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I get how you guys wouldn't remember every character I mean. It's more like the Bible. Yes. I was actually going to ask like was that even something that you guys...
Really well put, Michael. It is like God Jesus to us. Because he broke us through. He was like, Oh, get out.
He put some trips on the barbie to you guys. And you guys were like, dude, I want to show him on a barbie. And we didn't even have that. He wasn't entering fosters.
Like everything was a lie. Yeah, but he knew that that's what would get you guys. If you had to say put a couple of snags on the barbie, you guys wouldn't have gone for it. You don't like our sausages.
But it's like, you know, and a VB. VB doesn't have the kick that fosters... Fosted sounds cool to America. Like, well, they've got their own beer.
You know, sounds cool. He knew exactly what he's doing. He gave us the kick off. They sent the rest of us to glory.
It was the giant can that did it. Yeah, the big can was with sold us all. For sure. Yeah, the can was massive.
Because it was bigger, yeah, yeah. Oh, you thought that sold the cans that we used? Yeah, we were like, these guys are great. Yeah.
We're the size of the can they drink out of. We only drink out of those sized cans. Yeah, because it was like the equivalent of like, we had the tall boy. Yeah.
And then to us, we were like, this is the normal size can. They all make monsters down there. Back in the day, we never had that. It was only here because he knew.
Dundee. Thanks, Dundee. Welcome to the show. That's how you start the show.
Welcome to the show when the dust settles will have a guest. This is appropriate. Right. Yes.
Because Brian Scotto is here, CEO of Hoonigan. Just make sure that's cool. It's fine. Two creative officers.
It's a bunch of loads of domains. It's cool. He's in charge of a lot of shit. I've seen it.
Stuff. Stuff. Or are we keeping it? Yeah, the podcast YouTube.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you're in charge of a lot of stuff. But Scotto is, Hoonigan is a brand and they are the ambassadors of burnouts and doing cool stuff with cars.
And you can't see Scotto yet, right? I can just do this for a minute. I got a little hype done. I was actually curious how much he knew about me.
Let me keep it on. Well, I know that he was involved in, he was a writer and he did articles and stuff. And he was into cars, but he was more into, you can do like ads, he can do ad campaign photography photography. He did a lot of that stuff for designing stuff.
And he was so good at what he was doing that when he met Ken Block, Ken Block was like, dude, you've got to work with me. We've got to work together. And then you were like, you know what, I believe in this kid, I'm going to totally invest in it. And then you became his right hand man.
And then he became ridiculously big in several different things. And it seemed like to me that Scotto became in charge of every one of those things. And it was, it looked like a lot. And then he was in charge of Hoonigan and they're all bouncing off the walls, they don't know what's going on.
And he organizes them. And then he organizes them. One of them, I feel like, I mean, I'm good friends at Tony Hawk. I feel like Ken Block is as busy, if not busier and Tony doesn't, you know.
And he's like, hey, man, you want to meet me for lunch? He's like, dude, what day, what time, like what country? Cause I'm here, here, here and here. But seem like you were in charge of all that stuff to the, like he really trusted you.
Yeah. And I don't know why at first. Yeah, guess a good point. I don't remember him trusting anybody.
I don't remember him ever leaning on anybody. But I can say that it looked like that to me that he would lean on you for a lot of stuff. Yeah, it was weird because, you know, when I met Ken, I met him on the gumball rally. Remember the gumball?
Yeah. So like where rich people go to show you how much money they have, how rich they are. Yeah. And they celebrate and brag about how much money they have.
And then they buy a more expensive car or sometimes they break a car and they buy another super car while they're there and they get a taxi to the place ahead and they like, quote a million, half a million dollar cars and the problem. Sure, there were some sweethearts on that. But it seemed to me that I know there were some celebrities who were great people along for the ride, but the people who paid to be there, if some accident had happened to everybody in the gumball, the world's douche population would have fallen. Yeah, but I fortunately, unfortunately they- Yeah, but I was all over the michael.
Yeah. They're almost all there. Like the best of the best. Oh yeah.
The thing is like, I really like the organizer, like the guy who puts it together, because he's actually not one of them. Hey, if people want to spend money, somebody's got to take it from them. Yeah. So anyway, they put this all together.
And like early on though, I think it was still cool. And then like it just passed, it's like Overton window of acceptable douche baggery. When we're in Coachella. Yeah, and you're just like, this is just gone too far.
