CboysTV: Inside the Chaos

All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. We're still here at Hay Days. And like I said, all sorts of weather coming in here. It's been a wild day. Fortunately for these three, you guys didn't get to experience yesterday here on the grounds, right? On the golf course.

Yeah, I was on the golf course.

Yeah, you guys were back home.

Well, we're used to this. This is Minnesota weather, man. It's freaking 1st of September and it feels like winter already.

Yeah, we left 85 degrees in Idaho and came out to 30° in our trailer this morning.

My wife flew in on Wednesday night. She's like, “Babe, it was 102 when I left Kamloops.”

That doesn't make any sense.

I know. She gets here, she's like, “Dang, it is winter.”

Some guys have it all, dude. You guys got it all. You got the mountains and you got good weather.

Yeah. So, we're stoked today. So, I reached out to the Cboys. It took me a while. So, this is kind of a funny story. I was telling a few people this. You guys go check your DMs. You're going to see one from Trevor Erikson on your Instagrams, on your Facebooks. I'm sure that thing went right to your unread thing, you know, your request folder.

No, you came at us from all directions.

It was great. I saw them.

I was working hard, bud. Gosh, we have such a tough time committing to things cuz it's like, oh yeah, we're in for Friday. Never mind, we won't be there till Saturday night or something, you know. So, anyways, it felt like it was a couple months of just kind of noodling around and trying to see where my angle was, and I was getting nowhere. So, then I just went to Instagram, hit the close friends. I said, “Guys, who's got someone from Cboys' contact information?” And like five minutes later, little text message from Brett right back. Sent me Ryan's phone number. Love it.

And shot you a message and you responded pretty quickly and it worked out.

I was stoked. We actually don't get invited to do other people's podcasts very much and, you know, our town's pretty small. There's not a lot of podcasters going on there so it was pretty fun to get invited on somebody else's. Glad you made it happen.

Yeah, we're stoked. So I've got a list of questions. Like I said, a lot of it is kind of selfish questions from the inside here. I want to get to know more about you guys. I've got five kids and about half of them just eat, sleep, and breathe your guys' YouTube content.

So you're already sick of our voices then, right?

No, we're good. They're all back home extremely jealous right now.

Five kids. That's a lot of kids.

That's one more than I do.

Yeah, we've almost got a football team.

You could run your own supercross circuit.

Yeah, exactly, dude. I could have my own team. Team Deviant and Turcotte.

Yeah, that'd be sick. So, I mean, you all know who these guys are. We've got Brett, Micah, Ryan, and we've got a list of fun questions that hopefully take you on the inside, kind of the behind the scenes of the Cboys operation. And so, we're going to dive right in. I put a lot of thought into the origin story. I was telling Ryan this just a minute ago, and then like two weeks ago you guys busted out your own podcast that was I think even titled like origin story or how we got started or something like that. And so there's a lot of information there.

But as far as the origin story, when did you guys realize that you had like a big thing going?

I mean the thing about our growth is it's been pretty consistent. So it comes in moments. The first moment was I think our second or third video was the shifter kart on the highway and that video started gaining some traction, like 1,000 views, 5,000 views, something like that, and we're like, we're viral, we're internet superstars. That was viral to us at the time. And so when that happened we're like, all right, maybe we should just keep doing this. You know, we got that little itch of success basically right off the start even though we didn't make any money or really get that much notoriety, but we're like, okay, it shows that people want to watch.

Well, and so that was based on a shifter kart and everyone loves the shifter karts. And so I was like, “Well, let's film 10 more videos with it.” And CJ said, “No, cuz then we're just going to be a shifter kart channel.” And that was huge. It seems like a small thing, but it was huge because that's what I would have done, and he had more knowledge on YouTube. I would have just filmed more shifter kart videos and blown up from that. And then you corner yourself. Then you're doing shifter kart stuff for the rest of your life. And so then we worked at that for quite a few more years. And I would say like the big

The big moment was when we hit a million subscribers. That felt like you had something to really show and prove for it.

When was that? Do you remember? Approximately?

2019.

So how many years in? Three years to get to a million. Three years to get to a million and you guys are at like four

Almost five now. We're pushing for five for the end of the year. So, please subscribe.

But it's like a snowball. Once you start, it just keeps going.

Right. Like in the position we're in now, 5 million of course seems obtainable because we are close, but 1 million, if you'd have told me

I can attest to that, too, cuz I'm at like 50 and some change right now. And I'm like, man, 100K would be insane. And I look around at other channels that are up over that in the same genre that I am, and I'm like, what am I doing wrong or what could I do different? But for you guys to do a million in 3 years is bonkers.

I remember when we got our 100,000 YouTube play button. That's coming for you. It's pretty exciting.

Hey, we'll plug you after this podcast right there. That's cool. Three years to get to a million.

We've been going for just about nine total.

Which seems crazy.

So, how old were you guys when you started?

Ben was 16. Just got his license. And the rest of us were 19, 20.

And kind of off topic here. I should probably know this. You guys aren't brothers-in-law, right?

We are brothers.

You are now? Two years ago, right?

Like a month ago.

And you made that happen, right? You did it. But I mean with his help because he had to kind of say yes.

I don't think I had to say yes. But I did. But I did.

Okay. So let's unpack this for a second. How old is she?

She's 24.

And you're how old?

30.

30. So how long has this been going on?

We dated for four years. Known each other for about as long as I've known Ryan. Ryan was actually the first of the crew I met. He took me snowmobiling. He said, “You want to go snowmobiling?” I still had a broken foot. I said, “Yeah, I'll wrap my boot up and we'll make it work.”

