You good? Yep. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. This is Overland Weekly, episode number 22. I'm your host. My name is Davey, and if you are watching this, you are like, That does not look like Davey's office. I've come down here to the one and only Big Tire Garage today. If you grew up anything in the last 20 plus years watching off-road fabrication, TV, Power Block, Power Nation, all that good stuff, Extreme 4x4, Extreme off-road, four-wheeler, Big Tire Garage, Build for Off-Road, Multiple-Time UA Participant, Onyx Build Challenge. Am I missing any? No. Monster Garage. Monster Garage. That was a long time ago. Monster Garage. That was a one-shot. I'm good at everything. It's getting to the point now where I just tell people that I just play trucks for a living. That's what I do because it's getting too complicated to explain all the TV shows we make. But no, it's good. This is Ian Johnson, folks. Ian, thank you for inviting me to come down and have this conversation. No problem. Yeah, glad you're able to come down to the shop. I always like doing these things in person better than over the Zoom type of thing. It's more fun. Yeah, it's more real. Ian, you were... Let me see if I've got this story straight. Twenty-five years ago-ish, you're teaching high school shop class in Canada. I am, yeah. In Ontario, Canada. Yeah. So at that point in time, before any TV auditions, any of that stuff, what did you think the 6, 25 years was going to look like? Did you have your career plotted out? Was it educational? I thought it was going to be because it already changed careers once. I was a shop teacher. Before that, I was a licensed automotive mechanic. I went to become a tradesperson first and did not plan to be a teacher at all. Hated school. I wanted out as soon as I could. In Canada, you basically sign your apprenticeship papers when you're 16 years old, which is what I did, and started working in grade 11 in a shop, and then went to school in the afternoons, and basically finished high school, basically doing a split schedule where I would work for half the day and go to school for half the day. Then I thought I was going to be a mechanic for the rest of my life. I didn't know I was going to become a teacher. In Canada, winters are really long and summers are really short. My parents were teachers, and I started doing a lot of whitewater kayaking and a lot of camping. The summers were just too short. It was too much time to go back to work. I hated going back to work on Monday after weekends of being in the woods. I was like, Well, I said, I need a job where I don't have to work in the summer. And the problem is when you're a mechanic, that's your busy time this summer because people are traveling, cars are out in the road. In the winter, it's just slow. I had lots of time off in the winter, and we would travel internationally. We'd go kayaking in Cuba, we go all these different places. But I wanted the summers off, and so I asked my parents, I'm like, Hey, can I become a teacher? And they said, Yeah, you could be a shop teacher. You don't have to go to university or everything. You just have to go get your teaching degree. That takes you one year to do it, and you can be a shop teacher. I was like, I'm in. So your motivation was 100% to have your summers off? Yeah, my motivation was 100% summers off. Well, that and teaching in Canada is than teaching in the States. Teaching in Canada is a highly paid, very sought after profession. So if you get in, you're in. So once I was in, I honestly didn't think I'd leave because you retire at 55 with a full pension. It's a really, It's a hard job to get, but it's a super good job to get. It's a challenging job. And you're teaching, it's not an easy job. But yeah, I thought I was going to be teaching high school for the next 30 years. I would basically retire at 55, 60 and then go live my life. That's It was a very Canadian thing, right? I see. You work, retire, and then live. Then you live. Yeah. But then I went and did episode of Monster Garage, had tons of fun, then went and got the audition to do Extreme 4x4 and create that show with Mike TV. I honestly thought I was going to take two years and do that. We'll do that for two years, then go home. That's what we thought of, because no TV show lasts forever. That was 2004. That was 21 years ago now. We've been ever since. The two years isn't up yet. One year, I may have to go back and get a real job. We'll see. You might have to go back to that teaching career. No, I said I'm going to go work at Home Depot. I'm going to be the guy at Home Depot. I can see that. I think it'd be a perfect retirement job. That'd be tons of fun. But no, one day I'll have to have a real job. Let's talk about that Monster Garage episode. How did that come about? I'm thinking this is early 2000s. Was it a classified ad that they're looking for- Commercial on the show. Somebody to come on? Commercial on the show. Same way I found the gig with Power Block. It was just they just ran a commercial during the show, said, If you want to be on the show, apply. And I applied on the internet. Same thing just went on, web forum and found the application, filled it out, sent it in, and then made the short list, and the next thing you know. And that happened fast. I applied, and that was when... I didn't know how TV worked because I was teaching high school, obviously. And now that I know how TV works, I know that was perfectly normal. It either takes forever something to happen in TV or it happens in five days. And that literally happened in five days. I filled out the application, had a phone call interview, and then they basically said, Can you be in Long Beach on Monday? I said, I don't know. I'll have to ask my principal if I can take the time off. Luckily, my principal was like, Yeah, you can take the week off and go ahead. I took the week off, and next thing you know, I'm in Long Beach, California making Monster Garage. Isn't that cool? Yeah, it was tons of fun. It was good. Then that opened the door, because when I applied to be on Power Block, same thing, online application. But I was able to say, the question was, Have you ever been on TV before? I was like, Absolutely. Check that box. I was on Monster Garage. Here's where you can see episode and had to do the same thing, send an application video. When I sent it in, because I'd been on TV, obviously, I just got shortlisted right away. Then it was like, there was 20 of us that were flown into Nashville to screen test. We screen tested. And of those 20, I flew back to Canada, and I said to my wife, I said, This is like a real job. This isn't like Monster Garage. This isn't like in and out. I got to move to Nashville. They're going to have to get me a work permit. I'm going to have to get a job. This is not as simple as fly in, do the thing and fly home. And so next thing you know, I got a phone call week later, and they said, Yeah, you're the one. Can you be in? We got to start the process. Here's a lawyer to call. Call this lawyer, fill out this piece of paper, and we're going to start the process of getting you. It was all contingent on me getting my work permit. If I get the work permit, the job was mine. But once I had the lawyer and the job in the States, then it was just, Okay, it was just a matter of checking boxes for a work permit type of thing. How did your folks feel about that, the two tenured teachers? I tell this story. My dad hates when I tell this story, but it's so funny. When I was becoming a mechanic as a teenager, my dad didn't understand it because they were white collar, not blue collar people. They lived in a world where... The joke was that teaching was the family profession because it wasn't just my parents. It was my aunts, my uncles, my cousins. Everyone in the family was a teacher. A whole house of educators. Yeah. Everyone in our family was teaching. When I was going to become a mechanic, my dad was always like, I can't believe you're going to throw your life away and work on cars all day. You should go to university. He kept trying to talk me into being an engineer and all this stuff. But once I started working as a mechanic, he then realized, you know what? It was the right job for him. He's happy, he's doing well. And eventually he came around. But then when I told him I was going to become a teacher, I thought, this is it. Coming home. My mom was like, she helped me apply. She helped me fill out the application with the right words and stuff because that's part of the game. When I went home to tell them, Hey, I got a job as a teacher, I thought my dad would be like, Yes, He was like, Why would you want to join this thankless? Because they were at the end of their career. I get it. Once you've taught for 30 years, you're burned out. You're done. You're at that point, and I think that's every career, and you just don't want anyone to go into that job because you're just tired of it. When I told them I was going to be... Then when I got this job, leaving teaching to get this gig, their risk averse, my parents. The idea of packing up your family, moving to another country, taking a job in television that's got absolutely no guarantees. You don't know what's going to happen. For them, it was just like, they just didn't get it. They were like, Oh, this is... We were just my wife. My wife's family was the same way. They were like, Why? You're throwing your life away. Both my wife and I were like, It's going to be an adventure. We're going to see what happens. That's all it is. Worst case scenario, we can go back and be teachers. That was our thought process. They were not exactly fond of it because my son was three years old, so that was not their first grandkid, but one of their grandkids. I'm taking their grandkid away. I'm taking my in-law's daughter away. We're taking everybody away to another country. Was your wife teaching as well? Yeah, she was a teacher. Everybody's teaching there. Yeah, I'm telling you, it's family profession. I met my wife at the school, my very first job that I got teaching. That's where I met my wife. She was the art teacher. I was a shop teacher. Classic pair. That's how it worked out. All right, so you said your folks were white collar. I'm going to assume then that your dad dad wasn't the one that taught you how to turn wrenches. No, my dad was handy. My dad was a guy who... My dad, he built every house we lived in. So he was a very handy, but he was more of a construction handy guy. He was always a If it came time to replace the furnace, he was doing it. He wasn't going to hire somebody. If it came time to build a shed behind the house, he built the shed. He didn't hire somebody to do it. So I grew up in a world where you did stuff with your hands, but he was not... Nobody was a car guy. Nobody. I had no one in my family, no aunts, no uncles, no brothers. Nobody was into cars. And I