Modern Jeeper, Corey Osborne, on Episode 100

A renaissance man, Corey Osborne keeps re-inventing himself and his ideals by learning everything he can. From corporate suit to off-road guy, Corey brings the CTI trailer to the masses for conversation and insight. Join him at Modern Jeeper online or one of their many adventures.

3:57– It’s a demented curiosity…

13:43 – are you sure this is something you want to do?

21:37 – so that’s why you have a yellow Jeep!

27:54 – …literally having a party for a year and a half straight!

32:22 – you ought to do something you enjoy

38:59 – from “that’ll never work” to just over 9000 rigs on the CTI trailer

43:23 – “you can only say no twice” – you have to be available

49:50 – my most horrible experience off-road, followed by my second worst experience

1:05:03 – I want to be inspired, I want to be inspirational

1:15:17 – Modern Jeeper is really about the adventure side

1:23:03 – the educational side of the off-road industry is going to be important

We want to thank our sponsors Maxxis Tires and 4Low Magazine.

www.maxxis.com

www.4lowmagazine.com 

Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.

Transcript

[00:00:01.150] - Speaker 5

Welcome to the Big Rich Show. This podcast will focus on conversations with friends and acquaintances within the fourwheel drive industry. Many of the people that I will be interviewing, you may know the name, you may know some of the history, but let's get in depth with these people and find out what truly makes them a four wheel drive enthusiast. So now is the time to sit back. Grab a cold one and enjoy our conversation.

[00:00:29.430] - Speaker 4

Whether you're crawling the red rocks of Moab or hauling your toys to the trail, Maxxis has the tires you can trust for performance and durability, four wheels or two, Maxxis tires are the choice of Champions because they know that whether for work or play, for fun or competition, Maxxis tires deliver. Choose Maxxis, Tread victoriously.

[00:00:55.990] - Speaker 1

Why should you read 4low Magazine? Because 4low Magazine is about your lifestyle. The four wheel drive adventure lifestyle that we all enjoy. Rock crawling, trail riding, event coverage, vehicle builds and do it yourself tech, all in a beautifully presented package. You won't find 4low on the newsstand rack. So subscribe today and have it delivered to you.

[00:01:20.110] - Big Rich Klein

On today's episode of Conversations with Big Rich, we have Corey Osborne. Corey is the RTI trailer articulation trailer, let's put it that way. We'll talk to Corey about that. We'll talk to Corey about his experiences in off road time at Metal Cloak and Modern Jeeper. So, Corey, thank you so much for coming on board and being part of Conversations.

[00:01:46.570] - Corey Osborne

Good morning, Rich. Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:01:49.130] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, yeah, absolutely. You've been on my list. It's not that I get down to where I just take everybody in order. I just look at who I think is available. This particular moment. I knew you were at home.

[00:02:03.240] - Corey Osborne

That can be a challenge.

[00:02:04.890] - Big Rich Klein

Yes, it can. As doing a podcast, you know?

[00:02:09.070] - Corey Osborne

Absolutely. Yeah. It's very difficult, especially. I mean, winter months are typically better for all of us in the off road industry, I think. But yeah, you never know when somebody is going to be around or not.

[00:02:20.580] - Big Rich Klein

Correct. All right. So let's just jump right in. And Corey, where were you born and raised?

[00:02:27.010] - Corey Osborne

I was actually born in Southern California, about 30 miles north of San Diego in Oceanside.

[00:02:33.470] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:02:35.050] - Corey Osborne

Yeah, I lived out there for about twelve years. My folks were divorced and I lived with my mom out there. My dad was in Colorado the whole time. And yeah, it was a different life living in SoCal. I was a beach kid and a skateboarder and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it was okay at twelve, moving back to Colorado and spending some time with my dad.

[00:03:03.750] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. Let's talk about that beginning there in Oceanside. You said you surfed and skateboarded. Any other interests? I mean, I'm sure you were biking at a BMX bike or something like that, too.

[00:03:18.150] - Corey Osborne

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. If it wasn't for my little BMX bike, I don't think we would have gone or done anything. It was our transportation in those years and how we got back and forth to school and. Yeah. And even then I was a tinkerer. So we took our bikes apart and maintained them and messed with them. And maybe that's where the mechanical side of our brains came from.

[00:03:45.980] - Big Rich Klein

Right. I think it's an innate thing with you or it's not to dive into taking things apart and putting them back together.

[00:03:57.870] - Corey Osborne

Yeah. It's some kind of demented curiosity. I think it is.

[00:04:02.240] - Big Rich Klein

Like how does this toaster really work?

[00:04:04.490] - Corey Osborne

Right. What's really going on here.

[00:04:06.530] - Big Rich Klein

Kids, if you're listening to this at home, make sure you unplug the toaster first.

[00:04:11.790] - Corey Osborne

Right.

[00:04:14.010] - Big Rich Klein

So then those early years, up to twelve years old, you're what, in about 6th grade then?

[00:04:21.390] - Corey Osborne

Yes. 7th grade. Yeah.

[00:04:23.630] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. What kind of things did you do down there Besides the surfing and skateboarding? Were you involved in any I mean, that's pretty young for organized sports, except for maybe getting into some softball, baseball or something like that. Little League. Did you get into any of that?

[00:04:44.130] - Corey Osborne

Not really. In those years, it was all about going to the beach. As I recall, we spent a lot of time, like I said, riding our bikes and riding up and down the coast. In fact, I remember a time when we actually got on our BMX bikes and we were up near the main entrance to Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base there in Oceanside. We rode our bikes from there all the way down through to Escondido and down to Carlsbad and 10-11 years old. That's just kind of what we did. We took off and would just ride to go either down the beach further or go to the malls or whatever. Lucadia, all that stuff. That was quite a riot. Eleven years old in the 70s.

[00:05:35.650] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely. And it's interesting that we didn't have cell phones for communicating with our parents.

[00:05:42.950] - Corey Osborne

Right.

[00:05:43.570] - Big Rich Klein

Our parents trusted our judgment for the most part until we screwed it up.

[00:05:50.250] - Corey Osborne

Right.

[00:05:51.570] - Big Rich Klein

It's so different nowadays with kids being attached. You can get trackers for them. If they've got the phone, you're tracking them anyway. But I mean, it's just crazy.

[00:06:05.730] - Corey Osborne

It is. And to think about then versus now, I don't know. Parents don't even let their kids go outside across street, down the street. And then we basically from sun up until sundown if it got dark. We knew we had to get home, but more so because we just knew we didn't want to be outside in the dark, not because it was some kind of a weird requirement. It was just what we did.

[00:06:31.540] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. It was a different world. Definitely safer. I don't think that there was I mean, there might have been all the crazies that there are now, but you didn't hear about them. It wasn't instantaneous in your face. This is somebody got abducted or somebody whatever.

[00:06:48.260] 

Right.

[00:06:52.090] - Big Rich Klein

There's a great thing about information and having it instantaneously and being able to get that information right away. But anything you can think of, you can do that. There's a lot to be said for not having access to all that for sure.

[00:07:14.110] - Corey Osborne

I'm sure we'll talk more about this later. But being a kid meant being a kid, whereas now even very young, what do they have in their hand? It's either a phone or a tablet, or they're connected to the Internet in some way, shape or form. And I don't know, I don't necessarily agree that that's healthy, but it is what it is. It's technology and it's evolution and all of that.

[00:07:40.430] - Big Rich Klein

Right. So true. So then when you moved to Colorado with your dad, you moved to the Western Slope.

[00:07:49.750] - Corey Osborne

Yeah. My dad lived in Salida at the time. And my grandparents, they had grandparents. My dad actually graduated from high school in Leadville and my grandparents had a restaurant in Leadville and they moved from Leadville down to Salida. So I would spend the summers with them pretty much every year. But yes, at the time going to Salada, which was a town of, I don't know, 5000 people. Then coming out of Oceanside, California, was. Yeah, that was a little bit of a culture shock.

[00:08:26.450] 

Right.

