YouTube Superstar Civil Talks Gaming, Faith, and Content Creation

Why were you not happy?

It wasn't fulfilling.

Like, it felt like it was never enough, and there was always

something I was trying to chase after.

It became very obvious, very quickly,

that no matter what next goal I hit,

whether it was a dollar amount, whether it was a subscriber

count, whatever it was, was not going to be like, oh,

Kenny's satisfied now.

And so I just went looking.

I looked for partying.

I looked in relationships.

I looked in every which way that you could possibly

look, trying to find, OK, maybe I

need to be around other YouTubers.

My friends just don't get it.

No, that's not it.

Maybe other entrepreneurs are like, no, that's not it.

For some reason, I remember thinking this so cruelly.

Like, dude, you are about to crash, you idiot.

And I remember thinking, I should

look into another place called church.

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Hey everybody, it's Dale Jr. back again

for another Dale Jr. download here in the Arby's Studio.

This episode is presented by Arby's Meat in 3 Box.

Get more meal for your money at Arby's.

We had the meats.

And we got a pretty cool guest for you today.

I'm excited about this.

For all of my life, I've been a gamer.

I've played video games.

I love them.

I'm 51 years old.

And I'm not ashamed to admit

that I'm just as crazy about them today

as I've always been.

And I could list all of the games

that I've played over the years

and the ones that I've loved.

We've talked about them on this show.

I won't bore you with all of the full list,

but one game that I really have enjoyed.

I fancy myself as a young kid,

either being a race car driver or being a football player.

And we dream of being something when we're kids.

And man, I wanted to play for Washington in the NFL.

If I couldn't be my dad,

I was hoping that that might happen for me,

but I never grew into the football player frame

that I was hoping for.

But I can play on my Xbox

or the playstations that I've had over the years

with Madden and college football.

College football went away in 2014.

I didn't think it'd ever come back,

but EA Sports brought it back last year.

And it was a massive, massive

bit of energy and excitement around that game returning.

And TJ, who has been the commissioner for a dynasty

and Madden for over a decade,

he's had a Madden dynasty that he's managed

for over 15 years that I was a part of at one point.

He started a dynasty for college football.

There are 32 users, 32 members in this,

and we're on a discord and we communicate daily.

It's where I go to talk all my buddies.

And it is a big part of my everyday life,

more so than Amy would like.

But I have a lot of fun with it.

I really pour a lot of my competitive nature

into things like that.

It's just an outlet, a hobby.

And I've wanted to get good at it.

And so by trying to become one of the better players

in the league so that I could try to win

the national championship every year,

I went looking for content creators

and people that were talking about this game

and how I could improve.

And I ran across civil.

And so today I learned his real name's Kenny,

but he's known as Siv or civil on YouTube and social media.

He was, he won a big tournament for Madden many, many years ago

that put him kind of on the map

in terms of a professional player.

And he has since transformed into a concurrent creator

and a guy that just kind of gives daily videos

with tips and ideas.

And I thought that was great.

He was one of two or three, four guys

that I clicked the subscribe or the follow button

on YouTube and I see their videos every day.

And then one day, and he's got great energy,

easy to listen to, very helpful.

Seems like he just really, truly wants you

to get better at what you're doing.

And so it's easy content to absorb.

And then one day I saw that he had posted on his Twitter

and pinned the post of being baptized

and that he had recently dove into the Bible

and man, it was really having this great effect on his life.

And I grew up in a world and a generation

where we didn't talk about politics.

We didn't talk about religion.

You just didn't have those conversations

and that was kind of understood.

Of course, we've shifted quite a ways away from that.

Whereas, you know, it's talked about.

It's not, you know, it's not as kind of uncommon, I suppose.

But I saw him post about, you know,

his decision to read the Bible

and get to know the Lord and all that.

And I was like, wow, I'd be interested into,

I'd be interested in having a conversation

with him about that and what went behind that decision,

what drove him to that decision

and the decision to share.

So I thought that I was interested in that.

So I thought, why not?

See if he'd come on the show

and we could talk about it and everyone could listen.

And also, obviously wanted to know

about his content creating, decisions he makes

and why he creates the content he creates.

And, you know, his thoughts about a game,

a video game that I absolutely love to play.

So I'm looking forward to bringing him in the room.

I've never met him.

I've talked to him on social media, seen his videos

but have yet to really even see him out in the lobby

here at Junior Merch Sports.

He came all this way from Texas, came into town early.

I know he's been bopping around,

doing some things, mountain rock crawling

or something, he's into fitness.

So he's been doing some things here

around Mooresville, I suppose.

But I wanna get him in here.

So let's see where this goes.

Kenny, Civil, on the Dale Jr. Download.

Man, I'm excited about this.

Yeah, I know we talked a little bit on DM

over the last year or two,

since they started, you know, brought the game back.

And it's been a lot of fun,

kind of trying to get better at the game

but also learning from content creators

and how you guys have found a way to make a living.

Yeah.

Creating content and helping people enjoy the game.

And so your real name's Kenny Cox.

Everybody knows you as civil or civil.

Yes, sir.

You had success, I would say, publicly

as a Madden gamer years ago.

And we're gonna talk about your story a little bit

about how it's just kind of shifted

to where you are today.

And one of the things that you did recently

was you went public with your faith.

Yeah.

And I was following you already

and just sort of skimming some ideas

off of your information

on trying to beat my buddies.

And you have a dynamic personality on your content.

You're very personable, easy to watch,

good energy, all of those things.

I'm not sure if you even have to try.

But it comes across really, really well.

Appreciate that.

And then you decided to make this public announcement

that just you made this change in your life.

I thought that was very interesting

because when you're serious about it,

I guess it's an easy choice to make

but you don't know really

how people are gonna respond to it.

So I wanna talk about that later as well.

At 16 years old, you started playing Madden.

Yeah.

You'll say that you're at best top 50

or top 30 player in the world.

You were never going to be a top five guy

that could be one of the absolute best players.

What is the difference?

I mean, between fifth and 30.

I think the difference,

I don't know if it's like this in other sports

because I'm sure you've seen it in NASCAR,

like dudes being like, they're good

but they never get over like the elite type home.

You see in sports all the time, I feel like.

I think in Madden, it's like an extra level of like

execution, an extra level of like,

and this applies for college world too,

an extra level of like anticipation too

and just like being able to pick up on people's tendencies,

knowing like the next move

because it becomes like a,

there's like two parts of the game, right?

There's like pre-snap of like the ball's not snapped.

So nothing's happening yet.

You're not even, it's not even like reaction time.

It's all like thoughts of like,

what are we gonna do when the ball snapped?

And there's things that happen when the ball snapped

of like hitting the correct button,

clicking onto the guy, moving your thumbs fast enough

to be able to do X, Y, and Z.

And so some combination of that,

some guys are just like elite when it comes to

like just knowing what the next move is.

There's a guy in Madden,

they have like this professional championship series.

And there's a guy named Drini,

who just won like the most recent one.

So he's the best player in the world again.

He was the best player in the world eight years ago too.

He won it back then.

And one of the things he's incredible at

is he's just so good on defense

of just having an idea of what his opponent's gonna call

before they ever call it.

And he does it at like the highest of levels, right?

Cause like I can go into a game against a random guy,

see what they come out and be like, he's gonna do this.

But then he's doing it against like

the best player in the world, right?

I have a great buddy named DeCroft.

I was one of the best players in the world.

Are you, would you consider yourselves partners?

Yeah, we're partners, he's a partner of civil.gg.

And then he is just a great friend of mine too.

