Tony Hawk: Harnessing Passion, Drive & Persistence for Lifelong Success

[OPENING THEME MUSIC]

Andrew Huberman: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is Tony Hawk. Tony Hawk is one of the most celebrated and accomplished professional skateboarders of all time. For more than 40 years, he has been at the forefront of the sport and I don't mean just doing a sport for more than 40 years, I truly mean he has been at the forefront of skateboarding, developing new maneuvers, aka tricks that include incredible feats like the 900, a 900-degree spin in the air, as well as numerous other maneuvers that have really pushed the entire sport forward.

He has also completely popularized the sport through his video game and through his ambassadorship for skateboarding. In fact, few, if any, names are as synonymous with skateboarding in the general public as Tony Hawk. And he is oh so deserved of that title, because for more than 40 years, he has shown up as the consummate professional. He is kind, he is respectful, and he is completely committed to his craft, and that shows up in every aspect of his life.

He still, to this day, skateboards daily. And as you'll soon learn, he recently suffered a major injury, a complete break of his femur, that is the bone in his upper leg. And this is what many people would consider a career-ending injury. Not only did Tony come back from that injury, but he went back to the very trick on which he broke his femur and recently completed that trick. That is a 540, or so-called McTwist.

I mention this because at every level of his life, Tony has demonstrated himself to be somebody with incredible drive, incredible vision and incredible persistence. And today we talk about that drive, vision and persistence, and we talk about what it takes to set a goal and to continually evolve one's goal and to continually progress as a basically young preteen, as a teenager, as a young adult, as an adult, and, well, let's face it, as a 55-year-old man, he is now heading a little bit past middle-aged, although we do hope that he lives forever. Tony Hawk, aka the Birdman, really does seem to be superhuman. But as you'll learn today, he is oh so human in the way that he shares his own experience and shares with you the ways in which we can each and all look at what we do and think about what we want to achieve and put our minds and our bodies to those goals and achieve them.

I confess that today's discussion with Tony Hawk was a particularly thrilling one for me to have. I grew up in the sport of skateboarding, so I had met Tony previously. Although he doesn't remember it, that was many years ago. In fact, I met his parents. You'll learn more about that story during today's episode, but I was aware, of course, of Tony's accomplishments. I was also aware of his philanthropy, so he has a skatepark foundation. I also listened to his podcast with another professional skateboarder, Jason Ellis, called Hawk vs Wolf. We provided a link to that podcast in the show note captions as well. But never before have I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to the Tony Hawk and learn from him. So I was absolutely delighted to have this conversation, and it far exceeded my already lofty expectations.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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And now for my discussion with Tony Hawk. Tony Hawk, welcome.

Tony Hawk: Thanks.

Andrew Huberman: I'm particularly thrilled to have this conversation because I've tracked your career for a very long time. Grew up in the skateboard thing.

Tony Hawk: I know.

Andrew Huberman: Had your poster on my wall.

Tony Hawk: Oh, thank you.

Andrew Huberman: Your name is synonymous with skateboarding, as you know. I think a question that probably get asked from time to time, but let's just clarify the data from the outset. Tony Hawk is your real name, right?

Tony Hawk: Yes. Anthony Frank Hawk. But I never went by Anthony. I mean, my parents call me Tony since I could remember.

Andrew Huberman: It's a fitting name, given the sport and what you do. And we will get into this a little bit later when we talk about family and parenting and parents. But I'll allude to the story now that when I was 14 years old that your parents took me in. I slept in your bed, in your home.

Tony Hawk: Wild.

Andrew Huberman: Not with you in it, but surrounded by a near infinite number of trophies.

Tony Hawk: It must have been right after I moved out.

Andrew Huberman: This would be, I was 14 years old. Maybe I'll just tell the story now very briefly. I was 14 years old. I was at a contest at Linda Vista Boys Club. Everyone left. Me and another kid named Billy Waldman were still there. Your dad said, where are you going? It was clear that I didn't know where I was going. My life was ... I was a wayward youth at that time, and so they took me in for a night, maybe even two nights. Your mom, Nancy, and your dad, Frank, were so gracious, brought me into your home, took me to dinner. I don't recall.

Tony Hawk: I mean, that tracks, that would definitely. My dad and my mom together would be doing that. Yes.

Andrew Huberman: Incredible people. And we'll get back to that story later because you and I actually met the next day in Fallbrook at your ramp.

Tony Hawk: So it had to been '88, '89.

Andrew Huberman: I'm going to say '89.

Tony Hawk: Okay.

Andrew Huberman: And it must have been one of the either NSA or Castle contests that your dad was very active in. Well, we'll get back to that, but I have so many questions that relate to skateboarding, to you, and really, as a neuroscientist, to the whole concept of a life of continual progression, because whether or not people listening to this and watching this are skateboarders or not, and I imagine that most of them are not, it's absolutely clear that you've been in this game a very long time and that you've somehow managed to continue to progress over and over to come back from very severe injuries and somehow keep getting better and better.

So the first question I have is about the younger version of you. Did you have any sort of self-concept, like, I want to be a pro athlete, or I want to be a skateboarder, or I want to have a video game named after me.

Tony Hawk: Tony Hawk : [LAUGHING]

Andrew Huberman: Right, exactly. But if you can think back to maybe even pre skateboarding, do you remember what your self-concept was? This notion of, like, I have a self, and I'm either similar or different to other kids in some way.

Tony Hawk: When I was young, I was put in a lot of advanced classes, and not that that felt like a badge of honor. It felt more like I was just classified as a nerd. But then I thought, okay, well, that's my strength, so I'll lean into that. And I thought that maybe I would be a teacher because I thought, well, I get all these concepts, and I think I could relate them to kids or to my peers because I helped a lot of my classmates through some classes. So that's all I really had. I didn't know. And then when I would play sports, I would be okay. I wasn't terrible, but I wasn't the VIP or the MVP. And so I was just kind of playing basketball, playing baseball. And then when I found skateboard, it was pretty obvious that that was what I wanted to do once I got on a skateboard and realized that I could maneuver it and do things that were unique. Not that they were moving the needle or anyone cared, but they were unique in the sense of, like, I've never seen one do this, and this feels awesome. And so I just want to do this. And so I didn't think that this is my career. I was ten, so I just thought, this is my hobby, this is my thing, and I don't want to play these other sports anymore.

Andrew Huberman: Did you stop playing all the other sports?

Tony Hawk: Yes. I quit Little League in the middle of the season when my dad had been appointed president of that chapter of Little League. Because he was the coach, he was always very involved in all of his kids. I have three siblings, so he was always very supportive, whatever they were doing. And then when I was playing baseball, he became the coach because he had time, and he was doing that. He was almost retired, and then he was such a prominent figure in the Little League. They said, oh, you're president now? And so then someone else was coach, and then I was skating, and I was over it.

Andrew Huberman: Did you immediately start skateboarding in the parks on transition, as we say, or were you pushing around in the driveway like most kids?

Tony Hawk: I was transportation, and skating was kind of a fad. So I started in '78, roughly, maybe '77 even. And it was kind of a fad. So kids just had skateboards, and they would all cruise around. It was the '70s, so everyone had a bike, right? And you knew where all the kids were because the bikes were in the front lawn. And then at some point, that kind of turned into skating. So everyone had a skateboard. They were all like, shitty JCPenney or big box store skateboards. No one had a really good one, not in my area. But then at some point, we were just looking at these magazines of people skating, and everyone's skating in pools, because that was the Dogtown and Z-Boys era, and it was like, these guys are like, where do we do that? And then the skate park opened up in San Diego.

Andrew Huberman: That was Del Mar Skatepark.

Tony Hawk: Oasis.

Andrew Huberman: Skate Ranch.

Tony Hawk: Oasis Skatepark was the first one in our area, actually, I take that back. Spring Valley was the first skatepark. I tried to go there, and I was nine, and you had to be 10. And I remember sitting in the parking lot looking over the fence, and my dad didn't realize what the age, because my dad would have easily lied for me, but he didn't realize there was an age limit, and he said, how old is he? Nine. Oh, sorry, he can't come. And then they closed not long after. So wham. I never got to skate Spring Valley.

Andrew Huberman: Because I think of you as synonymous with Del Mar Skate Ranch.

Tony Hawk: Sure. Well, that came later because Oasis Skatepark was open. So this is when I first went, was like '78. A friend of mine was going, and he said, I'm going to go to the skatepark. So I had to go get ... such a hassle. Like, I had to go get the authorization form. I had to get it notarized by the bank, by my parents to go there. And then I went. And that was my epiphany. When I first saw people flying around in person, I was like, this is what I'm doing for as long as I could possibly do it, because it looked like magic. It really did. It looked like they were flying on magic carpets. And it spoke to me in the sense of being a daredevil, but also doing it individually, not relying on my team, not getting hassled by a coach. It was just like, oh, I can be part of the scene, but do it my own way. And then I skated Oasis as much as I could whenever I could. Get your rides there. And then my parents moved to North County, San Diego, when I was in high school, mostly because they were just chasing kind of real estate deals. And so I got lucky that Del Mar Skate Ranch was right there. Every other park closed, but Del Mar Skate Ranch remained open. So, I mean, there was a bit of luck to all that. And it was based on geography.

Andrew Huberman: Your dad's involvement is interesting because I got into skateboarding. Know, my dad wasn't around that much at that time. A lot of kids get into skateboarding because it doesn't require parent involvement. Was it unusual to have parental involvement at that stage?

Tony Hawk: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, I remember Frank. And by the way, I remember Frank and Nancy, your parents, with such fondness, not just because they took me in, but I remember thinking, like, they were at times the only point of stability in a landscape of, like, 200 people where, as you know, there could be potential chaos of any kind.

Tony Hawk: Always.

Andrew Huberman: And your dad had this way of moving about. I recall that he wasn't afraid to say what he thought. Like, hey, don't do that. Like, impose some regulation at these contests. And at the same time, it seemed he also understood that this was a sport unlike other sports. Like, you're not going to regulate kids like me at the time or you're not going to try and control people.

So what was it like to have your dad involved? And the reason I ask is that you're a parent. We'll talk more about parenting. But also, it seems that he went from saying, okay, Little League, other sports, which is more typical, to okay, this kind of unusual sport, skateboarding. But your mere interest in it was enough to get him excited or motivated enough to take you around to these places. That's pretty special.

Tony Hawk: It was, and in that respect, it was great to have his support and to rely on him for that. The fact that he was always around and that he was in charge of a lot of the events, that sucked because it just marked me as one being favorited and spoiled. And most of my friends, their parents didn't want them skating. So even though they were stoked that my dad was doing this kind of thing and giving that kind of support, they still were like, your dad's here. This is our thing. This is our scene. This is our getaway from our parents. I didn't really have a choice in the matter. I did at some point tell him my concerns and my frustrations with it, but he didn't really want to hear it. He was very much steadfast, like, well, I've been coming this far. We can keep our distance at these events, but people are relying on me to organize them, and so I just had to suck it up for a while.

Andrew Huberman: Did it push you harder? If you could prove yourself with the skateboarding, then you didn't have to worry about any claims of favoritism, because ultimately, you can't fake skateboarding, right? I mean, there's no deep fake version of skateboarding. You either can do it or you can't do it, and it's shown in real time. And I suppose back then, I recall you were quite a bit skinny or skinnier.

Tony Hawk: Oh, yeah. I had all kinds of things going against me at the time. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, I don't think people will realize this unless they've met you in person, but nowadays, there are a few taller skateboarders out there because the sport's grown so much. But you're pretty tall. You're like six three.

Tony Hawk: But I was not. When I was growing, when I was that age, I was very small and kind of concerningly small, because by the time I got to be 16, I looked like I was 13. I used to get pulled over, literally, like, I had a car that I bought with my earnings. I had a Honda Civic 1977 CVCC. And I would get pulled over, and then the cops would be like, how old are you? Sixteen. Well, you looked like you were 13 back there. And then I shot up around age 17.

