Life Wide Open with CboysTV - Grind Hard Plumbing Co on Going Viral From Their First Video, How They Got Their Name, & Strategy vs Luck

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

In todays podcast we sit down with Grind Hard Plumbing Co, they are NOT a plumbing company but rather responsible for some of Youtube's most insane and creative builds such as the Barbie Jeep and Mustang seen on Jay Leno, Monster Choppers, Offroad Teslas and much more. We talk about their time in TV, the exploitation of country people or "Hicks", Dealing with Keyboard Engineers, Mental health, Bad Designs the world has never seen, How they got their name and the issues it causes, and much much more. Enjoy Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://www.shopify.com/wideopen Get 20% off your first order at https://www.mackweldon.com and use code WIDEOPEN Follow us on Instagram @cboystv and @lifewideopenpodcast To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/LifeWideOpenYT Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/LifeWideOpenWithCboysTV If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: https://bit.ly/LifeWideOpenWithCboysTV You can also check out our main YouTube channel CboysTV: https://www.youtube.com/c/CboysTV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One week and every single comment, you copied the Seaboy. Did you guys get on like Jay Leno with that? The Idaho state government forces us to be insured as plumbers, like even your camera guy. No way. No, I was on a unicycle. Sometimes safety is not first. Or third. Because I had to take the truck topper off my truck to fit the go cart. Your house.

That's my house. I was like, it's full commitment now. North Idaho is not an easy place for anything. I mean, it works well for you guys because you get forced. seasons. You get to live out in the middle of the woods, dude. Yeah. You've got to be the only YouTubers out there, I'd imagine. Surprisingly not. There's actually one probably less than 10 miles from us. Oh, wow. Yeah. They're called Ambition Strikes, and they do like off-grid stuff. I don't, I haven't watched any of their content, but they do. Yeah. Ten miles down the road,

and you haven't even watched her video yet? I don't watch any of those videos. Ethan legit does not watch YouTube. Well, you make up for it. Dude, you got to watch more YouTube than Anyone else I know. I'll be watching like a random music video and I'll see a grind hard plumbing comment underneath it. I'm like, what is going on? Like on our podcast, on our videos like early on. And I'm like, man, dude, Edwin is just on it. I used to watch probably like six hours of YouTube a day. And then now I have probably watched like three and then like more like six on weekends. Even all my podcasts I get on YouTube too because it's like, I don't know. I just feel part of that world even before we started a channel.

or anything. Wow, that's crazy. Six hours a day. Oh, my gosh. Well, I guess it's kind of just doing research, you know, being that you're a YouTuber, it's easy to justify. But yeah, it is. Well, anyway, all right, guys. So we've got on Ethan and Edwin from Grindhard Plumbing Co's YouTube channel. You guys got just over 2 million subscribers. You make build type content, but like kind of like us, you guys build very, like, abstract vehicles that should not be built and you guys bring to life. But you've kind of been doing it. You were doing it before we were doing it. You were doing it kind of before any YouTube channel got on, like, the concept of, like, weird builds do better than just, like, normal things. I remember the first time that we met you guys was, what, four years ago when we came out to Cordillane.

Something like that, yeah. You guys is filming compound, uh, Ethan's house in the middle, like, people think that we're in the middle of nowhere. You guys are actually in the middle of nowhere, like trees, woods, surrounding everywhere. Like, you would think that it's like, kind of like, you would think like a serial killer would come out of. of your guys there. Like I think of like Ted in the shed. Like that's what it reminds me of. I mean, back when I was, back when I was dating, like, yeah, it was definitely, you know,

people were a little concerned. They're wondering where you're going. They're like, uh, I'm going to let somebody know where I'm going before I come over. Jump out of the car halfway there. I think I'll walk. Just make sure you text them at the bottom of the mountain because you lose cell service. Exactly. But no, you guys, uh, when we first came out there, you guys had just finished up the,

uh, Colonel Sanders. Yep. So you guys took the like Jeep, like power wheels platform and then just made it like an actual drivable full grown vehicle. And you were like the first ones to do something like that. I just remember like showing up to your compound and seeing like all these different vehicles that were just weird abstract builds. I mean like, dude, this is like entertainment right here. This is what people want. The crazy, crazy things like that. So anyway, tip my hat to you guys and what you guys have built. thank you yeah i can't take like or we can't take all the credit for that because one of the first things i saw was um boosted boy kyle and his shopping cart oh yeah had really good videos like making really fast civics and stuff and like gaping ferraris and Lamborghinis on the highway and stuff and still that shopping cart video did better than those videos and i remember watching that and being like, holy smokes, that is what I saw as the first person to make like a goopy thing that shouldn't exist be more popular than these like more common things. So yeah, that was definitely

a lot of inspiration just seeing that project. So how did you guys come together? Like explain to me kind of your start. Like is that what inspired you to get into YouTube or like what's the story behind this is how long have you guys known each other? Well, Ethan had viral videos way before Grindhardt. He should take that one. Really? Sure. Yeah. You were YouTube and before being a YouTuber, huh? Yeah, I mean, kind of by accident. Like, I, you know, from a young age, I always liked film or photography, mostly still photography, but I ended up getting into filming stuff as well, just, you know, kind of for fun.

And then the first video I ever posted that got any sort of views, I built a snow cave and I time-lapsed the whole process of building the snow cave and called it how to build a snow cave in two minutes or something like that. And it was a two-minute time lapse of like a week's worth of digging a snow cave. in that one. I mean, it didn't exactly go viral, but for a channel that had like three subscribers, it got, I don't know, 12 or 20,000 views or something. I was like, oh, this is cool. I'm a YouTuber now. Yeah, it's not like an igloo. It had multiple rooms and like you lit it with candles and stuff. We slept 10 people in it. It was a solid snow cave. So how did you have time

to do that when you're not a YouTuber? You spent a whole week digging a snow cave just for fun. Yeah, pretty much. I had just gotten out of college. I, well, two years of college. So I went to local community college for photography and I got my associates and then I was kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do next and I had a trip plan to go to Ireland and some of Europe and there was just kind of a gap in between that where I was kind of just at my mom's place which is now which is now my place but so yeah I was just kind of you know didn't have anything better to do built a snow cave for a week but yeah then after that like the next year or something I was just working for local people doing you know construction and whatnot and

had the inspiration to build a tree house. Um, I'd built a small tree house when I was a kid. You were going to do a big this time. Yeah, I was like, you're an adult now. Yeah, I was 22 and I was staying at my mom's house, not indefinitely, just kind of trying to figure out what I was doing next. And then I was like, you know what? I could just build like a little tree house to sleep in. So I have my own room. So I did that. And then because I like doing weird things that are different, I built a bicycle elevator to get into it, uh, because stairs and ladders suck. And the tree house is like 25 feet in the air. This is not a normal tree house. This is like the mac daddy of all tree houses. That's what I thought too. The time we went in it, it was dark. And riding that

bicycle elevator up and then walking across the rope bridge, I was like, dude, this guy is not afraid of heights. There's no way I could have built that, dude. Well, dude, when you were walking across the rope bridge that has the ropes on the side, but you weren't touching the ropes on the side, and you would just walk across like it was just like you were in the mall. And then when I got up there, I just watch you do it and then I get in there and shaking back and forth and I'm like terrified. I'm not afraid of heights

but that was like I was easily the most scared I've ever been that high off the ground. Like how high generally, how many feet? It's around 20, 25 feet. Like high enough that you would severely hurt yourself. You get hurt right away. You don't even get to see the ground for what when you're going to hit it.

But yeah, so long story short, that the bicycle elevator I made a really crappy little video like 60. seconds long of just riding up and down it and that went super viral um i mean considering on youtube yeah on youtube well actually everywhere um it was one of those videos that like went way outside of youtube what year was this roughly uh 13 20 13 so like early yeah yeah so it went super viral it went it got about a million views on youtube and then um CNN aired it and really like just everyone yeah like um wasn't in a national geographic children's book yep yeah i i have

I still, I kept the pay stub because, like, as a kid, my dream job was to be a National Geographic photographer, and technically I am because I sold National Geographic pictures of my tree house to put in their book for kids. Can you tell how much they were they bought them for? I was like 100 bucks. Damn. It was nothing, but like, it's still awesome, though. Yeah, it was the pay stuff that mattered. But yeah, it was in like, I got interviewed for like a radio broadcast in Germany, a TV show in Japan. Holy smokes.

It was in a children's book in Turkey. Like, it was everywhere. It was wild. Like globally viral. Oh, yeah, super, super global. The tree house heard around the world. Right. So, yeah, and I mean, I made a few more videos with that.

You know, a few videos with a million views here and there. Some of them not monetized because, like, I didn't know how to find rights for music and stuff. Right. But yeah, and then I ended up building a few tree houses because of that for, like, local people that heard about me and were like, hey, can you build me a treehouse? and one of those ended up being a really nice treehouse. Like if you saw mine and thought that was the Mac Daddy, like the one that I built, it was on the lake, like, you know, in a tree. In a tree on a tree on a lake, yeah, and you just walk into it from ground level

because it's on a super steep slope. So it's only like 15. That's badass. Like from the base of the treehouse to the ground at the tree that it's around, it's only like six feet or something or eight feet maybe. But because it's a big tree house, it's, I think the total square footage, including the porch is like 300 square feet. What?

God damn. That's a mansion of treehouse. Yeah, it's not... Is it funny how everyone, like, loves the idea of a treehouse until you actually are, like, in a treehouse, and you're like, this is kind of inconvenient. Yeah. If you need anything, you've got to, like, crawl back down.

So this one was designed to... Yeah, wanted a tree house. Right. So this one was designed to... Sorry. You're good. This one was designed to be convenient. Like, you just walked in on a bridge from ground level,

like right in front of this nice house. Anyway, I did a full time lapse of that build. Like, I actually wore out the shutter on my DSLR are taking photos for it. Hundreds of thousands of frames. Anyway, actually probably millions, but did a full time lapse on that

and I filmed a few clips here and there, so it was just like a time lapse, edited the music with a few random clips. And that one for a long time was actually, until maybe very recently, I haven't checked, honestly. It had more views than any grind hard video

we've ever done. It had like 8 million views or something. Damn. Especially back in the day, those are huge numbers. Yeah, yeah. That one was later. And then I ended up being on a TV show on History Channel.

As like a treehouse builder? No, as like an imaginary character that lives in a tree house, survival style. Classic TV type of. Yeah. Oh, they made you kind of like. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was 100% made up. Yeah, we've filmed one of those one time too.

Yeah. Every scene. Yeah, it was. Yeah, so I was on a series of that. That was, it was a cool experience to do it once. I would never do it again. Never recommend it to anyone. Yeah.

I think Ben's name was going to be dogy. Yeah. They wanted to name them Duggy. Yeah. Ben was not good enough. Dugy was a better name. He was going to be known as Duggy. Can you imagine if that would have like actually caught on?

