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That is a different approach to that ledge. Congratulations, my friend. Oh. Oh, that was... Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. This is Overland Weekly, episode number 21. My name is Davie. I am your host. And I am joined tonight by a gentleman that if you have spent any time watching the off-road YouTube YouTube scene you should recognize from 24 Hell and Back, from Rain of Rocks, and most recently, the Hell and Back Adventure series from the Flex Rocks and Rollover channel, Mr. Marvin Stamwell. Marvin, welcome to the show. Beautiful intro. Thankthank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Well, I had to start since you've got flex, rocks, and rollovers in the name, and this wasn't quite a rollover, it's a flop. But this was my buddy Mike, just a a couple of months back at Hawk Pride, he thought he was going to try a new line on this little ledge, and it didn't work out for him. Luckily, it looks like a pretty continuous info. Luckily, he stopped right there. Oh, Yeah, a little more momentum right there, and it could have gone end-to-end. Yeah, it could have gotten different. Well, I text him before we started recording. I said, Mike, do you want to issue a formal statement? Because I'm going to start the show with that. And he said, yes. He said, here is my statement. Bitch, I'm from Texas. End of statement. So there you go. When's the last time you flopped one, Marvin? Myself, honestly, I mean, I rolled my Jeep two years, it was almost two years ago when I put the Jeepster on its lid. Then my dad's Jeep shortly after, my dad's YJ, I rolled pretty heavily also. It should be, it's almost two years ago at this point. I had one year there where there was a lot of rollovers and it was my Jeep and my dad's Jeep back to back. But ever I think I've been pretty good. Not that I can remember, at least. No, nothing. If it happened, you don't remember it, so it doesn't count. No, yeah, exactly. No. I mean, in the Toyota or other vehicles, we don't even care. We just lay them over on the side and laugh about it. Well, before we jump into the interview here, I've got one more bit of housekeeping. I want to play this clip because we've got this event coming up here in a few months at Wind Rock. So let me queue this one up. 34 years ago, a few trucks rolled into the Smoky Mountains, and a tradition was born. They said it wouldn't last. They said the club would fade, but year after year, we came back. More trails, more challenges, more memories. The rigs got bigger, the trails got wilder, and the G-Smitter family kept growing. Today, this isn't just an event. It's a legacy, a place where stories are told, friendships are forged, and off-road history is made. Now, in 2025, we're making history again. The biggest G-Smitter yet. More trucks, more trails, more adventure. Mark your calendars. Registration opens March first. All right, so I may be slightly biased because I did volunteer to chair the event this year. But as my buddy Kyle says, This is the best shit show this side of the Mississippi, and this will be the 34th year of it, and we hope to uphold that reputation. But on a serious note, it's a great event. We raise a lot of money for some veterans and some very important causes. We expect 300 plus trucks. It is a Toyota event, but all are welcome to register. So if you got friends with a Jeep or a Nissan, bring them on. What is it called again? Being heckled Say that again, Martin. What's the name of the event again? The event is called the Great Smoky Mountain Trail ride. That's what it is. But it's a brief as GSMTR, which has come to be known as G-Smitter. Trail ride. I'll make a note. I have somebody reach out to me already. It might have been you. I don't know. Somebody reach out to me about it on Instagram to bring the Toyota out for it. I think we did. Yeah, I messaged that before. I think that's something I have on my calendar I'm trying to make work. I would love to. Since I've had the Toyota, I didn't really have a chance to branch out and attend a couple of Toyota rides. I really want to. I want to see something new for us. At this point, it would be awesome to just to experience some new events, meet some new people, and be around in a new rig. Absolutely. Well, there's not much Toyota left in that truck, but we'll talk about that in a minute. I don't know what you mean. All right, Marvin, you have talked on your channel and elsewhere before about your journey to the States and getting the off-road bug once you got over here. But if I understand correctly, it started even earlier. Did you have a relative that had a Jeep shop when you were younger that you spent some time working at? Yes and no. But that's not where it started. The off-road passion started back in Germany with my dad. My dad bought a YJ when I was born, had land rovers before I was there. That's where it started off-road clubs in Germany and then branched over here once he moved over here when I was 12 years old or something. But then also on a separate note, we had a very dear family friend that was originally from Germany as well, but made the move to the United States in the early '90s at some point and opened a Jeep shop here, or a Jeep business, here or a Jeep business here in Atlanta. That's why Atlanta was our address and how we got, because we knew somebody here that a good friend that helped us back in the days to get established over here and to catch some roots. So definitely. And he had a Jeep, and now he still has a Jeep shop in Atlanta. A pretty successful Jeep shop. 4tec Custom Jeeps. Big shout out to Andreas. Awesome. All right, that makes sense. So you made the journey over, and then... But you're... Let me make sure I've got the story right, because you were involved in a few different things before your ventures that we know today. So you had a You and your father had Axel Off-Road that I guess has now become Axel Helmets, and there was some changes. He still called Axel Off-Road, but he was focusing more on Helmets. Back when we did it together, Helmets were always the front runner, the main product, but I also put a lot of effort into apparel. So it was apparel and gear. Now, he has just boiled it down to mainly the helmets as of right now. He's doing great with it. But yeah, business is still around. In the meantime, in between there for about six years, we ran, operated a really big off-road show that traveled to the United States with the biggest events we had in Texas at the Texas Motor Speedway and in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Expo Center for several years in a row. Every year, we had a little show circus through the country, but those were the biggest stops we had every year was Texas and Kentucky, and almost 20,000 people in attendance on the weekends, sometimes even more. Crazy, crazy, even crazy times. But that was the biggest project I've ever had to handle over six years, pretty much up until COVID is pretty much as long as we pulled through with it. So were these like expos before expos and all the overlanding buzz was a thing or what? I don't know. I don't want to say it was before expo. It was, I don't know, in my eyes, still until today, the only true new off-road expo. I love that. They're truly about off-roading, especially the one in Kentucky, man. I'm telling you, we had ultra four race exhibitions outside rock bouncer, shootouts, and backflip musicians, and we build a really, really