Sean: 00:05 – Hi everybody and welcome to another edition of Two-Brain Radio with Sean Woodland. On today’s episode, I talk with Heber Cannon and Marston Sawyers, better known collectively as the Buttery Bros. First: Chris Cooper almost went bankrupt in 2008. Now he’s running a multimillion-dollar company dedicated to helping entrepreneurs avoid the mistakes that he made. He spent thousands of hours mentoring gym owners one-on-one and his new book is packed with advice to help you grow your business and create your Perfect Day. “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” is an Amazon bestseller. You can check out the book reviews, they’re calling it a must-read and a lighthouse for your business. If you want to level up, this is the business book you need. Heber Cannon and Marston Sawyers have been involved in CrossFit and the sport of fitness for 10 years. They are both part of the team that created four of the top 100 best-selling documentaries on iTunes while they were working at CrossFit. Now they are out on their own creating more great content around the CrossFit Games season. We talk about how they got started making videos for CrossFit, the challenges they faced while creating their documentaries and some of their most memorable moments from the past 10 years. Thanks for listening everyone. Heber Cannon, Marston Sawyers, Buttery Bros, how are you guys doing?
Heber: 01:32 – What’s up, dude?
Sean: 01:32 – I got to give you the horn. You guys just got back from Hawaii. How was that experience?
Marston: 01:44 – Oh, it was such a good experience. We’re out there for the Ultimate Hawaiian Trail Run, raising money for the Keala Foundation.
Heber: 01:49 – Phenomenal experience. They’re doing crazy things out there.
Sean: 01:55 – I can’t wait to see the stuff. I’m sure you guys got some great content from down there.
Marston: 02:01 – Swam with dolphins, went up on the coast and man, I’ve never been to Hawaii. I’ve never been to a warm ocean. So I fell in love with the ocean for the first time.
Heber: 02:11 – That’s a lie, he’s been to Miami and the water there is extremely warm. He’s forgotten because he wasn’t on the beach.
Sean: 02:21 – For a lot of people who have been involved in this community for a significant amount of time, you guys have always sort of been part of it. We’ll start with you Heber,. How did you come to get involved with CrossFit?
Heber: 02:31 – So I had been doing CrossFit for about a year and been making videos for my local affiliate to pay for my membership and some local throwdowns and stuff. And people had sent my material or content to CrossFit HQ, so they kind of knew who I was. And then it was just the right time, right place. I emailed them directly and said, “Hey, I’m here in Salt Lake City. I’ve made these videos. I would love to follow CrossFit Games athletes.” At the time, Tommy Hackenbruck had just taken second at the 2009 Games. Miranda Oldroyd was a big name. Chris Spealler was competing and they were all within about 30 minutes of where I lived, and I said, I’d love to follow these guys through the season. Tony Budding, who was the head of media at the time, immediately responded and said, “Let’s hop on a phone call.” It turned into what I thought would be a 10-minute phone call into a four-and-a-half-hour interview in the middle of my best friend’s wedding. And went from—I was actually doing documentary work and wedding videos. I was doing a documentary on Vanilla Ice of all the people, to within a week I had a gig with CrossFit and for every other weekend throughout the year of 2010, I was shooting stuff for CrossFit until they finally just gave up and said, “You have to move down here full time for us.” And I said, “OK.”
Sean: 03:48 – Mars, how about you?
Marston: 03:50 – So I got into it like right at the end of my college football career. I had just gone through like knee surgery and I was up here working a summer job in Salt Lake City and bumped into Tommy. Like it was funny, Tommy was like starting his first gym, Tommy Hackenbruck, and he was kind of doing some, I guess exercises that didn’t look familiar to me. And I walked over into this like warehouse and I was like, what are you doing? And he like explained to me what he was up to and he was opening his first gym. And so I started training with him to kind of like rehab my knee. And then he basically was going to like, the CrossFit Games like the next week or something. And he was like, yeah, I got this competition out in California, I’ll be back.
