Where Surfing Ends and Music Begins, with Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.3 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the mid-90s, the cultural collision of music and sports was everywhere in pop culture. You saw it through the brand new X Games and MTV Sports, in movies like “Point Break” and “Airborne,” and you heard it through what we used to call “alternative rock.” The band Third Eye Blind was a staple of this era, so you’d think that frontman Stephan Jenkins might have followed a similar trajectory to his rock god peers of the era. But you’d be wrong. Stephan, a surfer since childhood, grew up in the Bay Area and his break of choice is San Francisco’s notoriously big, dangerous, and sharky Ocean Beach. And he’s not just out in the water looking for stoke; he's a tireless ocean advocate. For as long as he’s surfed, Stephan has fought for kelp restoration and plastic reduction along the California coastline. He also regularly volunteers with the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation, which helps veterans treat PTSD through surfing. This connection endlessly—even subconsciously—influences the music Stephan makes. Turns out, when you spend your life in the water and making music, the two things combine in ways that it takes a lifetime to understand.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Outside Podcast with Paddyo.
0:12.4	Music, the muses got lit up for me.
0:15.4	So I began to sing what it sounded like.
0:19.0	And I never loved anything that didn't scare me oh that
0:23.0	that lyric yes that's that's my next question is that directly related to surfing directly yeah
0:29.6	surfing scares me oh sure yeah yeah getting denied out at ocean beach in california is like trying
0:36.6	to paddle out and these waves are coming at me
0:39.3	where it's like not only am I not going to be able to get underneath this thing and get through
0:43.8	but I don't know if I'm going to survive it's like holy you know but then if you get it if you
0:50.3	harness that it's like you feel this enormous sense of, it's, I don't know what it is.
0:57.2	I'm going to stop. Don't go surfing people. It's terrible. Don't do it.
1:04.3	In the mid-90s, the epicenter of all things cool was conveniently located across the hall in the
1:12.5	bedroom of my two older brothers, Sean and Brendan. Don't laugh. It was the suburbs and I was in
1:18.5	middle school. Anyway, within those hollowed walls, I was introduced to the intoxicating
1:23.6	cultural collision of music and sports. You saw it on TV through the brand new X games and MTV Sports
1:30.5	in theaters through movies like Point Break and Airborne, and you heard it through what we used to call
1:36.3	alternative rock, grunge and post grunge and punk and hip hop that gave birth to the original
1:42.5	Lollapalooza Festival. I'd eavesdrop on my brother's
1:46.3	conversations about which athletes were cool, what the latest flicks were, and all the pubescent
1:52.0	drama that played out within this milieu. And the whole time, my face would be melting,
1:58.3	thanks to the CDs they kept popping into their boombox.
2:02.1	The band Third Eye Blind was a staple of this era.
	...

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