Andrew Huberman: Okay, so that's interesting. And we can get back to this when we talk about your almost remarkable levels of ability to recover from physical injuries, because, well, I'll just share a little bit of biological theory here, which is that there are a lot of people that study longevity, and perhaps the fastest rate of aging that we ever undergo is puberty. Right. If you think about a kid before puberty, kid after puberty, it's like different human being, psychologically, often physically as well. Some people have a longer arc of puberty than others, and that does seem to correlate with a longer life. And so it's kind of interesting. Some kids hit puberty and they go through all the markers of puberty in, like, one summer. Other kids, it's very, very long. And it sounds like we don't have to talk about when you hit puberty and the other markers, but it sounds like your growth spurt occurred late. That's a terrific marker of a long life, by the way, because what it reflects is the onset of a big burst of growth hormone out of the pituitary and the brain. And if you continue to grow for a long period of time, that indicates it gives you a little bit of the slope of the line. Does that make sense?

Tony Hawk: Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: So this may have important and fortunate consequences. So at 17, you shot up. Am I correct in remembering? Maybe you said it, maybe somebody else did, that you were, forgive me, but so skinny when you were a kid, that you actually wore elbow pads as knee pads.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, that's a true story for sure. And I took inspiration from others that I identified with, namely Steve Caballero, because he was already an established pro when I started to come up in the ranks or even get noticed at all. And he was wearing elbow pads on his knees in this full-page picture of him in Winchester doing a backseat air. And I was like, that, I want to do that. And he's small, and I feel like that's my goal. I didn't say, like, if he can do that, I can do it. It was just more like, oh, I identify with that, and that gives me hope.

Andrew Huberman: And as I recall, Stevie also has a pretty severe scoliosis, right? At one point, he was turned pretty tight to the right or left, I don't recall which. I mean, still, incredible skateboarder. Love Stevie. He's a Nor Cal guy. So I grew up in Nor Cal.

Tony Hawk: I know whatever he had is from birth, but it was more that his size, and I didn't even know he was not many, but he's, like, four years older than me, so I just was like, oh, there's small guys doing that. I can do it. Maybe. But when I got tall, when I went through puberty, suddenly I had all these tricks, and then suddenly I had the strength and the height that gave me confidence. And so all of a sudden it was like, oh, I can go way higher now. And I'm comfortable with these tricks, these intricate board maneuvers and stuff. So that was a huge advantage to me. The smaller stuff felt different after that, which was harder. But being able to blast eight feet in the air as opposed to four feet in the air was a huge advantage.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Isn't that wild when the nervous system knows how to do something and then your body changes and you can do the same thing, but with so much more force?

Tony Hawk: Even the bowls look smaller. When I would stand on top of them, I was like, wait, this isn't that big.

Andrew Huberman: It's wild. Well, the reason I ask about this, I think people listening generally seem to assume that if you become a Stanford professor, you become a professional skateboarder or you professional soccer player, that you were just fated to become that.. And it's clear that it's the confluence of so many different factors. But one of the consistent factors, for sure, is a sense that you just really love doing it. I mean, I can't imagine getting proficient or excellent at anything without loving doing it. And so, still, at this time, when you were, let's say, 14,15, did you have any concept of a pro model? None of that.

Tony Hawk: Well, there was none of that to be had. So we didn't have these great aspirations because no one had really done that before. You could have some success. Yes, you could have maybe a signature model, but even the top sales of skateboarding then wasn't a career. The prize money was $150 for first place, 100 for second, 50 for third.

Andrew Huberman: A couple of tanks of gas, some food.

Tony Hawk: Yeah. So let's put it this way. I turned pro when I was 14. By the time I was 15 and a half, and I had a learner's permit and I could drive a scooter, I had $600 in my bank account, and I used that to buy a Honda Express moped. For a year and a half, that was my earnings, was $600.

Andrew Huberman: So clearly money wasn't the dopamine hit, it was the actual skateboarding.

Tony Hawk: Sure. And that's what I mean, though, there was no goal of that because it just didn't exist. So I didn't care. Are you kidding me? I have my own vehicle at age 15, like I was living large. I could get to the skate park on my own. That was amazing.

Andrew Huberman: To be 14 and be a professional at anything. Must be a trip, so to speak. But what I'm wondering about, because I came up when your early cohort with Powell Peralta. So for those that don't know, so-called Bones Brigade, right. I guess it was a total, what, like six, seven guys? There were some that were a little more peripheral than others. There are about six, seven core guys in the various videos. I mean, you guys were famous, right? You had posters on kids' walls who skateboarded. There was a second, or maybe it was a third surge of popularity in skateboarding because it would sort of surge in general popularity, then disappear and come back as it has over decades. It keeps coming and going to some extent.

Did you have a conscious awareness of just how much attention was being placed on photos of you, videos of you? And I'm just wondering about the younger version of you, whether or not you realize what was happening. And the reason I ask is because you've always seemed to me somebody who, through interviews, through videos, through our interactions, and for those who've known you much longer than I have, just very grounded, like, not caught up in it. We've never seen headlines about you kind of just blowing all your money or wrecking cars and destroying your life. I mean, I'm sure you've made mistakes like any of us, but. But you seem to have avoided a lot of the pitfalls of, quote, unquote, famous people and celebrities. And yet you were a famous person from a very young age.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, well, I think it was ... that was never a goal. And then when I had a sense of it, I was very uncomfortable. I mean, I was happy. I was happy to be successful. I was happy that people recognized me. That was amazing. Just because I was good at skateboarding, I never imagined something like that, but I was always very. I mean, some people thought that I was sort of almost, like, pompous or arrogant because I wasn't interacting, because I was walled off. I was like, I don't know what to do.

Andrew Huberman: Gosh, this is the last words I would ever use to describe you.

Tony Hawk: I think it was just more that people would see me. Like, I'd go to a ramp. I didn't know anybody, and I would just start skating, and I'd do all my stuff. And they were like, oh, he doesn't even talk to anyone. And I was like, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to act.

Andrew Huberman: Also, you're 14 years old, right?

Tony Hawk: So Stacy broke me out of that, because I remember one time there was a kid that was just staring at me, like, hold my skateboard. He had my signature model, and he said, go say hi to that guy. Are you sure? He wants to interact with you. Just go high-five him or anything. And I learned to sort of break out of my comfort zone by doing that enough. But my first go-around, I mean, that was sort of my first wave of fame. I'd say the Bones Brigade years. And we were so young that we thought, this is forever. And so we were definitely careless with our money, with our actions. And at some point, my dad saw that he didn't think it was going to be long term, because no one had a long-term career, right? So he encouraged me to invest, to get property, like, to buy a house. That was my saving grace, because I definitely was spending.  [LAUGHING].

Andrew Huberman: On cars and things of that sort?

Tony Hawk: Yeah, a car. Like, kind of a little bit beyond my means. I wasn't really, considering. All my money was 1099 income, so we weren't paying taxes on anything. And at the end of the year, it would be like, oh, you owe this much. Like, wait, what are you talking about? For instance, hey, do you want to go to Hawaii? Yeah. Okay. Invite everyone. We're all going to Hawaii. Let's rent a place. You know, and it was on me because I had the means.

Andrew Huberman: You mentioned Stacy. We should probably clarify for people. Tony's referring to the great Stacy Peralta.

Tony Hawk: Yeah. He was the one who put me on the Bones Brigade when I was still considered sort of a circus act. You know, my skating was not really established. The stuff that I was doing was largely made fun of because people thought that what I was doing was just more like a freak show.

Andrew Huberman: Can you explain more? And let me just tell you that my first recollection of you, that I still have that image in my mind, is the finger flip air. Right? So for folks that aren't familiar with skateboarding, people ride around on transition or in the street, handrails, stairs. People probably familiar with all those things. But skateboarders will ride up toward the top of the pool or the ramp, and they'll do something on the so-called lip or the coping. That's to ride at the edge of it, or they'll go above it, like, in the air. But I recall seeing you do the finger flip air. I'd never seen anyone flip a board in the air. I'd seen people do varials. So move it. This is going to be complicated for people just listening, but just flip it upside down and then catch it in and finger flip air. I remember that was a jaw drop, right? It was like, so if that was considered circus era or circus-like, then I don't know what it was being compared to, because at the time, we probably watched that. It was in slow motion, as I recall. And we probably watched it 3000 times that summer. There was a big group of us that all started skateboarding that summer.

Tony Hawk: I would say kind of just before that, in that window is when people were more giving me flak for what I was doing, because I was mostly doing board variation stuff, but I still didn't have the height. The height in terms of getting in the air. So I was doing all this stuff kind of right at coping level. And so people weren't taking it into consideration or giving it much merit because it was just like, oh, he's doing a little board twist or a board turn. And then when I started to get some height, around the time you saw and started doing those tricks visibly way up high, that's when the shift happened in terms of more acceptance. But I was still labeled as, like, a trick skater, robot skater.

And then you had Christian Hosoi, who was all style, airs higher than anyone. Anytime he did a trick, it was going to be so flashy and so amazing.

Andrew Huberman: And rock star personality.

Tony Hawk: And rock star personality. And so in that era, it was very divided. It was like no one liked us both, you know what I mean? [LAUGHING] It was just so strange to be of that age and of doing something that had never really been established, and then suddenly I'm pitted against another skater, and we're just trying to make our way through teen years and skateboarding. It was hard. I got bullied. Yes, I was successful. Yes, I was-- But Thrasher Magazine would talk shit about my performance when I would win.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I remember that because I was from Northern California, and Thrasher Magazine was a skateboard magazine from Northern California. I actually wrote for them for a while when I was a postdoc to make some extra money under a different name, folks. But you can try and find those articles. They're out there. And then in Southern California, it was Skateboarder Mag, TransWorld, mostly TransWorld Skateboarding.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, it was TransWorld Skateboarding and Thrasher Magazine were the two the rivals, right? Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: So, yeah, I recall some of those things that were said. It just is amazing to me, but it brings about a really important lesson, which is that kid that gets made fun of, if they're determined and they love what they're doing, that's going to be the kid that blows everyone away later. And I know this for sure because I'll never forget. Do you remember the Back to the City contests that were held in San Francisco? So I went to those. They were in the drain fountains in front of City Hall. I remember getting there one day, and there was this guy with kind of like Afro-like hair pushing around, and he was doing what are called daffies. He had two skateboards, and he was kind of like weaving around. And I remember know San Francisco's got its issues now, but back then it was rough also for different reasons. I remember thinking, like, this guy's going to get beat up. I hung out with the Embarcadero crew. I was like, this guy's going to get beat down. That guy was Mark Gonzales.

Tony Hawk: Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: So one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest street skateboarder, if you can't really define these things, greatest and whatnot in skateboarding, you know, I remember thinking, this guy's just a kook. And then I realized who it was. And then I realized he was just like any other kid there at some level. And then a lot of the kids that got teased early on, they stuck with it. Five years later, I'm seeing them in the magazines, and I think about this with podcasting, too.

There have been some podcasters that have reached out early on and had questions, and I look at their stuff, and one's initial impression can be like, what are they doing here? And then you just see them two years later, three years later, and they're doing amazingly well. And you're like, this guy or gal is here for good. They're probably going to be top of the game in a few years. So you never count anybody out. When you would go to sleep at night in that era, were you, like, laying on the pillow going like, oh, my God, people hate me. There's stuff in the magazines. I got to push harder. This is hard. Did you talk to your dad about it? I mean, again, it's a lot to bear. Even as an adult, I can only imagine what it's like to bear as a 15-year-old kid.

Tony Hawk: I didn't really have a support group or any resource to voice those concerns. I just knew I wanted to keep getting better. That was it. And so, if anything, if I was worried about those voices, if I was worried about whatever take people had on me, I knew I was just going to go back to the skate park and learn more tricks. And at some point, I had so much of that as a foundation that it was sort of undeniable that, well, he can do all this stuff and he doesn't just do it at his home park. And I think that's probably when the tide turned for me, is when I started to do well at other events, namely Upland Pipeline, which was for the most part the most frightening pool that we could ride.

Andrew Huberman: The thing was big, but I also recall the hips, as they're called, like the transitions, the way they match up were super tight.

Tony Hawk: Lot of vert, giant coping, super rough. Like if you fell in Upland, you're getting chewed up. It's pulling your knee pads down.

Andrew Huberman: I didn't know that because from the photos I wouldn't know that.