Marston: 04:34 – And I remember like, he came back and I was like, “So, how’d it go, dude?” And he’s like, “Well, actually we got second.” “Cool, good for you.” I had no idea what that all meant. And I had no idea like what an enormous achievement that was. And so, kinda got into it that way and then come Sectionals before they had the Open in 2010, I was at a local competition here filming my girlfriend at the time and Heber was there working, he was part of the media team and I basically like got in his ear and I was like, “Hey, if I give you the footage that I’m shooting here, will you give me a media pass?” And that’s kinda how my relationship with Heber started. And then he put me in touch with the media director of CrossFit. And then I started doing like little gigs here and there until about 2011 when we had just finished up the Games and then ESPN had come on and wanted to partner with CrossFit with doing their post-production shows and that’s when everybody basically had to commit to Santa Cruz. And then we moved out to Santa Cruz in September of 2011 and I was there until October of—well no, I guess until August of this year. So I was there for about almost 10 years.
Sean: 05:46 – You guys when you were first there, I think it was probably just like a lot of highlight videos and just following athletes around. Where did the idea come from to do more feature-length content?
Heber: 05:56 – 2011 and 12, I produced the ESPN shows and then I was really like, I didn’t love the live broadcast stuff. I wanted to have a little bit more creative freedom. In 2013, 2012 to 13, I did a whole bunch of features and packages for the Games and then also like features on people within the community. And then at the 13 Games, I didn’t really have a role other than shooting highlights and I was like, I want to do something more than that. So I came up with the idea of creating a rap video. And so I created this rap video with a Roy Mckernan and Pat Sherwood and Miranda Oldroyd.
Sean: 06:35 – I remember it well.
Heber: 06:35 – We had an awesome time doing that. And then in the fall of 2013 or immediately like the month after Justin Bergh and Tony Budding were talking about how they wanted a little bit more out of the CrossFit Games in terms of media content and they wanted to create a video. And at that same time I’d had a debate with a friend of mine about the legitimacy of the title Fittest on Earth. And I said, we debated back and forth of whether the CrossFit Games, if they found the fittest on earth. And I was so heated about this debate that I turned and made like a thesis documentary that was 30 minutes long called “The Test of Fitness” that is now on YouTube. And everybody loved how that went. They immediately after I finished, I think I hit export and the next day someone came and said, “Hey, we want to do a feature-length, something like this for 2014.” I responded with “Hey, well we’ve already done this. It’s already going to have like a million views on YouTube. Why don’t we do something bigger but yet more defined?” And so I said the only story I want to tell about 2014 was Rich Froning is going to retire. Let’s make a documentary about Rich Froning. Come to find out that same six months during production that he was going to be adopting a child and the events at the 2014 Games would be a real struggle for him. So we ended up with this amazing feature-length film, “Froning,” and from there they just wanted some more stuff like that on a regular basis.
Sean: 08:07 – What were the challenges that y
ou faced in putting those together? Because those are some pretty major undertakings.
Heber: 08:15 – Oh, there was a bunch. Like I had never done a documentary. Everything that we had done up to that point was going to ESPN and they kind of handle some of the QC stuff. But going onto like making a feature film, well the biggest challenge for me was I didn’t want it to just go on YouTube. I wanted it to be respected as a movie. If you put 90 minutes on YouTube, it’s still a YouTube video. It doesn’t matter how good you make it. People still refer to it as a video on YouTube, not a documentary they saw on Netflix or iTunes. So for me I was like, I don’t care what the money is, I don’t care what it is, but I think it’s going to be—people are going to respect this and our sport if we put it onto iTunes. And getting that idea across the C suite at CrossFit was actually really hard, like, they were like no, let’s just put it on YouTube like we’ve done in the past. And then I kept coming back and saying like, hey, I need money to pay for X, Y, and Z cause we have to have these things to be able to go on iTunes. And so like every time I had to come back for more requests about what it was going to take, they just didn’t understand and see what the value was going to be. But within 12 hours of it launching on iTunes, they immediately understood and they were like, oh my gosh, we’re the number-three movie on iTunes right now. Like how awesome is this? Like our brand is everywhere. And we were in the middle—when that was released, we were in the middle of editing the 2015 movie that we intended to just go on YouTube, and they came into our office and they were like, this is going on iTunes.
