Cops vs Supercars: The Underground World Of Car Scams, Sales, and Theft | VINWiki

what's the fastest you've ever gone in a car I got to race a fighter jet in a brand new McLaren 765 LT so what was the speed 205 and the guy that had supplied the car I was like you know do I need a helmet or a fire suit he's like nah man if things go bad that's not going to make any difference in this outcome maybe take us back to the beginning I did not come from money I didn't have anybody hand me anything I was always kind of chasing how do self-made people do this you buy these cars at a price where you can't possibly lose money there's always a price where everything makes sense most of my wealth always came from buying these cars and and flipping them or making them go up in value and so it's granted me a little more license to buy cars more aggressively as I looked back on how difficult the early days of my career were it's easy to get demoralized and to think like there's no hope for me to achieve these dreams that I've had but there are also going to be profound advantages to being in the moment that you're at and if you can find the ways to use those you can be so powerful so Ed thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour we really appreciate it now you got to tell us about what cars are behind us right now well thank you for having me I've been looking forward to this for some time I love your show H yeah we got some fun stuff so right behind you is my uh newly acquired but very much not brand new Bugatti veyon Grand Sport uh I bought it just about a month ago and it was originally the Frankfurt Motor Show car and then Birdman owned it he gave it to Justin Bieber as a present Floyd Mayweather had it for a little while and little lzy vert still has my speed key and I had always dreamt of having one ever since the car was announced over 20 years ago and I am so glad to have made it home from Miami driving it that's so cool and then we got a Spiker I see yes I've always loved spikers I think they represent such an interesting approach to building supercars very bespoke very unique very rare but such a cool Driving Experience so that's a 2009 C8 Lavalette and then behind me is the uh 2006 Gallardo that really was the car that started car trek a show that I did with Tyler Hoover and Freddy Hernandez both Veterans of your show and uh certainly had a lot of fun that one was in a Santa Monica mudslide uh that Spiker was quite neglected this thing live some hard days but uh at the end of the day I'm always searching for the worst examples of the coolest cars that's always kind of been my mindset that and trying to look like I won the lottery 10 years ago tends to be the the best way for me to avoid my greatest allergy which is Automotive depreciation yeah you're very much 2004 rich as they say I and I found out about that Facebook group recently and now I there's also recession Rich which I think I'm a little more recession Rich than 04 rich but I uh I I got there and they're like we've been waiting for you and I'm like oh this is it's my people I mean they're just celebrating all these Escalades on spinners and all my car it's it's amazing that's so but then you also have a few Lamborghinis that are currently in a shop I see like rare examples though yeah and so my my favorite car of all time is a manual transmission Lamborghini Merci aligo lp640 and I fell in love with the cars when they were first released setting records of for the fastest you know times at Nardo and stuff like that I I remember reading all the automotive magazines because there was no real exposure to exotic cars back then when I was growing up in high school and I just thought the mercy was perfect and so the the second iteration of that the lp 640 that they made from 07 to 09 is my favorite and the fact that you could get it with a manual transmission but not many people did that became one of my obsessions while I was working at Lamborghini Atlanta and so I've had a bunch of them I've had nine Mercy's so far but I uh right now I've got two I've got a coupe and a roadster of a manual lp640 and there's only 23 us coups and only 10 US roadsters so they're proper rare which has been nice sometimes it's it's really cool when you know the car that you honestly love and always dreamt of also goes up in value once you buy it so that's been a lovely little twist in the story do you know how many Lamborghinis you have owned in your entire life so I've had 64 cars in my life I'm able to keep that as a list on our vinwiki app so I can go back and see what's happened to them since I sold them um Lambos had nine Mercy's five gardos two Diablos so yeah I mean a bunch and and that's you know most of the wealth that I've ever accumulated has been in buying these cars and and flipping them or making them go up in value and so you know we were talking about cost bases and things like that like it's all very very low because they all represent a lot of transactions becoming whatever is here so I mean I got rid of seven cars to buy that and and you know that's how the whole thing works yeah but hearing your stories because I've watched your channel for probably seven years maybe eight years at the very beginning you buy these cars at a price where you can't possibly lose money like it seems as though the the the offering price is so good and you'll only buy a car if it really makes sense is that true well it is and there's always a price where everything makes sense and you know the the thing that sellers are really bad at is disclosing everything that could devalue a car because they're worried about it and the as a car salesman because I worked at Lamborghini Atlanta from 09 to 15 you want to make