The first episode of YoYo Player, my new podcast with my dear old friend Mark McBride, is finally live and we decided to kick it off with our origin stories. Episode 1 is mine, and Episode 2 will be Mark’s.
If you haven’t subscribed, please do! You can listen and subscribe here:
Apple | Spotify | Google Podcasts
I’m really excited for this new project because I feel like it’s the completion of a circle for me. In 2011 I started something called 365 YoYo Tricks, which was me challenging myself to post video of an original yoyo trick every single day for a year. It was partly to help myself finally create a record of a huge number of tricks I’ve created, and partly to help nudge myself out of a creative slump. Some days I posted old tricks that I’d never properly memorialized, other days I made something up that day and shot & posted it. I ran it for a few years, with the following years also involving several friends of mine whose tricks I wanted to showcase. But overall it was a way for me to create a permanent record of what I had contributed to the lexicon. I’ve always been an archivist…someone so scared of something that seems important to me being forgotten that I have boxes and boxes filled with every scrap of paper from every yoyo contest I’ve ever been to. So I wanted to make sure that these ephemeral series of movements didn’t die with me.
Of course, my video host and my entire account got nuked because the record label I was working with crapped out and I got like 50 copyright strikes in 24 hours. I was able to save a good chunk of the video but it not all of it. UGH. What survived is on my YouTube channel now. I’ll eventually get through all my old hard drives and see if anything else is salvageable.
So YoYo Player is another swing at this, but to archive the story of how I became a yoyo player and the stories from the most creatively prolific time of my life…when I was a touring yoyo performer and demonstrator. My buddy Mark was around for nearly all of it, and our time as touring yoyo professionals overlapped by a lot, so we thought it would be fun to tell our stories together. As he points out in the first episode, he and I together created 40% of the now standard divisions at yoyo contests worldwide, which is both hilarious and kinda wild to think about. We’re also both pretty good at poking holes in each other’s rosy recollections of things, so it’s both a fun trip down memory lane and a smack to the nards of the self-congratulatory retellings of these stories that we’ve both developed over the years.
I hope you enjoy hearing these stories as much as we enjoyed living them. We obviously have a lot more coming but feel free to ask for more detail/clarification on things here and I’ll do my best to answer.
