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

“In life — from the simplest thing to the biggest thing — I want to be proud of what it is and stake my claim: ‘That’s mine and that’s how I do it.'” — Ken Block Ken Block (@kblock43 https://www.instagram.com/kblock43/ on IG https://www.instagram.com/kblock43/ and TW https://twitter.com/kblock43) is a co-founder of DC Shoes https://www.dcshoes.com/ and a professional rally driver with the Hoonigan Racing Division http://www.hooniganracing.com/. His rally career began in 2005, and he won Rookie of the Year that season in the Rally America Championship http://www.rally-america.com/. Ken has accumulated five X Games medals and achieved global fame through his wildly successful viral series of Gymkhana videos https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhU72li4fhIfBIHMHSa5ZtjGCplUazKlu. Gymkhana 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 https://adage.com/section/the-viral-video-chart/674. In January 2010, Block formed the Monster World Rally Team (later renamed to Hoonigan Racing Division) and signed with Ford to pursue his dreams of racing in the World Rally Championship https://www.wrc.com/en/ and in doing so, became one of only four Americans to ever score points in the WRC. His latest project is The Gymkhana Files https://www.amazon.com/At-the-Peak/dp/B07J5W8S96/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1548827520&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Gymkhana+Files&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=a18f7667a0ba961a59ebb13b978369ee&language=en_US, which takes viewers behind the scenes of GYMKHANA TEN: The Ultimate Tire Slaying Tour https://youtu.be/m_KBvP0_8Tc, a video that, as of this writing, just went up and already has nearly 20M views. It’s all complete insanity. Please enjoy this interview with Ken Block! Click here for the show notes for this episode. https://tim.blog/2019/01/31/ken-block-gymkhana/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions https://LinkedIn.com/TFS, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact. With a community of more than 575 million professionals, LinkedIn https://LinkedIn.com/TFS is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. You have access to a diverse group of people all searching for things they need to grow professionally, and four out of five users are decision-makers at their companies -- so you can build relationships that really matter and drive your business objectives forward. LinkedIn has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to job title, company name, industry, etc. Why spray and pray with your marketing dollars when you can be surgical? To redeem your free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com/TFS https://LinkedIn.com/TFS! This podcast is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor http://tim.blog/sponsor. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  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 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.

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  You have access to a very diverse group of people, all searching for things they need to grow professionally. That is explicitly the purpose of LinkedIn. And four out of five users on LinkedIn are decision-makers at their companies. So you can build relationships that really matter, that can drive your business objectives forward, that can also have a high LTV, lifetime value. LinkedIn has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to, among other things, their job title, company name, industry, etc. This is important because better targeting equals a message that your customers actually care about. And it also means your advertising is more effective and cost-effective.

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  So why spray and pray with your marketing dollars when you can be surgical? It just makes sense. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com/TFS, that stands for Tim Ferriss Show. So that is LinkedIn.com/TFS. Check it out, that's where you can go to get your free $100 ad credit. LinkedIn.com/TFS. Terms and conditions apply.

• 2:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 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 4-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 sick. I take it in the morning to ensure optimal performance, and overall, it covers my bases if I can't get what I need from whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. And if you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they're offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users.

• 3:05Tim Ferriss?

  I nearly always travel with at least three or four of these one-dose bags. In other words, if you buy Athletic Greens as a first-time buyer, you now get, for a limited time, an extra $79 in free product. So, check out the details at athleticgreens.com/tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim for your free travel pack with any purchase.

• 3:31Tim Ferriss?

  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. So, 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 to tease out the lessons, habits, et cetera, that you can apply. And my guest for this episode is Ken Block. He is a co-founder of DC Shoes and a professional rally driver with the Hoonigan, that's H-O-O-N-I-G-A-N, Hoonigan Racing Division. His rally career began in 2005, and he won Rookie of the Year that season in the Rally America Championship.

• 4:14Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 4:29Tim Ferriss?

  Gymkhana 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, 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

• 5:12Tim Ferriss?

  views and counting, following globally recognized race car driver and viral star Ken Block 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, subtitle, "The Ultimate Tire Slaying 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 more about Ken and what he's up to at hooniganracing.com, on Instagram @kblock43, Twitter @kblock43, and Facebook @kenblockracing.

• 5:57Tim Ferriss?

  So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Ken Block.

• 6:04Tim Ferriss?

  Ken, welcome to the show.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Well, thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it.

• 6:08Tim Ferriss?

  Where are we sitting right now?

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Uh, we are sitting in the Hoonigan Racing headquarters, uh, in Park City, Utah.

• 6:17Tim Ferriss?

  And we are inside of a shipping container.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Yes, we're very expensive shipping container.

• 6:25Tim Ferriss?

  Very expensive shipping container.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Uh, but yeah, I have about 40 shipping containers that are cut up, that make up my offices and shop here in Park City.

• 6:34Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Uh, 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, uh, growing, we moved probably five different offices and therefore building all new drywall walls all over the place and all that and it costs a lot of 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 a shipping truck.

• 7:26Tim Ferriss?

  So if you need to upsize or downsize or anything in between size, you have everything here that you can pack up.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  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, you know, empty warehouse spaces like this and building offices. A lot of drywall gets wasted out there as people change buildings and change businesses.

• 7:58Tim Ferriss?

  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 the show notes as well. You've had a number of different careers and, uh, makes me think of Bruce Wayne in some respects because you've had, you've lived many lives in one life. Uh, this is not going to be chronological, but first, hoonigan, where does that name come from?

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Uh, well, the word hoon, uh, is basically similar to our laws here in America of reckless driving. Uh, so if someone were to say, oh, you were hooning in Australia, that would mean you were out doing something reckless with a car. Uh, 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. Uh, whereas if you were reckless driving here, it'd be like, oh, you're going to get a ticket. Uh, 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.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  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, 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, and I came up with the, the, the term hoonigan. And it just kind of stuck for us and ended up, you know, being great for the brand. And, and now we've continued to grow and grow. I think we're in our seventh or eighth year with the brand.