First of foremost, we've been friends for like,

we got into the space together eight years ago.

Daniel's an awesome guy.

He's incredible when it comes like

seeing the field from an offensive standpoint

of like just knowing like, okay, the defense,

like this defender's gonna go here.

If I put two players in this position,

that defender, no matter what he does,

he's wrong, it's just a read and react.

Like I'm gonna choose this.

He's able to do it in unique ways too,

where people haven't seen like these route combinations before.

So whenever you see something you haven't seen before,

you're slower to react as well,

just cause like you just don't have the same muscle memory

and like you just hesitate for a second.

So it's just like another level of like,

they're just elite.

Like DeCroft's one of those like elite dudes,

he's like next level.

Yeah, yeah.

It's been a lot of fun sort of understanding,

you know, we have a dynasty and there's 32 users

and there's some is a wide range of skill level.

And I find a lot of things about it fascinating.

We have a couple of guys, we're all,

we all get along great.

We all give each other a hard time.

We have a discord, we talk a lot of shit and have fun

and you can imagine, but there's some guys that are,

that we've played Madden and college football with them

for over 12 years and their skill level

has just kind of plateaued.

They just, that's who they are.

That's a player they're gonna be.

And we have, you know, it's just fascinating to me,

I guess, how these, you know,

how hard you have to work, I guess,

to actually get over the hump, right?

I mean, there's different categories of great, you know?

And I work really hard to try to be these guys,

you know, at this game.

And it takes a lot of effort.

And I think that's, you know, you found a niche in that.

You found a niche in an area

where people are craving more knowledge, more information.

And so, you know, you started playing Madden,

you realized, hey, I'm actually pretty good at this.

What was the moment where you were like, you know,

when you guys, I guess you realized your skill level?

Yeah, so I played like video games in general,

like any other kid did growing up just here and there.

I played them a good amount,

but never like, I was never going professional or something.

I joined, I liked Madden a lot.

I just liked X's and O's in football.

And so I'd like try applying that to Madden,

Hit or Miss, whatever.

I joined a couple of these like online like franchise leagues

and I joined one, it was like 32 users.

And I went undefeated one season,

like perfect season, one Super Bowl, like cool, whatever.

But then I did it the next season too.

Was it easy?

I remember it was like, it was easy.

I did it the next season too, undefeated, perfect.

I'm like, I just went back to back undefeated,

whatever, I'm kind of like, whatever.

And some dudes like, he's talking crazy to me.

Like he's saying like, I suck at this and that,

whatever, he's out playing for $10.

I'm like, I can play for 10 bucks, like whatever,

who cares?

Never even thought about it before.

And I beat him in like 20 minutes.

And I'm like, okay, I just made like 10 bucks

in like 20 minutes.

And then he's mad, I beat him.

So we play again, I beat him again.

And so it's like less than hours gone by,

I made 20 bucks.

And I'm like, wait a second.

I think there's something like,

this is way better than a,

like I was working at a car dealership at the time.

I was doing pizza too.

And I was like, this is way better,

like hourly than anything else I can do.

And this is, I'm playing a video game.

This is awesome.

Cause that was like the first thing where I was like,

there's like something to this.

Like, yeah.

When do you start, you're not creating content, right?

And so what was the next move?

How do you, how do you find opportunities

to actually go play tournaments

and create opportunities for yourself

to actually play professionally?

Yeah.

So the big one for me was like, I would like Google.

I wouldn't really just use Google.

My dad would drive me to, there was one,

we went to a couple,

but there was a Microsoft store

in Detroit, Michigan at some mall.

And we went there and I did really well.

There was a tournament there?

Yeah.

There was a big tournament on Microsoft store there.

And it was like a us nationwide.

Where are we all living?

We were in Quincy, Michigan.

So about two hours, very bottom of the mountain,

about two hours away from Detroit.

He drove me there.

We went in a snowstorm.

My dad went above and beyond to get me there.

And he's thinking the entire time,

I'm sure like, it's kind of nonsense.

Like it's a video game for my son, whatever.

And I kill it.

How old were you?

I was, I was 16.

I was 16 in that.

And so I came up like one game short.

I ended up losing, but I came up one game short

of like super bowl tickets.

And I was like, wait a second.

Like my dad's realizing like,

my son's like, okay, at this.

And now I'm playing this game on the side a little bit,

like playing for 10 bucks here, $20 a year, $30 a year.

How is that happening?

It's all through like Facebook groups.

Like, hey, who wants to play for $10?

Who wants to play for 20 bucks?

That's pretty prominent back then.

Yeah. Super, super popular, super stressful.

I mean, I was winning that too.

The issue with it though,

the more you win in that,

like no one wants to play anymore

because they're just going to lose money.

And so slowly I have to start playing

better and better people, which I made less money,

but it made me better, right?

You just compete against better players.

You compete in anything in life.

You just naturally going to like rise up

to their level slowly.

And so I was doing that.

Do you know what you were making on average a week?

Back then, I want to say like just from that,

probably like four, five, 600 bucks a week.

When I was like 16 or something like that.

Yeah, it put me through a good part of my college

when I was in college.

I get, it was a legit thing where I was like,

we're not doing something here.

Wow. Like, okay.

And then my dad always told me,

so like I knew there was like the professional route,

but my dad always told me growing up that

it was kind of a dumb analogy,

but it was actually really smart.

It was like every kid wants to be like a professional athlete.

And so did I.

My dad would be like, Kenny,

you don't want to become a professional athlete.

Like you want to be the agent for the athlete.

Like you want to be the guy like

making the phone calls for the athlete doing this stuff.

Cause partly because my dad knew I probably wasn't,

I'm five, eight,

probably not going pro and NFL unlikely.

And so I was like, okay,

like I probably won't be a professional man player,

but I wonder if I could like get into like behind the scenes.

And so I reached out to a few people,

one of my really close good friends now,

but I like kind of cold reach out to him like,

hey, can I like make videos for you at like 18 or so?

Like I'm really good at the game.

Kind of make tip videos for you.

And so one guy let me, his name's Ace, awesome,

awesome guy.

And so I started working for him a little bit,

then was kind of doing on the side.

Where was this for YouTube shorts?

Yeah. So it was like YouTube videos

for like a whole different person, whole different channel.

You edit it or would you record it?

I was like the, I was like the face of it was you.

Yeah. It was, it was me, it was for his channel.

Yep. And then so I kind of got my feet underneath me there.

But ultimately like I got into college

and I was trying to do college.

I was working at FedEx.

Driving forklift.

Driving forklift at FedEx.

Yep. Yep. That was awesome.

I loved it.

It was so, oh, driving forklift there.

And I tried playing this professional tournament

and ended up losing before I could make any money.

I lost to a good player.

I was like, dang, like,

I'm trying to pull myself through college.

Just like playing money games every day,

like the 10, 20 bucks thing.

Like I was playing too good of people.

We're like, we'd spend eight hours one day,

50 bucks to you, 50 bucks to me, 50 bucks to you.

It's like, dude, this, like I'm playing eight hours.

I made 10 bucks.

It's like, what are we doing?

So I kind of give it up for like six months

when I'm like 18 years old.

This is 2019 now.

You just stopped?

Yeah. Pretty much like cause like, dude,

I got to make money and like,

I got to like the game stuff is cool.

Helped me so far.

Like we're done.

The next Madden came around.

I picked it back up a little bit, was playing it.

And I was just good at this game for some,

like it just clicked for me.

Like I was like good at the other ones.

This one I was like, I was playing like the top dogs.