Marston: 09:45 – The funny thing about 15 is like we only really intended on doing like a highlight video after-movie type of thing. But when we got back from the Games, we had such a cool story with Mat being like this expected to win and then barely losing at the end with Ben Smith taking it, and we went back and looked at all this different footage that we had and we’re like, I think we have enough to actually make a documentary. And that was like, we didn’t intend to make a documentary that year.
Heber: 10:09 – I think it was always the intent. Ian was supposed to make a documentary and I was supposed to make a highlight video with music. We got an awesome rights for music for the mad neck song and DJ Dylan Francis’ “Get Low,” and because I had those that were going to go on my package, Ian was like, hey, I want those for mine. And instead of making like a 15, 20-minute highlight video and a documentary, let’s just roll that all into one thing. And I was like, OK, yeah, fine. Let’s do that.
Sean: 10:38 – The two of you were just two of many people who worked on those. How did you go about organizing your resources in order to get those things put together?
Heber: 10:48 – Sorry, we lost you there.
Sean: 10:49 – So the two of you are just two of many people who are working on those documentaries, those features. How did you go about organizing your resources in order to get those things put together properly?
Heber: 11:02 – For Froning, it was a lot of just me organizing and getting things going until like the last minute I was able to say like, hey, I need allocated to me Eric Diaz who was our art director and designer at CrossFit. I need him for a month. And that was hard to work out right before Regionals and in between the Open, and it worked out that he could work with me for that. And then the “Test of Fitness” was another producer name John Glancy and I did that together. But we just kind of used the same lessons that we learned from the broadcast, which was we have to bring in someone to mix sound, we have to bring in someone to mix color and then I would send cuts of Froning out to people that I trusted and just say, hey, what do you think of this? What am I missing? What is it not saying? And then get feedback and make some minor changes to it. Same thing with the “Fittest On Earth,” it was just that, but we had tested it before so we knew who we wanted to come in and do color. We give it to a guy named Vince to mix sound. And then we had various people on different levels bringing–like you, Sean, coming in to voice stuff over if we needed it or making tweaks to whatever, you know, minor storytelling tweaks.
Sean: 12:16 – Why do you think, I mean obviously they’re great and the video’s fantastic and the sound and everything is awesome, but why do you think the community at large responded so well to these?
Marston: 12:26 – I mean I think it’s just they’re hungry for the content and like a lot of the like peeling back the curtain and seeing what the athletes do, not just when they’re on the floor performing. So like when we would be shooting these things, later on, like in, especially in like 2016 is when we started doing more of like the “Road to the Games” series, because we’d be out with these athletes in their homes and in different places kind of showing what they were like behind the scenes of it all. And I think that’s what they really like seeing, is just how they are as humans and how they interact and like what drives them, what motivates them and kind of seeing the them grow as people, too. Cause like a lot of—like even like filming with Fraser since 15 ‘til now, he’s grown like a ton and like we’ve become like really good buddies and he’s just becoming like a really awesome human. Like he’s always been a really good guy. But like I’ve just gotten to know him a lot more and I think the audience feels like they’re kind of part of that in this whole like journey of these athletes.
Sean: 13:28 – You guys have gotten unprecedented access to a lot of these athletes. And like you mentioned, Mars, have gotten to know them really well. What have you learned about them that maybe surprised you?
Heber: 13:40 – Tia and Mat.
Marston: 13:40 – They are very similar.
Heber: 13:42 – I’ll tell ya, they are the most frugal people I’ve ever met and they’re very similar in other ways. But that’s one that caught me off guard when we were in Miami for Wodapalooza. I had similar conversations with both about—Tia had, we were on South Beach and we needed to get to the hotel and it was like a $25 Uber.
Heber: 14:08 – But Tia called Chief Keef and asked for him to get one of the assistants to come pick us up, who was then going to wait an hour in traffic to get to us and then turn around and drive all the way back in 45 minutes of traffic. So this is like an hour and a half of everybody else’s time. And I didn’t realize what was happening until about 40 minutes into waiting. I was like, wait, why don’t we just go like—why hasn’t anyone called an Uber? She’s like, oh, somebody’s coming. She told me that she would wait two hours to get a ride before she would pay for an Uber. And then when I asked Mat Fraser the same question, I said, “How long would you wait before you had to pay for an Uber? He said it would have to be a marathon for him to not—
Marston: 14:53 – He’s like, “Making money is the easy part. Keeping it’s the harder part.”