Yeah. And then that's just my name. Dugie. Yeah, it was some genius script writing. But no, so then what? So you do this TV show? How long does that go for? They only did one season because it was terrible.

Oh, really? Yeah. And it was, what were you going to say, Edwin? Oh, I just had an antidote for what type of show it was. It wasn't Ethan. You probably wouldn't have let the producers make them do this. But in one of the episodes, these guys hunt elk with dynamite.

That's how bad it was. Oh my gosh. Is that even legal? That's not really savage. You would have got one. Yeah. Also, they're just pretending.

Like, we're setting up traps under these rocks with dynamite. And when the elk goes by, we're going to ignite the dynamite because we don't have any other way to hunt. And then we're going to pick up the meat. Only dynamite. Yeah, we don't have,

we don't have weapons. We just have just dynamite. That is a crazy video or a TV episode. Sorry, I had to pretend to fish. But, like, they weren't going to wait around to actually catch a fish. Also, it was, like, a creek. They were not supposed to be fishing in. So they bought a trout from Safeway and put it on the hook,

and I had to pretend to catch a fish. This is already dead. This is why TV is dying. Yes. This is 100%. And this was 10 years ago, so, like, it's way worse now. Well, my question is, why does anyone give these producers that come up with these terrible ideas, any kind of credibility to be able to continue to come up with these terrible

ideas. I think there's some that are great, you know, but a lot that are bad. We've had a lot of experience with, only experience with bad ones. How do those ones like continue to keep doing it? It's my question. I think there's a person at the top of the food chain that gets pitched normal ideas every day. The day is long. And so you make something stand out. Like these guys with beards down to their bellies are hunting elk with dynamite in Alaska. And then that person at the top of the food chain does know anything. That is pretty crazy. Like, I want to see that.

Like, they don't, I think that at that far, it's so far detached, they don't even know that it's not real. That's some savage behavior. Like, I don't know. Hunting with dynamite. That's the only justification I have for you. How would the TV show pay, if you don't mind me asking? I mean, at the time, it was really not bad.

What year was it? 2014. Okay. I mean, compared to the money I was making doing anything else. At the time, I think we filmed for a little over a month, and I made like 12 grand or something. So like, yeah, I mean, at the time, it was great. I think our, our official rate was like $1,200 an episode. And then, but it was filmed all in one block of time, basically.

And then we got, we made some other money here because we also built the tree house and we charged them for some of that. Like, we built the second tree, you know, you saw the rotating one. That's the one we built on that, on that show. And like you say, it was the start. So something to get you into it. Yeah, it's just, you know, something to do. But, yeah. When you think back at that, though, it's like these TV networks kind of are just like

preying on people. Oh, absolutely. They made a lot more money than that. They have a name for it. It's called Hicksploitation. Like the producers, that's what they call it. That makes sense. You find a guy.

Yeah, it's true. They call it Hicksploitation because they go around the country and find people who don't know what their time is worth and what their entertainment value is worth. And a lot of them, they don't pay at all. Like a lot of reality TV shows do not pay people that are on him. The people are just doing it because they're like, I'm going to be famous. I'm going to make a million dollars because of something, you know?

Yeah, I remember when we were getting pitched, when I asked how much we were going to get paid. And it was like in like 2018, 2019. And it was not much at all. Yeah. I was like, that's not worth our time. We can make way more just doing YouTube. But obviously, if you don't have a platform,

you then can get risen to fame. Yeah. So that is honestly what it's worth. Right. Which, I mean, obviously, yeah, you're not getting paid probably what you are worth for your time, but you do get the put onto a platform that hopefully you can then cross over, but nowadays you've got YouTube. Yep. And also the thing is a lot of these shows don't, your character on the show is so far removed from reality.

It's tough that you can cross over. Like my character on the show didn't know that computers exist pretty much. Like I lived in a tree and had no access to society. Like how do you capitalize on that as a character, you know? Yeah, that's tough. you're doing engineering on a computer right you know it's not that you couldn't but it wouldn't like direct like for example um heavy d they got lucky well yeah and his crossover exactly his his character on that show is a very marketable character and very marketable products and stuff so like

yeah and it was close to probably somewhat close to who he is you know because right that was his whole thing with youtube is he was going to just be real because they were sick of doing the the fake reality stuff yeah but did you pitch the next to the next works at all like hey i i can like do a bunch of other things too like do you want to film me actually living my life and like doing these there was a couple other like that show wasn't the only one that approached me so like i i had pitched another one where like they wanted us to like go around building tree houses for people and like i kind of came up with a pitch for him but that didn't go anywhere and like got you it's that'd have been a better show than

the one that sounds like oh yeah almost anything would have been done it was custom treehouse building show would have gone off for yeah i mean there was already like they were looking for like a new take on it because there was already tree house masters and it was like some other show but anyway yeah uh that never really went anywhere but it was an interesting time in my life and the point is it through all of that like i already understood that youtube could be a way to make money in a career and stuff and then so then later when edwin started talking to me about stuff i like i already had that idea and some experience with it and like had already filmed and edited videos and stuff so it was like it was easy like oh yeah let's you know do this so so you came into the picture

because you were the YouTube guy watching 14 hours of YouTube back there commenting on every video well I was definitely doing that and like I was making music when my space was big like I was making weird like Lady Gaga remixes and stuff and then you remind me so much of Mike same I was just saying I'm sorry I'm sorry to interrupt you but I just can't like you look like Mike right now like the things you do are totally things Mike does like oh man we're gonna have to talk music speaking about the Myspace there I missed out on that too it was fun. How old are you? 26. My mom wouldn't let me

get one. Ah, yeah. Smart. Yeah. It was a waste of time. I mean, I was in elementary school when it was popping, but yeah, yeah. It was a lot of fun. It was cool, but I was making YouTube videos, like, I hope it's not on the internet anymore, but one of my first one was Santa Claus versus the Easter Bunny

where we, like, dressed up and fought each other. But that was in, like, high school, but I was always making videos, and I never really, like, had a passion for. I guess, like, I just did it because it was so much fun, which I guess is passion, but I never thought of it, like, as a job or anything. I moved to Orlando the second I turned 18 to DJ and, like, try to promote my music.

So you were into music or are into music. Did you not hear Will's drift funk? No, I did. Oh, yeah. Wrote, Will, a song about Subaru's. Really? I'd love to hear it. Yeah, we'll play it for you later.

No, hit us with a copyright claim. No, it's not claim anyone can use it. It's all good. There you go. More rights free music for your videos. There we go. And that was kind of a beginner song. Like, we got a serious song coming.

Okay. But, yeah. Music video and all? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've had some ideas for music videos. For sure. Yeah. We're going to do a rock song too that's like a Mad Max themed music video.

With like samples of all the shop sounds. That would actually be very fitting for you guys. Like different tools and like banging on different stuff and like engine noises. Is there, like, tuned to different? Yeah, it would be cool. Wow. And Steven, our camera guy, he's an incredibly good piano player. Oh, yeah, like phenomenal.

Genius level will blow your mind. So we're going to do kind of that whole, you know, in Fury Road. There's the guitarist on the front of the truck. We're going to get, like, a piano on one of our trucks and really go for it. Nice. It's going to be. Stay tuned for that. Hiaping up the music video.

Promoting the music video. That's why they're on the fire here. It's like you guys are doing your press tour. I mean, we have no idea when it's going to happen. So it's not really a great idea to promote it yet. One of those. It's going to be sick, though, but when I seriously kind of, my first serious channel was trying to promote my music, and then I started doing music tutorials, and then I kind of had this website that had like presets for synthesizers. And so around that time, I just got kind of burnt out on music, and I realized that I liked the process of making the videos more. And so then I started kind of a lifestyle brand with one of my friends. It was kind of like when Red Bull was getting into Red Bull Media House and Art of Flight came out. And we were doing like, really cinematic surfing videos and we filmed like a couple break dance competitions for red bowl and

stuff like that and what year would this be like 2017 somewhere around there yeah it was right after steel rafferty got his first gold medal in the x game so it would have been like around there i think we started grind parting what an interesting way to keep time well yeah well i kind of knew I was like, I'm trying to, was it, was it three gold medal steel racetrack in the next game? I guess I just assumed you guys followed Wakeport. Or AD. I got to see your boats. No.

How old is he? Oh, he's 14 months after steel got his. But it would have been somewhere like 16 and 17 because we started drag hard. It was actually seriously accurate. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then. I just wanted to give a time for the listener.

I've got to blown away that you dialed that in like that. But yeah, then I moved back to Idaho and we hung out before then. Yeah, but not a few times, yeah. Yeah, but not a whole lot. But our mutual friend Stephen, who's now our filmmaker, was hanging out with both of us all kinds of a lot. And so after that lifestyle brand didn't go anywhere, I was just like kind of traveling and surfing and I was filming documentaries

and stuff and commercials for travel. companies and things like that that were like cool gigs filming weddings you know pay the bills and then um i was kind of like simultaneously starting a wedding filming company at the same time as i was like i'd rather just film whatever i want since i'd been serially watching youtube for so long i was like thinking ideas like what's really fun what would give a lot of cool creative control and stuff building weird things like i've always been really into dirt bikes and been dirt biking my whole life and missed it because i didn't have a dirt bike and Florida. I mean, you see where Ethan lives. Like, I lived even further in the woods.

Oh, wow. He did. Yeah. I dirt bike to high school. It was awesome. I didn't even want a dirt bike in Florida because I was like, where am I going to ride? Like, you know, we have, like, there's not even any hills here. Like, what do you? You go to Miami and join the 12 o'clock boys. Yeah. Well, that's what I really wants to do that. That's my dream. Yeah. We want to do a video doing that too. We probably go to Philly. But Evan is, he's our wheelie guy, right? And even he's like, oh, I don't know. I mean, think of all the things. I can. could go wrong like he's kind of nervous about like getting in the pack i'm not really interested in that at all yeah you guys are all like you guys can all hold 12 o'clock wheelies just fine it seems on a pit bike i

can but yeah if there was like i'm not a full size bike oh okay we probably get left in the dust yeah i think i was just going to be more filming it but i figured uh we have like a few friends that are in that scene they could get us in the door but it actually kind of the idea got kind of scrap because YouTube's like buckling down on riding on the street stuff like that really yeah that sucks some of the coolest channels i know i that's what i used to watch like 20 16 20 15 i just watched like running from the cops on dirt bikes and stuff and like we could see the influence on the uh shifter cart on the street yeah yeah yeah of your first like major viral videos were those that was actually our very first one but yeah you that's actually a really good connection that's

I just saw those videos were popping. Yeah. And, like, they'd have, you know, two, three million views. So I just kind of stationed it that way. And that's where the title came from. But not to mention how much fun they were having doing it. Yeah. Right.

