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I'm Mike Boris and this is Straight Talk.
If we don't get a million views in the first seven days,
We dropped it and it hit a million views
in six hours or something.
Sam McIntosh, welcome to Straight Talk, mate.
Like, they're actually unreal ideas.
How do you think of this shit?
Like all those things,
you don't think they're going to work.
You work through it, you work out how to do it,
and then when it comes together,
the feeling's extraordinary.
The gold standard of storytelling
is tell me something I don't know
and sort of like show me something I haven't seen.
Yeah, that's what we're trying to do.
My dad didn't want me to work in magazines.
He knew what I was making.
He was just like,
you've got to get out of this thing.
But I just loved making the magazines.
I loved putting together the stories.
Who's the craziest out of all of them?
Out of all the surfers?
That you can deal with?
Sam McIntosh, welcome to Straight Talk, mate.
Nice to meet you, Mark.
Thanks for coming down from Byron.
You're living in Byron now?
Yeah, I haven't been there long,
but I was in Sydney for a long time
LA for a couple of years
and now that's...
We've got an office in Byron
and we've got an office in California as well.
So you grew up, though, in...
Your dad owns a pub there?
Is the pub in Yambur?
The Pacific Hotel, the one up on the hill.
The old school one, yeah.
He still owns it?
My mother's still there.
So do you know Robert, Craig Robinson?
Yeah, really well.
He's a good mate of mine, brother.
Is he still living...
He's at Yambur, isn't he?
No, he's in Gowrie.
Yeah, so he spends the weeks on the Gold Coast
because his kids go to school up there
and then comes down on the weekends.
Yeah, his kids go to the same school as Ginge.
That's why Ginge sent his boy, Ted, there.
Because he's close to Robbo.
But Robbo is one of the...
The older boy is like killing it at school.
It might be his last year or something.
Like he's really bright.
Super smart kids, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I haven't seen Robbo for ages.
He's a great mate of mine.
So I'd love it if you'd see him.
Grew up, obviously...
Well, I shouldn't say obviously,
but I grew up as a board rider.
What period are we talking about now?
We're in your 40s, are you?
Yeah, so grew up...
Well, yeah, just before we get into it, though,
I went through your analytics
to look at what does well for you.
And you've got these colourful characters
that connect really well.
And then anything you do on surfing, tanks.
So I'm like, I'm super interested to see what...
Have you seen that?
I was talking to the boys about it.
I was like, really?
You guys want to do anything on surfing?
Our audience is not that interested.
But if you throw in a few names like Mick Fanning
and someone, something might change.
So I'm going to try to turn it around.
Okay, here we go.
Well, you're going to turn this whole thing around
because I suppose you just want to get to this dude's smart.
And by the way, I've seen some of the stunts you've done.
So I'm really relying on you...
...to turn the stats around.
No pressure, but let's do it.
Okay, so just tell me, when did you grow up?
Like, what period?
I grew up in the 90s in Yammer and Gowrie.
So we actually used to live inland.
We used to live sort of 45 minutes to an hour from the beach
and grew up in a town called Casino.
My dad was a shy clerk at the council
and he always wanted to buy a pub.
And I was surf obsessed at that point.
And he looked at a bunch of pubs.
We went up to Northern Queensland too.
We nearly bought one in Ayr, which is, I don't know,
a day from the beach if you're driving south down to Noosa or whatever.
Yeah, because there's no beach.
And across, sorry, across because of the race.
And then we did a trip to Cape York a couple of years ago,
my dad, my son and I, and we called into the pub.
And he's like, your mother walked into this pub.
She walked back out, laid in the back seat with a migraine
and she didn't get out of the car.
So thankfully we didn't buy that one.
And then all he wanted to do, his dream pub was at Pacific Hotel in Yammer.
And then a couple of guys from Byron, they all went in together
and they bought it.
And so we moved from inland.
We moved from inland down to Yammer, which was just life-changing.
A bit different than it is to what it is now.
It's still a smallish town, but back then it was quite remote,
relatively speaking.
It was really a surfing town.
And like a little resort town, so it gets busy in the holidays
and a fishing town.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Still very small.
And then what does that do for a kid growing up in an environment?
So how do you come out of a place like that?
Because now you've got an office in LA.
So like how does...
I mean, what did it do in a formative sense for someone like you?
That's an interesting one.
Well, for a formative sense, on the front of the pub it says Pacific Hotel
in big letters on the front.
And so I had a bedroom above the A.
Oh, you lived in the hotel?
We lived in the pub, yeah.
Okay, I didn't know that.
Yeah, so we lived above the...
Cool, that's cool.
I reckon that's cool, but anyway.
It was really fun growing up in the pub.
And then my dad had me go to work in it pretty early.
So I was balancing the tills and learning about how to run the business.
So that was really helpful.
And then he was just always pushing me that we had to go to university,
get out of a small town.
So the moment you turn 18, you get out of there.
So did that, moved to Sydney, moved under Jeff and Penny Carr's house
But how's Jeff, how's Carrie related?
What's his friendship with your dad?
How'd they come about?
They went to school together in Grafton.
I didn't know Jeff was from Grafton.
So he's a country boy.
By the way, those people don't know Jeff Carr played for St. George
and a long-time administrator in the New South Wales Rugby League.
And I know Jeff through the state of origin where I sponsored for,
I don't know, 10 years or something.
And, of course, I knew Penny, his late wife, Penny, quite well.
Yeah, lovely people.
So your dad sent you down to deliver to Jeff at Tamra.
Yeah, well, Jeff offered and then they had this little,
this sort of like little granny flat under their house in Tamra.
So I got to move to.
But what period is that?
That's like, must be late.
Well, that's when I was sponsoring New South Wales.
Jeff used to walk all the time from, I don't know if he still does,
but he was always, every time I ever see him,
he's walking from along the coast there along to Bondi.
And he's, when I was living there, Scottie's big birthday present for him
because he plays football, big legs.
His son bought him Vaseline so he wouldn't get a rash between his thighs.
They were Vaso days.
It was such a good, yeah.
It was the perfect way to come to Sydney.
It was like a wonderland for me.
I just was like, wow, look at this place.
Did you, what did you do at uni?
What did you study?
I studied a few different things.
I studied business and then I didn't get through that degree
and got a job at the surf magazine called Waves.
So that was out of Chinatown.
That's where the office was.
It was the big British publisher called EMAP and they had FHM
and Smash Hits and Tracks, Waves and a whole bunch of magazines.
And a bunch of sort of teenagers and 20-year-olds running them.
It was really, really fun.
Did you go there as a journalist or admin or what were you doing?
I just went in as a deputy editor.
I didn't study writing or anything.
I'm not a great writer.
But from there I kind of learnt, I learnt what I wanted to do in life
I just loved making the magazines.
I loved putting together stories and it was,
Waves was always the little brother to Tracks.
Tracks was sort of the cash cow and Waves was like,
you stay in the corner, you get anyone trying to get in the youth market.
And so I worked with a guy called Vaughan Blakey
and we had a lot of success with the magazine, grew it a lot
and that's when I realised that I was sort of not that great of an employee
and I had to go out on my own.
You're not great at being an employee?
I'm not great at being an employee.
You don't like taking orders or?
I just was like so to get, so I grew up learning,
learning how to read a balance sheet and a P&L
because my dad taught me at the pub.
And so we're these young guys and to their credit,
they're really transparent with the numbers.
And I could see Tracks would make a million bucks a year
and then our magazine, Waves, would make between 200 and 400
and we're having a lot of success.
So we'd go, oh, because I was on 25 grand a year or something.
And I was like, oh, I'd like to get a raise.
The magazine's doing really well.
They said the sales team's amazing at the moment
and they're getting amazing advertising.
And then newsstands say I was really good.
And like, oh, the marketing, they're doing an incredible job.
