Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left That's Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is a special treat, truly legendary skier
Speaker 1: Bode Miller. Good to have here. How's it going? How
Speaker 1: often do you ski these days? More or less every day?
Speaker 1: So did you go out today? I didn't. Today was
Speaker 1: one of my one of my bad bad days. Um,
Speaker 1: I was on in front of this computer all day,
Speaker 1: which is my least favorite thing. Maybe, but um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's usually it's been. I probably had fifty five days
Speaker 1: this year, so it's it's a lot. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: not it's not what it used to be. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of skiing. Okay, do you still enjoy
Speaker 1: it as much? As much? As pretty subjective? But I
Speaker 1: enjoy it a lot. I enjoy going with my kids
Speaker 1: and just parting around. I can ski with with anybody
Speaker 1: and have a good time. I think more or less
Speaker 1: I liked outside. I would be a really good golf caddy. Um.
Speaker 1: I I golf a lot, and I could give two
Speaker 1: ships about hitting the ball. I just like being outside
Speaker 1: and walking around. So I think as a caddy, i'd
Speaker 1: carry the bag and kid give advice and um enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Probably three times more than I enjoy golf, but um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I still you know, the other day we had a
Speaker 1: little powder and I and I ran a couple of
Speaker 1: steep shoots with a good young friend of mine who's
Speaker 1: I've known since he was born, um since he's twenty
Speaker 1: years younger than me, and my older sister's best friend's kid,
Speaker 1: and it was there was a unique pleasure that I
Speaker 1: don't know that I've ever really felt before seeing a
Speaker 1: kid who I knew from when he was born and
Speaker 1: I was a huge influence on his life being that
Speaker 1: We're from the same town and watching him, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: just kill these shoots at at Yellowstone and Big Sky,
Speaker 1: and um, there's definitely a special pleasure of that, but
Speaker 1: I enjoy just all of it about skiing. Now, I
Speaker 1: certainly skied Big s guy. What shoots did you ski?
Speaker 1: In this case, we were actually we hiked were way
Speaker 1: over on the Dakota side, so the side that faces
Speaker 1: kind of the south, and and uh we we rode
Speaker 1: up Dakota, we rode up um Shed Horn, and we
Speaker 1: hiked up a little bit and then we traversed far
Speaker 1: to the backside kind of the outskirts of what big sky,
Speaker 1: uh limits are, and we we ran a couple of
Speaker 1: shoots that kind of face towards I guess the East. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know if they even have names over there.
Speaker 1: I don't know that anybody really gets to him because
Speaker 1: you have to go off the tram and ski down
Speaker 1: that kind of back ridge and then drop into the
Speaker 1: Dakota Bowl. But that that wasn't the better stuff. Honestly.
Speaker 1: The better stuff was in y c Um just off
Speaker 1: of the shoulder there, and we we went over to
Speaker 1: there's Pinnacle and Corner Pocket and they're just you know,
Speaker 1: they're short and easy, which is perfect for me because
Speaker 1: my I'm not as fit as I once was, so
Speaker 1: it's nice that I'm not doing four thousand continuous vertical,
Speaker 1: But um, it was. It was. It was awesome to
Speaker 1: watch somebody who had known since they were a kid
Speaker 1: ski and a lot of ways better than I was. Now.
Speaker 1: I've certainly skied a ton, not as much to you,
Speaker 1: but at this point in time, unless it's a really
Speaker 1: stormy day, which I enjoy, I find it much more
Speaker 1: enjoyable if I'm with somebody. Is that also your experience?
Speaker 1: I like both, honestly, I think for me I'm not
Speaker 1: a I'm not a meditative person um in terms of
Speaker 1: sitting still and being quiet, but skiing gives me that,
Speaker 1: and it did when I was young, so I was
Speaker 1: really kind of born into it. I you know, skied
Speaker 1: at Cannon my formative years. Cannon On and I skied
Speaker 1: every day. The mountain was open for three years, and
Speaker 1: there you'd routinely on a on a minus fifteen or
Speaker 1: minus twenty day blow and you'd have four or five
Speaker 1: people on the whole mountain. So I was riding the
Speaker 1: chairlift and then the PbD chairs seventeen and it's um,
Speaker 1: you know, the Hong Kong share was twelve minutes. So
Speaker 1: I had these intermittent blocks between active action where I'm
Speaker 1: you know, trying to ski of like totally serene silence
Speaker 1: and just looking at nature. And that was my aitation.
Speaker 1: So I think I I revert back to that really easily.
Speaker 1: So for me, skiing alone is different, I think than
Speaker 1: a lot of people. But like I said, that was
Speaker 1: a unique opportunity. The other day of skia, Shamus was
Speaker 1: really I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as
Speaker 1: I did because it was disproportionate to just a good
Speaker 1: conversation on the chairlift. I really enjoyed the actual skiing
Speaker 1: and watching him ski now skiing in that cold weather.
Speaker 1: I know, I still have toes at this very moment
Speaker 1: that they're tingling and I'm sitting inside. To what degree
Speaker 1: if you've gotten frostbite, and to what degrees your body
Speaker 1: banged up from being on the circuit. M uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm actually not too banged up. My back is a
Speaker 1: bit so I wake up, you know, the stiff back
Speaker 1: in the morning. I'm not sure how much of that's
Speaker 1: my matches that you can see in the background here,
Speaker 1: or or just my you know, twenty five years of
Speaker 1: racing at a high level. But um, but you know,
Speaker 1: I'm super thankful, remarkably lucky considering the crashes I took,
Speaker 1: in the longevity of my career in a really high risk,
Speaker 1: low margin, high consequence sport. But in terms of frost
Speaker 1: bite and stuff, I was I I was gifted with
Speaker 1: ray nods. I don't know if you know ray nods.
Speaker 1: I know what you're talking about, kind of a circulatory anomaly,
Speaker 1: but done correctly and managed correctly. I think reynods is
Speaker 1: actually a gift for those of us who are cold
Speaker 1: weather athletes, because my hands get really stiff and white
Speaker 1: and uncoordinated really quickly. So like I can be in
Speaker 1: the pool in California and it's probably pools eighty degrees
Speaker 1: or eighty five degrees, and my heels will get all white,
Speaker 1: my hands get all white, and I can't really a
Speaker 1: dexterity goes away. But they don't get frostbite ever. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've been in minus thirty five and I've had little
Speaker 1: little bits of frost bit on my knuckles from you know,
Speaker 1: certain things, but in general, compared to the people around
Speaker 1: me in Maine, when I was at boarding school or
Speaker 1: at Cannon, or even on the World Cup in certain
Speaker 1: instances with super tight boots and out there for you know,
Speaker 1: four or five hours at a time in minus thirty, um,
Speaker 1: I was remarkably lucky. And I think that Ray nods
Speaker 1: actually because the cat larry reflects where everything trunches down somehow,
Speaker 1: it actually prevents prospect to some degree. Wow, that's pretty interesting. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's my own philosophy. You can. I don't want to
Speaker 1: get too scientific on you. No, plenty, Scientifically that's what's great. Okay,
Speaker 1: you have a new education initiative can you tell us
Speaker 1: about that? Yeah, I see l is in STU for
Speaker 1: civic leadership. It comes really I'm I'm sort of the
Speaker 1: figurehead for it, although I've supported it for sixteen years now.
Speaker 1: They've been online for roughly twenty years. UM. The Spawn
Speaker 1: family has been stewards of Dwight Academy or Dwight Schools
Speaker 1: for um a hundred years, more than a hundred years,
Speaker 1: and the Dwight Schools have been around for a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty or so years, so a huge legacy and
Speaker 1: incredible quality of school and educational purpose and drive and
Speaker 1: also human development. Really, they they put kids in the
Speaker 1: top colleges around the world all the time. But more
Speaker 1: than that, they're developing leaderships, pills and uh community UM
Speaker 1: responsibility and accountability, all that stuff. So we intended to
Speaker 1: do brick and mortar academies these last few years, and
Speaker 1: we were probably on the ten yard line um of that,
Speaker 1: and then COVID struck and it just kind of really
Speaker 1: throw a wrench and things. So we we launched the
Speaker 1: online initiative just to give parents a better opportunity to
Speaker 1: give their kids a high level education during this time
Speaker 1: where all these schools are even really fantastic schools are
Speaker 1: really struggling to transition to online learning for these kids,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, I see all have been doing
Speaker 1: it for twenty years, so they had a nineteen and
Speaker 1: a half year head start. So um it's been. It's
Speaker 1: been incredible to engage these kids. We have fifty years
Speaker 1: so students in the Winter Sports Academy, and um it's been. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's it's part of my nature. My
Speaker 1: grandparents started a tennis camp that was heavily into tennis instruction,
Speaker 1: but also character development and community and um, you know,
Speaker 1: all the all the good qualities that we all hope
Speaker 1: we could you know, instill in our kids or and
Speaker 1: still in ourselves if we have the choice. Um so
Speaker 1: it's very natural to me. And uh it's been. That's
Speaker 1: been one of the really cool things that's come out
Speaker 1: of this COVID debacle. Okay, what specifically is different about
Speaker 1: this academy. Uh So, it's an inverted blended curriculum, which
Speaker 1: means essentially each kid is obligated to somewhere between an
Speaker 1: hour and an hour and a half of live online
Speaker 1: classes per day. But during that time, this is the
Speaker 1: inverted part. The teacher actually just facilitates conversation between the kids.
Speaker 1: There is no teacher trying to tell you about your
Speaker 1: homework or what you did or they just they let
Speaker 1: you apply that within your class to how you felt
Speaker 1: about it, what it applies to in real life. They
Speaker 1: facilitate that conversation the rest of your day. You you
Speaker 1: are held accountable to it, and you can self regulate
Speaker 1: manage your time. So, but they're all online courses that
Speaker 1: are essentially self instructed, So they have videos for kids
Speaker 1: who are more visual learners, they have audio and visual
Speaker 1: for reading and all that. It's basically demonstrations of what
Speaker 1: it is and applications in real life. And it's like
Speaker 1: you you can't go to your parents and say I
Speaker 1: don't understand what I'm supposed to do. It literally spells
Speaker 1: it out. You have all these different drills. If kids struggle,
Speaker 1: puts them into a different group and they learned that way.
Speaker 1: So basically it allows kids to do about twice as
Speaker 1: much work and feel like they're doing half as much.
Speaker 1: And then and the only obligation they have, which is
Speaker 1: an hour and a half all day, you know, is
Speaker 1: spent conversing with their friends with facilitation of a teacher
Speaker 1: and they come out of it with a you know,
Speaker 1: a degree that will get them into Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
Speaker 1: you know, Stanford, any of the big school So it's
Speaker 1: for me. I mean, it's one of those things I
Speaker 1: wish was around when I was there. And my element
Speaker 1: of that is then I do webinars weekly. We have
Speaker 1: webinar Wednesdays. I talked to the kids, give them, you know,
Speaker 1: contextual stuff about what I did my career, what I
Speaker 1: wished i'd had, how I deal with stress, how I
Speaker 1: dealt with competition, um, you know, every every rething. And
Speaker 1: it's really just kind of a very family oriented kind
Speaker 1: of feel of just being a resource for them. Plus
Speaker 1: I give them training, um missions and and and affiliate
Speaker 1: training programs and products that they could test out and
Speaker 1: try that that I would have loved to have when
Speaker 1: I was younger. I think would have really helped. And
Speaker 1: um yeah, you know, my my role in this, because
Speaker 1: we don't have a brick and mortar, is much less
Speaker 1: where I'd be doing programming and kind of day to
Speaker 1: day stuff. In this case, I'm just trying to layer
Speaker 1: in as much help as I can to a really
Speaker 1: kick ass let me be clear, is this only for
Speaker 1: ski racers or is it for the general public. No,
Speaker 1: so i CEL has been around for twenty years, so
Speaker 1: they've had students for twenty years doing this for dance,
Speaker 1: for acting, for who knows what. But um, the Winter
Speaker 1: Sports Actually Academy was this year and we have kids
Speaker 1: who are snowboarders, Nordic alpine, um snowshoe who liked to
Speaker 1: go mountaineering, who just wanted to not do the crappy
Speaker 1: public school program and are finding things to do with
Speaker 1: themselves in the winter. And that's partly what we talked
Speaker 1: about our webinars is just how do you do fun
Speaker 1: stuff that you could explore and when use your youth?
Speaker 1: You know, they all say you youth's wasted on the young.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to make it wasted less. Okay. You know,
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell popularize the theory that ten thousand hours are
Speaker 1: needed to become world class. It's been a lot of
Speaker 1: documentation after that. But let's just assume you were presented
Speaker 1: with a very young person under the age of five.
Speaker 1: Do you think you could turn that person into a
Speaker 1: competitive World Cup ski racer or do you believe there's
Speaker 1: inherent natural talent. Yeah, there's there's an airent natural talent
Speaker 1: that will make it a lot easier. I think you
Speaker 1: could turn them into a World Cup ski racer. Depending
Speaker 1: on what country they're from. We happen to be gifted
Speaker 1: with a lousy World Cup culture. So being from America,
Speaker 1: you could turn almost any race or get get taken
Speaker 1: them in at five. You could turn almost any racer
Speaker 1: into a World Cup or any person young person into
Speaker 1: a World Cup racer. Would they wig races? I doubt it. Um,
Speaker 1: it gets very nuanced and very difficult at the very
Speaker 1: very top. We're talking about the best in the entire world.
Speaker 1: But you could definitely get them to race World Cup
Speaker 1: and place, say, you know, in the top thirty and
Speaker 1: in several races for virtually any human uh that you found. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's go back to education. Needless to say, we have
Speaker 1: a large education problem in the United States. There's the
Speaker 1: war between religious private public. Is there enough money keeople
Speaker 1: keeping people interested? Teaching to the test as opposed to
Speaker 1: learning to analysis? Uh the analyze two questions, is your
Speaker 1: program scalable? And yes or no? Do you feel there's
Speaker 1: a way to solve the educational problem personally? In the
Speaker 1: United States. Yeah, I'll start with the second. First is
Speaker 1: is yeah, I think I think ours is fully scalable.
Speaker 1: This is I believe the solution is that the difference
Speaker 1: is we don't you need back end programming because this
Speaker 1: allows for this remarkable amount of freedom and flexibility of schedule.
Speaker 1: You need programming to fit around that what the requirements are,
Speaker 1: and that programming has to be done well. School kind
Speaker 1: of cheats that system where they basically lock your kid
Speaker 1: up from eight in the morning till three in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: It's more of a glorified glorified babysitting system more than educational.
Speaker 1: I mean, the kids, if they're determined, can learn a
Speaker 1: lot and can get something out of it. But in
Speaker 1: my opinion, the more critical elements, as we all see
Speaker 1: as you get to the top of an industry, is
Speaker 1: you know, perseverance, um, determination, self reliance, creativity. Things that
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily taught in books, they're discovered through activities, are
Speaker 1: through challenges and um I'm hoping that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: ours is fully scaled, but we could literally go. We
Speaker 1: have master class teachers. They're all recorded, so because the
Speaker 1: way they're designed, you don't need more. I mean they
Speaker 1: are what they are. We will refine the curriculum all
Speaker 1: the time, but it's ultimately scalable to the entire us
Speaker 1: and the cost is less than public school. So call
Speaker 1: about eight thousand bucks right now for a public school kid.
