Stab Podcasts

The sun never sets in the EAST, and New York City never sleeps. A match made in insomnia, and we figured the two ought to meet. Last week, we gathered at Vans Skate Space in Brooklyn for the finale of EAST starring Harry Bryant, where we crowned Ashton Pickle heavyweight champion of the weird. The next day, we took the party to 90th Street, where attendees got to test drive Haz’s EAST quiver. Having made a day of the beach, we made an evening of the bar. Ashton, Harry and Dooma took the hot seat at Bungalow Bar retired for a live StabMic, with special appearances from Mikey Feb, Danny Johnson and Dugong breeder, Will Solly. Our thanks to Kona Big Wave and Vans for bringing EAST to New York, and to Red Bull, Dome Dust, TurtleBox, Visit Dominican Republic, Devium, Yucca Fins, Roark, and Vaer for making StabMic possible.

In Episode #33 of StabMic, Hunter Martinez, Dane Reynolds, and Jake Kelley sit down with Dooma to talk through the making of DEFECT. We let the film run, and we let the boys talk to it. Stories of great value ensue: misadventures in an Indonesian corner named after the phallic appendage of one sailor-surfer, the music choices, the trips, and an additional clip of Dane running shirtless through a cemetery, narrated by Chris Hemsworth. This is DEFECT, explained by the chefs themselves. For those keeping score, we missed a week. DEFECT was meant to be Episode #32, but music licensing issues threatened to consign it to the dustbin of digital history. Happily, the threat has passed, and DEFECT shall remain on the internet for eternity. Thanks to our partners at Red Bull, Dome Dust, TurtleBox, Visit Dominican Republic, Devium, Yucca Fins, Roark, Colby +, and Vaer for making StabMic possible.

“I look back on that moment as the single most important moment of my life.” Quite a thing to say about the day you died. On December 21, 2012, Greg Long suffered a three-wave hold-down at Cortez Bank and clinically drowned. Greg was wearing the first iteration of the flotation vest developed by Shane Dorian and Billabong. He yanked the trigger, but it didn’t inflate. He tried again. And again. Nothing. No air came. The vest was faulty. His team found him, and he was brought back from the brink. The vest emerged around 2012, as paddle surfing began pushing into territory that had previously been reserved for tow surfing. Sion Milosky’s death made the risks harder to dismiss. If the pursuit was going to continue, they needed a way out when things went bad. Greg eventually began working with Patagonia. After years of R&D, they released the first PSI vest to the public in 2017. Nobody has drowned while wearing one. Now, nearly a decade later, they’re releasing its second iteration. Alongside the new vest, Patagonia and Stab are releasing Inflation Point, coming soon to Stab Premium. Greg joins us at the desk to talk about the new film, the experience of drowning, the importance of safety, and the paradox of the PSI vest: the safer you make something, the more tempting it can become to push further. Greg says more people are paddling out underprepared, convinced they’re harder to kill than they are, with the vest as a kind of guardian angel. It was never meant to be used that way. We also hear from fellow big-wave surfer Izzi Gomez, who recently released Chrysalis, a film about her own journey with big-wave surfing and mental health. Thanks to our partners at Red Bull, Dome Dust, TurtleBox, Visit Dominican Republic, Devium, Yucca Fins, Roark and Vaer for making StabMic possible.

“I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell this story… But I’m gonna do it anyway.” The best stories tend to live on the wrong side of the velvet rope, and every so often a gentleman must ignore the bouncer and let the public in. Parko, being a gentleman of considerable repute, has brought several such stories with him. Bisous! Fresh off the Surf100 $100k Finale, where the public judges may have been a touch less charitable than the man deserved, Parko joins Dane and Dooma at the StabMic desk to unpack the experience of putting a jersey back on, and what he’s been doing since hanging it up for good in 2018 after almost two decades on tour. There’s an obvious bit of crossover here, too. Joel spent the entirety of Dane’s relatively brief CT career on tour, before Dane left the building and Joel eventually did the same. Between them, they’ve seen enough of the institution from the inside to have developed some opinions on how the thing is constructed. It’s a good old-fashioned trip down the rabbit hole. The contents of said hole: waking Adriano De Souza from his slumber for the traditional Namotu Skulldrag onslaught, the night before a heat, only to face Dane Reynolds in that very heat; rescuing Kelly Slater; the early days of the Cooly kids; Joel’s diagnosis of what the modern tour has lost; and a tantalising hint at a new film project in the works with Mick. Thanks to our partners at Red Bull, Dome Dust, TurtleBox, Visit Dominican Republic, and Devium, for making StabMic possible.

