Paul Rodriguez

my biggest set would be i 360 flipped a 15 stair holy crap that's my biggest but that's not even the big people have done stuff down 20 18 17. you're in the air for like five plus seconds yeah yeah probably like more like two and a half to three but it feels like an eternity

it feels like a long time when you're when you're doing it but like it's crazy how like these tricks are like a second or two but so much happens yeah when you're in it it's like almost go slow-mo and then you go back and you watch it on footage and you see it on the timeline it's like second and a half and you're like that is fascinating how the brain works right yeah even like i had a basketball game last night and we were tied up and this kid took a jump shot it felt like he was in the air for like seven seconds yeah like when you watch like sports movies and you see them slow-mo that last

oh and the ball's going you see it it's about to go in like it feels like that sometimes yeah you could picture it frame by frame almost right yeah it's just being so in the moment yeah that is fascinating wow 15 set of stairs that is fucking crazy yeah and that was that was a while back i mean uh you know i'm 40 now so i i don't think i'll be i have the desire to jump that big these days i'll still skate a good 10 12 stair damn but um

But that was my peak of jumping.

And so that was a while back.

But I never considered myself being one of the guys who was known for doing big, dangerous stuff.

I think maybe I'm more known for being a little more technical.

I don't know that it's directly the social media that's amplified it.

I think what social media is responsible for is the progress, how fast skaters are progressing.

Like when I started skating, it was pre-social media and a skateboard video would come out and we would live off that skateboard video for like a year or two until the next big skateboard video came out.

So content wasn't dropping as fast.

So we would sit with these videos that we had for a year or so and

study them rewind them pause slow most try to learn all the tricks that your favorite pros are doing and You would take that time and then by the time the next video comes out you're like, okay now we need to learn this but now social media every single day a brand new videos dropping whether it's like a full-blown video part say on thrasher or just you have you know a kid from middle of you know in the Midwest just

unknown kid doing a trick at his local skate park and it goes viral and you're like holy shit like I've never seen this before like so every day these kids now are seeing something new that hasn't been done happen every single day so I think they're processing and they're

understanding of how fast they got a progress is just on hyper speed yeah you see that in every sport now right yeah everyone's just so much more talented it's way harder to make the nba or the nfl these days 100 because the access to information is just so easy it's just non-stop by the time you wake up tomorrow what the level was yesterday is now a little bit higher you know what i mean so like the skill gap is just yeah it's crazy it's growing so

i guess as a byproduct yes guys are going bigger and doing more dangerous things just because they're seeing where the level's at so yeah i guess it can be responsible for that there's always pros and cons yeah but i think it's just mainly responsible just for like the speed of the progress yeah like i'm sure if you go to the skate park now everyone's just way better than when you were a kid right yeah there's a lot more talent out there um

And plus skateboarding when I started was still a very young sport and still relatively a young sport compared to a lot of other mainstream sports.

So like it just has so much room to progress, so much room to grow.

And also we don't have a,

standard court or course you know like every contest is a different course different obstacles different dimensions different everything so you can't really prepare like you know basketball it's the same court same dimensions everything it's just what they do athletically that changes same thing with any in baseball football whatever maybe golf there's different courses every time that could be different so that's maybe more comparable um so we just have to kind of prepare for