This is chasing infinity. I have Jason Shuck. I’m here with Joe. Go ahead, Joe. Hi guys, I’m Joel.
We are honored, absolutely honored to have Adam Dunlap, the professional parkour athlete, the actor and business owner of Take Flight. Adam, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It’s nice to be here. Absolutely perfect.
Just have a few questions here for you, buddy. Yeah, man. Do you remember the first time that you saw a parkour athlete in action and how did you feel? Yeah, this is interesting. This is kind of the root question that everyone asks in parkour is when did you first find parkour?
How did you find it, how did you get into it? And I had this really vague memory. It was actually the show, ripley’s Believe It or not. They did a feature on I believe it’s the Yamakazi. I think you can find it online.
The Yamakazi was this early parkour group and I don’t remember when it aired. Maybe it was 2003 or something like that. Early in the had this memory as a kid, and I don’t know when it was, of these people jumping over fences and thinking it was really cool. And somehow that cataloged in the back of my mind. And then years later I was in college and somehow that memory came back up.
And I was living in this Christian fraternity, and I asked the guys, does anyone know what this jumping thing is? And someone said, look up the yamikaze. And this was in 2006. And so I went online, YouTube at the time, which was a very new platform, and I looked up the Yamahazi and found videos of David Bell. And then that inspired me to start this parkour journey.
So the first time I saw it, it registered enough in the back of my mind that I didn’t forget it, but it didn’t register enough that I had any idea what it was or wanted to follow it. It was like this seed was planted and then years later it grew into something that was actually noticeable. That is absolutely phenomenal. I love it. Yamakazi.
So, Japanese heritage, Japanese background. I see that. If you ever traveled to Japan at all, or if you have any experience in Japan. Well, the group was a French group. Oh, sorry.
And I forget how they called, why they called themselves that, but I think someone just had that idea. This was in the late ninety s. And so the kids back then there were training and this is like a really small group. The amakazi is this complex story. I’ve forgotten some of the history.
I’d have to look it up. I know kind of the generalities, but they were highly influenced by things like Dragon Ball Z and Samurai and things like that. So someone thought of the idea Yamakazi. Everyone else thought it was cool. It’s a cool name, there’s no doubt.
And for teenagers it’s a cool name. Especially cool. So they just kind of went with it. And that’s where this name came up. So this name resonated kind of.
Now, I’m not a big fan of the Yamakazi group, and that gets into some of the history and some of the drama from the early parkour days. But there’s no doubt that the name is like this legendary name and in some ways a legendary team in Parker’s history. That’s undeniable very interesting. Yeah. But it’s all France.
It’s all French. It all came from France. Mercy Boku yeah. Can you share a little bit elaborate on the history of you spending time in Mexico and how that kind of shaped your life? Because I actually finished my degree in Japan, and that totally changed my life.
Moving forward, I would love to hear about how your time in Mexico has affected you and your personal life and your business life right now. And what was that experience like for you? I was studying in Oregon State. I was studying business at Oregon State, and I had an idea to study abroad in Mexico. I had studied Spanish for four years in high school, and then my intention was to study abroad in Mexico.
So in my second year in college or after my first year into my second year, I went and spent a semester in Coronavaca, Mexico, which is more or less in central Mexico, more or less a little south, more or less central Mexico. And at that time, I was 19 years old when I moved to Mexico, and I hadn’t discovered parkour yet. So this is like a precursor. And I think the biggest impact Mexico had on me was culture. So I had learned about culture and I had heard about culture.
And at 19 years old, I thought I knew what culture was. People are different. People have different ideas about life. Different countries have different approaches to living and different priorities and such. So I thought for sure, being an arrogant teenager the way most of us are or were, I thought that I knew what culture was.
But then I went and lived in Mexico and had culture shock and came front center with people that had different ideas about living. And so the most profound thing it did for me was really two things. Number one, I learned Spanish. And so I felt like that was a thing that expanded my mind, expanded how I thought it allowed me to learn French later when I moved to France to work with David Bell. But the biggest thing, I think, like, intellectually was probably it introduced me to culture.
It made me realize at a profound level what culture was. And it was so profound. It was such a profound shift from what I thought culture was and what I thought other countries were and did to what I realized was that I’m convinced that most people don’t understand culture unless you live in another country. I just don’t have any confidence that you really understand what culture is, because being submerged in something and experiencing culture shock is such a profound difference. It would be like saying, you know what it is to free dive, because you swim around in your kiddie pool and then all of a sudden you go down 100ft or something on one breath and you realize this is a completely different experience.
It’s probably something like that, the profoundness of the cultural experience. And so I think that impressed upon me how different people are, how different people think. And then since then, of course, I’ve had to deal with it from living in France and dealing with their culture and my recent job in Nike and dealing with the cultures there in the different countries I dealt with. So I think that’s probably, like, understanding people at a profound level is probably what it helped me, help me get closer to at least expanding my mind to have the openness to different people and different ideas. So it was probably like a foundational shift in openness.
It’s probably what it brought me, adam that resonates so well with me, what you just said. I think that’s the best explanation I’ve ever heard. I’ve had a lot of international friends, obviously, and a lot of American friends that have studied overseas. And it’s amazing, just the ability to be able to transform your life in such a positive way. And the way you just described it just totally its own.
Oh, well, for me, I mean, Japan is a different culture. And India I think of Japan as I think of Tokyo as a different world. I’ve never been, but I’m like, I got to get to Tokyo because I’m pretty sure it’s like a different planet that somehow is on our same planet, like Mexico, France, they’re Westernized. I think of certain other countries, like Japan being even more different. So is that what you experienced when you were in Japan?