Tony Hawk: Oh, it was treacherous. It really was. And I wanted to do well at the event and I would drive up there every weekend. My friend Greg Smith was a freestyler, but he lived near Upland, and so I would go drive Friday after school, straight to Upland, skate at night, skate Saturday all day, skate Sunday early, and then drive home because I live in San Diego, and I just made it my mission to figure that thing out because that was the proving ground for me. So if I could skate that, I could go skate anything.

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So it's clear you had an enormous drive. Let's talk a little bit about the process of trying tricks and the anxiety associated with it. Did you, and do you have a sort of systematic process? Was it, I'm going to learn the basics first. Like, did you say that? Did you say, okay, I'm going to learn how to do stuff at coping level. Then I'm going to do a little air, then I'm going to go bigger. I'm going to do this?

Or did you just sort of try what you wanted to try? And you obviously weren't haphazard about it. It seems you're pretty systematic about exploring what's possible and then pushing forward little by little. But, yeah, Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you have conceptualized. Okay, tomorrow I want to try this.

Tony Hawk: It comes in different forms, but for the most part, I think about how I could combine existing tricks. And would this trick work going into this trick? And could your body position shift, or would it all work in unison? And when I approach a new trick, I'm saying more in the last 20 years, my thought process is, I have all the pieces to this. I've done every bit of it. I've done the first part of the trick in another form, I've done the second part or the grinding of it or whatever, usually in some other basic way. And then the landing is, well, the landing is from whatever that is. And if you can throw all those things together and make the timing work, it's going to work. And I never went at something with some haphazard approach or throwing caution to the wind, like, hope this, see what happens. It's always very much like, I know I have all these things and so I just have to put them together.

And I mean, now things are so technical that my same approach that I'm doing hundreds of times, one of them just works. And it's not because I committed to that one. It's because of some tiny fractional adjustment that happened that I didn't even know happened, and it just worked. And that kind of is the curse of what tricks are now. Because there are plenty of moves that I've done over the last ten years, even that I only did once because it was too fucking hard to get to and I didn't learn from that one make. And that's hard to accept because in the past I was learning tricks to have them in my arsenal, that I could just throw them down at a competition or a demo. I've got that in my pocket. These days? Like that trick, for instance. I did a 360 shove-it, 5-0 to fakie.

Andrew Huberman: Let's break that down.

360 shove-it. So who's going to take this on? I'll let you take this on. I can try from my knowledge and perspective, but why don't --

Tony Hawk: 360 shove-it is pushing the board with your feet and letting it spin a full 360 rotation under your feet and then landing back on it. It's a trick that people do, usually on flat ground. I've learned to do it up on the vert walls. Like, I can do 360 shove-it kind of in the air, but I'm doing that. I'm doing a 360 shove-it, and then I'm landing on my truck, right.

Andrew Huberman: Like the axle between the wheels on.

Tony Hawk: One axle in what we call 5-0 position, which is basically a wheelie on the truck. So everything is so precise. I got to do a 360 shove-it at exactly a certain spot on the wall. I've got to catch it so that my truck lands when my foot hits it, I can't push it into the truck because that screws up my balance. So it has to land on the truck. I have to land with my weight perfectly set back enough that I can come in backwards because I'm doing this trick and I'm going to come in fakie, right. 360 shove-it, 5-0 to coming in forward is a whole different beast. I could probably do that just in a few tries. But the idea that I have to land on this thing, balance on it like a teeter totter, and then reverse my energy and come in fakie.

Andrew Huberman: Backward.

Tony Hawk: It's so hard. It's so hard to get into the right position. So anytime I try it, there's like a one in ten chance I'm even going to get into the position I need. And that's the one I have to commit to. So every time I do it, it's so intense, and it takes so much commitment and so much mind ... I don't even know how to explain it. That you have shut everything else out except this one moment and this one fractional piece that you have to make work. And I've done it once, and I would love to do it again, but I know what it's going to. It's going to take the same amount of effort. I didn't learn from that one that I made some trick that makes it happen every time. It's all so technical and there's so many things that can go wrong that I'll accept that, okay. I did it once.

Andrew Huberman: In thinking about the 360 shove-it, 5-0 fakie, was that something that you thought of the night before? You decide that day? Do you ever use visualization? Have you ever had learning come to you in a dream or find that you try, try, tried something, went to sleep that night, next day, made it? Anything like that?

Tony Hawk: Yes. Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I'll write down something because it's like, oh, there's this trick. Oh, I think I could do that. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to write it down.

Andrew Huberman: So you dream about skateboarding from time to time?

Tony Hawk: Yeah. Well, yeah, that has shifted a bit after I got hurt, but, yeah. I used to dream that I can't skate, like I'm trying and that it feels like the ramp's made of carpet. I can't get the speed, I can't get the timing. And then as I went through this traumatic injury, my dreams shifted to, wow, I can skate. I can do all my tricks again.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, interesting.

Tony Hawk: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: A little piece of science around the can't-skate piece, or when people feel like they're bolted down in a dream or they can't run away. There's this one phase of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep, where the brain is very active. The dreams associated with it tend to be very vivid, and at the same time, we are completely paralyzed. And the idea is that no one really knows why, but that it's the case that we're paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams.

It's also an interesting neurochemical phenomenon because during these rapid eye movement dreams, they tend to be very intense, but the body can't release adrenaline. So it's almost like its own form of trauma therapy. It's like you're experiencing this intense thing in your mind, but your body can't react. And so oftentimes people have argued that that's why you feel like you want to move and you can't, because you actually can't. Some people have woken up while still a bit paralyzed in REM. Have you ever had that happen where you wake up?

Tony Hawk: But actually, a couple of my kids have struggled with that a couple of times.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. REM interference, it's called. It's not dangerous, and usually people can jolt themselves out, but it's kind of terrifying. So that's interesting.

So we'll get to a discussion about the recent injury, and thankfully, recovery from the injury — not miraculous, because that makes it seem as if it's surprising. Frankly, I'm not surprised that you've recovered, but it is spectacular the way you have. But you're saying that in your dreams before the injury, you would think about skateboarding, but you felt like there was a kind of can't do it.

Tony Hawk: When I was doing it in my dream, there was always some roadblock that I just could like, why can't I get any speed? Why can't I snap or do this trick? It's more in the moments where — twilight moments where I'm kind of awake and I'm thinking about tricks, that everything else falls away and I can actually focus on what kind of new moves to come up with.

An example of that was recently, I went to the X Games in Japan a few weeks ago, and I was thinking I was going to go more to show my support because they had a vert event. There's not a lot of vert events anymore. So if there's a vert event, it's kind of like, if you build it, I will come because I want to show my support. That's kind of where my heart is. And they had a best trick event, and I thought, man, maybe I could get in the best trick. Is there anything new, though? And I'm still recovering from my leg. And then at some point I was falling asleep and I thought, oh, I could do that trick and come in 180. I know I could do that with my current state and not getting that much speed. So to explain what I was doing is half cab body varial to backside blunt.

Andrew Huberman: Okay, we can walk through this. Half cab has come up backwards. Go 360 right. So half of that would go one.

Tony Hawk: As I approach the top of the ramp, I body varial. That means I jump around and then I jump around on my board, and then I make sure that it lands with my two trucks out and my tail on the coping, which is very precarious. And I've done that and come in fakie before.

Andrew Huberman: That's the blunt piece.

Tony Hawk: That's the blunt. So I've done that. And then you have to use your feet to lift up the board. Come and fakie, right? I've done that twice. And I thought, well, wonder if there's something I could do like that. And then I realized that if I just keep coming around and I come in backside direction, that keeps my body spinning and that might actually be easier. It wasn't, but I figured it out.

Andrew Huberman: I think I saw a clip of this on Instagram.

Tony Hawk: I did it. Yeah, I did it. X Games. And I was like, it was my last run. It didn't move the needle. I got seventh place. But for me it was a huge moment.

Andrew Huberman: It felt amazing, I bet.

Tony Hawk: Oh, yeah, for sure. It was like weeks of preparation and trying to figure this thing out. I made it twice before the event on my own, alone on my ramp. But that's just an example of. I was literally falling asleep and then all of a sudden it was like half cab body varial backside blunt.

Andrew Huberman: I love it. That liminal state between wakefulness and sleep is such a beautiful state that if one is open to ideas showing up there, they almost always do.

Tony Hawk: I start trying it the next morning.

Andrew Huberman: Do you ever find that when you're taking walks or in the shower or not thinking about skateboarding?

Tony Hawk: Yeah. It's usually in the sort of mundane moments that I get inspiration.

Andrew Huberman: Do you have practices for pure relaxation aside from socialization?

Tony Hawk: I know. I think that's something I've been lacking. I never was good at warming up, stretching, post warmup, or relaxing ... meditation. Nothing. I go skate and it's on. And as I've gotten older, I realize that's not the best technique. But it's worked so far.

Andrew Huberman: It has worked. So for you, it's go, hopefully a little bit of warmup if you.

Tony Hawk: I have more of a sort of OCD warmup run that I use to gauge how I'm feeling, but I kind of have to get through that.

Andrew Huberman: Like a surgeon. When a surgeon's about to do a surgery, they don't warm up. They just check off the various boxes of this is here, that's there, make sure that they're comfortable in their environment and then they do the lifesaving work.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, I'd say my warmup run is kind of basic tricks, but they give me a sense of how stiff or what I need to adjust for for the rest of the day. So I guess it's not so OCD, but I definitely feel like I got to go through that routine.

Andrew Huberman: What feels the best? I know that making a new trick feels incredible, especially if you've been at it a long time. Dialing it in so that you can do it again and again is its own form of reward. But what is the maybe list of two or three things that just feels so good?

Tony Hawk: Well, that for sure learning new tricks. Not even that it's something that I created, but just doing something that I've never done before. When I first learned varials. Backside varials, no one had done backside varials before. They'd only done them frontside. And a varial is where you reach down, grab your board, jump in the air, and then turn it 180 under your feet. It's like a shove-it, but you're guiding with your hand. I learned that halfway up the pool, the main pool at Oasis with no one around. And the feeling I got when I rode away was something that I had never experienced. And it is literally the buzz that I've been chasing ever since, because it was like I created something.

Andrew Huberman: Varials below coping was the butt.

Tony Hawk: That was it. It really was. And if you saw a video of it, you'd be like, that thing? What can I say? It was the first time that I thought of it. I went through all the motions of it. I did the work and I figured it out and no one cared. But at some point, I was able to do it six feet in the air and do a full 360 varial. And so that was the building block. But that feeling was like no other. I'd say that. And then just even to strip everything else away, the most basic tricks, like a backside ollie, is a no-handed aerial. That used to be what it was called, backside no-handed aerial. It feels so good because even to this day, people say, how does the board stay on your feet? And I can't even tell you how the board stays on my feet. I know how to maneuver it and I know how to keep the pressure on it and the friction going. And backside ollie's is like, I think it's like a marvel of physics. And a clean backside ollie, to me, feels good as anything. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: It's a beautiful thing to behold. I confess, I've never done a legitimate backside ollie on vert. On a miniramp, sure, but not on vert. So I can't relate to the feeling. But love, love, love the fact that you brought us back to that early varial-below-coping feeling, and that that marks the essence of what feels so good when you do something else. As a neuroscientist, I see as a chemical stamp. It's like a chemical fingerprint of progress, right?

And I'm also delighted to hear that it still feels that good to do these things, because I don't think anyone can have the kind of lifelong progression that you've had, and it's still going, without not just love of the thing, but love of the feeling that it brings when no one's around. Because you said skating your ramp by yourself. So how often are you on your ramp with no one's filming for Instagram? Nothing for a video, nothing for a video game. None of that. Maybe there's ... maybe other guys are around, gals around. We'll talk about gals, too, because one of the big shifts in skateboarding since I started is that there's some amazing female skateboarders now. There's a young lady, in fact, that's been skateboarding at your ramp. Forgive me, I can't remember her name.

Tony Hawk: Is it Reese?

Andrew Huberman: Reese.

Tony Hawk: Reese Nelson.

Andrew Huberman: Goodness. Goodness gracious.

Tony Hawk: I know.

Andrew Huberman: She is so good.

Tony Hawk: So good.

Andrew Huberman: So good. So we'll get back to that. But I think that people starting any kind of sport or academic career or business or anything, I think people assume that you go from zero to 100 somehow and that there are these people that are just selected by genetics or by luck or by some combination of things to just get it and be better than everybody else. But it's clear that you've spent a lot of time alone driving someplace to skate the next day or alone at the ramp. So do you ever reflect on that kind of drive and what that's all about, or is it just so intrinsic to who you are?