That was such a different time, though, for making videos. But, uh, it was like one of the first times I'd ever sat down and watched YouTube. I was at your house. We were watching it on your big lap or big, uh, computer downstairs. And you were like, check this out because we were like getting into dirt bikes at the time. Look at these guys. I would just ride wheelies like in the street. We were just mind-blown because we were so nervous about getting pulled over by like the local sheriffs and stuff.

So like we were- Just riding each other's houses. We felt like we were outlaws riding, but these guys are doing on a whole other level, you know, running from the cops just like blatantly, like just the disrespect. But anyways, yeah, back to you guys. So when you were moving back or even when you were in Florida and you heard about Ethan filming this TV show, were you like, oh, local. kid kind of like makes it big with his TV show and like wanted to be a part of that world somehow or were you like, yo, check out this TV show. I didn't see it. Ethan wasn't really proud of

the TV show. You weren't going around marketing it? No. Yeah. Not really. I mean, yeah, like I probably made like one post about it on Facebook. Like I was like, hey, look, I'm on a TV show. Like it was, it was so embarrassing how fake it was. I was just like, like, whatever, yeah. Yeah, so it wasn't anything like that. I don't think I even knew about it until I came home and then. Yeah, because we didn't, we barely knew each other at the time. Yeah. We'd only hung out a couple of times when I was filming the TV show. Like after that is when we started hanging out more and getting know each other more. Yeah, because we were like the parkour kind of slack line unicycle. I was going to say, that's something both you guys you just have tried so many different things that you now have this like experience and

you know you can use to work and that really is that the parkour is ultimately the connection that we know each other at all because our friend stephen was super into parkour and so was edwin and i was like surface level into parkour i like i'm really bad at being upside down and knowing where i am going downstairs like on the last one you'd rip a 360 no no i was on a unicycle. Unicycle parkour. Oh, damn, dude. You just got to take it to the next level. But it was a weird sport, so I'd, like, hang out with the, like... Yeah, I'd imagine there's not a lot of unicycle parkour guys to hang around.

Right, exactly. There's no other unicyclists at all. And I met Stephen because I was also into slacklining. So I did unicycling. I was known as the unicycle guy at college. Yeah, we had one of those at our college, too. Yeah, I think they all do. Every guy was a unicycle guy. I was also into slacklining, and one day I just went into the, like, student union building, and I was like, yo, anybody want to go slacklining?

And Stephen, who was, like, I don't know, whatever, like six years younger than me or something. And so he was this, like, super shy little 16-year-old kid with, like, a fro of curly black hair. And he's just like, oh, that sounds like fun, yeah, I'll join you. And then, like, no one else did. So it was just him and I out there slacklining in the rain for a while. And so that's how we got to know each other. And then he was into parkour. So I just started hanging out with him.

unicycling with the parkour guys and then that's how that's how we met and then when i was trying to think of the wedding video business i was like i know i can do it but i don't know if it's going to be as like rewarding to my soul as just being creative and i was missing that aspect of making music already so then it was like trying to find a way to like do youtube with like drift cars and dirt bikes and stuff and so you knew you wanted to be a YouTuber yeah for sure for sure it was it was kind of like planned like that from the beginning i was like i'll give youtube a solid go for a year while i'm setting up this wedding business and if it doesn't work up i'll just take the wedding business as far as i can you know i don't know where the idea came from specifically but i was

like man a dirt bike engine and a little pink musting would be awesome because i was seeing people make really good drifting videos really good dirt bike videos that weren't getting any traction and like no one knows who i am so it's like if you were already famous at the time and then you built a drift car on YouTube, people seem to care, like if you're on TV or something like that. And I'm like, okay, no one's going to care about me learning how to build cars, you know, that's kind of what I was thinking. So like, this would be insanely cool. So I went on like marketplace and bought like a really crappy go cart and a really like you. Beyond crappy go cart. I mean, it is so much worse than you can imagine. You're like, come on. We're like, we're not talking like a shifter cart

that's all beat up. No, this was like a kid's go cart from like probably the 70s or 80s that had been mutilated by so many people that didn't know how to weld. It had refrigerator water line for the brake line. Oh my. It had a two-cylinder Honda street bike engine from like the 70s in the back that had no power at all, barely ran. And it had like a sort of roll cage made out of just like two by two quarter inch thick angle wire. Oh, yeah. That was sketchy. It's just like it was, it was. That's sketchy. It was, yeah, just to paint a picture of how bad this go-kart was. So it had an engine, and we really tried to look at whether we could use that engine, but it was just not going to work. Did you guys know how to weld and manufacture at the time?

That's why I reached out to him. So I was living in my truck, and I had like a truck topper, and I made this like cedar kind of slide-out drawer thing, and I was just like climbing and surfing and being a bum. So I didn't have any money. So I spent my last money on the go-cart and this pink power wheels. And when I went to the guy's house to buy the little pink Mustang, he was like, hey, I also have this Barbie kitchen set, if you're interested. And I was like, oh, no, this is for me.

Like, I'm going to make a go cart. And he was like, okay. Like, it was so awkward. But I had to, it was full commitment. You're walking out. You're like, well, I guess I'll take the part. Exactly. It was full commitment because I had to take the truck top or off my truck to fit the go

cart. And I was like, all right. Your house. That's my house. I was like, it's full commitment now. Well, then he just moved into my tree house, so it worked out. It worked out. I was going to buy a welder and just try to figure out how to do it.

But then I was snowmobiling with Ethan, and I had the Mustang in the car. In your mom's Tahoe or something. Yeah, and I was like, what do you think about this? And he was like, just bring it by my house. Yeah, I was just like, yeah, just bring it over sometime and we'll like look at it and figure it out. I was like, yeah, I'm sure we can. And at the time, you were talking about putting like just a predator engine in it, because that was, you know, much more attainable and easy and built-in gas tank.

I wouldn't have to figure out all that stuff. And I had no idea. I was just watching welding tutorials because, like, I'm no, I'm going to need to do this. You know, cut up that go cart that I bought and do it. And then Ethan was like, it was the craziest thing I'd ever seen before because, like, I mean, you guys know, you're a kid with a dirt bike. Your dirt bike is all you have. It's like your pride and joy.

It's your baby. It's like actually all you have. So Ethan gets this crappy go-card I bought running. in like a day and it's terrible and he's like this engine isn't going to fit we should do we should put a dirt bike engine in there and he just pulls out his dirt bike and rips out the engine right and i was so nervous i was like oh that's your dirt bike man you're pulling out the engine that's crazy what if it doesn't work you know and then uh also the plan was always actually to just put the engine back in the dirt bike i was like we'll just throw it in this build it have some fun

with it and then like just throw the engine back in the dirt bike it's fine we always think that we're going to do that too. Oh, you know, if it works out that. Yeah, yeah, perfect.

And then we'll just, you know, put this into the next build or something like that never happens. No, of course not. Got to keep building like the eight years

and then we'll come back. But that's one of the coolest things and one of the things I tell everybody about you guys that it, everything is built just in what's in your yard. You might have an old car that was from another project and you just have half of it there. Like it's, it's nothing to anybody.

And you're like, okay, I can use, you know, a piece off of that to manufacture another piece for this everything you guys do is so resourceful and it's pretty incredible to see in an area like that you're like i'm not just going to run to the store that's going to take two hours exactly and that's have to make it work that's why i you know develop that skill set because like

i mean i also grew up without any extra money so like but it also just being there like to run to the store it's like an hour and a half round trip or something and it's faster to just figure it out with what i have and so that's that's where that kind of mentality came from and then also i just kind of enjoy it. I like kind of repurposing things and yeah. It's interesting is we keep it up too because now we could go on like eBay and buy the exact part we need but I don't know there's something that's like more fun and more entertaining about just figuring it out like Will and I bought this the cheapest electric car and like try to do this 100 mile challenge and it failed so now we're building it up better. Dude you guys love that electric car. We really do you guys have gotten you

have money's worth out of that thing. You have no idea how much they love it. I've heard We actually seriously disturb Ethan all the time. I think people think we're messing with them, but Will and I just get teared about that. I still don't know, honestly. I still think you're messing with me with the places you can't even walk. It's a hundred percent genuine passion. We love this little electric car. What's it called the Changwang or something?

Yeah, the Chang Wang. That's what I'm going to call it now. The Chang Lee. The Chang Lee. I love, dude. The Chang Lee. Yeah. When you guys drop a YouTube video or an Instagram reel of it

And you're just like so hyped on it I'm like I literally think every time I see it I go man these guys just fucking love that electric car I love it more than I've ever loved anything It's just like pure joy Your wife is probably listening Yeah well she's not a thing She's a person

That's very good That's very good point Exactly But yeah I mean when we went to Sima We went to like dream racing and, you know, we drove a Ferrari around the track or whatever. And it's fun. But that Chang Lee just off road going one mile an hour.

Are you just getting paid right now? No, we're not. You got to get, you got China in your pocket, don't you? Hang on, though. The distributor of Chang Lee tried to sell the business to Will. The U.S. importer of the Changleys that we got it from, they sent a text to Edwin that somehow they thought was Will. And we're like, hey, would you like to buy?

buy our business of importing Changleys. Did you do it? Well, we just got that text yesterday. You got to do it. It's like they've got to do it. And then send us one. Yeah, let's see what it's all about.

Yeah, let's see what it's all about. Or you guys should drive your Chang Wing to us. Yeah. There's like 500 miles. There's no chance of that. It's like all the, it's also way more than 500 miles. Well,

and I do want to drive it from coast to coast. So we'll just drive two. We'll drop one off at you if we buy the business. And then we'll just keep. keep rolling but it's like the slowest gumball rally yeah gumball you mean cannonball or cannonball sorry gumball is the european one oh yeah yeah right ryan's european yeah clearly you can't from the jean shorts yeah and the florida t-shirt yeah exactly what do tourists wear how to be florida with the chang lee it sat in ethan's yard for three months will and i never

even looked at it or sat in it or anything and then one day we were just like, let's drive that thing 100 miles off road. And we just drove it through Ethan's woods for like 10 minutes, just grinning ear to ear. Like, this is the best thing ever. Well, the thing is, they had asked for us, like, they didn't ask much when they sent it to us. They're like, just make a couple posts about it on Instagram. And we'd had it for three months and hadn't done that. So they were like, hey, and that's why you guys started driving it. You're like, oh, we need to film some stuff for them. And then they were out there driving it for like three hours just literally from across the property because it's they put the cameras down they were still

driving oh absolutely it's electric so it's quiet and from across the property you just hear whoa clunk clunk and then a bunch of laughing yeah it's like couldn't be a worse machine but that makes it so much fun to try to get it to go over a little tiny bump because everything is a challenge yeah yeah no that's how we were when we first got the smart cars and then again when we got the mini trucks. Oh, the mini trucks are still good. The mini trucks are legitimately just so much fun. They're just workhors, man.