Sean: 15:05 – Those are good words to live by. When the two of you were part of the massive layoffs at CrossFit, what did you think that your future with the sport of fitness was going to look like immediately after that happened?
Heber: 15:20 – I didn’t know that there was going to be a sport. I think when they made all the changes, it took me a while to wrap my head around how could they pull off a CrossFit Games, and it wasn’t what I was concerned about what I was gonna do, I was legit concerned about like, can this be sustainable? Especially if it feels kind of like there’s no love from the top. For the community and for the sport, there’s a lot of very capable people that they have on staff there. And once I took a moment to just kind of look back at the history and remember like, hey, what did they pull off in 2010 and 2009 and 11 with a very minor crew, that OK, if they’re hiring out and contracting people to p
ull up some of the legwork they could pull off the CrossFit Games. And then from there it was, OK, how do I continue to be involved and put a limelight on some of my close friends that are the CrossFit Games athletes.
Marston: 16:16 – Yeah. I think at first, like I know that like me and Heber wanted to keep telling the stories and be involved the way that we were in the past. We knew that it wasn’t going to be to the same capacity or it was gonna be just different or it was going to change. So like, we wanted to figure out a way to tell a series of episodes that would help kinda like lead you along the season, but we weren’t really sure how that was going to work as far as like distribution and being able to like, like where it would live and who was going to help us produce these things. And so that’s kinda like what started our whole Buttery Bros adventure. We basically figured out a way to make a business out of incorporating brands and sponsors into our content that we’re already going to be out filming and shooting that would allow us to be with athletes that we wanted to feature for the series that we were—at the time thinking we were producing a series when it’s since turned out to just be another movie.
Sean: 17:16 – You just touched on this a little bit, but what were some of the new challenges now that have arisen due to the fact that it is just the two of you working on this?
Marston: 17:25 – Well, we’ve actually hired out another editor, so you know Mark Billingsley, right? He’s editing our movie as we speak in Denver. So we just got back from Hawaii and while we were there, like a big reason we were there was to get with a bunch of athletes that were in one place. So we were there and we interviewed Tia cause we still needed an interview with her about the Games. We interviewed James Newbury, we interviewed a Matt O’Keefe, Haley Adams, Chris Hinshaw, Tommy Marquez. And so, we knew that we wanted to keep doing the Buttery Bros stuff because it actually like as we got into it more and figured out our style and what we wanted to do with that, it turned out to be like very rewarding personally. And it actually was like the most fun I’ve had in the community and in this CrossFit space since the beginning. And so we want to keep doing that. And in order to keep doing that, we had to bring Mark on to help us get with—to lead us in the edit on this. So we’ve kind of had to become like businessmen overnight because we were just creatives before at CrossFit. And now it’s kinda turned into like a balancing act of the big pie-in-the-sky is the documentary, but we’re also wanting to produce at least like three episodes of Buttery Bros a month.
Sean: 18:48 – We’ll be back with more with the Buttery Bros after this. Gym owners, we know you’re working hard, but what if you aren’t working smart? Over the years, the team at Two-Brain Business has seen too many driven, dedicated entrepreneurs get frustrated on their own. Some problems can be solved in minutes with the help of an expert. Your clients seek out your expert advice when they have a fitness problem. So who do you seek out when you have a business problem? If you’re struggling with something, Two-Brain will help you for free. No sales, no pressure, just free help on everything from hiring and firing to budgeting and marketing. Head to twobrainbusiness.com and book a free call with a certified mentor today. Two-Brain Business: We make gyms profitable. And now back to my interview with the Buttery Bros. What were the things that allowed you, that you guys accomplished, that allowed you to really get this thing off the ground and moving at the speed at which it’s moving now?
