‘I thought it was the coolest thing on Earth. But that’s fraud, so Google banned me for life.’
Aaron Lawrence
RAD RAT
October 2025
You run a YouTube channel about Skateboard history, games, tricks and more called Rad Rat Video for a long time. When did you start and what got you into it?
I started on YouTube back in 2005, when I was in high school. I had a channel called ‘aronl.’ For the most part, I was posting tricks for online games of skate, which I would get involved in. Basically, someone would set a trick and then throw a specific gang sign to prove that it was filmed after the game started. Then other people match it, upload it to YouTube, and post the clips in forums.
You must have been a pioneer back then. How did people respond?
People responding at all was really crazy to me. It was just a place to post stuff to share with people you already knew. People finding me on YouTube itself was something I hadn’t even thought of at first. If someone commented, I assumed I knew them. But eventually I started making things for YouTube people, like trick tips. There was a website called Bob’s Trick Tips back in the day that had trick tips for rarer tricks, like freestyle and old school footplant tricks. But nobody was doing them on video yet at the time. So, I started teaching freestyle tricks on video, and then eventually branched into regular street tricks. I made a trick tip for kickflips, and it got over a million views! Later, I started getting sponsors and really taking it seriously. YouTube rolled out monetization, and I clicked on my own ads to watch the number go up in the analytics. I thought it was the coolest thing on Earth. But… that’s fraud, so Google banned me for life. Just recently, I tried setting up a Google Ads account, and I’m still banned from that too.Years later, I started a new channel and called it Rad Rat Video. This was in about 2015. I had already taught most of the tricks I could do, so I thought I would use the channel as an excuse to play old skateboarding video games and talk about skateboarding history and other topics.
‘For personal reasons, hanging out with family and having a death threat pop up on my phone is a little less good.’
Which video is the most watched?
Toward the beginning of the channel, I made a video called ‘How Tony Hawk Ruined Hardflips.’ I grew up in the really small town of Almont, Michigan, and there were only a couple of skaters. There were no skate shops, skateparks, or much of a skate culture at all. This was also before internet streaming was a thing. So, we got a lot of our skateboard knowledge from video games. And the Tony Hawk games did hardflips dirty. In the original two Tony Hawk games, the board actually tilts backside, so it looks more like a pop shove it. Then there are special tricks like ‘double hardflips’ and ‘the well hardflip’, which are also not hardflips, and just added to the confusion about what the trick is actually supposed to be. Back then, if I skated with the kids from school, or made the pilgrimage to the city where there was a skatepark, I would often run into kids doing pop shove its and calling them hardflips. I knew what a hardflip was supposed to be from online discussions, and I was never able to convince anyone that doing a frontside shove it and a kickflip together was even a real trick. Hell, I even played a game of SKATE against a kid who did a nollie pressure flip, and he claimed that was a hardflip. It was chaos out there. I made a video talking about that, but it was really early on my new channel. I had no actual skating of my own there, and the majority of the comments are about how I’m a virgin who has never touched a real skateboard in my life, and that I’m completely wrong and my story is fake. That’s YouTube comments for you.
Isn’t bad publicity good as it is your most watched clip?
Yes and no. For YouTube algorithm purposes, yeah, getting lots of comments is great, and helps the channel get pushed out to new people, even if those comments are mostly negative. For personal reasons, hanging out with family and having a death threat pop up on my phone is a little less good. That has happened more times than you would think.
There was some beef between you and Kelly Hart that came to the surface during Chris Haslam’s episode with the Nine Club a few years ago. Can you fill us in?
Back in 2016, I made a video about a trick called a ‘kiwi flip’. Imagine a laser flip, except you hang your back heel off the tail a lot, and you underflip it with the edge of your back foot instead of heelflipping with your front foot. In the video, I showed that there are a lot of pros doing this trick, including Chris Haslam, and asked the question of whether it’s “cheating” to do that trick and call it a laserflip. When I started the script, I was of the opinion that it was a different trick, and that it would be cheating if you matched a laserflip with a kiwi flip in a game of SKATE. But I interviewed Aymeric Nocus, a french skater who is a master at the kiwi flip. He has done variations I’ve never seen before, like a nollie 720 gazelle version. The board is doing a nollie 720 laser flip while he spins 360 with it. In his mind, even though he’s the guy who came up with the name ‘kiwi flip’, they’re the same trick. Just different ways to get the board to do the same thing. He changed my mind, and in the video, my conclusion was that they’re technically different, but not in a way that really matters. Quite a few years later, on the Nine Club, Chris Haslam was a guest, and he mentioned that video, and how people online think that he cheats at laser flips. Kelly, who hadn’t seen the video, said that it was incredibly nerdy, in a way that I felt insulted by. I made a video addressing it and talking about the actual contents of the kiwi flip video, and I later heard personally from both Chris and Kelly, and we all shook hands and got over it. The thing is none of us actually disagreed. I made the video because I thought it was really interesting that there’s a secret technique to the trick that most people didn’t know about.
