Ryan Lay - "I'll more than likely be at the grocery store after skating."

I could've probably fanned out on this introduction for our Ryan Lay interview,  looking over it from multiple professional angles I got lost in the actual fact that I should just be stoked to sit down for an hour with someone I perceive as one of the true 'professional' skateboarders I've had the pleasure of talking to. 

So I reached out to Global Team Manager Levi Brown instead for an intro as to why Ryan was put on New Balance Numeric.  

"As far back as I can remember Ryan has been a part of the skateboard scene in Phoenix, and not just a part of it, but distinctly standing out in it. Nollie flipping sets of stairs others could only kickflip. And since then, Ryan has continued pushing himself as a skateboarder putting out part after part, and on top of that has become a community leader with his nonprofit Skate after School. So when Chad Tim Tim recently ran into Ryan at Santa Ana skatepark and brought his name back to the office we were all for having Ryan become a part of what we’ve been building here
at New Balance Numeric."

So here's the interview, we'd like to thank Dom over at Keen as well as Mark and Levi at New Balance Numeric for all their help with this one. 

Give us the “why” and “how” of putting Slow Impact together?

Theo Krish and Charlie Davis [from SkatePal] and the Pushing Boarders crew are good friends of mine. They were my biggest inspiration in doing Slow Impact. I got to participate in the second Pushing Boarders which was a rad experience. A lot of us were feeling sad that it wasn’t going to continue and obviously COVID wiped out in-person events for three to four years. 

I felt like our skate scene wasn’t as strong as it was 10/15 years ago. I’m pretty firmly rooted here [in Arizona], I still have my foot in professional skating, there's a lot of interesting things happening here, and I felt that if I could pull all the pieces together from the university, sponsors in the industry, and some of these people in the academic world that I know – alongside pro skaters – that maybe we could draw a big enough crowd to have a little bit of a vacation here. 

Phoenix is unique in that we have a nice climate in the winter and a horrible one in the summer, unlike most places. So we figured February would be perfect for most skaters in the North East and people based in England; they would just want to skate for a few days in a t-shirt so it was a confluence of all those things put together.

The main impetus was that as you age as a professional skateboarder you realise that the video part is the most-pronounced part of your career, which hasn’t always been the case for me. It gets harder to film and you're left with free time which is why skateboarders become artists or small-business owners: they have their own audience and want to do something with that time. Nobody is skating forty hours a week after 30 years old unless they’re Ishod Wair, let's be real. One of the things you want to do is contribute to the broader conversation of skating.

I feel pretty passionate about how if you call yourself a “professional skateboarder” you need to do the work of contributing to skateboarding at large. It doesn’t need to be all community work but you either need to be making video parts that people are talking about, contributing to the conversation, going on a podcast, making stuff or products that people are interested in. If you’re not here to do that then what are you doing here? I think, rightly, a lot of people get flak when they’re just hanging around, not doing much, or aren’t contributing to skating and are still collecting a paycheck – which to me is understandable. Why do you have your foot in the door if you don’t really seem to care about the community anymore? 

For me I had the resources to do ‘Slow Impact’ and it seemed like a good opportunity. Again, without Pushing Borders, there was this parking space in that world of people who are a little nerdier, are doing some academic work around skating, or are some community organisation, and they want to gather and talk. Obviously, people are doing this online but when you get people in a space together with four days of events similar to Copenhagen Open, it accelerates and impresses a lot of “knowledge production” in a very short amount of time, which is pretty rad. People will meet twenty new friends from different worlds and, in the best case scenario, they’ll help one another on whatever they are working on. That's what happened for me at Pushing Borders and I can't thank those guys enough.

Were you invited to Pushing Boarders due to the Skate After School programs you’re involved with or were you invited more as Ryan Lay, the professional skateboarder?

I think it was Skate After School, SkatePal and also the fact I was a pro skateboarder with an audience I could bring, maybe. I mainly went because I had a relationship with them from SkatePal, because the guys who ran SkatePal [Charlie and Theo] were helping organise Pushing Boarders, so they knew my role with Skate After School and as a pro skater, and they were looking for someone who fits both. 

When you’re planning an event that size it helps to have people with an audience. Some of the most interesting insightful people might not have an audience, and perhaps won’t draw a big crowd, but you need those people to make the meat of the event. Organisers look for pro skateboarders because you want to attract people who may be on the fence about coming and a name can help.