Speaker 1: Uh cost us about eight thousand bucks to do this
Speaker 1: in the education is about four times better. So how
Speaker 1: do you motivate someone who is hardheaded and not motivating? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean everyone loves to do something. Um, you know
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't know what they love to
Speaker 1: do yet, but they need exposure to lots of things
Speaker 1: to discover what that is, especially young people. It's usually activity,
Speaker 1: interaction with other kids. And then we have a really
Speaker 1: clever way of kind of parlaying that passion, that enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for something that you wouldn't have to kick them three
Speaker 1: times out the door to go get them to do
Speaker 1: if it was their buddy out there playing basketball or
Speaker 1: going skiing or whatever, they're chomping at the bit to
Speaker 1: go do that. You parlay that into the understanding of
Speaker 1: how to sort of make things that suck not you know, fun,
Speaker 1: make things that suck exciting. And it's it's takes a
Speaker 1: little creativity and a little time. But given the flexibility
Speaker 1: of the schedule, it makes a ton easier because they're
Speaker 1: not They're able to exhaust themselves doing things they love
Speaker 1: and then come in with a really as an attitude
Speaker 1: in the place, really um sort of receptive to learning
Speaker 1: and and get an incredible amount done. Okay, prior to
Speaker 1: going to Maine Caribasset Academy, which is ski racing Academy,
Speaker 1: what was your educational experience? Lay at regional public school
Speaker 1: and then a bit of profile high school, junior high
Speaker 1: and freshman year, and it was, Um, I would say
Speaker 1: it was really easy for me. I wasn't uh, you know,
Speaker 1: exceptional in terms of grades or anything. I was kind
Speaker 1: of a middle of the road student, but I never
Speaker 1: failed things. I just didn't really do a lot of work,
Speaker 1: didn't engage much, wasn't interested. Um, I like science. I
Speaker 1: liked you know. I came from a family of doctors.
Speaker 1: My dad was in medical school, as too older brothers
Speaker 1: or doctors, and his grandfather, his father, my grandfather was
Speaker 1: a doctor, um, a prominent East Coast doctor, so I
Speaker 1: kind of had like a I was exposed to lots
Speaker 1: of medical books and lots of my dad, you know,
Speaker 1: still try. He speaks Latin. He as an incredible vocabulary.
Speaker 1: So I had good homeschooling teachers prior to public school,
Speaker 1: which I started in third grade, and then public school
Speaker 1: was just kind of a waste of my time, I
Speaker 1: felt like. So I was excited and willing to take
Speaker 1: the risk of going off to boarding school. But it
Speaker 1: was definitely um. It was. It was nigo blow because
Speaker 1: I was going from a big fish in a small
Speaker 1: pond to a small fish and a much bigger pond.
Speaker 1: But and the demands were much higher. But I knew
Speaker 1: that I was capable of dealing with it, and so
Speaker 1: I just kind of dove in. Okay, you're a legendary
Speaker 1: independent thinker. Where did you get that from your parents?
Speaker 1: From your family? Yeah, I mean it's it's the great
Speaker 1: mystery is how much is uh nature versus nurture? I
Speaker 1: don't you know? Everyone in my family is stubborn. Right.
Speaker 1: We come from New Hampshire. It's a live, free or
Speaker 1: die state, Like just our state motto should tell you something.
Speaker 1: But I also my dad was in third year medical school.
Speaker 1: He was in his his what do you call that is?
Speaker 1: Um Yeah, he's in the hospital actually diagnosing real patients
Speaker 1: and all that, and he walked from that, through it,
Speaker 1: through it away after coming from a family with a
Speaker 1: very prominent father who's a you know, open heart surgeon
Speaker 1: and pioneering a lot of stuff in the East Coast,
Speaker 1: two older brothers who are doctors practicing, and he walked
Speaker 1: away from that to go speak at Woodstock and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and formed the political party, the Turtle Party,
Speaker 1: and you know a bunch of he was a hippie,
Speaker 1: you know. He So there's a defiant nature that comes
Speaker 1: from my dad's side and my mom's side is probably
Speaker 1: only amplified their true New Hampshire, Um, you know locals
Speaker 1: and and you know, screw anybody who tries to tell
Speaker 1: me what to do. And so I definitely had it
Speaker 1: from that side genetically and and culturally, like it's it's
Speaker 1: the nature of New Hampshire. You do what you want
Speaker 1: to do, and um, you stick to it, and you're
Speaker 1: accountable and you don't blame other people. And so I
Speaker 1: had that also through my upbringing of my you know,
Speaker 1: i'd leave that when I was four or five years old.
Speaker 1: I go outside at eight thirty in the morning and
Speaker 1: i'd come back at four you know, and I don't
Speaker 1: know how much the time my mom was tracking me around.
Speaker 1: I doubt she was, but um comforting to think she was,
Speaker 1: because I've got myself in a some sketchy situations and
Speaker 1: was touch and go for a lot of times. But um,
Speaker 1: that kind of independence, you know, teaches you a lot
Speaker 1: about um risk management and self reliance and and being
Speaker 1: accountable to your actions and that, you know, so I was.
Speaker 1: It's it's a mystery to me, but certainly I had
Speaker 1: it from every angle, uh to to develop into a
Speaker 1: very defiant, independent, self reliant, uh self motivated person. Okay,
Speaker 1: before you go to care Bassett, what kind of kid
Speaker 1: are you? Are you the loner, a member of the group,
Speaker 1: a leader, an outcast? What were you like? Uh? I
Speaker 1: was probably a general? Um I was. I didn't like
Speaker 1: the spotlight, so I didn't like being the guy. And
Speaker 1: there was always the guy. There was like some kid
Speaker 1: who was better looking or it was funny or had
Speaker 1: like you know, all the jokes or whatever. But I
Speaker 1: was super dominant in athletics. So on the soccer field baseball,
Speaker 1: I've never played, and I got to be the best
Speaker 1: kid on the team really quick. That was really good
Speaker 1: at I wasn't naturally that gifted. I was just exposed
Speaker 1: to a ton of sports as a home schooled kid,
Speaker 1: with a tennis camp all summer and skiing all winter,
Speaker 1: and snowboarding and sledding and standing up on those old
Speaker 1: snurfboards and climbing around in the rivers and running up
Speaker 1: and down the rivers and rock climbing of Mountcols. So
Speaker 1: I had this massive if you want to talk about gladwell,
Speaker 1: I had this massive volume of hugely dynamic sports activity, coordination,
Speaker 1: mental discipline, all these things at a really young age.
Speaker 1: So it allowed me to adjust and tweak to any
Speaker 1: situation I was in and be successful. So, um, you know,
Speaker 1: I had I had good friends. I was not a bully,
Speaker 1: I was I was a connector. I was friends with
Speaker 1: the older kids because they played sports at a higher
Speaker 1: level and I like that. I was friends with a
Speaker 1: skater guys. I smoked a bunch of weed because I
Speaker 1: like skateboarding and you know, and they were fun. I
Speaker 1: was friends with guys who were forty five years old
Speaker 1: because they skied on cold days. They were the ski bums.
Speaker 1: And I played soccer with my uncle's who were a
Speaker 1: generation before me, and so I really had. Like in
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, you don't have the option to pick one friend.
Speaker 1: Ye for me, I, like so many things, I was
Speaker 1: required to make friends with everybody. So I had a
Speaker 1: very diverse group of friends and I was kind of
Speaker 1: jumping around and most of them couldn't understand how does
Speaker 1: he like come skateboard with us and then go rock
Speaker 1: climbing with his uncle or go play a soccer game
Speaker 1: that afternoon. And that's just the way I lived. Okay,
Speaker 1: you talk about home schooling, but from K through the
Speaker 1: first and second year of high school you were in
Speaker 1: traditional school, right, No. I started public school in third
Speaker 1: grade in like, yeah, the middle of third grade thing,
Speaker 1: how do you decide to go to Cara bassett Um.
Speaker 1: The year before, I had gotten um sort of violated
Speaker 1: in a way, uh politically by a coach in Franconia.
Speaker 1: He'd he'd called up a race after and said that
Speaker 1: I admitted to him that I hooked a tip and
Speaker 1: I should be disqualified. I had never done that. He
Speaker 1: was upset with me because we had a little bit
Speaker 1: of a throwdown in front of some of the other
Speaker 1: kids and a couple of parents where he was saying
Speaker 1: that I couldn't train because I was too bad, and
Speaker 1: I should do the drills he wanted me to do,
Speaker 1: and I said, I don't care about your drills. I
Speaker 1: just want to run some gates because I have j
Speaker 1: O qualifiers tomorrow. And so he was pretty bad heard
Speaker 1: about that argument and and felt like he wanted to
Speaker 1: get me back. He called this race how a race
Speaker 1: thrown out? And uh, I didn't make the Junior Olympics
Speaker 1: that year as a twelve year old, and uh, my
Speaker 1: town and and kind of everybody ran him out of
Speaker 1: town on a on a you know, tard and feathered,
Speaker 1: but it didn't change the fact that it was out
Speaker 1: of the jail is that previous year. And they said, look,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're serious about this, we'll figure out
Speaker 1: a way, um to get you into care about that.
Speaker 1: My mom was good, was best friends when she was
Speaker 1: fifteen with the headmaster's wife, so that was kind of
Speaker 1: an in. And then I had to you know, I
Speaker 1: lived with a day student twenty miles away from school,
Speaker 1: off in the woods with no no access by car. Um.
Speaker 1: That was my first year at c v A, and
Speaker 1: I only went for the winter term. So I went
Speaker 1: November and came back, and I guess March um and uh,
Speaker 1: and I had to work all summer to pay it off.
Speaker 1: So I paid paid my own way with help from
Speaker 1: some of the locals in my town. But it was, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was it was scratching at that point. What did
Speaker 1: your father do for a living having dropped out of
Speaker 1: medical school, professional hippie? He? Uh. He and my mom
Speaker 1: were together till I was six, and then they separated
Speaker 1: and he went down to Tennessee primarily because he was
Speaker 1: unhappy and I think had had had had had several
Speaker 1: you know, early seventies, mid seventies affairs, but also um,
Speaker 1: he had missed out on He he invented foot spars,
Speaker 1: which were these date fig maple syrup, a bunch of
Speaker 1: different nuts in this tiny little rapper bar. And this
Speaker 1: is in nineteen seventy nine probably, and uh that's pre
Speaker 1: power bar, pre everything else. He if you went back
Speaker 1: through his his life from just before I was born,
Speaker 1: he he invented six or seven things that turned into
Speaker 1: billion dollar industries. And he was way ahead of the curve.
Speaker 1: But his lack of ability to see things through or
Speaker 1: or do the steps that maybe weren't as fun for him. Uh,
Speaker 1: prevented him from ever monetizing anything. So then he when
Speaker 1: he separated from my mom, which I think, as I said,
Speaker 1: was not to go make money, but that was part
Speaker 1: of the excuse. He went down to Tennessee and was
Speaker 1: a tree route, so he would climb up in huge
Speaker 1: trees along these big mansion uh driveways and outside of Nashville,
Speaker 1: and he he'd clean up the trees and make sure
Speaker 1: branches were going to break people's houses and cars. And
Speaker 1: UM he did that for I think five or six
Speaker 1: years down there, and then uh ended up moving back up.
Speaker 1: Now he's he worked. Phrase he was a homeless outreach
Speaker 1: worker for fifteen years in New England. UM, he still
Speaker 1: maintains his very hippie hippie approach. He's never really made
Speaker 1: made any money. Okay, if you're at Cara Bassett, you
Speaker 1: get out from under the bad coach. You're there, Hey,
Speaker 1: do you fit in these the coaching beneficial? UM? I
Speaker 1: would say fit in fine because I love sports and
Speaker 1: I was a hard worker. UM coaching was still problematic
Speaker 1: because I was bad. Uh you know that the end
Speaker 1: of that first year, UM, I didn't really have any
Speaker 1: good results to speak of. Uh. Certain coaches could see
Speaker 1: that I had a lot of ross speed and I
Speaker 1: was naturally very athletic um. But they they sat me
Speaker 1: down after the first year, and again keep in mind,
Speaker 1: I was I was getting up at four thirty in
Speaker 1: the morning, doing chores, getting on a snowbile, snowbiling six
Speaker 1: miles along these crazy main trails into Kingfield, hitching a
Speaker 1: ride with some worker or employee up to carabast, getting
Speaker 1: there in time for morning meeting, going through classes, going
Speaker 1: to hill training classes, come back down, get in a
Speaker 1: car eighteen miles back down to the Kingfield, back on
Speaker 1: a snowobile six miles through the woods, chores, homework, dinner,
Speaker 1: bed and doing that over and over again. And I
Speaker 1: was with another student who was two years older than me,
Speaker 1: but then he would go off on fist racing trips
Speaker 1: for a week and a half two weeks, so I'd
Speaker 1: be on my own. So I was, you know, fourteen
Speaker 1: years old, driving my own snowobile through six miles from
Speaker 1: the woods like rickety ass. And at the end of
Speaker 1: that year I had they had like an intervention. They
Speaker 1: sat down with the Dina students, UM all the coaches
Speaker 1: and they said, look, you're lazy and you. You suck
Speaker 1: at skiing, You're never gonna be any good. Um, we
Speaker 1: don't like your attitude. You don't, you don't really you know,
Speaker 1: show a lot of like initiative enthusiasm. If you switch
Speaker 1: to snowboarding, we'll give you a full ride back to school,
Speaker 1: you'll live in the dorm next year, won't pay anything
Speaker 1: all set. Um. I was good at snowboarding. I'd grown
Speaker 1: up snowboarding and we had an all school snowboard races.
Speaker 1: What inspired this is I was like second or third
Speaker 1: and one of the runs and the that we had
Speaker 1: the best snowboards in the country at that time, and
Speaker 1: they went around the circle and basically all just just
Speaker 1: pop my balloon, like talk about p in the serial.
Speaker 1: It was. It was brutal, and I was happy not
Speaker 1: to have broken down and cried right there, because it
Speaker 1: was pretty brutal because I I was doing double what
Speaker 1: any other student in the school was doing, minus the
Speaker 1: dude who was my my sort of I guess housemate,
Speaker 1: but he was even doing less than I wasn't he's
Speaker 1: a couple of years older, so um. But I reflected
Speaker 1: on that thought about a bunch and then told him
Speaker 1: the pounds and and that if they needed to charge
Speaker 1: me more to come back to school, i'd I'd figure
Speaker 1: out a way to pay it. And I wanted to
Speaker 1: be a ski racer and snowboarding was not what I
Speaker 1: wanted to do, so um yeah, I fit in, but
Speaker 1: I was still definitely defiant and definitely was not fitting
Speaker 1: into the system the way they wanted to. And I said, look,
Speaker 1: you guys, I suck now. I'll give you that. You're
Speaker 1: not wrong, but I'm gonna be better when I'm fifteen,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna be better when i'm eighteen, and when
Speaker 1: i'm twenty you'll start to see how good I can be.
Speaker 1: That's what it's gonna take. And I apologize if that's
Speaker 1: too long a timeline for you guys, but you know,
Speaker 1: I've known this for ten years at that point, since
Speaker 1: I was six or seven when I talked to my
Speaker 1: grandmother about it a bunch and I said, look, it's
Speaker 1: not important how good I am when I'm fifty and
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of prize money there, and if
Speaker 1: you win races, you know, it's it's a different deal.
Speaker 1: I need to be good when I'm when I'm old
Speaker 1: enough to be successful in the world stage. Okay, ultimately
Speaker 1: you were, but you know, you have a unique style,
Speaker 1: and certainly I grew up in the area. Was your
Speaker 1: in the are of first your skis were together, then
Speaker 1: racers were a part and they had changed in equipment.
Speaker 1: Was the coaching ever helpful or really you were coaching
Speaker 1: yourself and you had the benefit of them setting the
Speaker 1: gates up and logistics. I would say both. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think the coaching was very rarely helpful in the
Speaker 1: immediate term. I think the coaching was really helpful long term,
Speaker 1: over over one or two year span where I listened
Speaker 1: to everything and I retain information really well, and mostly
Speaker 1: what I was doing. The way that I developed, in
Speaker 1: the way that I learned things was by watching other people.