Have you had similar encounters with other pros?
Yeah, I also had issues with Jamie Thomas and Peter Smolik. Back when Ride the Sky came out in 2008, I made a review of it, and I used a couple of clips. Overall, I wasn’t a big fan. I’ve always been more of a fan of technical flip-in- flip-out skating, and the video was heavy on basic tricks done on big handrails. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t my thing at the time. All I wanted to see was NBDs on ledges. Fallen made an illegal copyright claim against my video. Reviews fall under fair use, and I showed maybe five tricks total. Still, they took the video down, and then I got a message from Jamie Thomas saying that a lot of people worked hard on it, and that it sucked that I was negative about it. He said he wasn’t personally involved in taking down my video, and we talked a bit. He conceded that it was okay for me to have an opinion on it. Lastly, I had a series on my channel that’s kind of a ‘where are they now’ for skaters from the 90s and 00s, called Retro Rippers. I made one featuring Peter Smolik in 2017 and talked about his career and video parts. He contacted me, told me there were some problems with it, and told me I need to call him so he can straighten me out. I was feeling a little intimidated about it, but I didn’t want to be putting bad information out there, so I called him. But his number was disconnected.
‘Donald (Grind King Trucks) himself later contacted me and told me I inspired him to get the company going again.’
Can you share some positive feedback you received from the community?
The most positive thing was my effect on Grind King. They had disappeared from the scene after being one of the biggest names in trucks when I was growing up. I made a video digging into the history of the brand, and all of their innovations in skateboarding. And then I talked about what happened to it, and where the owner, Donald Cassel was. Donald himself later contacted me and told me I inspired him to get the company going again. He came up with a new truck called the Disruptor, and he’s got a new one called the Locker now, which he gave me a set of before anybody else. It was such an honor to know that I had a small part in a legendary skate brand coming back to the market, and that an ave rage skater out there riding the trucks has been at least partially influenced by something I worked on. It feels good.
Why don’t you continue covering skateboard history in your channel?
I do, but in smaller ways, like my recent video on who was the first to do a salad grind, because it might not have been Eric Dressen. Trick history videos are definitely still in the mix. But bigger videos, like my pro spotlight videos, always end up getting me in trouble. As soon as your video starts to do well, people want a piece of it. I once got copyright threats from someone who filmed two tricks that I used in my Josh Kasper video. He wanted me to pay him $200 a year or else he would get it taken down. That video made me nowhere near that much total, let alone every year. I made a video about Ocean Howell, and a lot of the stuff you read about him in old interviews were about him hooking up with fans in the tour bus and lots of other crazy sex stories. That got me in trouble a couple times. First, I got contacted by someone whose mom was in the background of one of the clips I used. She was in the audience of a demo, and they thought that the video implied that she had sex with him. They were pissed and told me I had to cut that part out or there would be trouble. Later, Ocean himself contacted me. He’s a college professor now, and he didn’t like that the first thing that came up when students and parents Googled his name was a video about all his sex stories from 30 years ago. And Transworld tried to take down my video about Tom Penny. That one is one of my favorite ones. I managed to fight them off that time, but realistically, there’s probably 500 hours of work on the channel that nobody will ever see because of stuff getting taken down.
‘What secrets are you holding back, Rodney?’
Last question. If you could interview anybody, who would it be?
So far, I haven’t done any interviews. I’ve reached out to a few pro skaters, and I’ve never gotten a response. I wanted to interview some skaters from my early skate years, like Colt Cannon. And eventually work my way up on the fame scale until I get to Rodney Mullen, where I can ask him all my burning freestyle questions.
What is your number one burning freestyle question to Rodney?
What I really want to know is what tricks he never got that he wished he did. Or tricks that he filmed that never got released. We already know he invented everything. I even discovered with some research that he was probably the first person to do a casper flip. He did it, did a few variations, then never did the trick again on camera. What don’t we know? What secrets are you holding back, Rodney?