[00:08:26.850] - Corey Osborne

And no beach, no beach, cold weather. And it turns out that I was pretty independent. My mom was pretty unique and independent in her own way. She worked a lot and I very rarely saw her. And so moving in with my dad in Salida, a small town, I would leave the house and my dad would say, Where are you going? I don't know, I'm just going. And he'd say, well, you got to tell me where you're going to be. And I'd look at him like, what? Why would I do that? So it was a lot of change, and I think it was even different for him to go, oh, I've got a pretty independent kid, but it worked out. And I think that being in a smaller town was definitely helpful for me. As I started, I was involved in track and started playing golf and things like that, where I don't know if I would have ever done that. Staying in Southern California.

[00:09:30.800] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Shelley and I have talked about this a number of times with people and having her and her family, the kids grow up in Blackfoot. It was just big enough to where there was lots to do, but small enough to where there wasn't a lot of competition in activities. So they could get on the choir, they could become part of the play. They could be on the soccer team or the football team or anything that they chose to do. There were spots available they didn't have tryouts and then, oh, no, sorry, you're not good enough. Go home. It wasn't that way. I can remember going through that as a kid, especially like the first year of Pop Warner. I just didn't have what it took mentally to play to begin with. And then finally, I think I didn't really get the right mental attitude for team sports until after high school, unfortunately. But it gives people an opportunity when you're in a smaller town.

[00:10:43.010] - Corey Osborne

Oh, very much so. This is what we're probably late 70s now, early 80s. My dad was a banker and my grandparents had moved they actually moved from Salida to Lake Havasu and my dad was tired of Colorado a little bit. So from Salida, I was only there for about a year and a half and then we moved to Bakersfield, California.

[00:11:15.850] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, I'm sorry.

[00:11:17.970] - Corey Osborne

Yeah. And that was a culture shock. So you come out of this. I was in a pretty huge school in Oceanside to this little bitty school in Salida. My dad was getting into branch banking, so took a job in Bakersfield. And actually my 9th grade year was at Bakersfield High School in downtown Bakersfield. Yeah. It was definitely different coming out of Salida, but again, it's all those things that make us who we are. Right. It all builds character, as they say.

[00:11:58.030] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. You may look back on it and go, God, I hated those years or that was pretty screwed up or whatever. But like you said, those experiences are what molds you.

[00:12:10.930] - Corey Osborne

Oh, for sure. I think my freshman class was 1100 students. Wow. Yeah. And that was a big school and we lived in a nice enough area in Bakersfield. But I rode a bus like 13 miles into downtown Bakersfield because of the way the districts worked. If I would have lived across the Street, I would have gone to a high school that was about a mile and a half away. But since I lived on the other side of the tracks, so to say I had to ride a bus all the way into downtown Bakersfield wasn't that I don't have good memories of Bakersfield really well.

[00:12:49.970] - Big Rich Klein

And then moving there for your senior year.

[00:12:52.740] - Corey Osborne

You said my freshman year.

[00:12:55.370] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, freshman year, you moved there. Okay.

[00:12:57.910] - Corey Osborne

Yeah.

[00:12:58.410] - Big Rich Klein

That makes it more difficult because, well, at least like a freshman year when mine the school I went to junior high, you might call it, it was six 7th and 8th grade, and there was only like one or two schools that fed that from the elementary. And then you turned around and went to high school and then you have cities. We had people from two different cities coming into the school, our high school. And not only that, the clicks that you had in grade school were gone.

[00:13:36.910] - Corey Osborne

Oh, yeah.

[00:13:38.530] - Big Rich Klein

And especially for you, you had to make all new friends because you were new to the neighborhood.

[00:13:43.930] - Corey Osborne

Oh, for sure. I was kind of involved in track. I really liked to run and got out to Bakersfield and freshman year and I joined the track team and at the time I was a five foot tall. I think if I weighed £110 soaking wet. Yeah, I was a little kid and I was a hurdler. And I remember going to the track practice and one of my teammates, he was the state record holder in hurdles. It's like this six foot three, very wellrounded black kid. And he was super fast and super talented. I remember after practice for the first week, the coach drove me home on the last day and he said, are you sure this is something that you want to do?

[00:14:44.930] - Big Rich Klein

I had those conversations when I coached football, popcorn football with kids. They didn't have a choice because typically it was their parents saying, especially a dad, going, well, I was a football player, you're going to be one, you know, that kind of thing.

[00:15:01.400] - Corey Osborne

Right.

[00:15:01.840] - Big Rich Klein

But I've had conversations even just a couple of days into practice going, you don't really want to be here, do you?

[00:15:12.990] - Corey Osborne

Yeah. And I think at that point is when I finally said maybe I should just focus on playing more golf or something like that. But we weren't in Bakersfield very long. We were only there about a year and a half. My dad also realized that Bakersfield and branch banking and all of that, it was just wrecking us. It was not a good experience. So he wanted to go back to Colorado. And after a year and a half, I had just started my sophomore year, 10th grade. We moved from Bakersfield to Craig, Colorado.

[00:15:48.460] - Big Rich Klein

Okay, I'm familiar with that.

[00:15:50.290] - Corey Osborne

Craig back into an extremely small town. But again, it was kind of like going home a little bit, way more comfortable for him still in the banking industry. And then I was back at a high school that I ended up graduating from. But I'll never forget the first winter we spent in Craig. It was the coldest winter and one of the most snowiest winters they had in years. And this was like 1982, I guess, maybe 81. But they literally had 8ft, six to 8ft of snow that came in a storm and 20 below zero. Oh, it was just miserable.

[00:16:36.870] - Big Rich Klein

And then you were going, can we go back to Bakersfield?

[00:16:40.530] - Corey Osborne

Yeah. Wow. Bakersfield wasn't that bad, was it? Yeah, to where you go to shovel out a driveway and you couldn't throw the snow up high enough to get we had like these berms on the side of the driveway that it was just ridiculous. But again, it was a small town, and I think the quality of life was much better being raised in a smaller area. Again, one of my first jobs was I worked for McDonald's and eventually worked for I was a shoe guy in Kmart. We still had a Kmart then. And then Craig got a wave pool. So they built a wave pool. And my junior and senior year became a lifeguard. So it wasn't too bad. It was a fun town to be raised in.

[00:17:33.070] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. And did you continue with sports there or what?

[00:17:39.260] - Corey Osborne

I did. Yeah. I ran track and played golf again. It's a pretty small school, so we had five guys on the golf team, and that was it. There wasn't a bunch of people in line, but it was fun. One thing about living in Craig, which is Northwestern Colorado, as you know, we had to travel everywhere. So every time there was a golf meet or every time there was a track meet or something, we travel all over, clear down to Cortes and Durango and Montrose, Delta, Grand Junction, part of that. Oh, yeah. Lots of overnights. And I remember those trips. They were a lot of fun for being a sophomore junior, senior in high school. Those are some of my really good memories from high school. Those trips with the team and the coaches and going to other places and meeting people.

[00:18:35.570] - Big Rich Klein

So do you think that helped with your ability to move and travel? Because I know what you're doing now. You do a lot of travel like we do.

[00:18:48.870] - Corey Osborne

Absolutely. Yeah. I never really thought about it until it just came out of my mouth, but I'm sitting here kind of going, yeah. All the traveling back and forth and meeting new people, and that's what I strive for today, and I really enjoy it still. And maybe there's something to be said for that where a lot of those things came out of those years in high school.

[00:19:12.840] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. I grew up in the same town. Of course, it was a town of 50,000 plus people south of San Francisco on the Peninsula. But we had, like, big county parks and city park that ran into the County Park and we had a lot of open space at that time. I don't think there's all that open space there now. I haven't been back in years, but I needed as a kid to be out and doing things. I mean, with scouting, it gave me the opportunity to go backpacking into travel out into the wilderness. And it really gave me that sense of freedom I needed. I couldn't do what kids do nowadays and sit at home and play with electronics as an old man now. Yeah, I can.

