"I watch my 16-month-old son, and he's fearless, and he wants to just walk out into the shore break." "I mean, there's something so interesting about that, to watch him just stare at the ocean, stare at waves coming in, and watch them just crash on the shore, and that's super entertaining." "So much of it is just, you know, you put your feet in the water, and you feel your toes sink into the sand, and to feel that draw, the pull of the tides and the surge of the shore break..." "You know, and you want to go out deeper." "You could live for three months on 100 bucks." "We didn't think of it as any kind of a culture." "We just thought of it as like, "Aren't we lucky to be doing this?"" "There was less than 15 chairlifts in the world, and I bought my first pair of skis for two dollars." "We were kind of disenfranchised from society." "I mean, we had totally different lifestyles than our parents." "It was obvious that this was going to go someplace, but, man, we were like broke hippies." "We were kind of on the low rung of the totem pole." "You were kind of an outlaw, kind of an outcast." "And there was no future in that." "You're 100% focused on what you're doing right now, this instant." "This instant is the most important thing in all of your life." "The past is the past, and the future..." "Well, who knows what's coming?" "Somehow, every time you do it, at whatever level," "I mean, whether it's your first day or you've been doing it your whole life..." "It somehow manages to free you from a lot of the things in life that are going to try and sink you, try and drag you down, that are going to try and make you unhappy or negative." "It somehow allows you to leave all that behind for maybe just a moment, but sometimes that moment's enough." "It's a basic instinct of a human being, his search for freedom." "And still the search for freedom is within all of us." "Whether you're young or old, male or female, it's the same thing." "It's that thrill of the first ride, and once it gets under your skin, you can never stop." "We would all be in prison." "I think." "If you're kind of a misfit kid and you want to rebel, you need a place to do that in a positive way." "Some guys grab skateboards and did it." "Other guys grabbed climbing ropes and came up here." "My number-one goal was to cover the Earth with bikes." "You know, it's going to happen." "This is going to happen." "There's no doubt." "It's just a matter of time." "To me, being in the wilderness is what it's all about." "Wilderness is the battery that recharges all of your energy." "Gives us life, gives us inspiration." "You're touching it." "You're feeling it." "You're a part of the cliff." "You understand the power of this thing that you're interacting with." "I think what motivated me when I was young and what motivates me now are basically the same things." "That sense of glide, and that sense of weightlessness." "There's a host of sports now that didn't used to exist, and they all have that same sensation that is sort of core to a lot of people's nature." "Adventure, to me, is just getting out of your comfort zone and going into the unknown." "That's where I feel every emotion of life and feel the most alive." "Most sports are a form of art." "It's no different than an artist having a big piece of canvas and a paintbrush." "Having a skateboard and going out in the city is a similar thing." "Skateboarding happens to be one of those sports that allows you to push pretty far into a creative place." "Well, I just wanted to see what it felt like to be fifth gear, pinned, and just sail in the air as long as I could." "It just seemed like such a great idea." "When I started surfing, there were maybe, you know, not more than a thousand or two surfers in the world, for sure." "So we felt very, very elite because we knew about this thing that the mainstream had no idea existed." "Surfing was the antithesis of organized social behavior when it began." "See all those guys in their cars leaving for their nine-to-five?" "Who's got it right, them or us?" "And that was the question." "That was the question." "A bum is somebody who won't work, and I've never worked, so that fits." "If you love what you're doing, it isn't work." "It's fun." "I made my first movie in '49, '50." "I did all the photography, all the editing, stole the music, booked the shows, got the ski clubs to put it on, designed the posters." "I showed up on time, set up the projector, set up the screen, set up the microphone and the PA system, and narrated the show live." "110 cities in one year." "I made movies of people skiing." "Now, of course they said, "Who is going to watch that?"" "They were right in a lot of cases, because there was many times," "I can't tell you how many, where I showed up in a high school auditorium, 1,000 seats, 1200 seats, and there'd be eight or ten people there and that was all." "But those eight or ten people, I really screwed up their lives, because at least two or three of them took up skiing." "We all tried to figure out something we could do that we could stay at the beach and live how we wanted to live." "I mean, obviously, like, a surfer would rather live in an expand-o trailer on a perfect point break than have a mansion in Beverly Hills with 45 servants and eight Rolls Royces." "I mean, it's just where your priorities