Heber: 19:52 – Well, the things that we accomplished—
Marston: 19:53 – Well I think, I mean like the way it started with Buttery Bros was very like an organic and unexpected start. It was like we were in Mat Fraser’s place over in Cookeville at the beginning of the year and we had just been kind of like talking and telling stories of other workouts and stuff. And he was Heber’s idea. He’s like, hey, we should do that acid bath workout from Dubai when we were there. And Chris Hinshaw is there and he’s like team Heebs whenever we work out. So he’s just jumping on the Heebs bandwagon, just being like, he’s got this, he’s gonna beat you Mars. And we had Sammy film the whole workout, Mat’s fiance. And when we got done with it, we’re like, man, this is actually really kind of funny. And I think it’d be cool to just throw it up on YouTube. And we threw it up on YouTube when we were at Wodapalooza in Miami, and it kind of like, I guess kind of like caught a lot of buzz when we were there and it was like good timing with everybody kind of being hungry for new content. And so we saw that there was an opportunity there and with some help of like Matt O’Keefe and some other people that kind of pointed us in the right direction with the business aspect of it and how to approach brands and how to activate with other sponsors. That kind of how it all kind of started. Was that your question?
Sean: 21:18 – Yeah, absolutely. And now that you’re not under the CrossFit umbrella, so obviously you don’t have as many resources as you did when you were with them, but what are maybe some things that, opportunities that arose that maybe you didn’t have with CrossFit now that you’re outside of that umbrella?
Heber: 21:39 – Being able to work with whatever athletes we have and also whatever brands we want. So if Nike approached us when we were working at CrossFit there’s no way we could work with them. Now we kind of have free reign to work with whoever we want to and whoever wants to give us the best opportunities. The other thing is whatever athletes we want to work with and coaches, so some, like at CrossFit, they only wanted to support CrossFit gyms that were a part of the affiliate community. Now we can go to gyms that aren’t necessarily under the CrossFit umbrella, but still train functional fitness and have athletes that are competing for the sport of fitness, and be at those. The other thing that’s really opened up for us is outside events. Like right now, CrossFit’s all about the sanctioned events.
Heber: 22:26 – But two years ago they would, they had a hard time sending anybody to a Wodapalooza. They wouldn’t support that event in any capacity when we were there initially. And I remember being there when that was a part of the discussions, when I first started working for CrossFit, it was like there were long debates that I wasn’t a part of, but it was about, hey, how do we handle these outside throw-downs? Like what are we going to do as a company to do this? Do we support that? Do we cover them? Are they news for us or do we just kind of let them do their thing? And for a long time it was just let them do their thing. It just felt like the right business move that they wanted to make at the time. I don’t know if it was or not, but from my job as a creative at CrossFit, I didn’t really push to go to them but I wasn’t encouraged to go to them.
Marston: 23:10 – And then other things that are just a little bit that are just coming our way now that there’s events that are happening that aren’t necessarily like sanctioned events, but there’s just like, you know, resorts in odd places of the world that see what we’re doing that want to bring us out and show us how cool their place is and how cool their country is. Or like we’re going to Aruba next week and they’ve got a whole like, a whole itinerary of just trying to ball out and show us the best time possible. So we’re really excited about doing that type of stuff too. More of the like adventure tourism-type of things, but also having fitness and that type of stuff be like the core of our brand and our message. You know,
Sean: 23:53 – You’ve mentioned the documentary that you’re doing now for the 2019 Reebok CrossFit Games. How were you able to secure the funding to make that a reality?
Heber: 24:01 – So that’s a combination of a few things. Really we’ve been talking to Gravitas Ventures is the distribution c
ompany with whom we’re working. They were one of the first people I talked to when I was let go from CrossFit, just like, hey, I’m let go, you guys are my homies. We have some plans, we should be in contact. And every other month or so I’d have a phone call with them where we’d discuss what was going on and what they could do with it. Really the majority of the funding that has made this possible an a reality has come from commercial shoots that Mars and I have booked for companies like Reebok or FitAid or Compex. We have, you know, we’ve done commercials for a lot of different companies and the Buttery Bros funding, we signed a contract with Gravitas Ventures to help us kind of on the back end of stuff where we’re making enough for us to be out shooting stuff, but nothing’s been happening on the back end with editing and post-production stuff. Just cause we didn’t have the bandwidth and we didn’t have money to hire anybody. So, because if we stayed back and we just did that, we wouldn’t be making any more money until the movie’s completed, you know, so we’d just go into a huge deficit. So they saw, when I expressed that problem to them, they said, OK, well what do you need? We came up with a very reasonable number and said, this is what we think we need to finish this movie while still being able to maintain our other business, and keeping this thing afloat and came to an agreement with them to help us finish the movie.