[00:20:03.610] - Corey Osborne

Right. It's funny. As we go back and we think about growing up, I admit to anybody that my family was pretty dysfunctional, especially on my mom's side. They were drinkers and druggers, and my early days were kind of a mess. But later in life, my dad liked to go outdoors. He liked to hike. He was a Hunter. The variety of living in different places, having to meet new friends all the time or new people and just figure it out. Those were those years where, like you said, we didn't have cell phones. We didn't have the Internet and email and all of this stuff. We just went and did things and we figured it out. And I think that's so beneficial today. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see where these young generations end up, they'll probably look back on all of us and laugh.

[00:21:10.010] - Big Rich Klein

So with moving around, did you ever take it as, hey, I can reinvent myself moving to a new town. I don't have to be the same Corey that I was two weeks ago. Can I open up? Did you ever think that way?

[00:21:37.850] - Corey Osborne

I don't think I ever consciously thought I can be somebody different. And I think it's important that we always be ourselves. And I think maybe that's what my frustration with some of the social media stuff today is more along those lines of you can be anybody else every day. You can change. But I was really focused on I enjoyed school. I was really wanting to be better. And I was always hungry to learn more and new things. I left Craig, went all the way to Grand Junction to go to College, which was only about 3 hours away. But again, I didn't go to Grand Junction and go to school thinking I wanted to go into the military. I was all set to join the army actually, and have them pay for my College. Took the Azvab, did extremely well. They said, wow, you can do anything you want. And then they found out I was colorblind. No wonder you have a yellow T. That's exactly right. I have lots of bright colors. And if you ever notice, I'm either all Gray and black. But yeah, so then that changed. And they said, oh, gosh with your red green color deficiency, we don't have that many options for you.

[00:23:06.090] - Corey Osborne

And so I said, okay, I'm not going to join, which they didn't like that. But I went to College wanting to be basically an engineer and I liked learning new things. But then College in Grand Junction, that was 86 87. I went to school for three and a half years and still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I'll never forget I was sitting in a differential equations class and I'm taking notes seriously. And I look over at my buddy sitting next to me and he just sat back in his seat and he's just looking at the board. I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, I get it. And I kind of looked at my notes of four pages of chicken scratch trying to figure out what this instructor is talking about. And it was right then that I went, hey, maybe I should go do something different too because I'm working awfully hard. And the guy sitting next to me, his name was Carl. He ended up going to work for the Department of Defense and yeah, going to school three and a half years. I really didn't finish my degree then.

[00:24:28.130] - Corey Osborne

Didn't know what I was doing. And I was working in the mall in Grand Junction, went to work for a photography lab developing film mock photo, doing the 1 hour film processing. And they had a portrait studio, and I'd always liked the whole photography aspect of things, but yeah, interesting. So then I started working in a photo lab and quit school, quit College without a degree at that point and decided that Grand Junction wasn't big enough for me and moved to Denver and went to work for a corporate photo lab, CPI photo, that was located in all the malls in Denver.

[00:25:08.990] - Big Rich Klein

Okay, that's interesting. That to me, that the whole thing. That your evolution there of realizing school and that you weren't ready to be an engineer. When the other guy goes, oh, I understand it. I don't need to take notes. And then going, look at your own notes, going, Damn, yeah.

[00:25:33.860] - Corey Osborne

Wow. Maybe this isn't as naturally coming to me as it should. Or I liked what I was learning. I just realized there was maybe a better fit and just still, I think going to College after high school for a lot of kids is too soon. They don't necessarily know anything about themselves or what. I focused on kind of the architecture side of engineering and then the civil side of engineering. I liked mathematics, but I really didn't have a goal or a plan. And then going to Denver. I was in Denver for about three years working for photo labs, had my own photo lab. One of my customers actually said, hey, you should just open your own shop. And I said, yeah, I'm all about having pockets of money. I don't have the money to open my own lab. So he actually put up the money. I knew nothing about running a small business other than doing it corporately. We opened C and R custom photo. His name was Raymond. So it was Corey and Raymond, which was kind of interesting because the C and the R eventually looked just like the Colorado Rockies logo looked like.

[00:26:56.540] - Corey Osborne

But turns out nothing was in my name. We were pretty busy. It did really well, but I had nothing at the end of the day. And he came to me at one point and said, well, we're not really making enough money to give you a paycheck. Okay, what am I going to do now? And I became a bartender for money. I was actually a guy working a door at a topless club in North Denver and was a doorman and a bartender and trying to make money to make ends meet.

[00:27:42.090] - Big Rich Klein

Corey in the strip club. There you go. How many times have you told that story?

[00:27:54.070] - Corey Osborne

I think of it as part of my past, but man, was I a mess. I did that for about a year and a half working in it. I actually worked for a number of bars in Denver. In Denver, strip club, Shotgun Willys downtown, the bus stop up in Boulder, tended bar and was literally having a party for a year and a half straight because going to work was a party. And after work was a party, and my life was absolutely going down the toilet, literally.

[00:28:34.970] - Big Rich Klein

Interesting.

[00:28:35.610] - Corey Osborne

Yeah.

[00:28:36.060] - Big Rich Klein

How do you pull yourself out of that?

[00:28:38.750] - Corey Osborne

Well, let's see. Ended up talking with my dad after I think it was my second DUI. And my dad said, you should come work for me. And they had left Craig. He went down to Montres and was working for a title insurance company. I didn't really know what my dad was doing. I knew he wasn't in banking anymore, but he said I should come work for him. And I didn't even know. I said, I don't want to sell cars. And he laughed and he goes, Why do you think I sell cars? I'm like, well, it's title insurance. I don't really understand what that is. So he explained it to me. I literally picked up my one suitcase of stuff that I had and came to Montrose and went to work for him at this title insurance agency. And for those that don't know that's real estate transactions and we're kind of a third party to handle the money on both sides of the real estate transaction. And me being me, I went all in. I read and read and took classes, and I was hooked. I wanted to know more about title work and property lines and property law and contracts and all of that, and I was hooked.

[00:30:09.510] - Corey Osborne

Met my ex wife. That would have been about 94 in Montrose, and we moved to Grand Junction. I went to work for a larger title insurance company that I ended up working for for about 18 years. Went back to College, finished my bachelor's degree, actually in computer science. I went to work for this title insurance company in Grand Junction as their systems administrator. I was just a computer guy and then eventually took over their title insurance Department, the title side. There are two sides. There's closing side and the title side. I was a title guy. We eventually got bought out by a company in Denver, a larger title insurance company, but it was still privately held. We were about 10 00, 10, 00 people in the state of Colorado, and things were good. This was 20 02, 20. 03. They asked me to if I was interested in coming back to Montrose and the array area because they were buying another title insurance company out. They knew I was familiar with the area. So, yeah, we picked up from Grand Junction. We were in Grand Junction about eight years. Came down here and thought it took me about a year to figure out what I had actually done.

[00:31:33.150] - Corey Osborne

I couldn't believe we moved back into a smaller area. The first winter in your Ray. I spent pulling cars out of the snow, and I was happy. I was doing very well in my professional life. I became one of the vice presidents for the company, opened up the Telluride title office from scratch, converted this, your office into a land title office and then took over Montreaus. So I was managing these three offices at a time when real estate was going pretty well. But it was right before the real estate market took a crash.

[00:32:19.570] 

Yes.

[00:32:22.250] - Corey Osborne

So seven, eight, nine. I spent just literally laying people off. Hated it, was stressed out. I didn't know how we got here. And we've lived in Eure County now for 20 years. Finally got comfortable with being in your Ray. But my professional life was just a mess. My ex wife, Julie, she said, you ought to do something you enjoy. And that's easy to say, but how often do we get the opportunity to actually do something that we just enjoy that makes us money? And it was kind of interesting. One of the owner of the company's son, who was being groomed to take over the company, came to me one day in Montrose and said, what would you do if I asked you to resign? What would you think? And I'm thinking, I've been with this company now for just over 17 years, but I wasn't happy. I remember sitting back in my chair going, huh? What do you got? What are you offering me? And I resigned. They paid my health insurance for another four months. Five months paid for me the rest of the year. And this happened in June. And I took the offer and I packed up all my stuff in my offices and came and sat at the house and looked at my ex wife and said, all right, what are we going to do now?