Somebody was trying to go fast, right? Oh, it was just the thing I realized on that was like, if you're rich, from that watching the TV show succession, like if you're rich, you don't pay for your crimes. Like you pay, but with cash, like you don't actually do time. Right.
So like everyone there was rich, so they just did whatever they wanted. But we were there and like we weren't acting rich. Like we showed up in like Subaru's. Yeah, it's a way to the earlier conversation.
You know that Americans thought Subaru's were an Australian car. I could see that because didn't have the app back in Paul Hogan. Yeah, he did that back commercial. And it kind of sounds like Kangaroo.
Exactly. Yeah. And we don't care enough about what's outside of America to really do our research. So we were like, that's cool.
Yeah, Subaru hated that car. I hated fusses and I hated shrimp on the barbie, but I knew that it was good for us. So it didn't matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It did a lot. It did a lot. Outback too, right? Obviously they were kind of, they were kind of clean.
Anyway, we don't have any onion. Is that we don't have that? I was really disappointed when I went to Australia and all the things I thought were going to be there weren't there. Like what?
Like if you say believe in onion, a blooming onion, that's what you wanted. No, not really. But you guys do like barbecue though. Yeah.
Barbecue is like a thing. You're doing boggins, boggins, and then there's uppity, upperclass, white, snooty. I didn't get anybody to the queen. You for strains and they have prawns and lobster tails.
But if you have a bogan, Bobby, you get snacks and you put in a brand and you put tomato sauce on it. Sometimes they'll bust out steaks and burgers, but mainly snacks. You know who our audience is. We didn't have a problem.
Yeah, we didn't have a problem. So better. Yeah, I've had both. And I'm here to say that snags beat lobster tails piss off.
It's a cockroach. Anyway, back on topic. So I was a magazine journalist. Yeah, I was right about that.
Yep. Gumball three. That was kind of cool. I do take photos.
But I said that. Yeah, you said it. You're doing a lot of that. You do.
I don't know. I'm surprised. So anyway, you really like porsches? Not a lot of people.
He collects them. He collects them. He collects them. He has a lot of cars.
I do. How many cars have you gone through say in the last 10 years? All of them do though. Everybody at home again, they just all, like when they're not working, they're like, oh, look at this one I found that I could do, you know, I could spend my whole life savings on it.
It's really good to just fill the void inside of us with a sheet metal that doesn't work properly. Yeah. It seems to me as somebody who's like the least car person ever that there's two kinds of guys who have a lot of cars. There's the guys who buy all the fancy ones that are totally finished and working that they choose every day when matches this.
The other one you don't want to move in next to your house. And the other one is the one where you have 23 cars and three of them are actually working. Yeah, that's me. Okay, gotcha.
But they're good. Sure. Yeah. It's just like a yard of hopes and dreams.
It's gonna be way to be in Maritie, right? Yeah, except, you know, actually she likes cars too. Oh, and she didn't work on them? She did.
Oh, yeah. So she has like a 944, like a Porsche that she's worked on and then she has an old F100, like, you know, Ford trucker. She had a totally different minute that we had a kid and like bought a house. They've done everything.
Yeah, like the cars were just like, yeah, that's your thing. Yeah, that's like, I'm gonna think you're telling me the child is more important to her than tooling with cars. Surprisingly, didn't know that while we, I don't understand women sometimes. Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense.
I tried an hard one. I'm insane. Yeah. I think we could all agree on that, Michael.
So anyway, I think I probably won't get to tell the story by the time we get to the end, but I'll keep going. So anyway, I meet Ken. Yeah. Right.
That's where back there. So I meet Ken. Was it rally that you met him? It was like gumball and it's not like a race.
It's just like, what was he doing rally already? No, he had already been doing rally for one year. So it's like his rookie year rally race. Okay.
The story quick. You know Pam's am. Yes, of course she was, they say she helped me. They say through many years.
Yeah. So she was like my contact at DC. And I was at a magazine called rides, which was like celebrity car culture, but it was mostly hip hop. And I really wanted to bring like some non-hip hop element into it.
So I knew Dyrdik was going. So I said, hey, is there any possibility that we can connect with him afterwards? It was like the week of gumball and get some photos and debrief. Yeah.