Yeah, they're the best. They don't stop. So when you guys first made the Mustang, the dirt bike swap Mustang, or I guess Mustang swap dirt bike, whichever way it goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was like the first video that got traction. Didn't you guys get on like Jay Leno with that?

It was like a couple years later that we were on Jay Leno. But yeah, how was he? We didn't really interact with him much aside. It was just right. It was just film and then kind of, yeah. I mean, he was cool, but, like, it was just kind of a... There was a lot of other people there, too. He was busy all day, pretty much.

Yeah, he's super chill and... Yeah, like, he's not gaudy or... I'd love to me, Jay Leno. He still wears the denim off camera, like... Oh, I'm sure. He just walks up to you and starts chatting. Like, you know, he doesn't, like... He just doesn't act like a famous person at all.

Yeah, he's, like, so famous, but... Yeah, like, on that whole shoot, I was surprised because I thought he'd have, like, people doing everything for him, but like there was this little kind of booth with a cooler and he like came down off the racetrack like after a racing and like just grabbed a water and sat next to me like grabbed his own water and just sat with us not like a director's booth or anything like that

and then what really struck out to me is he got on the phone himself and I guess someone just got this kind of rare Lamborghini type deal like a really fancy car that was like a limited colorway or something And he called him up himself and he was like, hey, I heard you got that new car. Like, we'd love to stop by and just get a clip for the show, you know, just be in and out, 30 minutes, like, asking him himself. Yeah. And I thought that was really cool. I got, like, bad respect for him and that.

I was like, that's cool that he's still, like, chasing it through passion, you know? Like, he doesn't have to be doing that. Yeah, for sure. He could definitely have someone else make the phone call. But he genuinely wants to see the car. Right. He doesn't have to make TV shows anymore. He just literally loves cars.

Yeah. It's so cool. I do think that he looked at the things that we brought and was just like, what? Like he didn't want to add it to his collection? No, you can tell when he's like really interested in something. And ours, he was just like,

what is this now? Yeah, he just, he definitely wasn't excited about that. Yeah. Well, it's pretty hard to process, like looking at it. You've really got to wonder what you're looking at. Yeah, I think we shocked Ben a little bit with the colonel because, Ben,

one to drive it, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think you were probably the first one outside of us. He hopped in and just gave it a little blip and he was like, whoa, this thing is serious. You know, like you really like, if you're just looking at it, you're like, oh, okay, yeah, it's like a toy, but like definitely a sketchy toy. But then you get in it and you're just like, holy smokes, this is a full blown race car

without any safety equipment. Yeah, I was just say pretty much everything you guys build is full blown performance, little safety. It's not so much that I'm against safety. It's just that the aesthetics matters. yeah a lot because that's i mean we're it matters a lot to me personally but also matters a lot for like you know youtube and thumbouts and everything else you just can't you can't put everybody's like you got to put a roll bar on you got to put it it wouldn't look like what it is it would

just be a ugly pile of crap with a plastic body on it you know you know sometimes sometimes safety is not first yeah or third you know i think that was something about the first video was just how cool and unique the first Mustang looked because it was like a brand new channel from Complete Zero like my other YouTube endeavors didn't have any audience whatsoever and we built it before we posted anything and so we made the decision we're like we have to post the video of it just done ripping first otherwise like how are we going to package our vision

and we don't have any trust like now we can do that like build as we go and show it on YouTube because people know that we're going to finish it and it's going to be good. And deliver. But then we were like, you know, that was kind of like one little strategic move that I think really paid off. We're like, all right, it's done. It looks cool.

It's like we unload it from a truck drifted around this little pullout in the lake and that was our very first video. What was crazy is is now you hear it all the time. But even then you hear it all the time like, oh, like you just need to like grind for years and years. But that first one really did go pretty viral. And since we didn't have monetization or anything, we like viral. We like viral hog type deals that, like, license your footage for you.

And so they licensed it. And it was like in the news in like 15 countries, like a very first thing. And it's probably still the most viral thing we ever did, except maybe the Barbie Jeep right there after. Yeah, in terms of like reaching outside of YouTube. Yeah, definitely. Wow. Yeah, it was crazy.

I mean, I think the chopper is probably going to say this monster chopper is going to break the internet. Yeah, like it's insane. It already has. It already has broken outside of YouTube for sure. And then once it's done, it definitely might. I think there's a lot of. people waiting to see if it actually works right because there's so many people who don't think it will but dude i'm when it does i think that's the craziest thing you guys are built and i have a

bunch of questions on that one but i remember when you guys first dropped that video and i saw it on youtube you guys maybe had like 500 subscribers like when i saw that because i saw the video pop up and i was like wow this is a really good video like well put together and then i saw you guys had like no subscribers. I was like, wow, this doesn't really make sense. And then, sure enough, time caught up. Yeah, I remember when we had still only posted that one video, I remember we were sitting up in the treehouse, which Edwin was living in at the time. He just actually came and lived in my treehouse. But we were just sitting up there because there was slightly better cell phone service to use as a hotspot for the computer to have internet access. That's how we uploaded it.

Yep. I was going to wonder, and we watched it. How do you guys upload your videos out in the middle of nowhere. Well, he just takes days. He uploads from his house now, and he lives in town. Okay. But back, back then you used to, or we'd go to town and just go to a coffee shop and upload it. But there's most of them, like the first one's just hot spot from the tree house. And at night, it was a little bit better reception for some reason.

So, yeah, hotspot from the tree house did it. Yeah, dude. One of the only videos ever uploaded in a tree house. Of any significance of. But yeah, the point was, I remember we were just sitting up there watching the subscriber, took over to the first thousand so that we could apply for monetization. But at that time, YouTube was for some reason super backlogged. And so it took like a couple months to get approved. So we had millions of views that could have been making money, but weren't. And that's why we did

that. Like he said, that I think it was like storyful or something like that. They just licensed the video and then gave us a percentage of the revenue, which of course normally is a really terrible deal. But it's better than it. It's better than no revenue because we couldn't monetize it. man that's that uh i think is a really good lesson to a lot of other like people that are trying to make it on youtube or they're just starting out or you know they're doing it and it's not working you guys applied that strategy to it because like it is so much more than just making you know grinding and eventually getting lucky like you got to have a little bit of strategy to for when you do get that to go and i'm sure that video wouldn't have gone as viral if it if it would have just been you

know those little parts right but uh yeah i mean it's obviously no mistake on how you guys became successful also just your guys is love for adventure and lack of fear of trying new things as i it seems that you know you can just tell from listening to your guys's stories but no that's that's a that's a that's a great lesson for anyone that's trying to become a YouTuber so it was no mistake yeah and people kind of ask that like oh was it you know luck or it is like i mean there's a little bit we did get lucky in the sense that it actually worked but it was planned like it was it was very takes more than just luck you got to have everything else align right and you see it more and

more now that youtube's algorithms getting better at just showing you what videos are the best like people coming out of nowhere with just a really cool idea and it just takes off yeah good ideas always prevail and stories yeah but even the idea is almost a little more important because you could have the best story but if it doesn't look right or have something that catches you than it like i mean it's a full package yeah title thumbnail it's a full circle i mean i have a chart i could run through but don't you do but uh that's something also like that played into our advantage is we got lucky in the fact that the third video got some traction and i mean i'm not saying it blew up but you know when you have seven subscribers and then it hits it gets a thousand

views and then 10 000 and 30 000 whatever that that really put some uh gasoline on the fire and then makes you want to keep going. Like, I'm sure it's very hard where you're, you know, you've posted 50 videos and you're actually trying and you're not getting anywhere. And also if you have one early on that gets those views, it gives you a direction. Like you can, you can go, oh, this works.

Yeah. Do more of this. Whereas like, yeah, like you said, if you're getting just, you know, 40, 45, 50, you know, if you're just slowly building the views for each video, you don't have any indication of what is better than anything else because it's just, like, really slow build. whereas if you yeah it was enough motivation for us to be like this could definitely be something

let's just not work for six months and just do this and see what happens you know yeah and we just kind both of us were lucky in in that we were self-employed at the time he was doing filming i was doing construction and so we could just like work a week here and then take a few weeks off and like you know you had a trip planned or something so like well you were on that trip i was i did i built a shed for somebody and made some money and paid the bills and then then we came back and then And, yeah, so we started in April, and, like, I think the first time we made enough money to, like, cash a check was, what, like, September, October of that year. Yeah. And that was crazy.

Yeah, like, because that's, I mean, I had a friend in high school who was one of the first monetized YouTubers. Oh, wow. Yeah. Who is it? What was his name? You know, Des and Nate. I don't think I do. Okay.

They were, like, early comedians on YouTube. Yeah. And he had this, like, really viral joke that got memed. those like guns don't kill people people with mustaches do i don't know if you've heard it but like it was like mad viral it was like i mean most of the like big YouTubers you think of now like this was before that right like even a million views on youtube when there's not that many people using the platform that's hard to do yeah very hard yeah so i saw that and i was like that is the coolest thing ever but it seemed like very unobtainable at the same time because at that time

it was all pranks and comedy that were the only things getting that kind of views besides your cat video. But like, I knew it was possible. Ethan had viral videos. He knew it was possible. So we were like, when we had that little blimp of success, we're like, all right, let's just go for it. It kind of made that decision pretty easy. Like, it seemed like a no-brainer to us at the time. That's cool. Were either of you guys plumbers? How'd we land on grandhood plumbing? That's definitely a story for Edwin. But to answer your first question, no, neither of us were ever plumbers. I have been paid to do plumbing, but I was not a licensed plumber. Not certified. I'm not certified. I'm not a license plumber. It's like I thought it'd be so funny because I was thinking that these like kind of little goofy projects would get us to the point we're building like full on race cars sooner. But then the goofy projects ended up being so much fun. I was like, well, I don't even want a race car. We can't use them in Idaho. Yeah. Like I want little buggies. Yeah. Like when we first got the Barbie car running like we think we both thought that it'd be kind of fun and like it'd look really cool. But when we first started driving it up and down,

the driveway at my house where like this is so much more fun than a dirt bike yeah the dirt bike that i took the engine out of was not like a race bike it was a CRF 230 which was perfect because it was air cooled yep and electric start but like as a bike it was really not exciting as a bike it felt slow as a go-car it was like the most terrifyingly fast thing you can imagine yeah and so i thought when i still thought okay the end goal is for a plumbing company to be on a race car is hilarious Let alone, like, because I see these YouTuber garages, like, full of race cars. Like, if they all had plumbing company logos on it, that's so funny. Imagine you guys actually do it.

Like, well, we did it. Well, we did. We're out of here. Last night, we achieved that dream. Oh, my gosh. That's true. We had a race car in an actual official race that said Grindhard Plumbing Co on the side of it. Yeah, man.