[00:34:11.250] - Big Rich Klein

You were good at your job, but maybe you were in one of those spots where you were just treading water. It was just a job.

[00:34:19.380] - Corey Osborne

That's right. It was the same thing every single day. And it was very monotonous. I was really tired of the corporate life, but I was needed. I was wanted. And so I think that was the hardest thing for me to do was to walk away from it. And then nobody called. Nobody needed me on a day to day basis. And we can take a vacation. When you have a corporate job, you take a vacation and you don't think about work. Maybe for a while. I just didn't know what to do with myself. And it turns out I'd always been a Jeep enthusiast. I was always spending my vacations off road if I wasn't doing off road things. When we took our vacations, I was diving. And again, me being me, I couldn't just go diving and have fun. I wanted to learn more and know all there was about it. So I became an instructor. And I'm really good at, I think, at turning my hobbies into work and into careers. But I knew that I had two options. I could either go to an island somewhere and make Angels in the sand and teach diving, or I could do something in the off road environment.

[00:35:46.110] - Corey Osborne

And I didn't even know what that looked like. I knew I like to go Jeeping, but who's going to pay me just to go Jeeping, right? And Lo and behold, Tim Pellegrino called me and said, hey, at the time, I had an two Wrangler. That was my first yellow Jeep spike that I had built. And that's what I had been taking to events and stuff. I've been going to Easter Jeep Safari. This would be like 23 years in a row, other than the COVID year.

[00:36:21.640] 

Okay.

[00:36:23.410] - Corey Osborne

But, yeah, I didn't really know what I was going to do. So Tim calls and he says, hey, my brother's got this company. And I knew of Jen, right? Of course. And he's like, yeah, he needs some accounting help. I need some help. He was helping his brother Tony out at the time. And he said, Why don't you come out and take a look at it? And from my business background, he's like, why don't you come see what help you can give us? So I packed up. I had been doing nothing for about three weeks here at the house, left Julie here and took off and went out to California for a couple of weeks and tried to figure out if that was something I could be a part of, I guess. And you know what? I truly learned so much from Tim, from Tony, from being a part of Genre. I ended up being their operations manager for about ten months. Got to travel a lot, built relationships with so many people across the country. But our perspectives of what business was two different things. Tony was very interested in the racing side, and I was building the business on the back side.

[00:37:42.420] - Corey Osborne

And I was focused on the business, and we just didn't meet in the middle. And also my relationship was falling apart. Julie was still back here in Montreaus, and I'd been in California for ten months. Seen her maybe two or three times in that ten months. So I had some things I needed to fix. Came back home, realized that maybe the marriage thing wasn't going to work out. Julie had her career. I had mine. We were kind of really good friends, and we had become just really good friends for the last two years. We kind of went our separate ways. And in the middle of that, Madsen from Metal Cloak called and he says, we have this idea. And I said, okay. And he had taken the CTI trader, this Corner Travel Index trader, to some events. And he said, we built this trailer, and we want you to take it to these events and have people get up on the trailer with their Jeeps. And I said, that's a really stupid idea that will never work.

[00:38:57.230] 

Yeah.

[00:38:59.210] - Corey Osborne

And here we are, about eight years later, I've had just over 9000 rigs on that trailer. I get to travel the country. I'm very fortunate. I'm super lucky that I've had the experiences that I've had, and they've enabled me to do what I do today. But I love what Shelley in her most recent newsletter, be brave enough to suck at something new. And if we don't do that, if we don't take those opportunities, I think we miss out. And yet it's so hard because sometimes you come out the other side and you may not land on your feet, but you dust yourself off. And life is full of those decisions and choices. I'm too analytical and I'm too structured because I think a lot of that corporate experience is every time we make one of those decisions, it's recognizing which way is going to be a better path when you come to that intersection. I can go left or I can go right. Well, which way is best if I go left? Well, I have to cross traffic and I may get T boned if I go right. It's going to be the longer way for me to get home.

[00:40:29.690] - Corey Osborne

But that's kind of an over analysis. But I do that all the time, which makes me pretty dysfunctional because there's a lot of stuff going on in my head that is pretty worthless information. But it's trying to decipher those decisions all the time. Every time you have one to make sure you're making the right choices.

[00:40:52.850] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And I see that in Shelley as well. I've always been the type that I don't know if it's like chasing butterflies or what, but it's something bright and shiny over there. It's like, oh, let's go do that. And I just kind of jump. I don't analyze it a lot. And in time I've had to start over three times because of that. You might say you go all in and then you lose it all. And it's like, all right, now I got to start over again. What am I going to do? So being analytical to a point is good, but you can't let it keep you from doing something as well. I know a lot of people overplan and overplan and over plan and just don't react, don't move right.

[00:41:47.730] - Corey Osborne

Then it never will come to fruition, right. It just becomes we've over planned it, we overanalyzed it. So now I'm terminated that. We're just not going to do it. Well, that's all about balance, and I think we struggle as we get older. I'm still trying to find that balance. And leaving a secure corporate environment and going to work for yourself, I think, is one of the biggest changes in your life that you can have other than having kids and all that and relationships. But the balance of working for yourself and having those I got to turn the switch off right now. Corporately, you get a check and you can go and do your eight to five or whatever those hours are. And as long as you're meeting their needs, you get a check. There's a weird security to that. And then when you go to work for yourself, you're the one pursuing those dollars. And if you don't, well, you're not just going to get a check in the mail because you're not performing for anybody other than yourself. Really. At least my mind. I mean, for the last eight years as an independent contractor, we look at everything as an opportunity.

[00:43:23.560] - Corey Osborne

I had a boss in my title insurance world. She always said live a clean life. And I never knew what that meant. But she viewed everybody, every relationship she ever came across as either potential employee or she would end up working for them like everything, live a clean life, because you never know who your next boss is going to be and you never know who you may end up. I mean, you working for them or them working for you. It's interesting. And sometimes we don't shut off. We don't give ourselves that break. We don't have this. I work for myself and I'm going to work from eight to four. Well, good luck with that because I think today's world, we definitely were always connected. We have to be connected. I've had people say, well, you got it made. I want to do what you do. And my first comment to them is, well, here's what you need to do first. You have to give up everything. And they kind of step back and they look at me like, what do you mean give up everything? Yeah. And I think it was Rick Payway who told me this years ago is you can only say no twice in the off road industry, because if they call you and they need something and you say no, that's fine.

[00:44:48.340] - Corey Osborne

They may call you again, but there's not going to be that third phone call. You can say no, but know that when you say no the second time you're done, that isn't going to work out. So you have to be available. You have to be able to be so flexible that whether you, hey, we've got this thing going on or we need you to be here at this time. Can you do it? And using that balance, finding that balance to go either, yeah, it works for me or no, it won't. You've got to be flexible enough to just jump when somebody needs you. That's chasing your own dollars in your own path, and it all comes back into that balance and full of decisions and choices and everything.

[00:45:37.330] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely. So then let's backtrack a little bit because we jumped into I mean, I love the progression through the professional life. You might say, let's go back to the personal side. And how did offroad become an interest of yours?

[00:46:02.030] - Corey Osborne

Wow. So let's see, I had a Jeep when we lived in Grand Junction. I had a YJ and we liked going out. We had a couple of dogs and we would take them out on some fire roads and stuff like that. And this little YJ, it was all stock leaf Springs and we'd go bounce out in the Hills outside of grand junction. And we really enjoyed that. It's that escapism. It's a way to get away from the work side and to go camping and all of that. Prior to that, I had an old Scout 72 international. That literally Julie and I would throw some blankets in the back of the thing and we would just go camping. Later we got a tent and we just take off and go spend the night out in the Hills somewhere. Sold a scout, upgraded to the little Jeep. At least it was a Jeep. So it'll obviously go everywhere I want it. Well, to a point. I had a buddy that lived in junction. Jason had a he was an engine builder. He was a racing guy doing the quarter mile stuff. But he opened a machine shop and I thought that I wanted to do something off road related.