I love that you guys' friendship started on snowmobiling. 100%.

He rolled up on his dad's Renegade and I was like, you have a rocket ship.

Cuz it was like brand new. Yeah, it was sweet.

Awesome. And then pretty much the rest is history on that one.

Yeah. He kind of introduced me to the rest of the guys and then I'm like, yeah. I don't know. There was some magic in it. I'm like, “These are my new friends.” I had friends in high school, but I was like, “These are the guys that I'm going to spend my time with.”

Surround yourself. What's the saying there? You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So, make sure those five people are pretty rad or remarkable, right?

There we go. What was it like when you guys created the first product and got the first ka-ching? Do you remember that moment?

Well, so Micah is our designer. So that was great. We had like a built-in person to do that and so we created merch pretty early. I would say like the first t-shirts, right?

Right. Probably sooner than we should have cuz there is a threshold, you know? You can't just start a YouTube channel and then be like we're going to make, I mean if you're making them for yourself, cool. But it's like, oh, do you want to buy our sweatshirts when no one knows about you. I was in school for graphic design and I never really found passion in designing a website or print per se. We toured print factories, but specifically t-shirts and hoodies, that's what I wanted to do. So then when we got to make our own brand it was like getting a homework assignment that was the most fun ever, and all you had to do is make it successful and you get an A+ for the whole year.

That's how it felt.

We ordered them from a local company that did small runs. It was actually set up kind of like for what you would do for a school volleyball team. Like you know the parents can all order t-shirts and whatever. And I think what was the minimum on it? It was 50 t-shirts. And we're like, holy, we got to sell 50 t-shirts. Two colors.

Huge investment. Right.

We were doing one color. Yeah. It was all friends and family.

That's what was nice about it. So if you signed up for a t-shirt, like you were signing up for a baseball t-shirt, you paid for it. So we didn't have any upfront cost. We didn't have to put up money up front. And so those were our first merch. And after that, we're like, we do merch now, right? I mean, we had you to create it.

Yeah. And then we printed it ourselves, too. So Ben's now fiancée, her dad owns Lake Shirts where we print all of our stuff, and he gave us a manual screen printer that we ran for a while.

So you guys are slapping your own ink on there. No way.

And it was awesome. It was so cool. And the margins were the best they could possibly be until we were like, “Wait a second. We just spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday screen printing when we should be making videos.” There was a transition.

And a little background is we started out with seven guys, right? And we're all broke high school and college kids. We worked, you know, I did landscaping on the side. CJ worked at a gym, stuff like that. And so we're like, “All right, well, if we're going to make money, we got to make as much as possible to feed all these people basically.” And so we started hand screen printing our own t-shirts. And we did it for, how many years?

Like three years.

Three years. So every t-shirt, if you bought one after that first merch drop, we hand printed them in the shop. And like Micah said, we would work until 3:00 a.m. or later, and the local pizza shop closed at 2:00 a.m. And so we would call at like 1:30 and that was like your payment. You would work all night till the sun came up for pizza. But it was cool because it kept us all busy. It kept us all invested in the thing.

But as Micah said, probably would have been better off, you know, working on the YouTube videos as opposed to printing t-shirts.

But it also gave you guys a chance to realize like, whoa, this is sick that we're doing this, but we're actually losing focus of what the main priority is here. So having to go down that road and learn that lesson on your own is probably one of the most valuable ones.

I'd say for sure. I think that is where we learned to work together.

Yeah. You know, we learned to bounce ideas.

Find roles, you know, how we could all be together as a team.

You mentioned that was a challenge at the beginning, the transition of slapping your own ink versus outsourcing it. Starting any business is no small feat in and of itself. Any other challenges that you guys faced? Because it's kind of a hobby at first. At some point you guys are looking at it like, this is actually a business now. Anything from those early days?

Early on it was difficult to decide where the money went. You know, we weren't all like, well, I want to get paid. But it was difficult when you're working with seven guys. We're like, we got 10,000 bucks. That's pretty awesome. But like

Yeah. More money than we'd all seen in one place.

Yeah. What do we do with that? Our first YouTube revenue we ended up just donating. It was a couple thousand bucks. It wasn't enough to necessarily split, you know, we'd all end up with like 500 bucks. And so we're like, well, we'll donate it. But still, beyond that, right away we didn't really know what to do with the money. Not that there was so much of it we didn't know what to do. We're like, are we paying ourselves, or how long is this going to be a passion project, which it was for two to three years.

Did a lot of reinvesting and we still are at that point where we reinvest into the company, which helps because that's how you have to grow. You basically have to just take everything and put it back in and then that way you can do more. And so once we were able to start spending money on videos, that definitely was a challenge as a group cuz it was like, well, we got 10 grand, we could put a down payment on a $55,000 pickup. And it's like, should we? And one of us that was smart at that moment was like, whoa, we should do something smart with this and allocate it to different stuff.

We started renting a shop and I remember going to Menards and we bought like $500 in tools, and I think that was probably an early argument, like what do we need tools for? But looking back, we still use them.

Yeah, and it was when we bought our first printer so that we could print the transparencies to screen print. Little printer.

We just never let Ken live this down. He sees we bought it and it was 350 bucks and he goes, we can't afford that. Like if we can't afford that then we're in trouble.

But I guess to answer your question, challenges always arise in a business where people aren't all on the same page, right? When one group or one person is going this way and everybody else is going this way. And that's something we've been really good at, everybody kind of coming together, and even if somebody makes a decision that I might not be like, “Oh, I don't know if I would have done it that way,” I know that they're doing it with the company and my best interest in mind. And any decision I make, I don't do it selfishly. I try to do it thinking of Micah and the rest of the guys as well.