Speaker 1: I would watch somebody who I liked a certain thing.
Speaker 1: They could be worse than I did than I was
Speaker 1: at that time, but I liked specifically the way they
Speaker 1: moved into a turn. And I had a very good
Speaker 1: understanding of of sort of the biomechanics of skiing and
Speaker 1: how did underrate speed. And that's one thing that I
Speaker 1: wasn't willing to give up, and that was always a
Speaker 1: pushback from the coaches. They wanted me to do manually
Speaker 1: adjust certain things, and I said, I can't do those
Speaker 1: things because it'll cost me these things that I need
Speaker 1: to keep alive because if I if I kill him,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I'll have arrest resurrect them later. And
Speaker 1: those are the most important things. So UM, the coaching,
Speaker 1: I would say in hindsight, was a lot of it
Speaker 1: was UM was emotional arousal control and races patients. I
Speaker 1: learned a lot of that stuff from those coaches, and
Speaker 1: I had some amazing coaches up at t v A.
Speaker 1: From a technical standpoint, I don't think I learned that much. Okay,
Speaker 1: speaking of technical standpoint, you had a breakthrough. You were
Speaker 1: in the U S Nationals I believe it was, and
Speaker 1: used the K two for which was a shaped recreational ski.
Speaker 1: How did you decide to do that? I've been a snowboarder, um,
Speaker 1: as I said. They tried to get me a switch
Speaker 1: of snowboarding in ninth grade. This is all the way
Speaker 1: into my senior year, and I've been working on rage
Speaker 1: tore me who was a K two rep uh and
Speaker 1: the East Coast too. Raised with my uncle, so I had,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of a little extra credibility with him
Speaker 1: and he's a great dude. And uh, I'd cut a snowboard,
Speaker 1: alpine snowboard in half and mounted mounted ski bindings on
Speaker 1: it and flipped the edges so that I had one
Speaker 1: side cut edge and then one raw band sad edge.
Speaker 1: If you touch that to the snow, you crashed immediately.
Speaker 1: And I was arcing turns and I had George watched me,
Speaker 1: and I said, George, we need to build a shape ski.
Speaker 1: I was always trying to innovate. It was during that
Speaker 1: time we had Derby flex and higher lifters, and the
Speaker 1: one thing that was missing was more side cut. And
Speaker 1: you could clearly see that snowboarders could turns all day
Speaker 1: that it would have been happening for years, and we
Speaker 1: just hadn't done in skiing. So George said, hey, we
Speaker 1: tried that in the seventies. It didn't work. I was like, well,
Speaker 1: you tried it wrong, let's try it again. And um,
Speaker 1: I had worked on him for two years. Finally he
Speaker 1: got them to build a semblance of of what I'd
Speaker 1: asked for. And I did everything from exact construction. I
Speaker 1: wanted a cap construction to give torsional stiffness, and I
Speaker 1: was in mechanical drawing and all that stuff. So I
Speaker 1: was doing at a on board and I was drawing
Speaker 1: everything out and um, finally he built them, and uh,
Speaker 1: the day that I got them, it changed really changed
Speaker 1: the sport. Um Alan had been developing their shape ski
Speaker 1: during that same phase, but no one had skied on
Speaker 1: it yet, and races, no one had really experimented with it.
Speaker 1: So the K two four was the first ski that
Speaker 1: I had really developed um and forced through and I
Speaker 1: raced on it in the Junior Olympics and I won
Speaker 1: the Super G by two point you know, seven seconds,
Speaker 1: and I was more than five seconds ahead before I crashed.
Speaker 1: I went on my hip a couple of times on
Speaker 1: the bottom and lost a ton of time, but still
Speaker 1: ended up winning by almost three seconds, and then won
Speaker 1: the Giant Sloan by over two seconds as well with
Speaker 1: several crashes, and the Giant Slam as well. So that
Speaker 1: really shocked people and opened the eyes and put the
Speaker 1: you know, the magnifying glass on K two. And then
Speaker 1: the next year, everybody, I didn't use those skis in
Speaker 1: the nationals. That's that's a common mistake. I was only
Speaker 1: in the nationals for Giant slom and and slom and
Speaker 1: I crashed in the gs and blew out. And then
Speaker 1: and the slalom, I used the traditional ski. My my
Speaker 1: slalom ski was the same length as my K two four,
Speaker 1: so I was using the same length and slalom and
Speaker 1: gs and uh and I'm pulled off a really magical
Speaker 1: um run from way back in the pack and finished
Speaker 1: third to objectively qualified for the team. If I hadn't
Speaker 1: objectively qualified, there was zero chance they were taking me
Speaker 1: on the team. Okay, so you are partially responsible for
Speaker 1: the development of the K four K two four. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think I mean not to split hairs. But
Speaker 1: I wouldn't even say partially. I would say, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: nineties seven percent. They fought me on it for two years.
Speaker 1: I've been pushing it. I gave George the snowboard. I
Speaker 1: showed him the side cut, I showed him everything. I
Speaker 1: cut the snowboard even thinner, and that screwed it up.
Speaker 1: And I said, this is what you did in the
Speaker 1: seventies when you tried shape skis. You didn't have the torsion.
Speaker 1: If I left the snowboard as half, I had a
Speaker 1: raw edge of wood that i'd bands on, and then
Speaker 1: a side cut finished edge. I could arc turns on
Speaker 1: that if I cut off another half of that to
Speaker 1: make it the width of a normal race ski. Its
Speaker 1: skied like ship because it was too torsionately weak. It
Speaker 1: would twist too much, and that's what they had messed up.
Speaker 1: So I said, you know, I really worked hard on
Speaker 1: him for two years, and I will say, of all
Speaker 1: my qualities, my persistence and stubbornness are are two of
Speaker 1: my elite level of qualities. And I just wore them down, honestly.
Speaker 1: And he finally went in there and said, look, dude,
Speaker 1: we gotta build these skis. And they didn't even really
Speaker 1: tell him. He said, it's a Rex ski. It'll be awesome.
Speaker 1: We'll try it. They built him and they sold out
Speaker 1: across the country in a week and a half. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about equipment. You were with numerous companies. You
Speaker 1: started with Fisher, you went to ros and y'all. You
Speaker 1: were Thetomic, you went to Head. Is there really any difference.
Speaker 1: Let's just start with the skis themselves opposed to the boots.
Speaker 1: Is there really any difference or you can get in
Speaker 1: and make the ski work for you. No, it's a
Speaker 1: massive difference, massive difference. I mean the engineers are are
Speaker 1: different philosophically, the equipment, the layoup process side cuts there.
Speaker 1: There's a huge prints also that they became systems pretty early,
Speaker 1: where a boot, binding plate, ski all work together, and
Speaker 1: if you didn't have that right you could really screwed up.
Speaker 1: But keep in mind before that, I skied on UM
Speaker 1: K two Olwen Rosignal previous to World Cup racing. This
Speaker 1: is through my sort of high school years. UM. I
Speaker 1: skied on uh Nasal, I skied on Atomic twice, really
Speaker 1: two different versions there. UM, and I gravitated towards K
Speaker 1: two because of the relationship with George, and I was
Speaker 1: able to get better skis and then UM. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the difference from KTU to Fisher was was night and day.
Speaker 1: I mean it was a huge I would have had
Speaker 1: a really, really really hard time trying to win a
Speaker 1: World Cup race that I stayed on K two my
Speaker 1: entire career, UM, regardless of my own engineering prowess or
Speaker 1: anything else. Fisher I had the ability to win races
Speaker 1: that year. Um, then Rosignal I had the ability to
Speaker 1: win races and start moving into speed effectively, so into
Speaker 1: super ge downhill, and then UM from from Rozzie. Is
Speaker 1: when I kind of I wouldn't say sold out, but
Speaker 1: switched to Atomic where I knew I was do. I
Speaker 1: was physically finally mature and strong enough, and um, I
Speaker 1: knew I could be a world beater. So I switched
Speaker 1: to Atomic and that's when I won, you know, the
Speaker 1: Wired to wire overall World Cup and all the events
Speaker 1: in seventeen days, you know. Um. And then and then
Speaker 1: after that was more of I wanted to develop skis
Speaker 1: and fell in with Head and stayed with them for
Speaker 1: three years. Okay, let's start with Fisher. Okay, I agree,
Speaker 1: totally ski ski totally different. I happen to like the
Speaker 1: French skis. I like something a little bit more alive.
Speaker 1: But at World Cup level you're not skiing on retail skis.
Speaker 1: So when we talk about Fisher, would you tell them
Speaker 1: how to make the skis or they just had a
Speaker 1: bunch of skis? You tested them and you skied what
Speaker 1: you liked. No. By that point I had a very
Speaker 1: clear idea. That was a big part of it is
Speaker 1: K two was actually pulling away from World Cup, and
Speaker 1: it was almost mandatory. I switched. And when I went
Speaker 1: to several companies which I was in demand. I could
Speaker 1: have switched to several UM. I told Fisher, will you
Speaker 1: build me this exact slom ski? This is the ski
Speaker 1: it needs to be, this, this fiberglass, this top sheet,
Speaker 1: this side cut, this would core this many laminates across.
Speaker 1: Will you build me this? And they said, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not gonna work, but we'll build it for you. And
Speaker 1: I said, okay, build it for me. And UM that
Speaker 1: was that was a dealmaker because the other companies were
Speaker 1: at that time this is you know, in two thousand,
Speaker 1: UM I was. I didn't have the credibility and the
Speaker 1: industry wasn't prepared to take that type of input from
Speaker 1: the athletes. They would take, as you said, they'd give
Speaker 1: them five pairs, which do you like best? And then
Speaker 1: they would go back and try to figure out which
Speaker 1: materials to change to make the new ones better and
Speaker 1: all that. So, UM, that was the very beginning of that.
Speaker 1: And I wanted a company that was going to do
Speaker 1: exactly what I said, and Fisher offered to do that, UM,
Speaker 1: and so I went. And actually that was the beginning
Speaker 1: of a massive revolution in the sport where within two
Speaker 1: years every company had their athletes in the actual ski
Speaker 1: room showing them fiberglass, showing them metals, and trying to
Speaker 1: figure out because there was a huge gap between what
Speaker 1: you felt on the hill and what the engineer decided
Speaker 1: was going to impact that feeling. There. There's there's thirty
Speaker 1: ways to skin a cat in that case, and they
Speaker 1: just had too big a gap. So we closed that
Speaker 1: gap right up, okay, slowly. How and why did you
Speaker 1: decide to switch to Rozzie. I decided because of one
Speaker 1: particular gs ski, so I'd want a couple of slams
Speaker 1: on Fisher. I had won a couple of gs is.
Speaker 1: Um the ski was already going down the path that
Speaker 1: we ended up on then now, which is a very
Speaker 1: tiptail ski, so you could feel the very very tip
Speaker 1: of the ski engaged in the snow, and if it
Speaker 1: hit a bump, it would deflect and you'd lose radios,
Speaker 1: so it would flap down and it would just and
Speaker 1: I skied on Nordica, I skied on Razzie, I skied
Speaker 1: on Dinas Star And the rosignal skis that they had
Speaker 1: for me at that time was a complete anomaly in
Speaker 1: the irony, As this has happened to me several times.
Speaker 1: They built five pairs. So it's a prototype run of
Speaker 1: a ski and they said, have body test these keys. Um,
Speaker 1: they couldn't get the I don't know if you remember Rozzie.
Speaker 1: At that time, they had a V A S plate.
Speaker 1: It's this little metal plate that's stuck on the top
Speaker 1: of the ski. They couldn't get that plate to stick
Speaker 1: to the aluminum which is right under the top sheet,
Speaker 1: and then the felt it was metal on metal and
Speaker 1: it would just fly off. And so they actually on
Speaker 1: that particular batch, they said, well, ship will just cut
Speaker 1: a hole in the aluminium, will will stick that thing
Speaker 1: through that hole to the aluminium, will glue it onto
Speaker 1: the wood below, and it worked perfect. So stayed on.
Speaker 1: I got all five of those pairs of skis. I
Speaker 1: broke one immediately actually in the testing program. But because
Speaker 1: they cut that hole in the top layer of aluminum,
Speaker 1: they created a bit of a hinge point in the
Speaker 1: ski right there, and you had this unbelievable grip point
Speaker 1: just in front of the binding. So if you slid
Speaker 1: into a turn in chundery, you know, icy conditions, you
Speaker 1: had this grip point right in front of the binding
Speaker 1: that you could always rely on. And the tip wasn't
Speaker 1: even the part grabbing you pulled radius that was disproportionate
Speaker 1: to your side cut because the tip was actually not
Speaker 1: doing it. It was just folding in this tiny little
Speaker 1: space right in front of the binding and you just
Speaker 1: it was like a hockey skate. And I I didn't
Speaker 1: know at the time that that was the only five
Speaker 1: pairs in existence. UH three M who was their glue
Speaker 1: provider at that time, gave them glue that worked. They
Speaker 1: built every ski from that point forward without cutting a
Speaker 1: hole in the aluminum because now the metal stuck to
Speaker 1: the metal and stayed on there perfectly. And we spent
Speaker 1: two years trying to figure out why my race skis
Speaker 1: were the best skis ever built, and every other pair
Speaker 1: they built was garbage compared to it. So um that
Speaker 1: one ski was the reason. It was everything I've been
Speaker 1: looking for. And I went one the g S title
Speaker 1: against one of the strongest giants long and fields that
Speaker 1: that's been around, um you know, Herman Benny Reich, uh
Speaker 1: Shaun Felder, Pollander, uh d d A Couch Um Niberg
Speaker 1: eber Harder. It was like the powerhouse of g skiing
Speaker 1: at that time. For me to win was something that
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have been able to do with any other
Speaker 1: ski company at that time. Okay, now from a retail level,
Speaker 1: Rozzie's in Atomic Sky radically differently. Did you experience that,
Speaker 1: You say you went for the money, but that's a
Speaker 1: big switch. No, I didn't. I mean you mean when
Speaker 1: I supposed to Atomic. No. That was one of the
Speaker 1: great regrets in my career looking back, was that I
Speaker 1: went to Atomic. They paid me half as much as
Speaker 1: Rossie did, and a quarter as much as Nordica was
Speaker 1: offering me at that time. A quarter. I would have
Speaker 1: had the biggest contract there's ever been in ski racing
Speaker 1: by going to Nordica. But Um in Nordica had almad
Speaker 1: at that time he was just kind of phasing out.
Speaker 1: I would have had an amazing quiver of skis. They
Speaker 1: were good in four events. I could have stayed on
Speaker 1: Nordica boots Um. There was a lot there that that really,
Speaker 1: in hindsight, I would love to know would have happened
Speaker 1: had I made that switch. But the Atomics I was
Speaker 1: on at that time with the Beta, so that was
Speaker 1: that that little arch top they had two aluminum tubes
Speaker 1: in there. That Beta did the same thing that Rozzie
Speaker 1: cutting the hole in their ski did, but a different way.
Speaker 1: It created a torsional imbalance between those two tubes that
Speaker 1: were longitudinally very stiff. The ski was was really stiff,
Speaker 1: but tortially all the way up until the binding. The
Speaker 1: ski actually rotated this way because there were two separate
Speaker 1: tubes that moved independently, and that that was a remarkable
Speaker 1: g ski. Um. It was the second best GSK I'd
Speaker 1: ever been on. And I wanted Atomic because of super
Speaker 1: G downhill. I was willing to suck in slam and
Speaker 1: and figure it out, but I wanted super G downhill
Speaker 1: because what I was on on Rosenal was not allowed
Speaker 1: me to move into downhill SUPERG. But I wasn't competitive
Speaker 1: and you know again I can't second guess myself. And
Speaker 1: that I got on Atomic built my first pair of
Speaker 1: boots was down in Cheon in Chile, south of Santiago Go.