Oh, absolutely, because I’ve been fortunate to travel to many countries all throughout Europe and Asia. And I would say Japan by far is one of the most different, beautiful countries. Just the people. When you say culture, it involves everything from people to food, the environment, just the mentality of the way of thinking. Just this morning, I was reading an article, and there was this train station, small little country town, and they found out that there’s only one passenger that religiously used this train station each and every single day, all right?
And so they kept that train station open for this one passenger. Who was the passenger? A high school student. So they were going to close that was the intention. They were going to close this train station.
But when they found out that this passenger, the one passenger that uses the train station, a is high school student, they waited to close that train station in this small little country town until that girl went to college.
That’s just one little microcosm of an example of how different they think in such profound ways. When I landed, I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about you. But that’s the question. And so what’s really interesting when I landed and I had this little chart, this little map, the diagram of how to find this shoe shop in the small, little town of Akita.
Well, not super small, but this smaller city of Akita. And I walked, crossed over the bridge, over the little river, take a right, turn left here at this little ice cream shop and get to this little shoe shop. And I show up for the Taka family, and I had this little note from a former student that she was handing to me to hand to them. They welcomed me into their little world like you could not imagine. And what I instantly realized was, if I take care of Joe, Joe takes care of you, adam, you’ll take care of me.
That’s the way the community works in such an amazing, incredible way. Now, realize that Tokyo culture, or Shibuya, all these shinzuku and all these exciting cities is completely different than a smaller town. Okay? So it’s much different. I compare Tokyo to the more like New York, but to really fully experience Japan, we could talk about this offline because I’ll be going there this summer.
We could talk about possibly you doing some parkour events there or something of that nature, if you’re serious about going. And we can do that at the time when I’m there, we can get some awesome content. But that, to me, is just really interesting because a lot of my white fellow Americans growing up, a big trip was going from Minnesota down to Chicago. That’s a big trip. Oh, my gosh.
We’re going to see American culture.
Americans. Oh, my gosh. I mean, we they we don’t get it. We don’t get it. You know the joke, right?
I mean, it’s such a great joke. I mean, it’s so simple. What do you call somebody who speaks three languages? The trilingual. Right?
Yeah. What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
Don’t do it. Bilingual. They’re bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language?
American.
Heck, yeah. Look, America is its own weird culture because we have the south and the north and the East Coast and the West Coast. We have these subcultures, but there’s so many people that have never left the country, and it blows your mind, and you talk to Europeans or whatever it may be, and we’re kind of full of ourselves.
We stay home. We stay in our country, and it’s a huge country. But anyway, it’s very funny because you’re touching on some ideas, and I think that a lot Americans don’t have those experiences, which is unfortunate because they’re great experiences. And Joe so I was on a contract at Nike last year and my boss was from India. He was amazing.
And then I have an acting friend who’s from India, and for years, I want to get to India because the music and I think of India as a flavorful country. And I mean that from, like, a sensory standpoint, like the flavors, because I love Indian food. And the music is you guys have different notes or something that we don’t have in Western music. I forget what it is. I’m not a musician.
But there’s something about the music that’s different, like different octaves or a different note scale, or there’s something that you guys do in the music that’s profound. And the dress, some of that traffic is not my forte. But have you been outside of India? Have you spent time in other countries? No, I haven’t been outside of India yet.
No. Now I want to come to India so bad. There’ll be a time when I’ll get there. I don’t know when. But your culture is very different as well.
Oh, absolutely. And we have about 2022 official languages, and each language comes with its own culture, traditions and all that stuff. And even like, I’ve lived all my life in India, and even I can’t really talk about all the cultures, and I don’t even know all the languages, even the names of the languages. Of the languages. As a country with the second most populated country, right, people are so different.
When you go from south and to the north, you’ll see it’s like two countries, right? The culture, the traditions are completely different on one end of the country to the other end. It’s very diverse, especially for you guys. If you spend most of your time in the US. And you come to a place like India, the culture shock would be too much because there’s a lot going on.
And if you spend time, some time in North India and you think you’ve understood India’s culture, then you come to the south and you see that it’s like a different country over there. Oh, really? Entirely different. Oh, man. I was my acting friend.
Like I said, I’m going to have a lot of acting friends, but there’s one saying I’ll win. And he’s from India. He’s an engineer, but he’s like a phenomenal actor, actually. And we were talking about Indian films in India, and he says that it’s something like if a film becomes really popular, then they remake the film in every language. There’s a film industry in every state.
And so they make the same exact film, sometimes shot for shot. Like, they literally just copy the film, but they remake it. Oh, no. I know what he said, too. He said that sometimes they’ll shoot a film in multiple languages, so they’ll hire actors, like, in each language, and then they’ll shoot the scene.
And then those actors leave, the other actors come in, and they shoot the same scene again. So they, like, shoot concurrently the same film in multiple languages so they can distribute it to different states. Anyway, there’s things like this about India that are fascinating and funny and endearing. Anyway, I like India. Yeah, that dump tells us right into part of what I wanted to talk about later.
But I’ll ask Joe to ask an acting relating question for you. I can know that’s part of your background, and I’d love to learn more about that. Go ahead, Joe. Yeah, so I was going through the website that you had put up, and I was just going through the summary, and I saw that you were supposed to be a part of Brick Mansions. Is that right?
Yes. David Brown. Wait, where did you hear that? That’s so true. Yeah.
So you have this website, right, your official website, and there was a mention that you were supposed to be acting with David Bell on Big Mansions with Paul Walker.
Yeah, I can tell you about that.