have no idea why I have this sickness that I have. But I do remember vividly being 14 years old, walking through a drug store up in Canada in the mall on a Saturday, and walking down the magazine aisle and finding a VW Trends magazine, seeing seeing that magazine and picking it up, and that was it. From then, it was just all downhill. I was going to buy a Volkswagen. I was going to customize my Volkswagen. Then once I got the Volkswagen and started customizing it, then it was just... That was the first time in my life that I'd ever done something that just felt normal. I was good at school, but I didn't like it, but I could pass. I was the worst kid for teacher parents because I was literally the Sees, Get, Degrees kid. I was I don't care what my grades are. Did I pass the course? If I passed the course, that's all I cared about because I was just looking to get out of school. My poor parents had to live with, I'm sure, because being a teacher now or about the time then, I knew what it was like. Now I know what it's like in the staff room. They probably had to walk in the staff room and listen to all these teachers be like, Your son did this test and got 50%, and he's fine with it. For them, that was probably just so hard on them. I feel bad, but that was just my life. I don't know where it came from, but then I started working on the Volkswagen, and it just felt normal. I was good at it. I enjoyed it. Then it was just like everything turned to cars. Nothing else mattered. It didn't matter. Nothing else that I ever did involved anything but what would get me closer to working on cars. That's all I cared about. You were doing the heavy truck, the diesel mechanic route. Did you do some vocational training school for that before? The way Or was it all you learned on the job? Yeah, the way it works in Canada is apprenticeship program, so it's similar to Europe. In Canada, you can work on your own car, you can work on your friend's car. It's the same. There's over 400 registered trades in Canada. That's everything from electrician, plumber, cable installer. There's even HVAC trades, welders, pipe fitters, masons, and then all your automotive stuff, auto body, a mechanic, a heavy truck and coach. When you're 16 years old, you make that decision. When you're end of grade 10, you sit down and you say, Okay, I'm going to go to college or university. I'm going to go into business. I'm going to be a doctor, lawyer, architect, blah, blah, blah. Or I'm going to go into the trade. If you go into a trade, what trade are you going to go into? Normally, it's kids whose parents are also trades people. They just know they're going to go into that trade. Then you start down the road of finding a shop will be basically your placement, and then you sign your apprenticeship papers. When I did it, to be a mechanic, you signed and you had to do 9,000 hours on the job. Once you completed 9,000 hours, you sit down and you write every ASC test in one sitting. If you get 70% or above, then you're a mechanic, and then you get your mechanic's license. Then once you're a mechanic, then you're allowed to work on a vehicle for profit. That means I could open a shop. If I was an apprentice, I could work under a mechanic, but I could not open my own shop or work on a car for money or any of that. But once you're a licensed, now it's called licensed automotive technician. They had to church it up. But back then it was automotive mechanic. Because when I started my career, the dealership I worked at was they had a car dealership on one side of town, and the other side of town had a heavy truck like Volvo a semi truck shop. Because I signed my papers with that shop, I bounced back and forth between the two. I got my heavy truck and coach and my automotive mechanics license at the same time. I was basically learning two busses at the same time. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I was working on cars. Thursday, Friday, I was working on busses, dump trucks, and semi trucks, which I hate big truck stuff. It's terrible. It's cool, but everything's hard. Everything's hard. Everything's heavy. Yeah. There's a fixture for the jack take the starter out. When you go from heavy trucks to cars, it just seems so much easier to work on a car because you just grab the starter and throw it on your bench. But that's how that transition happened. You come down here, you're doing extreme 4x4. You go let's say you go through Season 1, and then it gets renewed for another season and then another season. Was there a point that you were like, holy crap, this thing's going to keep going? Yeah, we actually had to make a decision at the end of year three. Like I I said before, teaching was a pretty sweet job. I took a sabbatical. I didn't have to quit my job. I literally just had to leave my job for two years. I had a two year sabbatical, so I was always guaranteed my job back. At the end of year Three, they said, Hey, you're not coming back, are you? I'm like, Maybe not. Why? And they said, Well, you've made the decision. You've got to tell us because we need to hire somebody full-time to replace you. So at the end of year three, My wife and I sat down and we're like, I don't think we're leaving anytime soon. So we gave up our jobs at that point. So year three, we were like, Yeah, we're going to stick around for a little bit. And at that point, you're working for, I believe, the production company, I presume. Hold on, I'm just going to check something here. I heard a truck backing up. I got to make sure we're not getting- Delivered. No, it's not us. Okay. All right. Were those studios in Nashville, your community? Frankly, So when I first came, they were actually up in Gallatin. Those were the old TNN studios? Yes. Well, it was... No, it was... I never actually worked for the network. I worked for RTM Productions, which was a company that subcontracted television shows for TNN that then turned into Spike, that then turned into Paramount. So the production company, RTM Productions, they used to shoot... The studios were always up in Gallatin and then Riverside. North of Nashville. Season one of Extreme was shot up in Gallatin, and then they bought a building in Franklin and then moved everything to Franklin. Season two and on of Extreme 4x4 were shot in Franklin. Then that was where we just stayed for, I guess it was 14 years is when we stayed there for that long. We were technically down in Franklin by that point. You and I talked earlier, you had Extreme 4x4. That became extreme off-road, and everybody that's watching from the outside is like, Is this the same thing but different? Yeah, I made the same show now under four different names. What happens is networks have different reasons for doing things. So the extreme 4x4, the reason it changed names was because at the time, actually, the show got canceled. But the way the contract was written was the production company could pitch other shows to other networks if the names were different. They weren't allowed to use the same shows. So they wrote up a pitch for other networks that were just new names of the same shows. And we were supposed to be canceled off of Spike TV. That was supposed to be a thing. But what happened was Spike canceled us. And then we talked about this earlier, too. It's called show business. There's two sides of the coin, right? So what happened was Spike canceled Extreme 4x4 4 and Hot Rod. At the time, I think that was called Hot Rod TV. No, it was called... It was Muscle Car, Extreme 4x4, trucks, and horsepower. Horsepower. Yeah. So they canceled all of them. And then the new year starts, and their advertisers, their automotive advertisers, their Castrolls and Geico's and their big money guys, they said, Where'd all your automotive TV go? And they said, Oh, we canceled it. We don't want that anymore. We're not going to do those automotive shows anymore. And they said, Well, that's where we want to advertise. So if you don't have automotive shows, we're not going to advertise on Spike TV. So then Spike called up and said, Hey, so can we have our shows back? We changed your mind. You're not canceled. The production company at the time said, Well, no, we've already changed the signs, changed the names, changed everything. They said, Well, how about we just take those new shows? They renegotiated the contract. We lost some airings because at the time we had like, Extreme 4x4's heyday, we were literally all that Spike played on the weekend. There were times that it played for eight hour blocks of time just to fill time. We lost our Saturday airing, and then I think we just got a Sunday airing. At that They were down to one day a week instead of two days a week. So they had to renegotiate the contract a little bit. But yeah, we ended up back on Spike again for that. So that was that name change literally meant nothing to anybody. So it was funny. So now today, you You have a name that I don't think a lot of people know, Digital Lug. Yeah, that's my company. That is the N Johnson Company, and everything comes underneath that. When did you decide after Extreme 4x4 Or at what point did you decide, I want to be more than just the host and the wrench Turner on this? The guy that owned the company, his name is Joe St. Lawrence. I've said his name many times. Very smart individual, very good mentor in this space. Very smart man. Joe, he was retiring. He was retiring, and so he sold the company, sold RTM Productions, when it was still big, still had airings on Paramount, still had airings on NBC Sports and CBS Sports, so it had a good footprint. But he saw the writing on the wall that this is going to go away. At the same time, we watched it happen. We saw social media come in at like '06, '07, YouTube, '06, '07. Joe Joe and I worked really, really close together, and Joe was one of those guys who would share anything. He wasn't a boss who kept cards close to his chest. He was like, You could walk in his office and just say, Hey, Joe, how are you making money in this business? He would tell you. He was a great guy. We saw social media and YouTube doing its thing. We saw our numbers slipping a little bit, reach-wise, from the beginning, from '04. So around 12, '13, we were seeing this change in viewership habits. I would sit down with Joe and we would talk, and we turned down the money from YouTube. If you've listened to the podcast with Dave Freiburger, he talks about how YouTube funded Roadkill. In the early years. Well, they originally came to RTM. Myself and Joe and another producer, Tom Spachausky, we sat in a conference room and looked at these contracts. Tom and myself were like, We got to do it. We got to take this money. We have to do these shows. Joe, I love him, but he was a micromanager. He had to have his hands and everything. He was like, I can't run four more shows. We were like, You don't have to run them. Just do them. Tom was like, in