are." "At the time, if you go, "I'm a surfer," they go, "Oh, God, poor guy."" "The high school I went to had 3,000 kids, and I was the only surfer." " And where was that?" " That was in Long Beach." "In 1959, the movie "Gidget" came out, and surfing went from just a small amount of surfers, trace amount, to several million by '63." "The Endless Summer came out in 1964, '65, and opened in Kansas City." "And there were guys driving cars around with surfboards sticking out the trunk that had never seen the ocean." ""Endless Summer" showed the rest of the world what surfing was really like, and it was correct for the people that were in it." "It entertained a general audience who didn't know anything about the sport." "It's just a home movie." "You just shoot it, and then when you get home, you look at the footage and edit it." "But that's what I'd always done." "We shot, edited, narrated, not because I thought I was good at it." "It was the only one I could afford that would work for 50 cents an hour." "Every time a new movie would come out, you'd go to the opening, and it was a gathering of the clan." "What the surfers found in them that was so compelling was what other good surfers looked like, what they were doing." "So they were the basic form of communication." "And the surf magazines came along in the early '60s, and it was the beginning of the lifestyle culture." "It was the first time they'd had a language and a dress code and behavior that left where you did it and was taken to school, or wherever you went." "And then the funny thing about surfing is, is that it spawned skateboarding." "And then skateboarding urbanized and came back and influenced surfing." "So there's all kinds of cultural cross-pollination." "The clothing industry caught hold in the early '70s, and this thing went ballistic." "If you were to ask me back then if we were going to have the largest surf-skate-snow industry company ever," "I'd tell you, no, not a chance, no way." "It's really not about any one person, never has been." "I always call myself just a humble board short maker so here we are." "Let's talk a little bit about you." "OK." "I lived in a little house in Newport." "We had no money." "I had a Volkswagen van." "That was our biggest asset in the company." "At least we could drive around and make things happen." "I had no business being in business." "I had no idea how to start something." "I thought my business experience would be to just go to work for somebody and get a paycheck and learn." "So we really had to make it up as we went along, just driving around town all day long finding fabric, Velcro, snaps." "We'd get about 24 pairs out of production every day." "I'd put the snaps in every pair." "And we'd put them in my Volkswagen van, and drive to an account who would take as many as we could supply." "I thought, "All right, well, this sounds fun."" "I can hang out at the beach." "I can keep surfing." "I have this little project, do it for a year or two, and then I'm going to go to graduate school." "That was my plan." "You know, when I was young, climbing saved our lives." "We had nothing to do with corporate America." "I mean, this is the '60s." "We just said no to a lot of that stuff." "We had a counterculture lifestyle and made our own way." "We really were proud of the fact that climbing had no economic value in society." "That was great." "When we were doing big walls in Yosemite and stuff, hardly anything had been done." "So you didn't repeat routes." "I mean, why repeat a route when you can go do a new route?" "I think the curious common bond that we all had is a passion to do something with no outside motivation." "It was more from the inside." "Because you weren't going to get famous about it." "You weren't going to get paid for it, no way, no how." "When you first started coming into this place, it was really intriguing about the lifestyle and the characters." "It just seemed like an array of characters." "You've got to remember, it was in the early '70s." "There was a whole revolution of things going on in mainstream society of protesting wars, you know, hippie generation and all that." "It seemed like everything was an adventure around here." "Every step you were taking had an inspiration of the unknown and the excitement just to be here." "If you go back in the history of bicycles, over 100 years ago, people rode nothing but unpaved roads." "So one could say," ""Well, off-road riding, that started when bicycles started,"" "which now everybody takes for granted." "But back in the '60s, '70s, it was a radical proposition." "There was this whole place where people would go to, this shrine, where it was so close to a major crazy city, San Francisco, yet at the same time you could get so far away." "The golden key was this thing called a balloon tire bike, and originally it was, you know, found objects." "It was bikes that were found in second-hand stores and, you know, the Goodwill or dumps." "What happened here was a mongrelized bike." "I mean, some people, half the people would spit on it and say, "This is a piece of junk." "Are you out of your mind?"" "And the other half would say, "That's what I want!" "I need that thing."" "I was lucky enough to have met a couple of the first windsurfers in Hawaii in 1974." "I wasn't big enough or strong enough to get