And I was like, okay, this is how this is going to work.
So I kind of realized I needed to get out because I just, I wanted,
my dad didn't want me to work in magazines.
He knew what I was making.
He's like, you got to get out of this thing.
Like this is, this is kind of like a really fun kind of dead end job for you.
That's what he thought.
And so I was really good friends with a surfer named Taj Burrow.
And he was sort of the best.
He was the best surfer in the world at that point.
And growing up, there was no really good instructional how to surf books.
And so I was like, okay,
we're going to make a really good contemporary how to surf book.
So I pitched him the idea and he said, okay, I'm in.
We went, let's do 50-50 on it.
And so I started writing at nights and on the weekends
and working away on it, working away on it.
And I was getting close to the end.
And then the publishers found out that I had this book and like,
they pulled me aside and said, hey, everything you do, we own.
And I was like, well, no, I'm doing it on the weekends.
He goes, no, if you're doing a surf book, we own that.
Publishers being the people you're working for.
And I was like, well, you don't.
And A, you don't.
B, you're not having it.
And so we both sort of saved face.
I got the sack, but I got a job in marketing.
So I got a job in marketing.
I went from the editorial floor.
It was really fun to the corporate floor.
And I spent the next six months in there,
learning everything I could about publishing.
So distributors, printers, made all of those contacts
and finished this book.
And I got really lucky.
I went to, I found a really good printer in Singapore.
I didn't have any money at the time.
And my email came through from either EMAP email.
And so I got 90-day terms.
Because they thought EMAP was the one asking for it.
And I used these printers for 15.
15 years after I'd started Stab.
And every bill I'd get, it would be like,
Sam, I can just care of EMAP Stab.
But yeah, we always paid our bills.
And so I made this book.
I was like, how am I going to pay for it?
And so I wrote for the sunglass company.
I sort of surfed okay.
And I wrote for the sunglass company, Arnett.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so I used to get $1,500 a year.
Yeah, sponsorship.
Personally, yeah.
And then this one day, they've accidentally put an extra zero on.
They paid me $15,000.
So I had to pay for these 8,000 books.
They were $2.87 a piece.
And I was like, okay, I'm going to dump this on the print run.
And I got 90 days to pay down the other stuff.
And then I had to pay back that.
And so I got this book out.
And I self-published it because I couldn't get a publisher
because I didn't have any runs on the board.
And one day my dad calls me, reads the Sun Herald and goes,
you're in the bestsellers list.
And so he was in the sporting section, the bestsellers list.
And the book just flew.
Flew in the US, flew in Australia.
And it was life-changing.
And then from there.
What was the book called?
It was called Taj Burrow's Book of Hot Surfing.
They put Taj Burrow's name on the top.
Like he was a co-author of that.
Yeah, so it was just a bunch of interviews.
And then all the basic stuff.
You interviewing him?
And just anecdotal stuff.
And then all this.
So I could write most.
And then I'd done so much, so many interviews with him,
I kind of got his tone right.
You nearly write his answers.
And then I just kind of go, the technique stuff I'd write,
and then I'd just get anecdotes from him about certain examples
of where things took place.
But that was quite a clever technique is to use the Taj Burrow's
in the title and given his status at the time.
Even today he's still got status.
And as you say, it would have been one of the first books
ever, there's books on everything you know season.
But I don't remember ever seeing you on surfing just
in one they went in a really contemporary way and at
the start he was, I don't want to go out and like stand
up in the white water on a soft top.
I'm just just trust me.
And so it was really broad Pro, but then went really
really pointed at the end.
And so it was like, you can't had to go through the
sections and see unless you kind of go through this
section, you couldn't go to the next color.
And then a whole generation of pro surface.
we later learned wouldn't go to the next page until they made each trick
as they went, which is pretty cool.
Younger pro surfers.
Younger, yeah, younger generation.
So you're really trying to appeal to, it's a good Christmas present
for parents to give their kids too, especially like, you know,
those little kids that run little softboards, like I'll get you the board,
I'll get you the book.
Especially up in coastal towns or even in Bondi and places like that
because the kids, I don't know if they still do,
but they're all riding those, you know, little six-foot softboards,
you know, because you can sort of ride on the edge of the flags.
And like it was more access.
And sort of like appeared much more safe.
It's so much safer.
They're just like the softer rails.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like when a hard rail hits you, it can knock you out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And parents like it because I got it from my, I remember I bought it
from my kids and I was just way too clumsy and heavy to ride one.
But like, you know, they're fun.
So what you're appealing to, I mean,
I'm going to ask you this.
I'm going to ask you, did you actually sit down and say,
okay, who am I appealing to?
Who are my buyers of the book?
I just, I didn't want to leave out any cohort.
And I thought if you have all the advanced stuff,
but then you have Taj Borough teaching you how to paddle and the front end.
If it's Taj Borough, you kind of got cloud cover to pull anything off.
So we dumbed it right down in the basic end.
And then at the other end,
it was the most technical surfing you could possibly do.
So were you, but you actually sort of telling the kids how to paddle out?
How to paddle out, how to duck dive.
All that sort of stuff.
How to be a good house guest.
Just like it was, there were a few,
there's a bunch of other things that weren't just surfing.
They were sort of surfing related, sort of surfing adjacent.
And yeah, the, interestingly,
so Taj had just signed a huge contract with Billabong.
And so we hit them up to sponsor it.
And I said, no, no, we don't want to be part of it.
So he had a shoe sponsor, Globe.
So Globe got behind the book and then the book came out
and it was a runaway success.
How do you mean Globe got behind the book?
So they sponsored the book.
How do you, I've never seen it before.
How do you sponsor a book?
How does that work?
We just put a logo on the front
and then the inside front cover was a big Globe ad of Taj.
And then the whole bottom of the book was like a little flick book
of like one perfect way of Taj had written.
It just had this like spinning Globe logo in there.
Yeah, it was really cool.
And then Billabong were bummed they weren't a part of it
and they said we want to be part of the next print run.
And I said, we can't.
It's, you turn the deal down.
And then they said, well, we want to do a book as well.
And so they did a 30-year anniversary book for Billabong,
which we made for those guys and then we just-
Oh, you got, they commissioned you to do it?
And so we made that book for them.
I had a partner on it.
We made it together.
And then we used the money from that to start Stab.
So can you, if I could just take back and say,
how old were you when you did this book?
And the biggest gift was I couldn't get a publisher.
Because I learned how to do it and then-
Because you had a publisher that would have owned you
and you would have just got like a bit of a royalty.
And books are notoriously shitty business, so.
I've done four of them and there's no money in them.
That's why I always, I mean, generally speaking,
I'm always happy to gift the money to charity because like it's modest
but like at the same time I feel as though like there's no reason to do it
and I think if I can at least give some money to charity,
there's a reason to do it.
Otherwise there's no money, there's no reason to do it money-wise.
And there's no dough in it.
What's the royalty look like?
Well, you know, it might be 50 grand or-
You know, if you get a couple of reprints, it might be 100.
So like generally speaking, I can't-
The last book I did, I only did it during COVID because I was bored
but I think like 55 grand out of it all went to charity
because like I wouldn't have done it otherwise.
I was bored so I did it but I had to find a reason to do it.
I'm bored, I'll do it.
That's my reason.
And there's no money in it so if charity makes money out of it,
Otherwise, using a publisher I'm talking about.
And no, I'm not having a great publisher, they're great people
and all that sort of stuff.
It's just a low margin game.
And especially today.
Do you get a psychic reward from it though?
For that particular book I did, Rise, I enjoyed that one
and I think the one I did before that, Straight Talk,
Straight Talk, What It Takes it was called, sorry,
that the book was called What It Takes,
I did an audio book too.
I got a bit of a buzz out of doing an audio book myself.