front of them. We turned that deal down. We're like, No, we don't want it. But at the time, I was sitting there and I was like, Wait a minute, this is the money that Spike was paying. If this is an internet company, it's to pay the same money that a network is paying, that tells me that something's more afoot than just a channel where people watch people get kicked in the balls, which is what YouTube was, which is why they were paying for content. They were trying to elevate themselves. Seeing that happen and then talking to magazine guys who had lost their jobs, and they had said, We all sat in meetings and said, We see this TV getting bigger, and us, We know it's coming, we're just ignoring it. I said, Well, wait a minute. If this is the same thing, if we see that this is happening on the social side and the streaming side and the digital side, and we're not paying attention to it, then we need to change things. I said, Well, I talked to my wife and I said, We got to do something that's digital-based, maybe have one foot in TV, but also take advantage of the streamings, all the digital stuff at the time. There's got to be a hole there. There's got to be money to get there somehow. Then Joe retired, sold the company. I knew right away that as soon as he sold the company and he left, I was like, You know what? I'm going to give myself two more years here, but I'm going to pack my parachute. I'm going to figure it out a way to get out. We just said, All right, that's what we'll do. I just said, We'll just plan. I ended up lasting 18 months. I also knew that Joe and I worked well together because Joe was a very hands-off boss with me. When we started Extreme, he was really hands-on like he was with other shows, but he fully admitted that he didn't understand the off-road space. At episode 3 of Extreme, they shut down our production. They came in and they were like, You're doing it all wrong. That's not how we do it. We don't use junkyard parts. We don't do this. We don't do that. They don't know their audience, obviously. I sat down with at the time, Tom Spachausky was my producer, and he said, What do you want to do? I said, because they wanted us to make the show more like at the time it was Hot Rod TV. They're like, It's got to be like this. They showed it. They were like, In one episode, they installed a shifter and a carpet kit. In the same episode, we started with a frame and junker and axles and had a Jeep, a rolling chassis of a Jeep at the end of the episode. They're like, You're doing too much in an episode. We don't show cutting and grinding and welding and all those stuff. I was like, That's what I do. That's what we news. That's what off-roaders do. My producer at the time, Tom, he said, Well, here's my plan. He goes, We'll probably get fired. He said, But I'm just going to delay delivery of the shows so long that they can't change them. He said, I'll just delay the drop-off. There were times when, literally, we were delivering shows to our editors. The editors had three days to cut the show based on my producer's script. So he would put it all together, deliver it to them. They would take the tapes, they would the show together. They would cut that show together. They would drop it on Joe's desk, executive producer, because he wanted to watch a show. But then literally somebody got on a plane with the tape, flew to New York, took a cab to master control at Spike and literally handed it to them, and they were sliding it in the deck because it was going to air in 10 minutes. Joe couldn't make a change if he wanted to. That was the deal, right? Tom's like, We could get fired for this. He goes, But I like the show, and I was I love this show. It's an awesome show. When that happened, episode one, two, and three launched, it was not received well. People did not like the show. They thought it was just trucks on steroids. It was not good. Then episode four released, and they were cutting a Jeep in half, and there's sparks flying, all this good stuff. That show, through the roof, 5 million viewers. We, at the time, we had forums for the show. Forum blows up, subscriptions blow up for the forum. Joe was very like, Okay, I don't know what you guys do, but just keep doing it. But I like it. Yeah. He just literally let us alone. I knew when he retired and sold the company that the new executive producers were not going to be that way, and they weren't. They were very much a, Why are you building this? We want a justification statement and of this and of that. I'm like, Dude, I'm just building what's cool. They're like, No, we need to see more. You need to get us data. I was just like, I'm not going to last. I knew I wasn't going to last. My My plan was two years, and in 18 months, I was just asked to exit the building. I said, Okay, that's fine by me. My office, I knew it was coming. My office was cleaned out, and they were like, We'll send someone down to clean your office. I'm like, It's empty. Don't worry about it. It's all gone already. Back of my truck was already full three weeks ago. I was just waiting for you guys to smarten up and let me go. Then we just said, Are we going to leave? We said, We'll spend six months on this idea, which we did. We worked with Kevin Tate's, who at the time had already left. We produced a show for him that we did a lot of heavy social, and it ended up on Amazon Prime. We basically boiled that show together, had some sponsors in it, and knew we had a good package, but we were a little early to the market for the people in our industry. Our industry is a little behind. I'll be the first one to admit it. We still have magazines. There's not still a lot of magazines out there, but especially seven years ago, if you went to a company- Yes, there were still a few. Yeah. If you went to a company and said, Yeah, you need to take all your money that you're spending on television and magazines and just put it into social media and content creation, they would think you're crazy. Now, if you do that, they're like, Yes, absolutely. We need to do that. We started doing that. Then in the meantime, that's how I started the digital production company. We made all those shows, did all that social media stuff, and then started bringing up a lot of clients for content creation, bought this property, built this building. The idea of this building was it was just going to be just for social media content creation. It's going to be like a fun house. We called it the... It was going to be like a Rob Diedrex fanistry factory. That's what I was going to say. But just for cars. That's all it was going to be. Then Discovery channel called and said, Hey, your old show is getting canceled. There's a hole in the market. We need an off-road show, and everyone we talk to says, You're the only guy to do it. Will you do it? I was like, No, not going to do it. I've left TV. I'm not doing that. You're going to make sign some egregious contract that doesn't let me do stuff on the social media. And they said, Fair enough. Nice talking to you. We'll leave. And then two months later, they called back and said, Okay, so now nobody else can do the job. We've talked to every other production company. We have a production company we want you to partner with because they already make some. That's Breton Productions out of Florida because they already make some stuff. But they said, Every advertiser we talked to said, They only want to do the show if you're on it. Because I've been doing it for For 15 years. We grew like spider tracks off road. We were the first people to put them on television, and all they made was wheel spacers, and we watched their company explode. Fleece Performance was working out of a pole barn behind his dad's house. We were the first people to put Fleece Performance diesel engines on television. Back then, that changed companies. We blew them up in the industry. Because of that, my reputation was very good because I always did what I said and said what I did. I never said, Hey, I'll put you on TV, and then didn't. We always were very fair with the companies that we worked with and always represented their products as best we could. Then Discovery came back and said, All right, well, we know that for the business side of this show to work, which is the other side of the coin, we need to have you on the show. I said, Okay, fine. Let's come to an agreement. They said, We shoot it in your studios. You have the vehicles, you have the know-how. We're hands-off. Just deliver us 10 episodes. Tell us what you want to build. We're going to slide our advertisers in there when we can. How does that sound to you? I said, How many episodes? They said, Well, how many do you want to make? Because I'm paid per episode. They said, As many How many you want to make, how many you want to make? I said, What's the lowest number? They said, 10. I said, I'll do 10 because that way I still have time to do other stuff. Because at RTM, I was making 23 episodes a year. You'd spend a week making an episode, so your year. You spent all year just making television. There was no time off to go to Moab or go to King of the Hammers or go on trips or have fun. I said, I want a life. I want to be able to go take these vehicles out and do stuff with them that isn't all of my free time. I said, I'll do 10 episodes, and they were like, Perfect, that's all. But we'll just do it. We'll do your fall schedule. We started that, and that was seven years ago now. We're in this season. Technically, it's season 2 of Build for Off-Road, but it's season 7 of Working for Discovery. I see. What's a big misconception that folks have about this automotive TV in general and the production of it? I would say probably the biggest misconception is that automotive television is dead, which it's not. I think people misunderstand the word television. Okay. So is cable television that you pay a monthly service for and you get 300 channels delivered to your house, is that dead? I don't think it's dead. There's still lots of people who do that, but it's not the number one way that people consume content. I think people confuse TV because that's what they think of when they think of TV. I think of TV as any type of entertainment that you consume on that large thing in your living room called a television. Fair. Now, we've bled those lines a lot because so many people are watching it on their phone. But I also would say that when I'm watching Discovery Plus on my phone. Technically, in my mind, I'm watching television. Tv. I'm watching a video that was curated for your entertainment on television. I would classify YouTube as television. I still do. People don't like when I do that. I say it bleeds the lines between social media and TV, but it's becoming more like traditional television than any other form of media. Instagram and Facebook and TikTok, that's still more social media, where is slowly bleeding into more