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  And you've, 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 and marketing and branding. And you mentioned Gymkhana. For those people who have not seen it, we're going to talk about that in just a minute, but the, the video series Gymkhana, K-H-A-N-A, has around or maybe more than, what, half a billion views now collectively?

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the, the main videos themselves have almost half a, 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. So quite insane. Not, 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, you know, revolution that is how the internet has kind of, you know, evolved over time.

• 10:47Tim Ferriss?

  And then you have your competitive career, right? And 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?

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Uh, started what? Started skateboarding at that age?

• 11:09Tim Ferriss?

  The, uh, the rally car racing.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  No, unfortunately, I started rally car racing when I was thirty seven. Very, very old in the world of motorsports. Uh, so I, I grew up in Long Beach, California. Skateboarding, riding BMX bikes as a kid and then moved down to North San Diego. Um, my parents decided they wanted to own an avocado grove, so it moved me down to the, uh, the countryside of North San Diego and, uh, 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 thirty seven. Although I'd been a fan of rallies since I was very young. I was never a fan of like American motorsports for some reason.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Like my brother 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 then through Africa and, and it, it's just something I related to much more than a car that just went straight or went in a circle. And I, you know, don't know 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.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  And so I just genuinely loved it for, from, since I was quite young, but I, I never had an opportunity to do anything with it or even knew it existed in the States till I was around thirty six, thirty seven.

• 12:49Tim Ferriss?

  Now, was that, was your first exposure in terms of training at, uh, Tim O'Neill? Or was it somewhere else?

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, my, my first driving, rally car driving lesson was at Tim 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 two thousand four did a couple rallies. And that just woke me up to the fact that rally even existed in the States and that I could potentially go do it. And so, uh, Travis's agent, Steve Astefan, 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.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Put me through a four day course and uh, I was hooked. Like I couldn't have enjoyed myself more and like I felt like I had a little bit of natural talent for it. I could throw the thing around exactly how I wanted and I was pretty quick, but no clues to where that would go. I just was like, hey, I really liked this. This is fun. I need to do this more.

• 14:02Tim Ferriss?

  So I, 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, uh, short-lived, but still entertaining called The Tim Ferriss Experiment, where I went there to train and compete against a friend of mine. And, uh, 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, uh,

• 14:47Tim Ferriss?

  training with pendulum turns and, you know, finish flicks and all of that. It was just so endlessly interesting.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Well, it's genuinely fun. It's a fun way to drive a car. It really is.

• 14:58Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, the science, there's so much science behind it. Uh, you have people who've done it from a very, very young age. I mean, there's certainly, uh, a number of countries that seem to produce a lot of, of champions. How at 36, 37, did you think about tackling this seriously?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Uh, well, you know, at the beginning, it was just a hobby. You know, the first year I, I went out and funded my own racing, you know, I was just, you know, as amateur as an amateur gets, you know, first year out, you know, just learning the ropes. Um, had a good team behind me. I had a great co-driver Alex that, 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.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  And luckily for me, I was already in very good shape at thirty seven years old because I loved riding dirt bikes. And with DC, you know, we sponsored guys like Ricky Carmichael and Jeff Amig, 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 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.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  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 two thousand and five 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 gonna 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 a completely wild ride.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:35Tim Ferriss?

  And we're gonna, we're gonna visit DC 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 different? Or what, any behaviors, any beliefs, any practices? Was there anything in particular?

• 17:59Tim Ferriss?

  That comes to mind or anything that comes to mind?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  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. Uh, 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. You know, there's, there's guys out there that, that aren't the most talented, but they're willing to outwork everyone, you know? And that's kind of where I was. I was an older guy, you know, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, I was competing against twenty-year-olds, you know? And I'm like, well, I'm just gonna be smarter, you know?

• 18:42Speaker 03

  I'm gonna train smarter, I'm gonna prepare smarter, I'm gonna do everything, find every trick in the book that I can to maximize the opportunity. And I, and I think that's, that's really a lot of what it takes in the end with a lot of athletes. There is a lot of outliers out there, the Ricky Carmichaels 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, there's a lot of people out there that it's, 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, that means you have to live it. You have to live it day in, day out.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  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, um, to the craft.

• 19:46Tim Ferriss?

  What, what were some of the tricks or approaches that you found worked for you? 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, uh, some plant protein plus MCT oil. And, you know, you commented that it makes it a lot easier to train if you've Say consume 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, 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 year olds are doing A, B, and C.

• 20:28Tim Ferriss?

  If I do that, I'm not going to be able to match what they're doing. Or any other kind of tricks of the trade that you ended up adopting for yourself?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Well, I think that with any sport, it's about being smart about what makes you successful in it, you know? And, you know, for example, like I race cars. I don't have to be a shredded, strong individual to do that. I have power steering and a foot pedal, you know? So it's more about reaction time. It's more about quickness. It's about, 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?

• 21:21Speaker 03

  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, it's working with the right people that 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?

• 21:52Tim Ferriss?

  What were some of the things you've found to work? I know you've been a long-term, it seems like, trainee with kickboxing and have worked with some fantastic athletes.

• 22:02Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a particular, you mentioned exercise before getting into the car. Do you have a particular exercise or any exercises you do?

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Well, you know what, I grew up in North San Diego. Uh, do you know who Paul Check is?

• 22:13Tim Ferriss?

  I do, yes.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Yes, so Paul Check, I've worked with many Paul Check trainers. I've worked with Paul Check 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 world balance needs as opposed to just grabbing a barbell and doing curls, you know? So that, that sort of, all that training to me helped a lot, but then upping the level of that, I worked with a couple trainers that, uh, you know, would help me with mental skills along with

• 22:53Speaker 03

  those physical skills. So with rally, you're having to hear notes. So, 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, that's telling you what's coming up next. And it's, 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 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

• 23:36Speaker 03

  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, uh, 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, little things that are harder to train with your brain that would potentially make you quicker. Cause you know, rally, we're battling for seconds over

• 24:18Speaker 03

  each stage. 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.