I'll never do it again because I had to go in studios for like 36 hours,
not once, but the best I could talk for was three hours at a time
so I had to do 12 sessions.
But you still have to do the work of writing it first.
Yeah, I had to write first, then I had to do the audio.
And I had to read out loud what I'd written literally 18 months before
and I started finding things in there I didn't agree with.
Like we're no longer relevant but I had to read it as it was written
because it was an audio book so I had to read it like, you know.
Oh, so your thoughts have evolved.
Yeah, changed society.
The guy said, no, you have to read it.
You have to read it as you wrote it.
And so I only did that because that was good.
What I got out of that was like the experience of doing it,
reading an audio book myself in my own voice.
But when you read what you wrote, what you write,
which is what you see,
compared to what you say and what someone hears,
they're completely different.
Because you almost have to juice the storytelling about 200%.
It's not the same.
It's not the same experience.
So it was good for the experience.
The rest of it I didn't make any money out of it though.
Well, the money I made went to charity.
So what did you learn from writing?
What did you learn, not from writing a book,
what did you learn from the whole book exercise
that maybe equipped you to go then and do STAB?
So what did you get out of it?
What are the things that you learned?
What are the things that you got out of it?
I just love putting it all together.
That's the thing.
I was like, okay, putting together the whole deal,
selling the sponsorship, getting Taj on board,
writing it, bringing it all together.
We'd walk into bookstores and there'd be huge cutouts of Taj on the front,
holding his surfboard, and just all those little things.
I just love the – because anything you do, right,
you go and do something with a major talent.
You think that's easy to get those people.
Every single person has to be onboarded one by one.
And so I just realized,
I liked pulling things together and making sure the economics work,
making sure you've got something the audience likes,
something the talent likes.
I just love that part of it.
And I guess for the purpose of this show,
economics is probably not where I want to go because –
But I personally love economics.
What's getting economic?
I love the fact that you make money out of it.
But for the purpose of this show, I think what's really –
what I'm getting from you, because I've done a little bit of looking at some of the stuff.
You've done on YouTube and Instagram and various other things.
I think you might be being slightly modest when you say, like, you know,
I love putting it together.
Being able to – just in a position to identify day one someone like Taj Burrows.
And by the way, this just goes through the future of what you've done,
especially with Stab and all some of the stunts you've done.
My gut feeling is your real talent or the talent that you've used
that's really made you successful in things.
You've done a lot of good stuff.
One of the things that you're doing is your ability to market,
your ability to come up with cool stuff that shit everybody wants to have a look at,
like the shaping competition.
The Stab in the Dark.
And you know what I nearly did today?
I fucking forgot.
I got a T-shirt at home and it says Insula Morris.
It's a really, really old T-shirt.
And it's actually this year's 50-year anniversary of this T-shirt.
A mate of mine who lives up in Ballina now, his name's Steve White,
and he and I, when we were 15, we set up a board-shaping business
called Insula Morris, Island of the Sea.
And the reason I know we called it Insula Morris
is because I was doing Latin at school.
Stupidest subject in the world, but I did it in HSC.
And so I said we'd call it Insula Morris.
And we used to shape boards and we used to sell them ourselves.
And we used to sell them to blokes we knew.
And I actually had the T-shirt on this morning because I put it on this morning
because right around now is the 50th anniversary.
I pulled it out of the drawer.
And so coincidentally, I'm going to meet you today.
So, you know, it was just a coincidence.
And I was going to bring it in and show it to you.
And I was going to get you to sign it, actually.
But it was – and, you know, board-shaping, especially when, you know,
you ran the – I call it a stunt, but a very successful one.
Very successful one.
And the other stunt that I want to talk about in a minute,
but the one where you get that floating mat and they jump off the mat
and onto the board, that's so fucking cool visually.
So where does – where do those fucking unreal ideas come from?
Like they're actually unreal ideas.
How do you think of this shit?
Well, it's like anything, it's just some of the parts, right?
So it's not just me.
But there's just – so we've done a couple of these things.
So we did one with a guy.
We put just a flare, the flare you have when you're in trouble at sea.
On the back of a surfboard.
So we just put it through the leash plug and then surfed at night.
I don't know where you saw that one.
So it's like surfing at night with a surfer called Bruce Irons.
It's all lit up and red in the tube.
And that was our sort of big first big viral shoot.
And we got into those viral shoots for a long time.
And then the one you're referencing, the one, the dock, the big floating dock.
So I was living in LA and one of my really good friends,
he lives over there as well.
He's from Newcastle and he's the skipper on James Packer's boats.
Is his name Chris?
And I was like, hey, we've got this idea.
They probably got it, Matt.
And they're just so forensic on detail, those guys, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's super organized.
And so he went to work on this thing for six months.
He found the company in Canada because it's just, it's just a floating pontoons.
And he said, and because it's, I don't know if you ever saw,
it's used for, the one use we saw was, was in a sort of, I mean,
it was when people come off boats and there's a tiny bit of swell,
there's people walking down, you see a tiny little wave run under it.
And you're like, wow, that could work in the ocean.
And if we just anchor that off a boat, we can have guys run along
and then dive and jump under the wave and ride the wave.
Yeah, they run along with the board and they're under their arm.
And really difficult to do because you can't tell,
but it sits about a foot out of the water.
It's that thick, is it?
Yeah, it's really thick and it's really hard.
So it's unforgiving, especially when you've kind of got the ocean
and a significant swell coming at you.
But he did all the work on it.
And so he's like, oh, can I have two grand to buy this special rope?
And then he built the sort of the infrastructure that's required
to attach it to a boat.
And then because the, when the, when a wave hits it,
it has so much power and the thing's a hundred feet long.
Oh, is that long?
Um, we probably didn't need to make that long, but that's, you know,
it's like you get that many cubes, you, you put them together.
So we'd shot that in Bali and we launched in Benoa Harbor.
It took us, we got there at four in the morning.
It took us four and a half hours to go down the coast to get to where we need to go.
And then we got there and the surfers that we went there with,
we just, there were waves down the beach and we were just out the back
and they were just ignoring us.
And, uh, it was really frustrating for, for a time.
And then it, like all those things, you don't think they're going to work.
And it's just, they're kind of trials and tribulations.
You work through it, you work out how to do it.
And then when it comes together, the feeling is extraordinary.
So is it, yeah, but it's, again, you're being pretty modest.
Like, um, it's, as you said, it's the sum of the parts, but the idea,
like the, the, the very, very concept and the fact that you thought
you might be able to put it together.
I mean, do you remember where you were sitting or what you were doing
when you come up with the idea?
Just, just, just, let's talk about the floating mat, um, uh,
or the mat that floats on top.
And why did you do it?
Like, what was the purpose?
We kind of went into this, this stunt space because it was, um,
it kind of became a part of our DNA and we really tried to do these things
that hadn't been done before.
But did someone like Richard Branson inspire you?
Like that's, Branson's a big thing.
Stunts, Virgin, Virgin.
He built Virgin's brand by doing stunts.
Like, you know, driving a tank down the middle of wherever.
You know, like, uh, really crazy.
Stuff that most of us wouldn't think, I just wouldn't think about.
Like, um, did you get inspired by someone like him?
We used, there used to be this website called, it was called Joun.
It was like all these, it was like four J's and, and, uh, O-U-N-D, Joun.
And we, I, we used to scroll that thing and used to have just weird images
and we'd try to get inspiration from this thing.
So the, the flare shoot one was just from a Kanye West film clip of a little kid
running along with a flare.
It's like, we could put that on a surfboard.
But did you see that on Joun?
Uh, that one wasn't on Joun, no.
But, but, so, so you, you're sitting there and you see the, the, the, the Kanye West video.
Um, do, what's, how do you trans, trans, like that from looking at it and going,
oh fuck, I could do that, putting it on a bag of surfboard?