Speaker 1: And I didn't lose a run of supergier downhill skiing
Speaker 1: against the entire French team Darren, my own team, who
Speaker 1: was who was strong at that time, UM for for
Speaker 1: a month and a half and I didn't I didn't
Speaker 1: lose a single run. I mean, so it was kind
Speaker 1: of a I wish I knew what would happen if
Speaker 1: I had made a different choice, But it was a
Speaker 1: very strong switch. Okay, when you were there, certainly the Austrians,
Speaker 1: an Austrian company, Herman Meyer, et cetera. You're kind of
Speaker 1: further down the totem pole. Does that affect what equipment
Speaker 1: you get in, what attention you get? Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: a big part of the oh six Olympic debacle. Um
Speaker 1: I built a supergee ski. There was also a downhill
Speaker 1: ski UM in in say September, and UH and they
Speaker 1: politically there was shenanigans there. They the Austrian team, which
Speaker 1: basically controls the Austrian factory, UH, took those skis test them.
Speaker 1: They couldn't figure them out, which is I wasn't trying
Speaker 1: to do intentionally, but there was a very specific way
Speaker 1: those skis need to be too and and mounted to
Speaker 1: work right, and they couldn't figure it out. So they
Speaker 1: kept trying and kept trying them. No guy could make
Speaker 1: them work. They were super fast on the flats, but
Speaker 1: they couldn't figure out to make them turn. And they
Speaker 1: held those all the way until two days before the
Speaker 1: Olympic downhill UM and then they gave him to me
Speaker 1: and Darren because they knew that I wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to resist trying them and they felt like that would
Speaker 1: be a distraction. Darren and I were the two strongest
Speaker 1: downhillers really in the world at that point, and uh,
Speaker 1: and they wanted every advantage they could get, and that
Speaker 1: political Shenanigan's upset both of us. We ended up racing
Speaker 1: on the same pair of skis Darren and I. I
Speaker 1: skied first, I was starting before him. They ran the
Speaker 1: skis up the chairlift. He they re finished them at
Speaker 1: the start and he ran the same skis and unfortunately,
Speaker 1: lack of experience on them and all that we we
Speaker 1: didn't have success in the downhill. I won the combined
Speaker 1: downhill against the same field a day later by a second. Um. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, they were successful in in thwarding
Speaker 1: our our stuff. But uh, that was a piece of
Speaker 1: why I was so petulant and upset during that oh
Speaker 1: six Olympics, because my team didn't go to bat for me,
Speaker 1: and I was just, uh, yeah, I was taking advantage
Speaker 1: of it away. How long does a pear of race
Speaker 1: skis last depends on how good year keeping them safe.
Speaker 1: My my Rozzie's ice skied on the same pair of
Speaker 1: race skis the entire first year and say six of
Speaker 1: eight races the second year one and would but I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: But I wouldn't. I wouldn't train on them. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: bring them out for anything. I wouldn't even bring my
Speaker 1: training skis out to train on. I would train on
Speaker 1: other skis that I specifically tuned in a way to
Speaker 1: make them more similar to my race skis, even though
Speaker 1: I was nowhere near time wise. And we had a
Speaker 1: little funny thing at Solden where we'd we'd do the
Speaker 1: Austrian time trial before the first World Cup of the
Speaker 1: year was was sold in the US had a sort
Speaker 1: of relationship with Austria. We trained with them, and we'd
Speaker 1: be training on it right before the time trial, and
Speaker 1: my coaches like, dude, you're sucking, Like what's going on.
Speaker 1: I'd like, don't worry about I'll be fine, and I'd
Speaker 1: go out and bring out just my training skis for
Speaker 1: the time trial. And I won that time trial. I
Speaker 1: won both runs three years in a row, against all
Speaker 1: the Austrians and all of our team, And then I
Speaker 1: would put those skis away and I'd go back to
Speaker 1: getting beat by guys on my own team, and then
Speaker 1: I'd pull out the race skis for a race day
Speaker 1: and and win races on them. But it's just you
Speaker 1: have to know how to manage them, and you've gotta
Speaker 1: be really careful with what you do. Even hitting hard ice,
Speaker 1: you can't you can't jam certain ways on it. You
Speaker 1: certainly can't hit rocks or anything else. Okay. In the
Speaker 1: switch to head you were really the first big name
Speaker 1: to go to head. Yeah. Johan Eliosh, who's the owner
Speaker 1: of head Um, you know, and I got to know
Speaker 1: each other a bit and he said, look, you know,
Speaker 1: my goal is to be the number one ski company
Speaker 1: in the world. And I was like, all right, let's
Speaker 1: do it. I was like, if I'm gonna join you,
Speaker 1: you gotta I said. I don't want to get a
Speaker 1: bunch of push back. I said, you know me, Uh,
Speaker 1: if you're bringing me on for this, I can. I
Speaker 1: can get you there. You will be in the number
Speaker 1: one ski company. When I tell you to buy this athlete,
Speaker 1: you don't bicker about it. You just buy that athlete.
Speaker 1: When I tell you about build new skis in this category,
Speaker 1: build new skis like it's gonna cost you some money,
Speaker 1: but will get to number one. He said, I'm not
Speaker 1: concerned about the money. Let's do it. And um, that
Speaker 1: was an exciting fun, uh new project for me because
Speaker 1: I was building skis not just for myself. I was
Speaker 1: building skis for the women's team. I was building skis
Speaker 1: for men's who skied very differently than I did in
Speaker 1: some cases, were much more talented in certain areas than
Speaker 1: I was. And that was that was fun. I enjoyed
Speaker 1: that a lot. Okay, but you're essentially going, it's a
Speaker 1: blank slate. Did you really just tell them how to
Speaker 1: build the skis? They had did remarkable engineers. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: Head was maybe the strongest in the entire world in
Speaker 1: terms of their raw engineering power. What they didn't have
Speaker 1: was what all these other ski companies that really capitalized
Speaker 1: in the six years previous to that was really good
Speaker 1: communication with top level athletes who are raising World Cup
Speaker 1: all the time. They just didn't have the athletes, and
Speaker 1: they didn't have a rapport or vocabulary to communicate even
Speaker 1: with the athletes they did have, which were lower level. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, when I came on, I basically communicated with
Speaker 1: those engineer it was. It was a great It was
Speaker 1: a great time because they understood everything I said. Nothing
Speaker 1: was shocking. They had already done a bunch of great
Speaker 1: things over the past years that I actually reinvigorated and said, no,
Speaker 1: I think you were really close. This was an awesome idea.
Speaker 1: You guys are way ahead of the curve. You just
Speaker 1: have to tweak these things because here's how this feels
Speaker 1: on the snow, and here's what you're missing. And they
Speaker 1: could do it, you know, overnight, and then I'd moved things.
Speaker 1: So we moved forward very quickly. Within that first year
Speaker 1: when I switched um that was six or seven season.
Speaker 1: We had the best speed skis on the planet that
Speaker 1: first year because we reinvigorated the traction system with that cut.
Speaker 1: They put this cut through the top layer and top
Speaker 1: layer of aluminum and they bridge that with a piece
Speaker 1: of aluminium underneath it. But it does that same thing.
Speaker 1: It creates an inflection point in the ski and they
Speaker 1: just hadn't quite got that right. And we got that right,
Speaker 1: and the skew was unbelievable. What about the famous two
Speaker 1: edge skis to I mean, like the one was on
Speaker 1: top of another, that those work was that you know,
Speaker 1: just get a lot of press. I think it just
Speaker 1: got a lot of press. I mean it was you know,
Speaker 1: there's metal slow period, like the thinner edges the better, UM.
Speaker 1: But there's certain elements of that that I think are
Speaker 1: gonna be relevant in the future. UM, particularly for big
Speaker 1: mountain really steep stuff, having an edge that skis normally,
Speaker 1: but having a secondary edge that comes out of your
Speaker 1: side wall. That's essentially for fifties six degree pitches that
Speaker 1: what you have a grip point that's really only right
Speaker 1: underneath your foot where you don't feel the tip or
Speaker 1: the tail. You're you're just like a hockey skate right
Speaker 1: under your foot. And that can be UM, really really
Speaker 1: important for safety when you're up on a you know,
Speaker 1: face that you're suspended over eight hundred foot cliff and
Speaker 1: you you know, your tip HiT's a wind drift and
Speaker 1: your backwards and UM, I think there's a lot to that.
Speaker 1: I think there's been some unbelievably smart creative engineers in
Speaker 1: the sport over the last four or five decades. And
Speaker 1: unfortunately it's it's a system. So it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a house of cards. If you did everything right, but
Speaker 1: one thing was wrong and the whole thing didn't work.
Speaker 1: So in this case, a lot of it is revisiting
Speaker 1: really old clever ideas and figuring out how to um,
Speaker 1: you know, tweak them a little bit and see if
Speaker 1: there's if there's value there. Okay, what about boots? What
Speaker 1: was your revolution in boots? You certainly switched a number
Speaker 1: of times. Yeah, and and boots roy is a frustration
Speaker 1: point for me. I wish that, um, i'd had a
Speaker 1: wealthy benefactor who would allowed me to build my own
Speaker 1: boots UM because I felt like it's such a crazy
Speaker 1: concept that we build this more or less chunk of
Speaker 1: plastic that just bends and flexes and somehow it works.
Speaker 1: And it does work, I won't deny that, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't work as well as it should um. To me,
Speaker 1: boots are much more of an engineering piece than any
Speaker 1: other part of the system. Right is you should have
Speaker 1: a boot that's controlled by either gas shocks, oil shocks, elastomers.
Speaker 1: Something there shouldn't be just plastic. The bending and bubbling
Speaker 1: where you know, in the whole front of the boot
Speaker 1: where all the flexing and movement happens, is constantly being
Speaker 1: open and closed to get your foot in it out
Speaker 1: of it and like, if you buckle the buckles lightly tighter,
Speaker 1: you get a totally different performance, you know, curved than
Speaker 1: you would with a looser It's just to me that
Speaker 1: was insane. So when I was on Nordica, I had
Speaker 1: some breakthroughs in terms of basic understanding of what different
Speaker 1: things could do to a boot, and that was my
Speaker 1: favorite boot. Um. When I was on Atomic I I
Speaker 1: did the same things and was able to create a
Speaker 1: really good four event boot. I see the exact same
Speaker 1: boot and slomgs supertoo downhill in one uh you know,
Speaker 1: seven races in in fourteen days or seventeen days or something.
Speaker 1: So um and on the same boot, and that that
Speaker 1: was the sort of extent beyond that, I think boots
Speaker 1: for garbage. So right now I see on a full tilt,
Speaker 1: which is an old rightly um from the eighties, right
Speaker 1: it literally is the mold from the eighties, and um
Speaker 1: that that boot was the best boot on the world then,
Speaker 1: and the only knock against it was it didn't turn
Speaker 1: skis that well, and that was because the skis had
Speaker 1: no side cut didn't turn very well. So now I
Speaker 1: think that's by far the best boot on the planet.
Speaker 1: So that's why I use. But I am trying to
Speaker 1: push somebody to evolve the boot process because I think
Speaker 1: there's a huge, huge capability for improvement there. Okay, specifically,
Speaker 1: what makes the full tilt boot better flexes straightforward, so
Speaker 1: you you flex linear u versus flexing out. So if
Speaker 1: you were to bolt your typical ski boots to the
Speaker 1: ground with a base down to flex forward, your knees
Speaker 1: have to travel out, usually ten degrees, thirteen degrees whatever,
Speaker 1: but they travel out, so if you're forward on the
Speaker 1: front of your boot, you're actually increasing the edge angle.
Speaker 1: And then when you with your knee moving in a
Speaker 1: linear motion straight backwards, the edge decreases an angle. Even
Speaker 1: though you're not decreasing your edge angle with your knees,
Speaker 1: the skis decreasing because you're coming back to a neutral spot.
Speaker 1: That to me, is a terrible design. It worked well
Speaker 1: when the skis had no sidecut because as you drove
Speaker 1: forward you could the ski would tip way up and
Speaker 1: it would cause the front to kind of turn when
Speaker 1: no sidecut, But now it just creates an overly aggressive
Speaker 1: ski that causes all kinds of problems and knee injuries
Speaker 1: and stuff. So that's one piece of it. They have
Speaker 1: the interchangeability. I can switch my tongue out and go
Speaker 1: from a six flex tongue to attend to a fourteen,
Speaker 1: and I have this your thing tongue that they made me. Um,
Speaker 1: they would be like the equivalent of like like a
Speaker 1: sixteen or seventeen or eighteen. But um, you can change
Speaker 1: the back the cuff the same thing. You can just
Speaker 1: pop it off and put on a different one, and
Speaker 1: um dramatically change the characteristics of the boots. So and
Speaker 1: you slide it on like a slipper and no snow
Speaker 1: gets in there. It's just it's just better. Okay, you
Speaker 1: famously tweaked your boots on the door remains you were
Speaker 1: added forward lean, So when it comes to forward lean
Speaker 1: and ramp aangle, what were your thoughts. It's all it's
Speaker 1: a system. It only matters about the system. If you're
Speaker 1: skiing a ski that you can trust the front half
Speaker 1: of the ski, and you needed certain things, you could
Speaker 1: ramp up, But generally I was going the other way.
Speaker 1: If I ramped up in the boot, I would de
Speaker 1: ramp on the ski, So I would put lifters under
Speaker 1: the toe piece of the binding. So even though I
Speaker 1: had more ankle flexion, in the boot. That was just
Speaker 1: to get the boot to line up correctly so that
Speaker 1: I could so I could drive down with my knee
Speaker 1: instead of tipping forward with my knee. So I always
Speaker 1: like to drive down into the ski with my knee
Speaker 1: versus so I needed ankle flection. If the boot was
Speaker 1: too open, too upright, the angle was too open, then
Speaker 1: you you were stuck. So I would always get that
Speaker 1: to a place I liked, and then I would bring
Speaker 1: the toe up to get me balanced on the ski. Definitely.
Speaker 1: One of the common mistakes is too much ramp angle
Speaker 1: and too much forward lean and too much delta between
Speaker 1: the front and back of the bindings. Typical bindings are
Speaker 1: you know, five millimeters lower in the front and the
Speaker 1: back um, and that's when you compound that by ramp
Speaker 1: angle inside the boot where the front is you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes thirteen fourteen millimeters difference between the height of the
Speaker 1: heel and the height of the toe. It's just this
Speaker 1: whole big ramp and it makes it impossible for people
Speaker 1: to ski forward because they're so tipped forward that if
Speaker 1: they actually pushed forward, they would just fall over the
Speaker 1: front of the skis. So um, I did everything, but
Speaker 1: I would say, I ended up in a really good
Speaker 1: place with fairly neutral to upright boots um with good
Speaker 1: ankle flection, and I was moving my foot around inside
Speaker 1: the boot quite a bit getting the right ankle position
Speaker 1: versus where the boot actually liked to bend um. But
Speaker 1: basically a flat ramp angle on the ski. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: been a big evolution. If you go to laying, which
Speaker 1: has been around since the fifties, hit it, say in
Speaker 1: the sixties with the old skis, the Stratos, the DTA
Speaker 1: meet VR seventies, they had a lot of ramp angle.