of a traditional television-style entertainment. The way it used to be was you had, if we go way back in time, you had three big networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, big networks. That's where you watched all your television. For you, young bucks, that was it. You go to your grandparents house and they'd tell you, Go change the channel. I firmly believe for a while, that was the only reason my parents had kids was to change the channel. To change the channel, sure. Because that was my job. If you think of a funnel, that's the big top of the funnel. You got NBC, CBS, ABC, CBS, ABC. They're at the top, and that's where everyone's watching television. Then cable comes out. Then cable, the funnel can get smaller because now you have all these little cable channels like HGTV and Spike TV and all these different channels. And those channels are your niche audiences. If you're watching HGTV, you like to work on your house or you're interested in home decorating type stuff. So that's a smaller audience, but it's a more focused audience. Well, now you can look at it and say the big funnel is pretty much gone. I mean, those companies aren't around. Now they've been replaced by Discovery, Netflix. That's who the top of the funnel is because they're looking for large scale productions that get everybody talking, everybody watching. Then you have your smaller niche ones that are your same thing, HGTV, but they've now moved over on to streaming. But at the same time, YouTube is the same. So YouTube is this big funnel. At the top of it are your big content creators like your Mr. Beast and your this and that, who they're just trying to get. Whistlin' Diesel, same thing. They don't necessarily care if you're an automotive fan. They just want 10 million people watching a video. Sure. But when you scale down into your smaller niche groups, like myself, Big Ted Garage, Flex Rocks and Rollovers, Ambition Strikes, we're We're after a niche audience. We're after, Oh, you like living off-grid? You should watch Ambition Strikes or Life Uncontained. I call them small networks. That's all they are. They're just a small network. They're like what Spike TV used to be. The difference is that instead of turning on your television and going to your streaming service and choosing what television show you're going to watch, you're doing the same thing. You're just going to YouTube and watching it differently. The number of people watching content hasn't changed They're just in different places. There's not fewer eyeballs out there. So your job as a production company now is for me to say, how can I put together a package of content that will get me the same number of eyeballs that I used to get just making a television show. Because in its heyday, I could put an episode of Extreme 4x4 out, 5 million people would watch it. Now, when we put an episode of Build for Off-Road out, if on traditional network television, if on the cable, if we pull a half million viewers, it's like a grand slam. The network is calling you. This is amazing. Half a million people watch a show. It's amazing. But our job is to find the other four and a half million. We do that through social, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. You just got to churn that audience back out. That's your job as a production company now. Has the storytelling changed then? Because I think in the old days, you had a 30-minute show, which probably means, I don't know, 20 minutes of actual- 22: 30 is what we were kept at. There you go. Yeah. Now you've got a blank slate. Yes and no. Now what you're doing, and if you talk to anyone who takes YouTube seriously, you look at what's the sweet spot. The beauty of now is you as a YouTuber or a content creator, I don't like the name YouTuber. I think it's silly. It's like me call myself a television because people watched me on television. A content creator or someone who creates content, your job is to find the sweet spot for your audience, which is one nice thing about YouTube is you can play around with that a lot. It's similar what we did in television where we would say, Okay, well, let's figure out what project people like. Let's run some promos on this. Let's find some audience. We would run a promo and a show that we think people will watch our show. We would take some time and run a promo over there, a promo over there, and then pull that audience over to our show. That was what did in the television world. Now what you're doing in the YouTube space or the content space is you're like, okay, so now you're collaborating with another YouTube channel with the hopes that their YouTube channel will slide over on to your channel. You are playing with the time of your video. What do people that my channel like to watch? Will they watch an hour long video? Will they watch a 48 minute video? Will they watch that? So yeah. But now has the storytelling changed? I think we had a pendulum swing. I think what happened was when everyone said TV's dead and YouTube, I think we saw a lot of the vlog channels take off because people were like, it's different, right? I just want to watch something different. It's really fun just to watch this guy just living his life, just doing things with his girl, just living her life, just being who they are, just random stuff. But I think at this point now we're seeing a burnout on that because I think what we're seeing now is the content that's doing really well on YouTube is content that's more like a traditional television show. Traditional production. There's a start, there's a story, it's planned. If you look at Chris Fix's stuff, if you actually follow him on social, he's very good at planning his videos. He knows I need a start, I need a middle, I need an end. He's planned it all out, which is what we do with a television show. Same thing. You start open middle-end. It's the same with all channels. Now, they're more focused on, Okay, I need a good story to make this video watchable. And so I think that's where our pendulum is swinging. I think now we're back into more of a traditional television mindset, even though it's for YouTube. Okay. What about taking the customer, not the customer, let's call it the viewer, from these short form, the TikToks and the Instagrams, are you able to capture that viewer and move them to YouTube or move them to the streaming platform? Yeah. The nice thing now is now it's easier to do. Now you have spots like when YouTube came out with YouTube Short, so now you can create a YouTube Short that's interesting, that has a direct link over to the longer YouTube video. So the problem is in the space is when you're dealing with the Instagrams and the Facebooks of the world, they don't want you to take people off that platform. So if you promote your YouTube video on Instagram, it's never going to get the same amount of reach if you just put a cool post on Instagram. So you got to find ways to talk about your YouTube content on social media without saying YouTube. It's a game. Yeah, that's literally what you're doing. So you're playing that game back and forth of getting it all figured out. But yeah, you can transition that viewer over, but it's also a different viewer. I'm more focused on the idea that, okay, let's make content specifically for that vertical one to three minute space, and then let's make content for somebody who's going to sit down and watch it on their television. So in my mind, it's not just ripping content. I'll rip content out of a video if it's interesting. If we're doing something, it's like, Oh, let's take this little clip out of there that's like how to fix this wire. We can turn that into a piece of short content. Two minute, yeah. Yeah. Whereas I'm not trying to take everything we did in that 30 minute video and jam it into a one minute video. That's just impossible. Ian, let's talk a little bit about the builds themselves. All right, so let's get back up here for a minute. When you watch or rewatch, I don't know if you do. Do you go rewatch? I watch everything. That's the biggest thing, and I laugh at people who don't. You'll talk to people who are in our space and they were like, Oh, I don't watch any automotive television. I don't watch any YouTube. I watch everyone's stuff. I have a TV in the shop that plays instead of a radio. If it's automotive-based or home-building-based, if it's a YouTube channel or a television show, I've watched them all. I watch every single one of them. By the time my stuff hits air, I will have watched it nine times because we watch it through edit, we watch it through voiceover, we watch it through color correction. I don't necessarily watch it once it hits TV because I've seen it so many times. But yeah, no, I'm a believer that especially if you're just doing this for fun, you don't have to do that. But if this is your business, if you're a professional football player, You run routes. That's what you do. Because a professional football player is not paid to play, he's paid to win. You do your job, you do your homework, and that's your job. If your job in this industry is to make content in the automotive space, as far as I'm concerned, it's your job to research everyone's content and find out what's happening out there. What about your old stuff, though? Do you ever find yourself watching any of those old early seasons? We've gone back because we were going to do a reaction series. That's what I wanted to know. Is there a cringe moment, something specifically, that when you look back, you're like, Oh, God, I can't believe I did it. Oh, yeah. No, there's lots. When we go back and look back in Seasons 1, 2, and 3, because there's two things in place. Seasons 1, 2, and 3 of Extreme Off-Road, or Extreme 4 by 4, I should say, we were the tip of the spear. We were the first people doing that on television. Also, the industry was so young. We were still making square drive shelves. We were still doing springovers and still bending steering links to get around some thinkpacks and just trying weird things. Whereas there were some people out in the industry which were roll past that, especially if you go out in the West Coast. If you go out and look through your trophy truck builders and all those guys, to them, that was just super hack fab, which it was. But in the rock crawling off road space, that's what we did. When they would watch the show to them, it's just like, Oh, I can't believe you would do that. I can't believe you'd show that on television. But for us, we're just showing like, this is what we do in our garage. But yeah, so when I go back and watch some of that, I'm like, Oh, my God, I can't believe we did that on that truck. We can't believe we just bent that steering link and then showed it on TV or didn't even build that correctly and just showed it on television. But at the time, that's what we did. There's lots of those. We can go back. I can go