Step into payment processing
Kyle Walker finds a side hustle and the mirage ripples, the top ten of Kevin Long's ten kickflips, FIFA fucks Vancouver, skate shops are such beautiful things, and more.
The definitive weekly ranking and analysis of all the skateboarding and other things online that I cannot stop consuming and how it makes me feel, personally.
Kyle Walker has stepped into payment processing
Rank: 335k
Mood: 💸
"Skating is still the main thing — keep the main thing the main thing — but I wanted to step into payment processing to help a bunch of homies out who have businesses." Professional skateboarder Kyle Walker tells the camera in a video shared to his over 335,000 Instagram followers. Walker goes on to explain that, in his estimation, payment processing is "where you transfer the transaction fee and the business owner saves the bread." And that's where the video abruptly ends. There is no call to action, no pitch to recruit prospective clients on this ill-described new venture he's stepped into, and no details on how he, Kyle Walker, transfers those transaction fees to help business owners save bread.
Five days later, Walker followed up with those details in another Instagram post. Sort of. The caption of the video reads, in part:
If a coffee shop does $100k/month and pays 2.6–4% in [credit card] processing…
that’s $2.6k–$4k+ disappearing every month.
That should stay in your business.
On my off days from skating, I’ve been helping friends and local businesses lower their processing and actually understand what they’re paying for.
Save money. Keep more profit.
If you own a business and want to see what you’re paying vs what you should be paying, DM me RATES 💳📈
At this point, it's still uncertain how Walker would do any of that, but we get a clue at the end of the video.
"I'm pretty much the business' agent. And they can hit me any time... if [an issue needs] more than me, we can get them on customer service — we've got the best customer service — over on PaybotX."
A cursory online search of PaybotX brings up three poorly designed websites: paybotx.com, paybotx.ca, and paybotx.company.site. The first two are near mirrors of one another, and the third is for "equipment ordering," as PaybotX's business model, when you cut through the nebulous chatter of Walker's video, is selling Point of Sale terminals that promise to eliminate credit card processing fees by passing the charges back onto the customer. "Sales agents" like Walker "make money while [they] sleep" through residuals on the accounts they set up.
This certainly resembles a multi-level marketing scheme, and given the level of thought and care put into its marketing, it isn't one that's overly concerned with avoiding that connection or being taken seriously. That's why it's so jarring to see Kyle Walker, someone who has reached the absolute zenith of his profession, awkwardly promoting an outfit like PaybotX, which smells so strongly of a scam that you can see the stench lines emanating from it.
It's not unusual, and in almost any other case, it should actually be encouraging when a professional skateboarder begins to consider a life outside of skateboarding. Fleeting is the way to describe such a career. Walker has accomplished everything there is to do in this sport. He's had longevity, with a PRO career that's lasted for over a decade, endless signature products, including multiple shoes with Vans, and a Skater of the Year trophy to boot. He is one of the rare few who have maintained and (most likely) done well for themselves financially. You would think he has (some) money to invest in whatever he wants his future to be.
This isn't the first time Walker has branched out business-wise. In March 2023, he launched Alte Volant, a clothing brand that sold $1,300 patterned jackets. Alte Volant hasn't updated its social media accounts since October 2023. He also does paid ads for apps on Instagram. Both leverage his standing in the skateboarding space, a reasonable way to parlay decades of hard work and achievement.
It's unclear what the PaybotX detour does. An ad, or explanation, so poorly done that it raises more questions than interest. Like, who is making these strange, stilted videos for Walker? The person tagged in them, along with a number of BTS/vlog-style uploads on Walker's Instagram page since the New Year, is someone named Benjamin Chmielecki. Seemingly unconnected to skateboarding, Chmielecki's Instagram bio reads "Social Media Marketing | Ads | Websites | Payment Processing," which suggests he's behind Walker's recent posting and perhaps even his step into the world of POS terminals.
Chmielecki's Instagram account is built around something Walker is driven by in a corny, amorphous, but by all appearances, genuine way: aspiration. Expressed in the style of Canadian self-help wealth guru Bob Proctor and Rhonda Byrne's The Secret.
Chmielecki's page touts 114,000 followers and a grid full of luxury sports cars and head-scratching social media strategy explainers. Those projections, in our age of slop and substancelessness, are success. Aspiration personified. The Law of Attraction made manifest. However, considering Chmielecki's posts average 200 likes, the quality of his social media marketing is far below entry level, his "business" farcical at best, and he doesn't look to be over 23 years of age, it would appear that Chmielecki is still in the fake it until you make it phase of manifestation, and one assumes, making money off of Walker in the process, much like PaybotX.
