A 15-Year-Old Snowboard Phenom + A 3-Minute Tube Hunter Walk Into StabMic
“If I didn’t have a GoPro, no one would believe me,” says Koa Smith.
It’s a natural progression from Reynolds, Slater, Dora and Florence.
A 15-year-old Chinese snowboarder, Patti Zhou, and a 31-year-old psychedelic smoothie merchant, Koa Smith — the two most recent guests to grace StabMic.
Patti joins us in the middle of a pro snowboard event in Switzerland, casually describing throwing double corks off a 22-foot pipe as “pretty chill.”
She’s 15, surfs sporadically, and still nearly wins Stab High when she shows up.
“I think they can coexist,” she says of surfing and snowboarding. “Without the other, that’s not me.”
Her parents sold their house to fund her career, she explains. She plans to buy it back ASAP.
A couple of Swiss Francs wouldn’t hurt…
Then there’s Koa, or Charles, if you’re airport security. Fresh off signing with Roark, he talks through the modern pro surfer’s reality. Or rather, questions it.
“What does it even mean to be a professional surfer now?” he asks.
Koa opens up about the head injury that left him depressed, disoriented, and eventually experimenting with psychedelics as part of his recovery. What followed, according to him, changed everything.
He also talks Skeleton Bay, Pipeline, secret waves, startup life, and the increasingly obvious fact that some of today’s best surfers happen to be their best entrepreneurs.
This is Episode 6 of StabMic.
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