WEBVTT

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(Music)

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(Skateboard sounds) (Music)

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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So, that's what I've done with my life. (Laughter)

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(Applause)

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Thank you. (Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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As a kid, I grew up on a farm in Florida,

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and I did what most little kids do.

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I played a little baseball, did a few other things like that,

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but I always had the sense of being an outsider,

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and it wasn't until I saw pictures in the magazines

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that a couple other guys skate, I thought,

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"Wow, that's for me," you know?

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Because there was no coach standing directly over you,

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and these guys, they were just being themselves.

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There was no opponent directly across from you.

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And I loved that sense, so I started skating

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when I was about 10 years old, in 1977,

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and when I did, I picked it up pretty quickly.

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In fact, here's some footage from about 1984.

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It wasn't until '79 I won my first amateur championship,

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and then, by '81, I was 14, and I won

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my first world championship,

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which was amazing to me,

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and in a very real sense, that was the first real victory I had.

NOTE Paragraph

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Oh, watch this.

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This is a casper slide, where the board's upside down.

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Mental note on that one. (Laughs)

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And this one here? An ollie.

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So, as she mentioned, that is overstated for sure,

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but that's why they called me the godfather

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of modern street skating.

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Here's some images of that.

NOTE Paragraph

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Now, I was about halfway through my pro career in,

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I would say, the mid-'80s.

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Freestyle itself, we developed all these flat ground tricks

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as you saw, but there was evolving

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a new kind of skateboarding, where guys were taking it

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to the streets, and they were using that ollie,

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like I showed you? They were using it to get up onto stuff

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like bleachers and handrails and over stairwells

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and all kinds of cool stuff.

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So it was evolving upwards.

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In fact, when someone tells you they're a skater today,

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they pretty much mean a street skater,

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because freestyle, it took about five years for it to die,

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and at that stage, I'd been a "champion" champion

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for 11 years, which, phew!

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And suddenly it was over for me. That's it.

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It was gone. They took my pro model off the shelf,

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which was essentially pronouncing you dead publicly.

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That's how you make your money, you know?

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You have a signature board and wheels and shoes

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and clothes. I had all that stuff, and it's gone.

NOTE Paragraph

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The crazy thing was, there was a really

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liberating sense about it, because I no longer had to protect

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my record as a champion. "Champion," again.

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Champion sounds so goofy, but it's what it was, right?

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And I got to -- What drew me to skateboarding, the freedom

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was now restored, where I could just create things,

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because that's where the joy was for me, always,

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was creating new stuff.

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The other thing that I had was a deep well of tricks

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to draw from that were rooted in these flat ground tricks.

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Stuff the normal guys were doing was very much different.

NOTE Paragraph

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So, as humbling and rotten as it was —

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And believe me, it was rotten. I would go to skate spots,

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and I was already, like, "famous guy," right?

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And everyone thought I was good. But in this new terrain,

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I was horrible. So people would go, "Oh, he's all --

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Oh, what happened to Mullen?" (Laughter) (Laughs)

NOTE Paragraph

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So, humbling as it was, I began again.

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Here are some tricks that I started to bring

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to that new terrain. (Skateboard noises)

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And again, there's this undergirding layer of influence of freestyle

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that made me — Oh, that one?

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That's, like, the hardest thing I've ever done.

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Okay, look at that. It's a darkslide.

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See how it's sliding on the backside?

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Those are super-fun. (Laughter) And, actually, not that hard.

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You know, at the very root of that, see, caspers,

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see how you throw it? (Skateboard noises)

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Simple as that, right? No biggie. (Laughter)

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And your front foot, the way it grabs it, is --

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I'd seen someone slide on the back of the board like that,

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and I was like, "How can I get it over?"

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Because that had not yet been done. And then it dawned

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on me, and here's part of what I'm saying.

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I had an infrastructure. I had this deep layer, where

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it was like, oh my gosh, it's just your foot.

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It's just the way you throw your board over.

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Just let the ledge do that, and it's easy,

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and the next thing you know, there's 20 more tricks

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based out of the variations.

NOTE Paragraph

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So that's the kind of thing that, here, check this out,

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here's another way, and I won't overdo this.

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A little indulgent, I understand.

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There's something called a primo slide.

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(Skateboard noises)

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It is the funnest trick ever to do.

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(Skateboard noises)

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It's like skinboarding.

NOTE Paragraph

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And this one, look how it slides sideways, every which way?

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Okay, so when you're skating, and you take a fall,

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the board slips that way or that way. It's kind of predictable.

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This? It goes every which way. It's like a cartoon, the falls,

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and that's what I love the most about it.

