Pro Skater, philanthropist, entrepreneur, TV personality, actor, Guinness Book record holder, Street League founder; it sounds insane, but the list of accomplishments for Rob Dyrdek are never-ending. The guy has done it all and then some, yet still somehow feels he hasn’t done enough.
That’s the magic of Rob Dyrdek. He’s not one to sit back and bask in his accomplishments. He’s the guy that’s only satisfied when he’s chasing his newest vision towards completion, pushing the limits of success along the way. Rob is non-stop, 100% charging at everything he does, making history and building multiple empires along the way.
I recently got a hold of Rob and talked to him about his new show, Ridiculousness, Street League, Lil Wayne, the Alias Lite and plenty more.
What’s up Rob? What have you been up to? I live a really weird life, man. I’ve just been working really hard trying to keep it all organized.
How’s Ridiculousness going? Has the reception been pretty good so far? You know, believe it or not I sold it to MTV before Fantasy Factory, during Rob & Big. But I ended up doing Fantasy Factory first because they wanted me to do them both at the same time and I was like, ‘That’s too sketchy’. And then we shot it last year, but we always knew that it has so much more crossover appeal, and it’s just so much bigger than Fantasy Factory’s ever been.
What’s the criteria for a clip making it onto the show? For me, America’s Funniest Home Videos is filled with wack, fake videos. Tosh is too sketch comedy. This is straight-up and down, if you watch it and it makes you laugh, you made the cut. If you’re breaking bones and really getting hurt, well that’s too much. It’s got to be good enough to where you turn it down, no volume, and you can watch the whole show straight through.
What do you think the general appeal is to watching people f*&% themselves up? You know, I don’t think it’s as simple as f****ing themselves up as much as you know that what you’re watching was some fluke occurrence that just happened to be captured on video camera and can never be recreated. That’s what makes it so special. It’s not acting, it’s not a script; it’s not somebody trying to do something. It’s just something super random happening. There’s four billion ways to capture something, with cell phones, cameras and everything, so you keep getting more and more of the most absurd stuff and it never stops.
I think it’s crazy that you guys cram so many clips into a single episode and there’s still no way you’ll ever run out. It’s so funny because we’re not allowed to take submissions. So we have to just scour the internet and then source who uploaded it to find them to get the video. It is just relentless, and that’s all over the world. Half these videos are like weird European dudes on the Eastern block doing ridiculous stuff.
Street League. What’s your take on how things went this year? You know, I’m psyched on the growth and everything that we’ve done and evolving it, but it still has a way to go. The biggest thing I took away from this years is, I want flow. So next year I’m gonna add a thirty second run to the format so it opens up some good old fashioned cruising around and flying around and putting tricks together. I tried to suffice that with the line section but it just doesn’t quite do it, man. And I think that’s one of the key elements that will make it even better. And I potentially might make the big section four out of seven so it’s about doing your four hardest tricks and giving guys a little leeway there in the end. But as a whole, you know, it’s such a massive undertaking and such a great project. I mean there’s nothing as intense as watching those big sections at the end of the contest where it’s just all of the best skateboarders in the world getting so gnarly. They’re in front of those big crowds and it’s really exciting. And it’s without a doubt my favorite thing on planet earth. I just want to make it bigger and better every year.
What have you guys done to make Street League appeal more to the masses who don’t know skateboarding? Say your average baseball, football fan. Without a doubt, that’s my long term goal and I think that it’s gonna come along with the growth of the property, and then eventually you’ll get to know these guys and see how amazing and crazy the Chris Cole’s and Torey Pudwill’s and Shane O’Neill’s and Mikey Taylor’s really are. We’re exposing that these guys are famous pro street skaters but they’re still in the streets on the weekends. I think it’s essential to build sort of programming around the sport to showcase the stars. As you can imagine, it’s a very long-term play and it’s a matter of getting smarter and getting better and doing it over time.
You’ve accomplished so much with Street League. Do you have like a 5 year plan or something for how you see it fully coming together? Oh man, I feel like I’m not even close. I feel like I’m still working out the kinks. I want to design the courses next year by adding flow and by building a plaza that you can skate in both directions, so it flows more like a skatepark, like a true hybrid. Then what I’m able to build are these perfectly self-contained skate plaza competition courses. And I just want to build those all over the country. And if you watch it on TV in Phoenix, I’m going to build that exact one in your neighborhood. I want to obviously tool around with the exact features and look to make everyone of them different, but to me it’s about trying to standardize what a competition course is and feels like. I want to showcase the worlds best and then build them in neighborhoods for kids to skate.
