TPM Episode 191: Steve "Stix" Nilsen Airwalk, Red Bull, PBR, Liquid Death
The Powell Movement
Mike Powell
4.9 • 860 Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2020
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Steve Nilsen, better known as Stix to everyone but his family, is a legend in the world of cans. While his career started with Airwalk in the days when it competed with Nike and Reebok, Steve then went on to have incredible jobs at Red Bull and PBR. Now, he's now championing Liquid Death and on the podcast we talk the rad road he traveled to get his dream jobs
Steve "Stix" Nilsen Show Notes:
3:00: Minnesota, Hawaii, and surf culture
9:00: Skateboarding, Punk Rock, and sports
18:00: College, Australia, and figuring out life plans
25:30: Stanley: Get 30% off site wide with the code drinkfast
10 Barrel Brewery: Buy their beers, they support action sports more than anyone
27:30: Life changing Warped Tour, SIA, and Airwalk
35:00: Airwalk, merchandising, development, and marketing,
44:00: Peter Glenn Ski and Sport
45:00: The demise of Airwalk, getting his job with Red Bull
54:00: The business of Red Bull, creating Red Bull sized ideas, and athletes
62:00: Red Bull changing, getting his job with PBR and marketing beer
72:00: Liquid Death
75:00: Inappropriate Questions with James Clifford and LP Paul Crandell
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And now, a show with inappropriate language, the Powell Movement. |
| 0:12.3 | Welcome to the Powell Movement. |
| 0:15.4 | I'm your host Mike Powell, and this week, well, life is kind of back to normal. |
| 0:20.9 | The kid is back in school, and I can focus on doing work during the day instead of having |
| 0:25.3 | to figure out something to do each day for a quarantine summer with an only child. |
| 0:30.1 | That stuff is behind me. |
| 0:32.1 | Another thing that's finally behind me is my use of nicotine. |
| 0:35.3 | For the first time in like 20 years, I am 100% nicotine free, and it is |
| 0:40.0 | quite amazing. I smoked cigarettes and dipped until about 2009. That's the year I found out |
| 0:46.0 | I was having a kid, so I did what any responsible adult would do. I switched to snooose, |
| 0:51.7 | and snooose is great until you realize that you have a snooose in your mouth every waking minute of the day. So I decided that I switched to snooose. And snooos is great until you realize that you have a snooce in your mouth every waking minute of the day. |
| 0:57.3 | So I decided that I needed to cut out tobacco all together other than spliffs. |
| 1:02.1 | So I started chewing Nicorette gum. That shit is the best gum on the planet and I chewed it daily since about 2013. |
| 1:09.3 | I loved it. It was expensive though. But you know me, I'm Jewish and I knew |
| 1:14.2 | how to find the deals. I would buy gum from Europe at a fraction of the cost of the gum here in the |
| 1:19.3 | U.S., and I would do that through eBay. It took some planning, but I'm sure I saved myself thousands |
| 1:24.7 | over the years. And if you knew me over the past decade, I was |
| 1:28.1 | always chewing gum, and most likely I offered you a piece of Nicorette gum with the pitch that it is the |
| 1:33.3 | best gum you will ever chew. But when the quarantine started, I was like, I need to quit this gum. |
| 1:39.7 | So I got myself the patch. And the patch works in three, twoweek steps, so it's six weeks' worth of patches that I bought |
| 1:46.5 | on eBay. |
| 1:47.7 | And other than leaving a tape residue all over my body, the patch works. |
... |
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