the buyer use as little imagination as possible because those gaps that they're trying to fill in are the fear that keeps them from buying the car if it's terrible and you just tell them that it's terrible they don't worry that you're lying to them because it sounds so bad and so I was always very forthcoming very honest probably to a fault at times but it just made it easier for people to commit and that's the mindset that I have when I'm trying to lowball somebody on a car it's not me trying to undervalue the car it's me trying to cushion it by the things that I can't know are okay and of course as I learn more I might become willing to pay more but you know when people talk about making money on cars they call them Investments and things like that and in most cases that's not precisely what it is usually it's an Arbitrage and so you know if you get an allocation for a brand new ultra rare Ferrari people oh this was a really good investment no it wasn't like it's an Arbitrage because you are a very small Market of people that were allocated this car and you can choose if you want to burn the bridge with Ferrari to offer it to the whole wide world and they don't have the opportunity to buy the way that you do and that creates a new market that has more ability to spend or more willingness to spend and so what I'm doing in most cases is buying a car in such a dilapidated or horrible state that most people would just not consider it and then I live in the margin between utterly unacceptable and okay that is where I like to be I don't want it to be good I don't even want it to be perfect I'm not taking it to carard shows to win anything I'm taking it just to have fun rack up miles and worry a thing about and so you know I've had a lot of success in doing that and and in figuring out just how little you can offer where they're not going to be so insulted that they hang up the phone but that if you go with full commitment I don't need an inspection I don't need anything else I mean when I bought Missy Elliott Spiker right there I knew that she hadn't seen it in five years she said it wouldn't run she didn't know why probably just a dead battery and stale fluids and all this stuff but I had no idea what level of reconditioning it would be required and I was able to build in that much of a margin because given the circumstances of the way she wanted it sold nobody else would have taken the or nobody would have bit it maybe take us back to the beginning because you have some very interesting businesses that led you to this point yeah so the first business was breeding albino iguanas in my parents basement how do you do that well I just found expl explain the process to Jack I found one for sale online and then at one point I had every known heterozygous for albanism iguana on the planet and so I was not great at it and I was not that much of a businessman but I just thought it'd be super cool so we had 36 6 foot long lizards and cages in my parents basement I must have been 14 or so and kind of did it through high school you know sold some of them didn't make a ton of money but learned a lot about you know how you run a business what accounting looks like how you'd manage the books and you know the fact that you obviously they only reproduce once a year and so you'd have to plan for you know this is how much I might make and this is how much it takes to keep it all going how much were they uh they were at that point between five and $6,000 each what yeah and so obviously the ones that aren't albino but Carri the gene the hetero were a lot less valuable and so we were able to you know make some and and I ended up selling the whole lot of it as I went off to college to uh not Tiger King but one of his friends uh he was actually in one of the opening scenes of Tiger King I'm like there he is and I hadn't talked to him in years but um he was able he moved him all down to Florida Florida they were a little more prolific when able to live outside as everybody in Florida knows there's iguanas at every underpass how do you get the first iguana though like how did that start to get like an albino of that well I had a pet one for a while and so uh and it was awesome a great pet and I so I I always thought oh more reptiles and I mean as soon as I learned that you could have dinosaurs that fit in cages I was sold on it as a kid and so we had all sorts of weird stuff and my parents were very overly indulgent in those kinds of ridiculous obsessions and so I uh I learned a lot from from them about you know the the some of the crazy things that were out there in the world I mean we were not Wealthy by any stretch but we they were able to you know show me like hey this is that and and they weren't car people either so I wasn't out wrenching with Dad in the garage this was something that really not until I could drive I became obsessed with and so just growing up and learn you know reading as much as I could and researching how businesses worked because I didn't come from an entrepreneurial background or family they had no idea but they just were like oh well this seems like a reasonable experiment for you to try and learn and fail and figure it out so I don't know if that's you know skill or luck or whatever but it was always just like trying to figure out how to throttle and how to understand the risks involved with whatever it was you were trying to do what was the profit margin of that whole business well you know what you look at you have no real cost in the egg but you know when you can sell something for you know a th000 to $110,000 it's the problem was always figuring out the profitability afterwards and and deciding if it was actually even worthwhile and that's the way