Well, I do want to say that I think you introduced me, Jason, as professional parkour athlete. And what’s funny is that was the term I use when I first decided to pursue a career in Parkour. But of everything I’ve done, the parkour athlete aspect is the least noticeable, the worthy of the least recognition you could say, in some ways. And so acting, I think, is one of the things that I care more about. I’m better at acting, way better at acting than I was at Parkour.
Cool. And so, anyway, acting is an important part of my life. Let’s see. But they all kind of interweave. So what happened was I started my parkour journey, started doing Parkour, trying to be a parkour athlete.
It was really early. There wasn’t a lot of ways to make money. But I got some sponsors, and that led me to starting a parkour gym. And then I started my parkour clothing company, take flight. So I was running two companies at the same time.
Awesome. And I had this idea to go to work with David Bell. So David Bell is the founder of Parkour. At the time, especially in the late 2000s, he was revered in the Parkour community as an immortal, almost like the Michael Jordan of Parkour, the Bruce Lee of this new sport. People would almost talk about giving their left arm just to meet him.
There was so much reverence and respect for this man. And I thought, well, if I’m ever going to really understand Parkour, I should probably go work with him or something. And so this idea percolated. And long story short, I was able to get in touch with his team, propose these ideas of working together, and they said they basically green lighted me moving to France to work with David and become David’s somehow, like, North American representative. That was kind of the idea on the table.
We had a couple of ideas. One idea was to help have him come on board to help grow my company take flight through an endorsement role. I wanted to help grow his brands. And then also there were some ideas, like a film festival that they had in the works at the time, and then me at on a personal level, my dream was to work with him on film. So clearly the connection was Parkour.
I was running a gym. Like, I was loyal to his version of Parkour. When other people were trying to kind of adopt this other type of Parkour, I was loyal to kind of the original version. There was branding, there was clothing, there was shoes, there was all these things that we had. But my heart of hearts was, my dream is to work on films with David.
So I moved to France. The problem was David didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak French. I learned French. And then David’s right hand guy at the time, a guy named GI. Jane O’Day, a fatherly figure to David, passed away suddenly, more or less.
And basically there was this void. And somehow I was in the right place in the right time, and I stepped into the void. So all of a sudden I became more or less David’s manager, David’s right hand man, david’s PR, David’s Brand Developer integrated with his family. So in 2011, I spent Christmas, it was like Christmas Eve, it was David, David’s mom and me, and we had Christmas together. So I became a part of his family, like his most inner circle.
Absolutely. And so anyway, we had all these dreams then in Lease, which is the birthplace of Parkour, like, he was living in Lease then I was living in Lease. We’d go on walks at two in the morning and talk about ideas we had for building brands and for his legacy and all sorts of different things he wanted to do as an artist and a creative. And working in films, of course, was a big part of that. We talked about the films we would make together, we talked about the ideas for films, we talked about the choreography we had for films.
We had all these big ideas and it was evident that we were going to be working together. For him, in my mind, clearly decades to come, clearly we had formed a brother friendship at that level. We were aligned on Parkour, on his legacy, on the legacy of his father, on the origins of the sport, on all these different things. It was very obvious that we were vibing and we were moving ahead with some great ideas. And where he was the artist with the legacy, I was the businessman with the execution.
And so it was this amazing partnership that was blossoming in awesome ways. Cool. So he also knew of my desire to be an actor. And at the time, I had never done any acting, I’d never taken acting classes. But I had this thing in me that I wanted to be in movies, in films.
And I thought that either Parker was my way in or now I felt that David was my way in because David was really good friends with Luke Bassoon, who’s more or less the Steven Spielberg of France. He’s the most well known filmmaker in France and he’s in the studio and all these things. So anyway, long story short, these films started to come up and it was obvious that I was going to work with him on these films, but it simply didn’t happen for various reasons. The first film was a film called The Family, which is a film with Robert De Niro and David. David was brought on to be a stunt director and he also had a very small role in the film.
And that was a film that I was supposed to have a role in or work with him in some capacity. And that was vetoed at the last minute. And then Brick Mansions came along and that was another thing that I was supposed to be involved with the film and work with him and be on set. And since he was the star in it, along with Paul Walker, he’s like, I’m going to have some authority to find some small part for you for finding you to have a way to be involved with the film, whatever it may be. And then that didn’t come to fruition either.
And I think that some of that had to do with maybe the integrity in David’s life. I think that David always spoke and thought with his heart, but he didn’t always follow through with the things he said. And some of it happened with maybe the relationship started to get strained because I moved back from France to the United States. And so there wasn’t this daily communion with him anymore. When things didn’t line up perfectly, it was easy for him to kind of just say, I’m not in charge, which he wasn’t.
No, it was super disappointing. But the film came and went and I wasn’t able to be a part of it. And, yeah, that happened. Now, a year later, oddly enough, I had an agent at the time and a year later I got an audition for an NBC show called Grimm. And I’d never acted before, but for some I had the talent for it and I laid down a great audition and they gave me a recurring role in this national television show, grim from their acting career or took its path.
So what I learned was I didn’t need David. I didn’t need this parqueur in I could be a great actor. But all it’s just to say is that, yeah, it was supposed to be with David on The Family with Robert De Niro was supposed to be on the film Brick Mansions with Paul Walker, and it just didn’t happen. And it was a big disappointment. But the bigger disappointment was that david and I stopped working together, so that brother friendship had a falling out and that was really tough.
Sure. Anyway, so how have you dealt with Adversity like that? Adversity, and overcoming that challenge because you were wanting to work with him. And I know you came back to the US and you got that role that was awesome. But mentally, how do you overcome that, say, fear?