gnarly obstacle course in the back of the Expo Center that people could, A, ride on, but also see exhibitions from the top drivers in all kinds of different off-road categories, put on a show several times a day there. It was just a good time. Texas was obviously a little bit more truck-oriented, but still had that core element of off-roading. Then we had a couple of other smaller shows throughout the country with different focuses. But usually, it was all about off-roading. No I'm proud of. It was UTV, Rock Crawler, Rock Bouncer, Overlander, everybody with the same mindset and bug in their head attended those shows. They were freaking awesome. It was a big blast. You can still check it out on YouTube. If you type in Unlimited Off-Road Expo or Unlimited Off-Road Show, Kentucky or Off-Road. Probably if you type that in, you should already find everything you want to see. It's definitely action-packed. The videos, the highlight compilations we did every year after those shows were always well reviewed. They were always just always a blast to watch. There's some cool stuff, some cool off-road history for sure. Got you. I'm going to have to go back and check those out. You're doing those and obviously doing Matt, you're meeting a lot of people, you're meeting a lot of companies, a lot of manufacturers, all that thing. And is that what morphed into your media business to zero to 60 and all of that thing? You got that right Yeah, good research. That's pretty much... That was COVID hit. For me, I got burned out from the shows. We were a small team, put a lot of work on our plates, and were very weather dependent at the end of the day. At a certain point, I had to I go my own ways. My background is marketing. Then using the knowledge and the contacts that I got from the shows to do some side work for some of these companies and get into working on the other side of the table for the first time and working for these companies and marketing and media. I did that. It was fairly successful for a good while. That was actually what was ended appropriately one day or another when COVID really hit and big company starts spending marketing dollars. Then at that moment, I already had a YouTube channel, but really only for fun. There was no intention to ever make it a priority, really. I wanted to monetize it and make it sound. Well, I mean, monetize it from a true business. Correct. It wasn't supposed to be my main business for a long time. It was always a dream one day, but I had, what, 6,000 subscribers when I went full-time? I do not recommend this to anybody, but it was because of COVID and all of a sudden marketing budgets were gone and customers put everything on ice and I had to act. That was the only other thing that I had going on and I was passionate about It was just shooting. Dude, just putting everything on one card pretty much and had to make it work. You had a Facebook page for Flex Rocks and Rollovers. That always was, correct. Flex Rocks and Rollovers, for years already, it has been a Facebook and Instagram page where I shared viral off-road content, personal weekend adventure, stuff that I experienced, stuff from my friends. I don't know. I think The social media 1. 0, the first iteration of social media, that was a normal thing on the internet that you had pages out there that would just share niche-specific content, not even original content for the most part. You grab everything from around the world and share it. That was a standard procedure for social media back in the days if you wanted to have content like that. Then eventually, I wanted to focus more on my own content, and that led into a YouTube channel. And then COVID forced me to take the YouTube series channel a lot more serious than I was planning on a lot sooner, which I'm thankful for. I mean, it was the best possible scenario at the end of the day, something that I really, really enjoy doing that I was doing. What I'm doing now is exactly what I was doing before that. I just now I'm filming it. The Jeep that I have that everybody knows, that was never a YouTube build. That was not something I built on or for YouTube. I had that Jeep before I started filming, and I was doing these adventures that I'm doing. That's the funniest thing, honestly. My latest favorite version of flex, rocks, and rollovers, which is what we have going on right now and the content we do right now with these multi-day adventures and wheeling, camping, wheeling, living out of your rig, depending on with the things that you bring, being dependent on that, and just that style of wheeling, that's how I started. Then I boiled it down for YouTube thinking, Oh, no, we just trailer our Jeeps to the hardest obstacles we can find and try to conquer them. If things hit the fan, then we just load up a broken Jeep and fix and go again next time. That honestly gets old after a while. Now returning back to my roots of camping and wheeling and living out on my Jeep and only going as hard as I feel comfortable with if I want to proceed for another three days, then that is where we're at right now and we're having the most fun with, and it seems to be what people seem to enjoy the most because the videos have been successful. I don't know, just for us, the vibe we have between Will and I and our camera guys and the guys that edit the videos behind the scenes, everybody just is loving what we're currently doing. So I'm pumped. Well, as a viewer, I'm loving it, and it's different in a good way than a lot of what is out there. There's a lot of... I mean, it's a business, and there's a lot of copy paste repeat that goes on on YouTube in any niche, whether it's off road or otherwise. But I believe you were talking about your marketing background, and you spent some time in the music business, I know as well. And so that's all about an artist trying to break through from the thousand other artists that are doing the same thing. Do you think you've found your sweet spot now? You've got your single going up the charts, if you will? I hope so. I just got off the phone talking one of my guys about that, that now for the first time, I feel like I can calculate and build the business in my head further because I have a baseline to work with. For years, I wasn't At least for myself, I didn't have that baseline because I was experimenting for such a long time with where's my home with videos? 