And I was like, I was with them the entire time.

I was neck and neck every game.

Even if I lost, I was like, like sweet.

Like, wait a second.

I take, I dropped out of college right then

and Cal's pursuing the career at FedEx.

Cause they had a good thing going for me.

And so with the money I saved from dropping out of college,

I was like, man, there's this big tournament in Dallas, Texas.

I haven't even really been out of Michigan before,

but I'm just going to take some of this money

and go down to Texas and like see what happens.

And so I play that guy,

I referenced him earlier named Dreamy.

I played him in my second game, best player in the world.

I'm some random kid and I beat him.

And I beat him like a no, no nonsense.

No, like, oh, you got like, it was just like,

I was like, dude, civil just like beat him.

And I'm like, oh wait, like I'm nice.

Like I'm actually good at this.

I do okay in this tournament.

But then two months later,

I played another one called a club championship

for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and I win that one.

And that's what gets me like some stream time on EA.

That's what gets me some like time on ESPN.

And then when I was on those,

I was always like kind of like a little bit more outspoken

when I play, I wasn't just sitting there.

I was kind of like energetic.

And so my buddy was like, did you start streaming

start doing YouTube?

And I just picked it up

and we just kind of kept going from there.

How are you streaming?

I was, I would stream on Twitch.

I'd stream at night after a lot of times I'd come in.

So I'd moved from the forklift to an office roll at FedEx.

And so I actually I'd come into immediately

after like a button down shirt and start streaming

and just like stream for five, six hours.

What's your, what is your major platform today?

Just YouTube?

No, it's YouTube and X.

Why did you move away from Twitch?

I just don't like streaming that much.

Honestly, it was, it was, it was exhausting.

Some people like have like the social battery

to like be on forever.

I don't have the same one.

Like you have to, to have, you know,

your subscribers need to know.

Yeah, you have to be consistent every time.

I was a believer in terms.

I always try to think of like,

what would help me five years from now in my decisions?

And so one of the things I was like, dude,

I don't think streaming is the best decision

for five years from now, Kenny.

Which is funny because like that's like, I'm 25 now.

I'm saying that when I'm 20.

And like I can look back and say like,

I was thankfully correct.

It just felt like it wasn't the most like scalable thing.

I was like, but YouTube, I think YouTube is like,

is like the way to go, I think.

And so we just kind of went all in on YouTube.

We did a little bit of streaming on the side.

I still do here and there for fun.

But yeah.

Just randomly.

I do it randomly now.

So what helped me understand in, since 2020,

there was a massive sort of, you know, with the pandemic,

there was a lot of streaming, a lot of people sending home,

a lot of people on Twitch, a lot of people watching.

We had this sort of a similar perfect storm

with the NASCAR world.

When we couldn't go to the racetrack,

we actually started doing races live on iRacing

and broadcast those on network television and so forth.

And so it was really, really cool.

And so, but to your point,

like no one really looked at YouTube

as a gaming platform or a streaming platform

or a place for that type of content

so much as they do today.

So where is the landscape?

There's still people on Twitch,

still people successful on Twitch.

And there's a, how would you, I guess,

how would you describe like the job there

and the job here, right?

Yeah, so I think first,

out of football coach in high school,

say this, I still say it quite a bit,

like there's more than one way to skin the cat.

Like you can be successful.

Like there's more than one way to be successful.

Do you feel like you have, do you,

I guess my problem is, is like when I,

when I was trying to be successful

as a race car driver and trying to market myself,

I felt like I had to get on every single new

social platform that came out, right?

And then it got to a point where I was like,

I just can't take on anymore.

Right.

I can't. And I hate missing out on TikTok

cause I didn't do TikTok.

Right.

I hated missing out on that wave,

but I'm like, I just gotta choose some joy here

and like some, some me, right?

And I'm going to whittle it down

to like the couple of things that I like to do.

Yeah. I mean,

we have like a very finite amount of time

that we can spend.

So you can't say yes to everything.

Like no matter who you are,

like you cannot say yes to literally everything.

So there's always opportunity cost.

I'm sure like you're a business man,

you've had to turn down opportunities.

I'm sure you're like, this is kind of sick.

Like this, this is probably even kill it for us,

but we just doesn't make sense right now.

And it stinks.

We think the same way about like,

I think we could kill it.

I'm like doing more short form content.

If I like put all my time and energy into it,

I'm pretty caught.

We've done well in short form before,

but I'm like,

You mean those quick one, two, mid bills.

Yeah. Like one, two, like one minute,

like just vertically,

you're just scrolling TikTok,

scrolling short, scrolling Instagram.

I think we could kill it on it.

I'm like, is that Kenny's,

is that civil's best use of time right now?

Like, I don't think so.

It is short, but like,

Why couldn't you,

why can't you take the current content you're making?

We've done stuff like that

and it's done fine.

I think if we,

like if I put more effort into making,

so like there's like,

there's a couple of different ways

to approach like short form content.

It's like take your long form, cut it up.

You'll see podcasts do that all the time.

And a lot of podcasts kill it with that.

And then you can see it with like normal,

like long form YouTube videos.

The other way is making like organic short form content,

which is like,

I'm sitting down to record

and I'm doing it for this one minute long wheel.

I think for the way we've done things,

like when I sit down and do that,

we kill it like those kill it.

When we take like long form stuff

and cut them short,

those do okay.

They kill it on Twitter or X,

but they don't do as well on like TikTok or Reels.

And so that's where I'm like,

dude, if I just sat down

and I just did this,

these organic short form posts every day,

we'd probably kill it in this realm.

But that's going to take away,

like there's a finite amount of time.

And so it's like,

it's going to take away from X, Y and Z

that we're working on.

And like we just can't do it right now.

So to go to what you said about like wanting

to do everything,

like you just can't, I don't think.

Who are some,

when you think about,

do you think about,

do you look at other people

that are creating a similar content as competition?

Or do you guys,

do you even know these people?

Do you communicate with them?

Do y'all share ideas?

Yeah, definitely.

I definitely know pretty much everybody now.

At least I'm definitely friends with some of them,

at least heard of most people.

Definitely competition, I think.

I'm definitely, yeah, definitely.

Like there's no way around.

And like, I love them.

No different than like,

you can love a fellow driver

and like you want to beat the fellow driver.

You know, I have a lot of love for them,

but we are competing to pretend we're not.

It's like there's,

I got to go back to the final idea.

Who's some guys that are,

that you're watching?

Yeah.

My buddy named Ace Madden,

who I used to work for.

He's a great competitor.

Is he all Madden?

He does some college football stuff as well.

He does?

He's a great competitor of ours.

There's guys like Huddle GG,

have a ton of respect for those guys.

They kill it,

but like we're,

and we're friends even,

but like we are competitors.

Yeah, there's a few others out there too.

Dude named Poodle.

Poodle, yeah.

He came a little bit different.

He's cooler.

Yeah.

He came out to Dover last year.

We got to meet him.

I was, we interact with him a little bit

and call me Jaden.

Yes.

I've never talked to him before.

I've seen this stuff.

He seems like a nice guy.

He did last year,

he did, so we do dynasties.

So that's, he's mostly,

he's all dynasties for the most part.

And so is Poodle.

And so that's why I was checking those guys out.

Jaden, I guess that's his name.

Went to,

but this game decided to do all this content around

if you were manually progressing players,

which we don't.

And so it's like, all right,

I can't use all of this stuff.

It's like 80% of this stuff.

I kind of listen to it, watch it,

and then like, I can't use that.

You work in,

you don't, you don't focus on dynasties.