the sail out of the water." "I was 11 years old, weighed, like, 72lbs." "I graduated from high school in 1981, and that's the year the sport turned pro." "So I deferred admissions to university." "I said, OK, I'll see what being a pro windsurfer might be, because there weren't any at that point." "When you first started skating, especially in the '80s, or even the '70s, skaters were outcasts." "It wasn't cool." "When I was in high school, I got ridiculed for skating." "There were only two other skaters in my school." "We just kept our head down, did our work and bolted as soon as the bell rang." "I got into it in its early days from before we had bindings, before it was allowed at ski resorts." "The vibe in the early days was like," ""You can never make a living doing that."" "There was no such thing as a snowboard industry or a pro snowboarder." "I left school and the whole thing." "Left at 16 to come up here." "I did not feel like I was smart." "That was some of the side effects of being in a situation where you're being given an A, B, C, D, or F." "And you convince yourself that you're not as good as, you're less than." "But at the same time, I realized something very curious for myself, that I had a very strong connection to nature." "Basically, rock climbing became a way of life." "Now, who would have thought?" "I was a youth." "What I recognize is you're willing to almost do anything to just know who you are and where you're at." "And with youthful enthusiasm, they're willing to try it just for the adventure of it, for the initiation into something that..." "Who knows what it is?" "It might be a gang." "I don't know." "And I tell them that you had to do something to get in here, even to get locked up." "Now you know where you're at." "What are you going to do about it?" "What I got to experience as a kid on a 20-day backpacking trip, hiking to the top of peaks and things, is that somehow your imagination will catch something, and you might get that miracle of life that is "anything's possible."" "All right, gentlemen." " Have fun." " Good luck riding!" "I fell in love with skateboarding and surfing early on." "Just getting to the beach was a huge adventure." "Oftentimes, it was hitchhike 45 minutes away, hide in the bushes, sleep on the beach so you're there in the morning." "I was seeking out the optimal places to surf and skate, and had those adventurous ethos from the beginning." "Going into these places, you fill your backpack with everything you think you might need, and you walk into the wilderness." "And to go out there and really walk through these mountains, one wrong call could have dire consequences." "It's super important to be really present-moment." "And it is a process getting into the flow, to, like, really, really get into the flow." "I'm really firing on all cylinders, and reading, like, every little nuance that the mountains are doing." "And when I come back from time in the mountains, whether it's a day or a week or a month, I respect life, but I feel like it's really important to live life." "Every day, I'm involved in a pathway that's a critical pathway." "Someone's life depends on the decisions and the actions that I take." "And I saw myself on a predetermined pathway." "There is a medicine career pathway." "And when I was taken into the wilderness for the first time, that disrupted my pathway." "It disrupted my life." "It was a liberating circumstance that just happened to explode my comfortable life into a million little pieces." "The wilderness opened up a whole new possibility for me." "It alerted me to the fact that there was another, deeper, more multidimensional person inside this doctor." "I get inspired by an idea and the challenge, the excitement for me is to make the idea, the vision, a reality." "I wanted to jump off, base jump, the highest cliff in the world, the great Trango Tower." "For me, all adventure is a metaphor for the journey inside yourself, getting to know the darkest, remotest corners of your own psyche." "Sometimes that means going way, way, way outside your comfort zone." "So I started to pursue fear, the mastery of fear." "The thing that I've looked at, which is on a poster my sister gave to me when I was a young kid, was a picture of a really big wave, and there was a surfer on there." "It said, "Face your fears, live your dreams."" "That sat above my bed from my early teens till I left home." "That inspired me to work the last 20 years of my life." "Almost killed myself, but facing my fears." "My fears were fears of acceptance, you know, and being worthy." "I was someone that was always pushed to "100% is all that's acceptable."" "Having that drive to always push for the top, it's driven me to want to jump further than anyone else." "As a child I was the one in the block where the parents didn't want their kids to hang out with me because I was crazy." "But one thing I liked doing was riding motorbikes." "I was four years old when I got my first motorcycle." "And that became the next ten years." "We just traveled the circuit." "We were doing all the state rounds, and eventually the national championships." "My dream has always been to jump big jumps on my motorcycle." "I've always looked to the top of the pyramid as, like, that's the goal." "I went to Evel Knievel's funeral." "It was something that