24 Hellenback is my dearest project, what I I put the most work in, but it is such a huge undertaking. I cannot produce 24 Helenbacks 12 months out of the year. That doesn't work. It would also kill the format, in my opinion. If you flood the market with that stuff, it eventually gets all too. So it's not sustainable. Talk about that, Marvin, about Helenbacks, specifically, and the behind the scenes, if you will, because not just the planning and the logistics, but are you personally traveling to to scout these locations ahead of time? And I would assume if that's the case, that you spend time and money to go to places and then say, it's not quite there. A hundred %. Yes. And I have. I luckily last year I had a short shot the year before that. The Utah one took me the longest to find. I I mean, I traveled into far remote areas and then had to say, sorry, but it's just not it, and then move on and go to the next place. So that one, and I mean, it was super worth it at the end. It was absolutely perfect, best possible, but sometimes it just takes a while. Every year I'm going through that. My own standards get higher and higher because for Helen back, dude, the scenery and the terrain and the obstacles set the stage for everything. Everything. If it's a lame trail or it looks like something you've seen before or something you've hit before as a driver, man, I don't know, it takes the craziness out of it. If you hit something and everybody is hysteric about Where are we? What is this? We're never going to make it out of here. That atmosphere just brings the camaraderie out of it and just a good vibe. I don't know. It's in my own... It's just my standard for myself that I want to top every year in a certain way. I don't think we need to go any harder than what we've done. We definitely found our limits when it comes to how much harder can a trail be. But then the challenge is keeping that level up and finding a good contrast and scenery for next year that is just as exciting again. Or maybe changing something in the concept. Why standing still? On one side, I'm a huge fan of, Don't I'll fix it if it's not broken, but on the other side, I'm a fan of evolving, bringing a new element into it or just slight changes here and there to keep it interesting. We will see. But that is all connected with trial and error. It 100% is. We have some good ideas and we're listening to what everybody's saying in the comments, and there's a pretty clear trend of what people want to see. I just My experience have told me that it sounds really good on paper, but in practice, it's really hard to make entertaining. I see. That's my current. We can speak openly. A lot of people want to see a small tire, 37s max, or 35s max, 24 Helen Bank, budget beaters and whatnot, which I'm a huge fan of, especially now with the vehicles that we're currently driving and we've currently been creating content with. I'd love to go down that route, but also because I'm currently I've been doing it and I've been doing it for a long time before, even YouTube, I tell you, it'll be 24 hours of wrenching and standing still because those damn things break up absolutely everything, and it's just more of a wrench fest, and it's very painful. The massive obstacles you are used to from watching 24Helen back, they look crazy on camera, but let me tell you, they look a thousand times worse in person. Now, if you scale this to an obstacle that's somewhat doable on 37s, telling you for you guys on video, it will look like we're having a field trip on a, I don't know, dirt road behind the house. It doesn't look like anything. To make that look entertaining, to make medium obstacles look entertaining is hard, plus the problem of that small vehicles, if people have the same expectations to what they currently have to a 24 going back, and that is crazy driving and pushing the limits, you can't do that on a day not 30. That's just not happy. Well, sure. It's funny you say that because I literally I had a group message with some of the guys from Heart of the South, which is a Land Cruiser Club out of Huntsville, Alabama. Before I was filming this with you, and that's exactly what they said is we need this this every man's, this 37-inch, 24-hour style format, which that conversation evolved into, well, maybe we just need to go live at Hawk Pride for 24 hours and do it ourselves. And maybe that's... We didn't think about it from a production angle. You have to think about this business perspective, this production- You have to make it where people want to watch it. I want to make things that people want to watch. And is it entertaining to watch a bunch of rigs on 35, and break over blue trails. As mean as that sounds, I love them to death. I just don't know if that is... I don't know. But on the other side, you don't know if you don't try. Maybe there's the challenge for us to make that because there is certain terrain we learned in our recent adventures that are very extreme and you can really drive a small rig very hard on, as long as there's not a whole lot of dry rock involved. Dry rock is really breaks a small stark rig. If you keep the surface you're driving on slick and somewhat muddy and dirt hills and winding mud holes and whatnot stuff that is really challenging still, and you need a lot of technical driving and throttle at the right moment, but it's not as hard on your equipment than a rock crawling course. Either way, that's just all the things that go on in my brain about the future of 24 Halleemberg. You're very welcome. What else What do people not know? Are there aspects of the company, like you said, having to think about this production and what it looks like in person versus what it looks like on TV and if it's going to get clicks? Are there things that you have to think about that people don't realize? No, man. Honestly, this makes it honestly sound different than the reality is, because the reality is that there's things that we really want to do, and we're still going to do them, obviously, because we're now feeding several families of this business that we need to make sure that we're like, Hey, we have to keep the business in mind, what we're already doing. The 99 % of what we're doing are things that we just really want to do. And then we have to argument with ourselves so long until we can make it sound like a smart business move to the world. You know what I mean? That's where we're at. That's honestly a little bit more of the truth than it actually is. We do the things we to do. And if we can sweet talk ourselves into why this really makes sense for the business, then even better. Strategic planning. Okay. All right, let's talk about this year's event. I mean, You've said on multiple years, this is the most extreme yet. This is this is the craziest yet. But I'm telling you and and I'm biased, I'm East Coast biased, but this was the craziest shit you all have ever done. I agree in a different way than before. But it also being there and coming out of the events, after the 24 hours are over, the feeling you have every year is different. You have a complete different journey through these 24 hours, depending on the terrain, the group, how you vehicle performed or how you performed. There's so much that goes into this, and there's such a roller coaster of emotions and feelings and everything, man. It is 24. Halenbeck is, and I say that every time, but there's a trip of a lifetime every single time. It is so unique and so extreme. People don't realize that, and people always want to decredit it by, Oh, it's just a bunch of YouTubers. It's just a bunch of YouTubers up until they get to go on the trip. We've had some of the realest of the real participate in the 24Helen bag and be part of it, even sometimes just in the passenger seat, and I think everybody that has gone through it can vouch for it, that it is the most brutal thing out there, that there is nothing that even cuts a close second to what you're going through during those 24 hours, even though it is a media production. Which honestly feeds right into that because the media production makes everything so freaking slow. That time, sometimes you're either on the verge of a nervous breakdown because of so much adrenaline or you're just anxious because you're sitting there waiting because everything takes so freaking ever. That really, it adds to it.

The frustration at 4: 26:53

00 AM when you're just sitting there waiting, it totally adds to it. You can see that in some of the participants, especially as the night wears on, which is good. Like you said, it's real and it's raw. Correct.