• 24:31Tim Ferriss?

  So you, I mean, you're a student of success. And maybe we could rewind the clock a little bit and get back to DC. Now, I was doing, as I always do, 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? How did you end up in business?

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Well, the funny thing about that is I didn't, 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, the avenue that I was left with, with the things that I, I loved to do in my interests. So the, the funny thing is I started off in high school studying architecture. I wanted to be an architect. And I did all sorts of drafts, drafting through high school. 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, the business of it, I just didn't like.

• 25:47Tim Ferriss?

  What, what didn't you like about it?

• 25:50Speaker 03

  I, I guess because it, I, I enjoy the art of architecture, but the only people that get to do the art of architectures are the people at the top.

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  And it takes either a ton of money or, you know, 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.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  So, you know, being a skateboarder and a snowboarder, uh, you know, I, I, 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, you know, 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, I didn't have the skillset that they had and I saw that. So I moved back to California and went back to college and, and started studying. Screen printing, graphic design, graphic layout, all that sort of stuff. And I just really enjoyed it.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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 schools, Palomar College in Vista, California, I met Damon Way, who's the older brother of the legendary 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.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  And I was, 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 eight ball and drawers. And, you know, 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 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

• 28:25Speaker 03

  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, 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, we wouldn't have had all that. Now, one thing that I did forget to mention in all that though is,

• 28:54Speaker 03

  You know, business is not easy to start, you know, and and I come from a family. Uh, my dad had his own business and he was fairly successful with it. And my parents, by the time that I was a teenager, had a decent amount of money. I wouldn't say they were overly rich, but you know, they were, you know, they had enough money to buy sixteen acres of avocados in a house. You know, in Valley Center. And so as I was growing up, you know, I I wanted certain things, you know, like there were kids in my high school that drove BMWs. I'm like, I want that. My dad just laughed. 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.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  They were gonna, they were going to help me, but they were gonna make me work for it. And so that's something that I really genuinely appreciate and something I'm gonna pass on to my own kids that like. Life isn't easy. You've got to figure certain things out and you've got to make it work 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, I think that experience really is the best lesson.

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  And, uh, so when I, when I was starting our business, you know, I, I went to my parents and said, hey, I, I need some money. And my, my mom said, well, I'm not sure that my dad will do that, but let's try. She said, write a business plan. You know, if you want ten grand, prove to us what you're gonna do with that ten grand and how you're gonna pay us back. And I said, okay, so I bought books and figured out I'm gonna make a business plan, wrote that business plan. And I got ten grand out of my parents to help start the business.

• 30:34Tim Ferriss?

  That was DC?

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Uh, that was actually for eight ball and drawers. And Damon came in with some money and we were equal partners in the beginning. Um, but really it, it, it was from my parents and my parents, you know, um. However, you'd like to say ethics law, you know, 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, you know, I was a nineteen, twenty 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 asks me from, from like, how do I start this business or how do I get sponsored?

• 31:20Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 31:50Tim Ferriss?

  And you have such a keen eye. You studied architecture and 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 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

• 32:32Tim Ferriss?

  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 that enables you to then pursue the craft that you want to pursue.

• 33:05Tim Ferriss?

  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-

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Well, before you go on though, let's talk about that real quick.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  That was one of the things that when I trans like the transition for me from going from chief brand officer at DC to race car driver, it was actually a real, it was, there 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. Like I, I, Damon and I didn't really like us getting press for DC. We liked the athletes to be the, 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 gotta put my face out there and I've gotta be the voice and, and I have to, you know, show a different attitude and a different,

• 34:01Speaker 03

  not necessarily different, but I, 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, the, 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

• 34:46Speaker 03

  waiting for this, these guys to sign autographs and, and some of them, instead of being engaged with these fans, they'd be, you know, looking at their phone or turning around, smoking a cigarette, you know, around kids and stuff like that. And it just, they, they didn't have the right understanding of what they were there to do, you know? And, and to me, that's a real simple example that when I go to, you know, an autograph signing, you know, we try to make the best poster. We, I try to be as engaged as possible, always trying to make the fan as happy as possible. They're there, you know, uh, for me and I'm there representing all these different brands and maybe, you know, the shop that I'm there for, those sort of things. So it's,

• 35:27Speaker 03

  It's understanding the the whole situation because of where I came from before, which has then made me such a great ambassador for all these brands 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. So 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

• 36:11Speaker 03

  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, 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

• 36:56Speaker 03

  can't be as successful as the potential is there to be.

• 37:01Tim Ferriss?

  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 in the form of starting these businesses before DC. What were some of 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. I was like, oh my God,

• 37:46Tim Ferriss?

  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 is 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 do any particular mistakes or failures come to mind that it kind of informed what you did with DC in any way?

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Well, I think that all marketing and advertising, you know, a lot of people don't realize they're like, oh, we have a hundred grand to spend. Sweet, you know? Well, you need to turn that 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, 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 do it better.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  But, you know, it's a difficult process 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 that was like, I want a bus. I'm going to build a bus. It's going to be 300 grand. I need 300 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 aren't my consumers. Like if we're going to spend 300 grand, we need to spend that targeted specifically on.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Who we think is gonna buy our product, you know?

• 39:34Tim Ferriss?

  For DC, who was that? Like, who was your archetype of your your customer? Like, who was your customer in the early days?

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Uh, well, DC, I mean, it would, 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 were still existed and were big, you know? So we had at least one to two ads a month that we were making that that drop in all those magazines. And then you add various video projects, and there was like 411 Magazine, the video magazine. And then on top of that, you you sponsored, we had sponsored maybe 10 to 12 skateboarders that were, you know, the top guys in the

• 40:23Speaker 03

  industry that fit our brand. And so, you know, you 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, you

• 41:02Speaker 03

  know, and so that kid isn't affected as much by, you know, the pro skateboarder and the skateboard magazine. So then we started working with artists like Mike Shinoda from Lincoln Park. And we had, you know, a Mike custom signature shoe and and did stuff like that. And eventually, we worked with artists, 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, I think at its peak, it, you know, 2007, 2008 or something was around

• 41:45Speaker 03

  550 million. So it, 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 Quiksler was having, 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.