all farming works now this is a very peculiar example of farming but you watch Clarkson's farm and they don't know if they're making money until long after a harvest and sale and figuring out all the logistics and so um the same was true for my next real business I suppose which was much more legitimate than that but was in college I started an exotic car rental company and you know you see so much on YouTube about people renting cars out on turo and doing all these other things to try to make their car payments and stuff like that but in 2006 when I was a after my sophomore year at Georgia Tech I that was a time when you could still get stated income loans for exotic cars so as a 20-year-old you just F out the application tell them what you thought you were going to make and they would approve stuff and so I bought my first Lamborghini at 20 years old I didn't have enough money to make the first payment and immediately started a rental car company and with that the same issue was true you couldn't tell if you were actually making money really until you sold the car you could generate Revenue you could get the cars out and make money but you didn't know when they were going to break catastrophically you didn't know how much they were going to depreciate and so you knew you know what you had to make to make all your payments and pay all your bills each month but you never really knew how profitable the business was at least until tax time and a lot of times until you actually disposed of the vehicle how much was the lambo I think it was $124,000 what did you say you were making on the stated income loan oh probably 200 200 and you know it wasn't long before I was probably generating about that much revenue off the business and so it was you know pro forma income I now know to say but it was a a very interesting time but for the US economy obviously lending practices like that are a lot of the reasons why it fell apart but it uh you know I paid all my bills and was able to generate just Rockstar car credit because I'd have multiple sixf figure car loans at a time paying them all perfectly and so you know as I shut that down and then moved on into uh sales at the dealership I had better car buying ability than almost all my customers because the banks would approve whatever I asked for because I'd proven that I could pay so much in car payments and they didn't know necessarily that those were more of a business expense than personal because I'm on the loans for them but before we answer that you got to ask yourself the question what does the future hold for businesses because if you ask nine different experts you're probably going to get 10 different answers the Market's going to go up it's going to go down we're going to get a recession we're not going to get a recession someone should really invent a crystal ball at this point but until that happens over 40,000 businesses have already been future proofed by our sponsor netsuite by Oracle the number one Cloud Erp bringing accounting financial management inventory and HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management Suite you have just one source of Truth giving you all of the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions with real-time insights and forecasting you're peering into the future with actionable data when you're closing the books in days not weeks you spend way less time looking backwards and way more time on what's next so whether your company is earning millions or hundreds of millions netw Suite helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees your biggest opportunities and speaking of opportunity right now you can download the cfo's guide to Ai and machine learning when you go to netsuite.com isted again the guide is free for you at netsuite.com netsuite.com IED with the link Down Below in the description thank you so much netsuite for sponsoring this episode and now let's get back to the podcast how was the rental car business at the time it was really really good and that is because you know in ' 06 when to '08 when the market was really blowing up everybody wanted the latest greatest newest things um the depreciation and maintenance costs were really On The Rise and so people were using it as a very viable ownership replace concept and those customers were amazing they took really good care of the cars they came back a lot very different than when I'd rent them for rap videos or you know people that were from out of town traveling just want to go blast through the mountains and stuff like that and we did that but I was really much more dependent and much more focused on those ownership replacement clients that were going to have be longer term much more significant relationships the problem was as the economy fell apart and depreciation just wiped everything out generally people were that anybody that cared about having a car was able to buy one for pennies on the dollar and so those customers went away and it was just the people that mistreated stuff and so around 2010 I ended up selling off the cars and selling the customer base kind of as a mailing list to a company that wanted to expand from Florida into the Atlanta market and that's uh that's kind of how that ended and at the time I was kind of being courted to go sell cars at Ferrari of Atlanta and Lamborghini Atlanta stuff like that how much did you sell the business for how much is something like that worth less than 100 Grand it was not I mean I guess there's always this thought that maybe I mean the the cars were obviously separate from that um and there was honestly not that much Equity left in the cars because we' put so many miles on them and stuff like that and so it it made me