Right. And Pam calls me back three hours later and she's like, hey Ken Block, which at the time I think she said was like the president of DC, which I don't think was actually ever his title. I was like, yeah, sure. Yeah, but he wasn't like in the forefront.
Like I grew up skateboarding. I didn't really know who Ken was. I knew who you were. It's weird.
I knew who Dyrdik was. I knew you were in the skateboarding then sure. But if you're in skateboarding, that's the industry. You knew that they were kingpins.
I was like, I was in the industry. You were just in like street kid skating in New York City. You didn't know who the business went behind it. You just knew the guys on the magazine.
Yep. So anyway, long story short, Ken was like, if he can be in Trafalgar Square, which by the way, I didn't even know how to pronounce the money he invited me. That was like Trafalgar, because if you can be in Trafalgar Square by tomorrow, you can get in the back of my car and join me on the couple of 3,000. I headed straight from work to the airport with a backpack.
It flew to London. Sick. Yeah. Join them on the gumball.
I kicked it off best with like, Dyrdik and Black, because they were just wanting to have fun. They were also filming the pilot for what would eventually be Robin Big. Oh, wow. So, Ruben was there and they were filming this pilot.
We got involved in a hockey, a Czech Republic won the hockey championship while we were there. And we were involved in a full on riot, rolling taxi cabs over and shit. Cool. Sick.
Anyway, all of that, like, I was there. I spent a lot of time with Damon. Even though I was sitting in the car with Ken, I barely talked to him. I felt like he was just very Ken.
I talked to Lucy, but Ken was just like, all right, this guy's here. He's going to write some cool stuff about us, so I have to deal with him. Yeah. Sounds about Roger.
He's the one who was the most guarded out of everybody. And at some point, he realized that I liked rally racing. He popped open the laptops, started showing me all the POV, all of his stuff racing. And he was like, just a good event.
And I went home and figured I would probably not keep in touch with any of them. And then Ken reached out and said, what are you doing Thanksgiving? You want to come to my house? I was like, I have a family.
I'm not sure if I can come to your house on Thanksgiving day, but like, sure, like, let's try to come out for the weekend. So I flew to Utah. And it was 100% a job interview. Like, he had the whole DC Mountain Lab video laid out on the table.
I was like, what do you think about this? And how about this? You know, I was like, dude, flew me to his house to just kind of like, you know, he was testing me. It was like, I'm not doing anything.
He knew that you knew stuff that could help get things looking better. Yeah. So that was it. And then like from there, we just started doing a couple of different projects together.
And then eventually we did Jim Kano, which was like that thing that really jettisoned Ken from just being what I always loved referring to him as the shoe tycoon turned rally driver because everyone called him was like in the automotive world. He was the shoe tycoon. And then like he started the Jim Kano film hit. And after that, it like all just changed.
It was a good one. Jim Kano, your idea as well. I waited it. Where did that all come from?
I did another magazine called Zero to Sixty, which was like pure performance. And we had a column in the magazine that Ken did. It was like a two page feature from the book. So every month we had to come up with a different idea for Ken to do.
So some of it was stuff he was already doing. Like he did that big jump with Todd Richards and all the guys in that snow park. Yeah, that was in Mountain Lab on the snow in the snow. And then he had some other stuff he was doing.
And at one point we were looking for something to do. And there was this like sport called Jim Kano, which is based off of horse racing. It's like obstacles, stuff like steeple chase, right? You saw it on YouTube?
So there was a group, it was kind of popular in Japan, but it was... Horse stuff though. Horse stuff. But they eventually converted to horse stuff and like car stuff in like the 60s or 70s.
So in the 60s or 70s, like Jim Kano racing becomes like this small little niche motorsport. It never took off in the US. But... Is it similar?
It's similar. It's interesting. Yeah, they're sliding. I wouldn't say it's like big fast stuff, but it was like a small course.
Some of the times like the guys drove in reverse. It was really like, I have to admit, it was really dorky. Right? There was like a real dorkiness to it.
Guys drove like Katerums, which is like an old like 60s open cockpit, like long nose. It's very British. It's like the kind of thing that you'd expect like British people to. Not to knock the Brits, but you know what I'm saying.
Like a Jaguar looking thing. Jaguar's way cooler. Like the Katerum was designed with like a T-square and a pro tractor. Like it's just square with like two...