Speaker 1: Now they're really flat. Okay, So on some level you're
Speaker 1: saying that's followed you. How does that affect how you
Speaker 1: ski on shape skis In the old days, when it
Speaker 1: was so much harder to have a car of turn
Speaker 1: you had to get the weight forward, do you feel
Speaker 1: that that's less of an issue and it's more about
Speaker 1: being centered now? Yeah, of course. I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: going dead straight in a straight line on a shape
Speaker 1: ski and you don't have to push forward at all,
Speaker 1: you just tip over. That tip initiates so quickly with
Speaker 1: that sidecut and pulls in so quickly that automatically your
Speaker 1: inertia is going forward, and now the skis trying to
Speaker 1: turn that way you are forward. You can't avoid being
Speaker 1: for it. It's actually hard to not be for it
Speaker 1: on a a dramatic side cut ski. Um, you're exactly right.
Speaker 1: They were designed around and so is an orderkle grhand
Speaker 1: Prix was designed around skis with no side cut. They
Speaker 1: were much longer where you really had to you had
Speaker 1: to twist and snap that front to get it to
Speaker 1: do anything, and now you don't. Yeah, the ski does
Speaker 1: all that for you automatically, and so a more upright
Speaker 1: boot with much less ramp angle makes you more efficient.
Speaker 1: You your skeletally, you're more lined up, You're able to
Speaker 1: support more force and absorb more. Um. The challenges with kneflection.
Speaker 1: You don't have a lot of suspension in the ski
Speaker 1: system right from the bottom of the ski to the
Speaker 1: all the way up. Your shin can't move that much,
Speaker 1: so a lot of your suspension is from your knee
Speaker 1: of your hip, and that's a really slow moving, long
Speaker 1: travel suspender. Um. So I tend to still like some
Speaker 1: ankle flection for absorption purposes, but again that's where the
Speaker 1: full tilt is so much better than other boots is
Speaker 1: that you you can't fold it over the top. You know,
Speaker 1: I broke my ankle inside my boot twice because I
Speaker 1: would hyper flex the boot and it would just pull
Speaker 1: my ankle apart and snap off the bottom of my tibia.
Speaker 1: And it's you can't do that in the full tail
Speaker 1: because the instep is actually if your ankle joint is
Speaker 1: here a normal boot, the instep might be there. In
Speaker 1: the full tailed in step is like two inches away
Speaker 1: from the front ear, so you it doesn't cause any lever.
Speaker 1: You can't be pulled up out of the boot. You'll
Speaker 1: just crunch against it, and it actually drives your heel
Speaker 1: down and back no matter what you're doing. So it's
Speaker 1: you know, for me, it's safer to okay. Now you
Speaker 1: skied at the literally top level of the elite level.
Speaker 1: And before you made it to the top, were you
Speaker 1: ever intimidated by the competition? Now you had a long
Speaker 1: history of competition. I was not a good ski racer,
Speaker 1: but I ski with the World Cup freestyle people in
Speaker 1: the moguls all the time, could ski better than them.
Speaker 1: But once you're in competition, it's like this guy Scott
Speaker 1: Brooks Mack he got better in competition. Okay, so what
Speaker 1: was it like for you competing? Yeah, it was, there was, Um,
Speaker 1: there was certainly times where I was intimidated. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a picture of Herman. It didn't happen early so
Speaker 1: much because I was always like, look, I'm gonna get better.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get better. I'm gonna get better. There was
Speaker 1: a time where Herman was I think it was nine, Um,
Speaker 1: he was on his full doping program, and the guy's
Speaker 1: legs were just like he's on a table in a
Speaker 1: lab with with the electro stim hooked up to his
Speaker 1: legs and he's doing a full both quads, full flection,
Speaker 1: like rocked out, and there's like striation that he had
Speaker 1: muscles that I don't even know are on a normal
Speaker 1: human that were like stacked on top of normal muscles.
Speaker 1: And and I was just like, I mean, I put
Speaker 1: me in the tank for like eight months because I
Speaker 1: was like, this is garbage, Like there's no way, no matter.
Speaker 1: He's better technically than Miami's on better skis, he's doping,
Speaker 1: he's you know, better technically by a mile. Um, Like
Speaker 1: what am I talking about here? And and uh, eventually
Speaker 1: I overcame it but um, I was one of the
Speaker 1: people who because of my ability to take risk and
Speaker 1: and that was my strength, was my ability to sort
Speaker 1: of motivate myself to take risk and be willing to
Speaker 1: do that in competition and deal with the fact that
Speaker 1: I was going to fail a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: That was my biggest skill set and I recognized really
Speaker 1: quickly even Herman didn't have that, I had them in
Speaker 1: that category. That was my that was my trump card.
Speaker 1: And honestly I set up specific split times, which you know,
Speaker 1: not not that we have to touch on it, but
Speaker 1: ski oh is my app that I've created now that
Speaker 1: measures everything, measures exact speed, distance, travel, g forces, all
Speaker 1: that stuff. During that time of like late high school
Speaker 1: into early World Cup, I was setting up split times
Speaker 1: because I needed to know how fast am I. I
Speaker 1: needed some positive reinforcement. I couldn't finish races. I was like,
Speaker 1: I only care about how fast I am for these
Speaker 1: two gates. I need to know that I have like
Speaker 1: elite level speed for two gates, and I would see
Speaker 1: what I could do for two gates. In the middle,
Speaker 1: of course, I would set up a specific split time
Speaker 1: for six seconds, and and that really helped my confidence
Speaker 1: because I was like, look, I haven't figured it out yet.
Speaker 1: I certainly can't do it for fifty four gates in
Speaker 1: a row. But for those two gates, I am way
Speaker 1: faster than anybody in our country and possibly the world.
Speaker 1: And that was sort of the thing that got me
Speaker 1: over the deficiencies that I had in every other category
Speaker 1: because I was kind of the middle of the road
Speaker 1: type dude in fitness, technique, endurance, um. You know, equipment,
Speaker 1: you know, tactics, understanding of hills, snow conditions, inspection, everything.
Speaker 1: But in a couple of categories, I was elite level
Speaker 1: and I had to figure out how to ulize those
Speaker 1: and capitalize on them. Okay, to what degree was doping
Speaker 1: a factor? To what degree is it's still a factor?
Speaker 1: And you famously said you didn't care if anybody doped,
Speaker 1: you could still beat them. Yeah, I don't know that
Speaker 1: that's exactly what I said, but I think you covered
Speaker 1: the gist of it. Um, I you know it was
Speaker 1: It's always been a thing. I think it's been a
Speaker 1: thing in virtually every sport since the beginning of time.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think guys used to chew coca leaves
Speaker 1: back in the old days, when they had little foot
Speaker 1: race over in Greece. But um, I think that there's
Speaker 1: there's a misperception that doping does it for you, that
Speaker 1: you dope and then you're just better, and that's just
Speaker 1: not the case. The guys. The the big, the big
Speaker 1: advantage of doping as you can train more and you
Speaker 1: recover more quickly. So half the doping stuff isn't even
Speaker 1: enhancement things, it's recovery things. So if you can train.
Speaker 1: I mean, the cost Lish family, I love them, they're
Speaker 1: great people. They both had organ failure later on their
Speaker 1: careers because they were on these programs that allowed them
Speaker 1: to ski twice or three times as much as every
Speaker 1: other World Cup racer. And they got really really good
Speaker 1: because they trained three times as much as any other
Speaker 1: World Cup racer, but it also caused organ failure. And
Speaker 1: for me, I was kind of the mindset of like, look,
Speaker 1: this isn't Tour de France, Tour de France. If you're
Speaker 1: not doping, I don't think you have a realistic chance
Speaker 1: of winning. You know, um, you know football, if you're
Speaker 1: not doping, you know American football, you're likely to get
Speaker 1: beat up throughout the season and not recover as well.
Speaker 1: And you're gonna get thrown around by guys who are
Speaker 1: that's but in ski racing because it's a minute or
Speaker 1: because it's two minutes. I felt like if I was
Speaker 1: willing to take the risk and great, I had to
Speaker 1: adjust my criteria, I would have loved it w of
Speaker 1: the races I was in, but that just wasn't in
Speaker 1: the cards for me. I was like, I can get
Speaker 1: through a minute, and it's more going to be about
Speaker 1: my intensity and my risk taking and how I can
Speaker 1: manage that. I'm I'm capable of beating even guys who
Speaker 1: are I'd always dealt with it. Guys who are much
Speaker 1: fitter than I was, much more technically sound, better equipment,
Speaker 1: and I beat them before, so I didn't really see
Speaker 1: that as a massive problem. I just felt like I
Speaker 1: wasn't gonna win the overall very many times because guys
Speaker 1: who were on that recovery program were just more fresh
Speaker 1: all the time, and I was not. Okay, so you've retired,
Speaker 1: then you wanted to come out of retirement using the
Speaker 1: full tilt boots, using Bomber. Skis Head said, no, Ultimately,
Speaker 1: you had a relationship with Bomber. Now I have a
Speaker 1: relationship with cross and take us through that evolution. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when I quit, I was I was well, well, good
Speaker 1: and done, um, but I still had things a bit
Speaker 1: like Rocky and Rocky six right. There was I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say there was skeletons in the closet, but there was
Speaker 1: things in the basement that I wanted to do and
Speaker 1: you can't do them on your local ski hill. You
Speaker 1: needed a World Cup forum and with the conditions and
Speaker 1: the level of safety to actually put them to the test.
Speaker 1: And it was more honestly, it wasn't about winning races.
Speaker 1: It wasn't about proving anything. It was simply about understanding
Speaker 1: what was possible with equipment and things like that. And
Speaker 1: it was the first time I've had the handcuffs off
Speaker 1: in eight years, um out from under head. And I
Speaker 1: retired with the intent of not doing that. But then
Speaker 1: I got on the skis. I skied on him for
Speaker 1: this project for Samsung up in Lake Louise and my
Speaker 1: my good friend Craig Daniels, who had been with me,
Speaker 1: and we had some technology like Skio on the skis
Speaker 1: that were measuring things. He was following me with a
Speaker 1: with a big follow cam trying to get this footage
Speaker 1: for them, and and he after about the fifth run,
Speaker 1: he said, dude, I've never seen you ski like this.
Speaker 1: He's like, if you raised a World Cup right now,
Speaker 1: you would destroy people. I was like, I was like,
Speaker 1: I know, I feel the same way. It's I'm able
Speaker 1: to move because the boots flexed straightforward instead of out,
Speaker 1: and because the skis were designed with much less sidecut
Speaker 1: but a slight hinge point in the middle, I was
Speaker 1: able to hold almost tuck down the steep pitch and
Speaker 1: in like Louise where c turn would normally be in
Speaker 1: a super G And he's like, I've never seen anything
Speaker 1: like this, and that that got me excited because I
Speaker 1: felt like my at that point it was really about
Speaker 1: legacy and what I was giving back to the sport.
Speaker 1: And I felt like if I understood that, and I
Speaker 1: could evolve equipment and ski boots to be able to
Speaker 1: allow your average person to have that same confidence level
Speaker 1: and improvement, um, I'd be doing something good for the sport.
Speaker 1: And it was a bummer that they shut me down
Speaker 1: because I think in the end it would have been
Speaker 1: great for head as well. Um, but it is what
Speaker 1: it is, Okay. That must have been very frustrating. There
Speaker 1: was no way to work that out. Johan Johan is
Speaker 1: a peculiar cat. Uh. I love him, he's a good friend.
Speaker 1: We're friends now still. Um. But that was a very
Speaker 1: American business um litigation. I mean, he had he sent
Speaker 1: me a seven hundred page he moved forums three times,
Speaker 1: tied us up and send a seven hundred pages because
Speaker 1: I wanted mine was one page that I sent him.
Speaker 1: It was here's what I'm requesting, here's what we said before. Uh,
Speaker 1: you're not paying me anything anyway. It's illegal for you
Speaker 1: to block me from making a living in my in
Speaker 1: my profession without pay, without compensation. That that's illegal in Colorado, California,
Speaker 1: anywhere in the US. Basically, Uh, he moved for hum
Speaker 1: three times to jump that around. All he was trying
Speaker 1: to do is tie us up until the season started
Speaker 1: so I couldn't do it. And UM, you know, I
Speaker 1: can respect somebody who's efficient at what they want to do,
Speaker 1: and he was, so I can respect that. But in
Speaker 1: the end, I think we all lost out. Okay, bomb Or,
Speaker 1: after you got involved, turned into more of an expensive
Speaker 1: boutique SKI. Ultimately you left and went to cross on.
Speaker 1: Tell us about that. Yeah, I think you know, coming
Speaker 1: from where I was at that moment where there was
Speaker 1: still potential to race, there was still this development. Then
Speaker 1: as that game unrealistic with Johan kind of putting his
Speaker 1: foot down on me, Um, we moved into that other
Speaker 1: space and it was not where I wanted to be.
Speaker 1: So UM, I had a contract, I wrote it out.
Speaker 1: I did my best for them, UM, wish them all
Speaker 1: the best, but wanted to go with a ski company
Speaker 1: where I could see my vision really come true. And
Speaker 1: quite honestly, I don't care about building skis for super
Speaker 1: rich people or I think skiings expensive enough as it is.
Speaker 1: I went through it as a young person. I would
Speaker 1: love to build skis and make them good enough that
Speaker 1: I could sell a million pairs of skis a year
Speaker 1: for two hundred dollars a pair, and build them for
Speaker 1: eighty dollars a pair and sell them all direct and
Speaker 1: make twenty dollars a pair, and I make a bunch
Speaker 1: of money. Um. You know. And even then, if I
Speaker 1: did that, I'd probably dropped the price to one fifty,
Speaker 1: because I think it's obnoxious that skiings as expensive as
Speaker 1: it is and as inaccessible as it is, UM, and
Speaker 1: I would love to see that change that, so they
Speaker 1: were kind of going the opposite direction with Crossing. At
Speaker 1: least we have the you know, full raine and really
Speaker 1: interesting background coming Chase coming from aerospace, and access to
Speaker 1: crazy smart engineers and unique performance materials and practices coming
Speaker 1: from an industry that's very unlike skiing. UM, and and
Speaker 1: we are trying to do some really unique stuff in
Speaker 1: this first year. I mean we start in June and
Speaker 1: we have two different models, three really that are absolutely
Speaker 1: exceptional at the top of their individual classes in the sport.
Speaker 1: And I'm looking forward to next year. Okay, but is
Speaker 1: your goal with Crossing to bring the price down and
Speaker 1: turn volume way up? Yeah? Eventually, UM, you know, I
Speaker 1: think it'll be some re engineering. I think there will be.
Speaker 1: There's a few steps, intermediary steps that have to be
Speaker 1: seen to first UM and obviously we have to be
Speaker 1: economically viable to get there as well. So my long
Speaker 1: term goal is yes, is that, um you need a
Speaker 1: certain economic model to to make it work. But I
Speaker 1: think we're pointing in the right direction absolutely, and ideally
Speaker 1: I'd love to build race keys. Again. I think it's
Speaker 1: it's embarrassing that we don't have any American aid race skis,
Speaker 1: and uh, every other country as you alluded to before
Speaker 1: with you know, Atomic Rozzi, you know every company. Maybe
Speaker 1: Italy is the only comping that doesn't really have a
Speaker 1: homegrown superpower race ski. But um, I want to build
Speaker 1: American made race skis and really kind of give the
Speaker 1: Americans advantage for once. Let's talk about the crossing skis
Speaker 1: that are available. Now, did you have a hand in
Speaker 1: developing those? I did everything from exact side cut, earlier rise,
Speaker 1: exact construction everything. Okay, so what makes them special and
Speaker 1: different from what's presently on the market. Um, we'll focus
Speaker 1: on the one A team because that's the one that
Speaker 1: I did a good job on and got lucky as well.