And so once we kind of came to that conclusion, “All right, we're all in on this and we're going to do whatever it takes to work and work together,” that helped resolve a lot of issues cuz we spend literally every day together. And especially in those times, we spent every waking moment together because if we weren't working, we were hanging out as friends. And if we weren't doing that, we were probably skipping class somewhere else, you know?

It's pretty rare that the whole majority is one way and someone's so passionately the other way. And if they are, we'll hear them out.

Yeah. Exactly. You're like, “All right, they obviously have a reason for it.”

Yeah. Well, I feel like you guys have grown with that group dynamic, where if somebody is completely going right and you guys are going left, you're going to steer them back around and show them, hey, this is why we were thinking this way. As a group or as a business, you guys have learned that you can operate that way, and if you do have an opinion, it gets heard, but it doesn't get shut down.

Once you guys earned each other's respect and responsibility as a group, those decisions just naturally happen in the favor that you want them to. Of course, you're going to have those moments where it's a little bit 50/50. But when you start as a group and you grow as a group, it becomes, like you say, more of a group decision than a personal one. And I think that's where you guys have done so well. You can see it in the videos. Everybody in and around what you guys are doing is having a good time and they want the best for that moment.

Unless it's Ken. He does not want the skate park in the warehouse.

You know, Ken has gotten to be a little bit more of a

He's gotten a lot happier in the last few years. He's been open.

Well, you know what? Started playing golf.

He's all relaxed now. That usually does the opposite for me though.

But yeah, I was thinking about it, now that I am married, whether or not you're married, in a relationship there's sacrifices that need to be made. It's the exact same thing. I'm not going to get bent out of shape. There's plenty of things that I want to happen a certain way, and when they don't, there's like 13 other decisions that need to be made in the next 48 hours. So I'll weigh in on those and we'll move forward. But it is insane.

How well we get along. It's insane. You know, we get the old-timers that are like, “You guys are all best friends. It's probably not going to last.” And we've heard that a million times. And they're coming from a place of probably seeing other friendship businesses fail, but

Not ours.

Yeah. It seems like there's a lot of self-awareness that you guys have to have. Without that self-awareness, man, this show isn't still going. Right.

Yeah, it's good. If anybody's ego gets too big, there's one of our best friends to put us right back in place.

So, if we fast forward to today, do you think your general audience has a pretty good idea of what a normal week looks like for you guys? Because you create your content, you publish the video, and that's kind of what they naturally think you guys do all week. What does a regular week look like? Like Monday is this day, Tuesday is this day, or is it just kind of sporadic?

I was going to say there's no such thing as a regular week. But to answer the first question, I really don't think the audience, I guess the more common sense you have, the more you can imagine that our week is not all fun and games or not all video. When they're like, “How could you miss a video? There's six of you. What's going on?” I'm like, “There's so much more going on behind the scenes.” But like Ryan does the podcast, so your week is

Yeah. Kind of like Monday I'm editing, and Thursday the boys edit all day, so those days are kind of structured. At any given time the biggest challenge with our videos is most of them can't happen in the span of 5 days. You can't just come in on Friday and be like, all right, now let's film the Stark quad. That took weeks or months to build, so we're filming like four or five videos at once. There's a track build going on. There's a build in the shop going on. We're working on a prank we're setting up down the line. So, there's a lot of running around. It's almost not working on just this week's video.

It's not all the fun and games that we have on video, but that is the part that we're all working to show. On a standard week, Monday through Wednesday filming, Thursday CJ and Ben edit. We have another editor, Pat. He does a great job. Dalton also will edit. And then Friday's kind of open for whatever. Lots of events happen on the weekend, so there's plenty of those, you know, go to the event, knock out whatever you're doing.

But yeah, it is all over the place, like, hey, run over to the farm, intro this, we're going to run out to the track, hit this, and then we're going to call the giveaway winners, and then we're going to go golfing.

They speak of it like it's a little bit loose. But from the outside, I got kids that are watching the films and they're like, “Oh man, it's so sick that they're doing this.” And me being a grownup and being friends with you guys, I can understand the schedules. You guys are running these multifaceted projects all at once. Like you say, there's like five videos being worked on over a span of a couple months. But just the communication that I had with Micah and the boys on the way down, they are running a tight ship.

When I was talking to Micah, I'm like, “Hey man, we're a couple hours out. I got the golf clubs in the truck. Let's go rip around.” And he's like, “Oh, you know what? We got to call the giveaway winners and the boys are working till 5, and after 5:00 we should be free and then we can go play.” You guys carry a lot of responsibility, which probably took years and years of patience and practice to be able to instill, but I can respect that.

And the boys gave me a tour of the shop this week and you walk in and it's being operated like a business. To see that side of it was really badass because I've watched the videos for years with my kids and you see all the different projects down the line, and I seen things in there. I'm like, “Oh, that's going to be pretty cool.”

A whiteboard changed our business. Just literally writing everything out like, “All right, we got to do all this. This is when we're doing it.” I mean, it's a game changer.

You guys are really good at portraying the looseness and the friendship and the Cboys image. Behind the scenes, you guys are running a really tight ship, and to see that with my eyes and get the firsthand look, I was like, damn, these guys are on point.

Yep. Lot of structure now. And I don't like meeting structure schedules, but even I can realize that it's the most important thing. It doesn't have to be that way, I always think.

It doesn't have to be boring.

