Summary
Sam talks to Knuckles from Country Trucker Caps and finds out what makes their hats unique, all while finding out how big of a podcaster he is.
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Show Transcript
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Sam [00:00:21]:
Okay guys, another interview time here. Field days 2025. I’m here at Country Trucker Caps with Knuckles.
Knuckles [00:00:27]:
Yeah, hey mate, nice to meet you brother.
Sam [00:00:29]:
And Knuckles tells me he has a lot of stories. He’s a top 50 podcaster in Australia, is selling a whole bunch of different country Trucker caps here at Field Days. I’m sure there’s a story about how that got started. There’s some giant looking country. What are they called?
Knuckles [00:00:45]:
It’s a stonker.
Sam [00:00:46]:
A stonker.
Knuckles [00:00:47]:
Yeah, because it’s a hell of a.
Sam [00:00:48]:
Stonker of a hat even for my giant melon head. Listeners to the podcast will probably know a normal hat sometimes doesn’t fit my head and got these giant, giant hats. Check out the show notes for that. Now. Is this your first time at Field Days?
Knuckles [00:01:01]:
It is, mate, yeah. We go to all the field days back home in Australia and plenty of events and they, yeah, they said come over and see the biggest, best field day in the southern hemisphere. So yeah, I’m not up for a challenge. Always just go hard.
Sam [00:01:12]:
What’s your impression about Field Days here in New Zealand?
Knuckles [00:01:15]:
Mate? It’s been phenomenal so far. Like we obviously have a lot of people that know us through different social media accounts and following and people like we would send a hundred, five hundred hats a week to New Zealand anyway. So we do have a lot like a fair customer base here. So. But as far as coming along, it’s been good. This is a bit of a recon mission. We didn’t know anything about Hamilton where it was situationally even from we flew into Auckland to where you stayed, whatever we went, even like the way you say names. So we end up at.
Knuckles [00:01:45]:
We thought it was the Wadda Wadda Tavern. You know Tambour is a footer footer, you know, like I don’t know how this guy get an F out of a W. But anyway that’s yeah not up for me to decide. It’s not my country. But yeah, it’s been fantastic. Few things will do different next year. We’ll have a lot more farming orientated hats. We have them at home.
Knuckles [00:02:04]:
It’s just mainly like sample different designs of different styles because yeah, just come over and it’s fantastic. Yeah, loving it so far.
Sam [00:02:11]:
So how long has Country Trucker Caps been around? How did it start?
Knuckles [00:02:15]:
Mate, we started the end of 2018. I couldn’t find a hat Big enough to fit my head. That’s what I thought. You resonate to that. And then, yeah, we just went out and found this sort of similar kind of hat that. Yeah, and we just made it better and made it bigger and, yeah, we call ourselves the big hat people. So, you know, it’s. Yeah, it kind of took off.
Knuckles [00:02:33]:
Many other buggers out there have got a big hat like myself, a big head like myself, so appreciate a good hat and. Yeah, I guess that’s always their biggest complaint, that your hats are too big. But, you know, you can always adjust them in, I think. Yeah.
Sam [00:02:45]:
For real. I found you guys online yesterday. I was here just wandering around randomly. I saw it and I was like, oh, my gosh. Looked you up. You had a big online presence, which is great to see. Do you get much feedback on what designs people want to see next?
Knuckles [00:02:57]:
Yeah, so as far as we get. All the time, mate. So I bring out tradie hats and different things, you know, like, you know, we got electricians, boilermaker, painters, all different trades. So it’s always another one, you know, of like a different. Different design. You know, a lot of, you know, we’ve got Tylers, try to keep to the base trades, you know, mechanics that. They’re a lot of, you know, you always get these random skew if trades at time, you know, can you make.
Sam [00:03:21]:
A super niche one for some bloody thing? There’s only five people in the country.
Knuckles [00:03:24]:
Exactly. You know, and they’re like, you know, we’ll buy a heap of them. It’s like, well, mate, I try to accommodate for everyone, you know. So the ones where we couldn’t have their trade. I just made a hat and it says Ima and I put a bit of whiteboard material in front of it and it comes with a pen so you can write whatever trade a personal, whatever you want to be, you know, and in these today’s societies, you can write I am a cat or identifies. Whatever you want to identify as. So, yeah, I. I try to come up with a market to.
Knuckles [00:03:47]:
Yeah, to cater for everyone.
Sam [00:03:49]:
Amazing. Jeremy Howson. You need to get in on this. He’s an electrician. I’m sure he would love one of these hats.
Knuckles [00:03:55]:
We got a Sparky’s cap there, mate. It says, we remove your shorts and check your box. So it’s. It’s what it’s about, you know, it’s. It’s. It’s a. It’s the band of the laughter. I’m a Sparky by trade myself.