Speaker 1: And I it's a twenty seven meter radius, so if
Speaker 1: you know anything about radius, that's a very long radius.
Speaker 1: That's a fist legal giant slalom radius ski basically, um
Speaker 1: and it's and so with that long radius, you're not
Speaker 1: going to get the same turn that you would on
Speaker 1: an arc. But it's a one A team underfoot, which
Speaker 1: you wouldn't get that turn even if you made the
Speaker 1: shovel huge because there's so much torsional for so, I
Speaker 1: matched the point where there's traditional camera where the skis
Speaker 1: this way to the point where there's early rise, which
Speaker 1: is really really subtle. When you stick the skis together
Speaker 1: and you push the base together, there's a tiny little
Speaker 1: slot of light that comes in between them earlier, and
Speaker 1: that's the radius that you use there, and where that
Speaker 1: is compared to the sidecut, how the ski is still
Speaker 1: getting wider, and then where that peeks out, and then
Speaker 1: how you use the actual tip curve, which is how
Speaker 1: the ski comes up off the snow. That's actually what
Speaker 1: you use to dictate your radius, is that that early
Speaker 1: rise in the tip curve. So I'm cheating the system
Speaker 1: where I have a radius ski that you can ski
Speaker 1: seventy miles an hour on it and it doesn't jump around.
Speaker 1: It's not crazy. You can make little slow turns that
Speaker 1: aren't arcs, they're just slid. But it's super consistent and
Speaker 1: reliable and easy to balance on and forgiving works awesome
Speaker 1: and deep powder sloft chunky snow because it just doesn't
Speaker 1: hook you on the tail. You never get stuck in
Speaker 1: the back seat, you never get pitched forward. But then
Speaker 1: still skis like a seventeen sixteen radio ski. When you
Speaker 1: tip it up because the actual initiation is coming from
Speaker 1: the curve of the ski versus the side cut, so
Speaker 1: it's it's nuanced and it's uh. I built it very traditionally,
Speaker 1: you know, nothing magical in it, which again allows me
Speaker 1: to reduce the cost down. Um. And yeah, I got lucky.
Speaker 1: I knew it would be a very good powder ski.
Speaker 1: I was confident there. What I was shocked at is
Speaker 1: how good it was on hard snow, on ice and
Speaker 1: on groom trails. And the reason that it was much
Speaker 1: better than I thought was because I had never skied
Speaker 1: on a ski that was at that shallow of radius.
Speaker 1: So you know, the most you see is two three
Speaker 1: and even that is usually on a really stiff ski
Speaker 1: that's just for like high speed bombing and powder runs,
Speaker 1: you know, huge lines in Alaska and stuff like that. Um,
Speaker 1: this thing is a normal construction, fairly soft, but when
Speaker 1: you ski it on hard snow, it just absolutely rips turns.
Speaker 1: I was my hip was on the ground for six
Speaker 1: g s turns in a row down a groom or
Speaker 1: first thing in this season, and I came out of
Speaker 1: that and I was like, it exceeded at every expectation
Speaker 1: I had on the harder still which my goal is
Speaker 1: always to build a ski that works on a big variety.
Speaker 1: There's lots of companies that build really good skis for
Speaker 1: one specific condition or type of skier. I want something
Speaker 1: that works for everybody, and I got really lucky this year. Okay,
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom and needs to say you're not conventional. Is
Speaker 1: a hundred and eight team would be a powder ski,
Speaker 1: not a big mountain Alaska powder ski. And maybe you
Speaker 1: have a hundred and five or a hundred and six
Speaker 1: for cried your daily riders, hundred maybe for hard snow.
Speaker 1: You have something somewhere in the eighties. Hey, do you
Speaker 1: agree with that philosophy or is that horseship? Um? I
Speaker 1: would say it's certainly not horseship, right. And the reason
Speaker 1: for that is just as I just stated right before
Speaker 1: that it was a lot of companies make skis that
Speaker 1: are good in one narrow segment. So if you love
Speaker 1: Stokely or you love Blizard or you love Atomic, you
Speaker 1: need five pairs of skis and you need the quiver
Speaker 1: you just said. I would even go narrowing that. I
Speaker 1: would go down to something the seventies for a hard ice.
Speaker 1: If you're an East Coast ski and you're going up
Speaker 1: to Cannon or or Stow, you're gonna want something narrower
Speaker 1: the eighties. But but then everything else you said is
Speaker 1: virtually right, and you're gonna have a great time if
Speaker 1: you can bring five or six pairs of skis and
Speaker 1: switch from morning to mid lunch to afternoon. If you
Speaker 1: had a powder day in the morning, and what I
Speaker 1: believe that if you do it right you can have
Speaker 1: virtually you still kind of need two pairs. Um. I
Speaker 1: skied on pretty firm snow. It didn't snow for about
Speaker 1: three weeks. There was smicy patches that got scratched down.
Speaker 1: I didn't I wouldn't say I enjoyed skiing on the
Speaker 1: one eight teens. If I was skiing in sugar Loaf
Speaker 1: when it hadn't snowed in two weeks, and you know
Speaker 1: that refrozen groom stuff where you barely leave a track
Speaker 1: in it when you're working right, the one teens probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been a really enjoyable ski there. I would
Speaker 1: have dropped right down to a one seventies six underfoot
Speaker 1: I mean a seventy six underfoot um, but a much
Speaker 1: more mela radius than than a typical carving ski. And
Speaker 1: but beyond that that one een it covers from Big Mountain, Alaska.
Speaker 1: I mean, like shoots, it's a touring ski. It's super light.
Speaker 1: It's it's as light as some of the high level
Speaker 1: touring skis. Um you can ski it fast. He's getting
Speaker 1: crud junk. I have some videos of my buddy that
Speaker 1: I mentioned before, just going crazy on the thing. And
Speaker 1: he's all of a d thirty five pounds, soaking wet,
Speaker 1: and he's one underfoot and he's shredding these hard wind baked,
Speaker 1: sun baked moguls um bouncing and shooting around and just landing.
Speaker 1: And they're always right where they belong. They're always right,
Speaker 1: you know, grips right under his foot. He's totally on it.
Speaker 1: And that that ski covers out here, it covers every day.
Speaker 1: There's no other ski that I would ski on out here. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, on the East coast, you'd want something narrower.
Speaker 1: But I'd ideally like to get it down to two
Speaker 1: two pairs. Okay, there's a whole school of thought now.
Speaker 1: Really the business was changed by the Razzie one oh six,
Speaker 1: the Yellow Soul seven, And there are people who have
Speaker 1: been in the business a long time say this is
Speaker 1: not good for your knees to have wide skis. Do
Speaker 1: you have a lot on them? Yeah, it sounds like
Speaker 1: live s tales stuff to me. I've heard a lot
Speaker 1: of people saying that, you know, we had FIST regulations,
Speaker 1: right we scrapped When I was on head, they made
Speaker 1: the skis now out of University of Salzburg, which is
Speaker 1: Austrian government controlled, and had we were kicking the crap
Speaker 1: out of Atomic, So of course the University of Salzburg
Speaker 1: came up with some data that said if you make
Speaker 1: the skis two millimeters wider, everyone's gonna be way more safe.
Speaker 1: So we all had to scrap thousands of pairs of
Speaker 1: the fastest down will skis on the planet because they
Speaker 1: came up with some arbitrary data. And then two years
Speaker 1: later the injuries were worse and they said, up, we
Speaker 1: were wrong, and but you couldn't add edge with to
Speaker 1: make your skis wider. So we scrapped all those keys
Speaker 1: and started new and that helped Atomic because we're all
Speaker 1: back on level playing field. And then two years later
Speaker 1: they realized their data was garbage and they scrapped it.
Speaker 1: So it's I think that's where that comes from I
Speaker 1: would say that a wide ski with a lot of
Speaker 1: sidecut because your shovel it becomes so big that it
Speaker 1: actually can hit and it has a huge surface area
Speaker 1: that if you hit a bump, or you hit loose
Speaker 1: snow or a pile of slough, um, you're gonna you're
Speaker 1: gonna get a huge reaction if it's not designed just
Speaker 1: right um. And that huge reaction oftentimes goes to your
Speaker 1: knees and you're back. And so I would say a
Speaker 1: wide ski should have very little side cut, and you
Speaker 1: have to figure out a better way to make it turn.
Speaker 1: If you do that, I don't think it has any
Speaker 1: impact on safety. Okay, let's talk about materials. The big
Speaker 1: breakthrough was metal in the fifties and sixties. Then we
Speaker 1: went to fiberglass. Okay, we had the strato of the
Speaker 1: VR seventeen, but then we had Rozzie the Rock five
Speaker 1: fifty for gs that was metal. Then Solomon entered the business.
Speaker 1: They had a cap ski. So the traditional thought now
Speaker 1: is you want metal for harder surfaces, for torsional rigidity.
Speaker 1: And then you talk about one eight teens. Conventually they
Speaker 1: will have no metal in them. What's your philosophy on
Speaker 1: materials and construction. Well, metal is not great for torsion
Speaker 1: in the sense of the properties itself. What it's good
Speaker 1: for is torsion and traditional layup is comes from shearing
Speaker 1: effect of the of the material. So if you have
Speaker 1: a bunch of layers, those layers when they twist, they
Speaker 1: have to rub against each other. They don't just twist,
Speaker 1: uh you know, as one big chunk, they actually shear.
Speaker 1: And that's where you get your metal doesn't it has
Speaker 1: a hard bonding property. The surface has no other particles
Speaker 1: that it creates a really solid bonds of Tortionally, it
Speaker 1: affects it that way. But the property itself, metal twists
Speaker 1: actually much easier than glued fiberglass. Fiberglass is the strongest
Speaker 1: for torstional uh control. Um. The reason we don't use
Speaker 1: metal traditionally, and you know wider skis is just weight.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just too it's just too damn much material.
Speaker 1: You'd use a piece of metal this wide and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's too much. But the other part,
Speaker 1: metals really damp and would metal together have a really
Speaker 1: interesting frequency um dampening properties. So you know, we we
Speaker 1: always use you know goodwood cores in our wide skis,
Speaker 1: but we're using rubber instead of metal and fiberglass instead
Speaker 1: of metal. So fiberglass to control the tortion because as
Speaker 1: it gets wider, you can really control torson very effectively. Um,
Speaker 1: you don't add all that weight. And then he use
Speaker 1: rubber inserts around the edges in certain areas to to
Speaker 1: dampen the vibration and have a damp ski. And Um again,
Speaker 1: I'm a believer that there's no one way to build
Speaker 1: a great ski. Um. Like I said, I'm the first
Speaker 1: to give credit to companies that have built great skis,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of different ways to go about it.
Speaker 1: I want to do it in a way that's super consistent,
Speaker 1: gives people a huge range of of you know, conditions
Speaker 1: that the skis perform optimally on. And a ski that
Speaker 1: one eighteen I put a dude on it the other day.
Speaker 1: He's never skied before, his first day on snow. He's
Speaker 1: one underfoot and had an awesome time. They switched into
Speaker 1: a black crow at lunch because he was curious, and
Speaker 1: he went immediately back to the team. He said that
Speaker 1: thing was garbage compared to this. It's so much easier
Speaker 1: to balance on this and control of the edges. So
Speaker 1: I think that done correctly, the sky is gonna work
Speaker 1: better in all conditions and for all skiers. And maybe
Speaker 1: that's optimistic, but it seems like it's working right now.
Speaker 1: Let's just talk about course. Course, we're all would the
Speaker 1: breakthrough in the seventies was foam, then we went back
Speaker 1: to wood. Dina starts putting some foam stringers in what's
Speaker 1: your philosophy there? Yeah, I think I think hybrid um. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I think that's the application for carbon fiber and potentially
Speaker 1: other exotic materials as well as stringers vertical stringers of
Speaker 1: carbon fiber. Uh, think of like an H box of wood.
Speaker 1: So an H of really thin but super dense wood, oak,
Speaker 1: beach poplar, you know, maple, um, ironwood, There's all kinds
Speaker 1: of wood that would be really interesting but super duper
Speaker 1: thin in an H. So you have an I beam
Speaker 1: type structure which adds a lot of the properties. Then
Speaker 1: fill the top and bottom of the H with foam
Speaker 1: with carbon stringers um. Ultimately, I've tried to have that
Speaker 1: core built for six years. Hasn't happened yet. I'm patients,
Speaker 1: so hopefully through. I believe that a hybrid core will
Speaker 1: will be where we end up. Okay, but we'll foam
Speaker 1: break down like it did in the seventies or just
Speaker 1: not really a structural material. No, it's it's not. In
Speaker 1: seventies there was they had bad foam. I mean now
Speaker 1: they have aerospace foam that does you can have do
Speaker 1: anything as zero temperature fluctuations. It's that can't shatter. It
Speaker 1: has like a fifty thousand and a half life and
Speaker 1: uh fully recyclable. I mean my goal ultimately is to
Speaker 1: have an exoskeleton ski, so carbon fiber um metal elastomer's
Speaker 1: frame and then foam injected and then metal top or
Speaker 1: potentially fiberglass or high density rubber polymer top over it,
Speaker 1: and then you'd have a ski that everything was dictated
Speaker 1: by this skeletal system underneath, and that's how all your
Speaker 1: flex was dictated. The foam dampens it, and the tops
Speaker 1: just to protect it. When you're done with a ski,
Speaker 1: just heat it up, peel at apart, and everything is recyclable.
Speaker 1: I think that's it's a shame that nobody has taken
Speaker 1: that seriously. There's millions and millions and millions of cubic
Speaker 1: meters of waste coming out of the skins every single
Speaker 1: year because of that. Okay, if one listens to you
Speaker 1: in the landscape and the news and podcast et cetera,
Speaker 1: you seem to know everybody you have a relationship with
Speaker 1: all these technical people. Did they come to you because
Speaker 1: if you were fame or is your personality such that
Speaker 1: people end up being drawn to you? I don't know, Um,
Speaker 1: I only know the results. I can't speak to the motivation. UM,
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people. I enjoy learning and
Speaker 1: talking about concepts and ideas. I'm not a talk about
Speaker 1: this person or gossip type person. I like talking about
Speaker 1: inspirational things that um haven't been done or you know,
Speaker 1: creative ways to collaborate. So I think that's appealing. I
Speaker 1: think we're in an interesting time right now where you know,
Speaker 1: connectivity is much easier than it was ten years ago,
Speaker 1: right with the Internet. And I mean, you can get
Speaker 1: to anybody, so if somebody wants to get to me,
Speaker 1: they can get to me. So UM, but yeah, I
Speaker 1: feel very lucky to have, um had the relationships I've
Speaker 1: had and continue to grow because you know, I don't
Speaker 1: know nearly enough yet. And uh, I learned from a
Speaker 1: lot of really smart people that I surround myself with
Speaker 1: all the time. Okay, but you're involved in your app Skio,
Speaker 1: you have the ski company, you have the educational thing.