hyperconscious of the cost of utilization in a lot of these cars and it took a while to be honest for the joy of it to return not that I didn't love the cars but I would think like because I was pricing this to customers like well if I drive this 25 miles to and then from dinner and and we go do something else I like I know exactly how that much that cost it cost me $5.7 a mile to operate one of these cars all in with gas Insurance interest cost of money everything that it was and I was like man I just I don't know that I'm going to get that much joy out of it now I've been able to reframe that and had a much different approach obviously to buying the cars that I truly want to own personally versus what's the best for the rental Fleet but sometimes when you go pro in whatever your hobby or your passion is you learn a different perspective on how to treat it as a business person rather than an Enthusiast and it can change the way that you love it now why did you decide to do a rental car business in the first place what started that well I'd become obsessed with exotic cars uh you know even back then you think like up until that point in 2006 the total production of interesting cars from our favorite you know Italian British automakers was nearly nothing relative to what they've built since then and so you never saw them but I was you know at readed duPont Registry and watching TV cribs and you know Top Gear and everything else that was available to consume to learn from Beyond just reading the magazines that you'd always see and so I I became obsessed with the idea of the cars and I was like how do you get to be around these cars how do you get to use them whenever you want and that was sort of the way that I found and so at the time the idea of an exotic car rental company was not common at all and I had learned a little bit from the guys at Gotham dream cars Noah and then Rob who had started it and I'd actually helped them locate the gardo that they bought cuz they we were we had some mutual friends and I knew they were in the market and you always wanted to find a higher mileage more depreciated one for them to use and so I'd learned some there was one in Vegas there was um budget and Beverly Hills had a couple Ferraris and so there was it wasn't nearly as built out from a business perspective as the concept is today and interestingly today it's a total train wreck because everybody's figured out that the easiest thing to do is steal a rental car cuz all you have to do is take it to another count count or another state and the cops don't even care about getting it back and so we deal with a lot of that on vinwiki of people and that what about the liability of running Exotic rental car business would people ever try to steal your vehicles or what would what about what if they ever crashed a car oh they did yes I mean it's one of those things you have to emotionally prepare yourself every time the car leaves for it to come back broken on a tow truck and I mean at the time they weren't as reliable as they are today so you had faster clutch wear and things like that and so yeah I had them crashed I had them stolen and fortunately you know it ended up okay it was in many ways the recognition of the risks that I was taking in that regard that that started to sour my perceptive my perspective on the on the business and so uh look for other ways to make money where other people were taking the risk for a little while did you get pretty good at gauging people like when they walked in you're like okay I'm not going to rent you just cuz I think you're going to crash this car well certainly and as you talk to them on the phone especially because they usually internet leads and stuff like that even at that point you because I didn't have the money to have a proper storefront where you could just walk in and rent something I was delivering these cars from a very small warehouse but you would you have to ask them the right questions about what experiences they had in similar cars you know did they have any or had they ever been around one or was this their their first introduction how long you're going to have to explain to them how the car Works what they're really all about how to treat it in order to maximize the life of everything that was consumable and and so yeah you had to ask hard questions to to really get to the bottom of what they they want to do with it so hopefully they bring it back in as much of One Piece as they can what was the closest you had come to bankruptcy goodness I mean back then we my I got married in ' 09 we my we were so broke I mean it was like every month was like barely making the payments barely paying our bills I mean we would end months with $8 and you know it was it was a dark time in many many ways and you know when you think about skill versus luck I mean those would be very there were a lot of unlucky outcomes that could have been much worse and so you know it's it's so hard to gauge there but no we we had no money at all and um really just betting the farm over and over again and it's certainly a risk profile that I wouldn't be comfortable with today but back then I mean you know I always thought as a college entrepreneur there's no better time to go broke than when everybody else is also broke you could just be broke with worse credit and the in the best case scenario is you're not broke you have great credit and you're kind of prepared more for whatever comes next in life now you know there were some downsides there I wasn't able to go you know study abroad or live quite the same college experience because I was working every weekend as hard as I could but you know did you ever miss a payment on anything or you always had perfect