And when you play,

you don't, you know, you're not,

you know, you're not playing in dynastie mode.

What is the, what is,

what is the decision behind how,

how, what, how you're going to choose

what information you're going to share

and where you're going to focus in the game?

Cause there's so many ways to do this.

Yeah, it's hard.

What I try to tell people consistently is like,

I care about gameplay.

So if you're like on the virtual,

good iron, the virtual field,

like what I want to tell you,

I'm going to try my hardest to let that apply to you

regardless of your playing dynastie,

regardless of your playing ultimate team,

you're playing just regular head to head,

point your buddy, whatever it is.

Like that's where I care about as much as I can.

There's some issues naturally built into the game like that

where for example, like making hot routes,

which you've tweeted to me about,

which is like, yeah, there's some issues

where like in ultimate team,

you can literally just do plays

that you can't always do in dynastie.

And so we try to just find that balance.

Like I know I'm good at gameplay

and I'm good at gameplay regardless of what game mode

I've played, I play the game long enough

to be able to say that, like with confidence.

And so it's like, I care less about like

narrowing it down into one specific game mode

and just like, I know gameplay.

I don't know anything about like recruiting

could not tell you at all.

Why?

I just don't, never interested.

Never interested.

It's not what I'm good at, never interested in me.

This is a business.

I've got to focus on what I'm good at.

It's the best use of my time.

And it's also like not, maybe if I was like into it,

I'd be like different, I'm like, I'm not good at it.

I'm surprised that you're not in any dynastie.

Yeah, when I was younger, I was like,

that's why I got started with this franchise in Madden.

I thought it was super cool,

but it's just like, dude, like trying to figure like,

okay, what am I good at?

I'm good at gameplay.

Everything else I'm not as good at

and to become an expert to the point where like,

I can teach people as well.

Like to do that in good faith,

you got to be really good at something.

If I'm going to tell you how to do something,

I better be good.

You know what I mean?

Like a lot of people go wrong

of like telling you how to do something

and they don't really know how to do it.

It's like, well, I'll never become nearly as good

at recruiting or anything as I am at gameplay.

Like it's just not who I am.

So let's focus everything I have here.

And that's where trying to build people in

from a business standpoint

of bringing in other people of like,

okay, civil struggles in this area.

How do we bring in somebody

who can just clean up that gap?

That's how I think of it.

So how do you, with all the other competition out there

and trying to keep your content fresh?

So I imagine like when the game comes out,

there's this constant sort of,

you're constantly sort of vetting the game

for unique things that you can share with people, right?

But there's only so many apples on the tree to pick right

before at some point, you know,

you gotta start looking forward to the next game

or so how difficult is that?

Is that even an issue where you're like,

dude, we're gonna run out of, run out of like things

to tell people to help them play better?

I think it's a combination of that.

I guess what was last year like

when you had a brand new game,

we hadn't had college in a damn decade.

Like it was so much excitement.

To begin, it was awesome

because everyone came back to that game.

Like Madden has a good like core base consistency.

Everyone came back to that game.

So I could tell somebody like,

hey, hit triangle to catch the ball.

People would be like, I can't believe you just told me that.

Like you just saved my life.

And it's like, I'm like, yep,

like I'm really that dude.

Here we go.

And but like from that,

so like that was awesome

because everyone like first time playing the game,

like hey, push the joystick, you'll move.

You had people that didn't play news.

Never played or haven't played in a decade,

which was awesome.

But it just goes into the cycle

of like there's a couple of things.

One, like you can reuse content

in the sense of like,

if I tell you a good piece of advice today, right?

Especially if it's like in a video of 10,

10 tips, all 10 are good pieces of advice.

I can use a couple of those

in a video that I make two months from now

and you're not gonna be mad at me

because if it's a good piece of advice,

you can be like, you know what?

Yeah, like awesome.

As long as the content's actually good,

people aren't gonna be upset

and you have to space it out a little bit.

So we're able to reuse ideas

and like they are helpful.

With that too, like there's just,

we've been in a cycle.

We've been a creator now for seven or eight years

or something.

And so we've gone through this game cycle

so many times where we have these ideas,

we're able to hit on these things

and the game does change enough

each year and throughout the year

where we can kind of hone in on certain ideas

or just like maybe tactics that are better this year

or maybe it's just something I personally

like more this year, whatever it might be

and kind of rehash those a little bit.

And then every three months or so

we'll do like a super beginners type videos

where it's like move the joystick,

your player moves, that's tip number one.

But like for the players who watch that video,

like that's incredibly helpful.

It's like that's a day one basic tip like heck yeah.

We don't run into the issue too much though

to answer your question anymore, thankfully.

Yeah, when do you start looking forward

to the next game?

For me, really it happens in like May

is like when I'm really,

because like that's when the game

really starts to like die down.

It feels like numbers wise.

We get, you know, Christmas is a pretty good boost.

We have college football season,

Christmas is a great boost.

A lot of people get the game

so we had like the national championship Super Bowl.

Then for like NFL wise,

the draft keeps the Madden alive for a little bit,

free agency, all that.

Then like May and June, just it stinks.

For a while, July was the worst.

But now college football comes out in July.

It's been like biggest blessing in the world

because it just bumps our entire season up one month.

Do you have the opportunity to get understanding

on what the next game,

are you like given some sort of like heads up

on some of the cool features

that the next game is going to have

to be able to allow you to make content,

sort of teasing content that we start to see?

Yeah, so good question.

There's two things I'm a part of

or I've been a part of the past couple of years

that's been really cool for me

is one they'll do like a preview event.

That's in like May or June.

And so you'll see like,

you'll see people like tweet out about like,

Hey, was that the preview event?

Whatever, whatever.

And so the developers will talk about like,

Hey, we're doing this.

We're trying to do this XYZ.

Here's like a beta version of the game.

And you kind of get to feel it out.

Then I'm usually a past few years,

I've been part of like a early capture program,

which is like the game comes out, let's say July 7th.

I'll get the game on June 25th or something for two weeks

to begin preparing content for that to be part of,

cause EA will use creators as like a marketing arm,

essentially.

And so those are the two big ones.

Wow. Yeah.

Why did you choose college football?

I just thought it was a massive opportunity.

I imagine the, I haven't played Madden like hardcore

since 2014.

I was the same dynasty that we're doing

with the EA college game today.

This same dynasty existed 12, 15 years ago

and we were all the same guys all playing Madden.

And I had to quit.

Cause it got to be Madden for whatever reason.

I haven't had this experience with college,

but Madden brought the worst out in me.

I mean, I'm playing friends,

but it was just the emotions that I had in losing a game,

especially important games was really tough.

And it was like, man, this is not adding to my life.

You know, and so I had to,

but I've, we, and so I stepped away completely

when college came back.

Obviously I got back involved in it

and it's been really fun, a lot less, you know,

lot less competition, more having,

having a good time of the game.

But I imagine, so what I guess I'm trying to say is

I haven't dove into the Madden landscape

on social media with YouTube and all that,

looking for tips, tricks and all that good stuff.

I imagine that, that area is incredibly crowded.

Yeah.

And there's some probably pretty established dudes.

So we, we actually have a whole other like a brain

or like another channel where like we do Matt,

like I do all the, like all the college stuff

you see of me, I duplicate it for Madden, essentially.

You can't do like word for word,

like idea for idea, but like same ideas.

And so we do all of that.

It's a lot of similar, same guys, honestly,

try to bounce between the two.

We were first on like committing everything into college.