Speaker 1: How many projects are you actively involved in and what
Speaker 1: are they? Thirteen? Uh? Really actively? Um, but there's another
Speaker 1: six or seven that are kind of where I'm a
Speaker 1: I'm a role player. Um, but not it's not my
Speaker 1: primary thing. Uh. Snow Cookie, which is Skio Crossing Ski Company,
Speaker 1: I c L is my academy, Rivo sunglasses, goggles, helmet development,
Speaker 1: trying to make things safer and better. Um, my relationship
Speaker 1: up here in Big Sky which is Spanish peaks, Moonlight,
Speaker 1: forward facing real estate, all that stuff, Kuto which is
Speaker 1: a C too C booking platform, so you would book
Speaker 1: me to take you skiing here. And sky First is
Speaker 1: having to pay eight hundred bucks for an instructor. Um,
Speaker 1: a really good dude. Uh. Friends started that and I
Speaker 1: help him as tech. My clothing company that I'm not
Speaker 1: officially involved with any longer because they're kind of plateau
Speaker 1: ng but um. Alchemist Alpine uh company out of l
Speaker 1: A cannabis and medical stuff around cancer research and swim
Speaker 1: Pals are wearable like a watch that strounding prevention. After
Speaker 1: losing my daughter, we we got really involved in that
Speaker 1: and want to stop that from happening, so we were
Speaker 1: inventing some new stuff. I'm working with the Nest guys
Speaker 1: Jamie simmon Off and guys at at Amazon for all
Speaker 1: that snow Bonn, which is the indoor ski hall. I'm
Speaker 1: a shareholder and it's outside of Denver now, but we're
Speaker 1: working on partnering with resorts and replicating that so that
Speaker 1: in these population hubs in Houston and Dallas and Atlanta,
Speaker 1: you can have these kids who would never be exposed
Speaker 1: to skiing go in and for thirty bucks experienced skiing
Speaker 1: and then package something together to have them go up
Speaker 1: to a local area for a tenth the cost and
Speaker 1: UH and get out. Their APEX is UH Technologies company
Speaker 1: that I'm in through my roommate at c v A,
Speaker 1: and they optimize UM everything from data security now that
Speaker 1: especially with COVID, everyone's going digital. It's a huge new
Speaker 1: push in that space. And their Ninja's flow code is
Speaker 1: Tim Armstrong's company was the CEO at A O L
Speaker 1: when I was there ten years ago, and we became
Speaker 1: friends and that's an advanced QR code. It's the fastest,
Speaker 1: quickest scanning QR code. So like now when you go
Speaker 1: into restaurant, your menu is that QR code. He has
Speaker 1: those that take you to a flow page that can
Speaker 1: do incredible stuff. He's just a wizard. Romp and Roost.
Speaker 1: We're building kids stuff because we have six six kids alive.
Speaker 1: We would have seven if we had lost my daughter,
Speaker 1: um parents stuff these you know, uh packing plays and
Speaker 1: travel accessories. When you go to a restaurant, how come
Speaker 1: it's such a pain in the ass with the high
Speaker 1: chairs and all that. And then Zortech, which is a
Speaker 1: shoe company that's doing smart shoes, so very similar to
Speaker 1: um to Skio where you get all his data out
Speaker 1: of your skiing the smart shoes, I want to put
Speaker 1: in Schuman's residents in of the shoe with a p
Speaker 1: c oh so you're basically like you're walking around with
Speaker 1: your feet in the grass or feet in the dirt
Speaker 1: all day because I think this electromagnetic field disturbances we're
Speaker 1: getting right now are kind of messing with a lot
Speaker 1: of people and so and then at the same time
Speaker 1: as giving you Shuman's Residents all day in your shoes.
Speaker 1: They're also giving you, you know, har rate variability and
Speaker 1: steps and stress levels and stress patterns. Hey, when you
Speaker 1: walk down this street you're super stressed every day, Maybe
Speaker 1: don't walk down that street. So, um, it's a that's
Speaker 1: there's about like I said, six more, but um, those
Speaker 1: are those are the main ones that I'm pretty heavily
Speaker 1: involved with. Okay, how do you have the time? How
Speaker 1: do you have the time to have even one of
Speaker 1: those in ski? Those those fit into the six percent
Speaker 1: of the time that I'm not dealing with my kids
Speaker 1: and and uh and wife and eating drinking wine. But
Speaker 1: are you actively involved? Needless to say, having your name
Speaker 1: attached to something is beneficial to an enterprise, But to
Speaker 1: what those are? Those are all? Those are all very active.
Speaker 1: Those are things where I have calls, maybe not really,
Speaker 1: but very active all the way from R and D
Speaker 1: to marketing to partnerships and getting things lined up, I
Speaker 1: mean everything. Those are Those are heavy involvement. And I'm
Speaker 1: I'm efficient, I am. I mean, you know, I dropped
Speaker 1: the ball all the time and every one of them.
Speaker 1: I'm very upfront. I'm like, look if I if I
Speaker 1: tell you I'm not not getting on that call. I'm
Speaker 1: not getting on the call. If you want to go
Speaker 1: find somebody else, fine, But like you know, so I'm
Speaker 1: open because I don't have the ability. I'm not a
Speaker 1: nine to five or I have. I literally fit that
Speaker 1: into the ten percent of the time where I'm not
Speaker 1: managing my kids and all that. I mean we have
Speaker 1: we have three kids who are two are under in
Speaker 1: the house, and it's there's not a lot of time
Speaker 1: that I can get this. This is a miracle that
Speaker 1: I've had this time. My wife's being an angel right now. Okay,
Speaker 1: just to go a little deeper and then just a
Speaker 1: couple more topics. Uh, what's the difference between Scio and
Speaker 1: this product that is being heavily hyped now Carve? Yeah,
Speaker 1: car I mean honestly, I love what Carve was doing.
Speaker 1: I've been in conversation with them. I know. The problem
Speaker 1: with that is their mechanisms. So they're doing it on
Speaker 1: the boot, They're doing it in the sole of the boot.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm never one to hate on anybody, but
Speaker 1: to disrupt somebody's boot, you have to, you know, insert
Speaker 1: this thing underneath your footboard. You're do what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: If you're doing your boots, right, there's no space in
Speaker 1: there to put that in there, so you're doingfications. But
Speaker 1: then but then also you're only able to capture certain
Speaker 1: data because the boot only does certain things. And what
Speaker 1: we did ours is three sensors. It's one on either
Speaker 1: ski just in front of the binding, and then one
Speaker 1: on the center of your chest. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: rotational force. It uses your phone and all the telemetry
Speaker 1: on your phone as well to have all that um
Speaker 1: but we can do rotation foraft movement. They do that
Speaker 1: through sensors in your foot. But again, you're you're getting
Speaker 1: When I skied on carve, I ripped fifteen ridiculously hard
Speaker 1: g s turns, perfect balance, you know, in and out consecutive.
Speaker 1: It said that I was sucking and then I slid
Speaker 1: a bunch of turns, just kind of bopping along super
Speaker 1: low edge angle, and it was like, great job, great job.
Speaker 1: So I think they have work to do on their
Speaker 1: algorithm engine. I think there's a place for it. I
Speaker 1: think a ton of people are going to benefit from it,
Speaker 1: but they're in a they went a route that was
Speaker 1: more difficult to achieve what I think ultimately is the goal,
Speaker 1: which is to have people have really good, clean, objective
Speaker 1: data that represents what it's supposed to represent. I can
Speaker 1: tell you from my experience I was skiing well, and
Speaker 1: it was saying I was sucking, and then vice versa.
Speaker 1: Ours is all built around you know. The algorithm is
Speaker 1: is legit, there's no if you're skiing better, it knows
Speaker 1: you're skiing better. And the in the centerpiece on your
Speaker 1: chest is really really important based because as you know,
Speaker 1: skiing is so much of it's how you're rotating, how
Speaker 1: you're initiating, how your foraft balance is shifting through a turn,
Speaker 1: what your skis are doing vibrationally, if your edges are matched, um,
Speaker 1: what your pressure is on either edge. We can get
Speaker 1: all that, um, you know, very easily, as well as
Speaker 1: you know all the other things that they can get. Okay,
Speaker 1: I grew up during the ski boom. Okay, everybody skied
Speaker 1: in the sixties and early seventies. Having lived long enough,
Speaker 1: I know there are other of things. You know, there
Speaker 1: was a snowboard boom. Snowboard is actually decreasing slightly, not
Speaker 1: that just did a big thing. How do we reinvigorate skiing? Um?
Speaker 1: I think accessibility. Uh, if you look at the barriers
Speaker 1: to entry and skiing. It's no wonder that we have
Speaker 1: like an eight percent atrician rate, so eight out of
Speaker 1: tend people who ski for the first time don't try
Speaker 1: it again. Um that's been flat for about the last
Speaker 1: thirty five years. So UM, that's a problem if you're
Speaker 1: if you're charging people enormous amounts the snow Bonn, So
Speaker 1: if you combine just and this is a big part
Speaker 1: of it, right, This is why all these projects become
Speaker 1: doable is because they're not these off on tangent silo
Speaker 1: little things. They're all connected. Snow Bonn is an indoor
Speaker 1: ski hall that allows people to learn to ski in
Speaker 1: about thirty minutes, from never having put ski boots on
Speaker 1: before to being able to go up onto a resort
Speaker 1: in ski blue runs snowplow, turn either direction, hockey stop
Speaker 1: on either side in twenty minutes for thirty dollars. So
Speaker 1: I want to replicate that in population hubs, and I
Speaker 1: want to tie it to the resorts because the lifetime
Speaker 1: value of a skier at a resort for Veil, for
Speaker 1: you know, Ask and whoever, that lifetime value is enormous.
Speaker 1: They can afford to give them a break for that
Speaker 1: first time, to get them interested, to get them psyched,
Speaker 1: um get them hooked if you will. So that whole
Speaker 1: package is one piece that ties in with Crossing, because
Speaker 1: I'm building special skis that actually work better on the
Speaker 1: carpet because it is this crazy, you know, big inside
Speaker 1: treadmill with carpet on it or plastic key carpet, and
Speaker 1: the skis don't work well. They're just using typical skis
Speaker 1: de tuning them and like, okay, give it a go.
Speaker 1: They need skis designed for that. So we're doing that
Speaker 1: with Crossing. My goal over the next four years is
Speaker 1: to reduce the cost of skis um go direct to customers.
Speaker 1: I mean we see retails going to the tank right,
Speaker 1: retails tanking everywhere, and COVID only accelerated that. But there's
Speaker 1: no reason you need to go into a ski shop
Speaker 1: to buy skis like to just asn't like with thirty
Speaker 1: day money that guarantee. Here's the skis two hundred bucks.
Speaker 1: Instead of selling them to a retailer for bucks and
Speaker 1: then they sell them to you for seven hundred bucks,
Speaker 1: we just sell them straight to you. We can make
Speaker 1: our margins, everything works, and you pay two hundred bucks,
Speaker 1: so reduce the cost of everything incrementally. There. Um, you
Speaker 1: know they've already done certain steps, the Icon Pass, Epic Pass,
Speaker 1: those are I think incremental steps in the right direction.
Speaker 1: I honestly think there's gonna be a new boom of
Speaker 1: very small resorts. You need traffic for that, and that
Speaker 1: hasn't supported that in the past because we've had no
Speaker 1: growth in the sport. But once these things are put together,
Speaker 1: there's these adventure parks that are incredibly profitable in Europe
Speaker 1: and they drive people to these other more more exclusive,
Speaker 1: more expensive involved operations. I think that when we spool
Speaker 1: out thirty five fifty hundred snow bonds in these population
Speaker 1: hubs and then we can run a ski resort that
Speaker 1: only operates from December eighteen till March and it has
Speaker 1: two lifts. You're only accommodating people who are the first
Speaker 1: three years of skiing, and then once they're better, sure
Speaker 1: graduate up to some others. But as you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: Christina Cosnick, Lindsey Vaughan, you know myself, steen mark on
Speaker 1: your person. They grew up on mountains. There were no
Speaker 1: bigger than my driveway is like, I mean, we're talking
Speaker 1: a couple hundred vertical feet you don't need, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the Pyrenees to to go out and enjoy skiing and
Speaker 1: have a great time. So all those things I think
Speaker 1: play together. I think the industry has been remarkably inefficient
Speaker 1: at converting new skiers. And you know, but look at
Speaker 1: ale stock prices. I mean, they're doing all right, so
Speaker 1: I can't really pick on them too much. But I
Speaker 1: think that's you know, you go through the early life
Speaker 1: complaining about all these people doing things wrong, and at
Speaker 1: some point you gotta step up and start realizing somebody's
Speaker 1: just got to do it. So that's the phase of
Speaker 1: it now. And again that parlays with vos. You know,
Speaker 1: everything everything I work on is all aligned in terms
Speaker 1: of that stuff, so it ends up being a bit
Speaker 1: more efficient that way. Okay, very quickly, too quick tips
Speaker 1: piece of advice for people who are experienced skiers technique wise,
Speaker 1: Um yeah, I mean to me, upper lower body separation
Speaker 1: is the biggest conundrum for people is with sidecut skis.
Speaker 1: Now you can commit down the hill so much more
Speaker 1: if your skis finishing a turn, coming around and you're
Speaker 1: used to coming up, becoming neutral and then initiating your
Speaker 1: new turn and going down and making a turn. You've
Speaker 1: seen it in World Cup for years now. But I
Speaker 1: think the exciting thing is get on a really good ski.
Speaker 1: Stokely makes a really good carving ski. We make, I
Speaker 1: believe the best carving ski. UM A bunch of companies
Speaker 1: make a good one. And by good I mean super reliable.
Speaker 1: It's never gonna do anything crazy on you, because what
Speaker 1: we're talking about is finishing your turn. As you're coming
Speaker 1: across the fall line, your upper body goes over the
Speaker 1: top of your skis in a low position. So for
Speaker 1: that little moment, you're basically just letting go. You're relaxing,
Speaker 1: your knees are super bent, your ass is really far back.
Speaker 1: You're just traveling over your skis straight down the hill.
Speaker 1: As that happens, you're putting your place self in a
Speaker 1: position where you can back up a ski edge angle
Speaker 1: that's really high, and it's basically upper lower bodies sepreasure.
Speaker 1: You're continuing to turn one way while your body is
Speaker 1: going over the top, and then your edges switch really
Speaker 1: quickly from one edge to the other, and the skis
Speaker 1: initiate so quickly that they dive down underneath you and
Speaker 1: pick you back up. And I think for experienced gears
Speaker 1: that's a really something they haven't felt before, and it's
Speaker 1: it changes entirely the sport because you're in a long legged,
Speaker 1: really powerful position all the time. The only time where
Speaker 1: you're in that crunched up awkward phase, there's no pressure
Speaker 1: on You're just flying down the hill. And for me,
Speaker 1: that's how you know that that's the most exciting thing
Speaker 1: about carving skis. Okay, needless to say, you can make
Speaker 1: a deal with any of the major companies and endorsement
Speaker 1: deal and get a big check. Are you into it
Speaker 1: with cross and not only to make the skis for
Speaker 1: the upside? And to what degree? You know if these
Speaker 1: some of these figures are published, but we don't know
Speaker 1: what you did with the money. How are you doing
Speaker 1: financially and how are your compatriots who were successful in
Speaker 1: the circuit doing financially? Um? I mean I'm still working,
Speaker 1: so I'm not doing that good. Um. But it granted,
Speaker 1: my kids and wife cost me a lot of money.
Speaker 1: They know how to they know how to spend it.
Speaker 1: But um, you know, I think we're we're comfortable. I'm
Speaker 1: very fortunate that I do things that I love to
Speaker 1: do and I don't do them for money. But I'm
Speaker 1: fortunate enough to be valuable enough to companies where I
Speaker 1: can get compensated in a way that makes things makes
Speaker 1: the wheel turn. Um. But you know the other skiers generally, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, if you weren't number one in the world
Speaker 1: and winning a lot of races, your work in day job. Now,
Speaker 1: I mean Europe is different. Their icons. They they get
Speaker 1: sort of taken care of because they're in these semi
Speaker 1: you know, socialist type countries where they get a lodge
Speaker 1: or they're they do different things. They're kind of set up.
