The Tim Ferriss Show - #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views)

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term

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Starting point is 00:03:17 check out the details at athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is Tim Ferriss, and each episode, it is my job to, in this case, sit outside and record this introduction. It's a bit of audio verite at an undisclosed location for recording future episodes. But it is my job in each of these episodes to deconstruct a world-class performer to try and tease out the lessons, habits, etc. that you can apply. And my guest for this episode is Ken Block. He is a co-founder of DC Shoes and a professional

Starting point is 00:04:02 rally driver with the Hoonigan, that's H-O-O-N-I-G professional rally driver with the Hoonigan Racing Division. His rally career began in 2005, and he won Rookie of the Year that season in the Rally America Championship. Ken has accumulated five X Games medals and achieved global fame through his wildly successful viral series of Gymkhana videos. That's spelled G-Y-M-K-H-A-N-A. These videos are completely bonkers. Jim Khanna videos, including all associated edits, have racked up more than 500 million views, landing the franchise in Ad Age's top 10 viral video charts. In Jan of 2010,

Starting point is 00:04:41 Block formed the Monster World Rally team, later renamed Hoonigan Racing Division, and signed with Ford to pursue his dreams of racing in the World Rally Championships, that's WRC, and in doing so, became one of only four Americans to ever score points in the WRC. His latest project is the Gymkhana Files, which is a series available on Amazon Prime Video, and here's the description. Quote, the Gymkhana Files takes viewers deep behind the scenes of one of the world's wildest, most successful viral video franchises of all time, with over 500 million online views and counting. Following globally recognized race car driver and viral star Ken Block

Starting point is 00:05:17 and his team of hoonigans as they attempt to make the greatest automotive video of all time while racing in the World Rallycross Championship. Back to me. So specifically, it takes you guys and me, I've watched the series, behind the scenes of filming Gymkhana 10, subtitled The Ultimate Tire Sling Tour, a video that, as of this writing, just went up and has more than 20 million views. It's all complete insanity. You have to check it out. In any case, you can find

Starting point is 00:05:45 more about Ken and what he's up to at hooniganracing.com, on Instagram at kblock43, Twitter kblock43, and Facebook Ken Block Racing. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Ken Block. Ken, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Where are we sitting right now? We are sitting in the Hoonigan Racing headquarters

Starting point is 00:06:14 in Park City, Utah. And we are inside of a shipping container. Yes. Very expensive shipping container. Very expensive shipping container. But yeah, I have about 40 shipping containers that are cut up that make up my offices and shop here in Park City. And you were explaining this to me a bit earlier before we started recording, but what is the practicality of having these shipping containers that are bolted to the floor?

Starting point is 00:06:42 Well, in my earlier life, I was one of the founders of DC Shoes, and we grew from a very small brand to a very big brand. And over that course of growing, we moved probably five different offices, and therefore, building all new drywall walls all over the place and all that, and it cost a lot of money money so when i built the race team offices here i decided i wanted to build something that you know we kind of have a recycling message with using you know things like use skateboards as tile and you know use shipping containers for offices that sort of thing but also if i have to move you can actually pick up these entire offices and easily move them somewhere else on

Starting point is 00:07:25 a shipping truck. So if you need to upsize or downsize or anything in between size, you have everything here that you can pack up. Yep, absolutely. And it actually ended up making a very cool looking office too. We had a lot of fun being creative with this office and doing something unique and different, but also to me is something that kind of on the leading edge of what I hope people do in the future with empty warehouse spaces like this and building offices. A lot of drywall gets wasted out there as people change buildings and change businesses. It's a beautiful space and I'll put up, and certainly there's no shortage of footage of this space online, but I'll put up a bunch in

Starting point is 00:08:05 the show notes as well. You've had a number of different careers and it makes me think of Bruce Wayne in some respects because you've lived many lives in one life. This is not going to be chronological, but first, Hoonigan, where does that name come from? Well, the word hoon is basically similar to our laws here in America of reckless driving. So if someone were to say, oh, you were hooning in Australia, that would mean you were out doing something reckless with a car. But once that term kind of made it over here to America, it became like a term of endearment, like, oh, you're out having fun with a car. But once that term kind of made it over here to America, it became like a term of endearment, like, oh, you're out having fun with a car, great. Whereas if you were reckless

Starting point is 00:08:50 driving here, it'd be like, oh, you're going to get a ticket. So, you know, a couple, you know, journalists here in America started calling me king of the hoons because I was a race car driver that was out having fun with my cars also. And around that time is when I started making the Gymkhana videos. So that was really kind of the epitome of technical driving, but having fun with the car because it was a race car that I wasn't racing, which is just something unique and a bit different in the world of motorsports. So, you know, that word Hoon then became something that we started using more and more. And then we started to develop the brand of Hoonigan, the idea of it. And I came up with the term Hoonigan. And it just kind of stuck for us and ended up, you know, being great for the brand.

Starting point is 00:09:44 And now we've continued to grow and grow. I think we're in our ended up being great for the brand. And now we've continued to grow and grow. I think we're in our seventh or eighth year with the brand. And you have a track record as a very successful entrepreneur, which we're certainly going to dig into. You also are very adept with media

Starting point is 00:09:59 and marketing and branding. And you mentioned Jim Conner. For those people who have not seen it, we're going to talk about that in just a minute, but the video series, Jim Conner, K-H-A-N-A, has around or maybe more than, what, half a billion views now, collectively? Yeah, the main videos themselves have almost half a billion. And there's a bunch of ancillary videos around that also. And we kind of keep tabs on all of them. And then we just totaled up the other day. It's over 600 million views on all of that stuff altogether.

Starting point is 00:10:30 So quite insane. Not something I really ever expected to happen. But it's been very cool to kind of be a part of this sort of visual, digital revolution that is how the internet has kind of um you know evolved over time and then you have your competitive career right then you have your competitive career and for some people listening they may think well much like other sports or even as we were discussing before we started recording say motocross you must have started when you were, what, four, five, or six years old? Started what? Started skateboarding at that age?

Starting point is 00:11:10 The rally car racing. No, unfortunately, I started rally car racing when I was 37. Very, very old in the world of motorsports. So I grew up in Long Beach, California, skateboarding, riding BMX bikes as a kid, and then moved down to North San Diego. My parents decided they wanted to own an avocado grove, so moved me down to the countryside of North San Diego, and continued skateboarding, but then started riding dirt bikes. So I, you know, raced amateur dirt bikes when I was, you know, in my teenage years, but didn't actually start racing cars till I was 37. Although I'd been a fan of rallies since I was very young. I was never a fan of like American motor sports for some reason, like my brother

Starting point is 00:11:56 had drag raced and like all that, I knew all that stuff existed, but as a kid, I was most interested in, in, in formula One, but really rally. Like cars that slid and jumped and raced in the snow and through Africa. And it's just something I related to much more than a car that just went straight or went in a circle. No disrespect to those sports, it just wasn't interesting to me. And I think that's also why I loved you know dirt bikes so much as a teenager was the creativity of it of jumping of sliding of you know racing around a track that had all these obstacles and really rally racing was that but with a car and so I just

Starting point is 00:12:38 genuinely loved it for from since I was quite young but I never had an opportunity to do anything with it or even knew it existed in the States until I was around 36, 37. Now, was your first exposure in terms of training at Team O'Neill or was it somewhere else? Yeah, my first rally car driving lesson was at Team O'Neill in New Hampshire. It all kind of roots back to Travis Pastrana. So at the time, I was the chief brand officer of DC Shoes, and Travis Pastrana was one of our moto athletes. And Travis, in 2004, did a couple rallies. And that just woke me up to the fact that rally even existed in the States

Starting point is 00:13:22 and that I could potentially go do it. And so Travis's agent, Steve Astafin was a good friend of mine. And I called Steve and I said, Hey, I want to go do that. What Travis is doing. How do, how do I do that? So Steve connected me with the team. The team said, yeah, come out. We'll take you to a great rally school, which ended up being team O'Neill put me through a four four-day course, and I was hooked. I couldn't have enjoyed myself more, and I felt like I had a little bit of natural talent for it.

Starting point is 00:13:52 I could throw the thing around exactly how I wanted, and I was pretty quick. But no clue as to where that would go. I just was like, hey, I really like this. This is fun. I need to do this more. So I knew for the first time about your time in New Hampshire with Team O'Neill because I spent a week there for a TV show, short-lived, but still entertaining, called the Tim Ferriss Experiment, where I went there to train and

Starting point is 00:14:19 compete against a friend of mine. And much like your wall on the other side of where we're sitting with all of the damaged and destroyed pieces of various vehicles there is uh there was some some shrapnel from some of your cars up there in new hampshire and uh i found it to be such i do not have i don't think any preternatural uh super skill related to rally, but training with pendulum turns and finish flicks and all that was just so endlessly interesting. Well, it's genuinely fun. It's a fun way to drive a car.