Tony Hawk: It's more innate. I don't think about it. I just know I have to do it. We can get into it with my injury, but to go back to what you're saying is you're saying that people think that, oh, you were chosen for this, or genetics, whatever. If you saw--

Andrew Huberman: Your last name is Hawk after --

Tony Hawk: If you saw me skate when I first started skating, there was no way you'd think that I was a natural or that I had any future in it. I was all gangly. I was all over the place. I was eating shit left and right. I wasn't good. I wasn't. I wasn't a natural. I've seen people that are naturals, and I've seen that how they don't have that drive, they don't have the discipline, and it's not wasted, but they don't take advantage of what they have naturally and for whatever reason. I don't fault anyone for it, but I've seen both sides of it, and I've also seen other skaters who are just driven and who are not really good, kind of sloppy, and become the best. Andrew Reynolds, when we put him on our team, he was just like me, super gangly. His board's bouncing around, but he's trying every single trick. And every time he'd send me a video, it's some new technique that he's figured out. And he didn't really, by the untrained eye, he didn't have the skill set for. And then he became the boss. You know what I mean? So I think it's just you have to give that as much weight as natural talent, if not more. I'd say more, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I would certainly say more for science and the people who are in the lab late at night and early in the morning and drilling away. Not always the smartest. Certainly not the dumbest, but smart enough to show up when other people are leaving and continue. And I think there has to be a little bit of friction internally, maybe externally also, but just some friction. Some "I'm going to show you."

Tony Hawk: Yeah. Okay. My best example of that, and I haven't talked about this yet because I did it privately, but I broke my leg doing a McTwist, something that I've done thousands of times.

Andrew Huberman: In 540.

Tony Hawk: 540. Yeah. So it's a one-and-a-half spin in the backside direction, but that particular grab that you do makes it a McTwist because it makes you kind of flip upside down. So it's kind of a one-and-a-half somersault. It's not my trick. It's Mike McGill's trick. I learned it not long after he created it in 1984. Been doing it ever since. I'm talking about 40 years of McTwist, right? I've gotten hurt once or twice, but not bad. Anyway, I fucked around and found out. Did one with no speed last year, thinking I could do it like I was still 20, and got tangled up and broke my femur. I had a super long recovery. I had a false start. I had a nonunion fracture, which means my bone never connected back to itself, and it kept pushing itself further away. And that's all in the past.

I got a second surgery in November, and all along in the back of my head is, I got to get back to 540, I have to. And I can't explain why I have to. I hate that it means that much to me, but it's in here. You know what I mean? It's not a sense of pride. It's not like I have to prove this to anyone. I just have to do it. And last week, I did it. It was so scary. And I prepped for it, even down to my diet. And I stopped drinking altogether. And I was like, every time I go to the ramp, I'm just trying 540s, like, to get the spin, to get the landing zone, with no intention of making it, just that I had to get there. And then I had to have this heart-to-heart with my wife that she doesn't want to see me get hurt. She doesn't want to see me risking myself at this age anymore. She doesn't want to live through another traumatic injury with me. And I had to tell her, like, I have to do this. She was gracious and accepting, and that's all I could ask for. It wasn't like she was like, yeah, you got to go do it, was like, okay, that's who you are. And so she was there. She was my only spectator.

Andrew Huberman: So good. I confess I've seen a video of this, and my first response was F yes. And my second response was, that was really high. Like, this is no, just-above-coping 540. This is a head-high 540.

Tony Hawk: I'm not going to make the same mistake I did last time where I tried it low, thinking I just get away with it, anymore. So going high was more of a safety measure, which is ironic. The bigger the ramps for me, the safer it is because I have a better landing zone. I have more time in the air to adjust. And even though it looks spectacular and he's six feet in the air, it's just like, no, I need that. I can't skate some eight-foot pool. I have no landing zone. I'm too tall. I move too slowly now to do that kind of stuff. So that's why you don't see me, like, in the park events, stuff like that. You're going to see me on this 14-foot vert ramp because that's my happy place and that's where I'm safe. But also having my wife there, I just knew I wasn't going to get hurt in front of her because I would have been such trouble.  [LAUGHING]

Andrew Huberman: The emotional support and pressure is a real thing in the best ways. Not to focus on the bad aspects of the injury, because there are plenty. Yeah. I recall you and I communicated not long after, let's call it what it was, the first break, and I remember you said to me over text, you said, how long before I'm skateboarding again? And I said, skateboarding as in pushing or skateboarding as in what you do on vert? And you said, what I do on vert. And I said, well, it seems you are doing a lot of things. You were doing deliberate cold, deliberate heat, pressure. You did a number of things. I mean, you're not haphazard about your career and your body and your health, and we'll get into that a little bit later, some of the things that you've enjoyed as beneficial for you. But you said, I'm calling it at two months. And I said, okay, I believe it. And then I recall that was it the Oscars or some other award event where you came out about a week later, you came out there, you walked out, this broken femur, and you weren't using any support to walk out.

So you clearly ditched whatever support you might have been using, which I think is awesome, by the way. And then pretty soon I was seeing videos of you dropping in. I'm seeing videos of you doing kick turns below coping. I'm seeing videos of you at coping. And we have a friend in common, the skateboard, and generally photographer Mike Blabac. And I remember texting Mike, I was like, Tony's back already. This is superhuman rates of healing, and I think it is superhuman rates of healing. Then you mentioned that you damaged, broke, broke the femur again. So did you allow more rest the second time? What was driving you to get back in it so quickly?

Tony Hawk: The first go around, I just didn't listen to any of the professional advice because I thought, well, I've come this far and I've always been able to push through broken pelvis, broken elbow, knee surgeries. And the timeline is always very shortened for me because I just get back out there and I get the healing started. But I also am comfortable with what people think is extremely risky. But in this instance, I wanted to get back out there right away. And not long after the Academy Awards, I was actually walking with a cane at that time, and I ditched the cane just to walk out on stage to present the award. So that was my big coming out moment, but it was kind of forced. And as soon as I walked off the stage, I grabbed my cane and I was hobbling in the backstage.

But I was skating kind of a miniramp, and I was already struggling because I couldn't put my weight on my front foot because my bone still had not connected to itself. So there's a gap in the bone, but there's a nail, what they call a nail or big piece of metal that's holding them in place. But I didn't realize how careful I needed to be with that because it was so precarious. And I decided, I'm going to drop in on the miniramp. I think I'm ready. And it wasn't the drop in on the miniramp, it was me getting to the top of the miniramp and stepping off my board.

Andrew Huberman: It's always that kind of stuff.

Tony Hawk: But I just stepped off my board like I would do any other day. But I didn't think I led with my front foot and I felt the bone move in that moment. I felt it either twist or get out of place. And I was in total denial for months because I just said, oh, it just hurts now. I got a minor setback and then I finally, eight months into my recovery, seven months into my recovery, I was always in pain. My skating wasn't progressing. I couldn't get speed, and by all measures, I should be back. At least I'd be back to a level that I feel good about. And I went and got X-rays, and they said, your bone never connected. You have a nonunion fracture. And every time I skated, so my bone's like this. Every time I skated, I was pushing it further away. And so my bone was like this on the last X-ray, and that was the hard truth.

Andrew Huberman: So for those listening, just laterally displaced, think about a pipe that's broken in the middle and just one's offset to the other.

Tony Hawk: And as I keep skating, and I could force my skate, like, I kind of learned this hack where I can put 75% of my weight on my back foot and 25% of my front foot and do what I wanted to do, but it wasn't where I thought I'd be, and it just hurt all the time. I mean, it really was like, that was my trigger because I have a pretty high tolerance to pain, and it was always hurt. I would dread going to the airport knowing I had to walk to a gate, so I knew something was wrong there. I went to a specialist that deals in nonunion fractures, and he had a very pragmatic, factual approach, and it was like, oh, I would do this. I'm going take to that nail out. I'm take the other hardware out and put it together, and you cannot move for two months.

Andrew Huberman: Did you obey that?

Tony Hawk: I did.

Andrew Huberman: Really?

Tony Hawk: Yeah. I was not going to risk that again. [LAUGHING]

Andrew Huberman: And do you prioritize things like sleep, nutrition, just generally. And did you emphasize those things while you were recovering from the injury?

Tony Hawk: Yeah, I was very disciplined in my diet, in my schedule, in my sleep. Surprisingly, I was very busy because I do speaking engagements, and suddenly my speaking engagements were getting booked left and right. I mean, to the point where I did a tour through Europe last summer of speaking engagements. So that was a silver lining, I guess, to my idle time. And I leaned into it, I made myself available, and it's good money, and it's fun to interact. But all through that, of course, in the back of my head, I was like, when can I skate? When can I skate? And then when I finally started skating, it was night and day with my leg. I felt like I could lean forward. Suddenly, I was learning tricks every session, relearning tricks. So I'm just lucky that I got to live in this time of modern medicine.

Andrew Huberman: Was that two months? The longest you've ever gone without skateboarding vert?

Tony Hawk: Yeah. Without skating at all.

Andrew Huberman: Not even just pushing around.

Tony Hawk: No.

Andrew Huberman: Good for you for obeying doctor's orders.

Tony Hawk: Finally.

Andrew Huberman: And also good for you for deciding that your rate of recovery is going to be whatever it is for you. Because I feel like I'm hearing both things. On the one hand, you listen to the medical professionals. On the other hand, I'm not hearing, oh, I looked at the average rate of recovery from this kind of fracture, this and that. It's as if you decided two things at once, that there are experts who have something to offer me here, I'll follow their advice. And yet I'm the expert at myself here. I'm putting myself in your first person. Tony's the expert in Tony. And I'm going to make sure that I come back 100% or better.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, not better. And I have come to terms with that because I know that I'm not going to be pushing myself the way that I did before I got hurt anymore. There are some tricks now that are way more difficult just because whatever, something changed in my body and for instance, I can't grab slob, I can't do it consistently. That used to be my go-to grab, could do that anytime. Over 60-foot gaps, whatever. I knew where my board was, I knew that was going to hold on to my feet. And half the time I try to grab that way now I don't reach it or I grab my foot instead and I can't make the adjustment to fix it. And so I've just sort of come to terms with, well, that's not the go-to grab anymore. And that's okay. I had a good run.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Your kit is pretty vast, so there's a lot of other things to reach, too, aside from the 540, which, by the way, congratulations.

Tony Hawk: Thank you.

Andrew Huberman: Not only is it a 540, but done at least head high. I've seen it with my own eyes and under really great circumstances. Your wife there, just the two of you, and the trick that broke the femur in the first place. So congratulations on that.

Tony Hawk: Thank you.

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Are there other things that you're thinking? Can't wait to get back to that. Let's set aside slob airs for now.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, I want to get my handplants back the way I used to do them. I have yet ... Yeah, it's so in vert, like one-handed handstand. I can do them now, but I've.

Andrew Huberman: Seen you do them recently.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, but they used to be my signature was a tuck knee invert and flopped all the way back, and I can't get a hold of my board to pull it all the way back like I used to. If I can get that, I'll feel like that's it. That was the last milestone.

Andrew Huberman: I'm not here to diagnose and treat these specific skateboard trick-isms, but between what you said about the slob air and what you're saying about this, it seems like there's something about getting your front hand around and pulling it back behind you. So maybe this is like the way that the femur is lining up with your pelvis and maybe some off-ramp something-or-other physical therapy could do it.

Tony Hawk: I'm actually working with at best core, he is a doctor of physical therapy and he has helped me immensely through my recovery. And when I'm frustrated with this motion or that's the same grab actually, as the McTwist, he worked on me before it and was just contorting my body and my leg into these positions that I don't really even get to when I'm skating, just to prepare me for that. And he did, but that's what it took.

Andrew Huberman: It's interesting that we're talking about skateboarding and we're also talking about physical therapists. We're talking about nutrition, we're talking about sleep.

Tony Hawk: So growing up, none of that, never imagined any.