Speaker 1: But they also have such a different culture over there
Speaker 1: where it's not an economic ladder. They just they like
Speaker 1: to do things. So they just run a restaurant and
Speaker 1: host people because they like to Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: I could if you got any tips, I could certainly
Speaker 1: use some cash. But um, I'm doing okay, Okay, do
Speaker 1: you regret not going to college? No, Now, I went
Speaker 1: to lots of colleges. I just didn't go to college
Speaker 1: per se. Um. I was at colleges all over the
Speaker 1: country and all over the world. Um, but no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm an easy study like coaches that I
Speaker 1: was uncoachable. I think that's not really true. I think
Speaker 1: they were just beating their head against the wall and
Speaker 1: something that I was very committed to, and unfortunately it
Speaker 1: didn't align with what they wanted me to do. But
Speaker 1: I learned things really quickly. More or less, stuff that
Speaker 1: I need to figure out, I can figure out really quickly.
Speaker 1: And as I said, I'm I have some of the
Speaker 1: best mentors in the world, the smartest people, um, that
Speaker 1: I've found, and I learned really quickly from them. Okay,
Speaker 1: you've gone on record for political issues and how you
Speaker 1: view the country. What is your view of the overall
Speaker 1: state of the United States? And do we have any hope? Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have hope, um, not a lot. But you know,
Speaker 1: the for me, the problem is that we've we've diverged
Speaker 1: away from sort of the concept. The concept was that
Speaker 1: the people would sort of semi govern that we would.
Speaker 1: But when you have three million people with hugely diverse
Speaker 1: backgrounds and priorities and all this stuff, you have to
Speaker 1: modify the system. It's it can't be a you know,
Speaker 1: nationally governed, it has to be stay governed. I think
Speaker 1: micro micro governing bodies need to take more responsibility and
Speaker 1: and and have flexibility there Um. That to me is
Speaker 1: is where our salvation lies is. You know, you can
Speaker 1: have different views, you can have different philosophies and different
Speaker 1: lifestyles and different stuff, but it still has to fall
Speaker 1: within the parameters of the national That was the philosophy
Speaker 1: in the beginning. But it wasn't so real then because
Speaker 1: communication took three weeks to get a letter from Colorado
Speaker 1: back to Washington. But um or Virginia. But in this case,
Speaker 1: you know, you just have to we can't have this
Speaker 1: this crazy um. You know, these extremist groups that that
Speaker 1: stuff is garbage. I don't know the solution there. UM
Speaker 1: that that's problematic because there really are hate groups and
Speaker 1: then they just they're just angry and want to do damage.
Speaker 1: But some of that comes to um a cultural um.
Speaker 1: Feel good about what you're doing, and feel good about everybody.
Speaker 1: And that's because we've sucked for quite a while. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not a US hater, but I find it really
Speaker 1: funny that people say we're the best country in the
Speaker 1: world when they haven't really been to a lot of
Speaker 1: other countries. I've been to a lot of countries, and
Speaker 1: I can say I think Daniel Tosh says, it is
Speaker 1: that have you ever been to Fiji, like maybe you
Speaker 1: go there. You've been to New Zealand, like you know,
Speaker 1: universal healthcare, like you could show up there and break
Speaker 1: your leg and they take care of everything for you know,
Speaker 1: Bill is not perfect healthcare, like you know. I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of things that unfortunately our government is
Speaker 1: incapable of doing because of the structure. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's going to change, But on a state
Speaker 1: and micro level, I think as we transition the renewable
Speaker 1: energies and we kind of I think we're gonna see
Speaker 1: a massive influx of job creation and and hopefully more
Speaker 1: productive direction than we've been for the last two hundred years.
Speaker 1: Um with you know, fossil fuels revolution that was that
Speaker 1: was inherently terminal, like it didn't you know, capitalism is
Speaker 1: terminal in and of itself. You can't always be uh um,
Speaker 1: you know, a capitalist culture exclusively. There always has to
Speaker 1: be some balance. We already have that. The irony is
Speaker 1: that people ignore the fact that we've been we have
Speaker 1: socialist programs. We have since the beginning. We've we've always
Speaker 1: had them. So it's just finding the balance there and
Speaker 1: hopefully um getting people excited to embrace the differences of
Speaker 1: our country because unfortunately or unfortunately, there's always gonna be
Speaker 1: huge variants in our in our people, in our in
Speaker 1: this country. Final question, this is one of perception for
Speaker 1: those of us who follow ski racing. Yes, you had
Speaker 1: that instant success with the K two fours, You did
Speaker 1: very well in the two thousand two Olympics. Then there
Speaker 1: was all this hope, in this hype which we get
Speaker 1: every four years in the Olympics United States. You were
Speaker 1: the golden boy. The success was not there, needless to say, Also,
Speaker 1: what I learned today, you're talking about certain equipment issues
Speaker 1: which were not well publicized. In addition, you've gone your
Speaker 1: own way in a country that thrives on group paint,
Speaker 1: group think, but all the pushing forward is by individuals
Speaker 1: who were frequently hated in them lauded. In addition, you
Speaker 1: commented did the play by play so to speak of
Speaker 1: the Olympics, and as opposed to being bobbed BIATI just
Speaker 1: being a national cheerleader. You got into the specifics of
Speaker 1: racing and took a lot of flak for that. So
Speaker 1: the question is, how do you feel about your perception
Speaker 1: of yourself. Do you think it should be changed? Do
Speaker 1: you care if it's changed? Do you bothered if it's
Speaker 1: not changed. No, I'm not bothered and I don't care. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I feel like that was a big learning
Speaker 1: experience for me. It was oh six right right. I
Speaker 1: was petulant. I take responsibility for my own behavior. But
Speaker 1: it was also not an anomaly. I didn't. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like that was my time where I blew up. I
Speaker 1: was that way all my entire life. And the fact
Speaker 1: was I was unapologetic. I just I said, look, I
Speaker 1: did my best. I won the I was winning the
Speaker 1: combined by three seconds, right, ted end up winning the
Speaker 1: goal there. I was three seconds ahead of him after
Speaker 1: the first run of slalom, and I was disqualified. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's things that happened that they could have
Speaker 1: changed everything there they didn't. Um. You know, when I
Speaker 1: walked away from that, I was definitely uh you know,
Speaker 1: I was immature and I was not prepared for what
Speaker 1: I was dealing with. I was the top gun on
Speaker 1: World Cup. I had I was taking of all the
Speaker 1: demands and press and everything else, and I just I
Speaker 1: wasn't good enough and I needed to improve and I
Speaker 1: knew that so UM when I came back after the
Speaker 1: OH nine semi retirement into two thousand and ten, UM,
Speaker 1: I was really proud of how I'd evolved in that
Speaker 1: four year span. And I came back a different type
Speaker 1: of person, much more capable, much more broad skill set,
Speaker 1: capable of dealing with real adult things and and being
Speaker 1: clear about my prerogatives, but also much more um effectively
Speaker 1: talking about what I felt was important and how I
Speaker 1: could make that work with your average you know viewer
Speaker 1: who's just an American who wants you to say, go America,
Speaker 1: where the best? So I'm gonna win for you, guys
Speaker 1: like I understood that in that time frame. And it
Speaker 1: took that failure in OH six and all the fallout
Speaker 1: of that to learn. I mean, it's just the reality is,
Speaker 1: you learned through those struggles and and uh, I've been
Speaker 1: super I wouldn't change a thing about that. It was
Speaker 1: an ass kicking at the time, but it's not the
Speaker 1: first as kicking I've taken. It certainly won't be the last.
Speaker 1: So to come into ten and win three medals and
Speaker 1: really kind of give the American people what they wanted
Speaker 1: in my on my own terms and with that expression
Speaker 1: and my my comfort level. Unfortunately I missed that stop
Speaker 1: on the on the attributes trade train when I was
Speaker 1: being created that I didn't feel satisfaction about that part
Speaker 1: of it, like I proved anyone wrong or anything. I
Speaker 1: just felt good that I had evolved and hopefully matured
Speaker 1: a little bit where I was more capable and not
Speaker 1: making the same stupid mistakes i'd make made before. Yes,
Speaker 1: but at the Olympics, Lindsey Vaughan was the heroine with
Speaker 1: one gold medal, and you had a better performance than
Speaker 1: anyone had ever had in the Winter Olympics skiing as
Speaker 1: a male, and they gave you a fraction of the attention.
Speaker 1: But as as you said, no, as you said, there's nothing,
Speaker 1: especially American culture, putting somebody on the pedestal and then
Speaker 1: they want to knock the pedestal out, you know, and
Speaker 1: then they want to build you back up, and then
Speaker 1: they want to knock the pedestal. The thing that was
Speaker 1: interesting about that is because I retired in oh nine
Speaker 1: and I didn't start my Olympic run until August. I mean,
Speaker 1: I was fatten out of shape and had no skis,
Speaker 1: no technician, no nothing going into the World Cup season. Um,
Speaker 1: they didn't have any time before I was six, and
Speaker 1: that summer going into six, I was on a cover
Speaker 1: of Time, Newsweek, Men's Journal, Sports Illustrated. You know, that
Speaker 1: was the build up, That was the pedestal. They had
Speaker 1: no time. Nobody could scramble. They'd already they'd already put
Speaker 1: Lindsay as their person. They were pot committed to her.
Speaker 1: So the fact that she delivered, they were on board.
Speaker 1: They were like, yeah, see, we were right. She's our
Speaker 1: American hero and they had for me. I was a
Speaker 1: side note. Because they had they couldn't validate, you know,
Speaker 1: not the individuals, but mainstream press likes to be right right,
Speaker 1: So the fact that I did well didn't help them.
Speaker 1: They were They weren't upset individually, but as a as
Speaker 1: an industry, they were upset because they didn't have the scoop.
Speaker 1: They didn't have it, you know, set up right to
Speaker 1: capitalize on that. And so, um, it's exactly what I expected.
Speaker 1: And as I said, I was very aware of that
Speaker 1: by that point, and they didn't upset me at all.
Speaker 1: I was really proud and excited to have you know,
Speaker 1: like I said, matured and got better and then delivered.
Speaker 1: I mean, at the end of the day, it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter how good you are, how mature you are, It
Speaker 1: comes down a hundreds of the second. You know how
Speaker 1: tight those races were. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: those performances that I put down there my the actual
Speaker 1: skiing I did to get that gold medal in the
Speaker 1: combined what I did in that slow on course was
Speaker 1: was nothing short of a miracle. I mean I was
Speaker 1: that was the that was the pinnacle of what you'd
Speaker 1: hoped for of yourself in an Olympic environment. And uh yeah,
Speaker 1: to do it after having let people down and let
Speaker 1: myself down the way I didn't know six was was
Speaker 1: a miracle. And then obviously fourteen I pulled off, you know,
Speaker 1: a bronze medal that I was as proud of as
Speaker 1: any medal that i'd ever you know, had in any event.
Speaker 1: Why is that the night before my brother it's supposed
Speaker 1: to go to that Olympics, that he was going to
Speaker 1: go as a snowboarder. It would have been the first
Speaker 1: one we've been at together, he passed away into um
Speaker 1: and before I should have won the downhill, I was
Speaker 1: crushing guys in the training runs conditions change, we could.
Speaker 1: We didn't have the skis to be competitive on the bottom.
Speaker 1: I was losing a second and a half on the
Speaker 1: bottom just going straight across, you know, eight hundred yards
Speaker 1: um and I end up losing in my stronger events,
Speaker 1: and the super gew was kind of the last one.
Speaker 1: And uh, the night before I took my goggle strap
Speaker 1: off my helmet and I replaced it with with one
Speaker 1: of those um physio bands, you know, those bands like
Speaker 1: the red and green that you used to stretch out,
Speaker 1: And so I replaced it with one of those. And
Speaker 1: I thought about doing that for ten years. I don't
Speaker 1: know it's I put it in the wind tunnel. We tested.
Speaker 1: We knew that that made a difference, and I said, look, tomorrow,
Speaker 1: a hundredth is going to make the difference. And so
Speaker 1: I replaced that for the first time in four hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty World Cup races, I replaced it and tied
Speaker 1: for third place. So one hundredth slower and I have
Speaker 1: no medal. And I come out of the Olympics, you know,
Speaker 1: dealing with all the press of no medals. Just that
Speaker 1: one bronze medal saves all that stuff. But also it
Speaker 1: was it was really indicative of my level of of
Speaker 1: commitment and you know, and ingenuity and and and self reliance.
Speaker 1: I mean, no one did it. I was the only
Speaker 1: dude in the race with a rubberized goggle strap that
Speaker 1: in a wind tunnel, I know, makes point oh six
Speaker 1: percent difference, which was theoretically in a in a minute race,
Speaker 1: which that was is a second. So and I and
Speaker 1: I one hundred slower and I get no medal. So
Speaker 1: you tie for second, you're one hundred slower, you just
Speaker 1: got a bronze, no problem. You tie for third, one slower,
Speaker 1: you get nothing. Bronze medal is important. And at that
Speaker 1: point I was the oldest Olympic medalist in history globally.
Speaker 1: Um it was. It was massive. And to know that
Speaker 1: all other things excluded that goggle strap that I've done
Speaker 1: for the first time in my whole life, uh made
Speaker 1: the difference, got me a metal. Um was was interesting
Speaker 1: and obviously, uh you know, I felt like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it was it was a testament to my commitment and
Speaker 1: the representation of my my commitment to getting better and
Speaker 1: not leaving any stones unturned. Okay, And the comments that
Speaker 1: you got in reaction to your play by play will
Speaker 1: you do that again? Did that hurt? What was the
Speaker 1: blowback from the people on the inside who hired you. No,
Speaker 1: they loved it. I mean we got way more positive
Speaker 1: feedback than negative. Um, because anyone who was a skier
Speaker 1: appreciated it because it actually instructed them and formed them
Speaker 1: of what was going on. They found that really educational
Speaker 1: and interesting and much more than just a cheerleader. Um,
Speaker 1: which was my intent. I mean, honestly, I feel like
Speaker 1: one of the biggest failings of of this industry has
Speaker 1: been education, has been informing people, you know, democratizing information
Speaker 1: and UM. So that's where the way I approached it.
Speaker 1: I after that Olympics, it was live prime time in
Speaker 1: the US. I was a big one for me to
Speaker 1: just know that I could do and be there and execute.
Speaker 1: But afterwards I was like, I'll do it again, but
Speaker 1: you're gonna pay me ten times as much and you're
Speaker 1: gonna fly my family. I can't be away from my
Speaker 1: family for three weeks. And in China, Korea, UM, And
Speaker 1: I think they see it as talent is more or
Speaker 1: less interchangeable, and in this case, um, you know, they
Speaker 1: hired Lindsay, which I'm I love Lindsay so I'm looking
Speaker 1: forward to seeing what she can do. And where are
Speaker 1: all your globes and medals and trophies, uh, bunch or
Speaker 1: in the Ski Museum in New Hampshire. Actually a buddy
Speaker 1: zoom I was on a zoom call earlier. He was
Speaker 1: there skiing at Cannon. He zoomed us um from in there.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. A bunch of them are all
Speaker 1: around different places. I don't. I don't think I have
Speaker 1: any in my house here, so it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a musician who keeps their grammy in the bathroom. In
Speaker 1: any event, body, I so much for talking with me.
Speaker 1: It's really been great. You've been able to answer questions
Speaker 1: that I've never seen either asked or answered in all
Speaker 1: of the ski media. So I really appreciate that. I
Speaker 1: appreciate it. Great to talk to you. Okay, hopefully I
Speaker 1: can see on the hill one day. And I'm one
Speaker 1: of those people. I do have those five piers of
Speaker 1: ski so I know what you're talking about. If you've
Speaker 1: got one pier of skis, it would work. I'm all ears.
Speaker 1: I'll get this already right out until next time. This
Speaker 1: is Bob left Sex