New Interview
Yuto Horigome

Yuto Horigome: “I have to push myself”

June 18, 2025

Yuto, as a two-time gold medal winning Olympic champion, do you think skateboarding is in your DNA?

Maybe, yes! My dad was also a skateboarder, and so when he was growing up, he would go skating just at the local park. Not a skate park, but a regular park. All the skaters were there, and I was there too, following my dad, watching at first, but then sometimes when my dad was finished skating, he would put me on the board. That was my first memory of skateboarding, my dad holding me up on the board when I was just a baby.

Is there a big skateboarding culture in your native Japan?

I feel like Japan has a pretty good community for skateboarding, but it’s not like America. There’s still a cool culture but it’s not as big. The generation before me is really the one that really started the street culture and the skating community. I learned a lot from them over the past few years. It's definitely up there, and it’s continuing to grow and expand really quickly.

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Last week’s Interview
Jesse JenkinsEmerging Masters

Jesse Jenkins: “You get another chance every day”

June 11, 2025

Jesse, as a chef, apparently you sometimes wake up in the morning thinking about what pan you’re going to cook in before you even know what you’re having for breakfast. Do you have to live, breathe, and dream this job in order to find success in the food industry?

I think it makes life easier if you're one hundred percent into what you're trying to do, sure. I think when you can have that admiration for something, you'll do better at making something about it. But you also don't need to know everything either; you just have to really be into it. If you're a fan, you're going to do even better. So when I wrote my cookbook Cooking with Vegetables, I had to ask myself, is this about me knowing everything, or is this about how much I love food and cooking? I think that’s why I’ve done well with my cooking videos on Instagram, because as much as I am a cook, I also fucking love this job. I love cooking, and I love making videos. It doesn’t have to do with what’s right or technically correct, it’s more just me being a fan and what my take is on a dish.

Both cooking and making videos have been a part of your professional life even before you started your Instagram channel, Another Day in Paradise, right?

Yeah, I mean, growing up in LA, I always wanted to be a professional skateboarder. That's just all I wanted to do. I started skateboarding — I didn't do competitions, we did what was called street skating. So my friends and I, we would just drive around in traffic with a bunch of other kids and film ourselves skateboarding at night, or making videos of ourselves doing tricks, things like that. So although my passion was skateboarding, the actual job was about what music we were using, what cameras we were using, how it was going to look. There was no Instagram or YouTube, so you’d get this bootleg tape and go around to skate shops and drop this tape off. Later on, I kept up with photography and started working as a fashion photographer, directing music videos, I was still so obsessed with taking pictures. But I’d also worked for a stint in restaurants, as a busboy, a waiter, a line cook, so I would supplement my income with cheffing.