Who IS Aaron Kyro? | Skate Stories ep.5

who is the man the myth the legend aaron cairo well if any of you began skateboarding i'd say any time after 2010 when youtube was the go-to place for tutorials you've probably come across the iconic sponsored skateboarder from the bay area himself aaron cairo he's probably taught more people how to skateboard than anybody else in existence and he's the owner of the biggest skateboarding channel on youtube boasting an impressive 5 million subscribers and a billion and a half views what's even more impressive though is that his channel is 15 years old that's right it was made all the way back in 2005 pretty much when youtube started meaning that braille skateboarding has been around before a lot of the og youtube channels including pewdiepie equals three and was literally made only a month after smosh that makes braille skateboarding one of the few channels that are over 15 years old and still uploading consistently with the growing fan base so in today's video i'll be telling you the story of the life of aaron cairo the creator of braille skateboarding aaron carr was born september 10 1983 and grew up in a small town in montana at the age of six erin cairo saw skateboard for the first time and said that's the coolest thing i've ever seen a few more years went by and around the age of 10 he got his first skateboard and started writing he describes growing up in a small town with a small school as being forced to take a certain path you wake up for school every day practice basketball or baseball with the team or if you're part of the band and over time you'll become more and more attracted to skateboarding according to cairo you would watch his favorite skate video literally four times a day and i got this skateboard video and i would literally watch it four times a day every day and skateboard many hours every day his band teacher and basketball coach strongly disagreed with his career path that he was thinking of taking because at the time being a pro skater was very unlikely especially when you're living in a small town in montana thousands of miles away from any city with a significant skate culture it seems like all that talk got to him because after graduating high school in 2002 he went to vancouver british columbia for college where he attended for one year of film school why there so i went to college there okay so i did one year of film school where i did more skateboarding than film and then i went to san francisco from there cool and why did you choose san francisco well san francisco is the only place i had been to i had never been to la at that time but san francisco had this one spot that was a manual pad and it's manual skating is like my kind of skating so what's manual skating okay two wheels okay the front two wheels either way either way the back two wheels okay manual or nose manual at the time san francisco had a giant skateboarding community with magazines plenty of skaters and new skate parks being built and although british columbia had a decent skate scene at the time he was forced to leave because his visa expired since dropping out of school which left him with a decision on where to move and since he was more interested in skateboarding than school he followed his dreams and moved to san francisco plan a is become a skateboarder and plan b was if that doesn't work out you're into film because you like skateboard videos so you could do film right i thought to myself if i don't go all in on this passion i don't think i will ever forgive myself for that you know i don't think i'll ever let that go after moving to san francisco he gave skateboarding his all where i skateboarded harder than i had ever ever skateboarded in my entire life like to say that i gave everything is a drastic understatement i literally gave it everything of course skateboarding didn't pay for anything at first so he got a job at kb toys which he absolutely hated no matter what the person bought you had to ask them do you want batteries with that and they would usually say no a bouncy ball doesn't require batteries and you'd say well i'm sorry i have to ask that you know eventually a few sponsors reached out noticed in cairo specifically habitat boards but they weren't quite all that he hoped for and although you commonly hear cairo boasting about being a sponsored skater from the bay area he started to try to film some video parts specifically two of them at the time and they reached audiences all the way over at the east coast the videos were mijos in seasons keep in mind that this was a time before everybody had computers and the internet so if your name spread across a country like that through dvds it was actually pretty impressive and a pretty big deal but still like the sponsor thing was going kind of just it was just stuck kind of just it was stuck for a very long time like at the different levels of sponsorship i made a video on my channel covering like the different levels of sponsorship yeah i watched that yeah so i was stuck at that lowest level okay and some people just are going to be stuck there forever recognizing his career if his sponsor at the time may maybe a dead end he combined the footage from both his video parts and uploaded his first video onto youtube in 2005. for whatever reason the youtube algorithm gods seemed fit this video was an absolute hit on early youtube and was literally one of the most popular videos on the internet at the time at least according to cairo and at that time i think it was the most viewed video on the internet period the video did surprisingly well before this cairo's main recognition in skateboarding had been in some magazines in canada unfortunately though the views didn't translate to money for cairo in fact at the time and still kind of to this day it was actually frowned upon in the skateboarding community to upload your videos to youtube youtube was such not a thing that like if you put your footage on youtube it was like just throw it away essentially the reason behind that is that you were dumping hours and hours of hard work onto a platform that didn't pay you whereas if you created a dvd you could sell it for money and also it's a lot more impressive to everyone video part so on dvd even if you're sponsored or not versus just uploading it to some random website on the internet shortly after the video went up he started realizing that sponsors were withdrawing his name from a team he said that he one time showed up to their shop getting ready to get a new freeboard and they said guess what we're not giving you boards anymore akiro hit a low at this point it's a rough world it's a rough world because he packed up his whole life to move to san fran and live out the dream of being a pro skater and it was crumbling all before his eyes youtube as a website eventually started getting more popularity around 2007 and you could finally have a viable option to make a career out of it so we saw other success on it and he started uploading everything that he had he started out with short clips i'm gonna make videos on youtube and i started out just making literally anything that's really what i did i would just go oh i'm gonna have this