Yes, that too. Meetings are for a good cause, you know. But there's also a world where you

Could be so insane or so talented at music or talented at riding that you just shoot to the top without any business structure. There's a world where that exists, too. But when it's more than one person, aka six and a team of employees, very structured.

What's the headcount for you guys?

Is that common knowledge? Yeah, I would say six guys. The whole operation in total, with the merch team now, is I think in the mid 20s.

22.

All right. Are they all local?

All in Cokato, other than our editor, who works remote out of the Cities, and our designer.

Yep. We got a designer in Canada. And their team helps us source all our overseas stuff. So they're all out of Canada.

I would say there's seven or eight guys full-time on content, on camera and stuff like that. And then we just drag in other people like Big Wrench and Gavin, whether they want to be on camera or not. Maybe this week they will, next week they won't.

Yep. And obviously we have Spenny.

We're trying to get him a visa to come work for us and film with us. And then you have Gavin, he's got his own channel, his own thing, and it works out really well. Everyone's like, are you going to have him be part of your group? And I'm like, no, what we have right now works amazing. He has his channel. He's making his money. He's making his videos. But whenever we call him he's like, all right, I'm there. He's on a plane.

That's probably been one of the biggest blessings out of this, the revolving door of cool people that we have in our life, like Gavin. I mean, it's freaking Tuesday afternoon and Brett Turcotte's stopping in to come play golf.

But I mean, the type of people that we have now that we can call up and be like, hey, we need somebody who can ride freestyle, or we need somebody who can paint a mural, or Gavin to just put it all out on the line on a three-wheeler. We have people we can call. So that's really fun, it can expand beyond us.

So we've talked about a lot of the hurrah, we're a team and everything. But was there a moment that could have ended the channel? Was there ever a moment that you can look back and say, man, that was the one that could have done it?

No. As far as ending the channel, no.

There was never a moment like, is this what we should be doing?

Yeah. No, nothing like that.

Nothing like that. But it was a bummer when Jake left. We were all bummed. He was ready to part ways and we were like, “Are you sure?” And he's like, “I think so.” And I was like, “I don't want you to leave.” I think everyone said that.

And it worked out. It was a long journey. Most people know this, but to clear it up, we're super tight with him. We film with him all the time.

Cokato's a pretty small town. When I was driving through, I seen Sherbrook Drive, right? That's the road he lives down.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's funny because that moment in time could have been one where you look back. Jake is leaving. A lot of people didn't have the faith in us. We were trying to buy a shop and we had started moving into it, but then the bank was like, “Well, your big guy just left. I don't think you guys are going to make it.” And so we got in this scenario where the bank wouldn't finance the shop and we just started paying all the cash we could towards the shop to keep our spot. And then internally, everyone was saying, well, you guys are done.

Jake's gone. And we're like, no. It kind of put this fire in us, like, no, we got to make this work. And in that, Jake was able to work on himself the way he needed and we were able to work internally on ourselves. And I actually think that saved CboysTV. I think things could have been a lot different if we hadn't all done the things we needed to in that time.

Because after that was when we shot up the hardest. We just put our nose to the grindstone.

Yeah. We were just like, we have to succeed, because he was a fan favorite. Absolutely. I mean, he's a riot to be around. And so we were like, “Okay, well, we got to step up, be the characters that we've been being, but better, more energetic.”

Yeah. And think of better ideas that don't just involve him.

Not that it played out this way, but we were talking about this last night in the camper. The Michael Jordan documentary. The only thing I really remembered from that is he was talking about how, man, I could just go out and play and I'm good, until someone opened their mouth and said something to me. That lit a fire in me, then I wanted to murder that person. It was game over for that person, right?

Not that that's how it played out for you guys, but in a sense, as entrepreneurs and competitive people, we look for those little tiny things that you can spin in your brain to be like, I'm turning it on, you know?

And I can attest to that just from the athlete side. When you're at rock bottom, the only spot you can go is up. In order for an arrow to go forward, first it's got to go backwards. Last year, this time of the year, I was sitting in this chair with a broken leg. And that fired me up so much. I had the best winter and summer that I've had behind a set of handlebars ever. And I'm 37 years old. That same mentality, you're like, “We just lost a key player in our game. How are we going to make this better so that we can still succeed?”

And that mentality, that fight or flight, you need that grit to be able to be successful. And I think that you guys have done a really great job of that. You've circled back around. You've rekindled that friendship with Jake. And you guys are good. He's doing the eyewear thing and the channel and you guys are doing the merch and the channel, and you guys have found each other's places and been able to keep the friendship. And I think that's the biggest win for everyone involved.

100%. At the end of the day, it really is about us continuing to be best friends, you know.

We didn't know it at the time, but now, speaking for us and him, it's better than ever.

I mean, this has been the best summer ever. Maybe answering a question that you might have, but what's the hardest part? Coming up with ideas, especially with trying to do something different every week. And this summer has just been finding the time to do the ideas, which normally isn't the case. Being three videos ahead has got to be the best feeling ever.

It's a beautiful thing.

Do you often find your ideas mid project on another one? Or is it back to the drawing board each week?

I truly think Ben and CJ are creative geniuses. They are constantly thinking. The amount of texts those two will send after midnight, just firing away, laying in bed when your mind's racing. That's when those guys go to work. And so although they do happen in the middle of other projects, I think they dedicate a lot of mental space to coming up with them.

Yeah. And Ben said, “Creativity is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the better it gets.” And as I've tried to put that in my life, I truly think the more you think about stuff like that, the better you get.