That's, everything we do is sort of bringing it from outside surfing into surfing.
So like the surfboard one you talk about, the Stab in the Dark, it's kind of the master chef
It's no different.
It's, I don't know.
Australian Idol of surfboards.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's sort of like, there's always an appropriation of bringing to surfing.
So that's how we kind of tackled it.
Um, the, yeah, so the, the dock one, someone said we should do that and get stand up paddleboards
and see if you can run and jump.
And we're like, then we'd seen that clip of that one floating with the tourists running
down it, falling over.
We're like, okay, let's join those two ideas together.
Um, and then a lot of ideas we do aren't that great.
Like we went to what we thought it'd be really cool.
We went to Indonesia and we thought, what if we put a thousand ping pong balls and someone
standing in a tube and there's just ping pong balls all around, around the tube.
You're surfing in the tube.
Surfing in the tube.
And there's just all ping pong balls around it, like an art installation.
How the fuck are you going to do that?
It was a failure.
And then we spent an entire day cleaning up the, the ping pong balls after it didn't work.
So, so because then, so the, because the stuff I love about it is like, the ones that work
And coming up with the idea and, uh, and I guess what you're saying is like, you're sort
of sitting around and you're sort of collaborating with your mates.
Like you're, you're all smoking a bong or what's going on?
Like, I mean, where does this shit come from?
Is it nighttime or what?
That friend doesn't drink anymore, actually.
We were just talking about.
We're just young blokes fucking having a, doing shit.
And I was just talking to a friend.
I was like, do you think this is possible?
This floating dock one.
And everything we do, we try to find a sponsor to fund it.
So the, the dock one, I have a bit, another business partner also named Tom.
We really wanted to pitch it to a brand called Volcom.
I pitched it twice.
And they didn't get it.
And I said, Tom, we've got to do this idea.
It's going to be really, really big.
And he's like, just read the room.
They're not interested.
I said, give me one last shot at it.
And he's like, just don't.
And so we go to this meeting and I said, I think the deal was 60 or 90.
The US, I don't know what the number was, but one of those numbers.
And I said to them, if you don't do it, if we don't get a.
If we don't get a million views in the first seven days to Volcom, it'll be free.
You're not going to charge them.
In other words, they can be the sponsor for nothing.
And you won't have to pay.
And they looked at me like, what do you mean?
I was like, I'm so confident about this idea.
I think this is the best idea I've ever had.
So there's no downside for them.
And they went, you serious?
I said, yeah, I think this is really big.
And they're like, okay.
It's a no brainer.
And then we dropped it and it hit a million views in six hours or something.
Um, and it just caught on fire.
And interestingly.
Did you ask them for double or if you get double, if you got 2 million?
Cause you got 2 million.
No, I got 2 million in, in a day.
So I mean, did they pay double or they still just gave you the 60 or 90?
No, no, we just got whatever it was.
Um, we were just happy that it did well and it connected and they backed us.
Um, but interestingly, we got so much, the accolades we got from that were incredible.
But you show up at Monday, Monday morning the next week to go to work and your
business is still, it doesn't happen.
It doesn't help your business at all.
It's not like you have this cash that's coming through the door.
And that was the last one of like, Hey, no more of these big viral shoots.
It's because it's not a business model.
It's really nice to get a spike like that, but then how long until you have the next
And it's, you can't build a business from it.
That's, that's interesting.
So I'm glad you raised that because I was going to ask you like when I, what, what was
the driver of, let's call it the stunts, but the driver of the stunts was it, I will do
this stunt because I reckon I can get Volcom to, uh, pay sponsorship.
Was in other words, I will design a stunt so that I can get some sponsorship from somebody
hopefully covers my costs and make some money out of it or was the driver of the idea, um,
I want to do this no matter what, but I need to make, in order to make work, I need to
Was it about getting sponsored first or was it about, uh, I just need to get this thing
It's kind of yes to both.
It's um, well we were like anything we were, we're the last to market in terms of magazines
up against all the big players.
So, so we just wanted to come in and have a point of difference.
And so we wanted out, we want it to the look and feel up to be completely different.
So how did you, uh, uh, collaborate and how does that fit into these things?
Like, so like for example, the let's talk to the man, um, how does that fit into that
relative to say the sponsor?
So what do you buy or what, how, how, yeah, so it's just the Volcom logo at the front
and then all the surfers who are running off the dock, they're all sponsored by Volcom.
They've got Volcom stickers on their boards and Volcom on their clothes.
On their clothing.
And then though, and Volcom can run all of those assets on, in perpetuity across all
So you run it on their website, posters, billboards, whatever, in turn that's how a deal works.
And how, but how did, how did Stab get a benefit of that?
How did the magazine get the benefit from that?
So the magazine would have the photos, we'd run that in print and then we'd put the film
online and then all of those assets would just.
So we just wanted to, when you, we just wanted a point of difference.
So everything we try to do would be like the gold standard.
The standard of storytelling is tell me something that I don't know and sort of like show me
something I haven't seen.
So that's what we're trying to do.
So it really does come down to storytelling.
And so when did you learn, like when you, you learned, I mean you worked at your dad's
pub, you learned how to, you know, look at the difference between money coming and money
Then you, then you, you know, worked at the magazine, then you went upstairs and you started
learning about the corporate stuff.
But where did you get into your head, it's about storytelling, because you're only like
in your twenties.
How did you understand?
The storytelling is such an important part of running a business, especially a new business
in a competitive environment.
I don't think I actually connected the dots back then.
I sort of knew what we wanted to do and how we're trying to do it and we're trying to
be world-class and try to create these big moments and I knew that like a big name and
a big idea, that's what connects.
Two basic fundamentals.
But no more articulated.
Not sophisticated.
Now I kind of truly know what connects in storytelling, but it's taken me a long time.
So what would you say connects in storytelling, from your successes, what are the sort of main
I think just storytelling 101 is tell me something I don't know.
And or show me something.
And I think if you, if you can kind of, whatever lane you're, whatever space you're in, if
you can be the expert sort of authoritative voice in that, in that space, I think it gives
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How important is, though, is the theater of it, though?
One, the theater business.
Three, the brand.
Seven, the brand.
Eight, the brand.
But also prankishness, some, I mean, it's like, you know, I'm having fun with it.
It's, um, you can call it a prank or a gimmick, or you can call it art.
So, yeah, I think that's important.
I think you need to have that high production value.
Like, I think that really connects with an audience.
If you put, if you kind of go and make.
You mean the actual production, that's well put together?
Yeah, well put together.
And it's like, um, that doc video.
So it was a complete shit show.
But I think when you watch it, it looks really slick.
But that's all – is that in the edit?
Yeah, that's all in the edit.
But, yeah, I think when it comes out, it needs to have that level of quality.
It's a bit like this show.
I mean, to be honest, like, you know, like I don't know what sort of material
I give our editors, but, like, they always make it look fantastic, you know.
Because you've got the show up, blow up mentality, yeah?
I've been listening a lot and you just show up and blow up.
And then they make it all look good.
And then what they'll do is say someone like this, for example,
they'll make it interesting because they'll – one of the reasons I'm talking
about this stuff is because they'll drag that stuff and they'll put it in
and somehow they'll bring it into the promos, et cetera.
And it's really good vision.
So it's about the production quality at the end of the day.
But I've got to give them the production quality.
I've got to give them an entree to the production quality through you.
You've got to extract the right pieces.
And I guess that's, like, all storytelling in all theatre.
Theatre is always about that stuff.
It's about colour, light, movement, you know, vibrancy.
Whether it's a prank or not, it doesn't really matter.
But it's got to have energy in it.
It's got to have energy.
It must have energy in it.
And I think your stuff has always got energy in it.
And I don't know whether you thought about that at the time.
Mind you, when young people do stuff, a lot of times it's got fucking energy
in it just naturally because they take risks.