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It's so much fun to do. In fact, when I started doing them,

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I remember, because I got hurt. I had to get a knee surgery,

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right? So there were a couple of days where, actually

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a couple of weeks, where I couldn't skate at all.

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It would give out on me. And I would watch the guys,

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I'd go to this warehouse where a lot of the guys

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were skating, my friends, and I was like,

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"Man I gotta do something new. I want to do something new.

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I want to start fresh. I want to start fresh."

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And so the night before my surgery, I'd watched,

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and I was like, "How am I going to do this?"

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So I ran up, and I jumped on my board,

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and I cavemanned, and I flipped it down,

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and I remember thinking, I landed so light-footed, thinking,

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if my knee gives, they'll just have more work to do in the morning.

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(Laughs) (Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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And so, when it was the crazy thing.

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I don't know how many of you guys have had surgery,

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but -- (Laughter) -- you are so helpless, right?

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You're on this gurney and you're watching the ceiling go by,

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every time it's always that, and right when they're putting

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the mask on you before you go to sleep,

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all I was thinking is, "Man, when I wake up and I get better,

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the first thing I'm going to do is film that trick." (Laughter)

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And indeed I did. It was the very first thing I filmed,

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which was awesome.

NOTE Paragraph

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Now, let me -- I told you a little bit about the evolution

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of the tricks. Consider that content, in a sense.

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What we do as street skaters is,

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you have these tricks. Say I'm working on darkslides,

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or a primo, that you guys know this stuff now. (Laughter) (Laughs)

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What you do is you cruise around the same streets that

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you've seen a hundred times, but suddenly, because you

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already have something in this fixed domain of this target,

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it's like, what will match this trick?

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How can I expand, how can the context, how can

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the environment change the very nature of what I do?

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So you drive and drive and drive, and, actually I gotta admit,

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just because I was struggling with this because I'm here,

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but I'll just say it, is, I cannot tell you, not only to be here

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in front of you, but what a privilege it is to be at USC campus,

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because I have been escorted off of this campus so many times. (Laughter)

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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So let me give you another example of how

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context shapes content.

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This is a place not that far from here.

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It's a rotten neighborhood. Your first consideration is,

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am I gonna get beat up? You go out and -- See this wall?

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It's fairly mellow, and it's beckoning to do bank tricks, right?

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But there's this other aspect of it for wheelies,

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so check this out. There's a few tricks, again,

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how environment changes the nature of your tricks.

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Freestyle oriented, manual down -- wheelie down.

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Watch, this one? Oh, I love this. It's like surfing, this one,

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the way you catch it.

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This one, a little sketchy going backwards,

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and watch the back foot, watch the back foot.

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Oop. (Laughs) Mental note right there. Again, we'll get back to that.

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Here. Back foot, back foot. Okay, up there?

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That was called a 360 flip. Notice how the board flipped

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and spun this way, both axes.

NOTE Paragraph

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And another example of how the context changed,

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and the creative process for me and for most skaters,

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is, you go, you get out of the car, you check for security,

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you check for stuff. (Laughter)

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It's funny, you get to know their rhythms, you know,

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the guys that cruise around, and

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skateboarding is such a humbling thing, man.

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No matter how good you are, right, you still gotta deal with —

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So you hit this wall, and when I hit it, the first thing you do is

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you fall forward, and I'm like, all right, all right.

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As you adjust,

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you punch it up, and then when I would do that,

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it was throwing my shoulder this way, which

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as I was doing it, I was like, "Oh wow, that's begging

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for a 360 flip," because that's how you load up for a 360 flip.

NOTE Paragraph

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And so this is what I want to emphasize that,

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as you can imagine, all of these tricks are made of

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sub-movements, executive motor functions, more granular

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to the degree to which I can't quite tell you, but one thing

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I do know is, every trick is made of combining two or three

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or four or five movements. And so, as I'm going up,

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these things are floating around, and you have to sort of

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let the cognitive mind, like, rest back, pull it back a little bit,

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and let your intuition go as you feel these things.

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And these sub-movements are just kind of floating around,

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and as the wall hits you, they connect themselves

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to an extent, and that's when the cognitive mind, you think,

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"Oh, 360 flip, I'm going to make that."

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So that's how that works to me, the creative process,

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the process itself of street skating.

NOTE Paragraph

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So, next — Oh, mind you. (Laughs) Those are the community.

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These are some of the best skaters in the world.

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These are my friends. Oh my gosh, they're such good people.

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And the beauty of skateboarding is that,

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no one guy is the best. In fact, I know this is rotten to say,

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they're my friends, but a couple of them actually

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don't look that comfortable on their board.

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What makes them great is the degree to which

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they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves.