And they were like road cars. Yeah, well originally they were the Lotus, the Lotus 7 and then Katerum. Yeah, like those kind of cars. Anyway, it was this like really weird like nuanced sport where guys would step up in a parking line and they'd do cones and they'd do a 540 around one and then they'd have to drive to another area and then do like another obstacle and go whatever.
So this company brought it over from Japan, they called it in the USA. They did one event. And then they were like, oh, I'm all in. Build a car.
Like throws like 80 grand into this like engine and everything. He was super excited because he was living in San Diego at the time. But this is not to race. He was like, I'm going to make my own race or no.
He wanted to compete in this. Okay. Yeah, because at the time he's racing rally in America. But there's like no rallies happening in California.
There was one at the time. Oh, this was in California. Yeah. So he could do this here.
It was at El Toro. Yeah, he could come and like he just wanted to be able to drive and slide cars around. Yeah. The thing like to take a step back.
You know, in skateboarding like even if you're doing a contest like you have fun before you go do that. But it's not fun. There's no fun. Like the racing part's fun.
But like you don't very rarely like at least back then it's changed and Ken has can change this. This is one of the major things Ken's changed. Motorsport back in the day you would show up, you would do your practice, you would do your qualifying and then you would race. Yeah, it has enough fun.
It is fun, but it's not like it's pressure fun. You know, it's competition level fun. But you're saying that this is different. There's less pressure.
Well, what I'm getting at is like Ken was kind of Ken went to motorsports and thought like, man, there's all this cool fun shit I can do in a car, but I'm not allowed to do it because I just have to. Oh, yeah, no cursing. I just have to do what I'm supposed to do. Right?
Like there's all this cool fun stuff, but I can't do this because I have to go from point A to point B and be there as fast as possible. So I can slide bigger on this corner or do all the stuff. And Jim Conner for him was this thing that he didn't care as much about competing, but he could go have fun doing it. Got it.
That makes sense? Yep. So anyway, I think about it's like contest versus non-contest. It was like one contest.
He did it. Everybody competed. He loved it. He thought it was really cool.
He wanted to go, you know, do it again. And then the whole series went to put. Right. It was one of the only person who liked it.
Right. Nobody else came. That's got to be a chem thing because it's a skateboard. It's very skateboard.
When he brought it out, I was like, this is a skateboard video part with a car. Yep. So afterwards he called me and he said, oh, I went to that event. It was OK, but it was kind of slow.
Could have been better. He's like, I'm thinking about and the second one's canceled. I already built this car. I think I'm renting the same location that they did this event at, but like taking it and just making it faster, bigger.
Basically like his filter on what he thought Jim Conner as a sport should be. Right. And I'm like, at this point, I'm living in New York City. So I'm like, yeah, that sounds good.
Go do it. He's like, I'm going to film it. So he starts sending clips on the realist. This is 2008.
So like sending a clip meant I'd like downloaded it noon and then like 7 p.m. I'd actually be able to watch it. Right. So like he'd send me a clip like, oh, that's really cool.
And then that started to kind of be the idea of, hey, there's something here. We should put this together. You know, it's funny to think back at this era because in 2008, like YouTube just didn't exist the way it does today. People making these like this type of stuff didn't really, you know, exist.
And it was, and if it did exist, it was in skateboarding and you were either waiting for, you know, once the VHS and then eventually the DVD, it wasn't like a digital download for something, right? Yeah. So I was at that point, you know, putting this all together and eventually it became this idea of like, hey, we should release this as a video. And that's where like we started a layer in the bigger ideas like, oh, he should do a donut around a segue because like that had never been done before.
The idea of like someone doing a donut around something as it was in motion had even done. We thought about all these other ideas like, oh, should you know, a motorized bar, bar stool and all these different things. And then eventually we landed on segue because the idea was like that wasn't segue towards and parks were really big. Yeah.
You'd like go to love park and some dude would be rolling around with helmet on the segue. And we thought everybody's hates those people. I remember seeing in the rain in Beverly Hills, a family with the raincoats that they gave them to wear and a little rain hat. And they were all on those pigs going down the street.
And I was like, this dad has no idea what he has done to this family. Like, no, I don't care what country you're from, dude. This was unnecessary. And it's like it was the most uncool thing.
It's so clever. It was most I remember that movie, Pop black mochop. And it was like, I never even knew they existed. And it was in there.
It was in front of the in Kevin James. It's like, you're going to give it a go. And I was like, no. And I was like, yeah, no.