payment history I never went more than 30 days late uh which is when you start to see credit reporting um I I definitely was a few days late you can blame it on the mail or whatever but it was because I needed to rent the car out the next day in order to be able to make the payment or the credit card processing was Tak longer so yeah there were and you have people bounce checks and there were tons of things and you know a lot of times people approach me for young entrepreneur advice and I I try to be careful about you know what I tell them because what works for me may not work for them what would work for them probably wouldn't have worked for me but I I really should have spent some time working at Enterprise or Herz or something like that for a summer just to see a little more of how these companies actually work rather than just diving in head first and and taking all the risk cuz when I started the company at 20 years old I wasn't even old enough to rent a car so I couldn't go rent a car if I traveled to another city cuz You' to be 25 in order for your insurance to go that's crazy that you have to be 25 to rent a car like this but you could buy it at 20 with stated income it it was a strange time and certainly it's something that it's a it's a good thing that you can't do that anymore because certainly most people were not making their payments and stuff like that uh but then yeah that was it was such a weird time and it really it was it was the the peculiarities of that time that made the opportunity to sell cars a lot more interesting when I kept being offered the chance to do so because you know when I started in 2009 Lamborghini Atlanta had only sold five new cars that year and by the time I left we were selling 70 80 or so so a a pretty big change a lot of it was the market was just a lot healthier the products were a lot better but significantly um it was just such a tough time and I I I was much more interested in doing that than selling say for Ferraris where even in' 09 there was still a weight to get a 430 scootery or 16m or something like that and whereas with Lamborghinis everybody knew you could just walk in and buy one and so those were going to be harder to sell if I wanted to become good at it it was better to start with something and I was more passionate about certainly the V12 cars from Lamborghini than some of the Ferraris I want to get into the uh selling Lambos but before we get into that I was curious what stands out to you as the craziest Exotic Car Rental story so the week I got married I had rented out to actually a former Atlanta police officer my gardo and a Ferrari 612 Sketti that I had in the rental Fleet and he and his friend were going to be driving around and I had told him like Hey by Wednesday they'd rent it over the weekend I said you know if you want to extend it for a day or two that's fine but by Wednesday the cars have to be back and every day he would show up and uh even though the original payments we always wanted them to be on credit cards but he kept bringing cash to continue and that was okay cuz I had you know a security deposit and stuff like that and on Wednesday he stopped answering the phone and I'm like calling him every few hours like where are the cars I'm tracking them and the uh the Gallardo had um the tracker had stopped in midtown Atlanta and so I went there and it was at a body shop and the whole front was knocked off of it and I'm like well you guys are not going to repair this I don't know what he thought that he was going to somehow be able to get a new bumper in a hood and get this done in like a very short amount of time but I had it moved to the body shop that I use so at least that that one was safe but the the tracker had gone dead on the 612 which should never have happened cuz there was an internal capacitance but they weren't quite as advanced back then as they are now and so I'm still calling them and and Thursday night I'm actually at my bachelor party and I get a phone call that from a number I didn't recognize but at that point I'm answering anything trying to find these cars and it was this woman and she said that her husband had bought my car from my employee that day and they had paid like a BMW 750 And1 15,00 in cash and he was going to take payments for the rest of it and I'm like man that's everything about that is just wrong false and impossible and she's like well we've got your car and we want our stuff back and we want to undo this deal I said well I definitely know we're going to undo whatever deal you think happened because it wasn't a real deal that anybody had the opportunity to make and she's like well I'm a lawyer and possessions n910 of the law and I'm like uh no you're not and that's absolutely not true it's a rental car possession is zero T of ownership ship like that's not how it works and so she's like well he's your employee said no he's a customer and I've got his driver's license right here and so we went back and forth and ultimately they didn't want to give it back because I couldn't find the renter because he had all their stuff and they're hiding the car around town and occasionally the tracker would blip or somebody would spot it but again the problem with the rental car industry is whenever it was rented in one County but it was there was a problem in another County it's not like proper theft it's theft by conversion not Grand Theft Auto and so the cops are useless to help get it back like this is really a civil dispute they were allowed to use your car they're just using it in a different or longer way than you had intended for them to and so it was such a nightmare and I ended up we the day of my wedding I had no idea where the car was or how