Andrew Huberman: And I'm chuckling because growing up in skateboarding early on, for me, not quite as early as you, but pretty early, twelve and got out of it and back. And yes, I can still do a thing or two here and there, but that's not the point. The point is that the nutrition consisted largely of fast food or whatever was around. Cigarettes and beer were sort of the energy drinks and supplements of the times. This has fortunately changed, but there was essentially no health-promoting tools or aspects to it at all. But that was back then. But then over time, it seems it's evolved. Like now. I saw a couple of posts from Stevie Williams, like, he's in the gym.

Tony Hawk: Sure.

Andrew Huberman: I think I saw Danny Way early on working with Paul Chek and doing some balance work, neck work, because he had broken his neck, surfing and things of that sort. So there seems to have been a big shift over the last 15-20 years where skateboarders are taking good care of their bodies, like other athletes, thinking about the resilience of their bodies, and also generally taking better care, like a lot of them opt not to drink and do drugs and all those sorts of things.

How does it strike you to see the way that skateboarding has evolved towards the option to be much healthier and treat it like a serious sport where you're a serious athlete? A word that even 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you called a skateboarder an athlete, some people might even be offended by, people in skateboarding, right?

Tony Hawk: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, to answer your question, in the early days, that was part of the scene and the culture, just because it was the antithesis to organized team sports and mainstream culture. And so it was just like, yeah, this is what we do. Fuck it, who cares? We drank and we'd skate and everyone ... It was Wild West, right? But as I never fell into that deeply, because I saw how it affected people's performances and the skating itself was paramount to me. That is what I wanted to focus on, that's what I wanted to be good at. And I saw people partying and partying their skills away. So I had at least that forethought. And then as skating got more established, popular, more of a career option, then people started taking it more seriously, especially competitors. But there's such a wide swath of what skateboarding is, and it's a big tent. So to say that it's more organized. Yes, it's more organized over here. There's still all these skaters over here partying, hopping fences, don't care about contests, don't want sponsors.

Andrew Huberman: Well like GX1000. Like those kids that bomb hills in San Francisco.

Tony Hawk: But that's what I love about it, is the diversity of it all. And we're all part of this scene. So I was a competitor. That was my path to success. And so I appreciate that people take it more seriously now and that they do have trainer, they have resources. I mean, they have sponsors that will pay for this kind of stuff. There was no such thing at our biggest skate contest. We were all staying at Stacy Peralta's parents house the night before, and he would take us out to get spaghetti because he thought carbohydrates was going to give us energy the next day. That was the extent of training in 1983, right? But nowadays we're treated like high elite athletes because they are like, if you really look at people that are at the top of their field, people like Nyjah Huston, you know what I mean? The dude is a machine. He is one of the most precise skaters that we've ever seen, or precise athletes this side of Nadia Comăneci.

Yes, I'm aging myself, but what I'm saying is this takes hardcore dedication, precision athleticism and devotion. And so now they have the resources to back that up and to keep it going longer. I mean, yeah. Would I be able to do this now, especially after getting hurt, without the help of a doctor of physical training? Probably not. I'd do it on some level, but I wouldn't get to where I am now. And so, hey, I think it's awesome. I never wanted to covet skateboarding as this thing that no one else can. Like a gatekeeper to it, no one else can touch it. I always thought there was something of skateboarding that was magical and that was good for mental health, and that required such passion. And I never understood why it didn't get bigger through those lean years. I was always like, kids. This speaks to kids. It's daredevil and it's active and it's exciting, and you can do it as a group, but you can do it your own way. And I don't know, all those things. It took a long time for everyone else to figure it out. They definitely figured it out. I mean, nowadays, skaters are the cool kids in school.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's in the Olympics. There was always discussion. Would it be. It was an exhibition sport in the Olympics at one point?

Tony Hawk: No.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, I thought it was. Maybe it had a run at potentially being an exhibition.

Tony Hawk: There was talk of that.

Andrew Huberman: Got it.

Tony Hawk: But it never did. At some point, especially in the late '90s, early 2000s, skating was getting appreciated and kind of reached that threshold of, is it mainstream? Well, it's on McDonald's commercials, so I guess that's pretty mainstream. And so we already had come of age, and it was like, we don't need the Olympics. We're already more popular than a lot of Olympic sports, right? So why do we need their validation? And then at some point, it became like the power dynamic shifted and it was like, oh, they need our cool factor. We don't need their validation. And it was like, yeah, okay, you guys want it? Sure, go ahead. Hold the events, hold the qualifiers. We'll participate, but we don't need this.

Andrew Huberman: Well, you've been an amazing ambassador for the sport that's driven so much of that wider acceptance and progression and invitation into different domains. One of the things that I definitely want to talk about is the video game, because I think that the video game changed a lot of things for the general public in terms of their perception of skateboarding. I mean, what it allowed, of course, is this is obvious, but it allowed kids that weren't going to bang up their shins or walk in with a broken wrist or all skinned up to do incredible tricks, but in silico, on a screen, right. And to pretend that they are the pro skateboarder, that's essentially what video games are about.

And yet, when you can see something, just like you can imagine it in a dream or while you're falling asleep and you can see something and hear in air quotes, do something in a video game, it also is going to inspire a number of kids to go outside and grab a real skateboard and try that, or try something like that. So clearly, the video game was a catalyst for what I consider now the wide acceptance of skateboarding as a sport in all its various forms.

Could you just talk for a little bit about the genesis of the video game? Were you into video games prior to the video game? Were you into technology generally and what sort of motivated the interest in the video game? Because it certainly has changed the face of actual skateboarding and the perception of skateboarding.

Tony Hawk: Well, I've been into video games since the get-go. I mean, I was a kid playing Pong, Pacman, Missile Command, Q*bert, you name it, and then getting the home systems, Intellivision, Super NES, Commodore 64.

Sega.

Sega, yeah. And I always loved technology. So when I finally started making money in the '80s, my first kind of big purchase in terms of electronics was Commodore Amiga, which was considered one of the highest end home computers alongside Mac, but more graphic oriented and more game oriented. And so I was always into that idea that you could do this kind of stuff at home, not just in arcades. And then I got a call from a PC programmer that wanted to pitch a skate game and had a crude engine of a skater that would cruise around, go ride in bowls and stuff like that. And it was all keyboard controlled. It was clunky, but it was something. And the last thing that we had as skating was 720 in the arcade or Skate or Die! for home systems for Commodore 64. That was like the last thing that had happened for skateboarding in video games.

And so I went with him. I was excited to get, like, I got to, we got to go to Nintendo and pitch it. We went to Midway, we went to all these different console and software manufacturers, and we're just told that this is a bad idea. Skateboarding is not popular. Home video games are barely a thing. Why would anyone want to buy a video game about skateboarding? Someone said those exact words to me at Midway, and so he got frustrated and he needed to find a job, and I was just kind of free floating. So I said, okay. He goes, well, I'm not going to do this, but I feel like you've established yourself, at least in the video game world industry, that you're interested in doing something. So maybe if someone does something, they'll call you. And I was like, yeah, right. Sure enough, like a year later, Activision called me and they said, hey, we heard you want to do a video game. I said, well, yes, I would love to work on a video game. I'm not a programmer or anything. They said, we have something we're working on and we'd like to show it to you. And so I went up to Activision. They were working on a skate game, but it was based on an engine of a game that was already released called Apocalypse, starring Bruce Willis. So the first version of my game was Bruce Willis on a skateboard with a gun strapped to his back in a desert wasteland doing kick flips. And it was awesome. It was truly like, I picked it up and I got past that visual, and then I started playing it, and it was intuitive. The motion felt right, the engine was right. And I was like, this is the baseline of something special. I didn't think it was going to be some big hit. I just thought, this is going to be appreciated by skateboarders. And that was my goal the entire development process, which was about a year and a half, after I signed on through that year and a half, we were going back and forth. They would FedEx me builds on CDs, I had a modified PlayStation. I would play it, make notes, and I thought, man, skaters are going to dig this. And that was it. And skating wasn't even that popular. It was starting to get some traction.

Andrew Huberman: What year was this again?

Tony Hawk: Like '98. So it was like X Games were starting to come into the fold. People were taking note of what skateboarding had become at that point. And then I thought, this is going to be cool. Skaters are going to like it. And then not long before the release, they called me and they said, hey, we want to offer you a buyout of future royalties for this game because I think people are going to like it. And I was like, what does that mean? They go, we'll give you a half a million dollars. And then you don't get royalties going forward, but you get that money up front. And at that time in my life, to hear someone say half a million dollars seriously sounded like a half a billion dollars. No one had ever talked about numbers that big to me.

Andrew Huberman: Well, also, '98 was a little bit of a quiet time for vert skateboarding, too, right?

Tony Hawk: Sure. Yeah. It was all skateboarding in general. Luckily, vert skating still was a thing because of inline skating. Because inline skating was huge, right? Late '90s, and they were all vert. And so we, as skaters, got to sort of ride those coattails because it was like, hey, there are vert ramps, because everyone's rollerblading.

Andrew Huberman: I forgot about that.

Tony Hawk: That did. And I have. Honestly, I was the special guest at a couple of inline rollerblade shows where it was like, this is team Rollerblade Live, and special guest Tony Hawk, the skateboarder. And I was right. All right. Dropping in. But it paid the bills.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tony Hawk: So to answer, from what you're saying, vert skating was a thing, at least established in the X Games, which was something and enough for us to make a living. So when they offered me this money, I actually was in a pretty good place in terms of, I don't know, my options and my trajectory. And I felt like. And I had just bought a new home, and I thought, I'm going to take a chance and just see what happens. And that was the best financial decision I ever made.

Andrew Huberman: Took the equity.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, I just let it ride. I was like, no, I want to see what happens with this. And as soon as the game was released, it was getting stellar reviews. And then I remember the very next week after it was released, Neversoft saying, okay, we're working on number two. What do you want to do? Like, what do you mean? Well, yeah, we're doing a sequel with what? Awesome. And then we end up doing like ten.

Andrew Huberman: Amazing.

Tony Hawk: Crazy.

Andrew Huberman: Amazing. I'm thinking about your decision to not take the cash and to see how it would go. I'm thinking about your decision to buy a car at 16 and, as a consequence, get pulled over because you looked younger. I'm thinking about the time when, through the graciousness of your parents, who took me in because I had no money to get back up to Northern California and they couldn't get a hold of my mom. They took me to your home. But then they took me to where you were living the next day, which was in Fallbrook. You don't remember this, but I do. And I know you've heard this story before, so forgive me, because most people listening haven't. But I remember getting driven up to Fallbrook. You had the ramps in your backyard. I walked in, got introduced to you, you were very gracious, said, hello, what's up? Said, feel free to push around on the ramps. It was a spine.

Tony Hawk: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Two ramps. Back to back, folks. Spine. Sorry, nomenclature. I think Ray Underhill was there.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, he lived there for a while.

Andrew Huberman: And as I recall, you had pretty vast music collection. And we'll talk about music. But it also seemed there was a couple cars in the driveway and whatnot. But it's clear to me, based on a number of things and that interaction and what I observed there, that either you had someone in your ear, either your dad or your mom, or both, or maybe it had been Stacy, or maybe it was somebody else who was advising you to make very good financial decisions, like not spend all your money or continue to spend all your money to invest in things. Or maybe it was just instilled in you at a young age. Who knows? I'm asking because I think so many people burn their early success. What represents a lot of wealth for them early on. They burn that, or they start making just bad decisions. You explained before why you tended to avoid drugs and alcohol and certainly any severe relationship to drugs or alcohol that would keep you from progressing and skateboarding. But the ability to make really good decisions as a young, famous athlete is more rare than it is common, even when people have coaches.

So I'm curious, where did that shrewdness and that prudence come from? And was Frank, your dad, and maybe Nancy also advising you all along? Like, hey, think smart, be smart, because clearly you've made some very smart decisions.

Tony Hawk: He was definitely a guide in it. He was the first one who said, you should probably buy real estate. I was 17, so I didn't even know that was possible. But he co-signed and made it possible. But then after that, I ended up buying that home that you went to, and it was a four-acre property, and we built these ramps on it. And that was amazing and definitely helped propel my skating to a different level than I ever imagined. But at some point, that was just a drain, and it was a drain financially, and I was living beyond my means, and my income kept dropping because we're talking about ... Not long after that was '91, '92, the slowest days of skating. And I've got this giant mortgage, and I've got this property and these ramps that I can't afford to upkeep. I can barely afford my water bill at one point. And so what you saw might have seemed stable, but behind the scenes, it was starting to unravel.