Starting point is 00:14:56 It's so much fun. It really is. And there's so much science behind it. You have people who have done it from a very, very young age. I mean, there's certainly a number of countries that seem to produce a lot of champions. How at 36, 37 did you think about tackling this seriously? Well, you know, in the beginning it was just a hobby. You know, the first year I went out and funded my own racing, you know,

Starting point is 00:15:24 I was just as amateur as an amateur gets you know first year out you know just learning the ropes um had a good team behind me had a great co-driver Alex that helped a lot um but in the beginning it was just like okay let me figure this out let me throw everything into it if i'm really into this and i really did try and learn as much as i possibly could um and and luckily for me i i was already in very good shape uh at 37 years old because i loved riding dirt bikes and with dc i you know we sponsored guys like ricky carmichael and jeff emig r Emig, Ryan Hughes, Jeremy McGrath like some of the best guys in the world so I got to go ride with them so I wanted to be in shape to go do that stuff you know and being around guys like that and Danny Way and Travis Rice and you know Andy

Starting point is 00:16:16 Irons these guys that you know were the top of the field in all their areas, like I got to see how champions trained. I see how they ate. I saw, you know, what it took to be a champion. So I knew how to train and how to mentally get myself there and do those things. So I was able to take all that and apply it to myself to develop my own talent to go do something that I love to do. And so 2005 was the first year I raced and was able to get like fourth overall in the national championship and actually beat Travis that year. So from there, I was like, holy shit, this is fun. And I've got some natural talent for it. I'm just going to put, you know, as much effort as I can into doing it and try and see where it goes. You know, I had no idea where it would go, but it ended up going a lot further than I ever expected. And it's been

Starting point is 00:17:11 a completely wild ride, but I really give a lot of credit back to not only the experiences that I had with DC of trying to be successful and figuring out what it takes to be successful, but also understanding the mental and physical sides of, you know, studying and watching these friends of mine that were champions and what it took for them to do what they needed to do. And we're going to visit D.C. very shortly, but since we're on topic, does anything come to mind that differentiates some of the guys you just mentioned? I mean, these are big names, very competitively successful. What did you see that made them

Starting point is 00:17:52 different or what any behaviors, any beliefs, any practices, was there anything in particular that comes to mind or anything that comes to mind? Well, the funny thing about all those guys is they all have different stories. You know, like there is no magic formula. There is no perfect human that then has the perfect formula. Everyone's different. You know, what worked for Ricky Carmichael would not work for Andy Irons, you know, like that sort of thing. But what you do see with a lot of those guys, you know, that you see with any top athlete is the drive and determination there's guys out there that aren't the most talented

Starting point is 00:18:31 but they're willing to outwork everyone and that's kind of where I was I was an older guy 37, 38, competing against 20 year olds and I'm like well I'm just going to be smarter I'm going to train smarter, I'm going to prepare smarter, I'm going to do everything, I'm going to find every trick in the book that I can to maximize the opportunity. And I think that's really a lot of what it takes

Starting point is 00:18:56 in the end with a lot of athletes. There is a lot of outliers out there, the Ricky Carmichael's of the world that just, he's the greatest of all time, kind of for certain reasons that no one else can match, you know? But other than that, there's a lot of people out there that it's a matter of mastering the game, always being a student of the game and finding every little moment where you can find some sort of advantage. And that means you have to live it. You have to live it day in, in day out you cannot be a champion of a sport generally without you know that study without the living breathing existing in that form of sport day in day out and so i think that's the main thing that that i've seen as a constant is that dedication to the craft. What were some of the tricks or approaches that you found worked for you?

Starting point is 00:19:52 And I'm just thinking, moments before we started this, you had your breakfast slash lunch, which was a cup of coffee with some protein in it, some plant protein plus MCT oil. And you commented that it makes it a lot easier to train if you've, say, consumed something like that, rather than having a very heavy meal. So that just jumped to mind as not necessarily an example from a long time ago, but a habit that might aid in training for any number of things, right? So are there any other things that you decided as a 37-year-old, you're like, okay, the 20 the 20 year olds are doing A, B, and C. If I do that, I'm not going to

Starting point is 00:20:29 be able to match what they're doing, uh, or any other kind of tricks of the trade that you ended up adopting for yourself? Well, I think that with any sport, it's about being smart about what makes you successful in it. You know, uh, and, you know, for example, like I race cars, I don't have to be a shredded, strong individual to do that. I power steering and a foot pedal, you know? So it's more about reaction time. It's more about, uh, quickness. It's about, uh, you know, mental quickness. It's about what it takes to have these moments where, hey, at three in the afternoon tomorrow, I need to be at the highest cognitive recognition level that I can possibly be, you know? So what's it take to get me there? Is it supplements? Is it training? Is it a particular exercise that I do before I get in the car so a lot of it to me is experiment you know it's uh it's working with the right people that

Starting point is 00:21:32 help you with different training exercises and a lot of it is just you know trial and error and figuring out what works and what doesn't work and when something you know when a mistake does happen trying to figure out what caused that mistake and then how do i correct it and and make myself better for the next time what were some of the things you found to work i know you've been a long term it seems like trainee with kickboxing and have worked with some fantastic athletes uh do you have a particular you mentioned exercise before getting into the car do you have a particular, you mentioned exercise before getting into the car, do you have a particular exercise or any exercises you do? Well, you know what, I grew up in North San Diego. Do you know who Paul Cech is? I do, yes. Yes, so Paul Cech, I've worked with many

Starting point is 00:22:15 Paul Cech trainers. I've worked with Paul Cech himself. And so I grew sort of up in my training world around people that, you know, really worked with, you know, those sort of ball exercises, imbalanced exercises, all that sort of stuff to really mimic more real worldpping the level of that, I worked with a couple trainers that, you know, would help me with mental skills along with those physical skills. So, with rally, you're having to hear notes. So, you drive down a road that's, say, 10 miles long, twisty, you know, windy, going through forests. You're going 90 miles an hour sideways next to trees. And while you're doing that, you're hearing notes that's telling you what's coming up next. And they're triggers. They're not like, hey, by the way, there's a left coming up. It's really dangerous. No, it's left five, keep in, you know, caution. And those have to be triggers in your mind that you automatically react upon and drive

Starting point is 00:23:25 as quickly through every situation as possible. So we would actually do that stuff in the gym where I would actually be training, doing a particular exercise, and my trainer would have me looking or listening to things and then having to react to that with certain triggers that I would then react with. And it was all sort of brain type exercises on top of that, even bouncing balls off a wall and having to react with my eyes closed, open them and then react and catch a ball. It was all about being able to see peripherally, see directly in front of me, see short distance, see long distance, all that sort of thing. So it was a lot more really these little things that are harder to train with your brain that would potentially make you quicker. Because rally, we're battling for seconds over each stage.

Starting point is 00:24:19 With rally cross, you're battling for tenths of a second each lap and if you can do that quicker than your competition because of how you've trained then that's one way to be faster so you yeah but you're a student of success uh and maybe we could rewind the clock a little bit and get back to dc now i was doing as i always, homework for this conversation. And it seems like DC was certainly not your first business. And maybe you could tell us a bit about how you got into entrepreneurship. Because I'm reading, I have eight ball clothing, Blunt Magazine, drawers clothing. How did entrepreneurship enter your life?

Starting point is 00:25:05 How did you end up in business? Well, the funny thing about that is I didn't necessarily intend to be an entrepreneur in the beginning, but it just kind of seemed like the only avenue. Not the only avenue. It seemed like the avenue that I was left with with the things that I love to do in my interest. So the funny thing is I started off in high school studying architecture. I wanted to be an architect. And I did all sorts of drafting through high school.

Starting point is 00:25:31 And then when I got out of high school, I went straight to a computer-aided drafting school and did that for a year. And then I got into the business and I hated it. Like, I loved it as an art and I loved it as a study, but actually the business of it, I just didn't like. What didn't you like about it? I guess because I enjoy the art of architecture, but the only people that get to do the art of architectures are the people at the top.

Starting point is 00:25:59 Right. And it takes either a ton of money or 30 to 40 years of climbing to the top. And I just saw that once I realized being in the business what it took. And I just said, yeah, that isn't for me. So being a skateboarder and a snowboarder, I wanted to do that stuff more. So I actually quit working for this architecture firm and ended up moving to Breckenridge, Colorado for two years and being a snowboard bomb. And I was actually friends with a bunch of pro snowboarders. And I looked up to those guys and wanted to be them. But in the end, I just knew I didn't have the talent. I just, I didn't have the skill set that they had.

Starting point is 00:26:45 And I saw that. So I moved back to California and went back to college and started studying screen printing, graphic design, graphic layout, all that sort of stuff. And I just really enjoyed it. And I thought I could, you know, because of my interest in skateboarding and snowboarding, I started designing some shop t-shirts for one of the shops that I was friends with out in Colorado. And I thought, oh, this would be great if I could actually be a part of this industry I love. And in the meantime, at the same school as Palomar College in Vista, California, I met Damon Way, who's the older brother of the legendary

Starting point is 00:27:28 skateboarder Danny Way. And Damon and I hit it off and we both had interests in trying to be in the industry of skateboarding and snowboarding. And we had this real mutual interest in that. I was more of the graphics business type guy, and he was more of the clothing designer type guy. And so we just kind of merged our talents and started working together and started very small with 8 Ball and drawers. And eventually I did a magazine called Blunt as part of this whole company, and we sold a company called Type A Snowboards, which were some friends of ours. We owned part of that. And eventually we started DC. So we were kind of lucky with DC that we got all this experience of a couple of years floundering

Starting point is 00:28:15 around with these other clothing companies and magazine. But we learned a lot so that by the time we got to making DC, which is 94, 95, that we were able to make this startup work very well, very quickly. So we already had the infrastructure of buildings and artists and salespeople and warehouse and all that. So that when DC got plugged into that, it took off, but we were able to manage it and make it work. If we hadn't had all that other stuff and experience and all that, we wouldn't have had all that. Now, one thing that I did forget to mention in all that though is business is not easy to start. And I come from a family, my dad had his own business and he was fairly successful with it. And my parents, by the time that I was a teenager,

Starting point is 00:29:06 had a decent amount of money. I wouldn't say they were overly rich, but, you know, they had enough money to buy 16 acres of avocados in a house, you know, in Valley Center. So as I was growing up, you know, I wanted certain things, you know, like there were kids in my high school that drove BMWs. I'm like, I want that. And my dad just laughed.

Starting point is 00:29:25 He's like, no way am I buying you that. You know, like you are going to earn everything that you get. And so I grew up with that mentality that whatever I did, my parents were not going to give me anything. They were going to help me, but they were going to make me work for it. And so that's something that I really genuinely appreciate and something I'm going to pass on to my own kids, that life isn't easy. You've got to figure certain things out, and you've got to make it work.

Starting point is 00:29:54 And it takes hard work to be successful. And I've seen a lot of people have stuff given to them, and they've floundered with it. And I think that experience really is the best lesson. So when I was starting our business, I went to my parents and said, hey, I need some money. And my mom said, well, I'm not sure that my dad will do that, but let's try. She said, write a business plan.

