing.' Like that's basically Socrates' worldview.
What an easier way to go about life though, right? Instead of like I know everything.
Yeah. I mean, I know everything's got to be —
I mean, you must just like fall on your face all the time if you think you know everything, right?
Or even 'I know what you need to do.' Like, yeah —
And we see some of that in our society. But —