Let me tell you're a reckless racer. Dude. You were driving like a maniac out there. You were taking people out. Hitting people, I'm, I'm, I'm, I, was Cletus mad at you at one point? I think Cletus is an expert entertainer. He, because you guys were under caution. He kind of like hit you.

No, he, I've never seen that. He slammed into me from behind and then pit maneuvered me. Yeah. But he pulled up next to me and then like, like, gave me a thumbs up. It was like, hey, I was just doing that for fun. Like, you're good. You're like, my neck. Exactly.

Yeah, I was like, oh, yeah, thanks. That's good. Yeah, I saw that. I was like, ooh. At first though, I thought he was out. actually kiss. And I was like, oh, man. I was like, I'm not getting an invite back.

Exactly. But then when I jumped the car or when I got crashed and went airborne, like, yeah, I saw that picture was in his, I was like, all right, we might get another invite. Yeah,

yeah, that was legendary. At the end of the day, it's all about entertainment. You were the only guy that went in the air out there that night. Yeah. And I kind of did it twice because the other time I got pinched between two cars, my front end like went up between them.

You were so funny. Did you guys have a run in? Yeah, we did, like next to you and I was like all right we got a podcast with them tomorrow I'm not trying to piss him off you know whatever and then you came in it was just boom it was the hardest I got hit the whole race I don't even remember that honestly dude just blacked out yeah but you just wailed into me and I was like from the side I think I was kind of running in the middle and then you

were trying to go low and we were just right next each other just boom and I was like all right game on dude I do remember that but there's multiple red cars I out there, so I didn't know it was you. I thought that was because the muscle was behind me, Keaton. He was behind me for a bunch of the race. So when I did that, I thought it was him that I hit. It was so funny that you two were next to each other, like the entire. Yeah, I felt he was always right behind me. Yeah. It was funny because we, uh, we call Ryan's car the red etny because Evan wears red etneys. Well, he used to until he trashed him, but yeah. And, uh, there was two of them, so there's two like little red et nets running around. Yeah. You guys were on like polar opposites of the

driving spectrum driving spectrum you were almost debatably demo derby out there and ryan was not trying to piss anyone off he didn't want to piss you off because you were coming on the podcast tomorrow he didn't want to piss cletis off because it was his race he didn't want to hit heavy d because he's our friend but i did but i did yeah he he ran into you ryan yeah you're and you apologize to him you're sorry but uh yeah ryan was just being so nice out there and you were just trying to avoid the crashes yeah well apparently i was still being too nice because every time we were under caution you were getting passed people just whipped around me that was that because at the driver's meeting they said you cannot pass under caution except when we do

the lane split thing yep and no one paid attention to that rule and then one time they came over the comms and said hey driver such and such get in behind so and so you're out of position and so I thought they were going to do that anytime it happened and just every time people were just whipping by and not they had that outside rule where if you were on the inside but and you know there's two lanes and say there's two cars on the outside and you're like number six you could jump up to number three on the outside lane which I was that's that's like that was part of the explained rules but I mean I'm talking like as soon as we go yellow I was like caution staying behind the car and people would just whip by me while they're saying you know the cops caution caution caution

yeah and then somebody just goes who and passes four cars and no one did anything you got to look at there's a helicopter on there is yes if you're not cheat not you're really trying yeah If you're not cheating, you're not racing. Right. At the driver's meeting, I took the rules as rules, and everybody else took them as suggestions. So next time, I know, to be a little more aggressive. That's the thing.

A lot of those guys had, like, eight races under their belts. Exactly. And they've been racing also their whole life. Whereas you guys, like, this is your first run of it. I feel a lot better. Like, if we race today, I would do a lot better today because I now understand. You got so much better as the race went on. Like, you could just tell you were getting confidence.

And then you were, you know, figuring out. Now, the one thing that we were lacking as a team that we did not do any service to Ryan on is he didn't have a right mirror. His car had no mirror on the right side, which is pretty important being like you'd be nice to see who's coming up. And everyone else had these like intercom things, like a spotter up in the stands. Like, hey, you guys do that? No, I was out there running raw. That would have been huge because like we could have been able to be like Ryan, scoot to the outside. Because every time there was a caution, you would go from, let's say, at one point, you were in seventh place.

you went back to like 11th. Yeah. That would have just been huge. So next time we're bringing an intercom system, maybe we'll bring like Haley Degan and have Herbie the spotter and just be like telling what to do. That was nice.

Turn left. Yeah. That was a hell of an event though. Did you start to finish? Yeah, it was. Did you ever use your NOS? I did. I forgot it existed.

Oh, yeah, it helps. But also I was definitely going to save it for the end. Yeah. And like I just never. It didn't make it to the end. No, it didn't make it to the end. Yeah, exactly. So I was saving it for the end. And then also I just forgot about it entirely because I was just focused 100% on it. I had a lot more than I thought. I figured I had like 10 uses and I started using it with like lap 80. I was like screw it. I'm just going to try to get up close to the front. We'll see what happens. Like you know, everybody is like you'll be able to go from the back to the front and five laps. I don't know how to like that's not true. So I was like I'm going to try to fight my way up. And I had a lot more. I had more to go win.

My car died. Yeah. Abruptly. Next time I'll have to remember the Noss button. Yeah. My car also had Derek from Vice Grip looked at it and he knows everything about all of the cars. And he's like, oh, yeah, this one's this. And it has a 308 limited slip differential.

So apparently I had like the highest geared differential there, which means higher top speed, but that's irrelevant on the track. Yeah, because you're not topping it out. Exactly. And so I had less acceleration. And I could see it every time we pulled out of caution. Yeah, you'd just get left behind. Same with him.

That's mine too, good. So slow. We might have both had that. I'd hit the gas and everybody else would move and I'd even try to jump like I'd lay back Yeah and then be like all right and wait to kind of like come up on people and every time Someone would just dip on the ground and then blow by me even even whistling came up after and was Like yo like your car was like really slow out there He wasn't saying like you were driving slow but he was like no like seriously like we'd be like next to each other and I would just go right past you like on the straightaway

Yeah, and that's... Dude, I don't know how the frick he's finding that many Crown Vicks. Like, that dude's got a heck of an event going on. Yeah. It's impressive. None of them can go to the auctions anymore. They have to send, like, new people each time because the auctions no, and they'll up the price.

They'll jack the prices up. Oh, no. Wow. It's Cletus. The price is triple. Wow. So he sends, like, people that are not even, like, affiliated with it. Yeah, right?

That event is, every time I go, I am mind-blown. Like, just to put that event on. Oh, it's insane. And let alone, like, the fact that he's, facilitating it and then he's got an intercom in his in his helmet and he's talking to the people in the crowd as he's racing like they're like tune in to cletus see what he has to say he's like yeah it's pretty gnarly out here you know but uh like no honestly and then the fireworks show he knows how to put on a hell of a show it is so fun every time we go it was surreal like

i was thinking about watching cleetus's videos like before we were doing anything just like from iPhones and burnouts on YouTube to what we saw last night the first ever sold out Freedom 500 like the execution of the ideas but also just like what what YouTube is enabling people to do is insane like it would have taken all these teams

and you would have had to get permission from all these gatekeepers you would have had to have investors and you would have that board of people that make decisions. The people at this top of the production company never would have given Kalidas a shot like oh what do you do?

you just build drag racing cars. Yeah, that's not a show. Like, maybe if you were, you know, half rat person, then we'd make that into a show or something. Yeah, I think. But it's like, that's the power of YouTube and it's just so cool. That's why I'm so obsessed with it. It's just the democratization of media.

Your business in general, like, it's so cool. To make it to that level of success on YouTube is extremely hard to do, that if you can do that, you can do pretty much anything. Like, I think, It just shows that you have the willpower and what you set your mind to. If you put that into anything, you'll be able to accomplish. Yeah. And we were talking earlier about like luck and stuff.

And I think that there's very little luck involved with Cletus's whole story operation. Like he knows what he's doing. Yeah. Like I was saying about the entertainment and like him bumping me in the crowd. Like he 100% knows what people want to see. He knows how to just trying to be awesome. He's trying to be. Yeah.

He's an entertainer. Yeah. In every sense of the word, like he just knows how to entertain people no matter how he's doing it. And that's why people will watch his content, even if he's flying RC airplanes. It has nothing to do with anything he built his channel on, but he knows how to entertain people to a greater extent than a lot of other, you know. I was thinking about that last night. I was laying in bed and I was like, man, that was so crazy. I can't believe I did that.

And I was thinking for all like the people at home that are watching, how lucky we are as people who watch it to like be a lot. in this time and watch him do something like that that's never been done before right that's completely uncharted territory that he's like putting his brain to and making it happen and people will do things like it probably forever now yeah but for him to reinvent what it is to be an online be a YouTuber yeah you know that's pretty cool yeah we're still in such an early stage of all this like I mean I'd say all of us are are kind of pioneering something yeah this path in a sense and And to reinvent yourself constantly, like, we kind of reinvented ourselves this summer with like longer videos and like crazier projects, but still I'd say relatable projects, was kind of like our

goal. And I think that paid off really well. And you guys reinvented yourselves this year and it seems to be paying off big time. Like you guys are going like crazy and the videos are just getting better and better. And there's like not a dull moment in a video you posted for what the last year? Is there like a lull? no try to keep it pretty high yeah but that reinvention is getting it's more fun to make it's more fun to do and it's more fun for the viewer so this kind of like highly competitive youtube world is making

things better which is really cool i don't know if i if i'd say that we reinvented i'd say we evolved that's probably maybe a better word for us that we just keep evolving and trying to just make everything better like right now we've been really focusing on building the back end of our team, you know, the support of what we are doing because it takes so much, as you guys know. Right. Just to do this week after week after week after week, we're coming on eight years doing this.

And, you know, just to make it more sustainable, building that back end support, like getting our fabricators because we don't know how to build like you, you guys do. And, you know, just all the people on our team. A lot of people used to always be like, well, you got to start. so many people on your channel like i remember back in uh like 20 like 18 2019 and now it's like every big youtube channel has a team around them oh yeah you know like it used to be like why don't you all just have your own or you know how are you going to make that work but now it's like if you don't have a team it's like you're not even i think the biggest thing for us too is

uh being from minnesota and having no YouTubers around us like there's no one to really talk to and And, like, you know, for the longest time, we had never even met another YouTuber to, like, bounce ideas off of or be like, so how does this work for you? And so we just had to figure it out, like, trial and error for the first, like, five years before, like, you know, kind of get some insider information. You're so small. You can't really contact anyone. I mean, we had the same thing. Exactly. In the middle of nowhere.

