Looking Sideways Action Sports Podcast

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Enjoying the podcast? Want to keep it free and ad-free? Donate here: https://bit.ly/LSBuyPint This week’s guest Mark Munson is one of UK skateboarding’s true greats. It’s that simple. In his 30-odd years of board riding, he’s been there, seen it, done it and helped set standards that define the scene to this day thanks to an uncompromising...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Enjoying the podcast? Want to keep it free and ad-free? Donate here: https://bit.ly/LSBuyPint Think ‘viral video’ and a couple of examples from the last decade stand out. Danny Macaskill’s ‘Inspired Bicycles’, certainly. Ben Moon’s ‘Denali’, too. Like a lot of people - over 20 million at the last count - this beautiful, moving tribute to h...

Type 2 is a podcast from Looking Sideways in association with Patagonia that explores the intersection between the outdoors, action sports and activism. This week’s guest is Lucy Siegle, a writer, journalist, broadcaster and film-maker who has been one of the UK’s foremost voices on issues of nature and climate for almost two decades now. Today, she co-hosts the So Hot Right Now podcast, is a trus...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Enjoying the podcast? Want to keep it free and ad-free? Donate here: https://bit.ly/LSBuyPint Since I started the podcast back in February 2017, a few classic themes have become familiar to listeners. Creativity. Independence. Perseverance. Individuality. Community, too - although not always in a wholly positive way. After all, community w...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Enjoying the podcast? Want to keep it free and ad-free? Donate here: https://bit.ly/LSBuyPint Sight loss is one of those primal fears we in common. It’s something everybody has pondered at some point, the type of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ scenarios we tend to shy away from because we don’t really want to know what our potential...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Enjoying the podcast? Want to keep it free and ad-free? Donate here: https://bit.ly/LSBuyPint What does ‘influence’ mean today? Somebody on Instagram with thousands of followers? A professional athlete using their platform to promote their own beliefs and interests, however erroneous? Or does it refer to somebody who, by their consistent a...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com How does it feel to go into space? What does it make you feel about the future of our planet, and your own place in the universe? What are the moral implications of space travel? And just how do you take a picture of Pipeline from the International Space Station as it flies overhead at 17,000 mph? All topics that I discussed with this week...

Type 2 is a podcast from Looking Sideways in association with Patagonia that explores the intersection between the outdoors, action sports and activism. This week’s guest is Mario Molina, and what a chat this one is. Mario is a climber, snowboarder, mountain biker and guide who grew up in the highlands of Guatemala and today lives in Colorado. As I discovered, he is also somebody who has dedicated...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Auspicious occasion alert! Yep, I conducted my first face-to-face interview since way back in March. Even more excitingly, it was a guest who also happens to be a really close friend of mine - the great Ben Mondy. Mondy is a surf writer, journalist and lifer par excellence of the Australian surf industry genus. He was a staffer at Tracks f...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Our attitude to mortality is one of the great paradoxes of modern life. It’s the thing we have in common and the thing we all ignore, putting off the inevitable reckoning until we’re usually forced to face it under the worst possible circumstances - grief, loss, sickness. It’s a conundrum we will all grapple with at some point, and one tha...

Type 2 is a podcast from Looking Sideways in association with Patagonia that explores the intersection between the outdoors, action sports and activism. This week’s guest is Alex Yoder, a snowboarder who is known for one of the best turns in the business and the series of thoughtful films he’s made in recent years about snowboarding in Turkey and Scotland. It was third time lucky for me and Alex -...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com These days, using action sports as a tool for social mobility and mentorship is a fairly well known practise. In 2005, when this week’s guest Steve Larosiliere founded his organisation Stoked, it was new territory. Stoked was founded as a result of Steve’s own experience of mentorship and his ambition ‘to use action sports to teach 21st ce...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com The search for our authentic self is a lifelong process. And not always a successful one. It takes a huge amount of self honesty, and a willingness to embrace consistent and at times not always comfortable evolution. It’s something we all have to face, whether consciously or not. But imagine undergoing this entire process as a world-renown...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com We live in an age of limitless content and endless progression. A period where a thumb-swipe can summon any film part in history, and where readily-available tools mean anybody can be a story-teller or documentarian. And yet what’s striking, in this age of digital plenty, is how rare - even now! - it is for an action sports film to have so...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com To call Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopaedia of Surfing a labour of love would be to do the entire project a grave injustice. As the name suggests, EoS is Matt’s ongoing, crowdfunded attempt to document the history of surfing and surf culture through the site of the same name. It’s an industry ‘lifer’ project par excellence. And a beautiful, Johns...

Type 2 is a podcast from Looking Sideways in association with Patagonia that explores the intersection between the outdoors, action sports and activism. This week’s guest is Dan Crockett, a writer, journalist and activist from the UK who is currently Development Director of the Blue Marine Foundation, a charity dedicated to resorting the ocean to health. Blue Marine Foundation do so by supporting...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com It’s easy to forget, but all stories are editorial choices. And those choices have a big influence on the way we collectively perceive our shared culture and history. It’s why the standard narratives around our shared history tend to default to the same names and anecdotes. And it’s why She Surf, the new overview of modern female surfing a...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Full disclosure: this week’s guest is a close friend of mine. Lauren MacCallum is a writer, broadcaster and activist who has the type of plates-in-the-air career that is very common in the action sports and outdoor industry. We’ve been friend for years, and she’s someone I can always rely on to provide some much-needed perspective. In this...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Let’s be honest - the Looking Sideways podcast is a pretty white and none-diverse space, reflecting as it does the action sports and outdoor community as a whole. I think this is why my first episode with Phil Young, broadcast back in November 2019, struck such a chord with listeners and very quickly went on to become one of my most popula...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Andy Howell has always been one of skateboarding’s sages. He’s an artist and intellectual thinker who discerns patterns, seeks out connections and is unafraid to grapple with the biggest themes of all. Story-telling. Humanity. Technology. Life. Rebirth. You know - the good stuff. You can see it in his career, and the sheer number of ways h...

Type 2 is a podcast from Looking Sideways in association with Patagonia that explores the intersection between the outdoors, action sports and activism. I welcomed a legend onto the show this week - surfer and activist Dave Rastovich, one of the world’s most respected, stylish and talented surfers. On the water, Dave’s always been an innovator and leader, whether because of the career path he chos...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com This week’s guest is yet another absolute legend of their chosen field - the great Torah Bright Torah’s been at the top of her game for the last 20 years. Sure, the headline news is that 2010 gold at the Vancouver Games. But that’s just one highlight in a career that has come to symbolise everything that is creative and expressive about sn...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com Jeff Johnson is probably best known for his film 180 South, a film which saw him travel to Patagonia with Yvon Chouniard and Doug Tompkins in homage to the original 1960s odyssey that is such a defining part of Patagonia story. It’s on YouTube, and I highly recommend checking it out. But there’s much more to Jeff’s career than this admitte...

Full episode and Show Notes - www.wearelookingsideways.com This week’s guest is Chas Smith, surely the most notorious surf journalist on the planet right now thanks to his work with Beach Grit, books like Welcome to Paradise Now Go To Hell, and podcasts like Dirty Water and The Grit with David Lee Scales. Along the way, Chas has come to personify a particular type of surf writing trope - the tough...

Lockdown Surf Film Festival bonus episode with Gabriel Novis! Yep, in April 2020 Chris and Demi, my friends behind the Lockdown Surf Film Festival, asked me to interview Gabriel about his film Sorria, which was showing as part of the festival. Sorria is a few years old now and is, as Gabriel explained during our conversation, an attempt to show another side of Brazilian surf culture and performanc...