Short interview with surfing champion Kelly Slater. Wasn’t planning on posting any more video clips from the USA road-trip but ran into Slater at Pipeline, on Oahu’s North Shore, during the Vans Triple Crown 2012 surfing contest (which was then taking place at Sunset Beach nearby).
Slater has won the Association of Surfing Professionals’ (ASP) World Champion title a record 11 times, including five consecutive titles from 1994-98. So I asked him if he was willing to answer the ooamerica “What’s your philosophy in life?” question:
Nice interviews. Does this show that people actually don’t have a life philosophy? I mean, treating other people good or enjoying life hardly counts as a philosophy, don’t you think so?
Hi and thanks for your input. Well, I think it’s a philosophy but perhaps you mean ‘hardly’ since it seems common or could be further developed – but maybe it seems so because that ‘philosophy’ (ie the golden rule), however common-sensed it may seem now, has been so widely successful (ie: we don’t live in a completely anarchic state of nature thanks to this kind of thought which has enabled us to grow collectively).
Also, it’s not easy to come up with a coherent answer about ‘life philosophy’ when asked spontaneously – I’m always impressed that people do.
I partly chose to include the girls’ four answers because they seemed to embody / resume a very large number of the answers gotten so far. So while it’s always exciting to have someone give a unique or original answer, and many of these will be featured in the movie, I think one of the project’s aims is also to illustrate these common threads in people’s beliefs and values, however simply expressed – more in the movie soon!