back through probably half of the first three seasons we could go through and just pick apart every single episode. Is there one vehicle specific that you'd like a redo? There's a couple that I didn't get to finish that I wish I could have finished. There was one, it It was a little Crawler that we used a Honda motor with a transaxle, and that was going to feed two Toyota differentials. It was super small, little single seat. It didn't survive because when we changed the show name, Extreme 4x4 stream off road, we had to get all new projects, so it just went away. I would like to do another one of those. I didn't get to finish my 6x6 suburban that I was building, and that's just because it was still in production when I got let I tried to buy it. I tried to buy it because they sold everything. I was trying to buy it through a third party, a friend of mine. I'm like, Hey, go and buy that thing because they don't know what they have. Because it had $30,000 for the axles underneath it. But to them, it was just scrap because they didn't even see it. They were selling it on Facebook, I think for five or 10 grand or something. I was like, buy that, get that back for me. But they found out, they figured out it was me that was buying it. They killed the sale and then just cut it up and scrapped it instead. That's painful. I would like another I'm not going to go at that 6x6 suburban. Because when I was doing that 6x6 suburban, the idea of a 6x6, there was only one or two out there. Not like now, where every time you turn around, there's a 6x6 Jeep. There was one other vehicle. It was a Dodge Ram The guy that had built that Ram, I was getting some parts from him to build this suburb. Yeah, that truck was in every magazine. It was everywhere, yeah. But I wasn't the first one to do a 6x6, but I was probably maybe the third one. But the problem is now if I do it, I'm just a guy that's building another 6x6 6. It's a bummer, but I do wish that I had to finish that one for sure. Is there a platform that you haven't got to do that's been on your wish list? I would love to build, but it can't be done. I would love to build a super full-blown trophy truck style or ultra four, like a Triton engineering, like show people, because I love ultra four. I was there at the beginning. I followed it for years. I was there before it was called Ultra 4, which is called King of the Hammers. I've raced King of the Hammers. I absolutely love the sport. I love everything about it. I love the progression of those cars. I would love to do one of those cars and give it the justice that it deserves of showing all the technology that goes into one of these super high-end. Like, Triton Engineering, half-million-dollar Ultra 4 car with portals in the front and IFS. Anything that Joe Thompson would build, who runs UFO FAB. His vehicles are absolutely works of art. But that is not television friendly because it's- Is it too niche? Well, so much doesn't happen visually for large periods of time. It's like you will never find a really good video on YouTube that is exciting and interesting to watch about wiring a car because it's really, really boring. It's like, Okay, now run the wire to the left headlight. It's the same when you're building those super high-end vehicles. There's so much goes into just building the front A arm. That would be a two-hour video Sure. But people would find it so boring. Your audience numbers would be so low that it really... The benefit for you as the person making it, unless you really, really wanted that vehicle, it's just not going to pay off in the end. So that would the one that I would love to do, but I just don't think it's possible. Is there any that you've, either on the show or off, that you get halfway through it and you're like, This was a bad idea? There was one. We were doing one that was all rolled It was called the Curvy Buggy years ago, back on Extreme Off-Road. We decided to put a diesel engine in the back of it, and it just got off the rails fast. We were trying to throw too much stuff at one buggy. We should have just focused on, let's just make a buggy, put just a regular old LS in it and call the day. But the thing about when you're making TV shows or content, you're always trying to do something different. My entire car collection that I have. I've got something like 20 some odd cars. I don't base them on, I always wanted a Jeep or always wanted this. I try to make them like, I've got one with an LS. I've got one with a Cummins 2. 8. I've got one with a Hemi. I try to mix up package a little bit to make it interesting to have. I think that when you're making TV, you have to do the same thing. You have to be like, Okay, how can I... Because I always joke, I say off-road vehicles, it's just Mexican food. No matter what you order in a Mexican restaurant, it's some type of seasoned meat inside a tortilla. That's all it is. All an off-road car is, what? 90% of our off-road cars are an LS-based engine, a General Motors transmission, an Atlas transfer case, and a set of Ford axles. Right. It's not just off-road. My brother and I were talking about this. During the Power Block and Power Nation, as the LS became what it is, it was just LS after LS. We teased them. When we were renaming the shows, we actually went and had T-shirts made because we tease them that their show should actually be called LS What? Because all they did was put LS's in things. That would actually been a good name. Well, yeah, I know. We actually bought the URL and had T-shirts made and everything with LS with a big question mark on the I was like, this would be the perfect... That's all you guys do is LS's. And that's the problem. And so I think they've tried to break from that now. Pat's like he tries to break out of that. But it's hard. I mean, you're building engines, right? And you cannot discount the fact that the LS, it's an amazing engine. It's probably one of the best engines that GM ever made. It's hard to justify that. So when it comes to off-road vehicles, it's the same. The LS is there because it works, and it works great. So when you're taking that package and trying to mix it up a little bit, it gets hard. So I always try to figure out a way to do something just a little bit different on every single vehicle that we build, and then it fits a different niche. I come from the Toyota world. You've got a couple of Toyotas here, one with an LS in it, and one with definitely not an LS in it. So talk about the FJ45, the story of how that came about and getting the body for that. And then I want to talk about that, to use the swap as well. Okay, yeah. The FJ45 When it comes to building the shows for Discovery, Motor Travel, it's Discovery. Now it's like HBO, Warner Brothers. I just sit down at the beginning of the year and I send them the whatever I'm going to build. I say, Here's the 10 episodes, here's what I'm going to build, and here's how they break out. The FJ45 was not on the list at all. I had a couple of other projects that were going to slide in. Then Aqualoo Industries out of Canada announced that they were closing. They said, We're closing the doors. They've since changed that. They found a buyer, so they're still open. But at the time, they were like, We're shutting down. They said, So if you want a body, now is the time to get one. They were offering super deep discounts on anything they had in stock. One of their FJ45s was always on my list of I want to build an FJ45. They're cool and Aqualoo does some really cool stuff to the FJ45 to make it even cooler. I called them up and I talked to the person I know there. I talked to my contact and I said, Are you guys really closing? Is this a thing? They said, Yeah, no, there's a chance we're not going to be around in a year. I said, Well, I need an FJ45, and they said, Well, we got one in stock. It's only missing a fender. We can make the fender next week and we can get it out the door in three weeks. I was like, Done. I need it. I'll buy it. I bought it and then got the body down here, and then I just was going to stick it in the corner and just figure out something to do it later. Then I was like, Why don't we just put on the show? Then I was like, Well, how am I going to make this one different? Because I have a Jeep with an Aqualube body, and I did the Defender, and I built so many vehicles with the Aqualube body on it. I had just finished the Tacoma, and I had just finished the frame swap on it. So I knew the frame inside and out, and I was like, Man, it'd be pretty cool if I took a Tacoma frame, front half of the frame, did just IFR I did a best front and then did trailing arm and a nine-inch in the back like an ultra-four car. And then I thought, Man, it'd be even cooler if I put portals on it, put 74-weld portal. So I called Quinn at 74 Weld and I said, Got this crazy idea. And he was like, I don't know why he built his portals with this plan in mind. He goes, I don't know why more people aren't doing this, aren't doing portals in the front, big one-ton axel in the rear of their Tacoma. He goes, It's a great package. You don't necessarily need the portals out back, but people like just to have them. He said, Because he built them with that in mind. He had the gear ratios all figured out. Yeah, it's got 74-wheeled portals up front, 6. 2 LS, 6. L-90, Toyota front frame, and the back's all custom, 2. 