Sean: 25:35 – What are some of the stories that you’re now looking to tell in this documentary?
Heber: 25:42 – Oh, I think that the story for me always about the 2019 CrossFit Games season, we debated long and hard about, hey, do we focus on just a single female or a single male? Like Mat is about to win four times. Very similar to what Froning had done. But for me it was always a question about what is HQ doing? Can they pull this off? Will the test still be as legitimate? What’s this going to look like? And that’s all everyone’s talked about. Like, it’s been a little bit about, hey, can Mat Fraser win? But I think everyone’s like, if he doesn’t win, there’s something wrong with the system. It was kind of my thinking going into it, right? Like if Mat Fraser doesn’t win, if he’s not even in the top 10, HQ messed up and the programming is wrong or something was wrong with the season. And so, for us the story has been what [unintelligible] and it turned out the story is pretty awesome. You have an battle between Noah and Mat. I’m really excited to bring Noah as like a big character in our movie. Tia walked away with it, but there’s a handful of new faces. But, we invested in what we’ve seen in the athletes that we’ve known and loved from the past. And that’s a dramatic story. You know, when you have Sara Sigmundsdottir come in and she gets cut, like that’s dramatic. When Brooke Wells is a good friend of ours and when she got cut that was super dramatic.
Marston: 27:09 – Very Game of Thrones, bro.
Heber: 27:10 – So you got that GOT, you got characters that you’re gonna love that are going to end up like you’re going to get heartbroken when—.
Marston: 27:18 – Red wedding, bro, red wedding.
Sean: 27:21 – How do you guys deal with that? When you go in with an idea of the story that you want to tell and then things like that happen, like Sara getting cut and Brooke getting cut, things you didn’t expect to happen. How then do you deal with that and stay true sort of the story that you wanted to tell at the same time?
Marston: 27:36 – I mean, I think that’s like just part of documentary storytelling is like you have this, you know, rough outline of what you think you’re going to tell. And then as things unfold and things change, you’ve gotta be able to adapt to that and figure out how to tell the story that you are dealt, you know, so some of the characters you know are going to die off. And that’s just part of the story. And by, you know, by the end of the weekend, obviously Mat and Tia won and we’ve been with them all year basically. So it’s still kind of cool to have a character that gets you to the finish line. Although, you know, there was Brooke Wells that we lost off and Annie and Sara and Vellner was a big one.
Heber: 28:18 – But in the top 10, you still, like, we hung out with Bethany Shadburne, we’ve got footage with her. We hung out in the past with Thuri Helgadottir, so if we want to do some with her, we can pull from that. And then Katrin Davidsdottir, so you have Katrin, Tia, Thuri, Bethany, so that’s four women in the top 10 with—so I guess we’re kind of lucky in that we’ve been with so many athletes over the years that we can kind of reach back and say, hey, let me pull from this and pull from this to boost up this character to really flesh out a story. But you gotta know when you start filming like hey, things might not go the way you want it to. And that’s drama. You know like it wouldn’t be dramatic if it was the same top 10 from last year.
Sean: 28:59 – You guys shoot so much good video and get so much good content. It obviously all cannot make it into the final product. What’s the decision-making process like when you get down to that, what stays and what goes decision time?
Marston: 29:13 – Well, it’s a little bit different this year just because in years past we knew that was going to be the case and that’s why we did the Road to the Games series. We wanted to be able to tell and show a lot more of this footage because I mean, if you’re shooting all year long and then you have to cut it down to a 90-minute to two-hour documentary, most of what you shot isn’t gonna make it. So this year is a little bit different. I mean, a lot of the stuff that we’ve shot has been Buttery Bros content with these athletes. So I mean, a lot of it has seen light of day, but when we get into what we’re not going to use in this documentary, I’m still thinking like there’s going to be a lot of like deleted scenes and a lot of stuff that we can either put up on Patreon to at least show some, to get some use out of it and to support our people that support us.