• 42:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's a huge accomplishment. What does DC stand for?

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Uh, 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. 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

• 42:58Speaker 03

  for one category, doesn't mean that it's good for another category.

• 43:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  So eventually we made snowboards, but the logo that we have looks kind of like Chanel and Chanel actually has that trademarked for snowboards. 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.

• 43:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  That's the sort of thing you deal with with the company.

• 43:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure. And just a side note for people, I run into this a lot with people who 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, like.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Like the, the actual expense spent over years. Protecting our trademark around the world is millions and millions of dollars.

• 43:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  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 out the back door, you know, and it's really unfortunate, but that, that is the world we live in, unfortunately.

• 44:20Tim Ferriss?

  Part of the ride. You mentioned a book when we were walking around that, that beautifully colored table tennis, I suppose, what would you call a platform over there. When did that, so Dale Carnegie, just, just to, to kick off a conversation and maybe resources and other things that have helped you i- in your entrepreneurial journey. So what was the book and when did it, when did it, when did it appear?

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Well, the, the simple background of that is I, you know, 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, you know, like I didn't, I didn't go to, you know, work in some other company and rise 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 it was successful because, you know, my business partner Damon and I worked very hard, but we were, we were working on our talents. And after a while, those talents were starting to run out. We were successful,

• 45:32Speaker 03

  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, you know, no matter what, in every company you, you have.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  You know, ups and downs of dealing with people and success based on the people you surround yourself with. And so I needed 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, 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?

• 46:14Tim Ferriss?

  It's, I would, I would say it's at least 40, probably 50 or 60 years old.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  I think it's older than that.

• 46:20Tim Ferriss?

  It's gotta be, maybe even like 80. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a fantastic book. Parts of it are a little dated and kind of make you chuckle or cringe depending, but great book.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, but I, I think that book, you know, I, I think that there's a, there's a lot of good lessons in it. And, and I like the attitude, even the title, like How to Win Friends and Influence People. And that, that actually fits very well with like how I like to manage, how I like to work with people. And, 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 and barking orders. So I, 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

• 47:11Speaker 03

  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 really one of the first books that really kind of helped me achieve my management, uh, style and what's helped me really be successful. There's, 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, and a director.

• 47:42Tim Ferriss?

  If we look at the, let's just say the apparel business, I've spent a good amount of time around, say, Damon John, right, at FUBU, which stands for For Us By Us, by the way, for people who don't know that, and the, or, you know, 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, and it's, they're, in some cases, depending on the scale, obviously, it's, 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? Like, was it innovation on how you approached the stores? Was it something

• 48:27Tim Ferriss?

  very unusual about your marketing? Obviously, you did a lot with product innovation also, but like, what, what were the ingredients, right? Because there are a lot of players, potentially, a lot of players in that world.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Well, that's a tough question, no?

• 48:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  But, you know, when I, when I look back on it, one thing that, that always, that 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 a lot of it is, has to do with like, okay, if we're gonna 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, something else, you

• 49:26Speaker 03

  know? Just for a random example, even throwing, you know, Reebok or something else like that. Yeah, the kid's definitely gonna take the Supreme shirt over the Reebok shirt, you know? So, so, but that, that is 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, and, 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

• 50:05Speaker 03

  have products that lead in the industry or that you have, um, 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, 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 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. Cause at the end of the day, a T-shirt, pretty

• 50:50Speaker 03

  easy to make, you know, uh, 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, you know?

• 51:04Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Um, well, back in the day when we started drawers, like we were, you know, a couple of industry guys, me and Damon, that, you know, we, we didn't have the experience that a lot of the other companies that we were competing against had and, but we just had a vision. We had an idea of what we wanted to do and. And we came up with some very innovative marketing concepts, not 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, like, kinda twisted ideas and, you know, Rob Dyrdek, who's now a fairly big MTV star, uh, he was one of our skateboarders back then and

• 52:02Speaker 03

  the 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. We just had these really obscure photos of just his head with 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 uh, at that time in the skateboard world, I should say. And it was much more of sort of a, uh, fuck you fashion style attitude and it just really worked, you know? And we kind of played on that idea of,

• 52:43Speaker 03

  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 a 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. Uh, but in the end, like, one of the biggest things that we ever did was build a a giant ramp, like, what's called the mega ramp for Danny Way to do basically giant skateboarding tricks that had never been done at sort of the scale.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  And that was around 2003, 2004 and That had really made us and him stand out in a way that it really that was we were seeing skateboarding go to like a whole new level to the point where X Games adopted that ramp and put it in the X Games and I think it's the mega mega ramp style is still in the X Games today 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 you know far apart from all of our competition.

• 54:04Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 54:17Tim Ferriss?

  We're gonna come back to video for sure because that seems to be a very native medium for you.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, on the business side, you know, like I said earlier, David and I were smart about, you know, realizing we weren't the smartest guys in the room and to hire those people, you know, and then manage the expectations of what we were trying to do and grow the business.

• 54:39Tim Ferriss?

  How did you find those people?

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Whew, how did we find them? Some of them were friends, some of them were friends of friends, 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 and we, you know, would hire and find and hire the right people and we were able to to to grow quite quite well over the years, but.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  You know, that's the tough part about business. I was a marketing guy, you know? I was very good at design. I had some design experience, you know, from doing architecture in high school and I ended up basically designing the first 15 models of our shoes, you know, with some of the pro athletes, but I did the drawings. I flew to Korea. I immersed myself in the business. So 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 gotta hire the right people and be able to manage them. And if they can't perform, the management side you has to fire them and move on and hire someone better, you know?