There are so many heavy-hitting dudes in Street League that are all capable of taking a win at any stop. What do you think it takes for a guy to follow through with a first place finish? You got to skate to win. It’s the weirdest thing. Just in that level of high-pressure format, you see some guys skating not to lose or not to get eliminated, and you see other guys that are just skating to win. I think it’s a matter of that approach. And I think a lot of the guys are still getting used to that overall scale of pressure. Most contests just don’t come down to these single moments where you have to put it down. I think a lot of guys have had to adjust to it.
Where you stuck in Jersey with all that Hurricane drama that went down? Stoked? That was like my nightmare!
Haha! No, I said stuck! (Laughs) One of the things that I loved about doing it inside the arena is that weather will never be an issue. And then low and behold, the one weekend when there is a fluke, once in 65 year hurricane in New York and New Jersey, is the one day it just ripped the thunder right out of it. And you know, we had to force it a day early just to make sure we got it done.
Was it insanity trying to scramble to make it all come together last minute? You have to understand; I ultimately have to say yes or no to everything. So there’s an immense amount of pressure on that level of decision making. And ultimately it’s my money. So the idea of moving an entire of event where we already sold all those tickets and it’s going to be the biggest skateboard contest in history, with the most people to ever be at a skateboard contest, and a hurricanes gonna come through and blow this thing apart? It was tough, but you want to know what was fun about it, it was like how we all got trapped in the hotel together and it was just this weird experience. All of us in one hotel, in the middle of New Jersey with no power. It was a really fun experience.
Holed up in the hotel, how did you stay busy? Man, I walked out of the hotel and Ryan Sheckler’s little brother was dressed as one of the Dime Squad Girls, and I about lost my mind. They had a full-fledged, full-scale costume party which was just insanity. Everyone had to walk down the stairs because the elevators don’t work and there’s no light in the building. It was super bizarre, but it was fun.
Recently, Lil’ Wayne stop by the Fantasy Factory. How did that happen? Believe it or not, he kicked this whole skate run off there [The Fantasy Factory]. He’d been on tour, hitting all the different spots, so he came through and skated. And he hasn’t been skating that long, but I was like, ‘You can do this, let’s pull you into the foam pit!’ Now getting pulled into the foam pit’s sketchy, because even my normal friends that skate are scared by it. He was like, ‘You wanna know what, let’s do it.’ And we whipped him right into that thing. I just love it, to me, he just loves skateboarding. He’s like, ‘I just love it.’ He has no agenda hiding, he’s just skating. And he watches every Street League. He’s like a modern day Elvis. Just to have him embrace skateboarding so much is pretty amazing.
Have you made your way to the DC Embassy park yet? No but it’s so well done. They did such a good job in designing it and the way they colored it, and just how sick the logo looks all lit up on the wall…they did such a good job. All those guys are really on point over there. We want to do a Street League qualifier next year that’ll give these guys a chance to win their way into the League, and we’d like to find a European guy from the Embassy. Since Penny and Rowley, it’s been a while since there’s been a dominating force from Europe and we’d love to find that kid through the Embassy.
What can you say about the Alias Lite? You know, I just love it. It’s the true process, man. It’s like when you put soul back into a shoe. I designed the original Alias back in the day and I had been so busy I had sort of let DC design whatever on the footwear front for me. And with the Alias Lite, I broke out the pencils and the tracing paper and sketched it up. It was really about the technology of finding the Uni-Lite that allowed us to make that modern, pure skate/runner hybrid which is one of those things that I’ve been trying to do throughout my whole professional skateboarding career and life with DC. I’ve always tried to bridge that sort of skate, athletic gap, which to me is the core value of what DC represents.
What’s next for you Rob? It’s Street League 2012. Just getting really focused and getting a little deeper with DC and Alien Workshop. I’ve got the cartoon coming out and I’ve got my other show stuff. I got an eyewear brand that I’m doing that’s super amazing. I’m just building, man. It’s just sort of a relentless lifestyle. I’m like a highly conditioned work athlete.
All photos courtesy of DC Shoes.
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