Tony Hawk Explains the Evolution of Skateboarding, From Vert to Street | Joe Rogan

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. Oh, I mean it really is just at this point kind of an extension of my body. It seems like. And it's, 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. And wait, indiscreet? Don't even walk on a skateboard as indiscreet? That's ridiculous. That might be the most ridiculous thing. I do get weird looks for sure. For sure. I get a lot of do-it-kick flips out from car windows. Oh really? Oh, that's funny. That's my curse that I that I that's my burden I carry. I've seen 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. Yeah, that's sort of a phenomenon, sort of a social media thing going on. Ah, so you can see it in slow mo. Is that what it is? 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. Oh boy. Yeah, that's it's very specialized though. I can't say that's a movement. It's just a few key people doing many bones. Do you have to break to perfect that? But I just dude sliding down rails. I'm like, how many times do you fuck that up? Yeah, a forearm. I well skating went through a different different waves of disciplines basically. And in the early 90s, it was all Street, right? And so what I did was 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 than the third time. The other one I was like, I don't want to do handrails anymore. This is not working for me. This impact is I'm not gonna be able to skate anymore. If I keep doing this, I see these kids like when you whenever you go like near like a large office building that has a lot of outdoor space and you see them using the rails and stuff like how many breaks can you have before like I there. I think that it's a little deceiving because people do know how to fall relatively safely from from stuff like that. But they get addicted right? They're doing that probably every day. Yeah, for sure. And and it there's there's all kinds of different styles. So there's textiles where it's more people are skating ledges and benches and you know, the 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, you know, jumping fences and how did this happen? Like what was like, how did it go from just riding a skateboard 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 like all my friends. We just ride a skateboard on the street. Like what happened? Like how did it get to be like grinding across benches and railings? Like I think there's a well, there's a pretty deep history there of how it got there. But skating was yeah, just more like a transportation toy. And then it was really the 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's nowhere else to go. And there was this there were a few key skaters that that figured out how to use like the urban landscape as a skate park. And then that was it like it was all bets are off skating kind of took off in the underground as the street culture street sport. And then people started doing handrails ledges benches stairs because they just didn't have parks.