And he's like, why not? Is it like a skateboard thing or something? I was like, I guess you could call that. Yeah.
It's just a general dignity thing. Yeah. The dignity. I love being anal about certain things.
Like certain things. I know it's wrong. I know it doesn't make sense. But I really screw you, man.
Like that thing is embarrassing. And if you don't catch it first glimpse, that's cool for you. So my first famous moment was doing the segue. I gave him my dignity.
I thought to be on the segue. But no, it's a little bit different. You're a legend segue if someone does bone answer around you. But that was cool.
Thanks, I appreciate you. But we got to get more of that segue guy. That's what he's saying. He leans and just knows.
When he gets scared, it stops and sees him. And then that all started to come together and the film came out. And it just exploded. Yeah, let me ask you something about that.
And I want to be in delicate about this. But I knew Ken by reputation from what Jason said. And I gathered that he did the DC thing and probably walked away from that with a significant amount of money. And he didn't necessarily need to make money from the next thing.
And he was going to do it with a passion project. Did you from the start see the potential of this? Or I looked at it and was like, yeah, this guy breaks even. I'm sure he'll be happy.
He just wants to do this. At what point did you realize what the ambition was for that? And at what point did you realize this might actually happen? This could be as big as DC or bigger.
It's a good question because realize the first Jim Conant film comes out in 2008. We don't actually officially start Hoonigin till 2010. And during those two years, you're watching all this stuff around Ken explode inside of DC. And I'll air it out now.
But there was a lot of people internally at DC who were pissed about this. Because you have this core skate brand or a brand that's still trying to be a core skate brand. And the co-founder, the co-founder, the chief brand officer is creating T-shirts that are outselling a lot of the skaters. I remember being in the X Games and I missed the final by one spot.
And he got, I think he got like a silver and a rock. And I saw him afterwards and I was like, I got to say it. Because I'm your friend, what's the point of me? He started laughing at me.
But I was like, seriously, I'm not on TV. I didn't make the cut. You got second. What is the point of me?
Like, you don't need this. You should just do it yourself. And it caused a bunch of ripples inside of DC because it was also selling really, really well in Europe because like motorsports are just still in Europe and Europe wanted to go all in there. Like, this is great.
This is great. This is great. And the US offices like, no, like we're going to lose who we are as a brand at DC. And so they kind of pumped the brakes.
And at that time it was called DC Teamworks and you had Travis, Wistrana, Dave, Mira and Ken. We're all doing it. So like you had three big names that like, you know, two obviously came from action sports and you had Ken kind of in the skate industry and it all just came together and it was doing really well. And they sort of pumped the brakes and that opened up an opportunity because we knew how well the stuff was selling.
So we thought, oh, we could fill this with a car based thing. And I think early on, I think Ken and I really thought it would live under DC, but it just never did. Oh, yeah, you know that? Yeah, I think early on, like we had this thought that if we built in again in a year or two, DC would see how valuable it was and that it fit that niche for that.
And we would just tuck it back in underneath that umbrella and, you know, catch a check. I don't think we ever thought it would become what it became and all the media and just this cult kind of following that it created because it really just defined an audience of, you know, the younger car generation. And DC was wrong thinking that that would make it look bad for skateboarding. I feel like, I mean, obviously skateboarding is fine by itself, but I think Ken bought a lot to the table when it came to making us look cool.
He sold us and then he did it for himself. And I don't think that it put a stain on anything to do with skateboarding. I remember people that don't give crap about cars thinking that it's cool now because Ken was in magazines doing it, jumping snowboard gaps in his car. We can all appreciate that.
Yeah. I thought it was cool anyway. I think it was just an interesting time for DC, but that's probably all the conversation. I think it's like this weird era where they were no longer on top and all of a sudden you had this weird thing explode that wasn't supposed to.
The Jim Conner film ends up becoming the biggest video that they'd ever put out in the show. Wow. Of DC. They've done the DC video.
They've got Mountain Lab 1.5 like all this other stuff and Danny's Mega Amps stuff and all of that. And then like, you know, Ken goes and makes a video on an airport by himself. It crushes all his people. It goes to the car.
Yeah. It goes to the car, man, it's in a car. Yeah. Skateboarding is for skateboarders.
I knew the video was successful when my mom sent it to me. My mom just sang it. Yeah, you made it. I know.