• 56:06Speaker 03

  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. You, you, 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, uh, 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,

• 56:47Speaker 03

  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 intended to be.

• 57:01Tim Ferriss?

  Did you guys, up until the acquisition by Quicksilver, did you self-fund? Or did you bring in financing for the business along the way?

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Uh, no, we, we self-funded. Uh, we had our names on very large lines of credit, which I genuinely hated, um, which was all the reasons why we eventually sold that like, you know, the liability of that, if there was a down year or the economy crashed or something, the, the business would have gone away quite quickly because, you know, we didn't have, uh, 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, that can make things volatile in the, in the long run. And that's why we saw a purchase with someone like, Quicksilver is a very good sort of...

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Root to a, to a good end for us and it worked out really quite well.

• 57:55Tim Ferriss?

  So video, I promised to get back to video. Let's talk about Gymkhana 5 specifically, just as someone who, because that was the first Gymkhana video I saw. I was in, I lived in San Francisco for almost 20 years before moving. And I would imagine, I'm only to describe it for people who haven't seen it. Everybody should see it. By the way, last time I checked, I had, 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. And it is, it is really mind boggling to watch this video. And maybe you can describe it for people, but also I hope in, in describing it for people,

• 58:38Tim Ferriss?

  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. So what, what is Gymkhana 5? Maybe that's a way of explaining what Gymkhana is. And everybody should absolutely go check this and all the other Gymkhana videos out, but almost 100 million views. What, what is Gymkhana?

• 59:06Speaker 03

  I love how you just jumped past four very viral videos to the fifth one.

• 59:10Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the, the funny thing about that is Gymkhana 5 is my favorite video. Um, you know, we started making these videos. Uh, 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 got like 10 million views. But Gymkhana, the first Gymkhana video that we did, it's called Gymkhana

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Testing and Practice. Um, it, it was the first real viral video. It got like 10 million views in a couple of weeks and then just kept going.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  And it, it was actually, this was before YouTube was really popular. So it, I had a video player on my Ken Block website and it got like,

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  10 million views there alone and finally I was paying for this. I was gonna say that. 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 gotta 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 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, everyone puts stuff there from, you know, the Daily Show to, you know, the YouTube, you know, community that some of them have subscribers in the millions, you know?

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  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 and they make sure they get all the best angles of it, um, 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, uh, you know, to the consumers.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  Um, 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, uh, at an airport called El Toro in Irvine. And that's what the first Jim Kana 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 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, uh, when we first put it out, I was like, oh, 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.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  And that video really took off. And so my sponsors said, hey, when you gonna 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 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 Kana four was on the, one of the studio lots up in Hollywood.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  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 Jim Kana 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? You know, to us, everybody knows Detroit as, you know, uh, part of the Rust Belt.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  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. 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, that's going to be too difficult. So anyway, getting to Jim Kana five, we went and scouted a, an area outside of San Francisco.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  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 three. So he's a very high level. Scout that does Hollywood type stuff. And uh, he's like, hey, you wanna go check out these spots in San Francisco, you know? And we just kinda laughed like San Francisco is never gonna let us do this in their city, you know?

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  It it wasn't, it had nothing to do against San Francisco. It was more of the idea 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 gonna 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 do whatever we want. We get a permit. We we have that street to do whatever we want, you know? And so he took us to a couple of locations and we were kinda blown away. We're like, really? We couldn't use these locations? And so, uh, 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.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  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 uh, looked at everything he brought us. And we said, wow, we have enough here to make an amazing video. 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 nuts. How do you, 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

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  a lot of TV shows are shot, a lot of movies are shot, a lot of uh, commercials are shot, like there's a very good film department there. The the police force are very adept to understanding what the needs are for these movies and things and and they they understand what what you need to do to do this. So the they offered us the bridge. We're like, I would have never thought. We're gonna 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, uh, like between Oakland, they, they start over, they get on the bridge over by Oakland. Then as they get towards the island, I don't.

• 1:07:23Tim Ferriss?

  Treasure Island?

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  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's 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 for 10 or 15 minutes.

• 1:07:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  And we did 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, 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, uh, the George W. Bush Senior. Um, so he was the only one that they'd ever shut it down for before that.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  You know, 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, to do some of this.

• 1:08:41Tim Ferriss?

  It's really astonishing. I mean, I never would have thought it possible. Is it, and 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 gonna bring a lot of tourism. Or is it really just the infrastructure setup? We are gonna 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?

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Tim Ferriss?

  For shutting down these streets?

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  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, that's good. You know, like these, this is a viral series that could potentially give, uh, San Francisco more exposure. But at the end of the day, I just think it's money.

• 1:09:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  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, it's a commerce system, you know? And so. You know, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of jobs around that that are being produced too. 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?

• 1:09:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  So it, it really is kind of a wild process.

• 1:09:53Tim Ferriss?

  No shortage of marks in that video.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, you know, and if you look back at that video, it, it, it's like San Francisco to me is one of the most unique driving cities in the world. And not only is it have some amazing driving situations like Russian Hill, uh, some of the twisty streets, all the elevation changes, all that. But it's also been immortalized by movies like Bullet.

• 1:10:17Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  You know, like Bullet wasn't filmed in Akron, Ohio. 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 were, 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, you know? And, and I'll tell you that like, I, 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.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  When you watch that video, there's a, 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 very big collaborative effort for us to, to do these things. And, 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, 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 long time friend of mine, you know? So it's, it's, it's such a great mix of friendships, creativity and hardworking people that make this happen.

• 1:11:42Tim Ferriss?

  If, if you're comfortable talking about it, just because I'm, I certainly sort of a burning question in my mind. Putting aside the, separating out the production costs, put, 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?