I struggle having to organise myself let alone anything else, how do you find being involved with so many things at once? 

I definitely struggle with it. I’m trying to get more organised, after I got let go from etnies I moved into a full-time role at Skate After School and I put skating a little more on the backburner because I financially had to. In the last year since getting on Sci-Fi Fantasy and New Balance Numeric I’m in a different financial position which I'm excited about because there's still a lot of skating I want to do at the tailend of my career. 

Skate After School is going to be a project that I help out with, so to answer your question, it probably appears that I'm doing a lot more than I am but there's a lot of people running Skate After School, day-to-day, and even with Slow Impact we had people help run that event. It's always going to be the case that the person who foregrounds the idea is going to get the most credit for it and also whoever has the biggest audience. I’m not saying Slow Impact wasn’t my project but there were alot of people who have helped me out.

The short answer is that I don’t do as good a job as I wish I could because I want to skate really hard, and I didnt have the time, but now with the resources available I can be more involved again. Whether that's with SkatePal and all the other projects I haven't been able to focus on because I was working a job.

Post-etnies, you’ve been rocking New Balance. How did that come to fruition?

I was floating around a little bit and, honestly, I was at a place where I was content with retiring. I've never wanted to be the guy that's pushing to make a place in skating if it doesn't exist naturally. We’ve all seen the dude who hangs onto being flow for too long. For me, before New Balance, I didn’t have the resources to fully devote myself to skating. 

I was living in Costa Mesa, because my wife was in a residency there, and I skated with some of the New Balance guys at Centennial Park. I’d just made this decision to leave Welcome and ride for Sci-Fi which made me feel rejuvenated. I wanted to put out a little part because I hadn't done anything in a while so I worked for a few months and put out that Sci Fi intro part. 

Those guys [New Balance], fresh off skating and reconnecting with them, were looking to make some changes to the team as well as being fans of Sci-Fi so they contacted me right after my part came out. It's a perfect fit for me because I love New Balance’s heritage – I'm an avid runner, I love the running component and history, and also the lifestyle shoes. I'm a big fan, I wore them in my “normal” life anyway, I just needed to find the right skate shoe. 

A weird paradox of being in skateboarding, as a professional, is that you don’t really try a lot of products. I’ve been sponsored since before New Balance Numeric started so I’d never had a chance to skate with them. It's always odd when you make this decision to ride for a company, thinking, “I hope there's a shoe that I like.” I like the 440 and the 480 that's coming out soon. There hasn’t been a formal announcement, or a part, since I started skating them so it makes sense it's gone under the radar. I probably won't do an intro part but we’re going on a trip. New Balance do campaigns more for riders around a shoe, which we’ll shoot in Chicago.

Before you got on New Balance Numeric were you a fan of anyone on the team? After the opportunity came around were you, like, “Yeah, me and Tiago [Lemos] doing it together?” [laughs]

I’m definitely a Tiago fan, Andrew Reynolds is an obvious one too. I’m also a big fan of Pedro Biajio, he's a little more underground and the whole team is pretty great. I met the entire global team earlier this year where I met Mark Baines and – no joke – I'm also a bit of a Mark Baines fan. I loved his skating growing up, I'm a nollie 180 into switch crook guy too. When you look back on how you form the tricks that become part of your arsenal, I definitely took some nods from Baines. He didn’t do tricks that were obnoxiously tech, he was a more tasteful, nollie and switch, tech guy.

It must have been difficult leaving a longtime sponsor with Welcome Skateboards. How did that go?

It was really the most challenging thing I did in my career. I've been let go from a bunch of brands, and that never feels good, but to be on the other side of things it doesn't get any easier. It’s like, “Would you rather break up or be broken up with?”’ [laughs]. I felt I had a good opportunity with Sci-Fi Fantasy and I had plateaued with Welcome Skateboards. We filmed a couple of videos and did what we could do. I'm very grateful for the career they helped me build but I wanted a change of scenery.

Jerry [Hsu] isn’t only one of my favourite skaters but he’s also a “skater's favourite skater” so to be on the ground floor, building a new brand with him, is exciting. Riding for older brands it's really hard to reorient the ship, you’re on a trajectory that's hard to make any changes whereas with a smaller brand you get input. I really needed that. I felt pretty jaded from skateboarding. Again, I could be fine if I didn't have my name on a board, I was content with all the things I'd done, so now I'm sparked again. It's been odd to transition my brain back into filming video parts, working on a first video – if it happens, building a team where you need to make cohesion which is essential to the video. We're going through this whole process together. 