It just like everybody from college I had

when I was, when I was going to schools,

like I don't play Madden anymore,

but I'm going to play college.

It was so obvious, like the hype around it.

And when I told you I went to that preview event

and we were able to tweet some stuff out,

well, I went to the preview event for college world 25.

And so I got to tweet some stuff out about that.

Now usually if my, let's say I had a tweet

I would do like normally three, 400, 500 likes

or something like that.

I would do it for college world 25 at this preview event.

It would do 4K, 5K, 6K.

And I'm like, okay, wait a second,

let's see what's going on here.

We post our first few videos when the game launches

and we're like, oh, this is obvious.

Like this is awesome.

And then for me, the games are, they're different,

but they're similar enough to where like,

I can be one of the best players in college

and then go pick up Madden

and I'll be one of the best year

and vice versa back and forth.

So the actual transition of loading up

to different games was pretty easy.

And it was just like a numbers game of like,

okay, well college is killing it from a metric standpoint.

College is killing Madden metrically.

It's like, why would we, yeah, why would we look at,

why would we do more mad?

We should double down here in college as much as we can.

How many people are part of the team?

We have six, six people.

We have Decroft, what does he do?

So Decroft, Hexed and Sirius,

those are their gamer names.

That's Daniel, Ryan and Ryan or Michael.

But nonetheless, they're like product guys

is what we call them.

So they're like professional players,

incredibly good at the game.

And we bring them in

and they teach underneath our umbrella here.

And so they go into,

they'll release like schemes and tips and tricks

and all this stuff inside of our website.

I'll help them with like content stuff.

I'll help them with like,

how do we actually become a better teacher?

And so they'll be like purely like producing product

with us.

We have Bo, we've worked together now

since like 2022, 2023.

I think it's official titles

like video production manager.

He just does all of our video editing,

helps a lot with ideas.

A lot of the Twitter clips you see,

a lot of them are like cut up by him.

He does thumbnails, things like that.

And so he runs the overwhelming majority

of the YouTube side of things

that isn't just being on camera, which is me.

Is all these people scattered across the country?

Yeah, everyone's around.

Yeah, Bo himself, he's in Cali right now.

He's our longest tenured person.

He's been incredible to have for the past few years or so.

Who owns the business?

Me.

Oh, a hundred percent.

A hundred percent.

Yep, we were bootstrapped and the brand

I guess has been around since like 2017, 2016 or so.

What is the GG part?

GG, so civil.gg is just a gamer term.

A lot of like gaming websites are .gg,

it's a good game.

It was like a domain name that was available.

Yeah.

And so do you, how many reputable groups like yours are there?

Is it?

Reputable is the key word, there are not many.

There's a few, there's other places that are good.

A dozen, half dozen, a hundred?

No, not like four or five.

They're like good at what they do.

Cause like, I mean, part of it is like teaching

such a skill, like you can be good at something

and not teach it.

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At one point you decided to go all in on this

and dive in.

What was your major in college?

My major in college, I was a criminal justice major

with a focus on juvenile delinquency.

And why did you think you wanted to do that?

I just wanted to work with kids who are at risk

and just like bad situations.

Kids who need a chance.

You think that's something that happens

for you down the line?

Yeah, yeah, we would've do some cool stuff

with the ways we've been blessed.

Yeah, yeah, so that's a big deal.

So you put everything with work, your job,

that you'd climb through some promotions through FedEx

and we had an opportunity there to stay, right?

And make something of that.

Your college, you put all of this off to the side

and have dedicated yourself 100% solely to this job

of creating content and it's been amazing for you.

You bought your family house?

Yeah, my brother and I were able to come together

and buy my parents house on Christmas of 2024.

Damn.

How do you remain fresh and sustainable?

I think it comes back to the Lord.

Like, dude, what a freaking blessing it is

to be able to do what I do for a living.

Like, who am I to be like,

oh, I don't know, what a freaking blessing it is.

And to take that for granted, it's crazy to me.

Before I ever came to the Lord, it was very obvious to me,

I'm like, I have no idea why

I'm having some of the material successes I'm having.

Like this makes, for a logical standpoint,

this makes no sense.

I was never the smartest in the room,

I was never like this or that or whatever.

And I'm like, we are objectively materially killing it

in this, I don't know why.

And then being able to see like,

okay, these different material things

that I'm having here for me

can be used to bless.

Like it's way bigger than Civil or way bigger than Kenny.

From the standpoint of like,

being able to provide like jobs for people,

like that's, I think one of the coolest things

you could possibly do,

but then being able to give back to community,

to be able to buy my parents a house,

be able to do other things like that's like,

dude, like that's freaking awesome.

Like how could it, what more do you want?

That's how I think of it.

You were having all this success and you felt empty

and you were like, you went out party,

had tried different things to try to find ways

to make life feel more full.

I dropped out of college and like my goal when I was 18

was to take care of my parent,

like figure out how do you do it?

How do you do it?

And then in December of 2024, Christmas,

my brother and I are able to come together

and buy my parents house.

It's like, they are set financially

barring some disaster.

And then afterwards I'm like, that was cool.

And I'm like, dang, that actually is not like,

cause if you told me before that I'd be like,

I could die the next day and like, we're good.

Like who cares?

And I'm like, this is not it, dude.

And then for the past seven years or so.

What are you looking for?

What do you mean?

There's just more to it.

You felt, you needed to feel.

It wasn't enough.

It was never enough.

Even the money things.

I would see, go from like making no money

while I was eating ramen every single day

for months and months and months and months.

I upgraded to ramen and rabbi always for a few months too.

I'm like, then I'm eating like actual food.

And I'm like, okay, do I get more, do I get better food?

Like that's not making much of a difference

on my happiness.

Like the money is.

Why were you not happy?

It wasn't fulfilling.

Like it wasn't, it felt like it was never enough.

And there was always something I was trying to chase after.

It became very obvious very quickly

that no matter what next goal I hit,

whether it was a dollar amount,

whether it was like a subscriber count,

whatever it was, was not gonna be like,

oh, Kenny's satisfied now.

Yeah.

And so I just went looking.

I looked for like partying.

I looked in like relationships.

I looked in every which way that you could possibly look

trying to find like, okay, maybe I need to be around

like other YouTubers.

My friends just don't get it.

Yeah.

No, that's not it.

Maybe other entrepreneurs like, no, that's not it.

Like whatever, whatever.

And I remember one time I was getting like,

I was kind of being like cocky to myself walking around

where I was like, man, like, Kenny,

you've done some like cool things.

Like heck yeah.

And I'm like, dude, for some reason,

I remember thinking this so clearly.

Like dude, like you are about to crash, you idiot.

And I'm like, I don't know what that means at all.

Like whatever.

And I remember thinking like,

I should look into like another place called church.

Like, I don't know what that really looks like.

I called one of my good friends

who's my girlfriend now actually,

and I called her up and she,

I said, she went to church.

I'd never done anything with them.

I was like, hey, do you know any churches in my area?

Like she's way up North Austin, now South Austin.

And she's like, I don't really know any around your area,

but like in the morning,

I'm actually getting baptized.

You want to come like see that.

And I was like, oh, like, sure, I'll just go there.

And I went, that was the first time going to church,

January 5th of 2025.

I remember like walking in like shaking people's hands

and like they were like talking to me.

Like I was like a human who like they cared about.

I was like, this is weird.

Like, okay, let's go.

And I got to see the baptism.

Didn't really understand what that was at all.

But I was like, cool.

Like people are cheering for her.

So like, let's go.

Was there for a couple of weeks,

all the guys who come up to me and be like,

hey man, like so happy you're here.