Starting point is 00:30:19 If you want $10,000, prove to us what you're going to do with that $10,000 and how you're going to pay us back. And I said, okay. So I bought books and figured out how to make a business plan, wrote that business plan. And I got $10,000 out of my parents to help start the business. That was DC? That was actually for 8-Ball and drawers. And Damon came in with some money and we were equal partners in the beginning.

Starting point is 00:30:43 But really, it was from my parents and my parents, however you'd like to say it, ethics law, business family ethics that basically set me in motion of how to learn business, how to start a business, how to pay back a loan, all that stuff. Because I was a 19, 20 year old kid that was just trying to better himself and they helped me set the path to to do what I did and that's something that I that I genuinely appreciate and anytime anybody asked me from from like how do I start this business or how do I get sponsored the easiest lesson is if you don't know business and you don't know what marketing budgets are, and you don't know advertising or sales, like you've got to understand that stuff and understand

Starting point is 00:31:32 a business plan to go anywhere, you know? And there's so much basics of life that if you understand, you know, how products get made and how companies profit and what it takes to spend advertising dollars, there's so much in life that you will understand just by knowing those basics. you know, how products get made and how companies profit and what it takes to spend advertising dollars. There's so much in life that you will understand just by knowing those basics. And you have such a keen eye. You studied architecture. I've watched a lot of what you've done over the years. And I just want to underscore, maybe using different words, the value of someone who has artistic ability in learning the business side is not sullying your hands with some crass aspect of the world necessarily, but enabling yourself to further

Starting point is 00:32:15 the art and what you want to do in the world, right? And it's a real liability not to have that. And what's struck me also is that you have these seemingly disparate lives that you've led and success in these different realms, but they've also built on one another in the sense that you sponsored athletes and now you are a sponsored athlete and you know how to do, you know which athletes you sponsor did a great job versus did a mediocre job versus did a do not pass job. And so you're able to fulfill that role really, really effectively for the companies you work with, right? Like the Fords and the Monsters, whoever it might be. And you have an operational awareness

Starting point is 00:32:58 that enables you to then pursue the craft that you want to pursue. Let me ask you about, because we're going to talk about good decisions and resources that helped you and so on and so forth, but do any mistakes... Well, before you go on, though, let's talk about that real quick. That was one of the things that when I, like the transition for me

Starting point is 00:33:21 from going from chief brand officer at DC to race car driver, it was actually real. It was a bit difficult for me at first. And mainly because as chief brand officer at DC, I actually liked to be in the background. Damon and I didn't really like us getting press for DC. We liked the athletes to be the people that stood out front and represented the brand. So as I became a race car driver, I was like, oh crap, now I got to put my face out there and I've got to be the voice and I have to show a different attitude and a different, not necessarily

Starting point is 00:34:01 different, but I had to be worried about what I said and how I said it and how I presented myself, which I just didn't have to worry about before that, you know? But so that transition was a bit tough, but once I got into it, I basically said, okay, I know what bothered me or I saw the good and bad of all these athletes that I worked with for, you know, 15 years before this. So how can I take all those experiences, what I liked and disliked about what all these different people did and make myself the best of what I can make myself. And I'll tell you a really stupid example. Like, you know, we had guys that we would send out to a shop to do an autograph signing and there'd be, you know, a thousand kids lined up waiting for these guys to sign autographs. And some of them, instead of being engaged with these fans,

Starting point is 00:34:52 they'd be looking at their phone or turning around smoking a cigarette around kids and stuff like that. And they didn't have the right understanding of what they were there to do. And to me, that's a real simple example that when I go to an autograph signing, we try to make the best poster. I try to be as engaged as possible, always trying to make the fan as happy as possible. They're there for me, and I'm there representing all these different brands and maybe the shop that I'm there for, those sort of things. So it's understanding the whole situation because of where I came from before, which has then made me such a great ambassador for all these brands

Starting point is 00:35:38 and hopefully a very good and engaged athlete for these fans that follow me. So it's been a very fun process to go from that guy behind the scenes that kind of understands it all because I wrote the contracts, I made the ads, I directed the social media, you know, we made commercials, I made skate videos, you know, to now being the guy on the other side and delivering what the sponsors needed. And there were certain guys that like actually pissed me off over the years that I saw so much potential for it and just watch them fail because they didn't understand that I said, you know what, I'm going to prove whether these guys ever see this or not, I'm going to prove what is potential if you just understand the process,

Starting point is 00:36:23 you know? And that's actually been very fun for me over the years, you know, and that's actually been very fun for me over the years, you know, maximizing the potential of social media, you know, really maximizing the potential of YouTube and delivering what the fans want. Because at the end of the day, this is all a business, you know, like I love to race cars at the end of the day, but without the sponsors, without the series that are out there, without all the fans, there's a whole culture here that all interacts and goes together. But you know, if you don't do it right, you can't be as successful as the potential is there to be. And you, even when we were walking around this building earlier, you were mentioning learning from every success, learning from every failure. You had your informal business school, so to speak, in the form of starting these businesses before DC. What were some of

Starting point is 00:37:20 the mistakes that you made in some of those earlier ventures where you're like, okay, now that we're doing DC, we are not going to do these following things. We're not going to make these following mistakes. And it just brings to mind, like one for me, for instance, is in one of the first companies I started, I became really interested in radio advertising, but I knew nothing about it. And so I bought Remnant Space. I thought I was so smart because there was this huge discount on space for drive time. And I was like, oh my God, drive time. Perfect. I found a needle in a haystack. And then all of my ads were run at like 4.45 AM because it was defined in the contract drive time. It's like 4.30 to 9.30. And so I just lost it all, right? So that's all. I learned a lot of lessons in that one. But

Starting point is 00:38:05 do any particular mistakes or failures come to mind that it kind of informed what you did with DC in any way? Well, I think that all marketing and advertising, a lot of people don't realize they're like, oh, we have 100 grand to spend. Sweet. Well, you need to turn that a hundred grand into say a million dollars worth of business. So it's about targeting and having the right message to reach the consumer that's actually going to buy the product. And that can be very difficult and there can be very many opinions with that. And even in a company, you can have 10 different opinions on that and even have some personal agendas thrown in, you know? And so it can be very difficult and a lot of it is a learning lesson and you got to look at everything else that's out there and what your competition's doing and try and it's one that you really have to work at and think through. And I mean, I've had so much random stuff, like your example right there. I had one of our athletes, it was like, I want a bus. I'm going to build a bus. It's going to be 300 grand. I need 300

Starting point is 00:39:15 grand out of you. And we'll put a big logo on it. Everybody on the freeway is going to see it. And I'm like, I don't care about everybody on the freeway. Like, those are my consumers. Like, if we're going to spend $300,000, we need to spend that targeted specifically on who we think is going to buy our product, you know? For DC, who was that? Like, who was your archetype of your customer? Like, who was your customer in the early days? Well, DC, I mean, we were mainly selling to skate shops in the beginning. So, you know, you're talking, you know, teenage kids, mostly boys that were going in and buying the shoes to skateboard in. So, you know, back in those days, mid 90s, you know, we had all the skateboard magazines because that's when magazines still existed and were big you know so we had at least one to two ads a month that we were making that the drop in all those magazines and then you add various video projects and there was like 411 magazine the video magazine and and then on top of that you you sponsored we have sponsored

Starting point is 00:40:18 maybe 10 to 12 skateboarders that were you know the top guys in the industry that fit our brand. And so, you know, you have all sorts of different genres of, you know, types of skateboarders out there. Same as like, you know, basketball, there's, there's, you know, guys that like high top shoes, guys that like low top shoes, there's guys, you know, so you have different athletes that represent different things like that. so we you know spent all our marketing dollars to attract those teenage kids to come into the skate shops and and buy it and over time as the brand grew and we did more and more sales you know that we expanded to more mall stores, and so that kid isn't affected as much by the pro skateboarder and the skateboard magazine. So then we started working with artists like Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, and we had a Mike custom signature shoe and did stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:41:19 And eventually we worked with artists like you know like cause people like that so you know as we branched out into more of youth culture as opposed to only skateboarding we found our unique marketing angles to do that and do it in fun and innovative ways and grew the brand uh i think at its peak it you know 2007 2008 or something was was around $550 million. So it really grew to be quite a big brand. It was actually on target. There was a plan at one time with a guy that was running our company, Nick, to be a billion-dollar brand. Unfortunately, he never made it there because of some problems that Quicksilver was having,

Starting point is 00:42:02 who had bought us in 2004. But it was incredible to take a brand from nothing, you know, to over 500 million in sales a year. It's a huge accomplishment. What does DC stand for? DC actually stands for drawers clothing. So almost every word or variation of the word in the English language is trademarked in some way, you know, or another. And so as we were trying to work on names for the brand, you know, we had all sorts of names that we submitted and everything was taken. You know, DC was actually, I had made DC logos for drawers, you know, because drawers clothing, it's just an abbreviation. You know, something you could make a simple logo and put on a sleeve.