It sounds as if your creative side was on the periphery of your career rather than at the forefront, within your own skateboarding. Is that correct?

If you've been skating long enough, even if you aren’t particularly good at it, you get strong opinions about how everything works [laughs]. It lends itself into wanting more control with the things that you do. Whether that's running an event or a brand you ride for, you want to give input because I must have watched a million hours of skate videos and ingested so much skate content, some of it useless, you form this opinion. As you know, in the skateshop everyone wants to talk shit about skating! But it's nice to be included in those conversations in a much more intimate way from how graphics and videos look to the team we’re trying to build.

You’re four years and 62 episodes into Vent City, one of my favourite skateboarding podcasts. How has the show been going for you and do you see the format changing to video at any point?

It's going well. We recorded something yesterday, we’re doing it as we feel like it. People are busy and audio is such a chore! It's the worst job in the world, at least when you cut video you can scrub and see through it; audio is very challenging. I’ve just brought in my friend to take care of it so hopefully we can do a little more. I still feel like there isn’t enough good skate podcasts. 

I'm friends with Joa [Gifted Hater] and there's a huge audience and market for skateboard content. The only reason I don't watch YouTube is because I don't have the time to sit down and stream a video. Maybe it ages me a little bit but podcasts, when you have a lot going on you’re looking for something to listen to, you probably listen to anything. It doesn't even matter if people are ingesting it, it becomes background noise.

Some people prefer a straight to the point interview so what constitutes a good or bad skate podcast for you?

For me I don't find most pro skater’s origin stories that compelling. There's a place for it, it acts as a historical archive of sorts. With Vent City, you meet people through skateboarding like Aram [Sabbah] from Skate Pal who isn’t a pro skater but has a far more interesting story that really tells the heart of skating much more than, “I grew up skating with clay wheels.” My origin story isn't that interesting either but it's relatable: I got introduced to skating from my older brother, I quit sports, I skated at skate parks until I got good enough to get sponsored. End of story [laughs].

Vent City also curtails around general interviews by discussing difficult topics such as mental health. How do you create the comfortability to talk about personal wellbeing and therapy in the podcast environment?

The group we've assembled are already pretty comfortable having those conversations as friends so it's helpful. We also don't have a whole lot to lose, they have careers in other industries, so that can be helpful in being a little more vulnerable. When you get people on, with this huge audience and the curtains are pulled back, people can be really hesitant to show this internal dialogue and make it public. We started the show with the intention of having this standard conversation: “What are the things we're going through?” 

I've gone back to some of those and I've gone through a lot of growth over the past three/four  years in the same way everyone else did. But for us the trajectories went off at Bernie 2016/2020, then COVID and social justice awareness which really ramped up. We set out with this intention of “It doesn't matter what happens outside of the show” – let’s have vulnerable conversations and see if we can make a show that doesn't appeal to everybody, which was another intention on the whole. It's better when shows are a little more divisive with people who love it or hate it, unlike shows like The Nine Club which shoot straight down the middle for a much broader appeal, without any intimate look. I’ve always approached things by thinking, “Who are the people I'm trying to attract? What are the conversations I ultimately want to have?”

I want to hear from people who love the show and maybe it got them through something, and having those conversations at something like Slow Impact. I'm not trying to waste my time building a huge audience with people who are, like, learning about the history of this person skating. I don’t know if that answers your question but – the short of it – we were happy with it being divisive, being as vulnerable as possible, and it is really scary to put yourself out there. But you have that conversation in private, have someone edit it, we listen back to it occasionally, but we put it out there. If people hate it, that's fine but it seems like the small audience we have enjoyed it. Again, with writing, do you want to write to the masses with some bullshit or do you want to write from the heart? You’d prefer the 5 people who actually take it in and listen.

There is that curtain where people want to make it in skateboarding, but don't want to reveal who they actually are. Is it just down to how to market yourself?