Like by the way, this Christ thing,

this Jesus thing changed my life.

Jesus changed my life.

I'm like, what are you talking about, dude?

Like, I don't know what you're full of,

but like any, but I know people said it.

I'm like, I'm not smarter than you.

So there might be something here.

Yeah. And so a couple of weeks ago,

I decided to read Get a Bible.

And one of the people at the church named Shane,

gave me a Bible, started with the gospel of Matthew.

And the end of it, I'm like, dude,

if this is true, this is a really big deal.

Tell me about that.

So I had a friend of mine talk about

picking up the Bible and read the Bible

and how reading the Bible and the stories within it

had this massive impact on them.

And so I've not read the Bible thoroughly.

I'm not read an entire, you know,

I'm not read an entire three, four pages, you know?

But so like tell me, like if I would just sit down

and literally dive into the story, right?

What would my experience be?

I think it'd become very, very clear

of like what we're doing here on earth.

There's so much more, it's so much bigger

than everything here.

It's bigger than our jobs.

It's bigger than even our immediate family.

There's something bigger going out there.

And there's a creator above who loves us

more than we could possibly imagine.

I'll say, I think one of the things that like,

I would ask you, Dale, is like,

what do you think about like Jesus, for example?

Like you just had to say, what do you think about Jesus?

What would you say?

That he died for our sins and...

So like that's a big deal.

So like if that is true, that's like a massive deal, right?

It's like objectively, because like if that's true,

if he died for our sin and the wages of sin,

it reads in the Bible is death

and he died for it to give it us forgiven

and with the chance for eternal life in heaven.

It's like, well, these are objectively big claims.

Like there's no way around it.

And so it's like, well, I wanna research these claims

and like see, are these like, is this just a load of crap?

Because if it's a load of crap, I want nothing to do with it.

But if it's...

And so in reading the Bible,

you gain confidence in those claims?

Yes, yes.

I gained confidence in the claims

that Jesus was the son of God, that Jesus was God,

is God, that his word is true, his word is reliable.

And if that's the case, you know,

like I think it was like a father figure,

but like to the ultimate extreme where it's like,

you know, you may not understand your father always

when he's telling you things,

but you can have confidence

when he's telling you things in good faith

and he has what your best interest in mind, right?

You don't see the big picture,

but like you know that like,

okay, like I'll listen to dad

because he's saying this and whatever,

or maybe you might even be like, ah, whatever dad.

But that's, so like take that idea

and like put at times infinity,

because as a father in heaven,

who knows what we need,

who knows our deepest and our smallest desires

and is telling us how to achieve these things.

And it's just like by putting faith into him and him alone,

we're like, we're able to come closer to him

and come closer to those things.

Yeah.

And so this has given you peace.

Yeah, it's gonna be fulfilling.

It's giving me drive towards like something way bigger.

It's like a lot of the thing,

I remember reading the gospel of Matthew

and consistently throughout,

I'd be like these like,

it was like different ideas that I would have.

And it's like articulated right here,

like so well articulated here,

so well articulated here, so well articulated here.

I'm like, man, like what a freaking great,

like it was so, so, so cool.

And so many things that would like challenge me.

And it's like, okay,

I look at like the idea of like forgiveness.

Like we can all agree that like,

it's good to forgive people.

Like you should forgive people.

At the same time, like someone really wrongs you,

it's like really hard to forgive.

Like Jesus says we should forgive

even the people who've wronged us the most.

And it's like objectively,

even though it's hard for us emotionally to do that,

I think we can all be like, yeah, we should.

Like that's probably a better way to live life

than like not forgiving at all.

Yeah, it is, yeah.

It has been an incredible,

incredible like life change for me.

I thought I would ask you

about your decision to go public with that.

But I mean, it sounds like

that that was a very easy decision to make.

You're like, hey, this is something I've done.

I don't know that you would be sitting here today

talking to me, had you not done that?

Because of course I follow your stuff

and I think you do great work

and I really appreciate what you do for the community.

You make the game a lot of fun.

You allow people like me that are casual players

to really get a little bit better,

be able to take it to our buddies and have a good time.

And I appreciate you for that.

But you went, I found you on social media,

six or eight, 10 months down the road,

you decide to tell everybody, oh, by the way,

I was baptized and I've had this thing happen to me

where I wanted to share that with y'all and that was it.

Really, hey, this happened.

And I just wanted y'all to know that

and back to what I'm doing.

And I thought that was so interesting.

And I wanted to know, I guess, were you at all,

I assume you probably weren't,

didn't even think about it like this,

but I guess what has been the reception to that

from your core base?

Yeah, overall has been great.

It's been pretty cool.

I was, I wanna say worried, one thing,

I would be like, oh, this is gonna potentially

alienate some people and I get that.

It's also what I truly believe is truth.

And it's like, okay,

and I've been given this platform,

I told you earlier, if I were to look at this objectively,

I'm like, dude, I have no idea why I have this platform.

But it's like, okay, I have it for some reason.

And so let me glorify the name of God

inside of that platform

because there's no other reason for it ever.

So the reception's been good.

I was worried about what it could do, I guess.

In the end though, I was like,

man, if I believe the words of the Bible to be true,

it's like, God's got me anyways.

So if this somehow really backfires on me

and people unfollow me and I lose a bunch of,

if I were to lose money or lose the business somehow

through some crazy backfiring,

it's like all those things were a gift anyway.

They don't belong to me in the first place.

So it's like, okay, if that's the result from it,

then that's God's will.

And it's like, okay, that's just what happens from it,

I guess.

And so I still,

I still will tweet about Christ here and there

and trying to figure out the best ways to go about doing that.

And I think about it all the time,

there'll be some people who are not gonna be,

are not gonna like this.

And it's like, okay, yeah, it just is what it is.

But I imagine too, you still feel like you're on the very,

the threshold of the whole trip, right,

about discovering the Lord and understanding

how to weave that into your DNA, right?

And you're still working on that.

Yeah, a question that got posed to me,

we have community groups that will meet like every Thursday

or something just like a dinner with like other young adults.

And a question that got posed to me is like,

how do you invite Christ in like every part of your life?

And what not like just like,

I would tell myself like, Kenny, don't be a Sunday Christian

or don't be a Christian when you read your Bible

by yourself and I like you,

you're a follower of Christ like everywhere.

It's just, it just is what it is.

And so like that's something I wrestle with

is one of the reasons like I wear a cross

cause like I have a look in the mirror

and I get reminded of all the time.

In a lot of my videos, I'll wear like Jesus T-shirts.

Big reason is cause like I'm on camera,

it's very centered on, it's just,

I'm on camera, it's centered on me.

People are listening to me and it's like,

well, how do I invite Christ into this?

I can't just sit up on camera

and only talk about Christ in a college football video.

Like you just, that isn't gonna work.

So it's like, okay, well, I think just wearing a shirt

with a simple cross on it is like one of those ways.

And I'm getting better at it.

I'm trying to get better at that,

trying to get better at understanding the word.

It's, the Bible's a hard read.

The barriers, and like it is a hard read.

I went into it, dude.

January 5th, the last year,

my first time ever being at church

and then two weeks later,

my first time ever opening the Bible.

It's like these words, I don't know,

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,

I don't know what a parable means.

I don't know what a gospel is.

I don't know any of these words.

So it's a, it's a tough read at first, but it's-

I'm curious as to how that does get easier.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, part of it's just like terminology, right?

It's like, if you're just getting-

I mean, I would think that if,

I thought about this before,

like if I were to sit down and really go dive in,

would I, I would be afraid

that I might misinterpret some things wrongly, right?