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Every single one of these guys, you look at them,

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you can see a silhouette of them, and you realize, like,

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"Oh, that's him, that's Haslam, that's Koston,

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there's these guys, these are the guys.

NOTE Paragraph

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And skaters, I think they tend to be outsiders

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who seek a sense of belonging,

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but belonging on their own terms,

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and real respect is given by how much we take what

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other guys do, these basic tricks, 360 flips,

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we take that, we make it our own, and then we contribute

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back to the community the inner way

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that edifies the community itself.

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The greater the contribution, the more we express and form

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our individuality, which is so important to a lot of us

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who feel like rejects to begin with.

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The summation of that gives us

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something we could never achieve as an individual.

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I should say this. There's some sort of beautiful symmetry

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that the degree to which we connect to a community

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is in proportion to our individuality, which we are expressing

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by what we do.

NOTE Paragraph

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Next. These guys. Very similar community

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that's extremely conducive to innovation.

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Notice a couple of these shots from the Police Department.

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But it is quite similar. I mean, what is it to hack, right?

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It's knowing a technology so well that you can manipulate it

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and steer it to do things it was never intended to do, right?

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And they're not all bad.

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You can be a Linux kernel hacker, make it more stable, right?

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More safe, more secure. You can be an iOS hacker,

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make your iPhone do stuff it wasn't supposed to.

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Not authorized, but not illegal.

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And then you've got some of these guys, right?

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What they do is very similar to our creative process.

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They connect disparate information,

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and they bring it together in a way that

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a security analyst doesn't expect. Right?

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It doesn't make them good people,

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but it's at the heart of engineering, at the heart of

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a creative community, an innovative community,

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and the open source community, the basic ethos of it

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is, take what other people do, make it better,

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give it back so we all rise further.

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Very similar communities, very similar.

NOTE Paragraph

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We have our edgier sides, too. It's funny, my dad was right.

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These are my peers.

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But I respect what they do, and they respect what I do,

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because they can do things. It's amazing what they can do.

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In fact, one of them, he was Ernst & Young's

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Entrepreneur of the Year for San Diego County,

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so they're not, you never know who you're dealing with.

NOTE Paragraph

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We've all had some degree of fame.

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In fact, I've had so much success that I

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strangely always feel unworthy of.

00:13:48.719 --> 00:13:50.904
I've had a patent, and that was cool, and we started

00:13:50.904 --> 00:13:54.104
a company, and it grew, and it became the biggest, and then

00:13:54.104 --> 00:13:55.701
it went down, and then it became the biggest again,

00:13:55.701 --> 00:13:58.760
which is harder than the first time, and then we sold it,

00:13:58.760 --> 00:14:01.160
and then we sold it again.

00:14:01.160 --> 00:14:03.633
So I've had some success. And in the end,

00:14:03.633 --> 00:14:06.425
when you've had all of these things, what is it that continues to

00:14:06.425 --> 00:14:09.447
drive you? As I mentioned, the knee stuff and these things,

00:14:09.447 --> 00:14:11.057
what is it that will punch you?

00:14:11.057 --> 00:14:12.697
Because it's not just the mind.

00:14:12.697 --> 00:14:16.192
What is it that will punch you and make you do something

00:14:16.192 --> 00:14:19.234
and bring it to another level, and when you've had it all,

00:14:19.234 --> 00:14:22.903
sometimes, guys, they die on the vine with all of that talent,

00:14:22.903 --> 00:14:26.184
and one of the things we've had, all of us, is fame,

00:14:26.184 --> 00:14:28.496
I think the best kind of fame, because you can take it off.

00:14:28.496 --> 00:14:31.088
I've been all around the world,

00:14:31.088 --> 00:14:33.556
and there will be a thousand kids crying out your name,

00:14:33.556 --> 00:14:35.119
and it's such a weird, visceral experience.

00:14:35.119 --> 00:14:37.297
It's like, it's disorienting.

00:14:37.297 --> 00:14:39.192
And you get in a car, and you drive away,

00:14:39.192 --> 00:14:42.431
and 10-minute drive, and you get out,

00:14:42.431 --> 00:14:45.656
and no one gives a rat's who you are. (Laughs)

00:14:45.656 --> 00:14:48.319
And it gives you that clarity of perspective of, man,

00:14:48.319 --> 00:14:50.018
I'm just me, and popularity, what does

00:14:50.018 --> 00:14:53.140
that really mean again? Not much.

00:14:53.140 --> 00:14:55.983
It's peer respect that drives us. That's the one thing that

00:14:55.983 --> 00:14:58.074
makes us do what we do. I've had over a dozen bones,

00:14:58.074 --> 00:15:01.773
these guys, this guy, over, what, eight, 10 concussions,

00:15:01.773 --> 00:15:04.128
to the point where it's comedy, right?