Knuckles [00:04:05]:
Yeah, it’s just good fun. Wholesome. And, yeah, putting quality hats on people. You know, as a kid, dad would always come home from out west and he’d hand a shitty hat and it’d just go into the cupboard, you know, And I’ve got a heap of crap ones at home, so I guess people don’t mind paying for a little bit extra for a quality hat that lasts. So.
Sam [00:04:23]:
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that statement. We saw some people wandering around earlier, some teenagers had a hat on that said, I love hot mums. I heart hot mums. And I knew where that had come from.
Knuckles [00:04:33]:
Yeah, yeah, mate, well, who doesn’t love a hot mum? I actually love all mums I don’t discriminate against. But, yeah, the hot ones do have a lot more special place in my heart.
Sam [00:04:42]:
Just taking a bit of a left turn here. You said you were in the podcasting realm. How long have you been podcasting for? And how did you start, mate?
Knuckles [00:04:49]:
It. Come on. So I’ve got a heap of yarns I’ve done. I went on a few massive podcasts in Australia, just telling me yarns. I told a story about when I got dressed up in a gorilla suit on a coal mine site and it kind of went super viral. And. And then, yeah, they’re like, is there.
Sam [00:05:03]:
More to that story?
Knuckles [00:05:03]:
Yeah, well. Oh, my. Y’ all. Yeah, just tune into the. Just look for the Blackwater YETI online and you’ll see it’s a very funny yarn. It goes for about four minutes, but. And then, yeah, I. My old man, he.
Knuckles [00:05:15]:
He sort of. He’s got all these different yarns and tails and a lot of them come from him, you know, like, as well. And mine was just to catch something with dad, you know, I wanted to start. I’m like. Because. And ours is a lot different every other podcast we’ve got, because I just care about the yarn. I don’t, you know, I don’t care what your dog, what do you want, or any of that sort of stuff. All I matter is the guts, the thing.
Knuckles [00:05:35]:
And then. So our podcast episodes are from sort of eight minutes to sort of 15 or 20. Then they’re not super long episodes, but for me, I can bring someone in and I can get, say, four to eight good yarns or stories off them. And that can be, say, two weeks worth of content, you know, of. And in a time poor society at the moment where no one’s got an hour and a half to listen to an episode, or two hours or three hours, mate, I feel it just works for me. And they can hear the guts and the crust and the funny story around it, you know. So, yeah, just how it works.
Sam [00:06:05]:
I love that philosophy. When we started, we heard and we got sick of listening to these really long form podcasts because it just didn’t fit into your life. We do 30 minutes, that’s it. We’ve been told it’s great to listen to while they’re doing the dishes or going for a shit.
Knuckles [00:06:18]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can go and get bread and milk or you do whatever. So.
Chris [00:06:21]:
Yeah, yeah. So Sam and I first met each other, we used to go to this social media club thing and we’d go to dinner afterwards and it always ended up me and him trying to out yarn each other. And that’s where it came from. That’s where we started. That was before we started the podcast and it was like, we gotta share these yarns with a bigger, bigger group of people.
Knuckles [00:06:40]:
Absolutely. And that’s what it’s about. And I think a diversity of yarns too. A lot of different podcasts and, and, and people, they sort of focus on, you know, just being like a rugby league podcast or a rodeo podcast or, you know, a yarn’s a yarn. You don’t have to be a famous person if you’ve got to kill your whole yarnie. Where someone go, holy. Like to me that’s, that’s cool, you know, so. And there’s so many yarns and stories and especially from the older fellas out there that, that, mate, they’ve seen a lot of that we haven’t.
Knuckles [00:07:07]:
And they’ve been through, been through wars, they’ve been through so much. They’ve, they’ve seen the highs, they’ve seen the lows, they experience adversity at the best. Yeah, that’s as far as I’m concerned. I just want to capture as many and yeah, so when they’re long gone and forgotten, their generations before them, after them can hear.
Sam [00:07:25]:
That’s awesome. I love that philosophy. I love what you’re doing. It makes complete sense. It resonates with me very well. How do you find people react when you don’t have a super niche podcast? Because like we have the New Zealand Podcast Summit here. I’ve been to it a couple of times in Auckland and everybody there has this super niche podcast. Someone really big was talking and they had these eight different things that you need to do to be successful.
Sam [00:07:48]:
We don’t do any of them.