Everybody hates me at 4: 27:10

00 AM. People that have never done this and are around it for the first time, they definitely have a different tone on their voice when they talk to me or

to anybody in the media team at 4: 27:24

00 AM.

Then once 6: 27:26

00 AM rolls around, it's all gone and forgotten again. But there's always that couple of hours in the night where certain people are just like, Bro, what the hell? Hey, that happens amongst the best friends on trail rides, even when there's no cameras involved. It's great. It's the realest thing ever. We don't polish any of it. You see it the way it happens. Well, it's one thing to take a rig like yours, like your Jeep, and basically say, We're just going to go out and run buggy trails. That's a challenge in itself. Like you said, there's a lot of channels that do that. And you can do the same thing. You can take an IFS rig, something like mine on 35s, and say, hey, we're going to go put it on a trail that should only be solid axles and 38s, and it'll be a different challenge. But you have an obstacle in this year's event that is just a wall. It is a freaking wall It was an obstacle on the trail at the end of the day. I don't know, man. To finish you, sorry to interrupt you there. We had a winch challenge in this year's 20 for Helen come back. We had an obstacle that was 1,000% undrivable, and therefore, that made it a million times more appealing that you had to winch it because we weren't telling you to winch something. We were like, Hey, what's the point? You were winching this, and it was safe, the most adrenaline you had all night, but you're hanging off a freaking winch cable. You just conquered some of the steepest hills that you've ever driven, eventually with a support by a winch that already felt awful. Then right after midnight, you pull up to this 40-something-foot waterfall that's 90 degrees, and the trail does not continue. But like I said, I went to this place many times before Helen back actually started. Eventually, the owner of the property told, We got to this point. I was like, Yeah, this is where it ends. This is where we turn around and drive back down it. I was like, What do you mean drive back down That's terrible for us. A, from a production side in a video, Sorry, guys, you just beat the snot out of your equipment. We're going to turn back around, drive this back down. What? That's super frustrating. If we wouldn't do this, we would cut out this epic Hot Dog Hill and all that stuff. We would lose all of these obstacles. What's ahead of? What is if you make it up there and winch up it? I don't know. Nobody has ever been up there. We met up a separate time to hike that entire upper section, and the property owner took a day with his buddies to come out with a chainsaw and clear it out just a little bit so we can ride it. Then the very first time we put tires on any of this was during filming of 24 Hormel. That was never pre-run. We never had a vehicle up there beforehand. We never winched a vehicle up the waterfall before the video started. None of that. So that was all a first. Now, did you pre-run to rig it? Did you have rigging up at the top already before the ride started? Not before the ride started. No. Okay. Because that was a lot of rigging, man. We had so many hardcore obstacles leading up walking distance to the hardcore winch walk that the guys from war and Sergio and Brad that were with us, they had plenty of time to go up there and break this up in the meantime by waiting for other things to move on. You can walk around. The The problem is that it was like a ball that the waterfall was in. But eventually, you can walk all the way around. You're literally on all fours climbing up dirt hills and holding onto trees to climb around it, but you can climb around it. Is what they ended up doing just to get to the top to put the rigging up. Even the rigging on that was... We're probably going to release a separate video at some point. I would love to see that. Going into that a little bit more detailed and how we set that up up there. Even Even the safety rigs, we had two different safety rigs up there that had to change in the middle of it because they were holding the rigs on the safety line and was just running winches all night long, burning alternators. That was a fun one, man. But it was, again, at the beginning, nobody really understood and was not really hating about it, but just thought it was unnecessary up until they were in it and they were like, Dude, this is the most epic thing I've ever done. I've never had that. You never feel like that. It was awesome. It had a meaning. We wanted to continue because the trail actually really unfolded afterwards and was really drivable. We just had this massive waterfall in our way. We all got winches in front of the rigs. Like Ricky B said, I spend way too much time overseas. I've seen what people do in race scenarios with winches, and we're not even touching the surface of what these winches are capable of. Let's use them how they are intended, and nobody needs to worry about anything ripping or breaking off. They can handle way more than what we throw at them. Well, it was fascinating. It reminded me of an old-school rope elevator as the vehicles were going out. It felt like it. You felt like a fish on a fishing pole. You were literally just dangling off the winged line. There was a few spots in that climb where the rear tires didn't have contact, and you can feel the whole thing swivel to one side. That's wild. Yeah. Marvin, talk to me about the... You've come up with this wild card entry system. Obviously, you've got sponsors, you've got some returning people, but you always have new faces in the mix as well. How does that work? What are you looking for when people submit to that wild card system? It really depends, man. Honestly, a good character is the most important thing, somebody that's good on camera in either way, you don't have to be the loudest, craziest guy in the group, but it's just somebody that is comfortable with the camera and is a good character and a unique vehicle of any kind, which that is not always... You never know. It might be a super just another Jeep, but the way they did it is really cool and it's really a good contrast to the rest. As stupid as it sounds, I even start looking at colors, colors of the vehicle. It's not a big breaking point. It's just another little factor because at the end of the day, I've learned, and I still do, I still invite people that have terrible colors for what we're doing. But when you think of a moment that's a thumbnail worthy, the absolute highlight moment of the day, and you are shooting in every and the rig that's doing something is tan, you can't make a good... It just doesn't work. Everything blends in. You can't make a good picture out of that because the vehicle blends in with its environment so well that it doesn't pop. Is That's interesting. Is it a make it or break it point? No. It's just something that I've had a few times now where I'm like, Dude, I would have a photo of a lifetime. If that freaking vehicle would just have any other color, then whatever it's got that blends in perfectly with the background, where you can't use an entire shot for that. Is it a make it or break it thing? No. It's just something that, like I said, there's a million different factors. Then obviously, the biggest factor is, who do I already have invited? Like you said, there are certain people that are always part of it. There's somebody like a wild card or people that just get invited to it. Once I have my must haves done, which I usually have pretty fast, I have a must have list done, then I see how I can fill it in to diversify it a little bit. Got you. 90% of the time, it always comes different the week