Because of not understanding the context.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that go into that.

One, like just being straight up in like prayer

and like asking for like understanding.

The Lord says that we ask for wisdom.

He will give us wisdom.

Having people around you who you can trust,

like trying to interpret the Bible entirely on your own.

Yeah.

Good luck, dude.

Having really good spiritual leaders in your life.

Like I'm surrounded by like an incredible church

where I have awesome like elders around me

and an awesome pastor and awesome friends around me

who like I can go to and if I don't know something

I can call them or something gets confusing.

I'm like, I'm just gonna call them and see.

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Moving back toward your platform.

Yeah, how many hours a day do you play?

Do I play?

Do now, people are shocked by this,

not nearly as much as people think.

I mostly play on camera now.

So probably about three to four, just recording.

It depends.

Like January, I played a ton,

because I did like a fun challenge in January of light.

Dude, I just want to grind this head to head ranked game mode

and see if I can just get into the top 100 again,

just because I hadn't played in a few years.

And I kind of like,

I'd fallen off enough to where I'd play games

and I'd been like,

I'm kind of like losing these games.

I feel like I should be winning.

Yeah, I'm like, these kids now

are like, they're, oh, it's tough, dude.

And so I had to like focus up

and like, let me prove to myself really fast

that like I can do this.

So that was a ton, but not like three or four.

In general, I work probably,

now like closer to like eight to 10 to 12 hours a day,

depends if I'm really into a project or not.

That's a lot.

I mean, it used to be a lot more.

Now it's not, like now it's cool.

And like it's all stuff I love to do.

It's fun.

Do you believe the, you know,

the hours that you're needing to put into this job

into your personal life and...

Yeah, I think it's like,

one cool thing is like,

I like my job is like very interruptible is the word.

So it's like, in the middle of the day,

I can go get lunch and, you know,

every Tuesday I get lunch with my buddies

and we'll talk about the Bible, for example.

Or I can, you know, it's just very like,

I can set my own schedule.

And so if I need to work late one night,

oh yeah, I'll work late one night

if I work really early in the morning.

You know, I can crack out the eight hour,

especially a few years ago,

I used to bang out eight hours from like 5 a.m. to 1 p.m.

And it's like, it's 1 p.m.

I've done eight hours already.

Like do I just do another eight hours?

Like maybe, yeah.

When you step out and say, you know,

fly out of Charlotte to do a podcast

and you're gonna be gone three days,

what's the, is that?

The main things that take a hit during that is like,

I call things like my day-to-day

and then my like growth focus type things.

So I just get my day-to-day or try my hardest

to get my day-to-day stuff done ahead of time.

And then usually my like growth focus stuff takes a hit.

So like right now, like all of our platforms

host on our website and all that's built by me.

And so we, I'm working on like rebuilding some stuff.

So that's like my growth project right now for February.

And so I'm just not working on that today, for example,

which is like fine.

And then I got our recording done ahead of time.

You've decided that, I know in the past like month

you went and worked your way all back

into the top 100 players on college.

Was it as hard?

Was it hard?

No.

Was it all?

No, it was the hardest thing, it was just a time thing.

Actually getting it done on the date you thought,

you predicted you would do it and it came close.

Yeah, it did come pretty close.

I had to play like 130 games the final five days or so.

Geez, 130 games?

And like, I mean every game like I went,

what did I go, 200, three and 15,

three of those losses were disconnects.

But like of the 203 wins,

like probably 100 plus or just like shutouts or something.

It's just like.

The dudes that out of any of the dudes that beat you,

did they know who they were playing?

Probably.

Yeah, at least one or two of them did.

Yeah.

Do you have an open mic when you play?

No, I don't know.

No, no, because usually I'm recording

and people be saying all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, people be saying too crazy and like,

I'm like, I can't have this.

Like this is kid friendly, like nah.

So I play every now and then I'll slide in

and play a game.

And I don't have a mic.

I don't turn my mic on, but it's so funny

listening to other things people say.

Oh my gosh.

You've changed.

You shifted from, you made the decision,

hey man, I'm probably not gonna go top five.

And this is what I am.

And you've went toward, you've embraced teaching.

Teaching younger, newer players how to enjoy the game.

Talk about how rewarding that is.

Oh sweet, I get to hear like,

I'll get like emails, I'll get Discord DMs,

Twitter, X messages, whatever it might be.

I'll be like, I have one that my league

with my buddies is awesome.

There's one guy who won like a Super Bowl trophy

or something and he put a bunch of beer in it

and like his wife like dumped it on him

and like sent me a video.

So I thank you so much.

It's super fun and it's way less stressful.

It's so much less stressful than competing.

You need to help people.

And so like competing is all about like

me, me, me just trying to win.

It's like, oh dude, like,

I don't have to be nearly as good anymore to compete.

So I get to like take a break from that a little bit.

And I just get to help people and I do that.

And it's like, yeah, it's sweet.

I love it.

So there's nothing better.

That's the reward.

Yeah, it's sweet.

I think teaching itself is like such a cool thing

to be able to do.

Like be able to help someone get from like point A

to point B and I see them go from that.

We have some guys who have been with us for years now.

And I've gotten to see them go from like,

they don't know how to even pick a play on defense.

Like now they're like winning their, their, their dynasties.

And it's like, this is cool.

Like you're getting better and like having more fun.

How does your community, how does your community gather

on discord?

Discord, yeah.

Yeah.

So you have thousands of people on your discord?

Yeah, we have a little over 3000 or something.

Y'all do, do y'all do events inside your discord?

Yeah, we do a big tournament every month now.

We started doing that.

We'll do some like a, we call them strategy calls

where I just like talk through like how to,

like how to use everything.

Just make sure people know what they're doing

with all that.

When does school happen?

School, like these, these calls.

So we need to get better about doing them consistently.

That's my fault.

But they're Thursday evenings.

Thursday evenings and we have a tournament

on the final Saturday of every month.

It's just like an hour just hanging out

and we're just talking like, hey,

that's how you do X, Y and Z.

And then, yeah.

Yeah.

And so it's, you'll just live stream some, you know,

hey man, I'm gonna show you guys some concepts.

Yeah, we'll do like Q and A.

Like, hey, civil, how do you stop X, Y and Z?

And it's like, oh dude, like here, here we go.

We'll just do this, like bang, bang, boom.

And it's fun for me because like,

it's crazy what like, it's like a teaching thing, right?

Where it's like, you have this knowledge

which is like really easy for you.

You just know it, right?

Think about something that you're an expert in.

And you give it to somebody who doesn't know it.

It takes you 10 seconds to exchange that information

but it changes their entire life in that moment.

It's like, oh, like now I have this.

So it's like, you just see like light bulb, light bulb,

light bulb, light bulb.

It's like sweet dude, like heck yeah.

And then all the other stuff is all hosted

through like videos and stuff on our platform

and all that where like people go in

and like whenever they want.

Yeah.

And they watch it like work and stuff like that.

Where are you most likely to see fan feedback?

For us, Discord emails, we're very active in Discord,

very active in emails, Twitter messages.

We do a good amount of like customer feedback surveys

as well with that.

And so people just have like a direct link to that.

Although those are always skewed either like,

whenever you ask for like feedback in like that format,

it's either someone who just had like the best experience

ever or someone who just had like the worst experience ever.

You never get like, Luke warm is like the type of

answers you want cause it gives like a good.

Yeah.

Cause like getting someone,

getting feedback from someone who like hates you is like,

okay, or if they just love everything you do,

it's like, well, awesome.