Starting point is 00:42:45 And so I knew that I could make logos and art for that. So we submitted that and it came back that, yeah, that was possible to do. So the crazy thing about trademarks, though, is even when you trademark something for one category, it doesn't mean that it's good for another category. So eventually we made snowboards, but the logo that we have looks kind of like Chanel, and Chanel actually has that trademarked for snowboard. So that's why you never see our logo done the way it is on shoes on a snowboard. Really random bit of side legal information there, but that's the sort of thing you deal with with the company. Oh, for sure. And just a side note for people, because I run into this a lot with people who

Starting point is 00:43:30 are starting businesses, intellectual property is really, really nuanced and having a trademark or having a patent does not protect you. It just gives you the right to sue someone who infringes, right? This is just really important. Oh yeah like the the actual expense spent over years protecting our trademark around the world is millions and millions of dollars yeah you know and it's just it's a fact of business and it's an ugly world it's not any fun you know and i've been various parts of the world and shown up and found like bootleg versions of our shoes and not even like good bootleg versions and it came straight from our factories too where they're like oh we have too many of these soles and too many of these uppers we'll just put them together and sell them

Starting point is 00:44:13 out the back door you know and it's really unfortunate but that that is the world we live in unfortunately part of the ride you mentioned a book when we were walking around that beautifully colored table tennis, I suppose what we'd call a platform over there. When did that, so Dale Carnegie, just to kick off a conversation and maybe resources and other things that have helped you in your entrepreneurial journey. So what was the book and when did it appear? Well, the simple background of that is I was a young 20-something and all of a sudden I have a business and I've got to manage it. And I have no management experience. I didn't go to work in some other company and rise

Starting point is 00:45:05 up through management and learn management skills. I went straight from junior college to having my own business, you know, and, and our, our business opportunity was growing every year. It was successful every year. And, uh, it was successful because, you know because my business partner, Damon, and I worked very hard, but we were working on our talents, and after a while, those talents were starting to run out. We were successful, but for us to continue to grow, we needed smarter people than us around us, and that meant that we need to hire them, we needed to manage them, and no matter what, in every company, have, you know, ups and downs of dealing with people and success based on the people you surround yourself with. And so I needed

Starting point is 00:45:54 to grow as a person in that position. And I knew that, you know, management was really, you know, one of the keys. So the first actual book that I picked up to learn, you know one of the keys so the first actual book that i picked up to learn you know communication skills and management skills was uh how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie and i don't know how old is that book now it's it i would i would say it's at least 40 probably 50 or 60 years old i think it's older than that i think it might have been written in the 20s yeah it's yeah it's a it Yeah, it's a fantastic book. Parts of it are a little dated and kind of make you chuckle or cringe depending, but great book.

Starting point is 00:46:31 But I think that book, you know, I think that there's a lot of good lessons in it. And I like the attitude, even the title, like How to Win Friends and Influence People. And that actually fits very well with like how I like to manage, how I like to work with people. And a lot of it is about working as a collective and getting people on a team to accomplish something as opposed to just being a director embarking orders. So I've always enjoyed the collaborative effort of working in a company that, Hey, we're trying to get this done. We're trying to, you know, finish this campaign, whatever it is. And everybody knows and understands the goals and we've set a bar and we've set this bar high. How do we all get there? And that book was

Starting point is 00:47:19 really one of the first books that really kind of helped me achieve my management style and what's helped me really be successful. There's plenty of other books, you know, like The Habits of Millionaires, all that sort of stuff, those books do. But I think that book really was part of kind of what shaped me as a business person and a director. If we look at the, let's just say the apparel business, I've spent a good amount of time around, say, let's just say the apparel business, I've spent a good amount of time around, say, Damon John at FUBU, which stands for For Us, By Us, by the way, for people who don't know that,

Starting point is 00:47:52 or Mark Echo in the early days. And it's a tough, or it can be a really tough business, right, where people are relatively undifferentiated. And in some cases, depending on the scale, obviously, it's an appealing business for a lot of people to go into. So what were some of the key decisions or approaches you took that were different enough that led to this year-on-year growth?

Starting point is 00:48:22 Was it innovation on how you approached the stores? Was it something very unusual about your marketing? Obviously, you did a lot with product innovation also, but what were the ingredients? Because there are a lot of players, potentially a lot of players in that world. Well, that's a tough question. But when I look back on one thing that

Starting point is 00:48:45 that always the damon and i always thought about was really like the easiest thing is saying set the bar very high and when you say that you're like okay well how does that apply like does that mean you make a really nice t-shirt well no you know that's part of it but you've a lot of it is has to do with like okay if we're going to go do marketing how do we do it unique and different how do we be creative you know the the thing about the world today is it's easy to make a t-shirt but how do you get someone to buy it why is supreme you know you know more desirable than say you know, more desirable than say, you know, something else, you know, just for a random example, even throwing, you know, Reebok or something else like that. Yeah. The kid's definitely going to take the Supreme shirt over the Reebok shirt, you know? So, but that is

Starting point is 00:49:39 because of a brand essence. You've sold someone a story, You've sold someone an image. And to do that and to do it at a very high level is very difficult. You know, it takes years of development and really having that bar set so high and kind of judging everything against that bar so that you end up with, you know, marketing projects that are huge and different and really capture people's attention, or you have products that lead in the industry, or that you have, you know, athletes that really stand out and stand right along with you with their huge accomplishments and represent your brand with them at the same time. So it's kind of all those things in one that that create this brand essence for you know everyone from you know big companies like nike and apple down to you know small brands even like us with

Starting point is 00:50:33 hoonigan so if you can capture the interest of the consumer you know with the right story that touches the right nerves in each of these markets, then you can really set yourself apart and then drive that consumer to buy the product. Because at the end of the day, a T-shirt, pretty easy to make. Even nowadays, a pair of shoes, pretty easy to make. Lots of competitors out there. So how do you grab the attention of that consumer and say, buy ours instead of theirs?

Starting point is 00:51:04 Can you think of a particular campaign or a particular athlete that was just the Willy Wonka golden ticket where you guys were really kind of aced the hole or one that completely face planted where you're like, okay, this is the reason why this didn't work. Um, well, back in the day when we started drawers,, we were a couple of industry guys, me and Damon, that we didn't have the experience that a lot of the other companies that we were competing against had. But we just had a vision. We had an idea of what we wanted to do. And we came up with some very innovative marketing concepts, only only for drawers but into dc but the first thing that really started us off in drawers was just coming up with really fun and unique

Starting point is 00:51:51 like kind of twisted ideas and you know rob derrick who's now a fairly big mtv star uh he was one of our skateboarders back then and one of our first ads that really stood out in the magazines was literally just I poured blue paint over his head and he was smoking a cigarette. And we just had these really obscure photos of just his head was blue paint being poured over it. We were selling clothing. There was no clothing in the ad, you know. But this is the early 90s. And we were just trying to be a bit outlandish and different than what everybody else was doing in the magazine world at that time, in the skateboard world, I should say. And it was much more of sort of a fuck you fashion style attitude.

Starting point is 00:52:36 And it just really worked, you know. And we kind of played on that idea of, you know, just being rebellious through the years. And it's fun because skateboarders are generally like that. So it was fun really playing into that over the years. DC, as we were growing it, got a bit more professional. The style of DC was kind of a bit more of like a much more slicker style skateboard shoe, more performance. So we kind of played into that over the years and had some funny taglines and made kind of creative but slick ads. But in the end, like one of the biggest things that we ever did was build a giant ramp,

Starting point is 00:53:16 like what's called the Mega Ramp for Danny Way to do basically giant skateboarding tricks that had never been done at sort of this scale. And that was around 2003, 2004. And that had really made us and him stand out in a way that we were seeing skateboarding go to a whole new level to the point where X Games adopted that ramp and put it in the X Games. And I think the mega ramp style is still in the X Games adopted that ramp and put it in the X Games. And I think the MegaRamp style is still in the X Games today,

Starting point is 00:53:48 but all initiated from Danny thinking in an innovative and different way and then us funding it and creating a video part all around this. And that was just the type of stuff that we did to set DC far apart from all of our competition. Was there anything with pricing or distribution? You were mentioning the contracts with the athletes that comes to mind that outside of kind of product and marketing, you guys did differently? We're going to come back to video for sure, because that seems to be a very native medium

Starting point is 00:54:21 for you. So we'll come back to that. On the business side, like I said earlier, David and I were smart about realizing we weren't the smartest guys in the room and to hire those people and then manage the expectations of what we were trying to do and grow the business. How did you find those people?

Starting point is 00:54:40 How did we find them? Some of them were friends. Some of them were friends of friends. A guy that ran our business for a while was actually the father of someone I went to high school with. And then as we grew bigger and bigger, we used headhunters to go out and, you know, steal people from Nike for sales and stuff like that, you know. You know, that's just the reality of big business is, you know, if you're trying to go a certain place, you know, like with sales, you need to hire the guys that do that for someone else, you know. And we, you know, would hire and find and hire the right people,

Starting point is 00:55:19 and we were able to grow quite well over the years. But, you know, that's the tough part about business. I was a marketing guy. I was very good at design. I had some design experience from doing architecture in high school. And I ended up basically designing the first 15 models of our shoes with some of the pro athletes. But I did the drawings. I flew to Korea. I immersed myself in the business and said, this is what I have to do to succeed and did it, you know, but doesn't mean I'm a good salesperson. Doesn't mean I'm a good accountant. And you just got to hire the right people and be able to manage them. And if they can't perform

Starting point is 00:56:01 the management side, you has to fire them and move on and hire someone better. And to me, that's a big part of success is understanding your strengths and weaknesses and hiring the people to really help make a business successful, that you can't do everything yourself. There's no way, at least in my mind, there's no way that you can be a brand director along with, you know, an incredible accountant, amazing salesperson. But you just have to have the wherewithal to understand what those jobs, you know, what it takes to succeed in those jobs and then hire the right people to do it. So it's, that's one thing I've really learned probably in a big way over all this is that, you know, it really takes a big community of smart people to make something successful, but at the top, you still need to be able to set that bar and manage that bar to get something where, you know, you intend it to be. Did you guys up until the, the acquisition by Quicksilver, did you self fund or did you bring in up until the acquisition by Quicksilver, did you self-fund or did you bring

Starting point is 00:57:05 in financing for the business along the way? No, we self-funded. We had our names on very large lines of credit, which I genuinely hated, which was one of the reasons why we eventually sold. The liability of that, if there was a down year or the economy crash or something, the business would have gone away quite quickly because, you know, we didn't have, you know, we were not cash heavy. We were definitely very debt heavy, but that's what we needed to grow and how we did grow. And it made for a very successful company, but also that can make things volatile in the long run. And that's why we saw a purchase with someone like Quicksilver as a very good sort of route to a good end for us. And it worked out really quite well. So video, I promise to get back to video.

Starting point is 00:57:57 Let's talk about Gymkhana 5 specifically. Just as someone who, because that was the first Gymkhana video I saw. I lived in San Francisco for almost 20 years before moving. And I would imagine, I'm going to describe it for people who haven't seen it. Everybody should see it. By the way, last time I checked, I'm sure it'll be past 100 million by the time most people hear this, but 99 million or so views. At least one version of it on YouTube. So quite a few people have seen this.

