Original subtitles

So when I look at the future I want my kids to live in, it's not the road we're

going down now.

Every time we go through an economic correction or recession, whatever you

to call it, you just see this kind of middle class globally getting hollowed

out.

You have working class that's like barely making rent, and then you have

wealth where it's like Bugattis and trips to Dubai, and it's just a

different thing.

It's starting to look really hopeless if you're at the bottom looking up.

And it's also starting to look hopeless if you're at the top looking down.

Because the rich people don't want to just give away money.

And the poor people don't have a great path to getting there.

The change that I want to see happen in the world is basically building that

ladder to get people back up into those meaningful middle -class jobs, those

careers, where you can make enough money to spend time with your family.

Make enough money to make the things that you actually want to do possible.

Being able to go work a normal job and make enough money to buy a house, have a

car, have kids, take them on adventures.

That's what needs to happen.

By kind of showcasing that this is possible with GoFast, we can kind of

light on this whole little niche segment that we're doing and say, hey, look,

try this.

It's kind of like the light on the hill.

We've had to have integrity and transparency and accountability be a

our business because we effectively crowdfunded the company.

So being able to build the company off of that kind of pillar is like, hey,

here's what we're working on. We're being good stewards of your money and

being good stewards of our employees' time.

After graduating college from engineering, I went to go work on

rigs. This is the most interesting job I could find at a career fair.

Kind of got hopeless after working in that industry. It was a little bit

and there wasn't a whole lot of future.

And learned there pretty early on that the only way to truly affect change in

the world is by making it economically viable to do so.

A friend of mine was building these big off -road campers.

Kind of got sucked into that world, started building these big campers.

During that process, we realized there was a real hole in the market for

something that was relatively affordable and really high quality, so something

that wouldn't end up in the landfill.

And we started Go Fast Campers under that concept and really started building

everything in -house from scratch.

We started on an online forum and effectively just announced the product

started taking deposits on product and then committed to a timeline to build it

and proceeded to miss that timeline drastically.

Like, really bad.

Through that process, we just told everybody what was going on the whole

And we did our best to kind of, like, make sure that we're in the shop

but also keeping everyone online up to date with what's going on.

We were so bad at delivering on time early on, like, six months to a year

on product, which was not ideal.

The price point was great for the customer, but that was, like, the only

part of the experience.

We actually ended up buying a truck and a trailer and delivering product around

the country with houses.

And I overdrafted my debit account like $30 ,000 paying for gas as I went and

just sleeping in the back seat of this truck and just delivering campers and

basically shaking hands and apologizing.

Taking showers in people's houses if it was hot out because I was just sleeping

in the car. So to be out in the field installing all day and just sweating

in Phoenix, you're 105.

Like, yo, is it cool to take a shower at your house?

From an early age, it got encoded in me that when you're on a vehicle, you kind

of have to go into full kill mode.

My grandpa's kind of the definition of the American dream.

Dropped out of high school, got in a fight, grew up without a father figure.

And he made his career out of building, owning, and running car dealerships.

He had seven car dealerships in Southern California.

With the proceeds, he and his buddies would go down to Baja and blow off

Pretty much started racing to kind of get out of that headspace of, like,

-duty work environment.

Gene McPherson has an unmatched history, unprecedented win record, and an

engineering legacy that benefits every car and truck owner. He and my dad went

down to Baja to start racing.

Meanwhile, out on the course, Jeff McPherson in 753 appears on his way to a

And he pretty much...

helped build the culture that turned into a full -on factory -raised team.

I mean, going back, that really is definitely genetic.

And kind of got addicted to that.

Off -road, it's just game on.

My dad raced cars for a long time and moved up to Montana with the whole

when I was like 13.

We kind of got pulled out of that culture.

So what's been neat is we built Go Fast without any of those connections.

And I'd go down there and I'd hear stories from people that were in the

about my grandpa.

These wild stories, crashing airplanes in San Felipe, just like getting wild

down south.

This is actually where we started the business. Just this one space alone.

Everything out of this little 3 ,000 square foot space.

That's been swapped out to about 30 ,000 square feet. So the reason our product

is actually able to go fast is because we have a structural backbone of our

product called the space frame that is pretty much an internal roll cage that

transmits all the loading from outside, from all the vehicle loads, from hitting

stuff, going through corners.

brings that load down through that space frame. It's all triangulated and

brought down to the truck bed.

So this is the camper cart right here. This represents the tube set for one

camper build. This is really the backbone, the space frame of our product

really gives us its strength and rigidity.

And that's a unique thing in our design.