before. I never plan on having an exclusive Jeep-only Helen back. It usually happens that I had three other vehicles, but those are the three that canceled last minute, and the only people that could fill the spots happened to drive Jeeps. That happened probably more, at least two or three times already, where we went from a good diverse group to a almost exclusively Jeep because people canceled last minute in exactly the rigs that I was counting for for some diversity. Then you have a thousand comments about how you only had Jeeps in the event. Correct. But on the other side, you can You can have a thousand wild card entries. If somebody cancels on you three days before the event, trust me, those wild card, they have plans. And especially, not this year, but a lot of times we shoot from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday because we need an empty park, depending on where we are. Then good luck finding a replacement to go real Monday morning to Wednesday morning. Yeah, people have work and life, and you can't just... Sometimes you I try to improvise last minute, and it is what it is. But I usually try to diversify as good as possible to get some... This year, at least, we had the majority of it was G, but you at least had a rock bouncer, a rock Crawler, a regular trail Jeep, down to an absolutely street legal vehicle on 37s and Dana 44 front Axel. You had that on the same trail with a 800 horsepower rock bouncer. Yeah, that was wow. I thought that That was my take for this year, if I could bring some... And then you had a real steer rock Crawler on red labels, and it was just... That was my nerdy way of diversifying it this year. For those first timers, first time doing a Helen back, is there a common mistake, if you will, that you see folks make? Do they come out too strong out of the gate trying to show off? No. I mean, the The wild card, the two wild cards we've had so far, last year's and the year before, were absolutely top runners, absolutely the underdogs, basically, of the Helen backs every single time, did a phenomenal job. But no, honestly, first time are mistakes. The biggest mistake is to sit down when you're tired. There you go. Even seasoned Helen back veterans do that mistake at a certain point when you're really tired and you want to just sit down for a second, sit in your seat and lay back. It's not even about getting a pink helmet because you're falling asleep. The problem is once you fell asleep once, dude, you just want to sleep. Then you broke the seal of being miserable. You have to fight that being When you get tired, fight it by helping out the media team or spotting somebody, running winch cable. There's always something to do. Just got to work through that for a minute and force yourself to not sit down and you'll be just fine. In my experience, once you start slowing down, sitting down, calming down, and closing your eyes for a second, after that, you're ruining it for your sofa the next couple of hours because you'll be miserable. I can see that. All right. You talked a few minutes ago that you cannot, physically, if you wanted to, you can't produce a 24 Helen back every month. It's not possible. I'm assuming that- Maybe, but I don't want to burn it out either. For me, what I'm doing now with Helen back adventures and a new format we're about to launch and the international travels, that is for me a perfect round package at the end. Once a year, you get your 24-hour hardest trails we can mind throughout the year, you get entertained with same video quality, same storyline quality. But we tame it down one notch from the trail craziness, but then add the craziness of having to in about a year rig for three or five days. Helen back adventures is just as crazy as 2024 Helen back, but in different ways. It's a different crazy. That's what I was going to say. Man, your boy Will always seems to get himself in the middle of it. Always something. Yeah. He is great. It's been so much fun for me also to share all this with a really dear friend that I've had for a long time. That's awesome. Doing these trips with together is an absolute blast. We're having a really good time. We have a lot of things in the pipeline right now that are getting edited. We have a little bit of some rearrangements to do within the company right now, getting some new help with editing and whatnot. Things are a little bit on the back burner right now. We are sitting on a lot of really good content that is just waiting to get out of the editing room, which we're working on it. Everything is under control. We all got it. But I can just tell you guys, we have some really cool stuff coming. I'm super excited to launch and even better plans for the future. So this year is going to be nuts. We definitely want to make it our goal this year to double up on content from what we had last year. We've been going through a phase of reinventing ourselves to a certain extent from weekly releases and rushing that next 20-minute video. Oh, man, it's Wednesday already. We need a video for Sunday. Better go shoot something. We've done that. We did that for four years and killed ourselves over it. It was an awesome time. I think we had to go to that school to get where we are now. But now I think we learned so much that we know what we want to do and what people want to see from us. I think the content we are now putting out is exactly what we want to do. Now we just got to figure out how to do more of it. That's really where we are right now. We finally found the things we want to do, the formats that we're pumped to produce and that that we feel 100 %. Now we just need to, okay, how do we duplicate this and bring on more? That's where we're currently at, and we're very close to having a solution to all of it. We've talked about the Jeep, and I think most people are familiar with your Jeepster. But tell me the story, if you don't mind, I'm sure you've told it a few times on sushi, on this trip, this wild trip from Seattle to Atlanta in this first-gen Toyota pickup. You had several adventures along the way with that. What was the worst part of that trip? Oh, man, the worst part of the trip? Dude, there was so much Being in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, in the high desert, in a snow blizzard, where my my windshield vipers quit working, so I had to pull over in a rest barrier to pour fluid on my windshield and a Ranex, trying to keep things from sticking to my windshield because I had no more windshield vipers. It was snowing super hard and it was in the middle of nowhere and then got back on the ramp and it was barely accelerating. As soon as I got onto the interstate, I spun out into the 360 in the middle of the lane and caught myself again driving in the same direction I needed to but just had a whole 360 driving out of it right after having a shock because I couldn't see and my winged papers wouldn't work. It was just like one thing after another, all in this freaking blizzard. Was there a point right there that you were like, did you ever think, no, this isn't worth it. It's not worth the content. It wasn't even on camera. The big lesson I learned from that trip, which is really dumb if you ask me, that also shows how we make our videos because I wanted to do this and then try to make it work for a video. You know what I mean? I learned right there doing this by yourself. I didn't have anybody with me. There was nobody in the passenger seat. I can't film when things are happening. I can only film the boring parts. When things are happening, I'm usually busy. Yeah, right. Them. I learned that the hard way on that trip, that a lot of good story was lost because I was busy executing. I couldn't film and execute at the same time if you're driving on public roads or