We're on a Hay Days turnup right now. You hear what's going on? I was like, did they tap into our head? Backwoods is turning up. The drags

Right across the road from the drags. You hear the drags going all over. God, I love Hay Days. I've been coming here for 16 years. The old location, this location. Hay Days is my favorite event.

Brett, do you feel like you're at the top of your game right now? Cuz it seems like you are, online for sure. You're crushing it, dude. I'm so proud of you.

I feel like I've never been better, you know? I said that at 33 years old and I was like, this is sick. I got two X Games gold medals, I got eight in total. Where does it go from here? And then I just keep opening up these opportunities year after year where experience is meeting talent and preparation, and confidence is still climbing the ladder. I feel like I'm in more of an athletic ability now than I ever have been. It's crazy to think that at 37 years old, that's the position to be in. Like you said, you've been to a lot of Hay Days. I've been coming here since like 2004, so close to 20 years of Hay Days.

So to answer your question, I do still feel like I'm on top, dude. I'm pulling new ideas and creativity for my riding from so many different sources. This summer, being active on my motorbike, doing shows all summer, is going to translate into my winter. And I have not let off the gas since I was able to get back on. I broke my leg this time of last year. My first ride was November 8th, and I was so excited to just go snowmobiling, to get gear on. The snow had hit the ground and we had a couple feet of it, and it was the most painful ride that I've ever been on.

But that November 8th ride at the start of the 2024-25 season, that flame has not flickered, not even once, right up until today. I have just stepped on the gas and have done crazy amounts of traveling, crazy backcountry maneuvers. I got three world firsts coming out in this edit that I'm premiering on Saturday night.

And since that injury, that reset, it gave me time to reflect, figure out what I wanted to do better. And I've just stomped my foot to the floor and have not let off. And I do not plan on letting off. The confidence that I get by feeling good and being athletic and making the right choices at the right times just fulfills me so much that I'm constantly chasing that feeling, you know.

You got that wolf in you, brother. I love it.

Maxing your stats. Madden with you in it, you'd be at 95 at least. Seriously.

And then in your guys' world, the whole YouTube side of it, I am in the YouTube space but not in your guys' genre. To have you guys come out sledding and to be able to get my face and name on your channel, having opportunities like that just keeps me motivated to keep doing more and more. Like I said, we're at mid-50s on my channel right now and I'm like, man, that 100K's got to come one of these days. So it's inspiring to put yourself around successful people. That's a really cool thing that you guys are doing. You're inspiring a grown-ass adult.

Thank you, brother. And the coolest thing is it's the same in reverse. When we ride with you, the collab is like, we're over here drooling because it's the coolest thing.

Getting to watch you ride and ride with you, like, hey, thanks for putting me on the channel, and there's a lot of eyes on it. Yeah, happy to do it.

Yeah, it's pretty sick. Snowmobiling, dude.

Ryan and I met through snowmobiling, like how sick is that? My dream job growing up was to be a professional snowmobiler. And I understand that, if anyone's wondering, you could answer this 10 times better, but you got to live in the mountains to do so. But the next best thing is getting paid to snowmobile through your YouTube channel. Ben said the same thing. He's like, I wanted to be a pro dirt biker. And now he kind of gets paid to dirt bike, if he ever swung his leg over one.

To add to that, you guys are legitimate professional fun havers. That is, to me, the ultimate.

Yeah, professional amateur.

But yeah, the discipline that it takes to be a well-rounded athlete is just as much work as anything out there.

You guys said it in your podcast, was it Rob Dyrdek, when you guys were starting out?

Yeah. The Fantasy Factory.

Did you guys say this, where you're like, that's what we did, but it's way bigger? You caught some heat for that.

Yeah, we caught some heat for that. People were like, “Oh, come on, man. You're not better than…” Cuz we also threw in Pastrana Land and a couple other places, which was a big bite to chew off. Obviously we love Travis and all that, but to be able to build, we've got an enduro track, a motocross track, a drift track, all those type of things.

I think what we try to do with our money is just, what would 13-year-old us do? And then just sprinkle a little bit of strategy in it. How can we just live out our childhood dreams in a way that we still can live them out next week?

That's awesome. I got a couple cool questions for you guys. These are good ones right here. Brand deals. I can only imagine, and I'm sure Brett sees this too on his side in the sledding industry, how many people are tapping into you guys. What checks a yes and what checks a no? How does that work for you guys?

I think the number one thing is if it's someone we want to represent or work with. And then as it trickles down into business, you go, “All right, can this brand help us make a project happen?” Maybe it's a brand that you don't need to create a relationship with, and you're like, “All right, well, they want to advertise. We get the money and then we can make an expensive video happen,” because we're spending ridiculous amounts of money on these videos a lot of times. And it's like, “All right, we just got to figure out how to break even.”

And then from that, we try to have people that we work with continuously, so that people associate them with CboysTV and vice versa, and have someone that we're proud to work with. People were stoked about that.

Two worlds. There's the world where we want their product. We want to work with them. And then there's the world where we want to buy a monster truck. And in order to do that, we'll do a promo for Clash of Clans or whatever.

Yeah, they're willing to put the money up. And we definitely say no, you know.

We say no to way more than you can imagine. The partnership requests on IG are deep. And it's also a bummer when it's a fella you knew for years or went to high school with, and they're like, hey, we want to do some promotion through you guys, but they're here and we're here.

It's tough to try to find ways to work between there, but it's important too. Everybody's growing at some point.

And vice versa, we'd scratch your back, of course. I was talking to Ryan about this one. The merch side of your business versus the ad revenue. Don't need numbers, but which is the bigger side?