Whether you’re jumping off of a building or that disappointment and not getting that role with him, how have you dealt with Adversity like that in your life?
I think you just give it time. There was a really rough time for me, and it was in the 20 14, 20 15, 20 16 range. And part of it was just falling out with David because we had all this momentum going and then it just shifted. It was like a 180. It was I didn’t know what happened.
All of a sudden the relationship blew up and it didn’t make any sense to me and I didn’t understand it. And clearly there was some miscommunication culturally on multiple levels and other things. And so it was this really weird time where all of a sudden, what I had invested, I literally invested years of my life and more money than I had to live in France and make this relationship and support David, and that fell apart. So that was tough. At the same time, I was getting massive hate in the Park Row community.
So there’s no doubt in the 2015 time frame, I was one of the most talked about people in the Park Row world and clearly the most hated person in the Parker world. And that’s a whole another complex story. And part of that was because I’d built a company and Parker wasn’t at the place where people were ready to accept people making money from the sport. It was very taboo. The idea was, well, David can make money from films because he’s the founder.
Maybe Seb Foucan can make money. It’s okay to make money as a Stumbin, but anything else is taking advantage of the parkour world. And so making T shirts and making shoes was still this taboo thing. And I was one of the people that opened that way in the industry. So you have all these brands making clothing and it’s like, guys, I’m the pioneer of that.
I was the first clothing company in the Parkour world in history to have a real, real parkour clothing brand. Sure. And so now it’s like, it makes sense. Everyone’s going to sell T shirts, you support yourself. But even today, I think there’s this mode of you have to be supporting the community in some deep, profound way, like as if you owe it to everybody else.
It’s a very infantile, adolescent mentality that speaks to the industry being very young. Every industry goes through this. I understand it. But the point was, I was the scapegoat for all that maybe the lack of success that other people were having. Other people started brands.
They weren’t selling anything even though they were famous athletes. Take Flight was doing bonkers business. So I was this guy that had all this hate. The biggest people in the park world were making basically hit pieces on me. And they’re still online, you could still find them, where people accuse me of being like a thief, of lying, of taking advantage of children.
Just incredibly ridiculous, awful stuff. So I was getting all this hate from the Parker community at large. The relationship with David Bell fall apart. The truth was, I wasn’t making any money from Take Flight. We were this global brand.
But I basically paid all the money to by the time I paid lawyers to protect the trademarks we had, by the time I paid the pros to be involved with the team through endorsement contracts, the operating costs and growing the brand because I reinvested all the money and things like David Bell and other athletes. I was living at Poverty Line, like trying to build something awesome, and yet I was being accused and being hated, and relationships were falling apart. And then I had some personal stuff that happened in my life, and it was by far the low point of my life. And like 2015, 2016, around that time. And how do you deal with that if you’re that low in life?
My thoughts are good luck. That’s a tough one. And I think you breathe and you live to see another day and you know that life. The one constant in the universe is change. It’s the only constant.
Nothing else is constant except change. And so if you can somehow tie yourself to the life raft or the mast of, like, your ship that’s in the ocean, and you’re like, tomorrow is going to be different because the weather is going to change. I’m in the middle of a hurricane or a tornado or a cyclo, whatever typhoon, whatever may be a storm in the middle of the ocean. The storm doesn’t last forever. The boat has to come out of the storm.
So I think at some point, you just try to focus on this is what I did. Try to focus on what’s in front of me and hope and believe that someday things will be different. And sure enough, they became different over time. But I don’t have any. I think in that situation, a lot of people turn to drugs or they turn to alcohol or self destructive behaviors, and you just got to keep fighting.
That’s all you can do. You don’t keep fighting. Indeed. That is absolutely beautiful. I love it.
And you’re a true testament to that journey. That’s just amazing. I love it. Adam we all go through stuff that’s, like, the human experience is like, you’re going to get hit someday. Just enjoy the good moments.
Because whether it’s a divorce or losing a family. Member or a child or whether it’s bankruptcy or illness or whatever may be, it’s like, man, I think what those experiences do, hopefully they do one of two things either harden you, or they soften you. So you either develop this armor that doesn’t you close off from the world, you become bitter, you become angry. I think those types of experience lead people towards that, or it breaks you in a way that softens you. And so at a deep level, what that experience gave me was deep empathy for other people, because you never know what someone’s going through.
And if someone flips you off when you’re driving or yells at you in a store or is a bad customer service agent or who knows? You even wonder. Some of these politicians that seem to be completely corrupt, that seem to be completely ignorant about what their job is, that seem to be completely selfish, you have to wonder. You just don’t know what someone’s going through or what their background was or what they experienced. And so for me, at the day, I realized I had a choice to become hardened or to soften.
And somehow I was able to land on the side of softening and empathy towards other people. But I think we all go through that, and that’s the choice you have to make when you go through those times, is are you going to soften to the world or are you going to harden? And if you harden, then I don’t think that’s the path. I think that’s not good for you or for others or for the world. So, yeah, we all go through it, man, for sure.
I really hope that this interview can be seen by a lot of young individuals or anybody that’s going through a tough time right now. This is phenomenal. What you’re saying is speaks home to, I think, a lot of people out there that could really hear these words. This is beautiful, Adam. Thank you for sharing that deeper in your heart, because this is what you’ve struggled and went through, and now you live to see the other side.
You made it to the light at the end of the tunnel and what certainly wasn’t a train coming. And so that is something that truly, truly, truly I wish this speaks home really personally, because my best friend, the whole reason why I came out to Vegas, he moved from Minnesota the day after graduating und. And we were super close, and he had everything. He had great money, wife, two kids, and he let depression bring him down, and he’s no longer with us. And so it’s just one of those things that I think a lot of people at some point in their life, to some degree, reach that bottom, and they have a choice.