Andrew Huberman: Birdhouse hadn't been started.

Tony Hawk: Birdhouse was started in '92. And when I started Birdhouse, I took the equity from that house to start it, because I burned through my savings from trying to keep this place going. So I took a second mortgage out on that house, or I took my equity out, started Birdhouse, sold the house for what I had taken out, and then moved to my original place that I had when I was in high school and just pulled back on expenses. I think that was when I really became shrewd, because I had to. I had a first child. I had an income that was very uncertain, very fluctuating, and I was just eating Taco Bell and Top Ramen and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and not spending anything and taking every job, like the most random demo requests, or we want you to be a consultant on this commercial, because I'm 24, I'm too old to be the guy skating, because it has to be youth, right? But they're like, well, we want to see what's possible. So can you come up the day before and show us the ropes? And so I would be the stunt skater that's filling in to show them the angles and stuff, and then they would go hire Chet Thomas as the young kid, and then I would stand around. I was getting paid. I didn't care.

Andrew Huberman: I think I remember those commercials. It was a cereal commercial, something like that.

Tony Hawk: The cereal commercial was Chris Miller, Frosted Flakes, and I was Tony the Tiger.

Andrew Huberman: So cow guys, you, Chet, throughout the Birdhouse, which is your company, but without telling people, what is it skateboard company. I remember Willy Santos was early on. I remember he's a super nice kid. Used to see him at the contest. I remember thinking, well, Tony Hawk has his own company for skateboarders.

Tony Hawk: We had a team, Willy was a maestro. Jeremy Klein, legendary street pioneer. Steve Berra, who's kind of a, we called ATV, but street and vert. We had Ocean Howell, who was like our number one amateur. We had Andrew Reynolds, Matt Beach. We had a team. It was full on.

Andrew Huberman: Was it fun to move from rider to also rider, but team manager, owner.

Tony Hawk: Was it fun? It was just necessary. I can't say it was fun. I mean, yeah, it was fun because we were still just kind of reckless and driving, six of us in a van, driving to skate shops across the country and begging them for $300 so that we could get gas and food and a hotel room and get on our way. I don't know. But for me, it just felt like a necessity. That was what I had to do to make a brand happen, and so I was willing to do it. But it was exhausting. Yeah, because I had to be the coach and the tour manager and the skater. I was putting myself out there on the worst conditions and just rolling my ankle left and right, and it was all street, and it just wasn't my thing. It was hard, but I loved it. I made it happen.

Andrew Huberman: In my mind, I'm thinking you had to be Tony Hawk, the skateboarder, Frank Hawk, the organizer, and Stacy Peralta, because Stacy had been a pro skateboarder. I still think of him as a skateboarder, even though he's filmmaker. Right? A skateboarder. Just like I still think of Spike Jones as a skateboarder, BMXer, filmmaker. Seems like you had to integrate all of those. And I mentioned that because I am curious. I think a lot of people are probably curious. Are you the type of person, like, sit back in a chair at night and think, like, okay, how am I going to do this? Are you contemplative, or is it really you just identify what needs to be done this year and over the next three years and set your milestones kind of short.

Tony Hawk: Mean now or back then?

Andrew Huberman: Back then.

Tony Hawk: Oh, no. Everything was just in the moment. We got to get here. We got to get to Dallas by tomorrow. As soon as this demo is over, get in the van. We're going. We got to get a hotel room. It was just stuff like that. It was very much. But I think I learned to respect punctuality because I travelled with plenty of skaters that were not and didn't care and show up late and was like, dude, and I don't know these guys. And then when I was in charge. It was like, we're going to be on time because we have to respect other people's time. And we said, we're going to be here at three o'clock, we're going to be here at three o'clock, and that's not easy with a skate crew.

Andrew Huberman: No. Mike Blabac, who, as you know, is integral to the Huberman Lab podcast. I talk about that. We've got some other guys that came over from DC as filmers and editors for us, and they're so punctual and they're so on it. And I notice you showed up early today, right on time or early by five minutes. And that is a distinguishing factor, I think, in any occupation, but especially in skateboarding, where there's this kind of looseness.

Tony Hawk: Sure.

Andrew Huberman: And so if you do show up on time, it really means a lot the professionalism that was instilled in you. It's clear the different places where that's showing up mentioned the shrewdness about the business decisions. I'm curious about another aspect of that, which is maybe a little more cryptic, which is whether or not it was the CD collection that I saw or your mention of the car, your interest in video games. It seems that one thing that you've done that a lot of guys that I knew, because back then, by the way, it was mostly guys, now, as we said, women doing it, too. Women and girls. It seems like you have a lot of other hobbies and interests, music, etc., but that we never heard about you getting distracted or pulled down those lines. We didn't hear about you going and surfing and getting hurt. Surfing so that you couldn't skate, or getting really into motorcycles or racing cars. Right. Some people went hard left out of skateboarding into that. Like Ken Block, the late, great Ken Block. But that became his main thing. Seems like you knew that skateboarding was the mainframe and stayed with that, and yet you have a lot of other interests.

Tony Hawk: Yeah. Well, with other sports, especially like motocross, I have this huge respect for motocross. I think it's super exciting. I would love to do it, and I know that I would not escape unscathed. Like, I would definitely want to learn the tricks, do whips and flips and whatever, and I'm going to get hurt, and I don't want to risk my skate career for that. So I purposely pulled away from that type of thing. The last knee surgery I had is because I overshot a jump in Mammoth on my snowboard. So that was a lesson. It was like, don't, what are you doing?

Andrew Huberman: Just cruise.

Tony Hawk: Yeah. Stay on the ground, hit the powder.

Andrew Huberman: Right.

Tony Hawk: Free ride with your bros. Because I learned my lesson. Yeah, you're right. But at the same time, I still love going surfing and snowboarding. I don't do them as much, obviously, but those were part of what I did all growing up, and they're important to me. I did do a couple of celebrity car races, like a NASCAR race, and I totaled a car in the Long Beach Grand Prix because this dude ran me into the wall, and it was like, well, that was fun, but I don't have the bandwidth to get that serious about it.

Andrew Huberman: And now you have a family, of course, too.

Tony Hawk: Of course. Yeah. And those things, as fun as they are and, I don't know, as sort of auxiliary as they are, they require a lot of time. I mean just for instance, that Long Beach Grand Prix, they want you to go stay in Palmdale for, like, a week and a half and train and figure out how to truly know how to drive and be safe. And it's like, I don't got time for that.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, that's time you're not skateboarding.

Tony Hawk: Or with your family.

Andrew Huberman: Right. Yeah, right. I feel the same way. If I get pulled away from reading papers and prepping podcasts and reading the latest research and thinking about experiments we could do, then, for more than a couple of days, I start feeling the itch. I have a feeling this stuff is programmed into one's nervous system after a while. Like, you've been skateboarding for so long that if you go a few days, it probably just your system is, like, depriving you of water or something.

Tony Hawk: Yeah, for sure. Well, just for instance, our ramp is being torn down on Sunday. Today is Friday. Our ramp is being torn down on Sunday at 10:00 a.m. To be moved to Salt Lake City for our big vert event. I'm going there at 8:30 so I can get a session before it gets torn down.

Andrew Huberman: I love it.

Tony Hawk: On Father's Day. That's my Father's Day. I'm going to work at 8:30 a.m. On Sunday.

Andrew Huberman: I love it. Speaking of family and lineage, tell us about your kids. You've got some talented skateboarders in your family besides yourself.

Tony Hawk: I do. Well, I have four of my own, and I have two step kids, and they all skate. My daughter, not so much anymore, but all the boys, five boys, are all really into it. My oldest son is the most. He's the most prominent because he turned pro and has his own following, has a name for himself. Riley. And he's 30.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, he kills it on street. He's a big street skateboarder.

Tony Hawk: He does, yeah. But they're all good. They're all good skaters in their own ways. And it's so fun. Of course, they're surrounded by it their whole life, especially Riley. Because when he was young, I didn't really have the means to have childcare or whatever, so I just had to take him with me on tours and whatnot. So he was always around it. So he got good at it by default. But at some point started to shy away from it because he felt the pressure in my shadow, and it was like, this isn't fun. People expect me to be super good or I have to do this stuff. And so he went, shied away from it, but then found a bunch of his friends in high school. They love skating. He's still good at it. So he found his crew, and they have all found their crews completely independent of me. And so when we go on vacation, for instance last year we were in, or two years ago we were on the Big Island, Hawaii. They want to go to skate parks. I don't want to go to skate parks. I'm on vacation.

Andrew Huberman: It's also little harsh stuff. It's a great way to get hurt, right?

Tony Hawk: What's that?

Andrew Huberman: Over in Hawaii? It's all weather worn.

Tony Hawk: Oh, yeah. And it's not even my scene. I'm, so I'm their chauffeur and I'm their filmer.

Andrew Huberman: I love it.

Tony Hawk: That's my vacation. But because they all love it so much, you know what? It just. It's so. How could I ever ask for more? It's amazing.

Andrew Huberman: Let's talk about Frank and Nancy a little bit. Just because I have this kind of odd connection to your family through, it's really two- or three-day interaction changed my life forever. Meeting you was spectacular as a young skateboarding kid. But also just the idea that someone would literally take me into their home. I mean, they had every reason to not trust me.

First of all, I was hanging out with Billy Waldman. No explanation needed. The people who knew Billy, I hope he's doing well. I haven't heard anything about him, but I hope he's doing well. But we were wild. But he basically took me into your home. He and Nancy took me, know, fed us or fed me. I had another friend with me. You know, I just have to say, as you're describing your family, I can only imagine what it must have been like for Frank and Nancy to see you have your kids, did they get to live long enough to see that Riley and your other kids were skateboarders?

Tony Hawk: My dad met Riley, but my dad passed away when Riley was two. So he's the only one of my kids that he met. My older sibling had kids, so he met two of his other grandkids besides Riley. My mom got to see some of Riley's success, but she suffered from Alzheimer's, dementia, and so things slipped away. But I think that my dad would not believe that skateboarding is in the Olympics. To him, that is the top of the mountain, because he was really into other sports. He loved sports. He loved the Olympics. He loved watching football. He loved watching baseball. He loved when the Olympics were on. He loved the competition element and the hype of it. And I think there was part of him that felt like, why isn't skateboarding in this? But he knew that there were so many hurdles to get through and so much more acceptance that needed to happen, and I don't think he imagined would ever happen.

Andrew Huberman: He was a special guy. I can still hear his voice. He was a very large guy, too. I don't know if I was just smaller then. I definitely was smaller.

Tony Hawk: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: No, he had, like, a big presence. And I know I've told you this many times before, this is actually how we got reconnected. I sent you a direct message and said, hey, I met your parents. In fact, they took me into your home, and I'm telling the truth. And you'll know I'm telling the truth, because they took me to dinner, and they ordered black coffee after dinner. And for years, I would order black coffee after dinner. As a kid, you're just so impressionable. These really nice people took me in. I was like, wow, this is what a really healthy family looks like. I'm grateful to have loving parents, always did. But I didn't have the healthy family structure. So for me, it was like, oh, my goodness, these people drink black coffee in the afternoon. This must be what healthy families do.

So, by the way, folks, don't drink caffeine within eight hours of going to do sleep.

Tony Hawk: [LAUGHING]

Andrew Huberman: It doesn't seem to be holding you back, individualize, but, yeah, it's spectacular that this lineage, you know, Frank to you and I mentioned and Nancy, because it seems like while she might not have been at the contest and running around setting up tables and doing all like, she clearly was supportive as well.

Tony Hawk: Oh she was. At a lot of the events, too. I mean, they needed all hands on deck when it started getting big and no one was taking salaries. That was the thing is that people thought, like, oh, your dad's, like, cashing in. He never took up money for any of that. And he took so much shit. You know what I mean? He just loved it.

Andrew Huberman: It was for you, I have to imagine.