Yeah, merch is the breadwinner.

Merch is the breadwinner.

And that's not to say that's the truth for all YouTube channels that are doing merch, but we've just put so much

So much passion into making it cool and

Making it a brand that can live adjacent to the boys, not just putting a name on a shirt and letting it ride, which is credit to Micah's designs and stuff like that. We always wanted to have

A brand from the start, and that's starting to show now as we get

More subscribers. I mean, the merch is, numbers-wise, a very large part of the business, but it also is a lot of overhead and a lot of space in the building and stuff like that. So, a little inside look at how we run the business: merch, brand deals, all that, they fund the company.

The beast.

And what we take from that is we make the videos, and then YouTube pays us the ad revenue, and that's what's distributed to us. That's probably the most cut-and-dry way to say it, but that way it incentivizes us. Our job, even though it's to run the company and do all the other things, is to make the best YouTube video possible.

That's cool. That's a nice little inside tidbit right there, ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah, I don't think many people know that one. Hopefully I don't get in trouble with HR for saying that one.

It's just Ken.

He's good. So, here's another question. You guys just teased this, kind of launched it. We're at Hay Days. You got a little something cooking in the snowmobile world.

Heck yeah we do.

So it's not on the website yet, but you have announced it. This episode will go live probably in October-ish. So there's some time here. What can you speak to?

We're starting a gear brand. It's Life Wide Open Gear.

Very original. We went through a whole bunch of names and we're like, well, this is the one we like.

It just fits the best. So we're starting out with a monosuit for this year, but we're already developing gloves, base layers, every part of the gear set, and other designs. Minus helmets. We're really trying to get someone who can collab with us to make a good helmet. But the goal is to make gear for riders like us that might not be performing at the top level, but they need performance gear. They need something that's going to work the best. And Micah's got a great eye for the design.

I was going to say, is that kind of the spin you're going to come at? Fresh, loud, interesting?

For sure. But also, that's why we went with the monosuit first. When monosuits came out, I actually had my first monosuit here at Hay Days. It was the FXR one, and everyone's like, “Do you like it?” And I'm like, “I love it. You can roll around in the snow.” So the monosuits are kind of our go-to. Even if we're just standing outside holding a camera in the winter, that's what we wear.

So we're really excited for that. A lot more to come with the gear.

I think the website should be live by now, Life Wide Open Gear. Check our socials for it, and we'll be continuing to develop over the next few years.

We're pretty excited about it.

Congrats. When do you plan for the first inventory drop to hit?

Black Friday.

Yeah, Black Friday.

Just in time for winter.

Nice. We've got a section here. I labeled it dumbest and greatest ideas ever.

Oh man, they overlap.

Okay, so we'll tap into that. What's the most expensive mistake you guys have made?

Ben crashing the unicorn.

Probably crashing the unicorn. We have that replica of Ken Block's unicorn. And Ben, along with a few mechanical errors, he needed a driver mod, and he just smoked a tree and basically totaled it out. We actually sent it to another YouTuber, Robby Layton, and he's doing a build series on it, which started out as getting it to work again, and now there's a chance it might be at SEMA. He's doing a full crazy all-metal rebuild on it. So we'll see. That story is yet to be told.

But a lot of times we can benefit off of a mistake, you know, piling up a dirt bike or something ends up at the bottom of a pond that shouldn't, but that one was a big one.

Yeah, that one was 75 or 80,000 for the vehicle. Obviously it's going to come back to life, but at the end of the day, when he did that, we're like, “That was a bad use of our money.” And then the one, personally speaking, but I think maybe up on the list, is when I tried to 50/50 the Pro R we had.

Yeah, I forgot about that one. If it would have gone great, we would have been like, that was the best idea ever.

It was so close to being glory. And we had welded tabs on it so that I would lock in, but I ended up flipping it off the rail and totaling it.

Had like five miles on it, right?

20,000 in damage. Shout out SideBySideBlog because they fixed it up.

And then turboed it, too, which is really cool. I don't think that thing had 50 miles on it. We got it, we got to make a sick video to show everybody how sick this thing is. Drove it around the track and then ended up… Thankfully, most importantly, Micah didn't get hurt. A lot of people ask that. They go, “Oh, you guys are going to get hurt,” or, you know, “you don't have fear.”

A HANS device. I should have had one.

But I'd say one other one, a funny one, is when we found out how much taxes we had to pay.

Oh yeah, taxes.

Taxes suck. You got to pay those though.

At one point we were like, “Okay, we actually need to restructure,” and put the money there.

Put money away for taxes. Another funny one was

Two years ago on our road trip, we go out west down to California, Glamis. We had our R6 that we got this dune tire for. Got the dune tire in California and put it on there and we're like, “Okay, we're good to go.” Gosh, we're exhausted. This is day 10 of our road trip. Ben puts the chain on. I'm not even going to blame it on Ben. It could have happened to anybody, but he didn't put the master link on the right way or something. And we put it in the sand. All right, ready to

Exploded the case. Totaled the bike.

Yep. And so then the fellas drove to San Diego, picked up another R6, came back the next morning, and then we ran it. And that's some stuff people don't see.

At that moment we were just so defeated. I remember that. We were like, we should just be done.

It's crazy what the collective amount of brains can come up with to fix a problem when the stakes are extremely high. In a normal situation it might take weeks to come up with a fix. On the fly when the stakes are high, it's crazy what can happen.

Yeah. It's like the opposite of, let's say you had a really corporate job and it's Friday at 11 and something comes in and they're like, “You know what? We're not even gonna get to that till Monday.” It's like the opposite of that. It has to be. Make it happen right away.