we were going to get it back I I knew that I had insurance but the thing about exotic carbonal insurance is was one of the hardest policies in the world to get but if you ever file a claim they'll nonr knew you and so I I was like well I I can at least get this loan paid off but then I have to go out of business and I can't pay the rest of the loans and so it was a dark dark place and I had to go leave on our honeymoon and just leave I called a lawyer that I could barely afford to pay him per hour and I'm like look if if you can just follow up on this while I'm gone see if something happens let it be the person they can give it to if they AG or agree at whatever point and I just had to you know turn it off and forget about it and a few days after we got back from the honeymoon I finally got in touch with the customer who helped me get in touch with the guy who had bought it the only thing he knew about this guy that he had sold my car to was that his name was lucky and lucky wanted $5,000 for me to return it and I didn't have $5,000 and I asked the cops that I've been talking to like what should I and they're go ask lucky if he'll take a check and I said um I I don't feel it's I should remind you Mr Officer that it's a felony to bounce a check knowing that it's not gonna clear like I don't worry about it it'll be fine I'm like yeah maybe you can text me that and he uh and so I I he lucky was happy to take a check I gave it signed it Mickey Mouse or whatever and he uh he took it right to the bank um the car was so dead at that point that I had have it towed so I was actually I I sat in the lot with him for a while he had this old Maserati quatra Porte that had been painted like seafoam green the paint was falling off of it he was asking me for body shop advice and whatever and I was just like smiling trying to get my car loaded up and so we finally got it back he got so mad at me threaten to kill me over the bounce check and I'm like dude that was an extortion payment for the return of stolen property like I am under no obligation to perform here so uh have a nice life and he never came back to kill me so that was nice but uh yeah why is it such a bad business today you mentioned that earlier that the car rental business is just it doesn't work why is that because now they know that if they just take them across state lines they can swap the vins wrap them they can get fake titles there's a whole Community around stealing all sorts of cars they're on Facebook it's pretty entertaining thing to watch but they so with vinwiki the way that we're tracking Vehicles a lot of and the fact that I am am pretty familiar with most of the people that are actively in the Exotic Car Rental industry there have been a few times over the years where we've been tasked to help people find these missing rental cars and so I had done some Consulting work with a company in Nashville about um how to set things up what kind of cars to Target I'd sold him some cars while I worked at the dealership and we were trying to you know talk through some ideas that they had about expansion and more business and they started to rent out a lot of people car people's cars that they didn't own and that's where the wheels really start to fall off because there's just not enough profit in the business model for the owner to make some money and then the rental car company to make some money and other marketing costs and stuff like that and so they had a Huracan that this guy had rented and he was blasting from Nashville towards Atlanta and so my friend called me at like 3:00 in the morning on the 4th of July 2017 I think it was and he uh said that he saw that this car was being stolen and asked me to like go get it and I'm like I'm not a REO man I don't work for your company I'm in no standing to go take this car from whatever villain now has it like and they they had learned at that point that they'd gotten fake insurance documents a fake driver's license and those have gotten so good that it can be hard to tell and so ultimately I chased the car around I gave him a glimpse file on my phone so he could see where my phone was and then he could look at that and his tracker to tell how close I was getting and stuff like that so I chased it all around Atlanta for like two or three hours and ended up uh it it showed up at a shop right next to the body shop that I tended to use and it was odd because yeah like 4: or 5 in the morning this car was you know in a lit up shop and I'm like I mean I'm not walking in there as me but I called the cops I explained to them what was going on I'd gotten out of bed i' for I didn't even have my driver's lights I didn't have a wallet with me and I'm like look the car is in there I I know that you don't have probable cause to go in there because of the nature of theft by conversion and stuff like that I said but I bet the door's unlocked will one of you just walk in there with me so that I don't get shot and uh they did and we walked in there and they pulled out the trunk liner they were pulling out wires cutting things out all this stuff trying to find the tracker so that they could then wrap the car swap the VIN and then try to sell it to whomever wanted to just drive it I guess until the registration spired and um I convinced them that they were in trouble even though they really weren't and they gave me the car back and I kept it overnight and then got it back to the guys in Nashville so they're not technically in trouble because you have to pay for your own lawyer to then be able to prove that and they can delay the court case month after month after month and just bleed you dry well even then they would just have to pay for the extended rental and the extra