3, Then it's got trailing arms and a Spider-Tracs Pro Series in the back. It's 529 gear ratio in the back, 430 in the front with a 122 portal, and it matches perfect. It's going to be nasty. It's going to be a fun truck. What's the timeline on that, Joe? I probably will work I'm finishing it this current year. Okay. Yeah. I'd like to have it. I want to make that one a little bit nicer. I got a lot of rat-rotty trucks. When they put the six-inch stretch in that cab at Occaloo, it makes the inside of that cab really roomy, really big. I think I have the space to put air conditioning in it and a couple of nice seats and make it a true... The problem is it's still Toyota at heart, so it's still a Toyota front diff, so it's not indestructible. It's not like a true ultra four car, but it's pretty good. I think with the package that's there, you could probably treat it pretty aggressively. It could be a good rock-crawler type ultra four style car, but I still want the inside to be super comfy. I'm going to probably put a full interior in it and make it really nice. But you don't build anything that you won't beat on, right? No, that's the beauty of that. No, everything has to go off road. Even my 53 Willies wagon, when I finished it, and that was crazy when I built that truck. I finished that truck, and then I don't know why I decided to do this, but I was like, when I talked to my painter, I said, I got this crazy idea. I want to do matte, pearl white on the body and then high gloss root beer metal flake roof, and he's like, Yeah, that'll be beautiful. It'll be awesome. I saw it on Joe Martin from Martin Brothers Customs had done a '55 Chevy like that, and I thought it was a cool color combination. We painted it, and then I was taking it to Moab. I said to him, I'm like, So what happens if I scratch it. And he goes, If you scratch this truck, we have to repaint the whole truck. I was like, Wait, what? Can't we just buff it? He goes, No, it's a mat clear. He goes, If you scratch it, we bring the truck in, we sand the whole truck down, and we repaint it bumper to bumper. I was like, Oh, this is a terrible idea to paint this with a matte clear, but it looks so cool. But he said, So are you just not going to take it to Moab? I'm like, No, it has to go off road at least once. It has to hit like... Because I didn't build it to wheel here. It's got a diesel and a manual. It doesn't have the wheel speed for crazy Southern stuff. But I knew that it would work really good out West because everything works good out West. We took it to Moab and we ran it We did all the hard trails in Moab. It did its job. It climbed up all the rocks. It did all the ledges. It did everything hard. Then it came home and I was like, That's it. It doesn't have to do any more four-wheel and ever again for the rest of its life. It proved itself. Yeah. No, that's every off-road. There's no point building an off-road vehicle and not taking it. Now, do you have to take it to the hardest trails? No. But you should build the vehicle and at least use it for what it's built for. I grew up building pro-street cars, and I hated it because back in Canada, we these pro-street cars, and that was before street outlaws and all these shows. People built amazing pro-street cars and never raced them because they were scared they were going to crash them. We would build... I worked at a shop that built amazing pro-street vehicles with high-end paint jobs and beautiful and gorgeous cars, but they never saw a racetrack. They just saw car shows. I hated doing that because it's like you're putting all these race car parts on and then you're not racing it. It just seems so silly Because we built one for our shop, a little shop truck, an Astrovan, and we built a pro street Astrovan. I said, The shop owner is like, We're going to do ladder bars or four-link? He goes, We're just going to put leaf springs on it. I was like, Why would we put leaf springs? He goes, It's not going to go. No one's going to look underneath it. It sits an inch off the ground. It's just for delivering parts and looking cool. We're just going to move the leaf springs in. I was like, That's actually the smartest decision someone could make. It's just because we're not taking it to the racetrack, so it doesn't matter that it has leaf springs. It just needs big fat tires and it has to look cool. Why would you go through all the work of doing the four link and the ladder bars and torque tubes and all this stuff if you're actually not going to race the car? In my mind, every off-road, every four-wheel drive vehicle has to go off-road at some point. I like that. I like that a lot. I want to jump back to that Tacoma. I've talked on the show before about two UZ swaps. Our friends in Huntsville at Rocket City Cruisers are big proponents of that. You've got one out there that's even more unique. I thought my buddy Zack with one in his '60, and there's one in '80s series down there. That's pretty cool. But a standard cab taco with a five-speed behind it, I don't think there's another one out there. No, when we were doing it, we're pretty sure we're the only one. So that started simply because I bought that Tacoma, we were making a show, and we knew we needed a Toyota. And so we were playing the show out. I was like, I got to fit a Toyota in here. And I started looking through the forums for We're looking through Facebook marketplace for a good deal of Toyota. And this '05 Tacoma pops up, and it's so cheap. So cheap. Standard cab, a little bit of a lift on it and some tires wheels. I'm like, Why is that so cheap? Went looked at it, and a four-cylinder with a dead hole. He said, One of these The four-cylinders only has 30 pounds of... He sold it. The guy brought it back. He was like, This motor shot, I'm not buying this truck. So he did a compression test on it, and he's like, Motor's done. And so like, yeah. Now, when you were looking at this, did you know that the Tacoma frames were a thing? No, not at all. No. So he's like, There's a little bit of rust on the frame, and I'm like, Man, I'm not worried about that. I bought it with the four-cylinder, and we did the mid-travel Trail Gear kit. I was trying to replicate that classic 4-runner look with the back, and I fell in love with the truck. Absolutely loved it. It was fun to drive, and it was cool, and it was fun to take on these little adventures that we go on. Then the motor let go. Head gasket, finally just done. I started looking at just a long block. The long block, that four-cylinder I guess, was only used for a couple of years. That little 2. 7 four-cylinder, I couldn't find one. If I did find one, I'd find it used, and it was $5,000. I paid like, 3,500 bucks for the truck. I'm like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to spend five grand on a motor for a 3,500. Then I started looking at doing the V6 swap, and I was like, I'll just buy a complete drive train on the V6. Same generation truck. There's got to be a way to make this work. I started researching it on the internet. Because if it was a Jeep, it would just be boom, boom. Yeah, because I'd look it up on the internet, and I did all these. You'd end up down the rabbit hole of all these Toyota forums. The Toyota guy is very different than the Jeep guy. The Jeep guy has no problem putting any engine in his Jeep that ever could possibly be an engine that might run in a Jeep, and he'd swear it's the best choice. There's guys who put four BTs in their Jeep, which is a terrible engine in a Jeep, but they swear by it. There's also guys that put Jeep motors in Toyotas. One of those has happened in this shop, and it hurt some feelings. Yeah, that was the whole point of that one. We could talk about that, too. I started looking at doing the V6 swap, and it just didn't seem that there was any information on it at all. I'm on ultimate adventure, talking to Fred Williams, and he's a big Toyota guy, and I said, I got this Tacoma. I'm looking to the V6 swap. I can't find any information on it. I said, Honestly, I'm thinking about possibly doing a V8 swap. I'd seen a couple posts about people doing the 2Z swap out of the Tundra. He said, Man, if you could do a V8 and keep the manual transmission, he He said, You'll break the internet. He said he's never seen it done before. I was like, Man, if that's the case, then I got to do it. If it's never been done before, we have to do it. Found a Tundra. Luckily, I started looking for cheap... Anything with a 4. 7. I was on copart every day. Luckily, the internet is now smart enough. They monitor everything you look at. I jump onto Facebook marketplace, and there was a tundra for sale for $1,000, 200,000 miles, truck been rolled. I was like, That's exactly what I need. So I went and bought that truck, running, driving, drove it home, put it on the trailer, drove it around. So you guys that are in this part of the country, that that came up on your Facebook and then disappeared, this is the guy that got it? Yeah, I bought it. I got it. I bought that truck, and then I'd already researched that you could put the 4. 7 in front of the 5-speed manual, found a company out of Florida, because I guess the drift guys love that motor because it spins up so fast, makes good powers, reliable, and they were putting it in Supras. The Tacoma 5-speed is very similar to the Supra 5-speed. Now, I've also been told, I can't confirm this, that the Toyota 5-speed is also the same as the AX15 in the Jeep, which I don't know about. I can't confirm or deny that. But someone told me that it's almost the exact same. I ended up buying this adapter kit and the Bell housing and everything to make it work, and we got it in there. That truck, it's so much fun. The irony was, when we were When I was building it, everything just fit. Fuel lines lined up. Everything just seemed to fit right. When I said that on the show, I said, Man, it looks like this engine should have been in this. It was made for it, yeah. We got an email from a guy who said he was on, he was retired, Toyota engineer, was working at Toyota when that '05 generation Tacoma came out. And he said that the reason that four-cylinder was only in that truck for two years is because that truck was actually supposed It was supposed to be released with the V6 and the two UZ only. And then the marketing department told them to kill it because they thought it would hurt sales of Tundra. Hurt Tundra sales. They killed the V8. And that's why the forerunner has the V8, and all the sheet metal is the same. Sure. I eventually converted it because when I first did it, I had the original four-cylinder radiator, made my own radiator hosers and stuff. Then when someone said, Why not just use the 4-runner? It's the same front sheet metal. I went out and bought a 4-runner radiator, 4-runner radiator, and that stuff just drops in, bolts right up, and you're done. I believe he was right because of the fact. If I could do it again, I probably would try to find a 4-runner, but I couldn't find one. Even on Copart, they were going for $4,000 or $5,000 for a V8, 400. Yeah, you got to find somebody that doesn't know what they have. Yeah, and that's harder to do now. Luckily, this Tundra, it was bad. It looked like a beer can, but it was a thousand bucks. I bought it, so it worked out. Speaking of low budget, so you've always been an advocate for get out there and have fun with what you've got. We're all aware of the current Facebook marketplace values and what you can go for. If you've got $5,000 and you're looking to make a buy this weekend, what are you looking for on marketplace? Man, that's hard because that's the tricky part, right? Is I always say to everyone, budgets are different for every person, right? My version of a low budget is different than someone else's version of a low budget. All budget buys you is the fact that you're probably not going to break on the trail. So the more money you have, the less chance you're going to break, and the less time you're going to spend working on the vehicle. If I had a $5,000 budget, I don't care what I buy it, because I'm going to go and I'm going to get a set of one-ton axles, some used coilovers, some used links. I'm going to scour Facebook marketplace for just parts, and then I'm just going to find anything that's got a V8, like a Tahoe. You really don't care. I don't care. As long as it's got an LS under the hood and a transmission and a transfer case, and then I'm just going to build