What's something that you guys have done in a video where you're like, we will never touch that, we will never do that again?

Front flip mini truck.

Yeah, probably that. I'm trying to think of ones we just said screw that. I mean, Evan's definitely never going to try to ride across floating pieces of ice again. Can tell you that much. But you know what else we've done a pretty good job of? Not buying mud trucks.

They're just all piles of turds. You drive them through the mud and then they kind of just break and you're like, “This is a lot of work.” Mudding just isn't our sport. Credit to the people who do it, but man, it's just tough.

But I would say the one where immediately we were like, “This was such a dumb idea,” is we built one of those K trucks, like the little trucks from Japan. And so we built a roll bar over it. And the idea was that Ben would hit the brakes and then roll over and do a front flip. Great idea in theory until you figure out you're going to be sitting on your tail and then come smacking down. And so he did that and sprained his neck and shoulder muscles and all that. It's basically a car accident.

It's like dropping from 9 feet in the air with some 80s suspension. He landed, he celebrated, and he went, I need to get to the chiropractor immediately. That was very bad. We looked back and we're like, that one was dumb.

Okay. I can attest to the front flip thing. I made an attempt a few years ago. Fully just pancaked. Well, not actually on my head. I got to my back and then the sled decided to body slam me.

That was the worst video I've ever watched in my life. I got to see it from an unnamed source, to protect his anonymity. I got to see it before it was released and I was like, “Oh my god,” and he prefaced it and said, “Brett is okay.”

I would have watched that and been like, “Oh my gosh, front flips don't work.”

It's the gnarliest. It was in a movie edit of mine. It was part of a monster project where I was trying to get a bunch of world firsts in one week.

How scary was that? When did you know it went wrong?

When I left the lip and I didn't get kicked in the ass. So, I had built a cheater bump. The lip was shaped like this, and we built a cheater bump for where the track has to go, and the skis would straddle it. The idea was that the center shock would collapse, put all of the energy into the rear track shock, and it would donkey kick me forward, and all I'd have to do is lock the brakes, tuck and pray. But we were working with spring snow and I was just overly hyped and didn't give it time to fully set up. And when I went up the face, the nose of the sled mushed the cheater bump flat.

And so then I was essentially just going off a fairly flat lip. But I was so committed to the move that I didn't feel that happen. I went off the top, spiked the brake, and legit got to 50%.

How many feet did you fly when you landed on your head?

It was probably 60.

60-foot jump.

And at one point I'm rotating around. I'm fully brake tucked. I look over and I see that there's no more sky left in the horizon. It's just starting to go white. Oh my god, that's snow again. And so instead of keeping my head turned like this, which would have been really bad, I turned my head straight to the dash and just took it, you know? And you know what the gnarliest part of that entire deal was? I got pushed into the hot tub, the belly of the snow, shoved in. I was holding the bars in my hands. The one side broke off and I punched the corner of the 7S dash.

Cuz I was gripped on the bar, I shattered the end of my fingertip. And I had a concussion.

Damn. How crazy to make it out of that?

I'm laying in the hot tub of snow and they peel the sled off of me, the crew that I'm with. I had a safety plan. We had a helicopter on standby. It was a stunt, you know what I mean?

Yeah. You were prepared.

I'm like, “Boys, my fingertip is really cold. What's going on there?”

Oh, and they're worried.

And I give my hand to my friend and he peels my glove off and I don't want to look. I'm not good with blood. I'm like, “How bad is it?” He's like, “It's pretty good.” And he takes a big glove and slides it back over and sets it in the snow and he's like, “Yeah, we should probably call a helicopter.” And he looks at my eyes and he's like, “Yeah, you can't ride out here.” You got a concussion.

It was one of those gnarly ones where he'd seen how bad my finger was, but he had enough respect for me to not make me freak out. He covers it back up and he's like, “You'll be okay.” Then I talked to him after. He's like, “Man, in the back of my mind, I thought you were losing your finger.”

Scary stuff.

Yeah, front flips are nasty.

Anything front flip, I'm against now. I was hyped for Bergmark to get his. We were at the pub one night and he asked me a bunch of questions about front flips and it didn't register, and then I seen in the spring he bamboozled me. But props to him. It takes a huge set to be able to commit to that trick. So, cool to see.

Well, boys, we're to the fire round. I think this is a fresh round for you guys, right? I don't think you guys make it that far down to the fire round.

Don't know how to read that far.

Who's the most low-key savage in the group behind the scenes?

Micah's got some sarcasm in him. He's very literal as well.

It's funny though.

Literally pisses everyone off.

I would say between me or Ken.

Ken is a mystery. Sometimes if he's feeling like he doesn't want to talk to someone, he might just cold shoulder them. You just never know with him.

He puts off such a good image, but low-key, you know that dude is just ready to fire back. He does a really good job of portraying victim.

But wanting to be a killer. Ken's got the best one-liners in the crew. That's for sure.

Okay. This one I think everyone out here is really interested in. Who's the most different off camera?

I read that one. I was like, that's tough because I like to think that we're the same on camera as we are off.

I would say Ben, only because Ben has to hit a lot of the talking points. So sometimes he's listing all the things that are happening and it's something he planned to say in his head. So that's maybe not what it's like to talk to him personally.

But without that there would be no structure to the video. It would just be us blabbing.

What you see is kind of what you get.

Okay. Most responsible, and who's the biggest liability?

Between you and Ken as far as responsibility. But Ken, I think, just subconsciously is an incredibly responsible person. If something's happening, none of us even think twice about it being wrong, and Ken's all like, “What are you doing? Shut it down.”