I just really wanted to go to and pay my respects because I really felt that we had some kind of tie." "I stood in line to go up and just kind of say a prayer and stood in front of him, and, you know, kind of bowed my head." "I just said, "Evel, I want to follow in your footsteps and take the torch where you've left it, and take it to a greater height and I want to do that with your blessing."" "And when I said that, there was this crazy rush of cold air." "I can feel my hair on my whole body standing up right now." "It's like I feel like I got the Knievel spirit in me." "It's just like I felt like he gave me his blessing." "When we all got out of school, it was like our skate gang." "There was no age discrimination other than what my brother tried to put on me." "It was always an uphill battle to get his approval for me to be around." "Then I would also have to impress his friends for them to also, you know, to stand me, to be OK to be in the crew." "So that drove me to push myself quite a bit." "When I was a kid, I used to sit in class and draw ramps all the time, and I always had this vision that ramps could be a lot bigger." "You know, why were they the size they were?" "I would sit there and brainstorm new ideas of things I could do when I got out of school on the ramp that day." "When I think of a trick, when I'm sitting at my house," "I come down here and learn it." "A lot of what I'm doing today," "I fantasized about it as a kid quite often." "I was a bit of a daredevil as a kid." "Combine that with the creativity, and that's really the formula of what makes me tick." "When I started snowboarding, I quit everything for it, and it was the only thing I thought about." "I was gonna move to Whistler, be a professional snowboarder." "Every decision I made was for that goal." "I don't think I had that feeling with anything else." "So there was no B plan." "There was no, "If it doesn't work out, what's going to happen?"" "That was just the plan, and it was going to work out." "I don't know how to say it." "It's like I'm almost breathing." "Like the best breath you can take of full bliss and happiness." "It's like magic." "I do tow-in surfing, kite surfing." "Surfing, stand-up surfing and wind surfing." "I've been riding with Kai Lenny since he was nine years old and helping him through the whole process of becoming a pro, and now being, basically, the best in the world at stand-up, you know, an incredible windsurfer, kiter, surfer." "He's kind of like me, where he does everything." "You know, Robby, since I was young, would always tell me, you're a product of your environment." "I always knew what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be." "Looking at Robby for inspiration, he's old enough to be my dad and he's still going, stronger than ever." "And he sometimes..." "I sometimes feel like he's younger than me." "Most people grow up." "You get out of high school and they stop playing." "They lose that aspect of falling down and getting back up and brushing yourself off and doing it again as an adult." "And I've never lost that." "I'm still doing the same thing that I was when I was 12 or 16 or 20." "I think it's good for you." "I like riding bikes." "Man, I like riding bikes." "I was the thorough addict." "I was a road racer." "And when I was 12 years old," "I told myself, "I will never stop doing this, no matter what."" "I wanted to spread this thing everywhere because I knew that we could just make a lot of people so happy." "The first year, we made 160 bikes." "The second year, we made 1,000 bikes." "People lined up out the door." "In 1983, for the first time in history, you could walk into a bike shop and walk out with this fat-tired thing called a mountain bike." "In another ten years, when someone would say "bike,"" "they'd actually mean a mountain bike." "You go to this amazing park, there are two gigantic, awesome artificial turf soccer fields." "There's a gigantic, beautiful dirt and grass baseball field." "There's basketball courts." "There's a full swimming facility." "Then there's a gigantic skate park." "I think that says a lot about the evolution of everything." "In this kind of community, all those sports are kind of at the same level." "Skating is such an important part of this community." "So many kids are doing it, we have to include that in our park." "Action sports have become mainstream because as soon as we step on a skateboard, on a surfboard, a motorcycle, a bike, it's on." "I noticed that contemporary youth adored and respected and revered these pro athletes, pro skateboarders, in the same manner that they felt about mainstream athletes." "Whether it be a Michael Jordan or a Tiger Woods." "You now have, at least at a competitive level, a ton of parallels to these traditional..." "Whether it's soccer, football, you name it." "Today we watch the Olympics, and the number-one rated event at the Olympics is halfpipe snowboarding." "I don't think anyone thought it would grow to that size." "Now you have the first, or probably second by now, generation of people whose expectations are "I want to be a pro athlete."" "Ladies and gentlemen, you've just seen some magnificent surfing out here in the Pacific Ocean and Santa Clara River Mouth." "Here with me I have Kelly Slater." "Kelly comes along." "He's this beautiful little kid