[00:47:37.450] - Corey Osborne

I ended up buying. I had an 86 full size Bronco, had a 351 in it. And Jason said, well, we should build this thing into a mud racing vehicle. Pulled the motor out of it and built that 351. And I'll never forget going to Sears buying some 35 inch tires and all the guys at Sears going, what are you going to do with tires that big? Back in those days, 35 was huge. But yeah, I really had fun. And we went to a few mud races, raced in grand junction, racetrain Rangely, just pretty much local stuff. And driving through a 150 ft. Mud pit. I got really tired of going to the car wash and the race was a minute long and I'd spend 4 hours at the car wash.

[00:48:39.610] - Big Rich Klein

I hate mud.

[00:48:41.230] - Corey Osborne

I hate mud. Yeah. Shout out to Woody there.

[00:48:44.970] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah.

[00:48:47.930] - Corey Osborne

So yeah, I was like, wow, this is wrong. I don't want to go in the mud anymore. And some other friends of ours in grand junction said, well, we go to Moab to this thing every year during Easter. And I said, yeah, okay. Well, I don't have a Jeep. It's Easter Jeep Safari. And they said, oh, no, you can just take the Bronco. And I said, well, the Bronco is really kind of more of a it wants to run at 6000 rpm, not at 1000 rpm. And he said, no, you'll be fine. And they had a really nice older Bronco like a 70 that was very fixed up. So we signed up for Easter Jeep Safari with our buddy Dan MC and signed up for the golden spike trail. Didn't know anything about Moab. Really didn't know anything about rock crawling at all.

[00:49:48.210] - Big Rich Klein

With the out there.

[00:49:50.320] - Corey Osborne

Yes. Took the Bronco. One of the most horrible experiences I think I've ever had off road. It was having some flooding issues. So every time we hit a bump, the Bronco, it wasn't fuel injected. It had a big Holly 850 on it, and it just died. So I spent the day starting it over and over and over, and I liked it. I liked where we were. Dan took us on that day. He took us to a place where they don't really take us part of the Easter Jeep Safari trail anymore, or trip. We went to a place where you have to kind of it's beyond where Eagles dare. It's overlooking some railroad tracks. And the railroad tracks are about 6700ft below us, where we eat lunch after lunch, hopped in our rigs, and we started up this incline that was about I'm guessing it had to be 45%. Pretty steep. Had a little turn in the middle of it as we go up onto the top of the Hill. Well, we got about halfway up, and I knew there were people behind me, Julie sitting next to me. And we had made this corner, and, well, it was so steep that I put both feet.

[00:51:21.370] - Corey Osborne

It's still in gear. Dies. I put both feet on the brake, and we're just sliding backwards. And I can hear him on the radio saying, he's coming off backwards. And I knew I can hear the trendy is like ratcheting. So I knew that there's people in back of me. So I took my foot off the brake, steered around these guys that were directly in back of me and ended up coming off of about a 14 foot cliff. Landing on the rear bumper, blew out the right the passenger side rear tire. And the Broncos started to kind of hop a little bit to the side, and a bunch of guys got out and got on the front. Keep us from going over. Well, if we would have gone over once, we would have gone over one more time and then down about 600ft to the railroad tracks. I was shaking so bad, I wasn't sure I could get out. Julie hopped out. I still look at some of the pictures from back then. And I'm sitting on the side of the rock, and Dan mix got his arm around me, and I'm literally vibrating. And a bunch of guys got out, and they fixed the blown rear tire and put the spare on.

[00:52:35.420] - Corey Osborne

And we were there maybe an hour and downloaded everybody back up and said, okay, well, who wants to go up? And nobody wanted to go up that way.

[00:52:52.270] - Big Rich Klein

Not after watching you.

[00:52:54.100] - Corey Osborne

Not after watching that. So the mid Gunner, he's going to take us out around the corner. And so we hop back in the Bronco, and we started back around the side. And I realized that when I put both feet on the brake pedal, that I also blew the seals and the master cylinder.

[00:53:10.630] - Big Rich Klein

Nice.

[00:53:11.130] - Corey Osborne

I had no brakes. We got off of Golden Spike. I think we got down, back to the highway. It was midnight, 01:00 in the morning. Ridiculous trip. Ridiculous. And Julie was like, oh, we're never doing that again until we have fuel injection or something like this was just dumb. Well, Dan still tells that story. In fact, it's funny. Over the years, I go out on the trip with him every once in a while and we talk about the spot and talk about that experience. It changed, though. My perspective of wheeling. It really caused me to go, hey, I don't want a mud race. We do need something fuel injected. Yeah, it was miserable. Came home, fixed the Bronco, put a new master cylinder in it, had a guy work on the car, adjusted the floats in there, tried to keep it from flooding all the time. Second trip out in the Bronco was to Mount Blanca down near Alamosa. Julie's parents were from Alamosa. So we were going to go out to the sand dunes. And I had read in a book about this Mount Blanca trail and stuff is in Colorado and blah, blah, blah.

[00:54:44.910] - Corey Osborne

Julie said, okay, we'll try it one more time.

[00:54:50.470] - Big Rich Klein

Second worst experience.

[00:54:52.540] - Corey Osborne

Yes. So my second worst, we get down to Blanca. I've got Julie's parents with us in the backseat of the Bronco. And her folks have been to the top of Blanca long time ago. They hike and stuff like that. Very outgoing people. We get about halfway up to just before the first real obstacle called Jaws One. And Dale, her stepdad gets out. And I asked him to spot me across this little narrow section. And he gets out and he gets in front of the Bronco and he looks over to the side. He looks over to the side again and he's like, yeah, you need to get out and come here. So I get out and I walk up in front of the Bronco and we look over the side, and there's a Jeep in the trees, about 100ft off the ground in the tree. And I'm like, well, I don't understand it's, mangled. It's been rolled. It's probably rolled ten times. And there's a big yellow piece of paper on it, says, this accident has been investigated by the state patrol. And it's got yesterday's date on it.

[00:55:55.670] 

Wow.

[00:55:56.660] - Corey Osborne

And I'm looking at it and I'm like, well, I don't even understand where this came from. How did it get here? So we kind of look above the trail that we're going up, and there's a switch back, and we look up above us about 200 yards, and the switchback is going to come up above us. I'm like, oh. So he went off way up there and rolled down. So we decided that we're not going to do that. We park the Bronco and literally one of the roughest roads I've ever driven on. I don't know what kind of condition it's on today, but that was had to be about 2000, I guess. So 20 years ago, we got out, grabbed our lunches and our little backpacks, and we decided to hike up the trail. We're going to go up to the little Lake up there. So on the way up, we met a bunch of hikers, and they were doing the whole, hey, did you see that accident? Did you hear about it? Yeah, we were here for it. It happened yesterday. Father and son died in that Jeep the night before. Been wheeling up there lots of years.

[00:57:08.180] - Corey Osborne

And the wife of the dad and the wife of the son were both up there with them. They'd been over the obstacle a bunch, but this obstacle was kind of an off camber, weird rock on this very narrow section. And they got around the rock and it just went over and they both died. And their wives stood there and watched. Wow, pretty horrible. Again, that whole is kind of serious. We hiked up to the Lake, ate lunch, came back down. By the time we got back down, they were extracting this Jeep out of the trees. They had this massive built Suburban and another really big Jeep up there. And they had three winches on the thing and pulling this thing out of the trees. And they're going to put it in between their two vehicles and they're going to go down the trail, get it off the Hill. So they wanted us to go down in front. And I said, no, you guys go ahead. You're in front of us. So we hung out. We watched him extract his Jeep and head down the trail. They're gone. They're maybe 100 yards down in front of us.