"I dunno, just be fucking smarter with your money." Some of Chmielecki's profound insights on social media marketing via the Ash and Ash Podcast.
This isn't surprising, really. As I've written previously, and as we're all painfully aware, now is the time of bullshitters.
What makes all of these lies, big and small, even worse is how stupid they all are. They don't stand up to scrutiny. It's brute-force idiocy. And without pushback or consequences, that stupidity begets more stupidity until it becomes the air we breathe. A common tongue that funnels down. Not just accepted, but expected.
While trying to figure out what exactly, if anything, Walker was talking about in those videos, I got sucked into a wormhole. It took me from PaybotX to Chmielecki to a link in the latter's profile that led to the website of Aviniti, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based branding and digital marketing agency that boasts of game-changing marketing services, while having such an objectively terrible portfolio (that includes claims of working with high-end luxury car brands like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati, when what they actually did was social content for local dealerships) that you have to wonder how their presumably wealthy, globe-trotting, entreprenuer-cum-influencer CEO, Jon Boles, affords the McLaren at his Laguna Beach home.
Perhaps the best way to frame how off this all feels, to pin to the wall how abject, bleak, sweaty, and completely normalized this permeating, self-perpetuating falseness is, and how this absence of substance has become deified and something for young people like Chmielecki to aspire to, is a mock-up of a Forbes cover that Boles, a self-described "visionary and serial entrepreneur," shared on Instagram in 2022.
Boles was never actually featured in Forbes. Boles was featured in a "partner content" piece in Forbes Australia, meaning he paid to have coverage in a subdivision of the husk of a legacy publication, where he likely chose the headline "Learn How Jon Boles is Becoming One of the Top Brand Builders." In the years since, he's slapped that ersatz accolade everywhere, including his Instagram bio.
Ultimately, for people like Boles, Chmielecki, and the countless others like them, brand-building is their lifeforce. The appearance of move-making, casual displays of (often simulated) financial and social "success," is how they "manifest." These symbols of power show a life beyond what the pleb can imagine but they assure the pleb that they can reach if they believe, grind, and open their wallets. It all has a slick sheen of unreality. Especially when its acolytes latch onto someone like Walker, who has developed an otherworldly talent and has achieved legitimate success — that's when the mirage ripples.
Because Walker has something real, it's the others that don't.
The top ten of Kevin Long's ten kickflips
Rank: 10
Mood: 🔟
Do you like counting and professional skateboarder Kevin "Spanky" Long? You're in luck. In a lovely little segment during the "Body" episode of the latest season of Yo Gabba GabbaLand! on Apple TV+, Long does ten kickflips as his daughter counts them up.
Given that this is the "Simply Ranked" weekly newsletter, it behooves us to rank those ten kicklips on execution, framing, and intangible x-factor, by counting down from ten to one.
10.
9.
8.
7.
6.
5.
4.
3.
2.
1.
Agree? Disagree? Sound off in the comments below or wherever you happen to be at this very moment.
Skate shops, a special thing
Rank: 1
Mood: 🗑️❤️
It is a special thing, isn't it, that people in countries around the world get together on the third Saturday of every February to celebrate the humble skateshop. Those hubs of community and culture where you can buy some wheels, say hi to your friends, and if you're from out of town, ask (politely) where you might find their cuttiest of spots.
Skate Shop Day is a celebration of consumerism if you choose to see it that way, but it's more so a celebration of the people who keep skateboarding alive. An acknowledgment of the small businesses we support and that support us, so we can continue doing the thing we love to do. These shops, whose owners are generally in it for the love of the game, put on events, storefronts become third spaces, doing so much more than your average business, and are most often hanging on by a thread.
We shouldn't need a reminder of everything skate shops do for skateboarding, but it doesn't hurt to get an annual prodding to buy some stuff if we need it, if we can. Things are tough out there for shop owners and their patrons. Which is why it's a special thing to realize that in skateshops around the world on Saturday, people gathered around sharp flat screens, buzzy old cathode ray tube monsters, and in the expansive of a crisp white bedsheet and a projector to take in the premiere of Antihero Skateboards' latest video, Dumpster Dive. A video whose release was made exclusive to skate shops, the people who run them and those who spend time in them, first.
All those thousands of people, enjoying each other's company in a space made for and by them, gasping in delight as the ever-entertaining Gus Gordon falls ass-first into a dumpster.