And then I don't think it's anybody's surprise. I don't know if I want to use the term liability, right? Is that the term you use?

That's the term I use.

But I mean, Evan is your biggest wild card. That's just how he's wired. He's just wired to make every moment…

Wild card. I would use that term.

Yeah, for sure. Evan, I mean, he's crazy. He's a crazy son of a gun.

If it all ended today, boys, you woke up tomorrow and it's done. What are you gonna go do?

Well, I've always had a dream of being a DJ, but in order to do that, you have to kind of get lucky. But this is just ironic, I love wraps. Love designing wraps. I love applying wraps. So I would get into wraps.

Graphics, graphics, graphics.

Are you looking for an employee?

Let's go, bud. Southeast Idaho. Do you like it out there?

I've gotten a chance to design a lot of the vehicle wraps that we've put on our vehicles over the years. It's fun. You know the drill.

We need a Muddy Mike signature wrap on our website. I think that's what Deviant Ink needs.

And yeah, the sky's the limit with them. You get a black sled and you can turn it into the coolest thing. So I think that's my avenue.

Mine's way less interesting. I would be a truck driver. I just love driving, man. It's just great.

I imagine you can get a lot done driving truck.

Yeah. Actually, I've always said that.

That's pretty much what Brett's doing.

Yeah, I can be your driver. I am 90% truck driver, 10% athlete.

Could I say something about you guys and a lot of the guys you've interviewed on this show? I think guys like Brett, like Muskoka Freerider, that are really doing a lot for the snowmobile industry, are currently laying groundwork that people for years will get to benefit off of. People like you doing this podcast. I think manufacturers and a lot of big companies haven't realized the value that those guys are bringing.

And I think in later years other people will reap the benefits of what those guys are doing, and I hope that the manufacturers and businesses around snowmobiling can realize how much weight those guys can move and how dedicated they are to the sport. So I commend you for doing this. I'm glad snowmobiling is a sport that I love. And like Micah said, if I had a dream job, it would be being a backcountry snowmobiler. And that's why I love events like this. I only went to West Yellowstone when I was a kid cuz that was easy for my dad to ride out of.

But there is no meet and greet on the mountain for athletes. And so it's cool that people can come and get to be face to face with guys like Brett and guys like Chris. I remember walking around here and seeing Jay, who's not that much older than me, and I literally ran the other way cuz I was like, “Holy, that's Jay.” So it's a pretty cool event, and what you guys are doing for the sport is cool. So, thank you.

Well, that's good to hear, cuz I'm sure Brett sees this a lot. You put in a lot of work. The industry that we're in is relatively small. So you can go drop a dope podcast episode and you're going to get thousands of views, and then you go watch Rogan, and it's millions. Obviously there's a lot of different stuff going on there. But you can get discouraged if you focus on that comparison, rather than just, no, who are you serving? We're serving the snowmobile audience. And how much value can you drop to them?

Yeah, you did a good job explaining that, because I thought, within the snowmobiling world, it can only get so big.

But it's like the best world. The most fun trips by far are the snowmobiling trips for me, and all the people we meet.

Just all the sledders. That's why Hay Days is awesome, too. You meet so many like-minded people, and it's so rare that you're like, “Oh, I met so-and-so professional snowmobiler,” and you didn't like them, because everyone's just so nice. Whereas in the YouTube world,

I met so-and-so YouTuber.

You might not like everybody.

Okay. Well, we send everyone off with one specific question, and that's: tell us something that no one knows about you, and you're unveiling it right here on the Sledder Cast podcast.

That one wasn't in the outline.

It is in there. I sneak it down there. Right there at the bottom. Something that no one knows about you personally, or the Cboys.

Well, this is something that people know, but Ken's real name is not Ken.

Grant. Do people normally have an answer for you right away? This is a crazy question. I'm actually trying to think of something.

You better hurry up, man. I've had too much Monster. There's a beer calling my name, I think.

Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes they're like, I've never broken a bone. Or I don't have a pinky finger, you know.

I think I'll get deep, and I would say something that nobody knows is it's sometimes scary to be on camera. It's scary to put yourself out there, even sitting down for this. I do it once a week. Sitting down and doing things that are going to be perceived by people can sometimes be a really intimidating thing. That's definitely something nobody else knows.

We film so much of our life that our life is probably 100% out there. Maybe that I say I'm 6 foot, but I'm really 5'11 and a half if I'm not wearing shoes.

This just got revealed as of last video, but I ride my motorcycle and I don't have a motorcycle license.

If you look competent, you're good.

We appreciate you having us.

Guys, thank you so much. I know you've got a million things going on this weekend, so I appreciate it. Brett, Micah, Ryan, appreciate you guys.

It's always so much fun to sit down with you boys, too.

The golf tournament went good. I don't know if you've talked about that. Tee Off with Turcotte. It was the inaugural golf tournament this year. We did it out at the Four Hills Golf and Country Club with the Hunter Hull Memorial Foundation. 125 players, well over $30,000 raised. We built 20 beds for Sleep in Heavenly Peace, going back to the local charities around this area. Hats off to my wife and everybody in the back that was making it all possible.

It's got my name on it, but I was just a pretty face. Nikki and the Hull family, everybody in the background did all the groundwork, and it was a huge success. We're hyped. We're ready for next year. We're going to try to double it up.

Love it. I see the camera's dying. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for tuning in. And go kill it. I'm excited to see what the snowmobile gear stuff does. It'll be fun to follow that.

All right. Appreciate you. Cheers.