Local pro surfer Kyle Thiermann will appear at the Patagonia Outlet on Nov. 25 to talk about his new book, One Last Question Before You Go.
A Santa Cruz High School graduate, Thiermann lands somewhere between an innovative entrepreneur and a comedic raconteur. The 35-year-old buff athlete is widely known as a world-class big wave rider, an OG Patagonia surf ambassador, and the co-creator of the MotherF**ker Awards, which skewered corporate America. He’s also a successful podcaster who’s released 400 episodes and climbing. And now, added to an already dense résumé, he’s an author of a smart, timely and emotionally moving book.
One Last Thing Before You Go is subtitled “Why you should interview your parents,” and its origin story was hatched during the recent worldwide plague. “I came up with the idea during the pandemic. I was living in this old RV called Starflyte. It was a 1997 Ford RV. It was sick,” Thiermann says.
While the type of RV seems a minor detail, it’s part and parcel of the fabric of Thiermann’s life. Consider that this interview was done while he was maintaining his balance on a slackline. And that’s because balance is an integral key to understanding how Thiermann traverses the depths and heights of human experience and emotion.
Like so many of us during COVID, Thiermann feared that he would lose his parents, and worried if it was possibly the end of the world as we know it. “I had the idea to have my dad, Eric Thiermann, on my podcast.” Having interviewed so many intellectual athletes, best-selling authors and other inspiring folks, Thiermann has developed yet another skill, that of an intuitive interviewer.
“There’s a dance to it. And I figured I would turn the microphone around on my dad. So I invited him into my RV. I interviewed him about his life. He has had a fascinating life,” Thiermann relates.
His father, Eric, was a child magician and paid for his schooling by doing magic shows as a kid throughout Santa Monica. A year-one UCSC student (“back when they had trailers”), his father became a documentary filmmaker.
Thiermann began the interview by asking his father what got him into filmmaking. “I learned that year one at UCSC, he was tasked to take photos for their first yearbook. I didn’t know that, because I had never asked him. He had this old Mamiya Sekor camera, and that got him into filmmaking. He told me stories about magic and just lessons of life that I had never really taken the time to absorb from him or get down on tape. It was a fun conversation,” Thiermann admits.
At that point, The Kyle Thiermann Podcast had a fairly small audience, but after the interview was broadcast online, he began to receive a notable amount of emails from his listeners. “Listeners said that they’ve been wanting to interview their parents. They asked how do you do this? Can you just give me tips? So that was where the idea for the book started,” Thiermann explains.
Thiermann believes that interviewing your parents is a lot like ingesting psychedelics (which is another of his passions that he is quite knowledgeable about). “It can reframe the way you see your parents. You know, for a lot of us, we just see our parents as these like old statues that are unmoving. But the reality is there’s a stat that by the time we’re 18 years old, most of us will have already spent 90% of our total time in life with our parents. So if you think about that after you move out when you’re 18, you’ve already exhausted 90% of the total time with your parents. And then you see them for holidays, you see them for events, but you have an outdated version of who your parents are. And I think the interview is a chance, like psychedelics, to recontextualize how you see them,” Thiermann explains, still mid-balance, hanging in the air.
One Last Question Before You Go is not only a biography of some of Thiermann’s early experiences growing up in Santa Cruz, but also a chance to hear some of his podcast guests weigh in on the importance of listening to your parents’ stories—such as Supercommunicators author Charles Duhigg and Sex at Dawn author Christopher Ryan. They flesh out this small but mighty book, but what will make your heart laugh, and eyes cry, are Thiermann’s interviews with his parents.
Kyle Thiermann will appear at 7pm on Nov. 25 at Patagonia Outlet, 415 River St., Suite C, Santa Cruz. Free. Find out more at KyleThiermann.com.