Just kind of figure out what works for you. Yeah. yeah that's that's definitely the biggest thing for us though is trying to like build out the team because we want to do this you know for a long time right the runway should be super super long as long as we can continue to make good videos which at the end of the day is the only thing that matters but like trying to avoid burnout by you know just like running ourselves into the ground just because it is so taxing and you know for sure especially on the builds like not trying to burn out our fabricators of like these crazy timelines and trying to just like make that clear too if we like miss a video upload

on a on a Thursday we upload every Thursday and if we miss people are like oh you got there's slack and oh you're just like taking a vacation lazy lazy yeah yeah it's like no we're trying to make a bigger and a better video and sometimes that takes more than seven days but I know you guys are on the schedule too every Friday so you you know the grind of it yeah yeah and it's it's hard too because sometimes it's like, okay, we set up a video for this is the first time we start this project. Like we just released the first start of the Monster Chopper. We're planning on it being a first test drive, but we couldn't get it in time, you know?

So it's like things like that are really hard and you can't plan for it. And if you have that deadline, then it's like weird. We're never really ahead. It's hard because you almost need to reinvent the video in the last day. Like, all right, now this video is about the first start, even though there's a bunch of clips of us talking about, okay, to get it running, we got to fix the brakes, this and this. that and then your audience like loves that that's what they they want to see is you guys building it and figuring it out and yeah yeah and that's i mean a lot of them are really there for the you know

the realism of it like the people when you show your mistakes and stuff like some people don't show that at all and we always get comments when we do you know when i like i build something that totally doesn't work and i have to redo it they're like wow that's awesome like it's cool yeah it makes it you know keeps it relatable and like yeah i'm sure you get the opposite though of like, oh, you idiot, you should have done it like this. Oh, oh, every, every time. Every day. There's somebody smarter than you.

Oh, yeah, every day. Especially the chopper build. There's, like, every video has about a thousand experts that know why it's not going to work and how to do it better. Of course. You know, you just can't really listen to those. Well, the thing is, is they're seeing a final product of it. And not, something is easy or easier to replicate.

Yeah. So at the end, yeah, it makes sense to anybody. Like, even with the steering thing, you did hydraulic for a while, I looked down on, oh, that doesn't work because it's too slow. But you had to think and make all that happen. And then at the end of it, you go, that's too slow. I have to figure out how to make it better now. Yeah, exactly.

It's easy in hindsight when you see the full thing to go, oh, it's much better this way. But when you're standing there in the garage after 15 hours of breathing, you know, welding dust and all that, and you're like, how the heck does this all have to go together? Right. You know? It'd still be hard to replicate even if you look at it. I'd like to see any of these comment warriors, replicas. You can even, like, give them everything, the dimensions.

I'd love to see them build it. Like, good luck, man. Unless you, you know, just, yeah, I mean, everyone talks big in the comments. It's probably going to be a thousand hours by the time it's done. Like, I'm not keeping track, but it's, I would be surprised if we showed on the next big build. That would be actually really interesting stat. We kind of did on the kernel keep track because we just kept track of days at that time.

You were, Edwin was marking each day in the video. It could be like the first episode, you know, day one, two, three. And so we actually had like a pretty good estimate of days and then we kind of got an hour estimate from there. This one I just like, I know it's been six months or something of like most of every week working on it, aside from when we're on trips like this. But yeah, I would assume it's going to be close to a thousand hours and like not to say that there are on other people out there that could do it, but you have to have like six different skill sets to just to build it. Like there's 50 parts on that, 50 plus parts that are machined on the mill and the lathe or, you know, one or the other.

And you need to have an understanding of engines. and electrical. Right, exactly the wiring. Like I did the, yeah, you have to be able to do the wiring. You have to be able to do the welding, the bending of the pipe, the CAD to design the parts in, you know, to cut them. Like, it's a skill set that normally to build a product like that, you'd have like eight different people doing each job.

And there are other builders out there who do all those jobs. But like the average person watching it is like they just see it happen. And it's like, oh, yeah, cool. But then on top of that you're talking to the camera, trying to make of entertaining a video. Yeah, put on a smile. That makes us even harder in a sense. Like doing, wrenching on your vehicle is, you know, sometimes it's easy.

Sometimes it's hard. But wrenching on your vehicle with a camera and you're trying to like make a, make it entertaining. At least for us, it's, it pretty much doubles the workload, especially the amount of time it takes. Yeah, you got to wait. He's going to pull apart the tank and Steve and I are like, wait, like, it takes us a while. Like we got the motion time lapse slider and like lights and like, you know, we're setting up and Ethan's just sitting there. Yeah, let's go, let's go. I want to get this done today, you know, but every time it's honestly kind of fun getting

the comments like this will never work because every time we read him, Ethan's like one day I just came up in the morning and he was like showing me like these like, he's like, I don't think it won't work for that reason. He's like, if this works at all, I'm going to drive it to Sturgis. I was like, let's go. What is the final idea? I mean, the idea is just to make it work, you know? like it's we'll be able to drive it down you want to be able to do like trails with it no i mean

trails is completely out of the question it's probably going to be over a thousand pounds like you're not going to ride a thousand pound bike on a trail but i mean i'm just guessing wildly guessing but each tire probably weighs over 200 so yeah i think it would fit in so nice they had sturgis they would actually really appreciate well they actually yeah somebody from sturgis like through through somebody else and they were like hey what do we you know what can we do to help you get here So you're aiming for this summer then, Sturgis? Yeah, I mean, it's, dude, the bike's mostly finished. We should go to Sturgis too.

Yeah, let's do it. We don't need to jump on your guys's video, but we would just meet up with you guys down there and like, hang, because I've always wanted to go to Sturgis. And it's maybe get some wild hogs, you know, a couple choppers. Maybe Ken will get a trike. I could see him on a trike, or maybe we do like a side car on Evans' bike and Mike rides in the side car.

I could see that. With his laptop? Yeah, I could see it. Let's do it. That would be fun to do together, too. That would be a blessed. And then Will built his CBR 1,000 swapped onto Ruckus, which is just like a scooter. But that would be really good?

How was that perceived down there in Sturgis? Like, if I showed up on my R6, would I get my ass kicked? I don't think so. No, it's just motor cycle levers. Everything's bikes. Yeah, like we did. Will and I were here for an event, and we happened to be in Daytona at Bike Week. And there was all kinds of crotch rockets.

And there's a bunch of custom ruckuses, like the ones with like the bags. and stuff and like it was mostly harleys and baggers and choppers i think motorcycle people just love motorcycles like there's like maybe kind of clicky areas of bike week and i assume sturgis similar like maybe there's a bar where it's like only sportsters or something yeah no there wouldn't be a bar for that because early guys call sportsters the girl girl's bike if you if you ride a sportsster hard like hardcore harley guys think you're yeah you know that's like the beginner Air bike, yeah. So that's the Weenie Hut Jr.

I'd probably have to get a Harley. Just if we're going to Sturgis, I don't think I'd have the nuts to drive my R6 down there. Yeah, I'd just go out of place. You should just half track the R6. Put a tire in the front, leave the track in the back.

Ride that around. Oh my God. I don't think you'd be able to go to Sturgis, though. The track would burn up in about the first 20 miles. You'd have to trailer it there. Yeah. And probably, like, get one of those tracks for, like, snowmobiles that race on grass

kind of a thing. That would be kind of cool. wheels instead of high fax it should be fine we could do that on the harley like the snowbike Harley yeah there you go a half-tracked Harley at Sturgis you guys ever been in Sturgis I asked that no no not at all I don't claim to know that the chopper is going to be that rideable I just know that if it's if it's capable if I'm capable of riding it I will yeah I don't doubt that one bit yeah yeah like yeah like I know it's possible to ride it to some extent I don't know if it's possible to ride it that far or you know that fast but I'll try maybe you're not cornering at six you

but, you know, I think it will work enough to, like, ride to town or whatever. Oh, yeah, and that's really my goal is, like, I want it to work well enough to ride it to town. Because, like, Sturgis is probably, I don't know, 800 miles or something. So, like, to do that feasibly, I'd have to, it'd have to be able to maintain comfortably a speed of, like, at least 60, 55 miles an hour to be able to make that plausible in a reasonable time frame. So if that's not possible, it's fine, we'll trailer it there and then just ride it around while there. But at least to be able to ride it to town, that's the goal. it's uh so bringing up like our bikes or our street bikes that are now snow bikes you talked about a competitive nature of youtube but it is kind of cool that i feel like a rising tide raises all

boats we did the r6 you guys did the hiabusa snow bike in like the same time frame it's so we're friends we didn't talk about it no i had no idea it's really funny because yours your your r6 video dropped like a week before ours but i was already building the boosts like i was already building the I was obviously you know how the time frames work like yeah but the funny thing is like one week and every single comment you copied the C-boys yeah totally dude we were getting that we copied you right and you guys did it after us and we're like this we can't do anything right without being a copy but it's funny because like yeah okay sure I watched your video and in one week I yeah drove to Seattle bought a high abusa brought it home got a timber slug kit put it on it and filmed the

video I know that's it doesn't make sense just because you wanted to copy us yeah just because I was Like, wow, that's a good idea. It'll be really good to post that next week. Also, like, if we're talking copying people, like, freaking stunt freaks team did a jixir 1,000 snowbike, like, 10 years ago. Exactly. Like, we're all copying someone. Exactly.

It's hard to be like an artist. But I think that's, it's kind of funny how that thing, how things like that work. It's hilarious. Do you read Austin, Cleon? Hmm. Do you like an artist? I just know of it from, I haven't read. Oh, okay.

I don't know how. He doesn't even know how to read. They make audiobooks. Yo, I should do that. I started hearing, too, a little bit. Well, you said that title, and it's funny because I read all of his books every month. How do you have time? Yeah, I'm trying to figure it out.

I'm a nerd. He also doesn't sleep a whole lot. Do you not sleep much or what? How many hours are sleeping night you getting? I don't know. Well, because I grew up with insomnia and I didn't really know it. And then when I was DJing, I was like making. music all day and DJing all night. So like maybe like three, four hours. I don't know. A night.

But then like now I sleep like a baby, but just every little free time I have, I just cram in. I'm either like working on YouTube, editing all night, reading creative books. It's just pretty much the world that I live in and I like don't stray out of that world. But now I probably sleep like six hours a night pretty well. That's pretty good. Yeah. And we kind of have like a somewhat of a nine to five structure yeah so you know for personal development out of it you know even though it is probably watching youtube it's figuring out what you're gonna do but yeah i mean you were you were talking earlier about like long-term sustainability and burnout and stuff and like i think that's a large part of why you know we've gotten as far as we have without

dealing with too much of that is like having a structure of like okay weekends or weekends like if you want to work on channel stuff sure but we're not like all here obligated to do it we're not trying to keep that separation and schedule. You've got to have time for yourself and to do things that aren't. And it really, I think, at the end of the day, you come back refreshed and motivated instead of just like, if you're just doing it nonstop, like, you're going to get burn out. Yeah. And we love what we're doing so much.