Local news update: Soccer vs. skateboarding
Rank: 11,000
Mood: ❌⚽
Here is a take so cold, so icy in its obviousness, that engagement with it actually causes one to tingle and burn with a frostbite of the mind: The Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the governing body more commonly known as FIFA, which organizes football-related events in cities the world over, might not have the best interests of those communities and countries in mind.
Once you've had a moment to thaw, a laundry list of reasons will come flooding back. There's the comical rot of corruption that appears to be integral to the function of the organization itself, which has led to countless mass protest movements against FIFA and its events, the arrests of seven senior officials in 2015, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which has a Wikipedia page dedicated to its controversies that runs over 11,000 words long, FIFA awarding Donald Trump its inaugural authoritarian-pleasing "Peace Prize" in December, to name just a few of seemingly countless other scandals. Including this recent horror:
Journalist Dave Zirin has described FIFA's overall efforts as a "neoliberal Trojan Horse."
...because it comes in, and people are supposed to be excited about soccer and hosting this big party, but in reality it pushes through a series of development programs, which are mainly for the benefit of big construction, big real estate and tourists—and tourist money coming in, and not for the people who actually have to live here once the cameras have left and once the confetti has all been swept away.
Much like the Olympics, while we all get to revel in the magic of sport, an event's host cities and their residents, particularly the most vulnerable, often suffer. Whether that's the displacement of low-income and houseless populations to make room for new developments or to "beautify" cities for the sake of tourists, the reported 6,500 migrant worker deaths in Qatar, or the smaller-scale impacts of disruptions to daily and civic life for those who call these places home.
As the 2026 World Cup approaches, whose games will be hosted in 16 cities across Canada, the United States, and Mexico, issues have long been swirling. There's the threat of even attending a game in the USA as ICE promises to provide "security" for events; continued water scarcity in the communities surrounding Azteca Stadium in Mexico City; and extreme budget overruns for matches held in Canada, as crises of economy, housing, and healthcare rage.
On top of all that (and of much lesser import), for reasons currently unclear, the City of Vancouver will be closing the famed Hastings Skatepark from May to July while the area hosts the "FIFA Fanfest."
The Vancouver Skateboard Coalition (VSBC) posted about the closure on Sunday.
The VSBC has been notified by the City of Vancouver's "World Cup 26 Vancouver Host Committee" that Hastings Skatepark will be closed for the FIFA Fan Festival at Hastings Park for 2.5 months continually from May 2026 to July 2026 , this will include set up, takedown and the FIFA Fan Festival itself (July 9th to July 19th).
As our community is well aware, this will displace thousands of skateboarders at one of Vancouver's busiest & most important skateparks. We are incredibly disappointed that the "World Cup 26 Vancouver Host Committee" has decided to close Hastings Skatepark and not work to keep it open during the FIFA Fan Festival or offer the local skateboard community compensation.
On Wednesday, the World Cup 26 Vancouver Host Committee held a "public information session" on Zoom, and according to attendees, didn't directly answer any of the skateboarding community's questions, like why the park needs to be closed and why the city refused to work with the community to offer alternatives or compensation of some sort (the VSBC has suggested a resurfacing of the bowl or "financial reimbursement") given one of the city's more popular public facilities will be closed during the majority of the spring and summer months.
Hopefully, the seven games Vancouver will host and their $624 million price tag are worth it!
In the meantime, the VSBC recommends:
- Spread the word to other skaters + skate groups
- Email fwc26inquiries@vancouver.ca
- Email phoenix.lam@vancouver.ca
- Contact Mayor and Council
- Contact Parks Board Commissioners
Something to consider: "One hundred accounts are behind the majority of conspiracy theory content in Canada" by Rory White for Canada's National Observer.
Good thing:
John Hendrickson
A good friends are blogging thing:
Another good thing:
Leticia Nogueira
Bill Conway, co-founder and former EIC of The Hard Times, has been reviewing skate video soundtracks:
Bill Conway
Ryan Lay's corner: Ryan goes bio and mellow in Tempe. Speaking of Tempe, if you're reading this at Slow Impact, have a wonderful time. I won't be making it out this year and miss you all terribly.
Until next week… have a pasty or four at Cornish Pasty for me.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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A collection of essays that I think you might like. The Edmonton Journal called it a "local book set to make a mark in 2024," The CBC said it's "quirky yet insightful" (lol), and it won Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2025 Alberta Book Publishing Awards.
Book cover by Hiller Goodspeed.
Right, Down + Circle
ECW PRESS
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I wrote a book about the history and cultural impact of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that you can find at your local bookshop or order online now. I think you might like this one, too.
Photo via The Palomino.