They have a choice to make. And I’m so glad that you made that choice the way you did. And I think a lot of people can learn from what you just said. That’s awesome.
All right, moving on to something a little bit more later. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.
Let’s make this fun. That’s what this show is all about. But this is a beautiful thing. I’m glad we shared it. I’m glad we made that direction for a little bit.
Joe, what would you like to ask Adam next? Yeah, so as someone from looking outside to the Park Court community, and I was going to the Parkour.com website, and I came across this article that titled the Best and Worst YouTube Channels Right Now. YouTube parkour channels right now. Yeah. And surprisingly, I saw store.
I’m not sure about paying the name right. I saw Store in the worst section. And as a person looking from outside, store is like, the biggest parko team that I personally have ever seen. And I always come across their content on social media or YouTube, and it was a real surprise when I saw that. So I read it and some of it made sense, some of it didn’t, because I don’t have any background in Parkour.
So can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, well, for anyone. I mean, everyone knows store. I think they’re the biggest success story in Parkour history. I mean, besides, of course, Parkour and David Bell, I think.
And there’s maybe some other things, like Take Flat, I think is an amazing success story. But at a global level, there’s no doubt that Store cracked the code. I was a big critic of Store in the beginning. They’ve proved me wrong. What they do is they’re awesome.
The athletes are amazing. Their production is phenomenal. They’re trying to take things to the next level. So they’re great. I think they’re close to 8 million subscribers now.
For a time, they had more subscribers than ESPN, which was phenomenal. They’re awesome, right? Everyone knows Store, but there’s an article on poker.com, as you said, the best and worst YouTube channels of 2022. And it was written by a contributor named Raven. Raven McCarthy, I believe is his last name, and cool dude.
He’s been in the Park Row community a long time, and he pinned that article, so it had nothing to do with that article. Like, I’m kind of the editor in chief of Parker.com, so I review articles, make sure they make sense, and they’re grammatically correct, and then I kind of let our contributors publish. So he published that article, and I was surprised to see Store, as well as one of the worst parkwood channels of 2022. But why were they labeled the worst? And I actually agree with Raven’s analysis.
You know, I’d have to go back and read it, but I think it’s something to the sense of stores in a situation where they’re kind of chasing the money now. Like, in some ways, their brand is kind of gone stale on the YouTube front, from a Parkour perspective. So when you think of store, you think of roof running, you think of roof culture, you think of store super tramps, you think of these epic video adventures they made. At the end of the day, what seems to be their bread and butter cash flow is their YouTube channel. If you monetize the YouTube channel correctly, then you figure about a million views, you’d get about three grand.
It depends, right? But three to five grand is kind of a good, safe estimate for a million YouTube views. And they have a math, more than a billion views. So if you do the math, you figure if they had been able to monetize correctly, there’s $3 million over the last ten years or twelve years that they’ve been able to monetize. Now, they haven’t probably been able to monetize it fully for various reasons.
Like one point the channel was blocked and things like that. But the point is this, as far as I can tell, seems to be the way they make money. Of course, they have other things, like productions they worked on the film, what was it called? There was a Michael Bay film they worked on. There’s commercials that they’ve done and things like that they make money from.
But the YouTube channel seems to be where they make the money. And so they’re caught in this weird trap where they have to get views. And it seems from a parkour perspective that they’re chasing views. They’re not necessarily chasing park crew anymore. And so they, you know, I mean and some of that take what I said with a grain of salt.
Some of that because some of that’s my perspective. And I don’t know how they make their money, but it’s kind of getting redundant, it’s kind of boring. They stumble across these fads and they run with it. Like the Water Challenge fad was a big fad for a while, where they do jumps over water. So they’re like, oh wait, that was successful.
So like, oh, we got to make another one, right? It’s not because they’re interested in it. It’s because they’re trying to say, how do we get 2 million views? Or how do we get 50 million views so we can make $100,000 off our video, which by the way, I give them total credit for. From a business standpoint, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what they’re doing.
I think it’s actually to be applauded in every way. But if you’re looking to make a parkour channel, they’re not a Parcour channel anymore. They’re like guys with a YouTube channel that are monetizing to the rest of the world. And the parkour community is interested in parkour content. YouTube community is not interested in parkour content.
They’re interested in content that’s infused with parkour, that tells a story that someone wants to watch. So a recent video, or kind of a theme of a couple of videos are climbing out of difficult things. So they found this water drain in a recent video, and they had to figure out how to climb out of this water drain. How do they get all six people to climb out of this water drain? And it’s a fun video to watch.
It’s edited super well. There’s some great personalities on the team. The mixture of the guys, the the chemistry they have is great. So it’s an enjoyable video. It has nothing to do with parkour.
They’re in this water drain trying to climb out of it, and the first one out of it is Toby Seager, who’s a climber. He’s learned to climb in Boulder at a really high level. So he gets out, and then he gets everybody out. It’s a great film, but it’s not a parkour. Nothing to do with parkour.
It’s like Store has now transitioned to almost like a personality with more power to them. I think that’s the transition you make when you make it big, but it’s just not a parkour. I just think that there’s something missing there. From a parkour perspective, that feels kind of shallow. It feels kind of redundant.
It feels uninteresting at a macro level. Now, they just launched a video called Cavemen Five, which was 100% parkour, 13 minutes. It’s awesome. It’s like it is it is the parkour Video of the Year. It might be the park or Video of the Year when we get to the end of 2023.