from Florida." "We met him when he was..." "I don't know, 15 or 16 years old." "Walked up to us at the trade show and says," ""I'm going to be the best surfer in the world one day."" "And we just looked at him. "Really?"" "Then other people told us that this is the guy, and we're like, "OK."" "I think he stands head and shoulders above anybody else." "He was the guy that took it from a core activity to a mainstream consciousness." "Probably by the time I was about ten or 12," "I was pretty sure I'd be a pro surfer." "That's what I wanted to be." "You know, I didn't know how, or if it was going to make a living for me or anything like that, but I knew that was what I wanted to do." "I woke up this morning and realized I had this long dream about a barrel all night." "And it's just... it's my passion." "I don't know if there's anything I would have been as passionate about." "11-time World Champion paddling in." "He's up." "There he goes, Kelly Slater in the pipe." "Riding in the barrel, can he come out?" "It's basically a desire, you know?" "Having a passion for it and having the desire to keep learning." "No matter how much you think you know, there's a lot more that you don't know than you do know, and if you keep that idea in your head, if you perceive surfing that way, then you're always going to have fun." "You're always going to keep learning things." "I mean, you look at the young generation of kids and they're surfing a lot better than we were at that age." "With video and film, they could sit there on a rainy day when it's flat and literally watch surfing all day." "By watching something, it's learning by example, you know." "You're getting taught visually." "As far as, like, videos, that is so important." "I think just as important, if not more important as winning any contest." "That's really where the progression of skateboarding gets pushed to." "People, they devote years to making a video part." "That's how important it is." "All their efforts of skateboarding, as a pro skater, if they're not competing, are going to making an amazing video part, and breaking themselves off in the process." "That's what kids ask, "How do you do this trick every try?"" "I go out there and I do it every single day for this many years." "You're eventually going to be able to do it almost every single try." "And, I mean, obviously it takes failing." "It takes falling a lot to be able to get to that point, you know, falling a lot, and falling hard, and getting hurt, and all those things." "But that's just part of the game." "Yes!" "Finally." "We're definitely in the age of the sports vid." "And I think it's changed the sports big time." "If you look at the films, they are the history books." "They do show you what the progression is." "The most important part of documenting these sports are watching the films." "What we've seen happen probably in the last ten years is what we're living in right now, the digital revolution." "You never know you're inside a revolution when you're living in it." "Now, if you look back, it'll be like we're living in the Wild West of the Internet." "Cameras are shrinking and getting better every day." "The reason those shots are so amazing is because it truly puts you in the perspective of the athlete." "It just became the staple of how people shared their sport adventures." "When everything got blown apart by the Internet, everybody started doing their web clips and stuff, it became very different." "It was more like the experience of out on the road and traveling." "The riding wasn't the most intense or the craziest, but it was accessibility, and it was about something anyone could do." "It started when I was, like..." "The summer of, like, sixth grade going into seventh grade." "I wanted to surf every day that summer to get better." "Once the summer was over, there was only 30 days left." "I'm like, "OK, well, I'll make it 100 days," and so I did 100 days." "Then I decided, like, a year, and then it was two years, and now I just did 1,000 days, so I want to do three years now." "Even if it's bad, I still have fun." "Surfing just makes me so happy, so it's good." "Every day is a good day." "We were in the water, growing up, every single day, all day long, as much as we could." "My parents never really forced us to surf." "It was just like, "Here's the beach, do whatever you want."" "Here's some surfboards, boogie boards, some sand toys." "Like, basically, just have fun." "And that's kind of where it started, just sandcastles on the beach." "I think my limits are a little different than other people's limits." "Other people's limits are maybe surf bigger waves, surf more often, or, you know, learn new tricks." "I just like to keep surfing the way I like it, and that's just to have fun." "For me, I think pushing myself in my sport is maybe more about teaching people, and showing people this amazing thing that we do, and putting a smile on their face." "That's pushing my sport for me, I guess." "That's what it means to me." "I remember the first wave I ever caught." "You know, still to this day, if I could explain the feeling, it would be like what it feels like for me now, dropping into a huge wave at Jaws." "Basically, you instantly feel like nothing else in the world exists." "Nothing else matters." "You're living in the moment." "Big waves