Tony Hawk: It was for me, and it was also for the misfits that I surrounded myself with. And even though he was brash and I don't know, what's the word, he was foreboding and intimidating and whatever else, he did it for all those kids that were kind of lost, like you. I mean, really, he loved that it brought them together, that it gave them a sense of self, it gave them a sense of purpose. He saw that because he was that. He really had a rough childhood, and he did everything he could through his adult life to make up for it with his own kids and with the kids that they surround themselves with. So that's what he loved about it. Of course. He loved seeing me thrive, too, but he loved that he created this safe space and this sense of community. And so my mom. My mom, that was her thing, was getting people together, gatherings. Oh, we should all get together. Even my siblings and I, as much as we want to emulate our parents, we don't do it as much as they did, and we regret that.

Andrew Huberman: Well, there's still time.

Tony Hawk: No, I mean, we do, but it's tricky. We're all in different areas.

Andrew Huberman: Sure. Yeah. The person that comes to mind when I think about your dad. I'm forgetting the movie, but there's this one Clint Eastwood movie where he lives in a neighborhood where I think it's a bunch of young gangsters.

Tony Hawk: El Camino.

Andrew Huberman: El Camino, yeah. And I just remember there's that scene of Clint coming out on his porch and just standing really upright. Everything in his front lawn is everything super manicured and just standing there like this immense presence. And that's how I remember Frank Hawk.

Tony Hawk: Yeah. But he was a total softie. That's the thing. It was all a front.

Andrew Huberman: Well, he was certainly very --

Tony Hawk: You got to see that side of him where it's just like, oh, yeah. Come on, we'll take you out. You want to go see Tony's place? Let's go. That's not some hard ass.

Andrew Huberman: Well, there's a tail end of the story, too, where he actually called my mom, and I think there may have been a statement or two about, hey, this kid's 14. Like, he can't be in Linda Vista Boys Club, taking the bus back to Lancaster, etc. May have been some discussion like that, but then they also paid for me to go home.

Tony Hawk: Oh yeah.

Andrew Huberman: They flew me home. So I think I owe you a couple hundred bucks for a Southwest flight or whatever airline it was. Well, it's fun. And I think, important to reminisce about these people, because they aren't just your parents, but they've done so much. And through you. I really think that emotions and stories are really like the equivalent of energy in humans when people talk about energy, because that gets carried forward.

Speaking of which, we share a common love of some particular music. Are you somebody who listens to music to inspire you to get amped up to go skateboard? Is music an important part of your life?

Tony Hawk: Yeah, let's put it this way. I had a playlist for my 540 the other day.

Andrew Huberman: Okay.

Tony Hawk: Fine-tuned to that trick and what would get me motivated and hyped to do it.

Andrew Huberman: You don't have to share with us what's on the playlist unless you choose to.

Tony Hawk: Oh man.

Andrew Huberman: But was it high energy, low energy?

Tony Hawk: High energy. Well, and some meaningful songs like New Order "Ceremony," and, let's see, Nine Inch Nails "Getting Smaller." Because that was a song we used in one of our big skate tours, and it was one of the most high energy sections of the show. Gosh, I can't go through all of them. I forget. Gang of Four. Wait, Gang of Four is ... shit, I forgot. What is it? Oh, "I Found That Essence Rare." Fires up. So I had, like, ten that were just going to. If any of those played, I'm going to make it. And I knew that it was about an hour and a half, and that's as long as I'm going to try it before I'm too tired.

Andrew Huberman: So you're listening in the warehouse, on random?

Tony Hawk: In the warehouse. And then the song that I made it to was off of that Prodigy album, "The Fat of the Land," and it's called "Climbatize." It's instrumental. I used it for a Birdhouse edit when 411 was the thing.

Andrew Huberman: 411 were these little video-newsletter type things.

Tony Hawk: Yeah. So when that song came on, I was feeling it. I made it.

Andrew Huberman: Fantastic. I love this because the neuroscientist in me is immediately going to say, we have this brain that loves to take in information and discard other information. But paired association is so strong. And when you couple that with some sense of reward, like the making of the varial below coping early in life, or making the 540 as a comeback to the injury, after the injury, it --

Tony Hawk: Was almost like I loved all that music, but I was indoctrinated by it through the skate parks, because that was the soundtrack to the skate. It was punk music. It was Sex Pistols and 999 and Black Flag and Devo and X and Buzzcocks. That's what I kept hearing, and that's what I associate with my best of times.

Andrew Huberman: It's in your nervous system.

Tony Hawk: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: There's a few voices. Rancid and Tim Armstrong.

Tony Hawk: Operation Ivy.

Andrew Huberman: Operation Ivy.

Tony Hawk: Tim's "Sound System" was on that playlist. Was on the 540 playlist.

Andrew Huberman: All right. Tim will be so happy to hear that. And Matt Freeman, the bass player, and Jesse Michaels is now playing again with Tim, the lead singer of Operation Ivy.

Tony Hawk: Yeah. With their new gig. What's it called?

Andrew Huberman: They had a name, and then they changed it. Initially, it was. I don't want to say because they changed it for a reason, but we --

Tony Hawk: I know they're making new music.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Which is amazing. Operation Ivy is incredible. My yearbook photo for I think two years running was the cover of Operation Ivy because I didn't show up for the yearbook photo. Speaking of which, did you show up for your yearbook photos or did you graduate high school?

Tony Hawk: I graduated high school, but I didn't go to any of the events, prom, or any of the auxiliary. I was an outcast. Even though I had success in skating, skating wasn't cool, and I was not homies with anyone at school except for two other skaters. And we felt very ostracized. Yeah, I did show up for the graduation because my mom and dad wanted to see it.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, likewise, I graduated, but I could tell you more about the curbs in the parking lot of my high school than I could about anything that happened in the class.

Tony Hawk: Man, I broke so many sprinkler heads because the sprinkler heads were right next to the curb, and there was a double-sided curb. And so if you boardslide, because I'd go there early and boardslide, and then I'd just, like, lean too far in and break the sprinkler head and never got caught.

Andrew Huberman: What high school?

Tony Hawk: Well, I went to a couple. I went to Serra High School originally. Then I went to San Dieguito High School, which is in North County, and then I ended up at Torrey Pines. I got so bullied at San Dieguito that I requested to be transferred because I couldn't survive there as a skater. I would have to hide my skateboard in the bushes before class and then go find it after school so that people wouldn't target me.

Andrew Huberman: The '80s were rough. It was like a John Hughes film, for sure.

Tony Hawk: It was jocks versus nerds. And then skaters were, like, not even considered in that realm because they're going to get hammered because there were so few of us.

Andrew Huberman: Well, things have changed. And not only have things have changed such that skateboarding is far more popular and respected. And at least one mark of that is in the Olympics. Although there are other marks of respect, certainly, but a huge evolution that I've observed is when I was skateboarding as a 14-year-old and close to my 20s and then took some time off, for sure. Hardly any girls. Hardly any women. There were a few, like Cara-Beth Burnside. They got teased, ridiculed. It was hard on them.

Tony Hawk: Super hard.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, super hard. Now, largely through Instagram, but some other channels as well. You can see this young girl, Reese on vert, skateboarding better than a lot of grown men who have been skateboarding for decades, I mean. And then there are a number of other ones in street skateboarding and also taking really hard slams. This is a complete revision of the recent history of skateboarding. So, thoughts on that and on Reese, and there are a few others. Is it Lizzie, who took a really bad fall that was filmed?

Tony Hawk: Broke the neck off her femur.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, these are tough ladies.

Tony Hawk: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Doing it. And for coming back.

Tony Hawk: Lizzie did the loop. She did the full 360 loop. First woman to ever do it.

Andrew Huberman: So what do you think changed that, paved the way? Is it just a critical mass of females doing it? Is it that Sky Brown?

Tony Hawk: For sure. There were the pioneers, people like Cara-Beth Burnside, and there's so many others. Pattie Hoffman was one of the first vert skaters, too, who ... They planted the seed. And then there were other women that took inspiration, like, oh, girls can do this, even though they're largely outnumbered and they get hassled, for sure. And then through the street era, people like Elissa Steamer, who paved the way for legit street skating. But then through the years, it started to become more common, more accepted, which is dumb to say, because it should have always been accepted. But the thing that really tipped the scale was when everything was leading up to the Olympics, there had to be equal divisions in equal disciplines for men and women. And suddenly there was no question of, should we have a women's event? Like, no, we have to have a women's event, because that's the road to qualifying for the Olympic stage and Vans Park Series. To their credit, they were holding events simultaneously. Not that were Olympic qualifiers, but just their own. And they said these events are equal across the board, equal prize money, equal attention. I mean, it was just like. That was just matter of fact. And that shifted a lot. It really did. Now, if you go to a skate park, you see plenty of women there.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's awesome.

Tony Hawk: Literal women, like moms, there are older women that are learning how to skate. It's awesome.

Andrew Huberman: Not that it matters so much, but does anyone claim to be the first female do 540 on vert? Is that sort of a known.

Tony Hawk: That would be Lyn-Z Adams.

Andrew Huberman: Fantastic.

Tony Hawk: And she did that. I'll tell you how she did that. She was trying it. So she's trying to McTwist. She's married to Travis Pastrana. It's like the elite action sports couple. And she was trying them. She was getting pretty close. And then we did a big exhibition in Paris at the Grand Palais on behalf of Quicksilver. It was a huge event. They put a halfpipe up and we did this giant show. There were thousands of people there, and it was very much unspoken but expected that I was going to do a 900 at this event. I think it was. I want to say it was 2010, maybe. No, like 2009. And the organizers were kind of like, okay, so we're going to do this. And then at some point you do a 900. And I was like, I can't guarantee that ever. Like, every time I've ever made it, it's been pretty spontaneous. I've set out to do it and I've come up short. I can't guarantee it. I'll try. I'll try. And they're like, yeah, okay. And so I knew the whole time that we're skating, I was like, okay, everyone's expecting this. So I kind of went through the motions of doing my exhibition tricks, playing the hits, and then started trying 900s. And at the same time, Lyn-Z started trying 540s because she was feeling that energy.

And so it was this sort of not battle, but definitely we were trading hits. It was like, all right, here goes Tony. Suddenly you missed it. And here goes Lyn-Z. Oh, she missed it. And then she almost made one. Like, was riding down and then fell at the flat bottom. It was like, oh, and then I made 900, and it was kind of the showstopper because that's what they expected. And everyone's going crazy and whatever. People are coming down off the ramp, knee sliding down, and we're saying goodbye to the crowd. And I look up and Lyn-Z puts her tail out. There's still people standing on the ramp. And she puts her tail out. And I was like, I think Lyn-Z wants to try it again. Here we go. I'm on the mic now. She made it.

Andrew Huberman: Love it.

Tony Hawk: She stole the show, like, without question. It was huge. You can look it up on YouTube. Like it's there. Lyn-Z Adams, first 540. It was awesome. And then she made it and we all grabbed her and put her on her shoulders.

Andrew Huberman: That is awesome.

Tony Hawk: It was pretty cool.

Andrew Huberman: That is awesome. Because these things are like the four-minute mile as a barrier. Then people break that barrier and then other people break that barrier. I've watched enough of skateboarding in recent years. Like the Sky Brown thing. She's phenomenal. And actually saw her family out to dinner here in Los Angeles and with her brother. And folks are really gracious. Really nice. And there again, parents going to the skate park. After all, she couldn't drive herself. I think she's, at that time, she was probably like nine.

Tony Hawk: Probably one of the biggest shifts, too is that parents encourage their kids to skate now. Could you imagine that when we were young? Never.

Andrew Huberman: No. There were so many factors telling us not to, which just made us want to do it more.

Tony Hawk: Sure. But now kids are like, parents are pushing them into it. Get out there, learn tricks. It's like, wait, that's not what we're supposed to be doing. But it's cool that. I think the really cool factor of all that is there are definitely people our age. I'm grouping you into my age category.

Andrew Huberman: Forty-seven.

Tony Hawk: All right, close enough. But that have kids and skateboarding was such a special time in our life. And then they're rediscovering it through their kids and they're skating together. And I think that's just so amazing that someone of our age would be like, you know what? I used to do that. You're into that. Let's go. And then you could show your kid how to do a sweeper. [LAUGHING]

Andrew Huberman: I could probably do that. I don't have kids yet, but when I do, I intend on being healthy enough and to do a sweeper. People can look up sweeper. We don't have to explain it for them, but little layback grind or a sweeper. Yeah. Because they wouldn't think to do it.