miles like they had permission to use the car but isn't there like a in the contract it's like okay you have to return it it reminds me of almost squatter's rights but for cars in a in a way yes and it and like squatter cases they are a nightmare because like if somebody was allowed in you making them leave can be a very very complicated thing and so it's it's you know something that you could probably try to criminally prosecute more so if for a fraud case and that's what these are also because there's misrepresentation and so that's where you do get some legs but at the end of the day these guys are just so happy to have their cars back that they you know they're just that that they just move on in most cases CU it's you're trying to get blood from a rock it's just you don't really even know where these people are what they're going to do and so after we made the video about recovering that car I got within a week a hundred calls of people that were missing cars in this exact circumstance and so we actually we started a WhatsApp chat and every every single day somebody does this to one of the rental car companies in at least the southeast Cali can you walk me through how someone is able to steal a car and make it legal and res be able to do so curious how this works what it is so like I like step by step like what they do well so there are several cases where uh like I bought a Diablo Roadster at one point and I bought it with no vins and no title and this car had been a rental car it had actually been stolen taken to Hawaii repainted they had figured out some way to get a title there's a lot of different loopholes in different states about how you can get a bonded title or a mechanics lean title or a court issued title and if there's not like a a perfectly accessible police report or record of the car being stolen A lot of times the the people that issue those titles don't know and so you can export them you can do a lot of things and then sometimes you can reimport them so they'll pull the windshields out out put a new vent on there and then they'll uh be able to if they can get a title through some way or print a fake title then put it to a state that doesn't check as well you can end up with a car now one day it generally catches up to them and so you hear about these cars coming back and So what had happened with this Diablo was that effectively this dealer had figured out what happened and he was able to triangulate back to the original owner bu buy them out of their ownership of it and he legitimately owned the car that being said um I was going to have to go through a process of getting a bonded title and you know remaking the VIN and stuff like that and and it happens like you know there's a lot of times where you uh oh I did another one that that that we bought a cheap gyot from the Virginia State Police Impound and it was 35 grand for a what would have been $130,000 car now eat but you know it ran and drove and we uh we ended up having a contest to see who would use it in the coolest way on the channel and so whoever came up with the whatever the audience voted was like the best use of it they could buy it from me for exactly what I paid for it so I sold this woman in Arkansas the car for 35 Grand because she was going to turn it into the ambulance and take sick kids around at her hospital with it which is awesome and it still does that well it doesn't run that well anymore but they're working on it uh but yeah that was another car no Vin or the wrong vins and so I just used a label maker printed the right Vin for the police inspection and stuff like that and we're able to get a title for it being an adult has its high points I mean you can eat ice cream for dinner play video games whenever you want you can even eat ice cream while you're playing video games but it's not all fun you have to do your taxes figure out what's for dinner every night and of course schedule doctor's appointments but for that one there is our sponsor Zach do the healthcare app that makes adulting that much easier for those una aware Zach do is a free app and website where you could search and compare highquality in network doctors choose the right one for your needs and then click to instantly book an appointment we're talking about in network appointments with more than 100,000 Healthcare Providers across every specialty from mental health to dental health Eye Care to skincare and so much more could also filter for doctors who take 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back to the podcast how do you get a fake Vin do you just make something up or yeah a lot of times they just make them up yeah or you know in the best the more legitimate cases they'll find a crashed car take the vins off that and stuff like that but it's still not allowed but Vin swapping but yeah in those cases and yeah we found one years 2016 I guess it was um it was just an orange gardo in the Target parking lot next to my house and this I'd only been out of the dealership for about a year at that point and I knew all the Lamborghinis that were in Georgia because I'd sold most of them and service the rest and so I uh saw we don't have an orange superliga so I walked down and I'm taking pictures going to post in our new vinwiki app that we'd launched and I look and I'm like man the VIN doesn't look right it's in the wrong font and so I took pictures because it was on a dealer tag and came to find out that it was a stolen car somebody had manually made a VIN and they left the digit out and I uh I knew that the range of the serial number wasn't right for the year that it was and no one else on Earth would have ever found this car or cared enough to look and they'd had it for years and