old footage throw it on youtube in the same year he changed his channel's name to braille and turned it into a company aimed at being a distribution line for his friends to put out youtube videos and start getting recognized for skateboarding aside from that he really was just starting to get the feel of youtube and experimented to see what kind of content people liked or just like after doing a series clip of the week he began uploading tutorials by the end of the year he made a total of seven dollars off youtube so he went back and started to look at what he had uploaded and how it had done views wise turns out people really liked his tutorials and he liked him a lot more than his random skateboarding clips so he knew which direction to take his channel in he started uploading more tutorials which really blew his channel up and sure enough it all ended up paying off in the end as braille is now the most popular skateboarding channel on youtube although he is known for his phrase i'm a sponsored skateboarder from the bay area he actually didn't become a pro skater until 2004. but wait skate or die you said he was sponsored well yeah he was sponsored but there's a difference between being a pro and a sponsored skater for example i have a sponsor cal7skateboards.com if you guys need a new skateboard new wheels new whatever check out links in description down below but just because i have a sponsor does not mean that i'm a pro skater one typically isn't considered a pro skater until they have their own skateboard made with their name on it so cairo finally became pro when one of his youtube friends andrew schrock created revive skateboards and one day hit him up asking if he'd like to be a part of his new skateboard company and of course he accepted the rest is pretty much history at least up until 2019 when revive officially closed and rebranded to revive wheels with this change came a new website and aaron cairo's board is not being sold anymore although interestingly enough they rebranded the website and still sell revive boards one of the cool things about aaron cairo is how he believes in giving back to the community a great example of him following through on this idea is when he got a skatepark built in his own hometown in montana there weren't very many skaters in his own town that he grew up in but there were still a few there that reside without a place to skate legally in fact back in the day the cops would often kick him and his friends out of local parks that he was skating at and surely enough he built the skatepark and to this day it still stands that wasn't the only place he'd given back though in case he didn't know aaron cairo is a scientologist my name's aaron cairo i'm a sponsored scientologist from the san francisco bay area which is where most of the criticism for him stems from first let's get into what scientology is so there's no confusion scientology as defined by wikipedia is a set of beliefs and practices that are variously defined as a cult business or a new religious movement there has been a lot of unpopular things per se that have been associated with scientology i'm not going to get into that this isn't a video about scientology but if you are interested there are plenty of resources out there that you can find anyways a lot of criticisms have been directed at aaron carro not only for supporting scientology but also pushing his fans to support it too specifically there's a clip out there where he claimed that scientology made him like before scientology and after was i was learning tricks a lot easier things were just coming to me a lot easier with less effort this is frowned upon because most of his audience is made up of young minds who are very impressionable and might think that that's what they need to do to get good at skateboarding in fact it goes far enough to say that scientology is a source of his self-confidence and his self-esteem aside from that there was that one time when he donated seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a church of scientology and then went ahead and asked his fans to donate two hundred thousand dollars to save the skatepark they made in montana when he could have just not donated nearly a million dollars scientology and been able to save his skate park three times over instead of having to ask his followers to do it it's honestly all a little bit confusing and i'm not someone to hate somebody for their belief i just hope he's not trying to influence the people around them to join a pretty much confirmed cult cairo has a life outside of skateboarding too right around the time that braille was becoming well braille skateboarding he met fellow scientologist danielle during a scientology course they're both taking her and erin cairo got married in april of 2010 which is the same month they launched a braille website braille skateboarding started out as a small youtuber uploading his skateboarding videos and eventually became the most popular skateboarding youtube channel the direction of the channel first started out as a platformer for friends to upload content but eventually shifted into what it is today a company aimed at helping beginner skateboarders and growing the sport globally while it's definitely impressive and i'm totally not jealous the real impressive part is how braille transformed from a youtube channel to becoming a full-blown merchandise ecommerce site even offering virtual and in-person skateboarding classes they sell pretty much anything that you can think of for skateboarding from hats shirts all the way to skateboards and everything you need for it braille has pretty much capitalized every part of skateboarding that a company could aaron cairo step down as the ceo of braille skateboarding in april 2020 and claims died so it can focus more on skateboarding and it seems like they have some pretty big plans for the future too even without their infamous leader aaron cairo started out as a no-name kid raised in a small town in montana who dreamt of skating as a career to becoming the founder of one of the most recognized youtube skateboarding brands we know today with his net worth estimated at over 2 million dollars he's given back to the community in a number of ways focusing primarily on beginner skaters who knows where skateboarding would be at without the countless tutorials he's put out on learning basic tricks while he does to have some interesting beliefs so did most of us and sometimes it's better just to look past it as long as not harming anybody and focus on all the good days and for skateboarding and its community [Music] you

Channel: Skate Or Die

Views: 279,052

Keywords: The Story of Aaron Kyro, aaron kyro, braille skateboarding, secrets of skateboarding, how to skateboard, learn to skateboard, who is aaron kyro, skateboard, skateboarding, george poulos, skate, skate or die, skateordie, skateboarding 2020, braille, first year of skating, first year of skateboarding, fetty potter, lamont holt, skateboarding progression, skateboarding fails, 10 skaters you will meet, skaters you will meet, poser, skateboarding compilation, skater, aaron, kyro

Id: EtO0r_W9o68

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020