Except Cleetus, apparently he just lives and sleeps and dreams and just never stops. Like, Thursday when we got here for practice, like, he was just literally running all day. Like he was running away from me And he was like running and jump over a fence And I was like, do you ever stop running? And he's like, occasionally. Yeah, not this weekend. Yeah.

But anyway. Yeah, that is wild. I think too, we love it so much. It doesn't feel like burnout. Like, because there are sometimes where we work like three weeks straight, you know, stay up all night editing videos and stuff. And then the next day I just wake up and start again. Like I don't even think like, oh, I'm tired.

Oh, this is exhausting. Like, I mean, could speak for myself. I'm such a big YouTube nerd. I like just don't think about anything else. So like sometimes if Ethan's gone for a week or if we don't have something to do for a day, I'll just like make a video and upload it on my personal channel.

Really? That's what I want to do. Like I can't stop it. I drive my wife crazy. Yeah. Like we're on Italy and I'm like, I bet you could make a YouTube channel just like with a camera on a tripod filming like the ocean for three hours and upload that

and people would love it. You know, like I just like can't turn it off. That's insane. It's part of the insanity of why it works. Right. And I like why what are you guys doing works? Obviously in my,

you know, court of what we do, like it's the same thing. My wife is in the army and she's been stationed in El Paso for the last most of three years. Really? So I go down there to visit her periodically,

you know, whenever I can and I'll be there for like a week. And the whole time I'm there, I'm like either like imagining a build or like sometimes I'll take the laptop and do cats. like I don't know how to not be thinking about that. Like even when I'm not physically do it,

I'm still, you know, planning, build, thinking up ideas. Like, it's just always there. I mean, we can relate to that.

Yeah. But I'm definitely not making YouTube videos and put on a second channel. True. Yeah. But it's probably really hard for the listener to like understand where we're coming from. But there just is something when you're doing creative that burnout can occur. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

And to be honest, I for a couple years there like I was off and on feeling very burnt out and all along I knew that part of it is like dealing with a long term or long distance relationship through that as well like living alone and all of that but um then uh then I got on antidepressants and realized that I was actually just depressed not like as soon as I switched that I was like oh yeah I have all the motivation again it wasn't really I mean obviously there's always like moments where you feel burnt out when things aren't going well or whatever but but yeah that changed a lot for me And I always try to talk about it whenever it comes up because like mental health is super important.

And what we do, I think, is really not the best for your mental health, like for anyone. It's terrible. Yeah, it's terrible, right. It's like it's just your nonstop in the spotlight, like, you know, reading all the comments. And like we all try to like not take them to heart, but you can't read a negative comment and not feel it. And like that and just the nonstop pressure to one up yourself and just keep getting more and more. And it's just like it's kind of an inherently unsustainable. concept really so like trying to make it sustainable but it's like how far how long can you keep doing

it right that's why we're doing this back end thing exactly and there's there's super there's totally ways to make it sustainable but like just that just sort of the nature of trying to always expand exponentially it's like that there's very few things in in reality that actually happened that way and so but yeah anyway our last video was our shop tour like it was wednesday and we were kind of wrapping up on film and we had been working like cleaning it getting everything like still we were still trying to get it done because we had planned for that Thursday because we needed to have it done so the following week we could actually film in there and do this build that we're trying yeah and like oh i was like you know wednesday i'm like nervous i'm like god like i really hope

this video turns out like i was like worried i'm like god is this even going to be good like does anyone want to watch this like we got we got a million people that are for sure going to tune into this i do not want to let them down you know and then uh ends up turning out great but uh right but yeah there's always that people loved it but no for sure like i feel you on that like it is it is very taxing as far as that goes it's a lot of responsibility for like just a handful of people to to tackle you know because if you've got like a really big ad campaign with the big business and you got a hundred people working on it part of that responsibility is divided up to make it but also if it is good or not right like if one of our videos flop if one of your videos flop it's

100% because you didn't make a good enough video and that's a lot to like yeah it's like wow that video was like not good yeah or like or like if you build like for me as a builder like if i build something and it just totally doesn't work or breaks like the first time or especially if we're going to an event like this one obviously we didn't bring anything you know to cleetus's the freedom 500 we didn't bring anything because he provides the cars for that and we didn't have anything for burnouts and whatever but like we've done events so like race things or going to king of the hammers or something like that or like driving all the way to moab and like you get it out on the trail and it just immediately breaks and it's like well now what you know yeah so it's like yeah

I mean not only did your thing just break but what are you going to do for the video exactly yeah more so what more so for the video it's like we gone all the way here and now what's the video you know when we've had that the schedule is what creates that though like exactly it's that worry it's that that's the the choke yep 100% do you guys have any like creative differences as far as when like going through making a video because you're the builder, you're the filmer and editor, like two completely different worlds that have to collab to make it work. Not very often. Yeah, I don't think so.

There's, there's times where there's like parts that I leave out of the video are put in the incorrect order. And he doesn't like, I'm very linear. I like things to be like very accurate. Yeah. And so. Yeah. And sometimes I like describe something and like it just didn't work in the video or it made

too big of a lull, you know. And I'm like, okay, I got to get around this. And then sometimes Ethan's like, oh, you didn't put the part of me explaining this thing. And then that didn't make sense. Or you showed the handlebars before you showed that, even though I did that first. And I did that first for a reason. And like, I'm with him. Like the people watching our videos do want to learn about building, I think.

Right. At the same time, it's like it would have been much less entertaining to do that way. So I think that's probably our biggest creative differences is I have no problem like rearranging the order a little bit. Like make it, yeah, make it a little more entertaining. And I've also learned that that's like over time. I've also kind of realized that that's like that's more important. And sometimes it doesn't matter.

I mean, it still bugs me internally, but I don't like. Yeah, right. I don't let it like be an issue because I'm just like, well, whatever. I mean, sometimes Edwin will come up with an idea for a build and I'll be like, yeah, I don't want to build that. But, you know, or like I don't think that's possible or whatever. But, but I mean, that's just the creative process and stuff. So one of the guys said it a while back and I can't remember with the mutual understanding of that whatever decision you make or you make is for the betterment of the team. You're not doing it. You're not taking stuff out of the video because you don't want to put him in it. You just want to make it better. Right. And that mutual understanding no matter how our videos play out that that decision's made with the group's best intent always seems to win overall. Yeah. In this point of I guess you could say contention will fills in that gap perfectly.

right because will's like the newest guy on our channel the newest member of the team and he's full time with us now and so my really stupid ideas that Ethan doesn't want to do that he doesn't want anything to do with like the Chang Lee will is like so easy to get hyped on that it's a nice tie breaker it is a nice tie breaker yeah yeah yeah and it's not to work on the harder stuff it's not even a tiebreaker because then I'm just like sure do we want like yeah it gives me time to work on what I want to work on and like keeps us going with content so I've noticed that you guys have done that, like, especially the bigger builds that you're doing. You need more time.

Oh, yeah. Some of those chopper videos were four weeks of labor, like three, four weeks of me working on it for one video. Yeah. You got to pick it up, man. Just do it all in one week and get that out on Thursday and then do it all the next week. Yep. Or Friday's for when you post, but yeah. I think sometimes because Ethan's extremely resourceful and builds things right from the get-go.

so I think sometimes it bothers them if we call it swindle brother project because Will and I are just goofy we call them Will and Edwin are the swindle brothers they're not brothers in reality but like they have the same kind of energy and attitude and Will brought the word swindly to us and it's just I don't know if that's a good word to describe yourself where's my wallet I'm gonna keep it away from that guy it doesn't mean like literal swindling in terms of like stealing things or conning it's just like a it's kind of hard to describe it It's just a general, like, chaotic nature definition on everything.

Like, the word premium could mean good or bad or something, not even that. Like, Swindley's the same way. But with Will, I think that some of the projects are maybe more wasteful or less resourceful than you would like. So he's like, that is just, no. And then he'll just walk away and work on his own thing. But then we get, you know, we make our video, we have fun. We build a cool little weird contraption. And it works out normally.

There was one that was so bad that we couldn't even show it on YouTube. Yeah, that one was really bad. And I'm really glad it didn't get shown. What was it? I was going to really be firm, in my opinion. That you should not be shown had that not been a group decision. I would be like, I'm not okay with this. Well, like Ethan said, his wife is on base in Texas.

And so he'll leave like a week a month pretty much. Lately it's been like every other month. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So sometimes if we have an idea that we know is like not Ethan approved, we'll do it while he's gone. That's like Mike and F, dude. Yeah.

Yeah, actually. Come up with something. Yeah. And so this one, Will showed me this picture of this like kid on like a homemade raft of like plumbing pipes. And he was like, wouldn't it be funny if we made an amphibious go cart with like plumbing pipes? And I was like, yeah, that'd be awesome. Because you've been talking. It's actually a really good idea.

Yeah, you're like, finally plumbing. How do we bring this back to the name, guys? Yeah, exactly. Edmund had been talking about an amphibious go cart for a while. So, like, they'd been... Will brought in the idea of the plumbing pipes. Yeah, for sure. And I was like, okay, what if we do it with only supplies from Home Depot?

It's like building a go cart that's amphibious... And parts we had laying around. With all parts from the Home Depot parking lot. And we're going to buy, like, one of those clear kitty pools and put it in front of the Home Depot and, like, take the thumbnail like, actually in front of Home Depot with our golf cart, or go-kart. We were all hyped on it. I had to do some editing.

So I was, like, gone for a couple days after starting the go-kart with Will. And it turned into a complete disaster. Like, he got super stressed out and, like, and demotivated. Will, like, will is really hyped at the beginning of a project. But then sometimes if he hits a certain point where, like, he realizes it's not the result he wants, it just completely flips.

And he's like, he just wants to get it done as fast as possible. And it just is a downward spiral. because as soon as he loses motivation and gets stressed out, he just starts doing worse and worse work, and then he hates it more and more. It's just like, yeah. It's not a good. At the end of the day,

it turned into a thing that had the front end of a banshee and the rear end of like a custom go-kart type thing with like a bunch of smaller than there should be Home Depot pipes. Only two of them actually. Only two, like three-inch, three-inch ABS, like drain pipe. with caps on it, and only two of those. It wouldn't have floated. With the frame bolted through the pipes,

so they weren't even really watertight. Oh, no. It looked terrible. It didn't function at all. And it had a knock-off Honda-Grom engine in it that barely ran being the lowest point on the thing. So, like, the engine, you know, it's a horizontal engine, that's how they're designed.

But it was, like, under the seat in the middle, and, like, the whole engine would have been submerged immediately. So you had to scrap it, huh? Yeah, that was the only thing that we still like the... That's a pretty good idea, though, like, actually doing it completely out of people, like, just replaced all the metal with PVC. I guess you couldn't. He's like, he's like, don't say that.