Tony Hawk: No. And they are doing all these difficult flip tricks and that's not my scene. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: What's your go-to on a Game of Skate if you're going to really take out the younger generation?

Tony Hawk: I can do impossibles, pretty regularly.

Andrew Huberman: On transition.

Tony Hawk: I can do them on flat.

Andrew Huberman: So this is where basically you scrape the back of the ... It's an ollie, really, but it wraps around the back board.

Tony Hawk: Wraps over your foot. Yeah, that's kind of my sneak attack on Games of Skate.

Andrew Huberman: Does Rodney Mullen get credit for that trick?

Tony Hawk: Oh, yes.

Andrew Huberman: That's a Rodney. Are you still in touch with Rodney?

Tony Hawk: Absolutely. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. He's somebody that certainly deserves mention in the pioneering of tricks.

Tony Hawk: He's the godfather of modern skateboarding.

Andrew Huberman: I think of Rodney, you and Mark Gonzales, "Gonz," as like the guys that I'm honored drove the progression in different, partially overlapping directions that set the template for essentially --

Tony Hawk: I learned fingertips because of Rodney. Like, the first trick you saw me do. I learned that because I saw Rodney do it on the ground. And I thought, well, I can't do it on the ground, but I have plenty of time in the air to do it.

Andrew Huberman: It's awesome. It's awesome that Stacy put you guys together. We mentioned Bones Brigade, but we didn't really talk about the architecture of it from the perspective of skateboard progression. But it was kind of like any good band. It seemed like there was really good chemistry interpersonally, but also that each person had something unique. You skated the way you did. Mike skated the way he did, Steve the way he did. And Rodney --

Tony Hawk: We respected each other, but we also fed off each other.

Andrew Huberman: Tommy Guerrero, because growing up in the Bay Area, in fact, Tommy skating the hills of San Francisco in those videos makes it look easy. But those hills are rough, they're dangerous, and they have real life obstacles like moving buses. You'll notice he wasn't stopping at stop signs, so it's fantastic. We could reminisce about all these angles. But the point being that spending time with people who do similar things or the same thing but do it differently is one of the best ways to progress. This is why I routinely fly to Texas and hang out with Peter Attia, another podcaster, Lex Friedman. Just because they do things differently than I do.

Where do you draw sort of peripheral inspiration from? Now, I know you see Jimmy Wilkins at your ramp quite a lot. The phenom Jimmy Wilkins. It's kind of eerie how good that kid is. Who else are you spending time with besides Reese? And one of the reasons I asked this is that skateboarding is unique among many sports in that a given session, a gathering to skateboard, will include an enormous --

Tony Hawk: Fifty-five-year-old men and ten-year-old girls.  [LAUGHING]

Andrew Huberman: Exactly. Yes.

Which is incredible. You don't think about soccer, a serious game of soccer between professional soccer --

Tony Hawk: But also, it's not even that we're skating together. It's that we are communicating and influencing each other. The last conversation I had with Reese was, she's talking about, like, are you going to try to do 540s again? I go, yeah, I'm kind of working on it. She goes, well, I think because she saw me try one, she goes, I think you need to pull out a little more. And she was right.

Andrew Huberman: And she's how old again?

Tony Hawk: She's ten. And I didn't even consider that because I'm just back in my mode, and I'm not taking into consideration that I don't have the snap that I had before I got hurt. That was one key to me making it. But to me, that's representative of skateboarding and the inclusivity of it and the diversity of it. Where it's me, I'm 55, there's 30-year-old pros that are at the top of the game. There are 17-year-old up-and-comers, men, women, ten-year-old girl that is doing tricks that we've never even thought of or want to do. And it's all part of the whole mix.

Andrew Huberman: That's really beautiful. I want to ask you about memorabilia. Not a topic that I think about much, but I think in a prior conversation of ours, you mentioned something about this. So there are skateboard collectors, there are people that collect stickers, skateboards. There's a whole market and world for this. And in addition to people wanting selfies with you when they see you, I imagine there's a long history and continued tradition of people taking a pen, putting your hand, and saying, can you sign this? Right ?

Tony Hawk: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Because you are in this very small but very clearly esteemed group of people where your signature increases the value of things. So how does that work and how does that feel? Like if a skateboarder who, there are the telltale signs of who is and who isn't, right, if they walk up to you and they're like, hey, will you sign this? Do you feel good about signing it, or is that something that you refrain from? And if somebody's just merely a collector, a trader, and they're trying to build their portfolio, so to speak, you can probably also sense that. So I'm not trying to put you in the hot seat here.

Tony Hawk: Well, to answer your question, through the years, I was always open to that, and I'm happy to, especially when people are skaters or skate fans and whatnot. In the last three years, there has been this new element of resellers, of people that just go buy signature stuff. They have nothing to do with skating. They don't care about skateboarding at all. They just want to get my signature on an item and sell it. And they usually do it on eBay or through their own channels. That's fine. At some point, like a few years ago, I respected the hustle. These guys, they knew that I was going to be at this event. Okay, they're outside waiting. They've been waiting for hours. I'll sign a couple of things. But in recent months, even they have figured out how to get my flight info. Like, some hacked into my actual airline accounts. Some have sources at certain airports that get the manifests and they sell the information. I found all this out because I've actually held a couple of them accountable because I said, look, I'm not going to sign this until you tell me how you knew I was going to be here. I have no business here. I'm here to visit family. No one knows I'm coming here. Oh, well, we saw -- Friends said they saw you at the Detroit airport. Like, no, they didn't. They wouldn't know where I'm going to anyway. Like, well, I saw it on Twitter. You didn't see it on Twitter? I'm on Twitter. Tell me the truth. There's a guy from TMZ that gets flight info and he sells it to us. Okay, thank you.

But that has increased to a point where it's not sustainable. I can't please everyone. The last time I flew out of Chicago, there were about 15 people. One guy had a shopping cart full of skateboards and they all bum rushed me at security before I went through security thinking that I'm going to sign stuff. I'm like, you guys, I can't do that. I'm going to miss my flight and I can't delineate who. I'm sorry. You guys have sabotaged yourselves. I don't know what to say. And then I went through security and there were four dudes waiting at the gate. They had bought tickets, airline tickets, so that it could be past security that they. Airline tickets they're not going to use to chase this.

Andrew Huberman: Wow.

Tony Hawk: People want my autograph, but it's weird and it's intrusive and it's kind of creepy.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, just tell them that a neuroscientist told you that you got to get that slob air, right? And if you sign too many autographs that you're never going to get chances --

Tony Hawk: Of getting it back.

Andrew Huberman: You're not going to get the tuck knee. You're just not going to do the flap knee in vert. You're just not going to get anyway.

Tony Hawk: It's just a really weird new thing that is weird that has popped up. And other than that, the tricky part is when there is a public thing or a public exhibition or whatever to try to figure out who is the true skate fans and who aren't. Usually they're pretty identifiable, but it has ruined the experience for people who truly are that grew up skating.

Andrew Huberman: Well, thanks for sharing that. And we won't tell everyone what the telltale signs are so that these people don't exploit them. The skateboarders, the real fans, will know. They won't have to worry about whether or not they represent accurately, because you just will.

On the positive side, something I've been wanting to learn more about from you is your philanthropic efforts. I think Kevin Rose, who's in the tech sector, was the first to mention to me that you guys have done some philanthropy together. And maybe you've done some with Jim Thiebaud as well. The great Jim Thiebaud.

Tony Hawk: Yeah. Well, both Jim and Kevin were board members. Jim is the current board member of the Skateboard Project.

Andrew Huberman: Tell us about the Skateboard Project.

Tony Hawk: It's my nonprofit and we try to develop public skate parks in underserved areas, but more so by supporting the community and giving them the resources to do so. So groups that are trying to get skate parks in the area, we are the resource center for them. We'll give them advice, we'll give them funding, we'll give them our stamp of approval, and that can go a long way. And to date, we've helped to fund over almost 1000 skate parks now, and 700 or 800 of which are open. I mean, it's my proudest work, for sure. And it's because I never took for granted the fact that I grew up near a skate park. And that was my home away from home. That was where I found my sense of community, my sense of identity. My crew. And so many kids choose to skateboard, but have no support in doing so. And so those skate parks are a lifeline.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I can attest. They absolutely save lives, there's no question. Where can people find out more about your foundation? We can provide a link, but --

Tony Hawk: Skatepark.org.

Andrew Huberman: So where does the funding for these parks actually come from?

Tony Hawk: It comes from donations from supporters, it comes from fundraisers, some corporate. Sometimes funding is funneled through us for specific regions. Like we have a built to play project that's in Michigan and New York, and that's funded by the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr Foundation. So they give us the funding and then we have to give it to that area. But it's easy because there's plenty of projects, and now there's an abundance of skate parks in those areas.

Andrew Huberman: Love it. Thank you for doing that, for organizing around that.

Tony Hawk: And I get to get more places to skate.

Andrew Huberman: I'm curious what's in the immediate horizon, right these days, you probably have the option to say yes to things and no to things. You have a family, you have your skateboard career. Where do you place your priorities in terms of how to carve up your day or your week? I mean, what would you like to make sure that you do, or as much of the hours of your waking day for the next, let's just say five years. If you want to extend that out, you can.

Tony Hawk: Well, I want to be available to my kids first and foremost, and we still have one at home for the next four years, so I will make sure that I'm available to her. And in terms of career, I never had great aspirations. Like, I never thought, okay, this is what I want to accomplish. It was always just very more trick-specific oriented. So it was always like, I want to try this and this and this. I would like to continue skating. I don't know if I'll be able to skate at the level I'm skating right now in five years, but I know that I'll still be on the ramp. I may not be doing it in public, trying to advocate for public skate parks, doing more with the foundation and whatever.

I think the way I prioritize my time is what will resonate the furthest and have the best impact on skateboarding in general. I do feel that I've come to a point where, yes, I'm some unofficial ambassador to skateboarding, and I want to represent it well. I want to be fair in that skateboarding is all kinds of different things. It's not just X Games or Olympics or whatnot. It represents a true culture, and I want to project that as much as I can and make sure that people understand that that's also positive. Really, everything that I'm doing now is just kind of fun. I would say in the last five to ten years is the first time I've truly enjoyed what skateboarding has provided me in terms of opportunity and what it brings to me and what it means to my family. I have a much better appreciation, understanding for it. And these days, it's just like everything's kind of just gravy. It's just so fun. I can't believe I could still do it for a living. It's crazy. I'm 55 years old, and I truly ride my skateboard as a career. Like, that's nuts, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Andrew Huberman: Well, it certainly is earned. And I just want to say thank you for a number of things. First of all, thank you for going to the skate park. Thank you for picking this trajectory. Thank you for inspiring me and so many other young people and old people, older people over so many decades now, both with what you did on a skateboard and off the skateboard, and including your resilience and determination to push and continue to progress to the point where you were badly injured, and then to push through that, come back, at least match what you did previously, and I would wager that you will exceed your prior skill level going forward.

So I want to thank you for your resilience. I know it comes from an intrinsic drive, your love of skateboarding. It just absolutely comes through. I share in some of that, of course, having grown up in it, but not nearly as much as you, but also just your willingness to stretch out into these different areas, like the video game thing or talk about X Games, the Olympics, because that did allow for a lot of growth and lateral movement of skateboarding. And at the same time, just as you said, to bring it right back to the fact that skateboarding isn't one thing. It is not like other sports. It's its own sport, and it's its own lifestyle. It's its own thing. And we do consider you the ambassador for skateboarding and --

Tony Hawk: I appreciate it.

Andrew Huberman: I speak for many people, and I say that we're very grateful that you are, because you bring that shrewdness and that prudence to it, but also that get after it punk rock spirit and the goodness that your parents instilled in you clearly comes through everything from the philanthropy and onward. So I can't say enough positive things or express enough gratitude for what you've done and for your time here. Your legacy in skateboarding, but also just in the game of life, is clearly cemented. So thank you.

Tony Hawk: Oh, thank you. And I appreciate that the ethos of skateboarding shines through on your show and just your crew here, clearly a lot of them come from the skateboard world, so you're still supporting it, whether you know it or not.

Andrew Huberman: Thanks so much, and hopefully you'll come back and we'll do it again.

Tony Hawk: All right, sounds good.

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