• 1:12:11Speaker 03

  The funny answer to that question is I ignore budgets.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  I get to focus on the creative stuff. You know, and that is the honest truth. I only deal with budgets when they seem, there seem to be overages. And most of that time is caused by me like, yes, I, 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 that there is always a marketing director that figured that into his budget. And, you know, we did, I think, five years worth of those videos with them. And then since then, uh, my agent and Hunnigan have dealt with, you know, working with

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  companies like Forza and Ford and Toyota to, to fund all these projects. And, you know, there's, there's a cost to doing it, you know?

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  And the more creative you are and the more extravagant you are, the more the cost is. But luckily, you know, we, we've had a great set of sponsors that really understand and see the value in this and have really kind of let us go wild and get these things done. The, the sky is not the limit. There are, uh, some very distinct, uh, budget restrictions, but you know, these have been big budget things. There's, there's, you know, movies that have sold in Hollywood that have smaller budgets than what we work with, you know? But it's, it's very cool to do this process and the, the, the creativity that goes into it all through the process of production, everything. It is on some of the highest level there is that with people that we work with in Hollywood.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  And it's really cool to be able to do that and have directors like Neil Blumkamp, 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, it's just been a really fun, wild ride and a really fun extension of not only my creativity as a, a marketing person, but also the creativity I'd love to do with the race car itself.

• 1:14:21Tim Ferriss?

  And at the same time, you know, when we were having, uh, Well, like I was meandering around the 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, you're saying that some of the, some of the, the most popular pics and so on that you've put up have in some cases just been from an iPhone, right, 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

• 1:15:02Tim Ferriss?

  and had Roman candles as you're going down through powder, what, what advice would you give to people who are hoping to create videos that get attention?

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  That's a tough question, um, but-

• 1:15:18Tim Ferriss?

  I love tough questions.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's a tough question, I feel like in, in general, like in marketing, in society, in whatever, uh, because today, like we were saying, t-shirts, yeah, it's easier to purchase a t-shirt, but how do you build a brand essence? Um, it's, it's the same kind of with a lot of equipment nowadays. It used to be so hard for, uh, you know, to get a really good photograph. Well, nowadays I can get a really good photograph with 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

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  photographers, artists, videographers, you know, all that stuff to produce the right content for all of our marketing, especially for DC.

• 1:16:13Tim Ferriss?

  You were some of the first guys to take high quality, like black and white shots of, 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, that's what I'd read, that you, you were some of the first people to really place an emphasis on that.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  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 connecting with the consumer in a different way and in a way that they wanted information. And when I say that, I, 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.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  And, and I, I think we're kind of lucky on, on, on my side that they create, the guys behind me, uh, 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? Makes total sense, yeah. And, and I think that that's why you see our stuff so passionately done because we genuinely love the stuff. Um, but back to that storytelling thing, you know, I, I, it was funny when we started, uh, just a random example that pops into my head, uh, we started making, uh, ads and doing a lot of marketing with motocross guys back in the late nineties with DC.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, we sponsored Jeff Ameg and Ryan Hughes and, 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 and that sort of thing. Well, we, we 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.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  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, it would look dramatically different than everything else in the magazine. But that's how we stood out 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, uh, 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.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  Uh, the director of photography that I use for like Jim Connaughton, he's a snowboarder. He doesn't know anything about cars, like he's, but he has a certain eye. His name's Pierre Wickberg. Uh, I've known him, blah, 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, Mountain Lab 1.5 about our research and developments facility that was my home here in Park City. Um, 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

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  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. And according to three weeks of Jim Connaughton being out there and 11 million views so far, apparently it's still successful. So we're pretty stoked about that.

• 1:20:37Tim Ferriss?

  So many different directions we could go. So many different questions I want to ask. But let, let me ask you about, uh, something that might seem mundane, but it's, I think it'll apply to a lot of people who are listening in some capacity.

• 1:20:54Tim Ferriss?

  And not just because they'd be involved with athletes, but I'd love to talk about the, 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 sort of key takeaways that if you were, let's say one of your kids starts a company, they're going to be sponsoring athletes?

• 1:21:37Tim Ferriss?

  What would you, are there any particular red flags or like warnings that you'd say, but you know, 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 at the macro or the micro that comes to mind about, given your experience, which is vast, how to do it the right way? Sponsoring athletes.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Um, that is a very vague and difficult question. Uh, you know, it all depends on what your ultimate goal is. Like, 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.

• 1:22:26Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, so, so just maybe I'll, 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, could be, could be a supplement. It could be an apparel brand. They want someone to wear their stuff, be featured in advertisements, be willing to be quoted as a testimonial. Uh, 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. Uh, 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.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like I said, it, it's, 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. Uh, 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. Um, and in, you know, 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, it, it's.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  It's a really difficult one, you know, and I I'm kind of amazed that the the expertise and the the understanding of value that say someone like my agent has because he has so many companies come to him from Ford, you know, the CBMD that that that say, hey, we want this and he's able to say, oh, well, the basic running value of that 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 the company's getting

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  their value and that the athlete's getting their um value out of it also. So it it really is like a difficult process. I I I actually don't deal with any of the companies that that I work with really anymore on the negotiating side like my agent does. All of it because I don't understand what, you know, 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. And like I that's something that's it's it's a it's a crazy world out there. But that that is marketing and advertising though. And and there are very particular values

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  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 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. Um, but you know, it what what, you know, a skateboard company pays

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  to put a logo on someone's T-shirt nowadays, it it really is something that that is quite.

• 1:26:00Speaker 03

  You know, a difficult answer to answer without an agent.

• 1:26:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this, this particular, which is, which is why I bring it up because there's a lot of information out there, 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 going to get into all the dollar figures, but it gives you a level of granularity, right? The, 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,

• 1:26:47Tim Ferriss?

  just to walk them through like the specific deal templates, right? Because I know that when I've done deals, you may, 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 you might, 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, it's one of those kind of black boxes. Do you, is your agent from one of the, the big sort of three-letter acronym, like WMECA, one of those guys, or UTAs?

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  Yes, WMG.

• 1:27:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's interesting to me precisely because it is so difficult, right? If you're, if you're just getting started, try to figure it out.