Yeah, like, there is a way that it could be done. That wasn't it. Yeah, that'd be really cool, though. As a channel that makes, like, quality builds, you were like, I can't let this happen. Exactly. Because, like, well, they got to work. I mean, at this point, people know that we'll build stuff different than I do. But, like, at the same time, it's the channel that we've built together and, like, there's a

My name is still associated with it. And like something that bad, I was like, I don't even want it. It's got a function. Yeah. Get that. But there later, like maybe like four or five months later, this video went pretty viral, I'd say. It was like a fishing raft houseboat that was made 100% out of these pipes. But it had just a car kind of chassis underneath it.

And it had these little flaps that rolled out when you were in the water. So as you turned the wheels of the car, they flapped and propelled the boat forward. and he had like a little fishing cooler and fished off of this little boat and it was with like an electric thing with a solar panel it's super sick and it was like uh i don't know someone who wasn't speaking english but he made like a montage for english speakers that were like just the building and no talking interesting and it got like seven million views in a couple weeks and i was like you're like kind of on to something it was i could see that popping on it really wasn't a problem of like of inspiration it was a problem with execution yeah right that's what i was going to say one day if

it ever comes down to like where you find out a way to execute right that's a banger so you know for anyone listening if the seaboys suddenly release a video in an amphibious go cart maybe they did copy us can we get that out next week did you ever see our our hummer pontoon yeah that was pretty hilarious that was awesome that one actually worked a lot better than we had ever thought it was going to like we took it out multiple times took it to the sandbar that was like a mile of way so a mile there mile back i think really we only made it back on pure luck like watching how everything was starting to bend like the pontoons would fold down so you could drive it down the highway and one of the bolts like broke on the end so it was starting to flip up oh you think so ideally

it would have still floated because they would have still been attached but it would like Yeah, the weld on the thing, on the hinge crack. So, like, we were losing structural integrity fast. But, uh, but, uh, we'll have to have big wrench. Just tidy it up a little bit. But it, it, it, yeah, that thing is awesome. It looked like you guys had a great time. Oh, we did, dude.

That thing was so funny. We have a great idea for this summer. We'll tell you off camera. It's actually potentially could be the best thing we've ever done. Okay. So far. Like, is this vehicle that we're buying, arguably the best vehicle we're ever, we could ever buy and then what we're going to do with it oh it oh okay i'm getting excited just thinking about it

have you guys ever gotten serious trouble for any of like your water stuff like i feel like people are so protective over water and like registering boats like well we registered the hummer pontoon and you were fine it was yeah we registered it as a custom pontoon so no one gave you any crap for that video i don't i don't even want to put that out there okay yeah well some of some of the stuff like especially with like waterways like we really want to do like uh drive the high abusa snow bike across a lake you know but then we're like okay but if we fall and that like pollutes the lake one that is like on us like that's a crappy thing to do but two like i feel like you'd get in a lot of trouble for something like that to answer your question though we try not to impede on like people's lives or

like property or you know just be an inconvenient inconvenient right right Like, just inconvenience anyone by us doing our thing. And it might seem that way in the videos, but most time we're very cautious of all other people's time and just lives and their property and whatever. So if you're prank someone, you're pranking someone like in the family. Like, yeah.

You're never in like random people's faces or like trying to cause a stir with the police. Normally if we prank someone, it's like us looking stupid and them just being like, this guy's a fucking idiot. Like, we're not trying to make them. We're not ruining their day, you know. For the most part. What else? What have we done?

That was bad. I don't know about bad. I mean, we made those valet drivers drive the shitty ass lambos, but he was chopping it up afterwards and we gave him a good tip and he would pump. Like we were, you guys can stay here all day. Didn't care. I think maybe like when we had Grandpa Ron pretend that my Lamborghini was his and that people were stealing it.

That one Asian guy, he was. was he got it pretty good he the rest of people thought it was funny though yeah come on we he was a joke it was a joke yeah he was pretty not happy about it but uh it was already done at that point what was done was yeah well and if you know someone's gonna be bothered that easy it's probably a good thing you bothered them that's the way i see it too yeah i mean he thought that he just helped the guy steal everything that was funny that was funny well how long we've been going i mean you guys got anything else that's solid it was cool getting our story out in one play Yeah, I don't think we've really done that before, so thank you guys for sharing.

Wait, okay, I think we kind of got off, off track when you were finishing it up, but grind hard plumbing. Where does that, where's the grind hard plumbing come from? Oh, you wanted to put it on a funny, yep, to be on a bunch of race cars, right, plumbing. And then my friend just had grind hard tattooed across his stomach. Damn, not me, to be clear. Not me. Like with a curve around his belly button? Yeah, kind of.

Grind hard, all the way across. Was he just in the club one day? He's like, I should put grind hard on there. I'm not sure what the motivation there was. Okay, so you saw his tattoo, and you were like, is it cool if I borrow that name? They were talking about starting the channel before I got involved. And this is, this friend is who, why Edwin got into drift cars.

Like, this guy was super into drift cars. And he's like, yo, check this out. And he was like, oh, I'm into this. And he was like, grind hard. And I'm like, well, if you just Google that, you know, the SEO is going to be a nightmare. And so, you know, like grind hard, work hard. There's already a record label called Grind Hard.

Naming it after a plumbing company, I wouldn't advise people to do. Dude, because we still get in a lot of like the, the Idaho state government is still like forces us to be insured as plumbers. Like even their camera guy. No way. So it's more expensive. Yeah.

We, you don't do plumbing. They're still working on it. Wait, what? They just don't get it. No, you're a plumbing company. You said you're a plumbing company. Even though we're registered as an entertainment company They just don't get it

Dude, they're just so confused That's a thing that happens though Like in our state We don't have a problem But I've heard of other YouTubers In different states Where like they can't get a loan And they're a successful YouTube channel

With over like a million subscribers And they can't get a loan Because the bank doesn't see them As like a legitimate business Right Yeah That was just a little ridiculous They can look into it

They're like wow like You live the loan The bank looks at your finances and like, wow, like, this is like a really interesting profit loss statement for a plumbing company. And it's like, yeah, you saw a lot of T-shirts for a plumbing company. It's like, no, no, no. It's like this is like an entertainment company.

They think something else on. And they're like, oh, like, you're a TikToker. And I'm like, oh, oh, oh, no. I was like, oh, no. Oh, like TikTok? You're like, yeah, I do plumbing TikToks. Yeah, but every time like business. insurance nightmare we still can't like get our business properly insured

damn because of the name and because of the name and because it's a YouTube what we do and and like in Idaho has one insurer that they made legal to insure anybody so this insurer cannot deny you and it's the only insurance that we can get because they're so confused on what we actually do the name isn't like yeah ensuring Ethan would be hard right he's like racing around Barbie jeeps and stuff and we have been denied for that reason. Like the insurance people are like, oh yeah,

no problem, no problem, be this much a month. And then they'll call me up before they write the policy. Yeah, we watch your videos now. Really?

Seriously. Yeah, for real. They're like, yeah, we saw this video specifically where at the time we had one of our friends

part time helping us like weld some stuff. Like, yeah, this person was underneath the truck welding without like this safety stuff. Really?

Like they just saw it on YouTube and they were like, no. So Mike, Ken and I bought a house together on our first like move in video ben went and put like farm animals and stuff in it anyways we were like trying to get uh wait could you see that again for me like you put like farm animals in it so like i didn't know and nor did ken or mike but it was like my birthday going in to

go move in got like my family like coming to come see it they're all proud you know that i pooled my money together and bought this house with two other guys but uh walk in there's benin's like overalls with like a pitchfork and there's like hay everywhere I had chickens in my room one laid an egg and then in kendrum there was goats and uh yeah it smelled terrible it smelled like a barn in this house like a like a fairly nice house and yeah it was it was a lot but uh i thought it was hilarious it was great j and ken gave great reaction obviously as you would walking into your new house with the farm animals in it but his girlfriend started crying his mom was so my aunt was so mad at me i think she might have even started crying like i just like tore the family

apart i think they were just i think my mom was sad because alick my girlfriend was sad because she went there the like a day or two in advance and had two or like two full days of her just like she she took off and was trying to clean this house and make it as nice and proper for her to move in and then basically those two days of work were completely put down the drain and then moved backwards oh by a lot by a long shot and so she started you know she didn't even go in she just started crying and left and then which rightfully so she deserted i felt bad i felt bad that due to your dating me you get you know roped in with these idiots and and you know your hard work just went down the drain and that's what my mom was sad about i think she and i was bummed too uh it was you know not not the best

but it was a great video and so my point uh we were trying to get our our our home insurance our home insurance dropped us right there so we had to go and get like a new they were like we're not insured yeah so we had to go and just off of some farm animals being in your house i was like we're not insuring you guys unless you're a farm i'm sorry you have to get farm no no we're not a farm but yeah they dropped us wow so yeah similar how you think of those content creator houses in like LA were like 12 TikTokers will live in and like do stunts all the time yeah they're like all super young yeah and they probably lose their insurance and like it's not like if you get away with it then no one knows you did it like if you put farm animals

in your house the insurance would never know but you put it on internet for millions of people to see and then you lose your insurance you know like there's there are some real repercussions for some of these things and hopefully your insurance ended up being too much more but there's a give and a take yeah for sure you got to do what you got to do pretty committed to this so yeah yeah yeah that's a funny one I did not know that you guys yeah it's an old one I'm gonna have to dig that up yeah man we got we got some gems that are very low view count oh you know like that would not even do well i mean it's probably got like a million views now but but uh think it's like i put barn animals in my friend's house yeah something like that like you know what you're getting it's a classic

yeah man no this has been this has been fun though get to chop it up with you guys and for sure and and like i said it's no surprise uh the success i mean just because of your guys is love for adventure you have no fear in trying something new and and just with that you've been able to take all these little things from all these different avenues and then put it all together and and use it to build this awesome channel and business so thank you yeah it's just it's cool to see and i think a lot that people listening can take from that so yeah yeah well thanks guys and next time we got to get you on the sent and bent podcast i really want to see you guys talk to will and see what happens oh yeah that'll be hilarious

He doesn't like us or what? No, you just never know. Will likes you guys. He's something funny. He's just goofy as heck. And you never know what it's going to say. Yeah, we get Will, Evan and Micah together.

And I just want to know what that would look like. Just watch their brains work. I'm out next week. Let's do it. All right. Let's do it. Sounds like a plan. We'll subscribe to grind hard plumbing coal if you haven't already.

Not plunged. And we'll see you guys next week. Peace. Some interesting plumbing content is out there. Thanks for having us. One week and every single comment, you copied the Seaboy. Did you guys get on like Jay Leno with that? The Idaho state government forces us to be insured as plumbers, like even

your camera guy. No way. No, I was on a unicycle. Sometimes safety is not first. Yeah. Or third. Because I have to take the truck topper off my truck to fit the go cart. Your house.

That's my house. I was like it's full commitment now.