Sometimes the best interviews are the dumbest…
I’m always kind of annoyed when I see an online article titled “X things we learned from so-and-so’s Reddit AMA.” So lazy, literally just scraping content to steal page views. Shameful, really.
But guess what, suckas?
I’m about to do the same thing! Our fave tow-headed super freak John John Florence did an AMA today and my creativity tank is running on empty at the mo’, so I’m gonna call it “curation” and hop on the bandwagon.
The hypocrisy is so thick I can taste it.
/u/HockeyCannon: What do you think of your father writing a memoir?
I don’t know if I like it very much so I don’t think about it, haha.
/u/BlasphemousFish: Do surf groupies exist?
/u/HayEwe: What’s your best surfing story?
My scariest one was when me and my friends surfed this big outer reef wave, and it was just us two, and we didn’t really know how big it was, because it was really far how there. We had the new blow-up vests and all that stuff. And so we paddled out, and we were like sitting there and I was like, “I think we’re in the spot right now.” And we paddled over a smaller wave, it then there was like maybe a 20 foot wave breaking behind it. I was just looking at it like, “We’re not in the spot right now!” It landed on us, and I was underwater for a while and I was trying to stay calm. Finally I was like, “Okay, I’ve gotta go up.” So I pulled my vest, and it blew up, and I slowly started going up. And then right as we got to the surface, another wave hit me and I just went straight back down. I was just like, “Oh no, this is really scary.” And then I was kind of getting rolled with the wave, because my vest was blown up. Yeah, it was just a long time underwater. Two waves. Really kind of scary moment, because we had no water safety or anything.
One of the best moments? Probably at the same wave, like a year later. It was just me and my friends. We were on jet skis, and we do step-offs off the jet skis. We’d go in pairs, my friend was driving and then I’d just step off the side of the jet ski and get these huge waves on little tiny boards. We surfed it for like 6 hours that day. Me and like five of my friends, and we were just taking turns getting the biggest, best waves of our lives. And just screaming the whole time. So yeah, that was cool.
/u/kfinnegan15: Where was your favorite spot to film for the movie? [A Blue Moon]
My favorite spot to film for the movie was probably South Africa. That place was just one of my favorite places in general, and to be able to go and film with the equipment we had was kind of something I had dreamed about for a while because I had been there a lot. So I was like, wow, if we could capture this, and something amazing… it would be really cool.
It’s just very vast. You’re in the middle of nowhere and everywhere you look pretty much you’re like, wow… that’s crazy. Yeah, vast would be the word.
The first trip we had like 20 people with us which was a huge crew. It was the biggest crew of the whole movie and then after that we slimmed it down to what we needed. That one just kind of had everything thrown at it and it made it so it didn’t work so well. Then we lessened up the crew for the next trip and it made everything go more streamlined and better.
/u/TuskenCam: What is the best meal to tuck into after a big day on the water?
My favorite meal to eat after surfing all day is pasta. I love pasta! And it makes me really full, and I sleep really good after eating pasta.
/u/JaredsFatPants: I’m a total kook that lives on the north shore. Wanna surf inside Pua’ena with me sometime?
Sure, maybe! Haha
/u/bhotep: What’s your favorite non-surfing film? And why is it still Point Break?
So it can be any movie? My favorite non-surfing film would probably be Interstellar. A great movie, I’ve watched it probably five or six times. And another movie would be Rush, it’s about Formula 1 drivers, don’t know if you guys have seen that — it’s one of my favorite movies as well.
Point Break is not one my favorite movies, haha. But it’s a cool movie – I’m excited to see the next one!
/u/CheddarCheesasaurus: whos your favorite shaper? How important is it to understand how to pick out the best board for my surfing/body type?
My shaper I have now, Jon Pyzel. He’s from Hawaii and lives down the street from me, and he’s shaped my board pretty much my whole life.
As for picking a board – it’s a personal preference kind of thing. There’s so many things that go into a surf board — the waves that you’re riding, and, like you said, the size of a human you are… I don’t think about the boards too much, to be honest! I just get boards and tell them how I want to change it and they change it to that, but it’s hard for me to explain how to tell someone what kind of board to ride, it’s such a personal thing.
The changes I ask for vary from big waves boards to small wave boards, all the boards are so different for such different kinds of waves: changing the shape of the tail, changing the concave in the bottom of the board, how much lift you’re getting out of it, how fast the board goes down the line…
When you add things, like, “Okay, I want my board to go really fast across flat sections,” then it’s going to make the board stiffer. So you lose things when you add things, and it’s kind of finding the happy medium. You’re really happy when you finally find a good board for certain kinds of waves!
Small waves are the hardest, but when you find a good small wave board if feels amazing, and I won’t ride it until I have a heat because I’ll just end up breaking it. My boards last probably two weeks, haha. Yeah, they don’t last very long. The other winter I broke 38 boards. I surf a lot, and the waves we surf in Hawaii like to break your boards.
/u/Joplinger: What’s your pre-contest routine?
My pre-contest routine? I’ve been working on it more and more lately. I kind of started doing more warm ups just to get my body moving. Jump roping and stuff like that, but I would say I pick 2 or 3 songs before each event that I like at that time and just listen to them on repeat and it helps keep my mind off the surfing and the heat and over-thinking it and think about the songs more.
I think I was listening to Eazy-E songs at the last event, but I’m not like a full rap person. My base in music is Pink Floyd and Talking Heads and Sabbath and Zeppelin and all those bands, but Eazy-E was a good one for the last event.
/u/Mister-Duke: What is the lineup at Pipe and other heavy breaks like? How do you determine the pecking order with so many great surfers in the lineup?
The line up at Pipe… there’s not really any lineup like that in the world because of the amount of people that are out there and the fact of how scary the wave is in itself.
Pipe has a pretty solid pecking order, like you know who’s up next and a lot of people don’t like it, but in a way it kind of needs to be organized like that because if they don’t, people are going to get hurt, people are going to be dropping in on other people. It’s not really a wave you can just go in front of someone on, you know, you could end up really hurting someone and possibly killing someone.
/u/lambkeeper: Who do you think is going to win the WSL tour? And do you ever do night surfing?
Hmm, it’s pretty hard to say right now coming into the last contest, but I would say…it looks like Mick Fanning, most likely.
Yes! I do do night surfing. We did it actually this summer and it was a full moon and we surfed in front of my house for like 3 hours. It was really cool.
It was one of the times I’ve had that sharky feeling, ha. At first it’s pretty dark, or well, it’s bright but it’s kinda hard to see and then your eyes adjust and it’s surreal.
With the white moonlight on the sand and then the water, it’s just so crazy the way the water reflects. It looks like a fluorescent light or something and it’s definitely a really cool experience.
He’s still answering questions as I type this (not mine, though), head on over to check it out for yourself. As for me, I feel dirty, I’m gonna go take a long shower, the length of which has absolutely nothing to do with the photos I just saw which are purportedly of Anastasia Ashley’s vagina.