everything from that. But I know that I also have the ability to... I have $100,000 worth of equipment to offset that five grand budget. If I was looking for a five grand budget for a garage build, I'm still going to go down the road of, well, I honestly, right I would be looking for a cheap JK. Because now there was literally one up the road, I missed it by a day. They had a '07 two-door black running, driving JK, not a Rubicon, but still a JK. It was $4,000. So nowadays, that's the new XJ. Oh, you think so? Oh, 100 %. And it's better than an XJ. Because the XJs are actually worth some money. Now they are. Yeah. Because anyone who's buying an XJ now wants an XJ. People who were buying XJs before couldn't afford a YJ. That was it. You're right. And so they had to buy an XJ. Or they told their parents they wanted a Jeep when they turned 16, and their parents brought them home an XJ, and they just got sucked into that unibody life for some reason and couldn't get out of it. The reality is that... But now that the JKs are getting so cheap, that's the new low buck vehicle. Because at the end of the day, that JK, if you can find one for five grand-ish, you've got a full frame, four I think front and rear. Yeah, the motor is not great, but eventually you could swap it, but it's okay for now. If you want lower gears, there's tons of junkyard options. I mean, it's the new easiest steepest vehicle to customize out there. Because everything older Toyota is worth money. You're not going to find an old single cab Toyota that you can solid-axle swap. That's not going to happen. The Tacomas are still holding their value like nobody's business. Unless you're Marvin and can fly out to Arizona and buy a $1,500 for a car. Well, that was a friend of a friend deal, too. Okay. There's the rest of the story. Yeah. That was somebody who was like, they knew what he was doing making this video, and they were like, Hey, we've got this for him. They were supportive. Yeah, because when he showed up here with that, I said, I'll give you two grand for that right now. Sure. After he's driven it across the country. I was like, I'll give you $2,000 for that 4,000 right now. I love those four-runners. Those are my favorite trucks. So yeah, I was like, Man, you guys got They stole that truck. Stole it for sure. And that's just the reality of it. I mean, there's still so many different... But if you're looking for a low budget, a potential rock car right now, yeah, two-door JK for sure. Or four-door. I mean, there's four doors out there. Or you can even hunt more and find the two-wheel drive JK, which they did make. And then all you have to do is put a transfer case and a front axel in it, and then you got a four-wheel drive JK. Because those you can get even cheaper because they were made for the And they're in California. There's a lot in California because they got better fuel economy. Of course. I see. That's the same as the old XJ. The same thing you do with the old XJ. They sold them in two-wheel drive, and you could buy a front axel in a transfer case and make it four-wheel drive. So it literally is the new XJ. Do you own anything that's stock? I mean, my tow rigs stock for now, but it's got up in a week. I don't modify my tow rigs. I'm not a fan of that. So I've I had multiple diesels of every manufacturer. Right now, I'm still rocking my Nissan Titan because it will not give up. It's in for the long haul at this point. I don't believe that you should delete them. I don't think that's worth the risk anymore. I never have any of my trucks. I never delete any of them because I was always worried about traveling because I travel a lot. I drive across country probably four or five times a year, and I never wanted to be in the spot where nobody would work on my truck. Oh, because of compliance policies? Yeah, and now it's just different. Now That's even more strict than it used to be. So that would probably be the only vehicle I have that's stock at all. Yeah, that's it. And even that's getting chopped up and turned into an Earth roamer. I think next month we're going to cut it in half. Yeah, that's going to That's going to be a good one. That's going to be exciting. It did its first job. It made the Internet incredibly mad. Someone's already sent me a message. They were like, Don't cut up that titan. I got this F550 I bought off copart. I can't use it. You can fix it. It needs this, this, this, and this. It's a good deal. He offered to me for 22 grand. He goes, I'll give it you for $22,000. It needs a bunch of front-end work, but the frame's straight. But it's a 22 F550 with the extra long wheelbase. He goes, This is exactly what you need to build. I was like, I would love it, but I've already made the Internet mad with the Titan. I have to continue down this road. It's going to be perfect. In folks that are a little bit younger or maybe new to the off-road scene, may not have seen some of these early shows, The Extremes and Four-Wheeler and whatnot, but they know you from the Onyx Build Challenge. Explain to us how that came about, because you said earlier, things in TV can move really fast or really slow, but this one just happened, huh? Yeah. Onyx, I knew of Onyx. Obviously, I was a user of Onyx, and I knew what they were doing with all their influencers. I had talked to some of their influencers, previous to them, calling me about this plan to do some build-off. And apparently what happened was the person at OnX, who I ended up working with, one of the higher ups, every time she talked with one of these influencers, she was like, Who should we get to produce this build challenge or make the videos, or how are we going to do this? And every one of the competitors, whether it was Nate or Holly or Matt from Bleep and Jeep, they'd always say, Have you talked to Ian yet? You should call Ian. And so they called me up and they said, We know who you are because you're on television, but tell us what you do outside of that. I said, Okay, well, this is what we do. I basically showed them all the... Because at that point in time, we'd already made hands-on cars for Amazon Prime, so we'd all have that in some place. We'd already created 4x4 garage and Carcraft TV for Motor Trend. We'd already done the Cummins Cruise for Cummins, which is very similar to the Onyx Build Challenge. So Digital Lug had a portfolio. Yeah, we had stuff that we could show. She said, Okay, well, we have this idea for this build challenge. I said, Okay. They had a very good budget for what they wanted to do. That's the biggest hurdle because a lot of companies will be like, We want an ultimate adventure. I'm like, Great, you need 100 grand. They're like, No, we've got 15 grand. I'm like, Well, you're not getting an ultimate adventure. There's just thresholds. Luckily for us, myself, I'll say to people, If you want it right and you want it good, it's going to cost X. There's no going back from that. If you have half that budget, just don't do it. Or if you want to find someone else to it, that's fine. It's not going to be as good as it could be because we know what it costs just to make something like that. They had a very good budget, and they Most importantly, when we sat down and talked to them about the creative side, they said, This is our idea. We said, Okay, well, give us a week. Then me and my team sat down and we said, This is their mission, this. How do we get from this to this? We basically mapped out the entire thing, the trips, the visits, the challenges, everything that we were going to do. When we called them back and we just basically said, This is what we were suggesting, they said, Okay, we went to Moab to do the first video, shot the first video, handed it off to their team. Then after that, they were just like, Okay, we're hands off now. We trust you guys. Just make us this challenge. We did season one of the build challenge, which did very, very well for them, incredibly well. Season two, there were some growing pains there, and I think it was just we weren't... It's no one's fault. It's just I think we had a sliding scale of what's your KPI? What's your key performance indicator? What's going to show that this is a successful thing? Because as we talked about before, it's show business. It's two sides of the same coin. I can make a great show that doesn't help your business, or I can make a great show that does help your business. But if you don't understand the process of that, it doesn't work. And ultimate adventure is a perfect example of Ultimate Adventure is a perfect example of that. Ultimate Adventure is very, very good videos, but had a very, very poor track record of keeping their sponsors happy. That was one of the reasons why that ends up just bleeding out in the end, because you run out of You run out of people willing to write a check because they just don't feel that they're being- That they get the ROI on it. Yeah. You have to justify to that company that's writing that check, this is what's going to come from this on the back-end. It It can't just be, we're going to see your Jeep drive over rocks, because that's not good enough anymore. There's so many players in the game. Twenty years ago when Ultimate Adventure was brand new and all these things were brand new, that was enough because there were only three suspension companies. There was Skyjacker, Superlift, and Rancho. And they were only advertising in two magazines. Yeah, but now there's 50 suspension companies. And then there's companies that sell you parts to make your own suspension. So you have to be able to make sure that company that writes that check, that's sponsoring this event or making a package that they understand that, hey, this is what I'm going to get out of this. And it can't just be a pretty picture on a rock. It's not enough anymore. Interesting. Is all of this the whole off-road lifestyle? Is it just a profession or is it a lifestyle? Let me follow that by saying, is there a time recently that you've gone to the woods and gone wheeling that you didn't drag a bunch of cameras with you? Oh, no. Mine's a lifestyle, 100 %. No. It's not just the four wheeling stuff, it's the shop, too. I tell people all the time, I said, if the cameras weren't here, I'd still be just building cars. There you go. No, I mean, I go and do Marvin's 24-hour Helen back because it's fun. I don't do it. It's fun until it's not fun? Well, it's fun and it is still fun. I love it. I think it sucks. Because you seemed a little worn out in that last week. Oh, you're tired. Yeah, no, you get tired fast, but it's still fun. I still go to Easter cheap every year because it's fun. I go to King of the Hammers. I go to work the livestream at King of the Hammers because I want to be at King of the Hammers someway, somehow. For me, Yeah, no, it's still fun. The problem would... Not the problem, but the reason that I only wanted to do 10 episodes of TV when we