From the Archive: Tony Hawk: Mastery, Failure, and the Trick That Changed Skateboarding

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show. Presenting the archive, classic episodes that remain timeless. The raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up. And so everything you do is is amplified in terms of your speed, your height, and so it's it's almost two to three times your usual height, and one wrong move on that, you know, just one small adjustment the wrong way is tragic. And I just don't have the youth that I can survive those kind of falls. I get paid more money than I ever imagined to go ride my skateboard, which still seems absurd to me. Yeah. It's funny, it was a totally different industry then. So, the way I turned pro was I had reached the top of the amateur ranks, and I'm filling out the entry form to the next event, and there's a checkbox that says amateur, and there's a checkbox that says pro, and so I checked the pro box. And then that was it. And I said, Riley, I know you're good at those things, but you're exceptional at skateboarding. You're already way better than most kids your age. And I know you, like, it's hard to go from beneath my shadow, but you do have your own style, you have your own direction, and, you know, you don't have to follow my footsteps necessarily, but you do have an opportunity here. So I have to admit, I have to ask totally stupid naive questions first. Are you okay with that? Like, the most stupid question. Prefer that. Okay. Good. So I can I can barely, like, walk three steps without falling over, so I have to ask just some of the physics of what you do? So when you're I was watching some videos earlier, and when you're, like, kind of vroom and sort of That's what we call it. Sort of upside down and about to do, like, two and a half twists, how is it that ten seconds later, you're not dead? It's it's from a lot of a lot of trying and failing. It really is. I mean, it and also you just start to get a second sixth sense of where you are in the air and where where you need to be and how to land and how to adjust yourself, and it just comes with experience, though. I mean, to learn tricks, like, in the air, doing flips and things, we have to be willing to take some knocks along the way. So you've been doing this since you were, like, 10 or 11, depending on when you consider when you got serious. What was the first time there was a trick you did that originally you thought there's no way I'm gonna do that without killing myself. I I think it was …