Talking is especially hard for men and most pro skaters are men. It's hard for them to be vulnerable to a public audience and no-one wants to be divisive because everyone has very precarious situations as a worker. As sponsored skateboarders, we’re all private contractors. For the most part no-one has a whole lot of insurance on their careers so when you have that precarity, you just want to present the skating – “Let the skating do the talking and I'm going to move onto the next video part.”

It really feels like that shifted a lot though in the past few years, people are much more comfortable, especially as political tensions have heightened. Many of my friends and peers who weren’t comfortable talking about things feel more emboldened to do so or feel a duty for them to speak about certain things. On the flipside of that, I think you can also recognise there's fatigue of awareness spreading. Like, what are we doing if we just – for a UK example, “gripe on about the Tories” online. Are you really doing anything? Or are you feeding this whole catharsis that you have because you're frustrated with the situation and things didn't pan out the way you thought? Is going on the internet and posting making you feel like you're doing something, even though you probably aren’t? Except maybe bolstering a pretty gross Silicon Valley corporation? 

That's a window into me, personally, where I’ve been thinking about what the end result is of all the posting and awareness spreading? We definitely tried that on Vent City and I've done that in my career. I think a lot more about what are the more tangible real things in the concrete real world that can effect change. If I'm not in the headspace to do that then maybe I should sit back for a little bit and gather my thoughts. 

I feel intimately involved in that world, whether or not it's helpful, around things that I’m very tuned in with. Not only here but other places, I follow the UK elections closely as well/ When there are unique opportunities to make change, or help join the effort towards mass politics, I like to tap in. I feel like there's a window. I think anyone who lived through the Trump era either became totally defeated or they got somewhat politically motivated. For me, Bernie 2016/2020 felt like pivotal moments where there was momentum, possibility of mass politics and I went to Iowa, canvassed the caucus for the primary trajectory. But a big part of that is sitting back and dealing with the loss. Like, don't think you help make change by posting when there are local organisations, little skate things, and food banks that can be helped with. 

For me there’s no alternative between Trump or Biden right now so I don't really know what people are supposed to do. I don't feel very emboldened by the organisations that do exist, they all feel like large fundraising schemes. Maybe that will change. There could be another rupture at some point, they are coming quicker and quicker with intervals or cycles of violence and unrest.

Is the lack of making “major change” a reason for you staying in your home state  and trying to make a difference at home?

Well, it's not as interesting as you think. When I left New York and came back here, you couldn’t at the time make a career in New York but, boy, did I fuck that up [laughs]. I left a year before every skater in NY got sponsored by a shoe brand, just before cherry [2014, which is a while away now. Before then, obviously, you had to move to LA or a big city, and now we've returned brands being focused on key cities, which are huge accounts, and most young people want to move to them because they want to be a part of the skate scene. Therefore, the things which will be consumed are produced mostly in NY and LA. 

With a few exceptions, the main reasons are affordable housing here and my family is here. There's a lot that I like about Arizona but there's also a lot I hate about it which is mainly that Phoenix is a suburban sprawling hell-hole, at times. We have most of the world's biomes, you can hike through high deserts, low deserts and mountain pines all within a short radius. I don't know what they all are, but also altitudes and climates and if you’re an outdoor person, like me, it's important. I can drive two hours north and be in an entirely different climate where it's snowing. The main thing is housing and family. I thought about LA too but it's not possible. Potentially rent but rent costs rise for all of eternity and if you're not making considerably good money, you can’t live comfortably there. Which is happening in every city in the USA but is heightened in the centres of capital: you'll find more inequality in those places and the disparity is much larger and pronounced. It sounds ridiculous to say but if you’re a middle-class pro skater, you have nowhere to go. Moving in with my wife with roommates in an apartment doesn't sound very nice. I've got a comfortable life here so it's worth it for me to just travel to LA if I need to. 

In regards to Skate After School, there’s some value in living in a place where you have little more influence. There are so many people in the big cities competing over the same creative outlets and there's only so much energy those projects can have. When we started Skate After School, there was nothing like that here and there’s still nothing like it here so we have a lot more influence with the city. I’ve become friends with different players in city politics and it helps with building skateparks and things of that nature. You can do those things in big cities, it's just more challenging and probably more difficult to get the ear of your city council member in places like LA or NY. I thought about that when I saw the Brooklyn Banks project, “Damn, they got that done!” It's pretty remarkable and the same with the Southbank, these guys ran an impressive campaign and got it done. 