are relative, you know." "I think everyone's a big-wave surfer if the waves seem big to you." "You know, that's..." "It's all relative." "You just want to feel it again, and you want to keep driving, keep going just to keep feeling the same emotion every time, every time you skate." "It's fun." "I mean, I keep saying that, but it really is that fun." "And it's..." "I just can't describe it." "You just feel like you're in the groove, and you're just going with it." "It's the best." "I really don't put that much thought about what I really want to do." "I'm just trying to skate and have fun and keep progressing the sport." "I don't really know what to do right now, because I'm just kind of..." "It's kind of the off-season I guess, right now." "There's really no off-season." "Just kind of always skating." "When you're a kid, you get asked this one particular question a lot." "It really gets kind of annoying." ""What do you want to be when you grow up?"" "Now, adults are hoping for answers like, "I want to be an astronaut."" "Or "I want to be a neurosurgeon."" "You adults and your imaginations." "Kids, they're most likely to answer with "pro skateboarder,"" ""surfer," or "Minecraft player."" "I asked my little brother, and he said, "Seriously, dude?" "I'm ten."" ""I have no idea." "Probably a pro skier." "Let's go get some ice cream."" "See, us kids are going to answer with something we're stoked on, what we think is cool, what we have experience with." "But if you ask a little kid, sometimes you'll get the best answer, something so simple, so obvious, and really profound." ""When I grow up, I want to be happy."" "This is where I'm really happy." "Powder days." "Skiing, to me, is freedom." "I look at this and see a thousand possibilities, and it's a good metaphor for my life." "People are celebrating just what action sports really entail, much more than just the technical side." "It's just more about the opportunity it gives you to be out on the mountains, be out in the oceans." "It's just an amazing experience." "At the center of the whole industry, there is still that core, that very limited, very small group of people who really continue to push progression and really take us to the next level." "Because that's really, at the end of the day, that's really where a lot of the new ideas are born." "You always kind of have in the back of your mind what your biggest passions are, and your biggest goals, and that's what you live for." "And for people like me, that's jumping off stuff, sliding down snow as fast as I can, finding interesting, creative ways to have fun in the mountains." "Skis, normally, are the fattest at the tip and they get skinny under your foot, and then they get fat again at the tail, and these are the opposite." "They're fattest in the middle and they get skinnier at the top." "I took that shape idea from water sports, from surfboards and from wake-boards and from water skis." "So finally I just decided, you know," "I'd grab these water skis and mount them up." "These are jumping water skis from the '70s." "I put those things on, and then all of a sudden these huge double doors just went..." "And I was like, "Look what we can do now." "Look what I can do!"" "To be successful, you've got to be learning new stuff." "You've got to be inventing." "You've got to be pushing the boundaries, going bigger, flipping more, spinning more, going higher." "That's the way you make your mark." "I think that is solely what drives me, the land of the infinite possibility, knowing if I go to work today, I can do something I've never done before." "Just like skateboarding as a sport, when the physical aspect of it evolves," "I believe that the environments that we skate on also should evolve with the skateboarding itself." "The ultimate goal is to get to where motocross and snowboarding's at, as far as magnitude of jumps and distance and heights, and the caliber and scale of the air time." "There's no boundary." "There's no limit." "We haven't found it yet." "It's crazy because I'd always watch the videos of Tony doing 900s." "It only took just one person to have the great idea to try to take it up a notch each time." "I guess I was that person on this one." "Somebody asked me, like, ten years ago, what's the biggest advance in the mountain bike?" "I said, "The trail."" "That whole technique, artistry, has seeped out and is just starting to cover the Earth." "The ultimate trail-building started out of Vancouver and the B.C. area." "The trail builders up there, some of them have become sort of like underground cult heroes." "When I'm not working at the hospital," "I practice the same procedural basis to go and do wingsuiting, climbing." "I change the outfit of clothes that I wear, I change the look, but the underlying process, I think, is very similar." "There is a thrill-seeking gene, the DRD4 gene on chromosome 11." "You can have between two and 11 copies of that gene." "If you have two copies, you're a low-sensation seeker." "If you have 11 copies, you're a high-sensation seeker." "And that's me." "That's Heather." "We've done the tests." "We have 11 copies of the DRD4 gene." "It's a whole difference in our essential brain neurochemistry." "A lot of the behaviors that we think are environmentally determined, in fact, many of them have a genetic predisposition." "And