[00:58:18.570] - Corey Osborne

And I get in the Bronco to start it. And the plates in the battery in the Bronco had fallen over internally. I got nothing. I got a dead battery. It won't do anything. So we're 11,000ft, 12,000ft. I go running down the trail to reach the group, and they end up pulling this crushed Optima red top out of this Rec Jeep and giving it to me, and I take it back. They're like, we don't know if it'll work or not, but you're more than welcome to try it. So I take it up to the Bronco, swap the battery out, it fires up, and off we go. We make it all the way down to the bottom. Of course, the family is down at the bottom. And I need to either thank somebody, give somebody money for this battery, and just this whole traumatic experience with everybody. And I've got this half crushed red Optima, and it was again, that whole second experience where you just kind of go, okay, maybe I'm not as prepared as I should be or think I am or as good as I need to be or all of those things. I ran that crushed red top for six months in the Bronco before I got another one.

[00:59:43.310] - Corey Osborne

And then we ended up selling the Bronco. And I bought that first yellow Jeep, that 2002 Wrangler. And the name of that Wrangler where Spike came from was from Golden Spike that was the first trail I ever did in Moab. And that's how Spike began. That's where that name came from.

[01:00:05.290] 

Nice. Yeah.

[01:00:06.980] - Corey Osborne

And you know what? Fuel injection and all that kind of stuff. So it made such a huge difference and we still liked it. I can't believe after those two horrible experiences, we still liked going and doing that stuff. And I had some friends that joined a four wheel drive club in Junction and then in Mantras later and started tearing into the Jeep and making upgrades and changing the suspension, the wheels and tires and adding gears and lockers. And I was always a tinkerer. I wanted to know more. And I was just so fortunate that I had friends that were very, very mechanically inclined. Of course, moving down to Montrose in 2004, I had the Jeep and Trevor McPherson ended up meeting him. He had an offroad shop here in town. And then I met Terry Hawkins, who had Alpine offroad and been wheeling a lot together. And then he and I became really good friends, as you know, and he exposed me to a whole another aspect. Here was a guy that did some professional rock crawling. And with your events, it's amazing again how fortunate and lucky we are to he introduced me to you and Shelley.

[01:01:31.670] - Corey Osborne

I think I was able I ended up getting to work some recovery at some of your events down in Cortez and whatnot and those experiences and being out around the racers and the environment and all of those people. It's just a big family and I think that was my attraction to all of it, to the entire industry. I mean, Rick payways events with the ultimate Adventure and we got invited to go on a couple of those and I was hooked. That lifestyle was that's what I wanted to do. And I just had to figure out how I was going to make money doing it.

[01:02:11.190] - Big Rich Klein

That's the key right there.

[01:02:13.320] - Corey Osborne

Yeah.

[01:02:15.090] - Big Rich Klein

My grandfather had asked me what I wanted to do when I was like eleven or twelve and I was in Scouts and I was backpacking and I really loved the outdoors. And I said, Well, I want to be a forest Ranger or fishing game, something like that. And he said, well, those are honorable professions. You get to do what you love to do, but think about as you get older, what it is you love to do and then figure out how to make a living doing it. And it wasn't when he said living, he didn't mean how much money I made, it was how I got to live my life. Well, it took me till 42 to figure that out.

[01:03:00.270] - Corey Osborne

Yeah. And I resemble that. I think it's interesting is when we're younger, we so see the future. We're excited about the front side of everything. We don't necessarily think about the backside. By that, I mean the side of what kind of path, what is my direction. We're so interested in running up the Hill when we're young. We don't think about what happens when we get to the top and what's on the other side. Now for even for me, I'm on my second round of traveling through all 50 States. I think I've got like four or five States left on the far northeast corner again, which are pretty hard to get to from when you live in the west. But that kind of stuff is still appealing to me. But yet for me, I have to go, well, it becomes an issue to leave the things, the stuff. All of that becomes less important, as you and Shelley know. But at some point we also have to have some kind of roots. We have to have a base. We have to be able to put our feet down. At some point we can't just continually pursue. There's got to be that other side.

[01:04:25.950] - Corey Osborne

And I think as we get older, that becomes the struggle of, okay, well, I'm going to be gone for a month or two or three or ten. I've always said it was healthy for a younger person to go travel for a year and then go to school if that's what you want to do or pick a job as we get older, there's that whole, well, when I retire, I'm going to buy an RV and I'm going to travel around the country. Let me tell you how much work as you know, how much work that is.

[01:04:59.270] - Big Rich Klein

Eleven years of it.

[01:05:03.330] - Corey Osborne

Nobody thinks about the maintenance aspect of it or just the mind games of not knowing what tomorrow brings sometimes is very negative. I mean, for me now, I want to be inspired. I want to be inspirational. How do we convey that? With the metal cloak gig, I get to touch so many people, and every time somebody gets on the trailer, I have six to seven minutes with every single one of those Jeeps and the people who own them to talk about what their paths are like and what they're doing and where they want to go and how they want to do their build. And people say, well, doesn't that you just have the same conversation 9000 times? Yeah, but every single one of them is different in a way. Different people, different experiences. Doing the guided trips that we're doing now, about three years ago or so, going to a place I'd never been through, Death Valley, I thought, who'd want to go through Death Valley? It's just flattened sand and heat. Wow. Where my eyes opened, I had no idea. And again, it changed my perspective of what do I enjoy. Did the rock crawling thing, did the extreme stuff.

[01:06:34.480] - Corey Osborne

Okay, that's great. Tired of working on stuff now. Don't really want to just fix broken things all the time. It's amazing that a little simple trip can literally change your path of what you end up wanting to do. I love Des Alley and people think that it's just that flat Sandy Cactus and man, there's so much to it. But that's the thing that's true with everywhere until you can see it through your own eyes or at least get a sense or a vision from a friend or a magazine or a book or something. Now everybody just sits back and watches YouTube videos. I guess so there's that.

[01:07:18.010] - Big Rich Klein

But I think that those people that are watching the YouTube videos of travel where other people traveling and experiencing really do want to get out and do it themselves. I think that and I don't just think this, I think I've got a pretty good grip on it is that people are afraid. They are so used to doing what they do. They're so used to that security thing. They're walking away from that security, walking away from the normal. Everybody else is normal. Myself, I've never known what that normal is for me. Right before I got into the rock crawling, I never had a job or a business of my own that lasted more than five years because I'd get bored of it or something would happen. The Desert Storm or whatever national disaster would happen would create a situation where I had to start over a business. So I'd go spend, go to work for somebody else for a while and then start doing my own thing again and then back and forth. And then I went to a rock crawl and I was like, okay, this is pretty damn cool. I was wheeling. I had been wheeling for years.

[01:08:46.200] - Big Rich Klein

But then when that first rock crawling event, it was like, I could do this. I could put on an event like this, and I think I could do it more organized. So I looked at it. I started going to the events and volunteering just to look at it, to see how they ran it. But what could be done differently that might make it more streamlined or whatever and more organized? And so that's what drove me into it. I love the people that were wheeling that we met and I just wanted that. And at first when my idea was to actually compete myself, and then I changed that when I realized building a rig was going to be financially out of my grasp. And it was like, okay, how do you get involved otherwise? Well, I can keep volunteering for people, but that doesn't do anything for me. So let's put some events on. And I really have enjoyed it over the years and there's a whole bunch of different reasons for that. And I've talked about it on this podcast a number of times, but it always boils down to the people and the places.

[01:10:02.020] - Corey Osborne

Yeah, well, and you have been so inspirational and there is no real path for people to be involved in the things that they don't even know they want to be involved in. They don't even know that they might enjoy rock crawling. And you hit the nail on the head, the relationships and the contacts and watching a video and going, hey, I don't have to be scared. I can just go there. And that's what's so amazing about the groups that not only go to your events, but the Jeep industry and lifestyle as a whole is pretty open armed. I mean, you don't have to know anything about it. You can show up and watch it and talk to people and they're not going to go, oh, you're just an idiot. Go away. That's just not the nature of no.