Starting point is 00:58:26 And it is really mind-boggling to watch this video. And maybe you can describe it for people, but also, I hope, in describing it for people, explain how it seems, at least from the editing, that you basically shut down san francisco to do this because you don't see a soul on the streets uh so what what is gymkhana 5 maybe that's a way of explaining what gymkhana is uh and everybody should absolutely go check uh this and all the other gymkhana videos out but almost 100 million views what what is jim kata i love how you just jumped past four very viral videos to the fifth one well i jumped i jumped to number five because all of the tech nerds who are my friends live in san francisco and they were just like what in the fuck is this

Starting point is 00:59:19 yeah well the the funny thing about that is jim k 5 is my favorite video. You know, we started making these videos. The first one, it took us two days to produce. It was a very small team. And it was the first time that we really had a video. Because we'd made several, like, recap videos of me and Travis racing. I'd done some stuff with Nitro Circus I'd done a 170 foot jump like on a dirt bike track with my rally car for a program called Stunt Junkies that

Starting point is 00:59:50 got like 10 million views but Gymkhana, the first Gymkhana video that we did, it's called Gymkhana Testing and Practice it was the first real viral video, it got like 10 million views in a couple weeks and then just kept going.

Starting point is 01:00:07 And it was actually, this was before YouTube was really popular. So I had a video player on my Ken Block website, and it got like 10 million views there alone. And finally, I was paying for this. I was going to say that. I was paying for this website to host this, and it was costing a lot of money. I'm like, this, I was paying for this, you know, this website to host this and it was costing a lot of money. I'm like, shit, we got to put this on YouTube. This is just costing me too much money, you know? So that's kind of how long ago this was. It was over 10 years ago that, you know, we started doing this. And it's weird to me that you think about

Starting point is 01:00:40 this today, that YouTube wasn't the video standard that it is now. People were still putting videos kind of all over the place because YouTube today is just the standard. Like every, you know, it, everyone puts stuff there from, you know, the daily show to, you know, the, the YouTube, you know, community that some of them have subscribers in the millions, you know? So anyway, we created this video and it was really fashioned after skateboarding. So a skateboarding video part, a guy will go out and say, you know, he'll skateboard and try and capture certain tricks on film for a year. And he'll go to a certain handrail and he'll try 30 times and slam 29 times, roll away on the 30th time,

Starting point is 01:01:26 and they make sure they get all the best angles of it. You know, and they'll take, you know, 20 of these tricks and put them together to make a video part. And it's just the best of what this person can do. And this is done a lot in skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, motocross, like they make these videos that are then sold to, you know, to the consumers. So basically I kind of created that same thing, but with a car. So I went and did, you know, a certain number of tricks and slides and around different obstacles at an airport called El Toro in Irvine. And that's what the first Gymkhana video was. And I thought it was really cool. It wasn't about trying to do something in one try. It was about trying something 10 times

Starting point is 01:02:11 to get the perfect shots to make it look really good and kind of tell the story of driving around this airport and kind of put it all together kind of as a course. And when we first put it out, I was like, I really like this video. It kind of showcases what I want to watch, what me and my friends want to watch. And when we put that out, well, it's turned out that a lot of other people like to watch it too. And that video really took off. And so my sponsors said, hey, when are you going to do that again? We really like that exposure. And so DC paid for me to do the second one and the third one and the fourth one and then the fifth one being san francisco now the second third and fourth one all are sort of very similar

Starting point is 01:02:54 filming concept but we just found different locations the second one was on some piers in long beach third one was a really unique old race course in france that has this banked these banked walls that go up to 51 degrees uh jim connor four was on the one of the studio lots up in hollywood so you know you've got jaws and you've got the war of the worlds and like all these different sets that i was driving through that made a real unique thing um but these were all closed sets right you know like private airfield and private racetrack and that sort of thing and uh for gym kind of three we'd actually gone to san francisco it's not san francisco detroit and scouted detroit and then we went to go get the permits to film there, the city was like, uh, we don't like certain locations you've picked. We're like, well, why?

Starting point is 01:03:57 You know, to us, everybody knows Detroit is, you know, uh, part of the Rust Belt. It's an industrial city that like, you know, isn't so industrial anymore and has a lot of urban decay. And we liked the urban decay and we had some new stuff in there too, but a lot of Detroit to us was very cool urban decay. And I wanted to drive in and through a lot of that. And they just didn't like that. They wanted to veto even on set. They could say, no, we don't like what you're filming and veto us. So there's no way we could put up all this money to go film at a location where they're going to randomly veto us in the middle of shooting. So we never ended up doing Detroit. We just thought, oh, it's going to be too difficult.

Starting point is 01:04:30 So anyway, getting to Gymkhana 5, we went and scouted an area outside of San Francisco that's like an old military base where they used to build a lot of bombs and warships and that sort of thing right on the water. And it was cool, but it didn't have enough creative driving situations to really make a whole video. So we went and looked at it and we're kind of disappointed and we're driving back into town to go to the airport. And the scout that was with us had just scouted San Francisco for, I think, Iron Man 3. So he's a very high-level scout that does Hollywood-type stuff. And he's like, hey, do you want to go check out these spots in San Francisco? And we just kind of laughed. Like, San Francisco's never going to let us do this in their city.

Starting point is 01:05:19 It had nothing to do against San Francisco. It was more of the idea, like like we're hooning with cars. We're having fun with cars. I'm doing giant slides and donuts with a car. There's no way a city is going to let us do that. But also we just didn't understand sort of the movie world as well back then. And so the scout was like, no, no, we can do whatever we want. We get a permit.

Starting point is 01:05:42 We have that street to do whatever we want, you know? And so he took us to a couple of locations and we were kind of blown away. We're like, really, we can use these locations. And so, you know, he had some good stuff, but we said, hey, we need a jump. We need this and that. We need a real twisty street. We need something down by the water. And so he came back to us like a month later. It was like, hey, I have all that stuff. You ready to go look again? So we went back to San Francisco and looked at everything he brought us. And we said, wow, we have enough here to make an amazing video.

Starting point is 01:06:15 We still need a few little things, but, you know, we have enough here. And then in that process, too, the city came back and said, hey, do you want the bridge? Like they offered us absolutely how do you know i mean how do you get the bay bridge how do you clear the bay i would have never even thought that would be possible but but that's the thing that's that's interesting about all this as as we went through this process you learn oh like a city like san francisco where a lot of tv shows are shot a lot like San Francisco where a lot of TV shows are shot, a lot of movies are shot, a lot of commercials are shot. Like there's a very good film department there. The police force are very adept to understanding what the needs are for these movies and things. And they understand what you need to do to do this. So they offered us the bridge. We're like,

Starting point is 01:07:04 I would have never thought we're going to shut down the Bay Bridge and use the Bay Bridge. But they're like, oh yeah, we do that Sunday morning. We block them over by, like between Oakland. They start over, they get on the bridge over by Oakland. Then as they get towards the island, I don't remember. Treasure Island.

Starting point is 01:07:24 Yeah, they get to Treasure Island. They start slowing everybody down. And when they have everybody start to slow down, the traffic then empties out ahead of them. And then we get on at Treasure Island or whatever that's called. And then go out and do what we need to do where the traffic still stopped before the island. We have 10 or 15 minutes to do what we need to do. Then we move on. Then the cops just let the traffic go. So really, they're only stopped have 10 or 15 minutes to do what we need to do then we move on then the cops just let the traffic go so really they're only stopped for 10 or 15 minutes yeah and we did

Starting point is 01:07:51 that i think four times so you know it messes up some traffic but for a short amount of time on a sunday morning which is you know the least amount of traffic on that bridge. So it's all about just really smart usage of public streets. And I would have never understood all that unless we'd actually done that project. Now we've shut down like the busiest road in Dubai, you know, the main strip through Dubai that had only been shut down once before for the George W. Bush senior. So he was the only one that they'd ever shut it down for before that. So it's been kind of wild to go on this ride of like, ah, they'll never let us do that to like shutting down some of the biggest cities in the world to do some of this stuff. It's really astonishing. I mean,

Starting point is 01:08:43 I never would have thought it possible. And is is it a function of let's say the scouting ace that you had or someone else putting together a pitch for the city like this is what we're planning this is why it's going to bring a lot of tourism or is it really just the infrastructure set up we are going to film this is how much you know what what is the retail price point for this or like what's what's the rate card yeah we're shutting down these streets? Well, I think that the exposure is a good thing. They do look at that, like San Francisco looked at it and said, okay, yeah, that's good.

Starting point is 01:09:11 You know, like this is a viral series that could potentially give San Francisco more exposure. But at the end of the day, I just think it's money. Yeah. Like you're paying the film commission, the city, the government to go do this, you know? And the city's getting paid. The police department's getting paid. You know, it's a commerce system, you know? And so, you know, and there's a lot of jobs around that that are being produced, too.

Starting point is 01:09:40 Everything from our crew to, you know, the guys that, you know, there's certain streets that they don't want marks on. So, you know, we're having to pay local guys to come in to clean up marks, you know? So it really is kind of a wild process. No shortage of marks in that video. Yeah. You know, and if you look back at that video, it's like San Francisco to me is one of the most unique driving cities in the world. And not only does it have some amazing driving situations, like Russian Hill, some of the twisty streets, all the elevation changes, all that, but it's also been immortalized by movies like Bullet. For sure. You know, like Bullet wasn't filmed in Akron, Ohio.

Starting point is 01:10:21 It was San Francisco, you know, like jumping down those crazy streets and the bridges and everything. And that's what makes it so legendary, you know, in its essence as San Francisco as a unique place for cars, you know? So when I, when we got the permission to do that, like, oh man, it was, it was really quite an honor and very cool to me that we were going to San Francisco to make this video. And I'll tell you that I'm very lucky. I have an incredibly great crew around me of smart, very innovative and creative guys. And that's what helps me make these things too. When you watch that video, there's a ton of things in there that I do with the car, but I can't do that without the great race team behind me and the great creative team behind me too. It's a

Starting point is 01:11:12 very big collaborative effort for us to do these things. And not only that, even my experience and connections in the industry, we have Travis Pastrana in there doing a wheelie that's, you know, part of one of the elements of the movie. And that's a part of, you know, the system and everything that's built into what we do with, you know, my agent is Travis's agent and Travis is a longtime friend of mine, you know? So, it's such a great mix of friendships, creativity, and hardworking people that make this happen. If you're comfortable talking about it, just because it's certainly sort of a burning question in my mind,

Starting point is 01:11:53 putting aside the, separating out the production costs, put the production cost on one side, meaning all the cameras, all the crew for the actual filming, what does it, we don't have to make it specific to San Francisco, but to shut down areas like that in San Francisco, what is the sort of range and cost in doing something like that? Do you have any idea? The funny answer to that question is I ignore budgets. I get to focus on the creative stuff.