Yeah, there is something about start getting into business early and taking
risks and making only mistakes early when you don't have.
Mortgages or dogs.
Yeah, it really doesn't matter.
But because I think the audience, if you pull it off, they like to see that.
They like to see the risk taking.
You know, because it's generally speaking something that some wouldn't do
And, you know, like I know everyone in this mental straight talk business,
everyone's under 30.
And I do it on purpose because they'll take more risks than I would ordinarily
even think about.
I just have to come and sort of be the so-called talent.
With the other talent, in this case being you.
But the rest of it's them, young people.
And you don't have to worry about how it shows up on YouTube or how it shows
I could be fucked.
I mean, just as long as my audience likes it.
So now you're 40, what, 40-something?
Are you different today to what you were when you – how different are you
to when you were in your 20s?
You're more aligned to the economics of things than you were to just getting
the thing out and done and produced?
The economic side of it is whatever.
I love just having a really good product.
And no matter what, I'll just always try to go for the best product.
What about risk then?
I love getting – I love being up against a wall.
It's my favorite place.
Is that because you're best then?
So you need pressure to create something?
We did a – that's my favorite place actually.
We did a sort of a big air contest at a wave pool in –
We're actually – the guys are there right now.
We're doing one in June in Japan.
But it goes around –
In a wave pool in Japan?
But the first one we did was in Texas.
Met this Texan like rancher, amazing guy.
Very – Texans and Australians are quite similar actually.
And we went to this wave pool, had this amazing air section.
He's got his own wave pool?
It was really cool.
And the thing about surf contests, the thing that makes them so difficult is you can't –
they don't start at 4 o'clock on a Saturday.
When Mother Nature shows up.
So I really like the idea of having these events.
But we did this one.
It was like 120 grand for the pool.
US we're talking.
100 grand for a broadcast.
And we just nickeled and dimed to try to have this event.
The guy let us pay the day after the event.
So let us get ticket sales and pay-per-view sales.
And maxed out our credit cards, won 75 grand off a friend.
And just – they're the sort of things that have made Stab what it is.
Like they're just these – these moments where like, shit, I hope this thing works.
And then it turns out to be one of the big pillars of what we do now.
And if I could just go back to Stab now.
I mean, I guess we're going back to a period when magazines were paper.
Was it similar to Trax?
Which Trax was like a dirty old get fucking print on your finger type magazine.
The only two magazines that I remember during that period, and I'm not Stabber so much.
I'm talking about the 70s.
When I was buying –
There was a glossy surfing magazine called Surfing Australia or Australia Surfing or something like that.
Something like that.
It was a glossy, but it was a bit too fucking expensive for me.
Trax was a bit more affordable.
The two magazines that were affordable were a magazine called Ryebald,
which is a dirty, filthy magazine like for young teenagers and young guys.
You're just looking at chicks naked and stuff.
And the other one was Trax.
But it was sort of like gritty.
It was gritty paper.
It was a big format.
Or Ryebald as well.
Like did you – what format did you have when you put Stabber?
We were just like glossy.
Perfect bound with the spine.
So it was bound with the spine.
Higher end, yeah.
And so like proper photographs, proper photography involved.
Very expensive produced, Mark.
Yeah, very expensive to advertise in, yeah.
It was – but for us –
Success came once we went digital because it opened up an international market as opposed
to a domestic market.
So but in terms of selling your magazine, you know, it was just through – in those
days it would have been through news agencies.
Yeah, all news agents based.
So you had to sort of hustle to get your magazine next door to whatever else.
Trax and Surfing World and everyone else, yeah.
So to make sure it was in the right spot.
Surfing World, yeah.
And then – so the digital world then came about and then of course you could then sort
of basically export your magazine to other places.
How did you do that?
Did you go and get sort of pro surfers to –
be part of the promotion?
Like you sponsored them?
Interestingly, so I had a guy start working with us, a guy named Tom Bird.
So he'd come from Fairfax.
He sold ad space for Fairfax.
And he came on and the GFC hit and I was all about print.
And he's like, hey, we need to get on this digital thing.
I started a thing.
So, oh, cool, that's good.
But I'm going to stick to print.
And he said, you're out of your mind.
Well, I just think this is going to be – I think we need to double down on this.
And he's doing really well.
He'd like – he'd gone through the contacts form of say for Nike on their website.
And then Nike were one of our really big clients.
And just really good at what he does.
Well, more like a master of the soft sciences.
Like those guys who are brilliant at reading people, real people sort of –
those people who just – people warm to.
One of those kind of –
One of those kind of guys.
Always on the client side, not the staff side.
Which is really good to have.
No, that's important.
And he said, well, I'm out.
And I said, what do you mean?
He goes, I'm leaving.
I said, I want $100,000 for a website, otherwise I'm out.
And I was like, it's just not a good time, Tom.
He goes, just trust me, I'll get this thing paid for.
And so he goes, I want to – gave him $100,000, had the website built.
We put a lot of time into the content and kind of made –
it was sort of – rather than being an afterthought, it was a focus for us.
Put someone full time on it and then he paid for the site in six weeks
and then all of a sudden –
In terms of advertising?
And then it just flew.
But how did you promote it though?
Like how did someone in America, how did someone in California
find out about your magazine?
We were never overtly Australian.
So we just wanted to sort of connect with whoever was world class.
World class photographer, surfer, cinematographer.
So you didn't really know where this thing had come from.
And so lots of Americans.
Lots of Brazilians, lots of Europeans.
And so when we went digital, it just opened up a whole new market for us.
But if they're going to talk about it, so like if I'm sitting in Brazil or wherever
and there's got to be a name in there that I recognize or a board
or a support shaper or there's got to be a break or something
that I recognize as a Brazilian.
Like that's a global thing.
What worked for you best?
Well, pretty much the talent.
The talent, the people.
Yeah, the people.
So like who, for example?
Like Felipe Toledo from Brazil.
How do you approach him?
Do you have to pay him?
It's getting more and it's the sort of with the demise of the surf industry,
which we probably will get to at a point, the servers aren't on what they were on.
So I don't know whether that will last forever for us where we don't pay talent
because we pay talent.
We put them in films.
We sell those films.
So, but for the meantime, it's more beneficial for their sponsors
to be in stab and getting that exposure.
So, so the great talent will agree to do it because somewhere in there,
he or she is going to have some of the sponsors stuff written on their board.
And they're incentivized to be, to be in there.
So, and so they, because, yeah, okay.
That makes sense because their game is to appear in as many broadcasts as possible.
And in which case you're a broadcaster.
It's a free magazine, online magazine.
So it's broadcasting.
So that makes sense.
So we do this surfer of the year poll.
If you do well in that, you get, you get bonuses.
Back in the day, if you get a cover, you get a 10 or 20 grand bonus of stabs.
So those things, there's different incentives for these guys.
And do Australian surfers resonate around the world?
As well as other countries resonate here?
Australian surfers, yeah, are the best of the best.
At the moment, Ethan Ewing is,
extraordinary, obviously we have Steph Gilmore, Mick Fanning, Joe Parkinson,
but Ethan Ewing is our big shot at a world title.
He will likely win the world title this year.
And who's the craziest out of all of them?
Crazy out of all the surfers?
Who did you deal with?
I've, I've hung out with the crazies.
I used to surf with the guys from Aruba a lot.
Mark Matthews is crazy.
Kobe Abedin is crazy.
The next generation, there's a-
Kobe's living in Bali?
Where's he living now?
There's a guy from the south coast of New South Wales, Russ Bjerke.
I keep saying we're crazy, but yeah, he's-
Were you around Rod Kerr's period from Bondi?
I know Rod, but yeah.
I was at his wedding, I know.
Actually, he was going to get married many, many, many, many years ago.
I don't know the district of his current.