With the move to larger cities do you think there should be somewhat of a responsibility for brands to help with skaters’ rent or living expenses, especially if they want skaters to be at the centre of a “productive skate city”?

I mean, good luck [laughs]. I definitely have seen that first hand with people. I think when you live in a unique place like Phoenix, you have a strong scene, but a counter-example is my friend Jason Suriel who rode for Welcome. He lives out in Birmingham, Alabama. He's got a girlfriend there, it's expensive to travel to-and-from LA, and there's not a super strong skate scene [in Birmingham] but he's the most gifted skateboarder I’ve ever seen in my life. But you can't incentives someone to unroot their entire life to move out to California for a few hundred bucks a month. When you’re faced with that challenge, you lose that talent. People can't make it work so, unfortunately, people who live in those places, with a little more means to get by, are going to succeed in the industry and you’ll end up with a geographic concentration, which is funny. The internet presented this possibility of where skateboarding could be global but it does feel as if it's reverted back to exclusively focusing on London, New York, L.A., San Francisco… Basically, everywhere there is a Supreme store [laughs].

Kind of weird, right?

There’s such a cultural concentration and power coming out of those places. Young people here will be saying, “F--- Phoenix, I want to move immediately.” I don’t blame them for it either. I’m starting to get fatigued with LA skating, seeing the same types of videos come out at the same place – not to say I'm doing a very good job filming parts in PHX. I just want to see a scene with a little more heart in it without the whole clear formula. Skating is less rich because of it, skateboarders in the US don't even get basic health insurance, you're definitely not going to get help with rent. 

Is it time for amateur and professional skateboarders to unionise?

Yeah, of course. I say that but it's not as if I'm going to do the work. Yes, but again people are in precarious places in their careers and to make something like that work you need support at the top like the Screen Actors Guild which is somewhat disjointed private contractors with stars getting involved. There would have to be a whole lot of political action and organisation education to happen in that regard. I hate to give that answer of “We're far from it yet” because it shows I'm lazy. I’m not in a position to rock the boat. 

So your answer is a “Yes… but no thanks”?

A good start would be salary transparency but every workplace needs a union. I'm a firm believer that part of the situation we’re in has to do with the lack of union density, especially in the US. It's so bad now. The industries that do have unions do much better and they are providing a living wage for people participating in them. It's always going to be tough with skateboarding because everyone perceives it as something you should be grateful for. As soon as you get paid to skateboard the baseline, semi-politically-educated, socially aware person is still like, “You should be grateful you have a skate career. That's not a real job. I skateboard just as hard as you and I don't get paid.” 

In any industry like that there's going to be the challenge of sympathy because people don't see it as work even though the core of conversations we have around skating mostly revolve around pro skaters. I’m not speaking for myself but the gossip, the interest, it all surrounds skaters. They make up the meat of the industry and yet people don't have a whole lot of sympathy for them. That's partly why when skaters get discarded they do so quickly and the industry will find the next up and coming star.  

It’s a craft someone has honed over time, worked towards for the best part of their lives, so why should they feel lucky?

It's also funny because most skateboarders don’t make much money so it's an even sillier argument. It's not like the NBA or NFL where they’re making so much but can probably retire after whereas skateboarders will be working a regular job. I’ll more than likely be at the grocery store after skating. 

You should have got into freestyle and you'd be running the industry.

I’ll get into it now so I can start a skate shoe company in five years and I can become a titan of the industry [laughs].

Left field question for this interview but, to wrap up, who are in your “Top 5” Ryans? 

Wow, that's really tough. Off the top of the dome? The name Ryan is dated to the late-’80s/early-’90s. There's not a lot to pull from. Possibly Ryan Decenzo, I think he's got a lot of heart for an older skater to still be in the contest scene. 

Do the Decenzo’s even age? Ryan has always looked the same to me.

He must be on the Adrenochrome diet [laughs]. Ryan Townley is a great skater and person; Ryan Barlow is sick’ Ryan Spencer is a very underrated skater – he had a few years where he was swinging. There’s Shecks, he’s a funny one – he's a pretty solid one but he’s thought of as Sheckler, without the “Ryan”.

Pop-culture wise, Ryan Reynolds is a totally mid-actor in my opinion. Ryan Gosling is carrying the torch for all Ryan’s worldwide and as far as a “Hot Ryan”, he's up there too haha.