Starting point is 01:12:19 You know, and that is the honest truth. I only deal with budgets when there seem to be overages. And most of that time is caused by me. Like, yes, we can use the Hollywood sign, but it's going to cost another day. Yeah, let's really do that. But luckily for what I've been doing, there's been a lot of success with this. And DC, you know, funded the first five videos. And I didn't have to deal with any of the budgets of that.

Starting point is 01:12:47 There was always a marketing director that figured that into his budget. And we did, I think, five years worth of those videos with them. And then since then, my agent and Hoonigan have dealt with working with companies like Forza and Ford and Toyo to fund all these projects and you know there's there's a cost to doing it you know um and the more creative you are and the more extravagant you are the more the cost is uh but luckily you know we we've had a great set of sponsors that really understand and

Starting point is 01:13:19 see the value in this and have really kind of let us go wild and get these things done. The sky is not the limit. There are some very distinct budget restrictions, but these have been big budget things. There's movies that have sold in Hollywood that have smaller budgets than what we work with. But it's very cool to do this process and the creativity that goes into it all through the process of production, everything. It is on some of the highest level there is with people that we work with in Hollywood. And it's really cool to be able to do that

Starting point is 01:13:57 and have directors like Neil Blomkamp, you know, email me and be like, dude, I want to direct one of your videos. And I'm like, I love District Night. Yes, how can we get you involved, you know, email me and be like, dude, I want to direct one of your videos. And I'm like, I love District Night. Yes, how can we get you involved, you know? But it's just been a really fun wild ride and a really fun extension of not only my creativity as a marketing person, but also the creativity I love to do with the race car itself. And at the same time, you know, when we were having, well, it was meandering around the

Starting point is 01:14:25 kitchen earlier, you have somewhere between 4.5 and 5 million followers on Instagram. And you were mentioning how we're discussing the affordability of the gear that I'm recording this podcast on right now. And you're saying that some of the most popular picks and so on that you've put up have in some cases just been from an iPhone or something like that. What in your mind for people who may not have a high budget and have seen footage that seems to also do well, for instance, where even recently in British Columbia where you were snowboarding and had Roman candles as you're going down through powder, what advice would you give to people who are hoping to create videos that get attention? That's a tough question. I love tough questions. Well, it's a tough question. I feel like, in general, like in marketing, in society, in whatever.

Starting point is 01:15:30 Because today, like we were saying, T-shirts. Yeah, it's easy to purchase a T-shirt, but how do you build a brand essence? It's the same kind of with a lot of equipment nowadays. It used to be so hard for, you know, to get a really good photograph. Well, nowadays I can get a really good photograph of my phone. So it's not about necessarily the equipment nowadays. It's about the content. And I think that's really what made us successful back in the day, um, was hiring the right photographers, artists, videographers, all that stuff to produce the right content

Starting point is 01:16:10 for all of our marketing, especially for DC. You were some of the first guys to take high quality black and white shots of athletes, and not just black and white, of course, but it seems like, is that accurate? I mean, you guys were, at least that's what I'd read that you, you were some of the first people to really place an emphasis on that. Yeah. I mean, there was all sorts of different campaigns that we did, you know, various different things in black and white, but I, for us, a lot of it was

Starting point is 01:16:39 connecting with the consumer in a different way and in a way that they wanted information. And when I say that, I mean, even when you watch a simple video, you can capture something on an iPhone that as long as you capture the right essence of something that connects, that's way more important than hiring a guy that can hold a red camera that may make it prettier, but it just costs you 10 grand instead of pulling out something out of your pocket, you know? So for me, it's always about the storytelling. It's always about, you know, connecting the content with what the consumer wants to see. And, and I think we're kind of lucky on, on, on my side that they create the guys behind me, enjoy we all enjoy kind of the same stuff so we want to produce the content that we want to watch if that makes sense you know and i think that that's why

Starting point is 01:17:34 you see our stuff so passionately done because we genuinely love this stuff um but back to that storytelling thing you know it was funny when we, just a random example that pops into my head. We started making ads and doing a lot of marketing with motocross guys back in the late 90s with DC. You know, we sponsored Jeff Emig and Ryan Hughes and Ricky Carmichael. And when we went into the magazines, we looked at everything and the, the motocross photographer shot really tight, you know, because the dirt bike sponsors wanted them, they wanted to show their logos on the bike, you know, and the bike manufacturers, they wanted the consumer to see their bike up close. So you just have all these photos of like a guy in the air and no reference to the ground

Starting point is 01:18:25 and that sort of thing. Well, we, we'd kind of did the opposite. We, we hired skateboard photographers to go shoot these dirt bike guys and they would shoot long lens and really show how big these guys were jumping. And then we'd, we'd buy a spread ad, you know, and run it in black and white and Ricky'd be way up in the sky, you know, and you'd see the real distance, 100 feet that he's jumping. And it would look dramatically different than everything else in the magazine. But that's how we stood out.

Starting point is 01:18:51 And the consumers love it, you know, because they're like, hey, you're showing the sport that we love in a more dramatic and beautiful way. And so we really had a huge success from those campaigns, like in motocross, because we were just standing out and doing it different but once again delivering to the consumer what they wanted to see and doing it in a fun and unique way so you know and we kind of carried that everywhere including like a random example uh the director of photography that i use for like Jim Connaughton, he's a snowboarder. He doesn't know anything about cars.

Starting point is 01:19:28 Like he's, but he has a certain eye. His name's Pierre Wickberg. Uh, I've known him, I don't know, almost 20 years. Uh, he used to have a company called Robot Food and they made snowboard films. And we hired him to make two films, Mountain Lab and Mountain Lab 1.5, about our research and development facility that was my home here in Park City.

Starting point is 01:19:53 But they were some of the most fun and creative movies because Pierre has such an eye for not only filming and making things look fun, but then editing it together with the right music and the right story and the right feel. So it's guys like him that help make our stuff look and feel a certain way. And, you know, and that's what continues to make our stuff successful because we keep attracting and bringing in these guys and managing all the content and the look the right way that we know is going to hopefully be successful.

Starting point is 01:20:28 And according to three weeks of Gymkhana 10 being out there and 11 million views so far, apparently it's still successful. So we're pretty stoked about that. So many different directions we could go. So many different questions I want to ask, but let me ask you about something. It might seem mundane, but it's,

Starting point is 01:20:46 I think it'll apply to a lot of people who are listening in some capacity. And not just because they'd be involved with athletes, but I'd love to talk about the right way or the smart way to sponsor athletes because you have agreements with sponsor with athletes and uh i think that you know hopefully there will be kind of lessons people can pull from this related to not just the specifics of sponsoring an athlete but just thinking about deals and contracts right we were chatting about negotiation a little bit earlier but we won't get into that we'll say that for another time. What did you learn or what were some of the key takeaways that if you were, let's say one of your kids starts a company, they're going to be sponsoring athletes. Are there any particular red flags or warnings that you'd say?

Starting point is 01:21:41 We tried this in the early days. It was a complete disaster. Make sure you do not do this. Make sure you have this kind of clause. Is there anything on the macro or the micro that comes to mind about giving your experience, which is vast, how to do it the right way? Sponsoring athletes.

Starting point is 01:22:00 That is a very vague and difficult question. You know, it all depends on what your ultimate goal is. Is it just a logo exposure? Is it trying to move a particular product? Is it using the athlete for an advertising campaign? Because all those situations equal sort of different types of contracts, different types of pay levels, you know, everything.

Starting point is 01:22:29 So just maybe I'll try to clarify. So the reason I ask is that I've seen companies do really well sponsoring athletes. I've also seen companies now, what does sponsoring mean? In this case, it could be a supplement. It could be an apparel brand. They want someone to wear their stuff, be featured in advertisements,

Starting point is 01:22:44 be willing to be quoted as a testimonial. A lot of people starting out don't even know what the options are, right? They just want someone famous or well-respected to wear their stuff, eat their stuff, whatever it might be. I've seen people also go under because they've overpaid or not thought through the contracts. So I'm trying to wade into this as someone who actually does not know a lot about it, but it seems to be an integral piece of launching a lot of different businesses. Yeah. Like I said, there's so many scenarios and so many options there that it really all depends. You know, if you're just trying to get someone to wear a pair of shoes to go do something from skateboarding to basketball, well, there's a certain value there. If you're trying to put a logo on a video that's going to get a million views, well, that's a whole different value.