Our product is built to hold up to abuse that most people don't put their truck

through. But we love hauling ass and beating our stuff off road. From a

strength, durability, and toughness standpoint, this is what lets us stand

from the rest.

It's optimized for the lifestyle that we want to create and live.

So we had a pretty long runway because it was a really innovative product at

time before Asia started catching up to us and really competing.

Once that happened, we kind of realized that we needed to make sure that we were

going to be globally competitive on pricing.

Getting loans early on at the start of the business is really challenging. We

actually started using PayPal loans.

buying one piece of equipment at a time until we have a full -blown machine shop

like this with like over eight CNC machines in the business.

No matter what we make here, if nobody can buy it or there's a better product

that's made somewhere else for less money, that won't work.

These big machines machine all the extrusions, the big beams, and then all

little guys over here are fully automated set up to build all the billet

that go into the camper.

Billet is all the things that are machined from like a solid chunk of

So this is one of the roof rack crossbar end pieces.

You don't see this quality of product outside of like the gun market, maybe

a race car, motorcycle.

And what allows us to make parts that are this nice on a product that still

a really reasonable retail price point is automation tools.

So Mike over here is currently running four different machines at one time by

basically tending to all of these robots.

These robots are loading and unloading the machine. And in most machine shop

environments, you'd see one guy for each machine.

So when you have one guy running four, you can spread that efficiency across

entire organization and actually pay people better.

What's really interesting about these machines is they can also run lights

So being able to run these machines at night, nobody around, is what that

So this will just dump all these parts right here into this bucket. It's super,

super simple.

We build a product specifically for your truck.

And being able to really specifically tailor that product to that customer, to

that person's truck, drives actual value for that user.

I've always thought of it more as I kind of figured out that I was an engineer

rather than necessarily deciding to be one.

I went to Cornell University in upstate New York.

I've always liked figuring out how things work, designing things, making

things, and tinkering with things.

And I like math, so it kind of drew me to engineering.

I wouldn't say there really is a typical day, which is one of the most fun,

dynamic parts of the job. One thing that...

separate, go fast from other camper companies is our efficient design

We have a templatized design process, which allows us to really efficiently

through new model design.

That new model could be for a brand new truck, the example of the 2024 Tacoma.

It could also be for an old truck that we don't support yet. It could be for a

1987 pickup.

And we'll take some measurements and photos of the truck.

I'll also 3D scan the truck, and then we'll fine -tune the design to make

sure it fits and looks as good as every GoFast camper should.

Everything that we build is purpose -built for that end user in what we call

low -volume, high -mix environment.

So we don't even batch campers.

So the guys and gals here in small parts actually go through and pull all the

parts off the shelf to build one camper's worth of inventory.

And all these parts are getting made to end up on this cart. If there's a

problem, we can make a rolling design change.

Or just go back to the design space, maybe.

Pass -throughs for the switch on the buttons on the bed rails.

And what that allows us to do is have zero dead stock.

So everything in this whole building is here for about a week.

And you're not, as a customer, going to be paying for all of the surplus

inventory or storage fees or us having to sell through products until the next

generation comes out. We added some functionality to them, like on the back.

These are now threaded to receive another billet piece on the back for our

latches. Really focusing on you, the consumer, and setting you up for success

with the most dialed product you can possibly get.

And that's really hard to do with Asian goods.

People roll into our install bay with really cool trucks modded out like this

one. We got diode dynamic lights all through the bumper and up top here.

Badass company, American made. We got deck drawers in this truck in

Really nice. You throw the camper on top and you have your whole ecosystem

living on the back of your truck. It's something that you can rip in Baja for

months. We have people that live full time out of these.

We really like to see USA Source materials.

We'd like to represent that capable kind of American -made manufacturing and

bring it back.

You can create this brand that's made in USA. You can build your brand tenants

and the vibe on made in USA.

But at the end of the day, if a product falls short, your brand's only going to

carry you so far.

There seems to be this confusion around American manufacturing where it's like

hard work. Like, let's go do labor. Let's go sweat.

Let's have... blue collar manufacturing jobs. Let's bring that back.

What people miss is that America has always been around ingenuity.

It's always been this environment of freedom that allows people to come up

interesting new ideas to make things better.

So we do all the sewing. We do pretty much every process in -house, but sewing

and fabric is kind of one of the most interesting ones because it's one of the

areas where our country is least proficient.

And we're not looking just to make things here for the sake of making them

We're looking to make meaningful jobs that make real value.

We have a bunch of really...

skilled craftspeople that also use a lot of automated equipment in the fabric

area to kind of multiply their efficacy.

I started out running a sewing machine when I was in seventh grade.