transitioned over to Discovery was, at the end of Extreme Off-Road, it wasn't as much fun because it was all shop time. My problem is I love the shop. If I could, my wife and I joke that when we built this building, we almost put a shower in it, and we're glad we didn't, because if we did, I would never leave this building. You'd never come home. Yeah. I love in the shop, but I also enjoy going out in the woods. I enjoy four wheel, and I enjoy spending time out in nature and stuff. By only doing 10 episodes, I now have the time to do all these fun things that I didn't before. No. My wife and I went to Iceland on a trip and I rented a Defender and we went four wheeling. So, yeah, no, it's a lifestyle. The thing that people understand is, I think in the automotive industry of all the different genres, because you have them all. You have the brodozer trucks, you've got the race cars, you've got show cars, street rods, all that stuff. Every one of them has a different form of what their lifestyle is. I think you have to love off road to really live, to survive in this lifestyle. Because it's literally a sickness, because it is you have to be willing to spend hours building something to then go and break it. It is a disease, man. And then spend time fixing it. Last time I was out with my wife, I had a winch failure, and I had to figure out a way to get the Tacoma out of this giant mud hole without a winch. It was just the two of us. We were just scouting some trails. I ended up making a stupid decision. We got out and we got back to the camper and my wife was like, So this is fun for you, right? I was like, Well, it sucks. In the mix, it sucks. But when you You are able to troubleshoot or solve a problem or conquer or not, and then you get back and you're sitting on the campfire, then you're like, That was tons of fun, even though at the time it sucks. But you have to be committed to this. This year, King of the Hammers, I sat down with Von Gitten. I don't know if you know who Von Gitten Jr. Is. Von Gitten Jr. Drift Car Racer. He transitioned into Ultra 4. We see a lot of racers come into Ultra 4 that weren't Ultra 4 racers before. They're coming from another form of motorsports. He's the only one that stayed. He's the only one that's really committed. He's stopped drifting. He's retired out of drifting. Now he just races Ultra 4. When I talk to him about it, it's because he loves it. He goes, I love being out there in the rocks and my steering rack breaks and I have to fix it by myself in the middle. He goes, You don't do that stuff at the racetrack. When the race car breaks, you bring it to the pits. The guys fix it. He goes, I love. You have to love that part. This is the hardest sport to love, I think. Hardest automotive sport to love. It's way easier to build a hot rod, park it on the grass, sit in your matching lawn chair, drink coffee, talk to your friends, then drive it home. That's way easier. If you like this sport, the people who love it, you're committed 100%. Nothing requires more innovation than the off-road side. Yeah. Like I said, it's just more work. You build the car constantly. I know the hot rod guys and cars never The car's never done. Well, yeah, it's never done because maybe you want to add a different wheel, or you want to maybe get more horsepower, or we're never done working on the car because the car is like, you're always like, Well, a blew up 13: 50. A 50 front accel, I better find a way to get a 1550 in there or a set of RCVs. You're always trying to upgrade it. Then it's just dominoes, right? Because you're upgrading it to hit harder trails, to break it more often, to fix it. That's how it works, but it's worth it. Absolutely. All right, Ian. Before I get out of here, I've got five rapid fire questions we're going to run through. Wait, you said, did you want to talk about Motor Trend? The different opinion on Motor Trend? We'll go back there. Yeah, we can do it. All right. We're going to back up. That never happened. Ian, you have, I believe, a different opinion on, let's call it the Motor Trend saga. That's unfolded over the last... Actually, it's been unfolding for a while, but it's just come into public knowledge in the last few months. Yes. I share a similar opinion to a few people, which is that, Motor Trend is It's not the evil empire that a lot of people portray it to be. I get that. When you lose your job, it sucks. I get it. I've lost jobs in the past. I've been fired. I've worked at dealerships where you walk in and the doors are closed. It absolutely sucks to lose your job. But Motortrend is not this evil empire trying to just make people not enjoy life. Motortrend was The transition from Motortrend into Discovery, that first initial move, that's what we just finally saw unfold in the past move where Motortrend Studios was closed. And Motortrend itself is still alive. It's owned by Discovery And if there's one thing that's constant, especially in this space of magazines or content or everything, is that things are ever evolving. And yes, did it suck that Motortrend studios closed? Absolutely. But as I said before, there's two sides to the coin, show and business. If the business isn't working, the show can't survive. And that's very... Anyone who in this business, you know that. You know that if there's not enough money coming in from advertisers to offset the cost of production, the show doesn't live. It's very simple. In my day job, I spend a lot of time working with private equity firms, and they make investments into companies like Motor Trend, and they make hard decisions. There's a lot of armchair quarterbacks that want to pick it apart. But to your point, there's two sides to it, and people just don't see both sides. It was very simple. When the final merger was finished and you had Discovery channel finally taking full control over Motor Motor Trends. It was obvious that Motor Trends had more money going out than money coming in. Now, could they have changed that? Possibly. I didn't run Motor Trends Studio. I don't know. But I do know that that's any business. That's your number one goal. Money out has to be less than- Pretty simple. Yeah. What I tell people all the time, if you're upset that your favorite show is canceled or you have a favorite show that you like, or even if you have a favorite content person on YouTube, if you don't want their channel to get canceled or their show get canceled, it's very simple. That is when you're watching one of these television shows or watching these content creators. For example, if Mike FINNEGANS on FINNEGANS garage is in stalling some aluminum turbo-pipping that he got from Vibrant Performance, then the next time you need aluminum turbo-pipping, if you're a big fan of Mike FINNEGANS, buy Vibrant Performance turbo-pipping. Don't buy the cheaper stuff on Amazon that looks like Vibrant Performance. When you buy it from Vibrant, you say, Hey, I'm buying this because I saw it on Mike FINNEGANS. I saw Mike FINNEGANS use this. That's why I'm doing it. That's the easiest way to support someone. Yeah, buy a T-shirt, but that's not going to pay the bills. I don't care what anyone says. You can sell a thousand T-shirts a week. You're not making as much money as Vibrant Performance is paying Mike FINNEGANS to use Vibrant Performance. That's just the truth. If you want to support somebody in the automotive space, that's what you do. When you buy a product that you see on their channel or see them use, you make sure that you tell the company. When you see these content guys on YouTube and they're like, Hey, use the FFlex Rocks. Marvin, perfect example. Marvin and I talk business all the time here because him and I have a very good open relationship about that. We had a drive shaft for the Bronco project, and I said, We'll get some from Tom Woods because Marvin's here. He'll get you the contact. I said, Marvin, you discount code. And he said, no, they don't have a discount code, but I'll call them to do the introduction. Because the discount codes are not used to save you money, which they do. The discount codes are so that company can then have a KPI of me sponsoring Marvin sells me X number of parts of whatever, because so many people collect the flex, rocks, and rollovers discount code that tells me I have this many customers, and therefore I made this much money. That's why they use them, and that's how you keep your channels and keep your people alive. That's just the reality. Oh, that one's dead. That one's dead. Okay. All right. That one's still going. Yeah, we're still going. Rapid fire questions. Here we go. Rapid fire. Let's wrap this up. Favorite off-road trail snack? Oh, jerky. Beef jerky. Now, do you just go in the gas station and peruse and grab one, or do you have a go-to? I like Duke's. They're small little, not like the big long slim gems. They're like super small sausages. They have a green chili that is really good because I'm a big Green Chili fan. Green Chili Dukes. All right. Green Chili Dukes. Yeah. You can only listen to one artist or one album while you're on the trail for the day. I'm Canadian, so it has to be tragically hip. Okay. I don't know the impact. That's a Canadian Then, yeah. If you're a Canadian, you have to say that you just listen to Tragically Hip. Okay. Got you. Dewalt or Milwaukee? I am actually an Ingersoll-Rand cordless guy, but I do have- Door number three. Yeah, but I do have Well holders that run off DeWalt batteries. Okay. As a DeWalt guy, I'll take that as a win. All right, this is a tough one. You can only choose one. Horsepower or torque? Oh, man. In the south, horsepower out west, I want torque. All right, fair. Because I need horsepower in the south. I'll give you that. Yeah, 100%. Skechiest trail you've ever driven? Oh, that'd be this last 24-hour Helen back. That was the scariest thing we've ever done in my entire So it's as bad as it looked. Yeah. I told Marvin that we're in there. I said, I've never gone four wheeling and said, What are we doing here? We don't need to be here. This is not smart until that trip.

00 in the morning How did Marvin respond to that? He loved it.

00 in the morning on that trip, when we were winching up that 60 foot waterfall, I said to Marvin, I was like, We just need to turn around and go home. We have no business being in this trail. Yeah, it was the scariest one I've ever done. All right, Ian, I appreciate it, man. This was fun. Yes. If you are listening to this or watching this, and it is about the time this comes out. Before June 12th, let me get my last plug in for the Great Smoky Mountain Trail ride at Wind Rock. Also known as G-Smitter, 34th year. Toyota event, but not just... We let anybody register. If you can handle the heckling, come on with whatever you want to bring. We expect 300 trucks this year. Our local club, Local Toyota Chapter, stlca. Org to register. Perfect. All right. Thank you, sir. Thank you.