But, and he was going to get married at my farm in Byron.
The wedding's going to be there.
And then I remember you rang me up and said, mate, wedding's off.
This is like, he was engaged to a girl in Perth.
Do you remember that one?
That was a fucking disaster.
He's a, like, you know, man, he's crazy, but he's a big wave surfer
and very good at, like, sort of pretty fearless.
When you're out in the surf and you see, like, a black line come in,
sort of, like, it comes up.
It looks like it kind of covers the horizon.
You see these things come in and your natural instinct is paddle out.
And they just sit, they hold, they just go in a little bit.
And it's frightening.
Like, you surely can't be looking at this.
They look, they put their head down, get this look in their eye
It's so confronting.
What do you think, what's the makeup of these people?
Like, someone like Kobe, I think he's just crazy.
And then someone like, I don't know whether you know,
a guy named Mark Matthews.
He is more, he tries to make a formula for fear.
So he sits there and he, like, looks up in his eyelids up
and just calms down, breathes through his nose
and then just chills everything out.
And, yeah, everyone's different.
But, yeah, they just have this, I don't know whether they're fearless,
but they just have this appetite for risk.
And it's astonishing to watch.
But some people would say, those guys, for example,
some of those guys would say,
Sam McIntosh, like, it's pretty weird.
Like, he has this mad appetite for risk in relation to business
or just doing some of the shit that you've done.
I mean, do you really actually see this much difference?
The techniques are different and the platform they work on is different.
But the process and the outcome are the same in that we all choose to be,
to take, not all of us, but people take,
some people choose to take risks in certain areas
and are able to manage.
That risk, that risk-taking or that fear of taking the risk.
I mean, you do it in business.
We're doing it in business.
Maybe now it's more plain sailing.
But then, you know, back then.
I guess it's, you'd be the same.
There's situations that you'd be really comfortable in
and some people would be uncomfortable.
And then vice versa, right?
Yeah, so why in your case is, so you're saying the same thing.
So why do you think in your case business risk is not really that big a risk?
It's not that big a deal.
Just like something's,
these guys surf these huge waves, they always say,
it's no big deal, you know,
for anyone else seeing this fucking black wall coming up.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, there is a sort of, there is a correlation for sure.
I like big waves, not to that level, but I really like big surf.
And there is an adrenaline that comes with it.
So you like the adrenaline?
I love getting hurt in the surf, but when it's not really bad injuries.
It's not going to kill you.
Yeah, I like those ones.
I just like the feeling of going out, getting washed around,
getting cut up and blood coming out of you.
I just, it feels, I don't know.
That's when I feel most alive.
But what do you think that fucking is?
Like, I like it in business too, by the way.
Yeah, it's a good feeling, right?
I mean, like people used to say, well, you get in the boxing ring.
I actually like getting hit.
I mean, I don't give a fuck.
And I want to know, does it hurt?
That doesn't hurt that much.
And now I'm going to give you some back.
Like, I enjoy it.
It's more, a little bit, I don't do it these days because, you know,
you get brain hemorrhage.
I'm getting older and stuff too.
But, like, I used to love it.
I used to, like, just, you know, I don't care.
If I can throw a punch at you, I don't give a fuck who you are.
It's a weird, is it a self-destruct?
Do you think it's a self-destruct thing?
I just, yeah, there's something about that, the heart rate coming up
and that it almost gives you this kind of, I don't know,
sort of Kevlar around you or something.
You kind of, it's good to just get pushed your elements,
like get pushed your limits a little bit.
I don't know what it is.
I can't articulate it, but I do like it.
Because you see these people climbing a rock face without any gear on them,
like no ropes and shit, and, like, I think, what the fuck?
Like, you're off your head like crazy.
Like, I can just imagine, I can imagine my grip, losing my grip, you know,
Your strength sort of disappearing and then you fucking fall.
That must be such a rush.
And I think that's part of it, like it's the rush.
And there's not that many people who do this
Like, would you recommend, do you reckon you could have survived,
had a good life without having done these things?
I don't think I'd be in business, no, without the risk.
It was, and, like, we've never had any outside money on Stab
or any investment from anyone.
So we kind of haven't had to answer to anyone.
So you can kind of make rational bets.
And that's what I like about it.
And it's only on you then.
You can just, it's all about the execution.
So, yeah, I do love the irrational bets.
So how long did you own Stab for before you sold it?
So, like, you sold Stab and you brought it back.
But, like, how long did you own Stab for?
10 or 11 years, yeah.
And you were, how old were you when you started, like, 20?
So you sold it in the mid-30s.
I sold it at 35 or 36.
Yeah, and who did you sell it to?
Sold it to Surf Stitch, the online retailer, yeah.
Yeah, the retailer.
So they had this big plan to weave content and commerce together.
Yeah, sort of like a convergence of the two.
Yeah, sort of use the magazine to promote their own brand as well.
And hopefully the magazine makes money.
So I presume it was profitable when they bought it.
So they bought a profitable business, merged it into their business.
You're going to use a profitable business to build an audience who's their audience
or part of their audience who buys stuff from them.
And then advertise.
To that prop, to that audience as well through the magazine.
That was a theory.
Yeah, that's in line with the CEO's, yeah, strategy.
That's probably what he said to you when he was saying,
oh, this is what we're interested in doing.
Did you stay on when you sold it?
So I, my shares were investing.
So you kind of get the chunk and then shares vested.
And so part of my deal was I moved to the US.
My shares vested early.
So I moved to the US.
They, to open up a store, open up the business in the US.
Is Surf Stitch in the US?
No, but they had an online retailer over there called Swell.
And so I was sort of working on Swell, working on Stab over there.
And then the CEO, Justin Cameron, he bailed.
And then a new CEO came in and he didn't like the strategy.
That's when we got unloaded.
Well, you bought it back.
We got really lucky.
So we tried really hard on the broader business.
They acquired a bunch of different businesses at that point.
And a lot of those founders took the cash and bailed.
And so when it came to the,
the negotiation, a, we were then unprofitable and then, so it wasn't that easy to sell.
Surf industry was sort of in structural decline.
Media was obviously in structural decline.
So there wasn't a queue of people down the street trying to buy surf media.
And then we've been in the game for so long.
We kind of knew any potential suitors, my partner and I.
And so we started banging the phones like, Hey, if this thing gets bundled up and you buy this thing, we're not, we're not involved.
Just so you know that, and this thing loses money.
Which means they'd turn, turn them, turn them away straight away.
So you sort of like conditioned the market a little bit.
And so then, then it was, we had the opportunity to buy it back.
But Tom, my partner was like, let's just get this thing done.
Let's put a, let's put a, let's put an offer in.
Tom, just hold, hold, just relax.
We're going to get this thing back.
We're going to get it back.
Which is stressful because if you had have lost it for a small fee, like a small, a nominal
sum would be frustrating.
But yeah, it all turned out in the end.
It all turned out well in the end.
And just, just like for my benefit, do you think that's a, an error of the owner or the
buyer who became the owner to keep in the business the two founders?
Because to some extent, whilst you've got paid, you know,
getting paid tranches.
And you had effectively probably an earn out or something like that sitting at the end
At the purchase price.
And as, as something starts, the demise of something starts to change, the owner says,
okay, we want to unload it.
But the problem is you've got the original founders still there.
Even though the original founders don't own the shares, but they still own the business.
I mean, to, to a large extent, to the, to the, to the broader public.
The, the, the broader public thinks, oh shit, like these guys have been running it forever.
They've been running it.
Now, if I buy it.
And they're not going to be there, what am I buying?
Do you, that's an error from the buyer dash owner's point of view.
So the, so you mean on the person buying it from Surfstitch?
No, the person buying it from you, having you stay there as a founder.
And then getting to a position where they wanted to resell it or sell it.
If you're not going to be, go alongside it.
