Flipping the script.
It is Christmas morning in Cortina, Italy and beautiful. Snow on ground, church bells ringing and I must get to the slopes but before I do, I would like to leave you with a loving new profile of Kai Lenny by the great Daniel Duane.
Duane is an accomplished author, having written one of my very favorite surf books Caught Inside. The piece is in the technology magazine Wired and likely very good but I will have to read later as the mountain is calling.
Here’s a paragraph.
Hearing Lenny talk about this in person, I could see his appeal to the Zuckerbergs of the world. The nearest cultural antecedent to Lenny—the other obvious choice for a billionaire’s water-sport man crush—was Lenny’s own childhood hero, Maui big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton. But Hamilton was the living archetype of the blond, muscle-bound surfer-god, with giant shoulders and cold green eyes—and therefore too reminiscent of the high school bully who pushes around the budding computer genius before the latter flips the script and becomes richer than God.
Lenny, by contrast, reads more like the protagonist in an extreme-sports version of Revenge of the Nerds, where the dorky kid from a loving family, abused in adolescence by the popular boys, grows up to become a better athlete than any of them, and way better looking.
Very cool.