It’s awesome, but at a macro level, it’s just it feels like in some ways, it lacks creativity. It feels like they lack originality. It feels like feels like they need to reinvent themselves, in my opinion. And they don’t know how. They have no idea how.
They’re like, well, this works. We’ll keep doing it. And instead of, like, looking internally like the way artists do, they’re looking externally like, well, what video will get us 100 million views? Let’s do that. Versus what music do we want to make?
Like, I’m a musician, I’m an artist. I’m putting out a new album. I’m going to do what I want to do, and I hope my audience and my fanbase follows me. That’s the artist vibe, and I think some of the artistry in store is gone. And like I said, it’s cool and more credit to them, but that’s the critique.
I think that Raven was more getting on and I’m expanding, and I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but it’s something complex like that that isn’t as interesting from a parkour viewpoint with a parkour filter. Does that make sense at all? Absolutely. Yeah, sure it does. Definitely.
That kind of leads up to a follow up question. In terms of the creative artist side of it and the park core, what would you like to create or what direction do you see things going for you personally in the future, and what would you like to be able to bring to the market? I see myself as a facilitator and a producer. So even with Take Flight, my vision was always I didn’t want to be the center of take Flight, and that’s one thing that got me a lot of flack was I wanted to run take flight from behind the scenes and I wanted the athletes to be the stars and that’s still what I want to do. And so for me, from like a personal viewpoint, it would be to empower other athletes to achieve their dreams.
And so we’re working with a new athlete to take flight. This hasn’t been announced yet, but he’s a guy named Evanstorm. He’s a 22 year old from California who’s up and coming, who’s phenomenal, and I think he’s going to get a lot of attention this year through his competition circuits and things like that. And so we’re working with him to empower him. And so we’re designing a T shirt and I’m working with him to design a T shirt that he’s designing, more or less.
I know I’m leading it because I have this experience designing clothing, but it’s like he’s the creative force and then I’m guiding the force and we’re going to create a T shirt and 100% of the proceeds are going to go to support him and his training and his travel and his career. 100% of the proceeds, right. It’s that type of idea. I feel like I’m in a position with Takeflightandporker.com and with my experience to come behind Tracers and help them achieve their vision, and that’s always been the goal. I did want to be an athlete, but I think my path in terms of like, an individual is more like in acting.
I think if I were to be a creative, it’s like that’s where I have my vision and then I want to empower other Tracers to achieve their vision. So it’s really more about facilitating and supporting. And that’s what Parker.com is. And that’s what we were trying to do, is find people and Tracers that it’s like we have this platform, like we want to promote you. And if you look at the Parker.com Instagram, we started doing something in the last couple of weeks called Parker News.
No one in the Parker world is doing this. It’s where we highlight news stories because what’s every brand and team and individual in the Parker world doing? They’re talking about themselves, every single one of them, as they should. Right. If you’re an act like, LeBron James is going to talk about LeBron James and it makes sense, right?
But what about someone that’s like, hey, I’m just here to support everybody? And so we’re posting news about the teams and the videos and bringing attention to issues. And that’s what we want to do, is we want to support everybody else. We want to be this infrastructure for the community that allows other people to be successful because of what they’re doing. Right?
And I don’t think most athletes have the business of cumin or the vision to do that outside of here’s a bunch of social media posts. People are trying, but it’s like you’re an artist or you’re a business guy. People are on both. I’m both. I’m one of the rare people that gets both.
There’s not any of those. And the Parker community is filled with the athletes. And so how do we support them? So that’s a long wooded answer to, say, supporting other people’s dreams and visions. And I think in doing that, we push the Parker industry ahead.
So everybody gets better, right? We push the brands ahead, we push the athletes ahead. Then there’s sponsorships, then there’s money, then there’s notoriety, then you get people outside the community buying the brands and that brings money in that they can make better videos. And it’s this snowballing effect of everybody supporting each other. It’s not a zero sum game.
It’s not there’s a we have to decide who gets the money. It’s there’s infinite dollars, there’s infinite value. And if we work together to empower each other, then the industry grows and everybody benefits. And so it’s being a conduit for that. It’s being an example of that and it’s directly trying to help people achieve that.
And so together we can achieve more.
That ties in and that ties into kind of how we started a few minutes ago in our conversation in relation to helping other people grow in advance, like the common Fred, like Japan, and how we help each other. We all get to a higher level than we can on our own and it’s a more beautiful place to be. Honestly. That’s awesome. I love it.
More fun, right? It’s more fun.
I do think the Parker community, one of the accurate critiques of their critique of me in the early days was that there wasn’t as much, there was a little bit of fear in my mind. I wanted to have the biggest brand. I wanted to dominate. I wanted to be so big and so successful that people didn’t even want to start Parker brands. They just wanted to join my brand, which is like, it’s aspirational.
That’s awesome. Like, I envisioned us having tens of millions of dollars in supporting athletes worldwide, which is awesome, right? But at the same time, I think they somehow, like, have this vibe and energy that maybe I didn’t have the heart I have now. And some of that I don’t think it’s completely accurate, but some of it’s accurate. And the point is, I’ve been in kind of more of a selfish mindset in the past.
What I’ve learned is it’s way more fun to be unselfish and help other people. Like, even it’s, it’s it helps everybody, but it’s just more fun. It’s just more fun to be cheering for each other and supporting each other 100%. It’s like, just go do that then it’s better. It’s better.
So yeah, it’s the way to go, in my opinion. But what do I know? I’m still learning. Bless you, brother. That’s phenomenal.
My goodness. That’s with Wfo, right? It’s like, dude, it’s like, well, let’s do it. Let’s host a Parker podcast on Wfo. And then Wfo is there and Parker.com is there, and Take Flight is there and the athletes are there.