whatever. That was the one thing that I regreted, was like, Man, I went through all these awesome... I had so much more cool story that I couldn't tell because of a lack of footage. It is what it is. But it was a wild trip. I learned a lot about carburetors. Let me tell you. A lot. Well, all right. Speaking of that carburetor, for those that haven't followed on your channel, the old 20R didn't stay in there long. And you made a rather unorthodox choice to replace it. And the Toyota purist of the world, they had some choice comments on that, as they always do. But even the Jeep guys were probably scratching their head on this choice. Honestly, I had way less bad feedback than I thought. I thought world is going to end, and it's either going to go viral or people are hate me forever, and it didn't do either of them. So it's really not... I don't think... I don't know. I thought it was just a good swap, honestly. Long story short, what we ended up doing is we threw out the 20R, the the operated 20-hour motor that was in it. It had a completely worn out four-speed transmission and then a stock transfer case. No doubler, no gears done, nothing stopped. We took all of that out and replaced it with a 3. 8 V6 out of a 2007 Jeep JK. So it has a 3. 8 out of a JK in it now with a six-speed manual transmission, which that's where the spicy sauce happens on that motor, with a south bend clutch, a little bit like the right upgrades done to it, and a Rubicon 4: 1 transfer case behind it. So it has a full Jeep drivetrain in it. Then because it's driver drop, had a different front accel, now have a Trailgear front accel housing that brings everything to the driver's side. That's it. Hotwire harness makes a full harness and ECU kit, plug and play, stand-alone. You can buy and just plug it up like you would with your LS or a Hemi or whatever. I have the exact same kit in my Jeep for my Hemi. So lucky enough that that same company makes a full stand-along kit for the 3. 8. It works great. And honestly, that's it. Some Tomwoods drive shafts and South Bend clutch we threw in That's it, man. Now, we just did our first four-day adventure in it that you guys are going to see on YouTube soon. Okay, well, there's the spoiler. Because last, you left us in limbo. I The sushi was sitting in the shop and you had to go somewhere. We had a bunch of... I mean, the swap itself was done rather quickly to a point where she was running and driving. I did it with Ian Johnson at his big tire garage. So all the credit to him for coming up with the swap and doing most of the work on it. But as always, there's going to be little shitty things that you need to figure out afterwards. We had fuel issues. We didn't want to swap a JK fuel tank into this thing. We wanted to make it work with the Toyota fuel tank. The fuel pump overheated, the fuel filter just clocked up. We had nothing but problems with the fuel system over many visits. Ian is four hours away from me. It was always me driving out there, staying for a couple of days, seeing how much progress we can make until I run out of time and I get busy with something else and I have to drive back. Then we have to find another appointment when we're both free to work on this thing again. That's why it just dragged on because we're both busy with other things. It's not our only priority to work. Obviously, I'm a little bit under Ian's mercy as well. It's also his baby, plus I want him to be involved in it. He's He's a very busy man, so we need to figure out whenever we can find time to do it. Now we finally got it figured out. We've had many visits and many test-in-tune sessions, and we had to have it figured out, and we just took her on our first four-day adventure. It You definitely, well, I don't want to say too much. You're in for a treat. You definitely guys got to watch that. There's a lot of consequences that come out of this video in that regard. But you got to watch for that. There's your It's easier. But yeah, super. The swap itself is badass. That's all I can say. A little something I can say is coming out of a trail with it, now in our recent adventure, on a dirt road, Most gravel dirt road. It was a Monday morning, so we didn't really have to fear too much traffic. We were going a little bit faster. Fourth gear, foot down, things still come sideways. I mean, it is massively overpowered. I like how you had to put a disclaimer before you describe that little episode. Yeah. Dude, it's violent. It is very, very, very fast. A motor drivetrain that is extremely underpowered in a 6,000-pound UK is the wildest setup ever in that little Toyota. It's violent and it's so great because they are everywhere. Nobody wants these motors. People will pay you to pick them up. Jeep shops that do engine conversions, they will give you money to finally pick them up and get them out of their hands because they don't know what to do with them. You can pick them up for a decent deal. It seems to be once we have it all figured out, I think I'm pretty pumped about it, man. I'm pretty freaking excited about it. Yeah, because I know Ian had to basically make an oil pan, but all the accessories and everything on the front, you didn't have any issues, correct? No, even transmission cross member lined up. I mean, transmission like the shifter goes to the same hole as the Toyota shifter when everything seemed to light up way too well. But yeah, we had to massively customize the oil pan, which that is still something we're going to tweak on now afterwards a little bit more, but that's just part of the trial and error thing, honestly. It's a really cool truck. I can't wait to show you guys more about it. It's a really, I don't know, their dog. Marvin, one question on switching back to the Jeepster because I wanted to make sure I got this in. I know you love that Jeep. There seems to be, Maybe I'm wrong, but there seems to be a love-hate relationship with that Hemi. Dude, everybody isn't just always... As soon as I have problems with that Jeep, everybody is blaming the motor for it. That is something I've been noticing. I can have I clearly had fuel issues during Helen back, and I mentioned that we changed the fuel filter, we changed the fuel pump, we cleaned the fuel filter, we did all these fuel-related things, and everybody in the comments blames the Hemi for a poor performance on this trip. It was never the motor. The motor is 100% fine. I had fuel problems. No matter what motor I have in there, I would have had the same issue. The problems that I had-Was fuel delivery. Was all fuel-related. It was first a clocked-up fuel filter, then later on, the fuel pump itself was bad, even though it still had the right amperage and it had in idle the fuel pressure we needed. That's why we never changed it until very late in the Helen bag, because I have a fuel pressure regulator with a gage on it. I could see my fuel pressure, but obviously only when we're idling. We only checked idle. My mistake, I guess, learned from that one. But it was cutting out as soon as you were putting RPMs to it, and that was obviously what you saw on the video. As soon as you crossed the 3,000 RPM mark, it was just bogging down. Once we replaced the fuel pump, all the issues went away. It ran like a champ, and then it immediately broke elsewhere. Then I lost a freaking front... I broke a limit strap from the front suspension, which caused the side to droop down too much, too much axer wrap in the front suspension, broke the yoke, broke the broke the front drive shaft. Didn't immediately realize it because it was 5: 00 AM or 4: 00 AM and no sleep and dark, but then later on realized why I broke the drive shaft and was all that. I love my G-Man, but she's getting old. That's the only thing I can say. I can't even be mad at it. This thing has