I don't consider myself to be an extreme sports person." "I consider myself to be somebody who's experiencing things." "Skydiving, it started as a way to save your ass when you got out of a plane that was falling out of the sky." "And then it became a sport." "People wanted to prolong the amount of free-fall time that they had, so they started building suits that gave them wings, that prolonged the amount of time that you could interact with the air, interact with that new environment." "And that technology is getting better and better all the time." "That's a nice climb right there, too, that little tiny thin crack." "It's funny how that works, because in your youthful times, you play the risk, in a way." "It's more exciting." "As you get past that, and you realize that you don't live forever..." " When you're 19, you'll live forever." " Yeah." "But when you're my young age of 56, you're like, "Dang, you don't."" "I'm only 16, but I've been through a lot of stuff." "Like, from 2011 to now, I've been locked up probably, like..." "Like 20 times." "Since I'm 18 now, if I keep continuing this path I walk on, it's going to lead down to destruction and all that." "Time makes you think." "It really does." "Just sitting in there, you think." "Yep." "That's right." "It goes around that way." "Underneath, and then back out." "Don't even think about it." "Just start going, yeah." "Put your foot right inside that crack." "Yeah, like that." "Exactly." " Keep going." "Motivation." " Lift this one up, down." "Yeah." "Focus." "Just use the rope a bit, and go up there and grab it." "Pull up, and we'll pull you up." "Got you, we got you." "Just jump." "Yeah, bro." "Yeah!" "Yeah, yeah." "It's so interesting." "We call it, when we're underneath a friend, you "spot" him." "So that's what we're kind of doing for each other now in these moves we're making." "Those kids are sharing how they feel and I'm sharing how I feel." "We're spotting each other in life, helping each other to the next move." " You're holding me." " Yeah." "My life's in your hands." "Every definition of adventure in "Webster's"" "has an element of risk." "If you take the risk out, you take a lot of the values that you get out of it." "When you're doing these risk sports you try to live right on the edge, and try to push that envelope all the time, push the edge away all the time." "But you never go over, because if you go over, you're dead." "I know going into it that there's a really good chance that, unless everything is perfect, I'm going to pull the plug." "I start out the day going, "There's 20 nos."" ""Unless I turn those into yeses, I'm bailing on this thing."" "Sometimes that means I've made it three quarters of the way up a mountain, and I can't get that 20th "yes," and I'm pulling the plug." "If I can just leave this thing that I've spent three weeks trying everything I have into it, and I can walk away from it, then that's when I know I'm making the right decisions." "I think the time when you're most stressed is when you do your most important work, and that's how it's been for me." "I've overcome some of the gnarliest injuries, broken backs, necks, and punctured lungs, and nearly ruptured my aorta." "I've had over 40 broken bones and none of them I'm proud of, but they've all taught me lessons, and they've molded me into the person I am today." "When you put your helmet on and it comes down to the night, you screw in the throttle and hope for the best, but it's a calculated risk." "There's been a lot of planning going in place." "In my biggest jumps, I've actually sat there before and been... it sounds crazy to say this, but it's the daredevil nature, being like, you know what?" "However this works out is how it's meant to be, and however it does go down, I'm just going to embrace it." "If I'm falling from a ten-storey building and it's the end," "I'm just going to give into it and just let it be, and not scream on my way down." "You know, just... just take it." "For the Arc de Triomphe, the fear was definitely killing myself." "Like, I was really worried about not making it and seeing the new year come in." "Part of me wanted to just quit there and then." "But that childhood dream of mine was that little echo going," ""You've got to do this for that kid in you, the one that dreamed like that all through school, who wanted to do that." "How's the opportunity."" ""You going to walk out now?" "Coward?"" "You could feel it in everyone." "You could see people were nervous." "Everyone around me, the whole team was, like, on edge." "It was such a tense moment." "I worked out and faced my fears in myself, and I faced the fear of that jump months before I even got there." "You're scared of hurting yourself, of hucking off that ledge." "You're scared of that giant wave that's barreling down on you." "Riding the edge of that fear and what is that fine line between reckless abandon and calculated risk, to where you're doing something, you don't even think twice about it." "I just saw the snow under my feet break up." "I knew right away what was happening." "Thankfully I was really calm that day, and I was able to keep my speed and focus on what I needed to do to get out of it." "Learning to deal with fear and talking yourself down from things you're scared of really helps." "It really helps you deal