Oh, I got a job working in an auto interior shop making custom interiors.

ran my own shop for about 20 years. Big rack of material you're seeing right

there gets rolled through and is laser cut. Basically cuts all the patterns.

This is some of the best state -of -the -art Kansas stuff going on.

And from there, everything gets either sewn or heat welded,

almost more constructed like a raft. Everything's going on a car, so you can

make it really, really burly.

I think it's a preconceived notion when it comes to making stuff in the States

that we can turn on all this old infrastructure that we use before we

everything.

There's a reason that those jobs left and went overseas.

It was cost.

The next phase of our picture of American manufacturing isn't just going

hard work. It's going to be ingenuity.

When you look down the line, you can see all those hits. It's like all those

little hit points.

little rivet gun right here built the first 4 000 campers here at go fast and

was responsible for probably about the first quarter of them at least this job

is day in day out bucking rivets 10 hours a day and it's loud it's hard

a lot of vibration a lot of joint pain a lot of fatigue that comes out of this

i've i've been there would you rather do this for 15 bucks an hour which is the

market value for this job or oversee this robot that'll get that job done in

minutes versus 10 hours

I started out building the V1 campers, and I just stuck with through college. I

was part -time and moved into building the V2s and helping implement how we

build them and the process we'd use to build them.

Then graduated and got my engineering degree, and now I'm doing a lot of the

engineering.

How do we build back American manufacturing? How do we create things

tangible value?

Because at the end of the day, there's three ways to create value. You can mine

it, you can farm it, and you can manufacture it.

And effectively, the value drives power. And the problem is that that value is

being consolidated into countries and governments.

And the more consolidation there is in that power, we're going to end up with

leadership that doesn't represent the individual.

And we're going to end up with this really upside -down economy, and we're

already seeing ramifications of that.

In order to kind of break out of that path towards global war and caste

we need to get more people making more stuff, bringing more value and getting

representation.

And that's a much bigger picture of what I want to see in the world, right?

Going to work and seeing people building the campers and having a connection to

the thing that they're building by hand every day is incredibly fulfilling.

When you don't have a clear picture of how things get made now versus how they

got made in the 70s and maybe the 80s, you don't really know how to be

competitive at the global level. Building the tent in the back over

will go together. Using these automation tools is the key to the future of

American manufacturing.

After the tent gets installed on that, the side panels go on, you have just

about everything in -house. And this is a really fast process. It basically goes

into final assembly.

About three four days by the time we actually start manufacturing the product

when it's actually completed

Right

around the corner here is actually where we started go

fast and I remember spending one cold Montana winter in here

prototyping a bunch of parts and putting together the first concept so it's this

shop over here with the open rolled up door it's pretty cool let's see it's

it's been a long time since i've been here but it's a tiny little space it's

probably only a thousand square feet of shop space so now we're pulling up to my

dad's old shop where the race truck that my grandpa built and my dad raced with

him is being stored my grandpa was a

businessman so He was around when I was little, but it wasn't like a traditional

grandfather -grandson relationship.

Because he died at work.

I think that that same spirit of adventure and that pioneering, that's

we're trying to do in order to make a future for our kids.

When I look back at my grandpa's life, I think it kind of showed me this is

what's possible.

And I also saw the sacrifices that it took to get there.

So as opposed to saying, hey, we're going to sell some campers locally.

neat to see some around Montana. It's like, hey, no, this could be global.

There's no reason we can't go all over the world.

Yeah, so we were able to secure 42 acres of land in Manhattan, Montana, the

Little Apple.

Kind of a complete development center that's going to allow for...

us to help other manufacturing businesses that want to make stuff here

America exist and also be the future home of a 50 ,000 square foot shop for

I don't think anybody should work as much as he did. He really busted ass.

But I do think that it's going to take hard work to build back the American

middle class.

There's a quality of life that can be met as long as we really focus on

efficiency and kind of working smart.

Doing hard, challenging things is really important, but also making sure that

you're there for your family is equally as important and there for your

community as well.

Kind of figuring out how to draw that line between building something that's

and successful and works well, but also creating something that is meaningful

and important.

Ideal situation is that people see what's possible to go fast and see, hey,

could do that for women's apparel. I could do that for the cycling industry.

I could do that for...

Food.

Really anything.

And take that and use it to make a ton of money.

Taking new approaches to old problems is what makes America great, makes America

interesting, and will continue to make America amazing.

I could not be more thankful to grow up in that environment where we get to see

those examples every day of people that think differently and take on those

hopes and dreams. And I think that's America's number one export is

And we need to start backing that up a little bit with manufacturing.