And that’s why we’re here in the first place is because we both get it. We both get the value of helping other people. I was going to talk about this offline, but you just brought it up and absolutely the official it’s going to be moving forward in the future that you will be the talk show host for your own podcast, powered by Wfo TV. And you’ll be interviewing athletes and helping bring them to a higher status, a higher level, like building that community, like you’re saying, so we all can benefit. You know what I mean?
It’s not just one, it’s a collective good. And like you just said, we have more fun doing it collectively together when you see somebody else rise to the top and do some incredible, amazing stunt. And that leads me to my last question. I know Joe has another last question, but my last question is over the years in the history when you were doing your incredible stunts, what do you see as one of the precious moments for you? When you were doing those activities as a parkour athlete, what did you cherish?
Which one comes to the forefront of your mind as the most incredible thing that you pulled off and you’re most proud of?
Was there a certain time of your life that you just said, hey, no one’s done this before, but I just really want to be able to pull this off? Or if there’s something that you remember as one of the ones that really, hey, I did this. And I know that you roll out of it like you say, if it doesn’t land quite right. But what’s the most biggest takeaway in your experience doing Parkour that you really want to hold and cherish and you wanted to say to somebody that you take away as the most incredible opportunity I mean, the most incredible thing that you did for yourself while you were doing that.
There’s not a great answer because I don’t think I did anything incredible or anything, really. I think the biggest jump I ever did was a twelve foot, a twelve foot jump, which I thought was huge at the time. And it’s no walk in the park to do a twelve foot jump. It’s just a jump to land and roll from 12ft. Yeah, but, you know, it’s like if you gave me a student who was ambitious and reasonably I don’t know, give me like a 20 year old who’s reasonably ambitious, we’ll get him there and maybe we’ll get him there in a year, just a year of training, we’ll get them there.
So it wasn’t even that high of a level, I think when I was a young tracer 20 06 20 07 20 08 Eight I didn’t have a lot of exposure to the rest of the parkour world. And it was hard to get exposure because it was new, there wasn’t a lot of people doing it. The biggest community was in England. I was in the United States. It was hard to make YouTube videos at the time because the quality and the technology lagged.
And so I thought that what I was doing was really high level stuff. And looking back, it wasn’t high level stuff. And so I think that there was probably a lot of hubris in me of thinking that I was better than I was. And in time, as I’ve widened my scope and realized how good people are at this sport, I realized how insignificant I was from an athletic standpoint. And some of that too is the evolution of the sport.
And this happens in all the action. Sports is the next generation comes along and they’re so much better than the previous generation that I mean, your legacy is that you were the first to do something, but it’s not impressive if you’re the first to do a 720 on a skateboard. It’s like, that was amazing. And now people do nine hundred s or twelve eighty s, whatever they do. And there’s a 14 year old that’s doing seven hundred and twenty s.
And so you at the height of the X Games was whatever. It’s just not impressive anymore. So the legacy is more like you were a pioneer, you were first. And so my legacy is I started the world’s first park clothing company, right? I developed one of the first ever parkour shoes.
I started one of the first parkour gyms in the world. I pioneered that. I met and worked with David and learned parkour and learned the essence of the sport from David. And so that’s the legacy. It’s not like the biggest jumps I did.
It’s just what I did wasn’t impressive. But what is impressive, I think, is having the vision of kind of pushing the boundaries of the industry and pushing that ahead. And then for me, I think the thing I’m most proud of or most thankful for was working with David. So David was my idol, was no question, like the person in the world that I wanted to learn from more than anybody else. If you had said like, you have everybody, like you have Brad Pitt and you have Michael Jordan and you have David Bell, if you listed of all the greats and eminem or whatever it may be, whatever sport, whatever practice, it was like David’s the guy.
David in 2010, 2011, he’s the guy that I resonate with most. And so for me, the most kind of special moments were that friendship that we had for a few years and being a part of his family and learning from him and understanding him, because I think that a lot of this stuff is trivial. Like, 99% of the athletes won’t be remembered in ten years. They’ll be on to the next generation. What do you have?
But David’s the one who will last. He was the person we’ll talk about in 100 years. And so for me, it was the chance to work and learn from him and to understand his mentality, to understand what Parker was from his eyes. Not the Parker you see from Store, the Parker you see from Take Flight, but the original method, the spark that ignited this industry, that ignited this movement and the sport. To understand that at the deepest level, there’s no other American that’s learned Parker from David Bell.
I can count on two hands the number of people that have been as close to David and learn Puckered from David as I have in history. And so to me, it’s that legacy that I see, like a direct passage of the discipline down through me that I’m most proud of. And then in terms of my skill or whatever it may be, it’s like, just don’t even watch it. It’s just not important. I just didn’t get to the level I wanted to be.
But there’s something else that I think that’s stronger in there, that has more longevity than a big jump I did once. Sure. I appreciate that, Adam. That really is well spoken. And now you have the ability, you have the opportunity to pass on that legacy from him on to the younger generation.
I mean, this is phenomenal. I love it. Wow. Take it away with your last question. Yeah, so my last question would be for an upcoming athlete, for someone young just starting out.
Parkour, especially in my part of the world, like, most people don’t know parkour. And just as in any action sport, most people don’t even know what parkour is. Fun fact, there’s this movie that released, I think it was a couple of years back, so it was a Malayalam movie. So Malayalam is my native tongue, so it was a Malayala movie, and there was no remake into other languages. So this movie, the protagonist of this movie, he was into Parkour.