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I would say if you're a very small startup without much budget and you're, you don't really know where you're going, that could be very difficult. But if you are a bigger company, you know, that has money, that kind of understands the business and what they're trying to do, it makes a lot more sense, you know? And an agency like WMG that represents me, they also...

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  Help companies with marketing with actually making videos, commercials, social media posts, all that stuff. Yeah. So they're actually a full-service agency. Cause 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. Yeah. Because like an agency like WMG and my agent Steve, 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

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  those consumers, not only with the company's social media, but with the athlete's social media. Cause 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, to really reach what someone's trying to market towards. So it, 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 varying experience and very little money compared to like, you know, if a, 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?

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  That's where an agency like WMG can really help maximize that in a much bigger way nowadays. Yeah. And, and most all of them are doing that, that a lot, a lot of these agencies have really realized, hey, we need to be full service. Like this is a big world now and social media has made things much more dynamic than in the past. You know, cause when I started DC, it was like, oh, we need to make one skateboard ad 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, your brand messaging and your voice needs to be.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Very thought through, very well put together and done multiple times a day, which is much more difficult than when I started.

• 1:30:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. And just to put a button in the, in this kind of topic, 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 they'll be more than happy to take your money for, to give you a 101 education. It will not be cheap, but it'll, it'll cost you a few thousand dollars, you 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?

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  51.

• 1:31:03Tim Ferriss?

  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, what does that look like?

• 1:31:14Speaker 03

  Ah, 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 with a very good trainer. I also have a regular physical strength trainer. I've had some tears in my left shoulder, so I'm actually using a very good trainer right now that specializes in shoulder rehabilitation.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  So he's, he's actually been able to take me from not being able to do a push-up for two years to actually functioning really quite normally.

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  So I spend probably about four hours a week in the gym doing everything from, you know,

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  high output intervals to You know, basic weight training. Uh, 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, uh, to downhill mountain biking. Um, 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. Uh, I just love the cardio of it and it's a great way to get my dogs 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.

• 1:32:46Speaker 03

  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, the potential risk to injury and or death, uh, really keeps you sharp. So I, I enjoy getting out and, and doing that stuff as much as possible. But at the end of the day, like for what I need, the reaction stuff, like kickboxing, really being physical uh, in that sort of way is what I think helps benefit me the most when I get in the race car and go race.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  So I, I really enjoy, um, you know, those things that really keep me mentally sharp and hopefully keep me sort of young.

• 1:33:36Tim Ferriss?

  You've, uh, you've definitely had no, no shortage of injuries, right? I mean, you've had your fair share was, um, is there anything that you've stopped doing? Where certain types of exercise, uh, or certain types of driving where you've, you've taken it off the table for yourself as you've, as you've gotten older?

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  Um, two things, uh, 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.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  Or the other saying is with age comes a cage. But you know, I absolutely love it, but you know, it it 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. Um, you know, so I've quit doing that just because the risk, you know, 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.

• 1:34:43Speaker 03

  And the other thing is, uh, for because of the physical side of it is, uh, I used to do, you know, I used to go out and run with my dogs. I used to play racquetball. Uh, 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 very good doctor. And he's

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  like, ah, I could fix that for you. It would be six months of pain and rehabilitation. It's like, do you make money right playing racquetball? And I'm like, nope. He's like, he's like, then just quit doing that, you know? So I had to quit playing racquetball. And not, I like racquetball, but I liked the mental and physical challenge of it. Because you're having to predict where the ball's going, having to turn, rotate, move, react. Like, I really love that training to make me quick to be in the car. And I just, I just had to give it up.

• 1:35:57Tim Ferriss?

  Have you had to modify how you do your kickboxing training because of the ankle or other injuries?

• 1:36:02Speaker 03

  Uh, no, because of the, 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 own mistake, but other than that, it doesn't really bother me whatsoever. And even because I do need some wrist strength and forearm strength. I actually work with a lighter glove, like a, and like a, it's not a real MMA glove. 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.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:36:52Tim Ferriss?

  Not kickboxing.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  Not, no, dirt bike, dirt bike and snowboarding. But they, they seem very strong now and just this process of not wrapping and doing this pad work keeps them even stronger.

• 1:37:07Tim Ferriss?

  We're gonna wrap up in just a little bit, but so to speak, but I wanted to ask you, and I ask a lot of my guests this because it's, 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, to humanize things a bit is, 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 a period of time that, that you could tell us about?

• 1:37:42Speaker 03

  Um, I, I would say, uh, you know, one, one part of, 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 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.

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  And those are the, 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 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,

• 1:39:11Speaker 03

  sitting in a room full of, you know, attorneys in suits and I'm sitting there in a pair of, you know, DC skate shoes and a t-shirt, you know, and having to make these decisions that are way, to me, would have been way beyond my experience level. But I dug down and 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, I'm sorry that those aren't very specific, but you know, for a company like what we had, you know, there were plenty of times that we hired athletes and they didn't work out,

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  or we made a particular shoe and like, oh, the consumer just didn't want that, you know. 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, he didn't work out. Damn it, we tried, we really liked this guy, but he just didn't perform. We gotta move on, you know, 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 like, for me, as a marketing guy... You know, 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.

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  We still had to say, no, this is the right way to go. We gotta let this guy go. He doesn't get what we're trying to do. 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 gotta 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 twenties and early thirties, you know? That's when I still drank a lot.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  It's just a different mentality, you know, than I have today. But it was a great learning experience and I came out better at the other end.

• 1:41:15Tim Ferriss?

  And so you no longer, you no longer drink?

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  No, I still drink, just not at that same level.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  I don't quite have the same, uh, uh, how would you say? Stamina to wake up the next morning and do, do things at the same level every day. It just affects me more nowadays.

• 1:41:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I'll ask some, a couple of light questions. Favorite drink? So what is your favorite drink?