Starting point is 01:23:36 And in my case, there's companies like Monster that all they want is a big logo on the side of the car. They see, you know, the amount of exposure that can get, and they put a certain value on that. So it's a really difficult one. I'm kind of amazed at the expertise and the understanding of value that, say, someone like my agent has, because he has so many companies come to him from Ford you know to CBMD that that that say hey we want this and he's able to say oh well the basic running value of that

Starting point is 01:24:15 industry standard is this you know and so that's where I see agents as like a real, you know, real important value to sort of this process of making sure that the company's getting their value and that the athlete's getting their value out of it also. So it really is like a difficult process. I actually don't deal with any of the companies that I work with really anymore on the negotiating side. Like my agent does all of it because I don't understand what Nike is paying a similar person as me somewhere else. He would understand that and understand the value and then how they're using them. That's something that's a crazy world out there. But that is marketing and

Starting point is 01:25:05 advertising though and and there are very particular values that people pay and certain athletes are you know quite different and and even even as you've changed countries like uh my agent represents a basketball player that actually does a lot of marketing in China, you know, and there's a whole different set of values as to how he does that and how, how much time that takes and what, you know, what that value and commitment is. And yeah. So the question that you're asking is, it's not a simple, if you ask me how much that logo is worth on my car sitting over there, I could give you a rough idea. But what a skateboard company pays to put a logo on someone's t-shirt nowadays, it really is something that is quite a difficult answer to answer without an agent. Yeah, this particular, which is why I bring it up, because there's a lot of information out there,

Starting point is 01:26:08 but it can be somewhat opaque and confusing. For instance, if you want to figure out what books you're selling for, there's a site called Publishers Marketplace, and you could buy a subscription, and you can see the rough range of advances that are being paid for different books. So it's a great source of information, even though most people aren't familiar with it. Or IMDB Pro, although that's not necessarily

Starting point is 01:26:27 going to get into all the dollar figures, but it gives you a level of granularity, right? The agent piece is tricky because, I mean, I have agents, but it's for someone who's just getting on their feet trying to learn, they may not have access to an agent, but I suppose they might have access to a lawyer if they're not hiring them for a specific contract, just to walk them through like the

Starting point is 01:26:49 specific deal templates, right? Because I know that when I've done deals, you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate, which is why it's so helpful to have an agent do it on your behalf. But that sponsor might want category exclusivity, right? And you may certainly not want category exclusivity. And then you have duration, right? You might have, if they want social support, you're going to want it to be really well-defined and capped. They might not want it to be well-defined because then it allows them to ask for more. So it's one of those kind of black boxes. Is your agent from one of the big sort of three-letter acronym, like WME, CIA, one of those guys? Or UTAs?

Starting point is 01:27:31 Yes, WMG. Yeah. It's interesting to me precisely because it is so difficult, right? If you're just getting started to try to figure it out. Yeah, but I would say if you're a very small startup without much budget and you don't really know where you're going, that could be very difficult. But if you are a bigger company that has money, that also help companies with marketing, with actually making videos, commercials, social media posts, all that stuff. So they're actually a full service agency because back in the day you would have your ad agency over here on the left, you'd have your agents over here on the right. And nowadays that stuff's getting much more all-in-one because like an agency like WMG and my agent Steve,

Starting point is 01:28:30 somebody can call and say, this is what we want to accomplish. These are the people we want to connect with. And not only can the agent determine what athlete is right for what they're trying to achieve, they can then help them write the campaign and actually get the connections directly with those consumers, not only with the company's social media, but with the athlete's social

Starting point is 01:28:53 media, because we're able to target things through Facebook and Instagram and, you know, and obviously make the right messaging with the videos, photos, or whatever to really reach what someone's trying to market towards. So that's why I say it's a very difficult question. And it is genuinely different when you talk about a really small company, someone with very inexperienced and very little money compared to like, you know, if a bigger company says, hey, we want to grow into this category, how can we do that? How can we hire the right athlete? That's where an agency like WMG can really help maximize that in a much bigger way nowadays. And most all of them are doing that. A lot of these agencies have really realized, hey, we need to be full service. Like this is

Starting point is 01:29:42 a big world now. And social media has made things much more dynamic than in the past you know because when i started dc it was like oh we need to make one skateboard out a month we need one message shit nowadays you need eight mini messages just for instagram you know and so the world has gotten so much more direct, so much more, I would say, complicated, and complicated in a way that your brand messaging and your voice needs to be very thought through, very well put together, and done multiple times a day, which is much more difficult than when I started. Yeah, for sure. And just to put a button in this, in, in this kind of topic,

Starting point is 01:30:25 I would just say for folks also, if you can't get an agent, don't want to get an agent because you don't necessarily want to get married and then figure out the specifics for something like this with say endorsement contracts and so on, you can find entertainment attorneys and, uh, they'll be more than happy to take your money for, to a 101 education. It will not be cheap, but it'll cost you a few thousand dollars. You can get a pretty good baseline and ask for a template agreement. If you just pay them for a template agreement, given whatever your basic parameters are, you could actually learn a lot from that. Now you are 50, 51 at the moment? 51.

Starting point is 01:31:03 51. You are still very physically active. What does your training look like on a weekly basis or on a daily basis? What does that look like? I hate the gym, but I realize it's a tool that I have to use. So I'm in the gym three or four times a week doing stuff. Like I did an hour of kickboxing today, uh, with a very good trainer. Uh, I also have a regular physical strength trainer. Uh, I have a, some tears in my left shoulder. Uh, so I'm actually using a very good trainer right now that specializes in shoulder rehabilitation. Um, so he's, he's actually been able to take me

Starting point is 01:31:46 from not being able to do a push-up for two years to actually functioning really quite normally. So I spend probably about four hours a week in the gym doing everything from high output intervals to basic weight training. And on top of that, I try and get out and do as much sort of physical outside activity as I possibly can from snowboarding with my kids to downhill mountain biking. I hike a lot with my dogs in the winter. I basically live right next to the Park City mountain. So I hike up into the mountains and snowboard back down. I just love the cardio of it. And it's a great way to get my dogs

Starting point is 01:32:30 out and get them exercise. And I take my snowboard because it's extra weight on me. And then instead of walking back down in the snow, which is just not fun at all to me, and there's no physical benefit to walking down, I can snowboard back down and be at my house in five minutes. So it's, it's stuff like that, that I really enjoy getting outdoors and doing. But the one thing that I really enjoy about sort of the outdoor stuff is like keeping me sharp mentally, like downhill mountain biking, the, the quickness and reaction that you need on that stuff and the potential risk to injury and or death really keeps you sharp. So I enjoy getting out and doing that stuff

Starting point is 01:33:12 as much as possible. But at the end of the day, for what I need, the reaction stuff, like kickboxing, really being physical in that sort of way is what I think helps benefit me the most when I get in the race car and go race. So I really enjoy those things that really keep me mentally sharp and hopefully keep me sort of young. You've definitely had no shortage of injuries, right?

Starting point is 01:33:40 I mean, you've had your fair share. Is there anything that you've stopped doing where certain types of exercise or certain types of driving where you've taken it off the table for yourself as you've gotten older? Two things. I don't ride dirt bikes anymore. It's so easy to get hurt on a dirt bike. I love dirt bike riding. And it's just, unfortunately, you know, it's called hurt bike for a reason. Or the other thing is with age comes a cage.

Starting point is 01:34:13 But, you know, I absolutely love it. But, you know, the risk, you know, I used to ride a lot of tracks. I love track riding and big jumps, that sort of thing. But I've also been injured many times from it. So I've quit doing that just because of the risk. If I can't show up to one of the events that I'm paid to go race or go do demos at or whatever because I hurt myself on the dirt bike, well, that's just dumb. So I don't do that anymore. And the other thing is because of the physical side of it is I used to go out and run with my dogs.

Starting point is 01:34:51 I used to play racquetball. But my ankle, my right ankle has gotten so damaged from skateboarding and snowboarding over the years. There's a lot of calcium buildup. They actually call it arthritis, but it just sounds like a very old person term to me, but it's actually from just all the impacts of skateboarding and snowboarding and then actually rolling my ankle from skateboarding that there's just a bunch of calcium built up around the joint itself. So I went to a doctor in San Diego, you know, that's worked on a bunch of different skateboarders and snowboarders. He's a very good doctor. And he's like, ah, I can fix that for you.

Starting point is 01:35:25 It'll be six months of pain and rehabilitation. He's like, do you make money playing racquetball? And I'm like, nope. He's like, then just quit doing that, you know? So I had to quit playing racquetball. And I like racquetball, but I liked the mental and physical challenge of it because you're having to predict where the ball is going,

Starting point is 01:35:46 having to turn, rotate, move, react. Like I really love that training to make me quick to be in the car, and I just had to give it up. Have you had to modify how you do your kickboxing training because of the ankle or other injuries? No, because, you know, just doing pad work and a little bit of sparring, it isn't that bad. Even I did a bunch of kicks this morning and it hurts the top of my foot, but that's only because I didn't place my foot where I should have on the pad. That's my

Starting point is 01:36:21 own mistake. But other than that, it doesn't really bother me whatsoever and even uh because i do need some wrist strength and uh forearm strength i actually work with a lighter glove like a and like a it's not a real mma glove it it has padded fingers and all that but it's a very it's a much lighter glove and i don't actually wrap my wrists so it actually keeps my wrists and my forearms and actually very strong so i don't have i've broken both my wrists before uh but my not kickboxing not no dirt bike dirt bike and uh snowboarding um but uh they they seem very strong now and just this process of not wrapping and doing this pad work keeps them even stronger uh we're gonna wrap up in just a little bit but so to speak but i uh wanted to ask you

Starting point is 01:37:12 and i ask a lot of my guests this because it's uh there are people who listen to these podcasts or see your accomplishments and feel very intimidated and think that it's always been home runs one after the other. To humanize things a bit, could you talk about maybe a tough time that you've experienced or a time of self-doubt, whether it's with DC or otherwise, just a specific situation or period of time that you could tell us about? I would say, you know, one part of time with DC growing was, you know, when you reach a certain level and things start to flatten out, you know, and there was a point in time with DC that, you know, the guy running the business side of the company was doing things. What we eventually found out wasn't exactly the most

Starting point is 01:38:06 approved way by the IRS and then then he wasn't treating the IRS officials very well and at the same time we're struggling as a company and you know it really was a hard lesson for us to learn of of what it really takes to to run a company through the tough times. And those are the times that you learn the most from. The easy times when things are all up and up and you can't do anything wrong, you actually don't learn that much from those times. It's when you have your failures that certain products just aren't working or maybe the market you're in turns left and you're still going

Starting point is 01:38:45 right, you know, or the business practices that you have going on behind the scenes that you think are, you know, all on the up and up. Maybe people aren't doing things exactly what to the directives that you think they are. And those are the times that you make the adjustments that you really dig down and learn what you need to learn to direct the company the way that you need to and those times are some of the most uncomfortable that I've ever had sitting in sitting in a room full of you know attorneys and suits and I'm sitting in a pair of you know a pair of you know DC skate shoes and a t-shirt you know and having to make these decisions that are way,

Starting point is 01:39:32 to me, would have been way beyond my experience level. But I dug down in, we researched, we read, we worked hard to find the knowledge that we needed to succeed. And those were the times that we learned ourselves the most from. And I know know I'm sorry that those aren't very specific, but for a company like what we had, there were plenty of times that we hired athletes and they didn't work out or we made a particular shoe and the consumer just didn't want that. But at those times too, you're not relying on one. You have 50 products. One may fail. Okay. We still have these others succeeding, or we have 15 athletes. We hire a new one. Oh,

Starting point is 01:40:12 he didn't work out. Damn it. We tried. We really liked this guy, but he just didn't perform. We got to move on, you know? And, and, and that's just the way it is. But, you know, those are little lessons. The bigger lessons really are the larger business things that, for me, as a marketing guy, we really did try to hire much smarter people than us in those areas. But when it came down to it, we still had to make the decisions. We still had to say, no, this is the right way to go. We got to let this guy go. He doesn't get what we're trying to do.