Like my mom would never give good feedback

on our platform.

She's got, she, my mom loves me dearly.

She's never going to be like, oh,

civil, I think you should do X, Y and Z better.

So yeah, Twitter emails, Discord.

Yeah.

What is the, so if I wanted to join,

I guess civil premium.

What is that?

So civil premium is, civil premium is a YouTube channel

we have where we do like gameplay stuff.

Civil GG is the website we have where we just have

like the membership to that.

What's the membership?

The membership is just a,

it's like an online learning platform

where we just teach people how to get better at the games.

And so we have like video breakdowns,

written breakdowns, like pictures of like showing like,

do X, Y, Z look for this.

How unique is it to the free content you share on?

It's, it's pretty, it's like,

that stuff is like very like,

hey, have you ever played the game before?

Like, here you go.

Here's a couple of things here and there.

Like this will help you.

The, the actual like paid stuff for what it,

for what it is, is like,

we're deep diving in what we're talking about.

We're going like, hey, here's this one thing

that we showed you in a YouTube video.

And here's like 10 versions of that,

how we're going to build together.

We're going to string these things all together.

And you're going to use this to,

if we're talking about an offense,

you're going to use this to go down the field

every single time against your opponent, right?

Cause on YouTube, like,

we're not, I'm not holding your hand in that, right?

I'm giving you like,

here's this cool play like, good luck.

Like hope it works well for you.

Or I'm saying like, hey, this is how you do X, Y and Z.

Good luck, dude.

Hope, hope, hope you figured it out.

Which is like, that's just the nature of it.

Whereas like this is like,

oh, people are like paying us for this.

Like we're going to hold your hand.

We're going to tell you to do X, Y and Z

and we're going to get some more wins.

So I asked a couple of my friends

that are in this dynasty.

One of them, you've been able to

communicate with Stefan.

Yeah.

He is the South Carolina Gamecocks.

What made you want to become a content creator

versus being a professional Madden player?

We discussed that a little bit,

but you know, how difficult I suppose was that decision?

And, you know, when you, when you make that choice,

did you have any reservations?

Did you have any regrets?

Um, definitely no regrets looking back at it.

I think maybe it was a little bit hard,

but I just remembered thinking

when I won my first tournament,

I was like, dude, I don't know if I'm going to win this,

this type of thing again, man.

It was just hard.

And like things had to fall in your favor.

It's like winning any kind of championship

in any sport ever.

It's like, yeah, there's luck involved.

And I'm like, but I just,

I remember just realizing like, dude,

I have this platform right now

where if I don't act on it, like it's going to go away.

And then I have to win again

to be able to ever get this chance again.

And it's like, let me just go all in

and try doing this right now.

What do you want to see in the next games?

In the next games, the big, big, big one,

this is very unsimulation.

So some people won't like this.

I would love to see defenders do a better job

of catching interceptions.

I just want to see that across the board.

If I would love to see like in baseball,

the tie goes to the runner, right?

In college wall 27, I'd love to see if my defensive back

and your wide receiver both get their hands in the ball

same time, defensive backs winning,

like punish you for, dude, you just,

there's so much open field.

It felt like in 25, that was pretty balanced.

It was balanced.

I even, I'm aggressive with this.

I lean more towards like, I wanted to be like defense.

I'm such a believer cause like, yeah,

I think NFL court or college court, like in real life,

you're like trying to see between linemen.

You have a very like this type of view.

We have a bird's eye view.

So if you're finding a way,

and we have every hot route known to man,

where it's like teams have to actually practice that stuff,

we just do it and like our guys run the routes.

And so it's like, if you're,

if you're thrown a pass that's hitting

a defender's hands, and defense is so hard.

That's my number one.

Defense was pretty, I mean, it is hard.

So in 26, my opinion, curious what you think.

In 26, way less interceptions and defense got worse.

Like there's more holes in the defense.

Yeah.

Well, I think the biggest thing is you see more holes

in the defense when the offense has more plays

and they have more plays

cause you don't get the interceptions.

So it's like, if the offense has 15 plays,

they're going to find a whole like,

every defensive coverage ever has massive holes

and it's just the nature of it.

But like when the offense makes,

it's really like when the offense makes a mistake,

I'm such, I'm so big, I'm like, I want them to pay for it.

Like you mess up on offense, dude.

There's a billion open areas of the field.

You mess up, you pay for it.

Outside of Madden, college football,

any other passions in gaming?

In game, dude, I really love playing like basketball games,

like 2K, I think it's super fun.

I really don't game outside of Madden or college football.

No, I wish I did cause I'm a big Detroit sports fan.

And so I love using the Pistons.

I love using the Tigers and MLB the show,

things like that.

But whatever, if I'm ever gaming,

I'm like, dude, I should just be on,

I should just be like working basically.

I used to play Minecraft a lot,

which was really fun while I was younger.

Okay, well there you go.

That was a cool one.

Yeah, we play, obviously eye racing is a big deal for us

with racing and motor sports and sims

and all the sim rigs are insane,

how they've changed.

I remember racing at a desk for years.

Man, this has been a lot of fun.

I'm probably gonna think of a million other things

to ask you when we're done with this interview,

but I just, you know, I was kind of thankful

that EA brought the game back.

I know that that was probably no small feat

considering it's been going for 12 years.

And interesting how unique 25 was to 26.

I didn't expect such a big shift in the game,

in the gameplay,

but it was kind of like they shuttled out 25

and we're working on 26 behind the scenes.

I don't know, probably more than you know,

probably way more about this

in terms of the coding and so forth,

but it feels like 26 is much more similar to Madden

where 25 seemed like a standalone.

Yeah, as far as the engine.

Yeah, they brought the game,

well, because college football 25 and Madden 25,

when they both dropped,

college football just killed it in every,

I mean, you didn't have to be a genius,

just go on Reddit and be like,

you go on the college Reddit, people are like all smiles,

you go on the Madden Reddit, people are like angry.

And so I think they just brought the games

a little bit closer together.

I think the way they did that though,

was like college became a little bit closer to Madden

and Madden came a little bit closer to college

instead of just like Madden just becomes college.

Yeah, yeah,

because the games definitely are a lot more similar this year

in terms of especially just like how they feel

than they were last year, 100%.

Well, it's been fun,

not only playing the game,

but also connecting to content creators like yourself.

And that's what we do here at Dirty Mo Media.

And we've had some folks come in here and sit at the desk

and do some interviews that are content creators themselves

and we're all trying to accomplish the same thing

in terms of viewers and attract attention

and so forth to our content that we create.

So I was just watching you man and loved your story,

thought that you were somebody that I'd wanna talk to

and get to know and I appreciate you.

I know you came a long way to be here

and I appreciate you doing that.

I know you could have said,

now I'm all right man, we got what we got going on,

we're fine over here,

but I appreciate you giving us some time today.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Thank you sir, sir, for having me.

My family was super.

When I told my mom and dad and my brother

about being out here, they were ecstatic.

So it was a super blessing to be here, sirs.

Thank you, Dale.

Well man, keep doing what you're doing

and I'm gonna keep being a customer

and enjoying the content you're creating

and make us all enjoy the game more

and I appreciate you, bud.

How good, thank you, Dale.

All right, Kenny Cox, also known as Civil

on the Dale Jr. Download.

All right, thanks for joining us here in the Arby's studio.

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We'll see ya.

Check out Dirty Mo Media on Instagram,

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YouTube Superstar Civil Talks Gaming, Faith, and Content Creation

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