• 1:41:41Speaker 03

  Wow, like favorite alcoholic drink?

• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

  Favorite alcoholic drink?

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:41:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:42:07Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds great.

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  But then year round, I actually really like, uh, good sipping tequila, like classe azul. Something like that, just over some ice. Just amazing.

• 1:42:18Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a default breakfast these days or a favorite breakfast?

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Um, I, I, 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 uh mix that goes into it with flaxseed, chia seed, that sort of thing.

• 1:43:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, hemp protein.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, called a vitality mix. And uh, so I drink that 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. Uh, and that, that to me is one of those little life hacks that, you know, that people have come up with it. It's not, it's kind of an unusual thing, but man, if you can get on it, it really works.

• 1:43:25Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any wind down or pre-bed rituals, anything you do to start shutting down before you go to, go to sleep?

• 1:43:33Speaker 03

  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. It just really sleep. 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 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

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  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 a 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.

• 1:44:36Tim Ferriss?

  And get the exercise. That's, that's a huge, huge component.

• 1:44:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, 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 it, it, your mental abilities to actually coincide with your physical abilities.

• 1:45:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  And if you put crap into yourself, you're going to get a crap output.

• 1:45:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  You know, and so I, I'm a firm believer in, you know, good exercise, you know, there, there's a, you gotta take care of yourself really well physically to really expect a high output mentally.

• 1:45:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, gotta protect the asset. Last one or two questions here. If you could put a message or a quote or a word, non-commercial, and 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?

• 1:45:40Speaker 03

  Don't be an asshole?

• 1:45:41Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's acceptable. That's perfectly acceptable.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  Well, the funny thing is I say that because I feel like, like, social media is just, like, and the internet's made it so that you're not talking to people anymore. It's so easy to be rude, you know, and that's one thing I really impart, you know, in my kids that like, you gotta look at people in their face and make a statement, you know? 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, and I just feel like, like, the human nature of, of us as beings on this earth, we gotta treat everybody in a, a good and fair way. And that, if we all did that, I, I think the planet would be a lot better. But, you know, I, so that, that's, that's a basic,

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  very basic thing. But on top of that, though, I, I think we're here. You know, we're not here for a long time, but let's have a good time. Let's, 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 gotta 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 wanna be creative. I wanna be fun. I wanna, I wanna do things the best way I possibly can. And I wanna be proud of whatever I do. There's, I, everything in life, if it comes to like, you know, from the simplest thing to the biggest thing, I wanna be proud of what it is and, and stake my claim

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  that's mine and that's how I do it.

• 1:47:15Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here.

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  Did that, did I?

• 1:47:16Tim Ferriss?

  That answers it.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  Shit, that was a long billboard.

• 1:47:19Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's.

• 1:47:22Tim Ferriss?

  Get up a sequence. You get up 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 is really fun. It was also fun to be in your backyard and, 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? Uh, I, I certainly they can say hello. They have Instagram at Kblock43. Also Kblock43 on Twitter, Facebook, Ken Block Racing, hooniganracing.com. Uh, are there any particular things that you're creating, working on, or have created that you'd like people to take a look at?

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  Well, Gymkhana 10, the 10th installment of this video series, uh, just came out recently. It's on YouTube. Um, 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. Uh, that's on Amazon Prime right now. Uh, both of them are very good. It's weird that we've made a documentary about me and what I do, but, uh, I think it's very cool. And, 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, it's a bit different than what you, what else you see out there because.

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  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, you know, documentary series, at the end, you actually get a prize. You actually get to see the end result of what we did. You know, 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

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  that, that at the end, you actually get to see what we spent two years making, you know, which I think was a really cool and innovative on Amazon's part to hire us to do all this. And it was fun for us to take, you know, this experience of making these viral videos and then tell that whole story and show how it all comes to life. So yeah, 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, you know, various car builds around the world and doing

• 1:50:14Speaker 03

  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 grown a lot because we've been able to do very creative and fun projects.

• 1:50:27Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we could talk, I'm sure we could talk for many more hours. We didn't get a chance to talk about Hemoni Barraco, or Nobu, or the UFC, Jim 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. So you can find all those links at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Ken's name and it'll pop right up. Ken, thanks again for taking the time.

• 1:50:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:51:13Tim Ferriss?

  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 projects in seemingly distinct worlds. It's been, 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.

• 1:51:34Speaker 03

  Well, thank you very much for having me.

• 1:51:36Tim Ferriss?

  All right, guys. Until next time. Thanks for listening.

• 1:51:40Tim Ferriss?

  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 before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email 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. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends,

• 1:52:20Tim Ferriss?

  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 fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.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 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

• 1:53:05Tim Ferriss?

  of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick or to help mitigate the likelihood of getting sick. I take it in the morning to ensure optimal performance and overall it covers my bases if I can't get what I need from whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. And if you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they're offering a free 20-count Travel pack for first time users. I nearly always travel with at least three or four of these one dose bags. In other words, if you buy Athletic Greens as a first time buyer, you now get, for a limited time, an extra $79 in free product. So check out the details at athleticgreens.com/tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim for your free travel pack with any purchase.

• 1:53:49Tim Ferriss?

  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 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.

• 1:54:32Tim Ferriss?

  You have access to a very diverse group of people, all searching for things they need to grow professionally. That is explicitly the purpose of LinkedIn. And four out of five users on LinkedIn are decision-makers at their companies. So you can build relationships that really matter, that can drive your business objectives forward, that can also have a high LTV, lifetime value. LinkedIn has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to, among other things, their job title, company name, industry, et cetera. This is important because better targeting equals a message that your customers actually care about. And it also means your advertising is more effective and cost-effective.

• 1:55:15Tim Ferriss?

  So why spray and pray with your marketing dollars when you can be surgical? It just makes sense. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com/tfs. That stands for Tim Ferriss Show. So that is linkedin.com/tfs. Check it out. That's where you can go to get your free $100 ad credit. LinkedIn.com/tfs. Terms and conditions apply.