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Brand new flavor by MOP.
I've shown to y'all who runs this motherfucking place. Now startin' what you feel.
We run through y'all.
Exclusive shit.
On a count of three, I want you to shoot fire to the ass. One, two, three, watch out!
I think it was 2005. Might have been the last year that I was a pro snowboarder, actually.
Well, you know, obviously I have my own view and opinion on why.
But it wasn't that I wanted to quit snowboarding at the time. I wanted to continue on.
And I had kind of what I call the three-year kiss of death contract, which is where you have a three-year contract near the end of your career,
which is nice, except that when the contract is up, usually you don't get re-signed.
So that kind of happened to me. The contract was coming up and I was with Ride Snowboards and they were sponsoring me, you know, head to toe.
And I really only had a binding sponsor and a goggle sponsor beyond that.
So when I didn't have my major board company supporting me, then, you know, it was going to be impossible to make ends meet and do the travel thing.
And I looked around for a while, but never really found anyone to support me.
I think I looked for probably about six months throughout the summer.
And I would have liked to continue to be a pro and I would have done it for a lot less money than I was making at the time,
but I was definitely, you know, I was still into snowboarding, but I had lost the desire for progressing really in a freestyle realm.
Like I still love to do it and have tricks I wanted to get and things like that, but I wasn't following the trend as far as tricks were going.
You know, I think you kind of just get to a point where you just kind of top out and you're like, you know, you don't have the desire to go to the next level.
But that's where they, you know, the new kids come in and they're already looking at this level and so they just step it up.
But anyway, yeah, I didn't really want to stop snowboarding as a pro.
Yeah, well, the cycling for me was something that I've done since I was 15.
I started riding mountain bikes and racing mountain bikes back then and it got to a point where I was going to turn 18
and I was starting to get into the snowboarding and it was either, you know, try to be a pro snowboarder or try to be a professional cyclist.
And, you know, the path of professional cycling was a lot more training and regimented.
And so I just opted to go with the snowboard route, which I'd say was definitely the better route.
Of course, at that time cycling was still pretty big and I might have been able to make it as a pro if I continued on.
But anyway, I took a long time off of that and then it was knee surgery that brought me back to cycling as recovery.
And then I got back into racing shortly after and I just, I like the cycle cross because it's a mix of technical and it's very intense.
And just racing for me in general satisfies my competitive urge that I don't really, I don't satisfy in snowboarding.
Like I said, in snowboarding it's, for me, more subjective and so I'm not looking to one up the next guy in, you know, in rotations.
Maybe I would just want to do something more stylish.
And so snowboarding for me is always the style aspect and the racing is where I get to like, you know, beat people and get excited about that.
Well, you know, like, like a lot of things lately, it kind of grew organically from I just had the GoPro and was out, you know, filming free ride biking
and then started taking it out snowboarding and was posting clips to my Facebook and someone said, you know, hey, maybe you should have a reality TV show.
No one's really doing that. And I thought, well, yeah, you know, wouldn't really require much more from me than I was already doing as far as I was already filming stuff anyway.
So, so I just kind of started doing it.
And, you know, for me, it satisfies a couple of different things.
Like it's very creative from the editing standpoint.
And I used to do a lot of DJing.
So I don't really do much DJing now, but you know, the mixing of the clips with the music and timing it to the music and all that satisfies that need for me a bit.
Well, Roots Culture Connect, again, you know, kind of came from something on Facebook where initially, you know, I was on Facebook and I was just kind of like, disappointed in the X games.
Big Air and the triple cork of Torstein's, which wasn't a triple cork.
And so I kind of just like, you know, I copied and pasted the thing up on my Facebook and was like, this is this is bullshit.
And not calling Torstein bullshit by any means it was because to me, you know, being a snowboarder and X pro snowboarder, I mean, obviously he knew what he did and didn't do.
And it was more of just how the whole event came off and how, you know, it became X games history and stuff.
So anyway, I put this up on my Facebook and a friend of mine from from back in the old Colorado days reached out to me and my friend Brendan Robey and he said, hey, we should start a business.
And I had no idea what he was thinking.
I said, just call me.
So he called me and we started talking about things and we formed this idea that there was a need for an online snowboard magazine.
Not that there really is a need.
There's lots of them.
But, you know, we think like most other people that we have a special formula that will bring to it that will be a bit different.
So yeah, so we're getting ready to launch this on the 15th of April, ideally.
And it's just it's more in depth really.
So we're not trying to do bang or snowboard edits and everything that's already being done.
We're trying to just put a different spin on it.
Well, you know, we want to be blunt ish, but not in like the take a crap in your toilet way.
And, you know, not like in a malicious way, but more in just a real way.
So we would we always want to be true to snowboarding and real that's kind of just one of our goals and not, you know, not pushing a rider purely because of our advertisers.
Not that we have any advertisers.
It should be a really great project.
My friend Nicholas Greenblatt out of Philly.
He runs a firm called 215, which is a branding and marketing firm.
And he also puts out a magazine, a small free magazine called Living Proof.
And so he will be guiding all of our creative as far as visually and all that.
So I think between the three of us, we should we should put out a product that's really good that people will enjoy.
Well, it's pretty crazy these days, you know, with the Roots Culture Connect project and with the Ali G show that, you know, the real Ali G show started out as more of a marketing piece to just generate interest for, you know, people to see me doing stuff
and generate interest for my my name and my brand to further promote the Roots Culture Connect when we launch.
And I mean, your proof in the pudding that it's working because I've been just pumping up my Facebook and all that.
And I've been doing interviews with other guys like yourself and, you know, other industry people.
But anyway, so the day in the life is like, you know, wake up in the morning to my son who's two and a half and get him going.
And then I'm mixing my real job, you know, with obviously a little bit of Facebook and then recording all of it along the way to to put the Ali G show out and then, you know, bouncing, bouncing work and family and some fun.
And then also staying up super late at night to edit episodes and, you know, do emails for both work, side work and pleasure.
So it's a full time full throttle type of deal that I love because of the flexibility.
But I think some people would rather just punch the clock and know when they're in and out instead of just being on the clock all the time.
Yeah, but you know how it is when you're working on your own projects, it's like none of it really feels like work.
And the job I do for my real life job is a rep.
So I rep bicycle components and and frames and other accessories during the summer and during the winter I do helmets and goggles from Jiro.
So I love that as well.
You know, I love the bike, so my work is fun.
My new projects are fun.
Obviously, you know, love my wife and kids, so that's fun.
And somehow I keep it all straight and I haven't fallen asleep behind the wheel yet.
You want to challenge my style of rap?