[01:11:04.120] - Big Rich Klein

They may say you're an idiot, but let me help you not be one, right? They may not verbalize. It very true. I'm not saying everybody listening to this is an idiot because they're into off road and they're beginners. That's not what I mean.

[01:11:20.390] - Corey Osborne

Right? No. One of the first events that you guys said you want to work recovery. And I'm thinking, and of course I'm like, yeah, wait, I don't know how to recover a race car. What am I getting myself into? But that's how you learn. That's how you experience things. And if you don't, there's that whole you fake it till you make it kind of thing. And I've never really embraced that. I want to know everything I can possibly know about something before I do it. Yet experiences and watching people do it. And I think you're right. The YouTube thing. Heavens, how many times do I get on YouTube in a week and go, okay, I can do this, but I wonder if somebody else has done it. Oh, they have. And look at that, that looked easy. I can do it better there. So then we modify it to fit how we need something done that's huge. We didn't have access to that information, you know, even ten years ago.

[01:12:23.070] - Big Rich Klein

True. So let's talk about modern Jeeper.

[01:12:29.450] - Corey Osborne

Okay, let's see. When I came back home after being out in California and Madison had touched base with me and we decided that, yeah, I'll take your trailer and we'll go around the country and we'll look at suspensions. And Madison knew we wanted another outlet. We needed another outlet, and I needed a new identity because everybody knew me as generate Corey at the time. And that wasn't going to fly. So we had talked about a media site and more of a blog type of site or just an additional outlet for me to post pictures, too, and write stories about events that I've attended and things like that. And we went through I don't know how many names, and nothing was working. Nothing was right. I knew I wanted to build this website, and I don't even remember how it became. But it was middle of the night and Matt's in calls and I'm like, yeah, all he said was modern Jeeper. And it was like a light bulb. I'm like, oh, that's so perfect. So literally, that's how I'd always kind of considered myself a gadget guy and kind of a tech guy being. My background was in computers and stuff.

[01:13:58.030] - Corey Osborne

Let's go with it. We created the website simply as a kind of a depository of stuff, news related articles, land use. I've been working around Del Albright a lot of years, and he was going to write some stories. And that was our hope that we would have a lot of other people feeding the modernjeeper.com website. But it was me. For the first couple of years, it was just me as Modern Jeeper, and it kind of evolved into more of me doing media stuff. So I was going to Seema and those kind of things and just throwing pictures from these events up on the website and we knew there was more. But again, time and how it all comes together when you're basically a one man show, some of these very successful folks behind some of these YouTube channels and even social media stuff, there's a lot of people involved, whereas we're talking about just one or two.

[01:15:14.450] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. Event promoters are that way too.

[01:15:17.570] - Corey Osborne

Right. We can't stop working. Right. We just continually do things. Matson called and said, let's do this podcast thing. And I think we're at 153 episodes on that. Again, that was another silly idea. Who's got the time to do that and how are we going to get it produced? Oh, my goodness. Every week. Are you kidding? That's too much. And it's just me and him. He's out in Sacramento at Metal Cloak headquarters running a portion and aspects of Metal Cloak. And everybody thinks that I'm just sitting at home waiting for a phone call. It's very difficult to pull all of it together and make it something that's of interest to anybody anymore. It really started off with him and I just having conversations on the phone, and we were like, we should be recording this, I think. And you and Shelley were part of our very first one, our sound. We didn't have good sound. We didn't know what we were doing. So again, stuff evolves, but Modern Jeeper really became now, for me, Modern Jeeper is I really like the adventure side. I really like doing some guiding. And again, my personality. I'm all in.

[01:16:47.080] - Corey Osborne

I've got a stack of 13 books sitting here on my desk that are all Death Valley related because I want to know it all. I want to know every aspect. I want to know the history. And I want to be able to convey stories because I think that we're losing we can all go run a trail because we can find it in whatever GPS system that whoever's using in their Jeep, but they don't know anything about that area. And I think we're losing. That really going through. Yes. For the narration side, the narrative of these places and the people, I think is extremely important. I don't want a history lesson. This isn't like that. This is literally about thinking how we got to where we are. So yeah, we do a couple of them. We do the adventure up in Tillamook. We typically do the Rubicon every year because it's easy for the guys in Sacramento, but because of covet and fires and that kind of thing, we haven't done one in a couple of years. The Death Valley trip, we do a Moab trip. And I started doing one right here out of my house up in San Juan's in Colorado.

[01:18:01.950] - Corey Osborne

And again, it's more or less just to share with people my perspective and give them a little taste of let's just not go down, run down this dirt road. Let's talk about why this road is even here. So, yeah, modern Jeepers become my personality now. And there are people involved with Jesse Rockstar. She conveys and contributes stories to it. Dell still does a little story here now and then. But no, it's really trying to find your own channel and your own voice. And how do you throw it out there to the world to hopefully be inspirational to somebody else?

[01:18:51.390] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, that's the idea behind what we're doing right now. This morning on a Sunday Morning is recording. This is to hopefully show people that have an interest in off road, maybe have been to Easter Jeep or been to Pigeon Forge or down to Daytona or wherever that there is a way, if you just want to pursue it, to get more involved in this lifestyle.

[01:19:21.810] - Corey Osborne

Absolutely. Literally. I started going to Easter Jeep Safari and I wanted to go to the vendor shows. Well, I like the new products. But more importantly, again, life is all about those little decisions. I don't want to talk to the sales guy, even though that's usually who you're in front of at a vendor type of show. A lot of times the owner of the company or the originator, the head guys are going to be around there somewhere. They may not be standing out at the table that you get to talk to. But I was very fortunate and I wanted to know who the owner was. I remember those early days of going to a show. They didn't have salespeople. Number one, it was the owner. It was Jim McGeen from Dynatrack, the real guys behind the sales side. And you can go to any vendor show if you want to get interested and just start talking to people and tell them what your interests are. And I guarantee you that somebody's going to go, hey, you know what? We're looking for a guy like that, it's amazing. You just never know. And unless you go have those conversations, you're never going to know.

[01:20:41.990] - Corey Osborne

And yeah, I was extremely fortunate and I didn't know hardly any of these sales teams. I knew all the owners of these companies, and it just worked out that way. Going to a place like SEMA, where I know that there are rules for the general public to go to SEMA. We all get that. But I was actually going out there with a shop and I was representing Terry at Alpine Off Road way back in the day and going to a show like SEMA and talking to the guys who are the guys behind these companies, man, that kind of networking. That's huge.

[01:21:19.110] - Big Rich Klein

Sure is. Absolutely. So what's the future like?

[01:21:24.790] - Corey Osborne

That's a good question.

[01:21:27.070] - Big Rich Klein

Or is it just day by day.

[01:21:33.350] - Corey Osborne

I try to plan out what my twelve months looks like in 2020. We really started to formalize and focus on what our year and plan it out. Well, we all know how 2020 worked out. It became OK, so we're going to have to be more flexible. And throughout 2020, we still traveled I still pulled the CTI trailer about 35,000 miles around the country even during that first year of the COVID scare. And last year, I think we pulled it about 40,000 miles. I get more good conversations and relationships being built through smaller events. Yeah. We head to the bigger events. We go to Jeep Beach in Daytona, we'll go to Easter Jeep Safari, we'll go to Pigeon Forge. But really for those events, they're so busy for us that, man, it's just hard to have any real good conversations and have any content come out of them. So we'll try to do some smaller stuff this year. I love going to shops and visiting and talking to the job or network that Metal Cloak has and seeing how they're doing business and what they're doing and where they're doing it. So, yeah, the future I can only see forward about three months usually.

[01:23:03.750] - Corey Osborne

But again, you got to be flexible enough that if something comes up that you're all for it and you got to decide whether or not you can support it and whether it makes sense to you and that balance of life. I'd love to get out and see some more races this year. And we didn't get out to Koh course that was okay for me. I've got enough dirt in my lungs still from prior years. I think I'm still full. But yeah, I think that going forward, so much of our industry is based upon the economy and even a little bit on the political side. And I think that land use issues are going to continue to come up. We all struggle to find places to go and do things. It's going to be a challenge. And I think the educational side of the off road industry for the next three to five years is going to be important and making sure we have a voice out there and still don't get any of our places that we like to go taken away from us. And that really can happen.