Sean: 29:59 – What are some of your favorite stories from the last 10 years that you spent from traveling the world and covering these athletes?
Heber: 30:10 – Ooh, favorite stories. That’s kind of a big one.
Marston: 30:18 – I mean, when I think back to like some of the coolest experiences, one that sticks out in my mind was when we were in Madrid for the Invitational back, I think it was like 2015 or 16, just because we for the first time were like, in a foreign land that this competition was taking place and it was really cool just to see how that whole place kind of adapted and was hungry for it. And the place went nuts and like seeing how into it the fans were, they were like, it was almost like they were like jumping out of the stands and chasing after the athletes after some of these events. And it was just cool to see how global everything was. I mean I’m trying to think of like more specifics of like a story that—I mean we stayed up all night after that event and it was cool just cause everybody kind of was like partying and stuff, and I remember like Kara Webb having hiccups and trying to do pistols and drink water upside down to get rid of them. Then I remember like—.
Heber: 31:22 – Sam Briggs biting off a beer cap. And Tia using her teeth as a bottle opener.
Marston: 31:28 – And I just remember like staying up all night and I remember we got to screen our first movie in Dave Castro’s suite for the athletes and it was like the first time that we had actually like shown [unintelligible] to the athletes into the crowd. And that was like a pretty cool special moment. It was like probably like three in the morning when we did that. Yeah. And everybody was probably like, you know, a little bit loose. So is was a pretty cool environment. I remember just being super hung over the next day and just struggling at the airport.
Marston: 31:58 – But man, there’s so many cool stories, cause like we’ve been to Iceland probably three or four times and got to hang out with the
Dottirs over there and see how they’ve grown and how they interact with that Iceland community. And it’s actually really cool to see the CrossFit Reykjavik is like, what did they say? Like the number one destination for Uber drivers in Iceland.
Heber: 32:19 – In Iceland, it’s the number two is CrossFit Reykjavik.
Marston: 32:24 – So it’s cool to see it just like how well-ran that places and see just the differences in so many different affiliates. How they can have like four classes going at once that just like are so well-ran on time and then at the top of the next hour just like reset and there’s a whole new four classes in there and then being able to go to like Latin America and see how it’s growing down there. It’s very grassroots. It’s almost like how it was back in 2009 or 10 here. People are just hungry for it and it’s cool to see that it’s still successful and that the pulse is still there for the content and for the athletes.
Sean: 33:02 – Mars, you are famous probably for being the guy that outran Mat Fraser while holding a camera.
Marston: 33:10 – He technically beat me, but I kept up with him for a straight-away.
Sean: 33:12 – What do you remember about that event and covering it?
Marston: 33:18 – Well I remember like there was—all the women had gone and I was on the opposite end of the floor and I remember just being like trying to keep up with them in these straightaways but I don’t know if people remember, but there was it was called a Zig-Zag sprint. So they’d run like a quarter of the way of the field and turn back and have to do that three or four times. So they were changing direction and they had just walked on their hands. So they’re fatigued and they’d done the whole Games and stuff. So I was just like, I wouldn’t say I was fresh but I wasn’t, you know, putting it all out there. So by the time the men had came out, I had like almost forgot that there was a whole other heat of men. And so I went to the opposite end of the floor cause I was actually shooting into more of the crowd that side. And it was just kind of a funny moment where I just like happened to catch and maintain the speed with these guys. And I ran across the finish and I remember everybody was like, wow, look at this guy, running with the camera, I was just like, I wasn’t even thinking about it. And then it just kind of like popped up and showed up in my feed and then we actually ended up putting it in the movie and stuff and people were pretty stoked on seeing a camera guy that could run with them. And believe me, if it was any other test it would not have been impressive, like I wouldn’t have been doing anything to try and match those guys at all.
Sean: 34:37 – What do you guys enjoy most about what you do?