00:15:04.128 --> 00:15:08.504
It is actually comedy. They mess with him.

NOTE Paragraph

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Next. And this is something deeper, and this is where I'm —

00:15:13.943 --> 00:15:16.633
I think I was on tour when I, I was reading one of the

00:15:16.633 --> 00:15:19.833
Feynman biographies. It was the red one or the blue one.

00:15:19.833 --> 00:15:27.101
And he made this statement that was so profound to me.

00:15:27.101 --> 00:15:28.831
It was that the Nobel Prize

00:15:28.831 --> 00:15:32.086
was the tombstone on all great work,

00:15:32.086 --> 00:15:35.429
and it resonated because I had won 35 out of 36 contests

00:15:35.429 --> 00:15:39.310
that I'd entered over 11 years, and it made me bananas.

00:15:39.310 --> 00:15:41.580
In fact, winning isn't the word. I won it once.

00:15:41.580 --> 00:15:42.887
The rest of the time, you're just defending,

00:15:42.887 --> 00:15:46.163
and you get into this, like, turtle posture, you know?

00:15:46.163 --> 00:15:49.087
Where you're not doing. It usurped the joy of what I loved

00:15:49.087 --> 00:15:52.309
to do because I was no longer doing it to create and have fun,

00:15:52.309 --> 00:15:54.560
and when it died out from under me, that was one of

00:15:54.560 --> 00:15:57.654
the most liberating things because I could create.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:57.654 --> 00:16:01.587
And look, I understand that I am on the very edge

00:16:01.587 --> 00:16:03.727
of preachy, right here. I'm not here to do that.

00:16:03.727 --> 00:16:06.192
It's just that I'm in front of a very privileged audience.

00:16:06.192 --> 00:16:09.119
If you guys aren't already leaders in your community,

00:16:09.119 --> 00:16:12.350
you probably will be, and if there's anything I can give you

00:16:12.350 --> 00:16:15.863
that will transcend what I've gotten from skateboarding,

00:16:15.863 --> 00:16:19.019
the only things of meaning, I think, and of permanence,

00:16:19.019 --> 00:16:22.218
it's not fame, it's not all these things. What it is

00:16:22.218 --> 00:16:24.705
is that there's an intrinsic value in creating something

00:16:24.705 --> 00:16:28.311
for the sake of creating it, and better than that,

00:16:28.311 --> 00:16:30.938
because, man, I'm 46 years old, or I'll be 46, and how

00:16:30.938 --> 00:16:33.230
pathetic is that I'm still skateboarding, but there is —

00:16:33.230 --> 00:16:37.839
(Laughter) -- there is this beauty in dropping it into

00:16:37.839 --> 00:16:42.185
a community of your own making, and seeing it dispersed,

00:16:42.185 --> 00:16:44.897
and seeing younger, more talented, just different talent,

00:16:44.897 --> 00:16:47.303
take it to levels you can never imagine,

00:16:47.303 --> 00:16:50.393
because that lives on. So thank you for your time.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:00.616 --> 00:17:03.945
Krisztina Holly: I have a question for you.

00:17:03.945 --> 00:17:09.175
So you've really reinvented yourself in the past from

00:17:09.175 --> 00:17:12.294
freestyle to street, and, I think it was about four years ago

00:17:12.294 --> 00:17:16.216
you officially retired. Is that it? What's next?

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Rodney Mullen: That's a good question.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:18.573 --> 00:17:19.884
KH: Something tells me it's not the end.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:19.884 --> 00:17:24.197
RM: Yeah. I, every time you think you've chased something

00:17:24.197 --> 00:17:25.671
down, it's funny, no matter how good you are,

00:17:25.671 --> 00:17:28.499
and I know guys like this, it feels like you're polishing a turd.

00:17:28.499 --> 00:17:32.989
You know? (Laughter)

00:17:32.989 --> 00:17:35.640
And I thought, the only way I can extend this

00:17:35.640 --> 00:17:38.880
is to change something infrastructural,

00:17:38.880 --> 00:17:42.142
and so that's what I proceeded to do, through a long story,

00:17:42.142 --> 00:17:46.427
one of desperation, so if I do it, rather than talk about it,

00:17:46.427 --> 00:17:48.272
if I do it, you'll be the first to know. KH: All right, we won't ask you any more.

00:17:48.272 --> 00:17:49.468
RM: You'll get a text.

00:17:49.468 --> 00:17:52.862
KH: (Laughs) Right. Thank you. Good job. (Applause)
RM: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

00:17:52.862 --> 00:17:58.734
(Applause)