He didn't see it until he was like in my mid 20's. Yeah. He was telling you my everything you're doing anymore. Did he tell you my amount of downloads that it did?
I mean, eventually, because she sent it to me on day 2. Like day 2 or day 3 of it being out. I was like, have you seen this video? And I was like, yeah.
I'm like, I helped make it. And she's like, oh, that's cool. You know, that's how I knew it was doing well. Yeah.
and my mom who's a cancer scientist, like somehow got the link. Cool. So that was at the moment we knew that kind of all cracked off. So to answer your question, we knew there was an opportunity, but we didn't really know I think where it was going to go.
Because this was this weird era in the automotive world where the Wall Street Journal ran this article about how kids weren't getting their driver's license anymore. People don't care about cars. And everyone just thought that the whole love, the American love for cars and going fast was over. And the Prius is one of the number one cars everyone's buying.
All Hollywood is is bumper to bumper Prius. It is everything changed. And I think that all of a sudden, Ken's doing this thing that a completely different audience met. And we're sort of in this sub-cult world where not even people are realizing how big we're growing, how fast we're growing.
And then all of a sudden people woke up one day. I'm like, these are looking guys. Millions and millions of people are watching what they're doing. They might be onto something.
Follow up kind of a similar question to the one I already asked. Do you think Ken was saying there's this huge untapped market? Or do you think he was kind of as surprised as everyone else that there was such a big receptive audience waiting for that? Oh, I think we were all surprised.
I had a feeling, but I was also the geeky car dude who was in that world and living it. So I'm like, no, no, there's all these people. I'm everyone Ken first came to me and said, hey, I'm thinking about doing some DCs for automotive. Do you think car guys would buy DC?
I was like, you don't understand. It's such a drought of coolness in the automotive world. Right now that anyone who embraces automotive, they're going to embrace back. Because there is nothing that is uniquely ours in the car world at the time.
How somebody who was planted firmly in that world, how did the car world react to him coming in? And all of them could have theoretically made that same video. He kind of just comes in from a different world and drinks their milkshake now. You're saying you're working for magazines.
There's people who are making their living, promoting this stuff, trying to look, we'll do in this stuff. No, but the problem was is people weren't that. He created this paradigm shift in the way people saw motorsports. So to give you some background, the world of rally racing in the United States at that time was just like, it didn't even exist.
I mean, the joke I always just had was if a car races in the woods and there's no one there to see it, it didn't even happen. Because you would go, you would spend the whole weekend, you'd have these ups and downs. And then when it was over, no one knew you raced. So Ken realized, and that's what Ken loved, Ken loved racing.
So Ken really built all of this just so he could go race cars in the woods. Like he created this whole thing so people would give him money to go race cars in the woods. Which is your earlier question? I don't know why he just didn't pay.
He had money from DC. He could have gone on his own. But I think he just wanted to be able to justify it at first. And then I think it became addictive.
Right? I think at first it was like he just wanted to justify to sponsors like DC and Monster and P.F.K. Rich were some of the guys that like, hey, we could do something cool, obviously Subaru. And then all of a sudden it became this thing.
And it became like a freight train. And it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And there was definitely a moment, you know, six or seven years in where I think Ken was a little over it at a certain point. And it was just like frustrating.
And you know, we just realized that like we started something that like at that point we couldn't stop. Right? Like we created this thing where kids were tattooing and hooting themselves. Not like a couple like at an alarming rate.
Like every day I'm getting another DM of like, you know, check out this full chess piece I got of Hoonigan. And it was just this cult thing that was moving and we wanted that stuff away. Somebody had a giant wolf knife knife. Yeah, go on there whole stomach.
And I was like, what the? That's bigger than my one, dude. Yeah, exactly. How's that?
Yeah. Yeah. We had a rule. By the way, Ken, I had a rule which anyone who had a Hoonigan tattoo couldn't work and Hoonigan.
It's fair. We just figured there was a line there that maybe was awesome. No disrespect. Yeah, no, no, no, it's just a different thing.
Some people can like stuff too much. Yeah, it can happen. By the way, I love everyone who's. You're listening.
I'm really good. Yeah. Oh, I love it. Thank you for the support.
Thank you for the support. But yeah, it was just a thing that's just kind of like blew up out of nowhere. And I we here's a funny story. So when the first film came out, like it's pre YouTube existed, but like no one really was using it yet.