Heber: 34:41 – It’s probably the behind the scenes, personal aspects. Like, it’s a combination of everything. I love being on the floor and seeing cinematic stuff that’s coming into my screen when I’m shooting and just saying like, oh my gosh, this is gonna make the cut. Like this is the butter right here. And then, on top of that, I love just hanging out with people that are cool and excited. There’s very rarely an athlete in the CrossFit space that I’m like, oh, I don’t want to ever film with that person. Like they’re all cool in their own unique way and have really fun ambitions and they’re fun to be around. And then for the last nine months for us, it’s just been amazing to be able to go travel and experience the world in a much more in-depth way and have a lot more fun with it. Like it’s fun to justify jet skiing as a tax write-off, cause I get to put it in my show, you know? Any time I’m like hey Mars, we should go do this, he’s like ahhh—and I’m like tax write-off! Gotta have entertainment, you’ve got to have fun-tivities. And so like that to me is super fun. And then also like just experiencing the world, like two days ago we got up and I was like, Hey guys, let’s get up at sunrise and go watch the Hawaiian sunrise on these cliffs here called shipwrecks. We went, it was absolutely breathtaking and it’s phenomenal stuff on camera and it’s just, you know, it’s picturesque stuff that you’d hang on your wall, but we get to experience firsthand and then show you guys through a screen what it kind of looked like.
Marston: 36:17 – Yeah, I mean I’ll touch on that a little bit. Like I think it’s super cool to be able to go to a new location that I don’t know much about and get taken in with like open arms from these people that I’ve never met that are just so understanding and like-minded and they want to be able to show us like what it is about their country or their town or location that’s unique. It’s like for forever we were just behind the camera and that was cool and I really enjoyed that. But it takes a little bit of vulnerability and a little bit of like, it’s a little bit scary to get on camera, especially when I have to like, you know, ham it up, you know, a little bit. So it’s very fun and like I never would have imagined like a year ago going from working for CrossFit to what we’re doing now and being, if you were to be like, hey Mars, you’re going to be doing your own thing, you’re going to be making your own documentary and you’re going to be traveling the world and meeting all new people and you’re doing it yourself and not under the magnifying glass of anybody. And it’s just really cool to work for yourself and be able to do all that.
Sean: 37:20 – Where do things go now for the Buttery Bros as we move into the future?
Marston: 37:25 – So we go to Aruba next week. That’s gonna suck. We just got matching tops and bottoms and suit jackets. I’m really excited to strut the stuff. And then, so getting into the Open, we’re going to be probably going to five different places cause there’s an Open announcement each week during October now because the Open’s happening in October. And then as we get later into the year, we’ll probably be going to a handful of sanctioned events, but we’re not necessarily just trying to go to sanctioned events. We’re trying to just go to the places that seem the most entertaining from a video aspect for the Buttery Bros show.
Sean: 38:10 – I can’t wait to see it, guys. It’s gonna be awesome.
Heber: 38:13 – Thanks, man.
Sean: 38:13 – And thanks for taking the time to do this. And when can people expect to see the documentary?
Heber: 38:22 – Documentary we are going to be done with by the end of the year and then it takes the distribution company a few months to get it onto the various platforms and make sure it’s all ready good to go. So it’ll be very similar to what we’ve done in years past, which is, it’ll probably be out in March, at the latest, April, unless for some reason we decide it’d be better later, but we feel like there’s a time stamp on it and the sooner we get it out the better. So that’ll probably be the earliest.
Sean: 38:47 – Yeah, I know people are going to love it. And I know they probably can’t wait to see it like the entire community is going to be waiting with bated breath for this thing. Marston Sawyers, Heber Cannon, Buttery Bros, thanks so much for doing this.
Sean: 38:59 – Want to thank Heber and Marston for taking the time out of their days to talk with me and they are all over social media. If you want to follow them, they have a YouTube channel. Just go there and search for Buttery Bros. You can subscribe and you will never miss any of their videos and you can follow them on Instagram at @ButteryBros. If you’re enjoying this show, I would encourage you to subscribe to Two-Brain Radio. Every week we bring you the best from the fitness and business worlds. On Mondays, Mateo Lopez fires up the marketing machine and explains how real entrepreneurs are generating huge ROI on ads. On Wednesdays, I bring you great stories from the most interesting people in the fitness world, and on Thursday, Greg Strauch and Chris Cooper bring you the best of business, a host of experts who can help you level up as an entrepreneur. If you haven’t, please subscribe to Two-Brain Radio so you don’t mi
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