gone through hell and back many times. It's eight years old now. Since we built her, it's eight years, eight years of a very rough life. At a certain point, things are just getting tired. I'm even aware, dude, limit straps have an expiration date. You limit straps you have on your suspension, they're not buy once, cry once. They have an expiration date. I always thought, dude, it's a freaking trail, Rick. It's a wheeler. We're not racing this thing. It'll be fine. But sure enough, eight years on the same limit straps, eventually they will break, and they did. Well, you were not the first person to do that. I don't know if anyone that is checking the expiration dates on their limit straps. To your point, yeah, it happens. Yeah. Obviously, the front suspension, just the way it was said, it was never perfect. It's not supposed to lean so much into the limit straps where the whole geometry gets thrown off once the limit straps broken. It's supposed to limit your travel, but not be an essential part of the geometry of your suspension, so to say. Something that has a... Once a limit strap breaks, your suspension shouldn't collapse, so to say. If that makes But yeah, anyways, it's at Carnage Motorsports right now. Will took the Jeepster under his umbrella after 24 hour on back and he's getting a rebuild. We're currently throwing an RPM suspension under it. The same suspension that Will has under his JK is going into the Jeepster because for those that don't know, the Jeepster has a TJ frame under it, at least up until the seats. The rest has a custom back half, but the majority of it is a TJ frame, and RPM offers TJ suspension. So Will is just tweaking it enough to make it work with the Jeepster, which really isn't that much, it seems. Then we're going to throw a bunch of big 2. 5 callovers. We're working with Bilstein on a full new call over and bump stop set up. And Will really wants the front half it and cut the whole front of the frame off and put a new front half on it to basically raise the front up higher to have more up travel. So he is working on all You guys should check out Carnage Motorsports on Instagram or Mr. Carnage. Yeah, he's a great follow on there. He's definitely a good follow. Definitely one I can recommend. Hilarious, really knowledgeable Jeep guy, has an off-road shop in Miami for Carnage Motorsports, and he's currently reworking the Jeepster, and we'll hope to have it back, but he's a Jeep Safari with all new suspension, and eventually, slightly different look because the front definitely, bumper will be gone. A lot of things that dress up the face of the Jeep will be slightly different. It'll get a little makeover. Yeah. Will's Jeep were handled so well, I have to say. Wheeling with him now for as consistent as I have been on so much hard stuff, and it was just us next to each other where I can see how his stuff performed versus my stuff. The RPM suspension, dude, the way he sets them up and just the way they are designed are just a really, really, really solid product. Dude, his Jeep is so freaking stable. It has gone through trails that it really shouldn't have gone through. And yeah, it's a really good setup. I'm pumped to get that performance into my Jeep. That'll be cool. It is in good hands down there Absolutely. Marvin, let's talk briefly about some of these global adventures. So you went the Rainforest challenge. Folks, if you If you're not familiar with the channel, just go start with one of these Rainforest challenge videos. You talk about wild stuff. I started to say it's unlike anything you'll see here, and that's not an exaggeration. It's a totally different experience. You guys went over there, basically, I believe on media passes for the event. Are you serious about going back and either building or renting or You're driving a car? I'm working almost every day on that for two years. Since we went, dude, I have no idea. I'm dedicating way too much time on that because it's another one of those things that I really want to do. Hopefully, the content works out. That's just something I'm pressing on doing. I don't make it a freaking secret that I'm not a builder. I know my way around as as I have to, but I'm not a builder. For me to build a rainforest car is a big undertaking. It requires a partnership with somebody like Will or somebody that know how to build a vehicle. With my input, I know the substance and what this vehicle needs to be, and I have enough knowledge about the subject to have a big influence on the car, but the executing manpower behind it to actually build it, I need a partner for that. I don't think I'm in a point or position right now or yet where I can build a car for one race out of the year on the other side of the world. It's just as much as I want to do it, it's extremely... And I've gone down so many routes. We've gone down from trying to build one here and ship it over there to building a car there. I was very close to signing something that made us pick up an existing project from somebody in Malaysia that is trying to get out of it, and we would basically take, buy the project and finish it in Malaysia. Now we're back to renting a car in Malaysia for next year or for this year. We are back and forth with, we just need to weigh our options because every option is expensive and has a rat's tail of responsibilities and expenses. So it will happen in one way or another. This goes back to what you said earlier about when you have your strategic planning meetings and we're going to find a way to make this thing work as a business idea. There's no point of me having to race this. The video was wildly successful and we were They're there on media passes, like you said, we weren't actually racing. What we did there was obviously right and people felt entertained by it. There's really no need for us to race it. Plus, if we're driving in the car, we can't film. That has a huge rat's tail of making this work out for a video is going to be expensive. I need another camera man outside the truck. Good luck finding somebody that wants to live through this for 10 days. There is no, Oh, I'm going to I'm going to do three days and I'm going to go to the hotel and then I come back. No, bro, you want to be into this? You're going to suffer through the same things that you saw in our video. No matter if you're the video guy or the water boy or whatever, that is your experience. Finding somebody that's crazy enough to do this, even from just a media perspective to film us is crazy. Oh, yeah. When he says suffer, folks, it is suffrage. The media does not go back to the Marriott at night and then come back in the morning. Slept in the jungle on cots for 10 days under tarps that were held up by whinch lines and in the rainforest, like elephants walking through our camp at night and taking a shower in an infested river that when you come out, you have freaking leaches the size of your thumb, of your body, that stuff. But dude, I crave nothing more. I want to go back so bad. We had epic time there. Again, long story short, I'm currently, after all these iterations of building a car here, building a car there, renting a car, now we're back to maybe renting a car to compete in this year. Then I'm hoping to be able to build a new vehicle for the channel for myself within the next year or two, like the next iteration of the Jeepster, start something in that ballpark. When I do that, I will keep the rainforest challenge in the back of my head and plan certain things where I'm like, Dude, if I want to ship this thing across the ocean, across the world, and have a car, it might not be made for it, but certain things are maybe set up where I can run either or, where I make sure that if I build a new car that I can pack it with winches that would be compatible with