[01:24:11.790] - Big Rich Klein

Yes, absolutely. Well, I don't know if this is the right place to stop or not. You and I could probably keep talking for hours.

[01:24:22.510] - Corey Osborne

You're probably right there. We've covered a lot of stuff, though. I think that the electronic vehicle thing. We've been talking a lot about that lately. I think that's going to play a role definitely in the next three to five years. I think our future is definitely bright. I think that there's definitely a desire for people to still enjoy the outdoors and whatever aspect of it they want it, whether it's an Overlander or, as we call it now, a Rocklander or whether it's extreme racing. I think that that's so important so that people understand that perspective. They don't even know. I still go to events and people say, So you guys sell trailers? I'm like, what do you mean? Oh, the trailer with the hydraulic lifts in it. You guys sell those? And usually I do the well, no. Have you ever heard of metal cloak? No. And that to me is amazing because that means there's so many people out there. We think we reach a lot of folks. But wow, there's a lot of people.

[01:25:36.910] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, yeah. I'm always amazed that people that have been around the lifestyle, they're offroaders, they've got built rigs, they're doing good trail rides, that kind of thing. And they've not heard of rock crawling or they've not heard that there's rock racing or they're just we like to think of ourselves as this big industry, but we're not no. And we're really niche and there are still so many more people out there to reach that are even still enthusiasts in the sport and have no idea that there's other parts of the lifestyle.

[01:26:26.730] - Corey Osborne

Oh, for sure. I think that's very important. Where we're at right now with this whole push towards getting outside and going to the national parks and this whole overlanding, we all used to just call it camping, but I think there's some real no, these people are brand new. They've never owned a Jeep before and they just went out and they spent $60,000 on this Gladiator and they not only don't know where to start, it reminds me of when the JK was first released. And you know, the next question on social media is what size tire can I fit on my stock Jeep? We make fun of that now. But now it's happening again with the Gladiator and it's going to happen again with the Bronco. And there are new people coming into this that just they don't know where to start. And so it's too bad. Back in the days of pirate and stuff, it became such a here's your little flame suit and you're going to get lit up if you ask a dumb question, we're not there now. But I can see that happening again on social media when somebody says, hey, can you send me a picture of my Gladiator on 37 and stuff like that?

[01:27:49.170] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I see it on like the Raptor boards and the Jeep boards that I follow and everything. When somebody gets a new one, it's like, hey, I just got my Jeep and I just joined this board. Help me name my Jeep. It's like, okay, I'm not a Jeep Namer. I'm not a vehicle Namer unless it's got its own personality.

[01:28:16.930] - Corey Osborne

Right.

[01:28:17.620] - Big Rich Klein

But it's the whole waving. And now everybody that has a car like yours, I don't care if it's a Jeep, I don't care if it's a Raptor, I don't care if it's a BMW. People are waving at other people that have what they have and people want to belong to a community. And the Internet has allowed people to belong to a community without belonging. And I think that more people are going to start wanting to belong to that community physically instead of just electronically.

[01:29:04.290] - Corey Osborne

I agree wholeheartedly everybody wants to be a part of something. And the Jeep environment has been I think all these other manufacturers are trying to go, wow, how do we create something like that? Lifestyle. They had the perfect word. The whole Jeeping thing didn't mean you had to be in a Jeep. It was just a term that described going offroad or out in the Hills or something. We went Jeeping, Yes, I have a Bronco or I have a Raptor. We went Jeeping. We don't go raptoring or broncoing. It didn't work out. But I think that people definitely want to be a part of something. We're all need that. I guess that's my fear with social media is it's created this. We can be anybody we want. Oh, but we're going to have to go meet you in public somewhere. Maybe I should be true to who I represent myself as being so that when I do meet you in person someday, I'm actually that same person. I think a lot of these guys and girls, you can create your own personality electronically and then you're never going to get to physically show yourself because you've created somebody else.

[01:30:23.140] - Corey Osborne

Right. It goes along the lines of things are changing so fast. The technology, I think it's having that USB cable and then now everything is USBC cable. And how do we fit that plug into the old stuff and the new stuff into the old? Where does the commonality where we find it? Yeah, I don't know. I've got a lot of thoughts about the whole thing being standardized. But yeah, if the standardized stuff, then it all becomes the same. And that's not what any of us want either. But things have to work well together. And I think the frustration right now is with new products always there's nothing being built that you don't get to put a rack on your Gladiator and have it work with all these other pieces parts. How many racks are being built for a Ford Raptor? Well, none, because that's not the demographic or that's not what people want to buy. But I guarantee you there's somebody out there that would do that. And put a rack on a Raptor. And who knows?

[01:31:40.210] - Big Rich Klein

People have them. They're putting rooftop tents on Raptors.

[01:31:44.890] - Corey Osborne

So there you go.

[01:31:48.130] - Big Rich Klein

I don't get that part. That's why we tow an adventure trailer.

[01:31:51.790] - Corey Osborne

There you go.

[01:31:52.430] - Big Rich Klein

So that we can unhook and go play. I can't see screaming across the dunes at 100 miles an hour with a rooftop tent on the Raptor, launching it and everything. It's just like, yeah, that sounds pretty cool. Launching it with your bet on it, but it wasn't built that way.

[01:32:17.410] - Corey Osborne

Yeah. Kind of like running forties on stock axles, which a lot of people do it, but. Okay. Well, I just don't want to be with you on the trail when something breaks.

[01:32:27.970] - Big Rich Klein

Because you probably don't know how to fix it either. Correct. That person that did that has no idea.

[01:32:34.870] - Corey Osborne

None at all. They wrote a check, and it looks really cool, and it is built very well. But good luck on getting up there with a wrench and turning it yourself.

[01:32:44.250] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, exactly. Well, Corey, I want to say thank you so much for coming on board and sharing your life and your story with us. And I learned a lot, and I liked that. And as we wind down our career in the extreme side of the sport and we have somebody to take over what we've been doing, we're going to find more time to be out there with our friends and not just seeing them at our events, but we're going to hopefully join them at theirs. So we're looking forward to coming out with you guys with the modern Jeeper events. And I look forward to someday putting on some events myself, like that social media type or social runs, especially for the magazine and stuff.

[01:33:35.350] - Corey Osborne

That would be awesome. Yeah.

[01:33:36.590] - Big Rich Klein

Looking forward to all that.

[01:33:38.470] - Corey Osborne

Well, you guys are very close family to me, and you're always welcome on any of those types of events. I'm honored to be a part, you know, some absolutely influential, amazing people in the industry. And your podcast has had so many of those on. I was kind of beside myself when you asked me to be a part of it because I don't consider myself to be in that group. I'm still the enthusiast inside my heart. I really enjoy all of the people and then what we do. But you and Shelley, you guys have changed my path as well. And you've enabled me to go, hey, this is something I can be a part of. And that was 20 years ago that started. So I'm very thankful, very blessed.

[01:34:29.270] - Big Rich Klein

Well, we feel that way, having you in our life. So again, thank you.

[01:34:34.030] - Corey Osborne

Absolutely.

[01:34:34.860] - Big Rich Klein

All right. You take care.

[01:34:36.610] - Corey Osborne

You too, Rich.

[01:34:37.510] - Big Rich Klein

Okay, bye bye.

[01:34:38.500] - Corey Osborne

All right. Bye bye.

[01:34:40.510] - Speaker 1

If you enjoy these podcasts, please give us a rating, share some feedback with us via Facebook or Instagram, and share our link among your friends who might be like minded. Well, that brings this episode to an end.

[01:34:53.030] - Big Rich Klein

Hope you enjoyed it.

[01:34:54.030] - Speaker 1

We'll catch you next week with conversations with big rich. Thank you very much, bye.