Remember when thousands of kilos of cocaine washed up on the shores of Hossegor, France, in the early 2000s, upending the entire surf community for years to come? Paul Evans does. In this Stab Premium podcast series, Paul speaks with dozens of people involved in southwest France's cocaine scandal and how it affected their no-longer sleepy surf village — and pro surfing as a whole. Episode 1 is available for free above. Episodes 2-4 will be available exclusively on the Stab Premium app, dropping every Friday starting on August 14. This is Hossegor Beach Cocaine.

Who is JOB, really? One of the greatest surfers of his generation, for one. At Pipe, he’s right there in the best-ever conversation, on any respectable list. In terms of pure comfort at one of the deadliest waves on the planet, he’s the prize mattress in the showroom. Five stars, perfect lumbar support. He toys with Pipe like the reef beneath him is a foam pit rather than a death trap, riding colourful pool toys and soft tops through a place that has humbled generations of very serious adults. Naturally, he’s now selling his own soft-top brand, Fun Days Surf. If you’re going to spend your life doing something ridiculous, you may as well own the factory. Build a business around your bad habits. The venture marks a clean break from Catch Surf, the brand he helped build. Jamie gets into the split in this episode, and he has plenty to say about how it all unfolded. “Sometimes people forget about the value you bring to the brand,” he says. “When they forget about that, it’s time to forget about them.” And though it seems perfectly ordinary now, a grown man wandering down the beach, board under one arm, phone held high in the other, live-commentating one’s own existence, it wasn’t always this way. Jamie essentially invented surf vlogging. At one of the most intimidating, tradition-bound waves in the world, no less. Imagine the abuse he copped, paddling out with a camera pointed at his own face. Then again, it helps when you’re one of the best to ever surf the place. Genius affords a certain social licence. Jamie is also a vocal advocate for saying exactly what he thinks, and he’s refreshingly punchy here. He names his greatest Pipe surfers of all time, unpacks what really happened with Catch Surf, and argues that most people claiming to be “core” are still cashing cheques from surf brands, which by his definition at least, means they’re not core at all. Thanks to our partners at RedBull, Vaer, Dome Dust, SlowTide, and Devium, for making StabMic possible.

“Anyone who does surfing is going to do it in their own way.” “The WSL does it in their own way, Stab does it in their own way. Obviously Louis Vuitton is going to do it in their own way. It’s going to be extra and over the top.” The question, really, is not whether Michael February belongs in a Louis Vuitton campaign. The question is whether any other surfer make the whole proposition look quite so fabulous. When the images dropped online, Mikey clad in a magnificent yellow knit, clutching a man-purse, the surf world was, you might say, a little divided. Some lamented the death of core surfing. Others accused LV of appropriating surf culture, or of repackaging the cultural myth of the Hollywood surf movie through an entirely outsider perspective. Rushing to the defence of Mikey and the great French luxury conglomerate were the wizened souls of Evan Slater and Joel Tudor. “It is so wild to me all the shit talking going on about the recent LV surf fashion line,” wrote Joel. “Yall are some hypocritical barneys.” “Where were all these passionate ‘saviours of surf culture’ when licensing conglomerate @authentic acquired the souls of every major surf brand from the past 30+ years?,” wrote Evan Slater. “This is life after death, guys. Keep surfing and keep generously sharing the gifts of surfing with others. The rest will take care of itself.” A lot more yapping, back and forth, can be found in the comments here. Also in this ep: did Pharrell and Louis Vuitton rip off Vans? Dane seems to think the whole thing might be a marketing play, and a very smart one at that. The boys also talk team surf films, EAST, and check in with the Rip Curl Padang Padang Cup comp director, Harry Mann.