But if, having had, having had you there the whole time.
Basically, you sort of kept you in that founder position, which means that if you're going
to leave, a new buyer's going to say, well, hang on, these guys are going to leave.
They're going to go and set it up to a new one down around the corner.
So what, it sort of, it, it, it, it negatized the value big time.
Yeah, it was, it would have been very difficult to sell.
Put you in control of it.
And we got really lucky.
So we, yeah, we did that.
So you conditioned the market and then you went, then did you put a consortium together
to buy it or did you just buy it yourselves?
It was a dollar Australian.
Because they were losing money.
You just like stop the bleeding.
Just take it away from us.
Because you know what it's like, you go into a bigger business, you've got to amortize
their accounting, their rents and everything else.
All of a sudden you've got this stress on the business.
We weren't running it the way we wanted to run it.
And so I was like, just, let's just cut the bleeding as soon as we can.
So what, what, what happened?
So just to explain to me, what happened in the surfing world, contraction of digital
media or media, generally speaking for surfing.
Where did this contraction come from?
I don't think surf media was a anomaly at all.
I think it's just in the broader media, just it went, I guess, internet, social media,
YouTube, all of those, those outside forces, those exogenous forces put pressure on media.
But are you saying that those other places like Instagram, for example.
They took people away from buying the magazine because I'm getting my thrills by looking
at, you know, something.
I'm going to Instagram for a half a minute or whatever it is, reels or whatever the case
might be, TikTok, et cetera.
So therefore I don't really need to buy the magazine anymore.
Well, it's twofold.
So you can get the audience through your phone and then the, if you want your, your advertising
to be efficient and measurable, you can't measure the efficiency of a magazine or a
billboard or you can, but it's very difficult.
You can, everything is so measurable when you do it on a phone, going through Google,
Facebook, which is Instagram and everything else.
So yeah, it was, yeah, those, that were pretty significant headwinds.
And then what's interesting is you're, the whole time you're in business, you think you
have all these enemies.
And for us, it was like, oh, surfer is the enemy, surfing magazine, trans world, or in
Australia, surfing world and tracks.
Surfing world is the one I was thinking about.
And then those magazines go away, like in America, surfer, surfing, trans world, they
all, they all just crumbled.
Yet the next day your business isn't any better.
It's not that you kind of realize they were never the enemy, the enemy of these outside
Which was really interesting.
So you went and bought it back for a dollar, but like, why did you bother buying it back
when you know that there's a contraction?
What, is it because you're just sort of emotionally attached to it or you didn't want to see it
We had a plan for the future.
We were kind of, we knew where we wanted to go.
We knew, we hoped that we had a, yeah, we kind of had a business model that we thought
And we, it's not like, cause the, the challenge with all those other magazines are owned by
So they couldn't move quickly.
And it felt like they were in a tanker, we're in a Zodiac and we're just zipping around
and we could, we could move really quickly.
And then we, we don't care about risk.
So it was like, spend here, spend there, don't spend here.
But like, we're not like, oh, we have to make this much money this year.
But like your, you still have to get advertisers.
What was the demise of Stab under the previous ownership?
Before you, before you brought it back, was it about not, was it about having too heavy
an expense relative to the revenues?
Because the revenues had contracted because there was too many other places that advertisers
could advertise on?
It's, it's a really good question.
So the reason it failed on the Surf Stitch, where they were trying to build their own
So say you're from Hurley and we do a hundred grand deal with you at Hurley and you're trying
to drive sales to your Hurley online store.
Because everyone wants direct-to-consumer, better margin.
Makes perfect sense, right?
Now, we were under instruction that if Hurley spent a hundred grand, we had to push Hurley
traffic back to Surf Stitch.
And we're like, hang on a second.
We're Hurley going to get the shits for that.
And so all of a sudden, our advertising diminished.
Because like, who, who would sign up for that deal?
Hurley worked that shit up pretty quick.
Effectively being competed on.
And so we became unprofitable really quickly because of that.
So you're like, so under the previous owners.
That they, you lost advertisers because the advertising model just didn't work.
But once you owned it, you don't have Surf Stitch.
You're not trying to redirect traffic.
You've got to put it back into an even footing.
And then I got the secret weapon, which is my partner, who's a complete magician.
So I knew we were going to be fine.
Oh, he's the guy I told you about with the soft science skills.
He's just, he's always on the client side.
He builds a lot of trust.
He will work with people.
A marketing director will go from brand to brand to brand.
And he'll work them.
And every place the new person goes, they call him up.
We want to do a deal.
And so I knew we had the best chance of success on this advertising model.
That was until COVID hit.
So how did it go up until COVID?
Was it making money?
We grew 500% after I moved to the US.
Audience or profits?
Well, yeah, revenue.
By moving to the US, that was the biggest.
Biggest success we'd had, which was great.
And then we kind of became a major player.
That was sort of, we went from being a little outside in Australia to an international voice.
So would that be like one of the biggest magazines today?
Surfing, surfing online, surfing magazines today?
The tallest midget.
It's a small business, but yeah.
But yeah, we would be.
And significant in terms, and what happened?
By the way, you mentioned COVID.
What happened to COVID?
So COVID, we just like everyone else, no one knew what the future was going to hold.
And then we got the calls, we're out, we're out, we're out.
And then that's when we went to a subscription model.
In the December 2020.
So monthly fee or an annual fee.
And that was the-
Because you now could rely upon advertisers.
We wanted, we always wanted to do it.
And it was just like the push that we needed.
And so that was absolutely revolutionary for our business.
What do you charge?
Like what's a monthly subscription?
Is it different levels?
Monthly I think is, talking US dollars, sorry, maybe 10 or 12 US a month.
And then 70 or 80 annually.
So you get a discount for paying annually.
So your business model now is people pay subscription as opposed to you relying so heavily on advertisers.
So that's pretty sort of modern, you know, because that's the modern way to do things.
You sort of, I guess you're probably forced into doing that.
You had no choice.
You had to try it out anyway.
But it's so much easier to run a business because you can just, you have a consistency,
you have a better eye on cashflow.
And then as it flips, I think, because you get the vanity metrics of social media.
So you put up a clip, you might get 6 million views or how many views on YouTube, which
is great, but it's not always a business.
And that's where the challenge we were in.
And I think these surf brands, they get, they have really wild up and down success as well.
But we're like, hey, we found the people in the world who want to put their credit card
They're the ones that way more chance of converting to being a customer as opposed to just anyone,
any view you're getting on the internet.
How do you work out the price?
How do you work out how much will someone pay?
What's the right subscription price?
I mean, did you say, well, Netflix is 20 bucks a month, so it's got to be less than Netflix.
I mean, how did you work that out?
We had a guy who was running the premium and he just came up with it.
We kind of, it sounds good enough to us.
Yeah, kind of ballpark.
It was in line in the US with sort of Disney.
What is it over there?
What do we got here?
They're different, but Disney, Netflix, it was sort of bored.
It's, it sits alongside those, but it's really interesting.
You go and see what Netflix spend on content a year, which is like 8 billion or whatever.
And we're the same price and we spend say four US on our content.
So it's just, yeah, it's, it's interesting.
And so, so given the state of the.
US at the moment, and I remember like it was heading towards a recession, but it looks
like it's still going, it's come back and it's doing pretty well.
Have, has there been any net effect on your subscriptions post-COVID, that inflation period,
higher, higher, higher interest rates, both here and in the US or around the world generally?
Have you seen any change in your subscription base?
We've been lucky.
We're still growing.
Um, but the, when you opt out, when you churn out, there's the, you can sort of say the
reason for leaving.
And then the highest rate of one is affordability.
That's what, that's.
And it's not your affordability.
It's your affordability in a whole affordability pack, like everything else, like cost of living
Like, so I've got to cut some costs somewhere.
