#1477 - Tony Hawk

Joe Rogan (0:02)

And we're rollin. How are you Tony?

Tony Hawk (0:04)

Awesome, thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:05)

My pleasure. Thanks for coming here, man.

Tony Hawk (0:07)

Yeah, hey, thanks for inviting me. It's an honor.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

It's interesting to see you even just fuck around with your skateboard, just the way you maneuver it.

You're so adept. It's really weird, like the way you move your feet and just pick it up and it's very impressive.

Tony Hawk (0:23)

It really is, at this point, kind of makes tension on my body.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

It seems like.

Tony Hawk (0:27)

I guess it's weird. I don't think about how comfortable I am. And a lot of times we'll be in a city or something or just like now. I didn't know where to park, right? So I just park somewhere kind of close and just I go skate.

And I feel way better about doing that than like parking and then walking somewhere. And it just, you know, I know I can get around people and sort of be indiscreet and stealthy.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

Indiscreet Tony Hawk on a skateboard is indiscreet. That's ridiculous.

Tony Hawk (0:56)

That might be the most ridiculous thing. I do get weird looks for sure.

Yeah. I get a lot of do-it-kick flips out from car windows.

Joe Rogan (1:02)

Oh really? Oh, that's funny.

Tony Hawk (1:04)

That's my curse that I, that I, that's my burden I carry.

Joe Rogan (1:08)

I'm seeing these new skateboards that are, they look like convertibles, where as these guys flip the board, the wheels flip up and go to the other side.

Tony Hawk (1:17)

Oh yeah, that's sort of a phenomenon, sort of a social media thing going on.

Joe Rogan (1:22)

Ah, so you can see it in slow-mo? Is that what it is?

Tony Hawk (1:25)

No, where the board is actually a contraption, right? Yeah, I don't really understand what that is. There's a select few people doing that, and I've seen a couple where they actually have figured out how to make their board grind and then do a flip around a rail as they jump back on it.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

Oh boy.

Tony Hawk (1:41)

Yeah, it's very specialized, though. I can't say that's a movement.

It's just a few key people that are doing it.

Joe Rogan (1:46)

How many bones do you have to break to perfect that, when I see this dude sliding down rails? I'm like, how many times do you fuck that up and snap a forearm?

Tony Hawk (1:57)

Well, skating went through different waves of disciplines, basically. And in the early 90s, it was all street, right? And so what I did was vert skating. That was kind of dying out. So I was skating street a lot, too.

And I realized I was not fit to be a street skater. The third time I rolled my ankle, like both ankles twice, then the third time the other one, I was like, I don't want to do hand rails anymore. This is not working for me.

This impact is, I'm not going to be able to skate anymore if I keep doing this.

Joe Rogan (2:26)

Yeah, I see these kids, like, whenever you go near a large office building that has a lot of outdoor space and you see them using the rails and stuff, I'm like, how many breaks can you have before?

Tony Hawk (2:39)

I think that it's a little deceiving because people do know how to fall relatively safely from stuff like that.

Joe Rogan (2:46)

But they get addicted, right? They're doing that probably every day.

Tony Hawk (2:50)

Yeah, for sure. And there's all kinds of different styles. So there's tech styles where it's more people are skating ledges and benches and flipping their board, grinding, flipping out, stuff like that, where it's low impact, but super technical.

And then there's just the stuntman who are doing the big rails, the big gaps, jumping fences and...

Joe Rogan (3:09)

How did this happen?

How did it go from just ride and escape? When I was a kid, you and I are the same age, but when I was, I guess I was probably like 11 or 12, I had a skateboard, I was just riding it on the street. All my friends would just ride a skateboard on the street. What happened? How did it get to be grinding across benches and railings?

Tony Hawk (3:32)

I think there's a pretty deep history there of how it got there, but skating was just more like a transportation toy.

And then it was really the Dogtown crew that took it to a new level where it was like, oh, you can use this to do aerials and skate swimming pools. And they were just trying to emulate their surfing. And so then skate parks started cropping up, skating got popular in the late 70s, early 80s. And then it was all swimming pools. And then maybe like four years later, the skateboarding kind of started falling in popularity. The skate parks couldn't get their insurance anymore because the liability was crazy. And so then the streets became the skate park because there was nowhere else to go. And there were a few key skaters that figured out how to use like the urban landscape as a skate park. And then that was it.