what they have over there. Dude, you are passionate about making this work. I can I am. I want to do it. The whole rainforest challenge itself. What I can also spoiler here is we went back to another one, but we didn't go to Malaysia. We went to Colombia the next time. Last year, that's the next video that will come out. It's a little bit in the delay with it. William and I went to Colombia and did Rainforest Challenge Colombia in the jungle of South America for five days. That one was five days versus 10 days, but still absolutely nuts. That is the next video that's coming out. But therefore, we were also just on a media pass, but we had friends this time that were racing that we knew had to mix us with over Instagram. Sergio and Brad from 24 Hellenback were also there. We all went together. It was freaking a wild trip. That's coming out next. But I want to continue this on. Way & Force Challenge is my favorite style of racing so far. I've I've been around Southern Rock Racing, Rock Balancing, I've been around Ultra 4, Megatruck Racing, Side-by- Side Racing, We Rock, Rock Crawling. I've seen it all. The one thing that really got my blood pumping and where I had FOMO that I want to participate was Rainforest Challenge. I want to make it work one way or the other, and even shipping my own rig over there, essentially, or hopefully making it work with a rental car beforehand. Rental car Hard, just to say that on top of it, is just also really hard because I'm 6'3, and the guys over there are 5'8. They're a little bit. That's the problem. The cars that are up for rent, dude, I don't fit. That's another issue, honestly. That's what I'm currently dealing with. We can have a really good car, but the bro, the dude that drives it, that owns it, is like five foot on a good day. It's Yeah, I get it. Also, speaking of international, you went to that event in Honduras. Yeah, that was really fun. It was right after. It was crazy. It was right after Malaysia. Malaysia, I wasn't even I didn't even arrive really back home yet. I already went to that one. I wish I could have spaced that out a little better for it to stand more. I feel like it fell into the shadow of Malaysia a little bit because it was right in the same time frame, but it was so so cool and so unique and so different from Malaysia. So also a really good video. Well, what it was to me, it reminded me of the old Four Wheeler Top Truck Challenge videos, but Instead of a bunch of separate events like the tank trap and the mud pit and these separate... It's one giant course that you run in one shot with all these different obstacles. Do you think there's a market or a place for us to see things like that here in the States? I really would love to, man. If I have the opportunity one day to own some land or something to do something like that, I would love to. What they told me is that a couple of guys that were there that are familiar with the US are just saying, Dude, it's just an insurance thing. You know what I mean? A, with the crowd being there, but you can even eliminate the crowd and just do it for YouTube. It's always an insurance thing. I can get around certain stuff like that by doing it for YouTube and making it where you're not paying an entry fee and you're not winning anything. At that point, you're 100% voluntarily participating, but you're taking away the whole competition sense at that point because it is just if there's nothing on the line, it's different. I don't know. I would love to make something like that work. The energy there was out of this world. Cheering somebody on, you see everything. Like you said, you had big rock mud pit, off center. You had all these different disciplines and obstacles right in a row from each other. It was a lot of fun. I could get behind that. I would love to see an event like that that anybody could register for multiple different classes and just a multi-day. Was it over several days? I assume. A multi-day party? Yeah, it was a Friday through Sunday thing, I think. It was a week. We obviously cut it a little short by showing it on video. Well, hey, listen, Marvin, before I let you go, we've got five rapid fire questions that I want to run through here. Number one, we ask everybody this one. Favorite off-road trail snack? Oh my God, Lunchables. Okay. Is there a particular lunchable combo? Or you'll just- The ham cheese one, the very standard. Okay. All right. So you're old-school lunchable. Got it. Old-school lunchables, yeah. If you could only listen to one artist or one album while you're out on the trail for the day, what are you putting on? I don't listen to music on the trail, man. It's really engine sounds and everything. Any cracking or anything that sounds suspicious is what I'm listening to when I'm on the trail. I'm not listening to music as much of a music nerd I am, but on the trail, dude. I had I have speakers on my Jeep for a short period of time. Never used them. Didn't even notice that they blew at a certain point that... You just took them off? Just took them off again because I'm listening to what the car is doing and not what... I can't focus to some music. Fair enough. All right, very important question here. Dewalt or Milwaukee? Milwaukee? I'm disavoyed. Honestly, for home tools, I have all the wall for home tools. But for trail stuff, the Milwaukee stuff is just like, I don't know what has gathered more. But dude, whatever I could find. Whatever you can use at the time. Exactly. All right. So here's a good one for you, especially. Manual or automatic for off-road? For off-road, automatic. I love manual for road driving, but for off-road, I prefer automatic. Okay. I can focus more on what's important, more on the wheeling and it's less hard on your drive train with clutching in and whatnot. Everything is a little bit smoother. You can drive a little bit more technical. You don't have a little... It has its perks. Will swears of running manual off-road, but dude, there's a reason why comp buggies and race cars in off-road, none of them run manuals. It's not that great. You're definitely not putting yourself in favor over it. You definitely have a harder Is it more fun? Probably, maybe. Sushi is manual. I have your Sushi wheel manual. It's not that I can do it, but it's definitely a lot more to do, a lot more distraction from what you're actually needing to do, and it's a lot harder on your You have to have a life train every time. Then you get on that hill in that off-camber situation and you're like a kid learning to drive again. Yeah, exactly. You need to finesse something or you're at a tipping point and you need to like the clutch. If you clutch in too hard, then you're done. You shake up everything. You're not doing yourself a favor with manual. But whatever you prefer, whatever is more fun to you. All right. So, Marvin, you're from Germany, but you've lived in the South. You've lived in Georgia for a long time now. So I think this question is valid. Bigfoot, real or mythical? Mystical. I I would say. Bigfoot, I don't know, man. I don't know. I'm not feeling it, dude. I'm not feeling it. I hope you run into him out there on the trail. I hope so, dude. Hey, I'm totally down. Prove me wrong, dude. I'm down from here for It proved me wrong, but I have the Yeti in the snow and the Bigfoot in the mountains and whatever. Awesome. Well, listen, man, I appreciate it. I hope we'll see you out on the trails at some point, potentially get Sushi up to G-Smitter. Dude, I'm hoping to make that happen. That'd be really cool. Awesome. Thank you. Good. All right. Fun. This was great. Good times. Awesome. For having me, guys. Definitely appreciate it. Check us out from YouTube, flexrocksrollovers, Instagram, all that good stuff. So, yeah. All right. Thanks for having me. See you now..