Starting point is 01:40:55 Or there's other people that just didn't have the same integrity that we did and, you know, weren't acting in the same light that we were and didn't represent us the right way. Okay, you got to go too, you know. And those are hard decisions. And when, I mean, shit, I made a lot of those decisions when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, you know. That's when I still drank a lot. It's just a different mentality than I have today. But it was a great learning experience, and I came out better at the other end. So you no longer drink?

Starting point is 01:41:19 No, I still drink. It's just not that same level i don't i don't quite have the same uh uh how would you say stamina to wake up the next morning and and do do things at the same level every day it just affects me more nowadays so i'll ask some a couple of light questions favorite drink so what is your favorite drink wow like favorite alcoholic drink favorite alcoholic drink my favorite alcoholic drink i have two of them right now uh in the summer uh it's called a long drink it's the official drink of finland okay um it's it's just something that they made for when they held the olympics in finland a long time ago they're like we need an official drink it's like gin and grapefruit juice and it comes in a can it's amazing it's amazing summer drink sounds uh but then year round i actually

Starting point is 01:42:09 really like uh good sipping tequila like classe azul something like that just over some ice just amazing do you have a default breakfast these days or a favorite breakfast? I find that I actually work the best and work out the best in the morning, but I hate spending the time to make breakfast and or digest that breakfast. I want caffeine in me as fast as possible and I want to be able to work as much as possible in the morning and work out. So I found that just drinking coffee and eating a light breakfast worked really well. But nowadays I drink basically like a bulletproof coffee, like coffee with butter and MCT oil in it, but then with on it makes a very good mix that goes into it with flaxseed, chia seed, that sort of thing. Yeah. Hemp protein. Yeah, called Vitality Mix. And so I drink that

Starting point is 01:43:07 every morning and that lasts me till 11 or 12 o'clock every day. And I get a great workout in, I get a lot of work done. And that to me is one of those little life hacks that people have come up with that it's kind of an unusual thing, man if you can get on it really works do you have any wind down or pre-bed rituals anything you do to start shutting down before you go to go to sleep oh wow that's a tough one um try not to look at social media for about a half hour before uh you know what as i get older the messed up thing about getting older is it seems like sleep gets harder which is really sweet my mom's like 85 and it's really hard for her to sleep um so i i feel like the actual best sleep ritual is actually working out really hard during the day

Starting point is 01:43:59 in some form or another like your body actually physically feeling tired going to sleep and then getting a good recovery by a very good deep sleep uh is really key to me but as far as really winding down i mean i you know i have three semi-young kids my oldest is 12 so you know we spend every night doing something with the kids and then putting them to bed and then my wife and i hang out doing whatever drink glass of wine hopefully not too late and and have a mellow evening and go to bed so it's not everything specific besides trying not to look at electronics too late at night and get the exercise that's that's a huge huge component yeah it amazes me how many people don't realize that if you're going to be a successful, functioning human, that you've got to eat well, you've got to take care of yourself, you've got to be in good physical condition. Like, your mental abilities actually coincide with your physical abilities.

Starting point is 01:45:02 Yeah. And if you put crap into yourself, you're going to get a physical abilities. Yeah. And if you put crap into yourself, you're going to get a crap output. Yeah. You know? And so I, I'm a firm believer in, you know,

Starting point is 01:45:12 good exercise. You know, there, there's a, you got to take care of yourself really well physically to really expect a high output mentally. Yeah. Kind of protect the asset.

Starting point is 01:45:22 Last one or two questions here. If you could put a message or a quote or a word non-commercial on this is a metaphorical question on a billboard that millions or billions of people would see is there anything that comes to mind any type of message question don't be an asshole that's's acceptable. That's perfectly acceptable. Well, the funny thing is I say that because I feel like social media is just, and the internet's made it so that you're not talking to people anymore. It's so easy to be rude.

Starting point is 01:45:59 And that's one thing I really impart in my kids, that you've got to look at people in their face and make a statement. You greet someone, you look them in the eye. You know, you cheers them. You don't look away when your glass is hitting the other glass. You look them in the eye, you know? And I just feel like the human nature of us as beings on this earth, we got to treat everybody in a good and fair way. And that if we all did that, I think the planet would be a lot

Starting point is 01:46:26 better. But, you know, so that's a basic, very basic thing. But on top of that, though, I think we're here, you know, we're not here for a long time, but let's have a good time. Let's be innovative. Let's be creative. Let's have fun. You know, there's a lot of shit out there in the world that we got to deal with but let's let's do things in a better way let's do things in a fun and creative way why why not why be stuck with the mundane and and be set with the bullshit like i i want to be creative i want to be fun i want to want to do things the best way i possibly can and i want to be proud of whatever i do there's i everything in life if it comes to like you know from the

Starting point is 01:47:06 simplest thing to the biggest thing i want to be proud of what it is and and stake my claim that that's mine and that's how i do it here here did that did that that answers it that was a long billboard no that's get up a sequence you get a sequence of billboards but don't be an asshole i think it gets us it gets us checks a lot of boxes uh well ken i really appreciate you taking the time today this was really fun it was also fun to be in your backyard and playing in the snow for a few days before getting a chance to uh to sit down together uh is there anything in particular you'd like people to check out? Certainly they can say hello. Instagram at kblock43, also kblock43 on Twitter, Facebook, Ken Block Racing, hooniganracing.com. Are there any particular things that you're creating,

Starting point is 01:48:01 working on, or have created that you'd like people to take a look at? Well, Gymkhana 10, the 10th installment of this video series just came out recently. It's on YouTube. And the Gymkhana Files, which is the documentary series that Amazon had us create around what I do with making these Gymkhana videos and racing and all that stuff, that's on Amazon Prime right now. Both of them are very good. It's weird that we've made a

Starting point is 01:48:27 documentary about me and what I do, but I think it's very cool. And, you know, the documentary genre out there has become very popular. It's something I really enjoy. So for us to make one was really cool and fun. And it's a bit different than what else you see out there because we're showing people what we do, how we do it to make these viral videos that have become a big part of everybody's life nowadays. And we've really pulled back the curtain to show what it takes to do this stuff. And that was a lot of fun to do, but different than a lot of other documentary series. At the end, you actually get a prize. You actually get to see the end result of what we did. You know,

Starting point is 01:49:10 unlike the Clinton Affair documentary, you know what the end result is. It's a cool way that they actually told that documentary and I really enjoyed it. But at the end, yeah, he gets impeached, but then he doesn't get impeached. He did a bunch of bad stuff. We all know about it. It was a cool story. But our documentary series actually was a cool twist on all that, that at the end, you actually get to see what we spent two years making, which I think was really cool and innovative on Amazon's part to hire us to do all this.

Starting point is 01:49:42 And it was fun for us to take, you know, this experience of, of making these viral videos and then tell that whole story and show it how it all comes to life. So yeah, if, if whoever's, you know, listening to this, go check out, you know, Gymkhana 10 and the Gymkhana files and all that's produced by our small company called Hoonigan that you can find easily online. And if you're into cars, they make all sorts of crazy and different content that covers various car builds around the world and doing funny stuff with cars and doing very serious things with cars. So it's a great and fun brand that we have. And it's been growing a lot because we've been able to do very creative and fun projects.

Starting point is 01:50:27 Well, we could talk. I'm sure we could talk for many more hours. We didn't get a chance to talk about Hamoni Berrico or Nobu or the UFC gym in Vegas, but we can do that another time. Folks, I will also link to everything we've talked about, including the videos that Ken just mentioned in the show notes, as per usual.

Starting point is 01:50:44 So you can find all those links at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. Just search Ken's name and it'll pop right up. Ken, thanks again for taking the time. Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed actually talking about this stuff and especially in a format where hopefully people will listen and actually take some of the lessons and knowledge that I have and hopefully apply it to their own experiences and hopefully better themselves. Yeah. Well, I've been very impressed over the years watching your longevity and also how you've sort of folded one project into the next and how the relationships and skills you've built from one thing have transferred then into other

Starting point is 01:51:25 projects in seemingly distinct worlds. It's been really fun and instructive just to watch from afar. So it's nice to actually be sitting in here having a conversation. Well, thank you very much for having me. All right, guys, until next time, thanks for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email

Starting point is 01:51:58 where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to

Starting point is 01:52:30 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode of the Tim Ferriss show is brought to you by Athletic athletic greens I get asked all the time if I could only take one supplement what would it be the answer is inevitably athletic greens I view it as and a lot of you now view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance I recommended it way back in 2010 in the four-hour body and I did not get paid to do so I've been using it since before that and I use it in a lot of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick or to help mitigate the likelihood of getting

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Starting point is 01:53:59 relationships that result in real business impact. Could be all of the above. I've had Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn on this podcast a number of times, often called the Oracle of Silicon Valley for many different reasons. And he, among other people and friends of mine, have made me more and more interested in LinkedIn as a platform, as an ecosystem in the last few years. And it's very nuanced. It's very subtle, but can be used in some very powerful ways. With a community of more than 575 million professionals, LinkedIn is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. You have access to a very diverse group of people, all searching for things they need to grow professionally.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views)

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