Knuckles [00:07:49]:
Yeah, mate, I think social media is massively key, like clipping up videos. Right. Doing that stuff, you know, just and consistency. So many people. The biggest thing in the podcast world that I learned, good friends of mine, I’m the major sponsor podcast, the AlphaBlikes Podcast. They’re big in Australia, they’re good mates of mine and they just same thing, two lads go out and just a relatable people. But every time they know that you got to consistently put the episode out, so many people start, they think it’s easy. They see all these big podcasts doing things I’m sure you boys would not have recorded every single week for the last 14 years.
Knuckles [00:08:29]:
You would have had loads of times. And the thing is, what’s not bashtime is consistency. It obviously helps when you have a bit of a following to start with before and that’s obviously you’ve got a support base of people who will listen to you, but hey, if you can sort of, I guess put out content that’s raw and real and mate, there’s not any certain person I’ve had on my podcast and told their yarn that is the standout favourite because I’ve had from UFC fighters to jockeys, to wrestlers to boxers to me dad, to, you know, an old truck driver, to anything like to shearers to, you know, concreters. And that’s what I say, like if you can do social media, right, clip it up, right and consistently keep grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding away, well, you know your numbers are going to go up. And in that whole podcast world, it’s not like what I found with myself and a lot of my mates, like we put on that podcast royale. It was the fastest selling boxing event in Australian history. And numbs are boxers, you know, like, go figure. Like we sold out the Gold Coast Convention center.
Knuckles [00:09:29]:
You know, had first year, had 4,000 people there. This year we had five and a half thousand people come from all around the world just to watch us numbscales fight. And none of us are boxers. Like, we just, you know, but it brings a community people together, everyone has fun. It’s just, it’s a cool event. We do a whole heap of shit that the conventional boxing probably wouldn’t do, but hey, we don’t, you know, we had a seven man blindfold, last man stand, you know, like that sort of stuff. You know, we had a midget fight the year before. You know, we’re just, we’re all about different things and if you’re gonna put a show on, just entertain and.
Knuckles [00:10:03]:
Yeah, so I guess my number one tip is consistency. Just. Yeah, just keep waiting. None of us are competing against each other. We’re all you know, whether there’s that many hours in the day to listen to podcasts, there’s that many truck drivers, different people working, you’re in office, whatever, just, just they, you know, listening to everyone. So, yeah, I just say consistency is key. Is my biggest message.
Sam [00:10:24]:
Awesome message to hear. Hey, we’ve got this random thing we’re doing at field days this year. It’s random question time.
Knuckles [00:10:29]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:10:30]:
You pick two of them and answer one of them.
Knuckles [00:10:32]:
Yeah. Too easy.
Sam [00:10:33]:
They’re pretty simple.
Knuckles [00:10:34]:
That’s right, mate. Like myself. Pretty simple. You might have to read this, eh? Something you’ve always wanted to try. Cooking.
Sam [00:10:41]:
Yeah. That’s one question. That’s one question. Or.
Knuckles [00:10:44]:
Or what’s the worst fashion trend you’ve ever followed, mate, I’ll go cooking because. And I think it’s relatable in New Zealand as well. A hungi. I’ve never had a hungi. I’ve never cooked a hungi. So I think it’d be cool to try and, you know, with traditional Maoris and cook up a hungi. I reckon it’d be pretty cool.
Sam [00:11:03]:
I would back that. I like a hungi.
Chris [00:11:05]:
Yeah, absolutely. And it is something different. There is definitely something different about it.
Knuckles [00:11:09]:
Yeah. And I think it’s grassroots New Zealand as well. Like, you know, it’s not like you can go into a pub and order it. I think it’s cool and different and. Yeah, that’s just come to mind off the top of my head, without even, you know, we’re in New Zealand and. Yeah, certainly New Zealanders out there take me for a hung. I’m happy.
Sam [00:11:24]:
Excellent stuff. Country trucker caps. Where can we find out more? What’s the link? Where can they find your podcast? I was not expecting this conversation from Knuckles. This is amazing. I’m loving it. And this is what we get when we talk to interesting people at Field Days.
Knuckles [00:11:38]:
Yeah, mate, just CountryDrugCaps.com on and yeah, you can lead to all socials and that. That’s their website. You can go on, you can design your own ad. We’ve got all our own that’s for sale. But we, you know, 60% of our business is making for other companies too. So other companies, other podcasts, other things. So I guess what’s about and all working together and help each other. And then as far as the podcast goes, it’s just proper Troyan on all social medias.
Knuckles [00:12:03]:
Yeah, on same thing. Social media as well as. Yeah. Spotify, Apple Music or any streaming services.
Sam [00:12:10]:
Awesome. Thank you so much. It’s been a really great conversation. Thanks, Knuckles.
Knuckles [00:12:14]:
Cheers, mate. Thanks for having us on, boys.
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