I don't even think Google had bought it yet. So Ken uploads the video to his website because of the time everyone had websites, right? This is like really kind of pre Facebook. My space is like just for putting alienating your friends by not putting them in your top eight.
Like at this point, there's not really a platform for this. So we throw it up on Kenblockracing.com. And a month goes by and Ken gets an email from his service provider. And they're like, yeah, you owe us $28,000 because $10 million in website visits came this month.
We had no idea that it had done that well. We put the video out. We didn't have like a view counter on the thing. We put the video out and people talked about it.
And that was where we saw the value. The blogs and magazines talked about the video. It wasn't even in our programming yet to think views. Views are what matter.
We didn't even know that. And a month later, Ken calls me. He's like, dude, I don't have the budget right now for this to pay $28,000 a month. That this keeps doing like this.
What can we do? I'm like, dude, I did some research. There's this thing called YouTube. And we don't even have to pay them to put the video out.
You know, fast forward years later, we make money off of YouTube. But at the time, it was just like, we can put the video there and people can go watch it. I remember there was a time where there was a guy, one of the top 10 YouTube guys, was a guy who did these completely unremarkable blues guitar solos in his house. And then he'd post one.
And then he would just click on it, reload, reload, reload, reload, reload. And he was one of the top YouTubers, just because he sat there clicking on his own videos. It was just such a different area. It was like, wow, West YouTube days, too.
It was like, I don't think there was even an algorithm that was functioned, not anywhere like it is today. There was no money to be made. There was no AdSense. There was none of that.
It was like, what the episode arc about making fun of people who thought they would ever make money off of the internet. And they'll look at it. Yeah. Look at people like Mr.
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And that's why I can't even pick a favourite. Theoretically, since I didn't actually get to try it. Sorry. Among me.
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Show Liquid Death. The Jason Ellis Show is still here. Thank you. Or we'll kill you.
So I have a tough question. It's not tough, but I just have to bring it up. Ken Spuneral, I saw people you talked, I talked to Rob did. A few other people did.
But I already knew that you really loved Ken, but I was super apparent that day. You know what I mean? That it meant a lot to you. And then to realise that you're still running the show, you're helping his family.
And you're like, what is, are you in charge of everything? You've been put in charge of everything. And you've lost your friend. Yeah.
It's been a lot, man. It's been a lot, right? Yeah. I mean, I don't know.
It's like, you know, what's the cliche everyone says is good days and bad days. I mean, that's just kind of how it's been for the past two and a half months, three months, whatever. But yeah, it's been a lot. I mean, I think at first, so the whole, you know, the day I found out was wild because we were like supposed to go back to work the next day.
I just, I took a month off. Like I never take a break. Yeah, that's my problem. And my wife was just kind of sick of me not like slowing down.
I've got a three year old. So I was like, I'm gonna just take a home month to December. I took the whole month off and, you know, we're coming back to work on the third. And I get COVID on New Year's Day.
All right. So I'm isolated from my kid and my wife. And I'm like in this room. And I get the phone call.
So I spent two and a half days by myself, like just sitting there, like just dealing with that. And I think in a weird way, and like we're getting deep, like in a weird way, I think it was good for me mentally. Yeah. Because it's kind of hard for me.
Yeah, like you it's so easy to hide. Like everyone has different addictions. And for me, like work was always that one. You know, like I started working.
I'm like the classic, like fell out of college, like dropout. And then all of a sudden like landed something I loved, excelled at it and then felt like I had a positive syndrome in my whole life. So I just was like, I'll just beat everybody by doing a 14 hour day. Like that's how I'll win.
You know? And I did that my whole life. And I look back now and it's like so many friends who have I lost, like who've died over the years. Like I just didn't take that time.
Like you know, like during the summer, an ex girlfriend I was really tight with and was a good friend. Like she passed and I was in the middle of production. I like saw the text and I just walked out on set and just kept doing what I was doing. And like you know, you don't take that time.
And you tell yourself like, oh, you're older. It's easier to deal with this stuff. I guess this is just life. You got to move on.
You know, you create all these things to justify that. And then Ken died and like my whole world stopped. Because he was so much a part of my world. There was no like, oh, I guess I'll just go work on Jim Kana.
I guess I'll just go hide my emotions in this. Like that didn't exist because he was everything. And then I had to like, I mean, there was the thought of like, okay, what's next? How does this move forward?