with other situations for the rest of your life." "Because then nothing becomes that big of a deal, since you've put yourself in a situation where you were so scared." "You're always negotiating with the fear of something to know how to protect yourself." "If you feel the fear come in, that's just a sign. "What are you doing?"" "And as a rock climber, you go the other way, I think." "When fear comes, you calm down and you think clearly, "OK, what do I need to do?"" "You don't panic and start shaking and wing it and start going for it and see what happens." "So I think that fear is a very interesting friend that's there for you to help you, protect you, make you consider." "There's no words to describe how scared I was on my first base jump." "Every animal on the planet has a fear system that's basically the same." "It's there to protect you." "But what can happen is it can get out of hand." "It can start firing off when you're having thoughts about doing the things that you want to do." "The fear of death is the fear of the unknown." "It's the fear that is probably the strongest in all of us, and to confront that and run off a cliff into the unknown, every cell in your body is on fire screaming, "Don't do it."" "When you know that you've undergone the proper training to get to the edge of this cliff, then you use that understanding, that reason and logic to cut through the screaming chatter and do it." "We both went into a tumble due to the thin air and the heavy 16mm old clunky cameras that we had." "I hadn't expected that." "I thought I had pushed it too far." "These sports used to be real rebel, counter-society," ""don't go near them" sort of activities, to now they're readily acceptable, although the extreme part of it is getting more and more extreme." "These guys have a crazy switch, and they can't wait to get there." "They live for it." "So they're pushing it, and by them pushing it, the next group wants to go bigger and higher, and it's just been pushed and pushed and pushed." "It's the inherent DNA of these performers." "They want to go big." "There's a point where, intuitively, you really do hit the red line on where you're getting to the point of taking serious risk, and that is injury or death or whatever it is." "There's a point where that's reality." "There's a threshold there unless you're really ready to go that far to risk, and you can digest the consequences, you know?" "I could keep pushing myself to be the best in the world, but realistically it's not possible." "I honestly feel like this lifestyle, the motorcycle lifestyle, has taught me what I needed to know." "I'm able to let go of that wild daredevil side that needs to prove to the world that I can do the craziest things." "I really don't feel I need to prove that any more." "The fears I've had to face," "I've really had to kind of face myself and find out who I am, and the only way to do that is to sit in a quiet room and sit it out." "It's a hard thing to do." "I still struggle with it." "But that's when I find the biggest joy." "I had to do some crazy things to find that." "Since the beginning, there's been monumental change in action sports." "At its core, the thing that remains absolutely the same is that experience, that calling that people have." "This is something that I'm completely dedicated to, and it's who I am, and it's something I'm going to do my entire life." "You get to the summit." "There's no summit." "It's just flat." "There's nothing up there." "There's nobody meeting you." "There's no wise man up there telling you the secret of life." "There's nothing." "You realize, you know what?" "It's all about the process." "It's a fine line when you're forcing something and you're learning to flow with something." "You're becoming a part of something, or you're just trying to grope your way through something with just strength." "There's a place I go to by myself a lot where it's just a horizontal traverse," "I just try to learn to move with the moment and be focused on my breath." "I might go across the traverse and just think about breathing." "I might go through it just thinking about my hands, or my feet, or, you know, how you're moving your shoulders, whatever, and practice." "By going out and rock climbing, you have to face everything about yourself, and it's all up to you." "You take your hands and feet, you put them on the rock." "You pull yourself up." "You are 100% responsible for yourself." "You've got to know that knot's tied right." "You've got to know who your partner is." "You need the trust of a partner." "I bring that up to our youngsters." "I say, "Rock climbing is like what you guys do."" ""if you get yourself into something, how are you going to get out?"" "I think for me, sometimes it's just to see the potential in something and try to bring it out." "Trying to grab surfing is like trying to hold a snowflake." "You know, the minute you try to hold it and possess it, it melts." "The wave is forming in front of you." "The wave is over your head." "Your wake is disappearing." "Your footprints are washed from the beach." "There's no material production from having done it." "There's no depletion, there's no creation." "It's just an aesthetic instant." "And out there, when all that holds you back is the horizon, that's real freedom." "Subtitles:" "BTI Studios"