So, and so do you see yourself then is stab subscription.
Do you see yourself more in the surfing world, surfing the people who subscribe?
Um, did, would you consider yourself as a luxury or a necessity?
I think we're a luxury.
But can you build yourself into being a necessity?
In other words, we're going to tell you shit that you need to know when it comes to, uh,
Do you put up, so on your website, do you have like surfing additions in, uh, I don't
know, somewhere in America where everybody likes to go and surf?
Do you like, do you have like a, you know, like the wind and the, the swell and, you
know, do you have updates?
Do you do those sorts of things?
I think when you talk about those, like, so there's surf line, right?
Which is cameras all around, beaches are all around the world.
And surf forecasting.
That is more of a utility.
Ours is sort of more on the entertainment side.
But you don't have that.
You don't have the utility in there.
Cause, cause, cause I was going to ask you, how do you think you can make yourself a necessity
as opposed to a, let's call it luxury or discretionary spend?
In other words, non-discretionary.
I've got to fucking have it.
Well, I, I guess the, the entertainment is the drug.
Like how, how vital do you, can you be to that audience?
I don't have the answer to that question.
Cause my, my gut feeling is that like surfing.
Like people in the surfing world, they love the drug of entertainment.
Surfing entertainment.
And all the shit that goes with it.
I mean, I can still remember going, sitting, I mean, I'm one of them, but because I'm like
a, you know, like a, I can get quite addictive or addicted.
I remember, I can still remember to this very day and it gives me goosebumps, sitting in
a hall up the North coast on sort of plastic chairs.
Watching morning of the earth when it first came out, I can still, and I can still remember
the soundtrack and, uh, and the sort of the addiction I had towards that.
And I actually bought the little tape and we had a tape deck and we used to fucking
play it literally.
Let me add three tapes with that.
And, uh, you know, a couple of other, a couple of other tapes.
You didn't have much money.
So, but that's what we would listen to.
We would listen to it.
Like, it was like impossible for me to go through a day without having listened to that
music only because I wanted to be, remember back the vision of the movie.
It was fucking uncomfortable and hot and it was shitty, but the movie was just, was one
of the first, but it was unbelievable for me.
Probably a thousand film.
And, uh, I'll never forget it.
And I would have been, if someone had said to me that, Mike, you can get that high by
buying a magazine and I would have kept doing it because there was no digital back in
those days, of course.
But can you see, I mean, you've got great vision of these things.
Can you see something that your magazine can present to, um, surfers and are surfers still
the same sort of people?
Are they still the same?
Generally, I think, uh, the one, the one advantage we have for being in a smaller kind of space.
If you look at say a, a GQ or an Esquire or a Rolling Stone and they get their cover
star that comes in.
So they get an Ed Sheeran or I don't know, Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift.
They come in, they do the shoot, they do the interview, they have the elite profile.
Really for those businesses to go to move to paywall, like the way we have, they kind
of need to make expert documentaries and really authoritative, just the inside lane.
And they're just really where they have their domain expertise.
The challenge they have is those celebrities are such big names in their own right.
They're never going to do a documentary with Esquire or GQ.
They're going to go and do their own deal with HBO or Disney or Netflix or one of the
For us, Dane Reynolds is an amazing Paul Twiggy Baker, Italo Ferreira.
They're huge in our world, but they're not huge, not big enough for the streaming world.
Mick Fanning could probably go across to the streamers.
Bethany Hamilton, maybe Kelly, maybe.
But if we can keep working with these superstars, that's about as vital as we can get.
And to create those moments where you have to sign up for what you're talking about.
I don't know whether we can create that same chemistry as Morning Girl.
But I think us surfing being so small is actually a benefit to us.
The talent is so small in terms of there's not, it's not Taylor Swift.
It's not Taylor Swift.
So say we're in soccer and we're doing something like Messi and those great plays.
They go and do their own deals.
But surfing, it's really big and broad, but it's not really, it's not too big.
So we still have access to those, our superstars.
And I think that's the way that we can get those people, make ourselves more vital.
But yeah, it's, I feel, I would prefer to, I almost feel like I'd prefer to own our business
than one of those other ones.
Because it's like, where do you go from there?
How do you go to subscription model and be like sort of words?
And that's sort of a hubristic thing to say, but I just wouldn't know how to, to chart
that, a path forward for those businesses.
And what's the future?
I'm going to, I'm getting wound up here, but what's the future of surfing?
What is the future of surfing?
Just on the, in globally?
I mean, is, has it reached a, in Zenith, like its highest point?
I mean, because there's all the competitions.
It's sort of like a bit like, it's a little bit like cricket.
Like, you know, there's so many fucking competitions on.
It's like, I just can't keep up.
And what happens, I stopped following cricket as a result of it.
During the cricket, during the summer period, there's so many things going on.
And it's just too much.
And it gets diluted.
Is surfing in a similar spot?
Well, we have the WSL, which are those 12 major events a year, and then you have the
other events around those, the sort of ones that lead up to those.
But they've just got such a big field.
And just like cricket, it takes a long time to go through the game.
Surfing takes a long time to get through the whole field.
And surfing entertainment.
Whether you run surf contests or create content like us or Mourning the Earth, you're only
as good as the wave quality.
And it's just not with Mother Nature.
You can't physically have good waves for four or five days out of 12.
It just so rarely happens.
It actually can happen, but it's very, very rare.
And so while you've got these big fields, the women have a smaller field, but the men
have such a large field, you're just going to have some boring things to watch.
And you don't know when it's on.
It would be as compelling as any other sport, but you just win, tides swell.
So it's too many uncontrolled variables.
We can't like we can't be consistent.
We can't have a barbecue and watch the surfing at four o'clock on a Saturday.
It's just not a chance.
And then we're in Europe.
We think it's going to start.
Then the tides are wrong.
And so it starts at midnight.
And so you have to be an actual judge.
die hard yes be prepared to fucking wait yes and it's a bit like not like the ufc so the ufc is
going to be on saturday afternoon at one o'clock and you know it's going to be volkanovski versus
blah and uh and you know what you're in for exactly it's much more control so that's why
yeah so it's not going to be the same not there's definitely not the same product no and you just
you really have no idea what you're going to get yeah and when it all comes together it's incredible
it might be as exciting as that as those matches yeah but the 99 of the time it's not yeah because
it doesn't all come together yes and it sort of can be i don't want to say because sort of boring
not boring but a bit underwhelming yeah it's just sort of background noise yeah yeah yeah
so where to from here what's what's what's next um we're going to do more of our events in wave
pools um wave pools much more predictable yeah they're more predictable you start at four o'clock
on a saturday um and we're just trying to do more documentaries more of those deeper storytelling
things like the the like the one you talked about the um the surfboard one
and yeah just follow that way kind of grow our subscriber base run more events um keep having
fun with it and how much time you spend in australia now uh i'm here most of the year i did
actually i did a two month stint well yeah two months in the three months in the u.s i just was
in the u.s last week for a week so i kind of do maybe a third of the year there yeah um and you
get and you live in byron do you go back down to your folks still your family's still in angari
yeah yeah do you spend much time down there
yeah quite a lot actually yeah uh it's good to get back down there and seeing them and there's just
there's quite good surf actually there's a terrible surf there now no no sorry yeah yeah yeah there's
been there's been i was up there last week a lot of swirl around them i'm like uh in fact i went to
meet uh ginge for breakfast and he i turned on me he was standing there with his shirt off it was
like seven o'clock in the morning seven thirty morning be just coming from a surf looking
magnificent ginge as usual um but in the middle of the in the middle of the cafe um but he just
yeah it's been a good run autumn's always the the best time yeah yeah yeah well sam thanks very
much that was great i and i actually when i go to buy an x i'll look you up yeah good seeing you
mate hey uh really nice to meet you thanks for having me same here appreciate it not all that
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