So there’s this scene towards the end of the movie where the villains are trying to catch this protagonist, and he’s running away from them, and he’s using Parco to get escape from them. So that’s when people saw this, and people around my community, people around my village, people around my state, so they started looking at this, and then they realized that this is something that’s actually a form of sport, that’s actually a real sport. And then they started looking at Parkour, and a lot of people, especially the older generation, they saw what Parkour was, and some people were hooked into it. Some people started doing Parcor. So, yeah, that’s a whole other story.
So the point is, a lot of people don’t know what parkour is. And so for someone who is just starting up, someone who doesn’t have access to a lot of facilities like this, what advice or what tips would you give them to become a professional athlete? Like, how should they start their journey or what should they always focus on, in your opinion?
There’s not an easy answer to it. And I try to hesitate from giving people advice because everyone’s journey is different, you know, and everyone’s passion is different. And if someone had a if you have an unquenchable passion, then the answer is just don’t stop, right? But maybe you don’t have maybe you’re not a Kobe Bryant, right? Maybe you don’t have the talent or you don’t have this mamba mentality and you just want to be, but there might be a place for you still.
So every person is different.
Here’s what I would say. I would say understand yourself and understand whether or not you really love parkour. Because I think what’s easy to get caught up in is wanting to be something rather than wanting to go through what it takes to become that thing. So here’s a cool way to phrase it. The person who loves walking will always walk further than the person who loves the destination.
And this is what I see in acting. And I’ll even be a little bit, just to tell you from a parkour perspective. So I love acting. The destination is cool. The idea of being a part of really big films, of course my goals is what I want to do, but I love acting.
I’ll act every day. I go to acting class because it’s fun. I go to auditions, other actors fret auditions like, oh, my gosh, I have an audition. And I’m just like, it’s another chance to act. I love it, right?
It’s like, I love walking. I love acting. I don’t think I loved Parcour as much as I thought I did. And what’s shown by that is when I had time, I built my companies instead of training. And there’s other athletes out there that like, they have aspirations to make money, but they’re just drawn to training all the time.
So Joey Adrian is a great example. He’s an athlete who has all this potential from a business standpoint, and he’s a friend. We’ve worked with him at Take Flight for years. He was third place in the Red Bull Out of Motion a few years ago. Like one of the best of his generation.
There’s an argument that he pioneered flow in a lot of ways, or at least he was one of the pioneers of it. So a phenomenal athlete that I think has a place in the history of parkour, and he’s never developed anything business wise. And at the end of the day, when I look at Joey, I think to me, it’s very clear why he’s never developed the business side of his things. And it’s because he loves. Movement so much that that’s what he’s dedicated to.
And so when he has time, he does that, and when he doesn’t have time, he still does that. And when he’s tired, he still does that because he loves it and it’s in him, and you can see it in his movement and you can see it in his progression. It’s very clear me, when I had time, I built companies, and so I really liked Parkour. There’s no doubt it’s a top four or five passion in my life, but it wasn’t a top one passion of my life, right? And so it’s easy to see Parkour and say, I want to be that.
And the thing is though, is to get there, you’re probably going to need to train every day for the next six years or something and risk injury and go through the ups and downs and make an awesome video that nobody cares about, even though it’s worth watching and training alone because your friends don’t want to train. And having the most, it’s like, can you go through that struggle? And the only way you’re going to go through that struggle is if you really love it. And the only way you’re going to find if you love it is to do it and to go through that. So it’s a discovery process, but my advice would be simply to be attuned to that and don’t lie to yourself and to try to understand how much do I really like this.
And if you find that you’re really on fire for it, then that’s awesome and go with it. But if you’re not, that’s okay too. You can become an Adam Dunlap who like, he does quality jumps. His technique is solid. He enjoys the movement.
He’s strong and flexible and agile and confident because of it. But he didn’t become world class. That’s okay too. So stay in tune with yourself in your nature and your energy. Be honest with yourself and be open minded to like where your heart and your spirit and your abilities lead you.
And maybe focus on the path rather than focusing on the destination. And that will get you where you need to be. Amazing. Adam, it’s a journey. It is absolutely profound.
Seriously, Joe, no question about it. One word, you are so humble. I love it. I love the fact that you want to pass this on. You truly have a heart of gold.
Seriously, Adam, I love what you’re saying, and I just can’t wait to see how you are able to engage with other athletes on your Wfo branded by you. You’re going to brand the powered by Wfo TV podcast that you’re going to take. You’re going to fly with it, take flight, and be able to help others and in their journey to discover that incredible enjoyment of the journey. Because I always say that. I say that all the time to my 15 year old son, whatever he’s doing.
And right now. He’s 100% cross fit, 100% kung fu for the last seven years. And it’s not the destination of he wants to get to that goal of 400 pound deadlift by X number of months, twelve months from now. And he’s just over 300. And it’s not things of that nature, it’s that enjoyment of the journey.
That’s what it’s all about. Adam, thank you. Thank you very much for joining us today. This has been a true treat to have you on Chasing Infinity, and I certainly look forward to seeing what you can do in your own podcast in working with these young individuals. This has been an honor.
Thank you, sir. Real pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Cool. Joe, thank you.
This is awesome. What would you like to say in closing comments? No, not a lot. This was fun. So I didn’t have a lot of insights into Parco.
I think I’ve learned a lot. I’m pretty sure the audience as well also learned a lot as well. So thank you so much, Adam, for being here with us. And we look forward to having you on with Wfo, producing more shows, producing more information, and building the parko community out there. Can’t wait.
Awesome. Excellent. Until then, have a blessed day, one and all. God bless. Yeah, see you.
Bye.