years and years but of course I got all interested and so I found out from it had been registered in California and I I we had a list of all the 08 superl eras in the US on vinwiki and so I was able to say all right well we can we know it's one of the five colors they only came in five colors and so it's an orange car with ceramic brakes and a big Wing that narrowed it down to like five pulled the caraxes on all of them only one had ever been reported stolen figured out it was Vin 6668 and uh got in touch with the local cops and they were like we know we've been investigating this from we're curious how you know all these things but they were able to find it find the dealer that the tag went to and um they they raided them and got the car back so what happens if you buy a stolen car unknowingly like you go and everything seems legitimate you buy it at a fair price you take possession of it you drive it for a year everything seems fine you register it so most of the most of the laws related to vehicle transactions are designed to protect the consumer the buyer so like if the dealer never provides you a title you can get a title in those cases it favors the person who had the car stolen from them and so if you buy a car that was stolen and they come and find it you may not have any criminal liability if you can prove that you didn't know that but if you bought it for you know 20% of what it should have been worth you have a harder case there um but no you're going to to give that car back and you will not see your money ever again so if you pay let's say 50 grand for a car you have to then go to the person you bought the car from to try to get your money back correct yeah so and that person inevitably will have known they were selling you a Sol Solen car and you're not going to see anything wow it's crazy to me how common this is and how just people don't prosecute this or find out about it I didn't know it was uh this prevalent there's uh there's a Facebook group that I follow that's like like selling cars with no titles and sometimes it's just people selling cars from out of their they've got a loan they can't pay off and they just want and you're you're going to get the car seized by a repo agent before too terribly long but since it's so easy to steal like hellcats and Chrysler products uh they're always on I mean like you can buy a Hellcat for five grand and they're like you know don't ask any questions and I I mean I know they're all stolen but I've like I've thought a lot like what if I just go buy one like they'll I'll probably get killed in the process but like I go drive it around for a little while I'll start if I'll find out who owns it and we'll make a video giving them their car back like that pay for the $5,000 why are hellcats stolen that frequently because the keys are really easy to clone it just takes a the simple little uh phone app and it's there's that Tommy G video that was so amazing where he he goes to a guy who steals cars from lots and this guy comes in and within like 30 seconds to a minute can unlock any car and he's using this thing that he bought online that's like you know not quite legal to sell but they sell them online programs this thing it it's insane he could start any car just remotely any car like especially uh Audi's I think was was one of the cars you just yeah and you're getting issues where a lot of them they won't be you can't Ure them anymore because they're so easy to steal there were some Hyundai like that they're having issues especially in Europe with certain Ferraris because the keys are so easy to clone and yeah they just R in 60 seconds I absolutely love being able to unlock Teslas from your phone I think that is the coolest thing and I also like the old old cars that have the keypad where you can type in the passcode that then unlocks the car I think both those things should be used more if we can have Apple Pan our phone and it's as encrypted as it is and you can't like you know just go up to someone's phone and steal their money by tapping your phone with theirs feel like we should be able to unlock cars with that Tesla's just as easy to do that too though is it actually yeah I had a buddy who was able to show me this he walked up and like is your car locked I'm like yeah he's like watch this I kid you not he just goes on his uh he had like this little device within like minutes my car is unlocked buddy so he justak he could break into every single T he's like this tech computer guy who's really big in a like have you heard of this oh I mean yes stealing cars is considerably easier it's really just what you do with them afterwards like I mean I I've been offered a lot of stolen cars that I knew were stolen and I you you can't do anything with them so even if you know apart from the morality or legality they're just useless because you can't take them anywhere somebody tried to sell me while I had the rental car company a perfect 60 spider and they were like you just have to go get it and I'm like and it doesn't have a title and I'm well where it was it was on a farm in south Georgia and they had wrapped it in aluminum foil because they didn't want the tracker they didn't know where it was or if it had one and so they didn't want it to Ping anywhere and so a lot of times when people steal cars they'll just pull them like around the corner and then watch them to see if somebody comes to get it but they W they really didn't want anybody to find it so they had it yeah for years it had been there and I was like well there's nothing I can do with I have a 360 spider I mean it's got 100,000 miles on it but like I I guess I could start swapping parts off and St but I didn't have the money for a parts car and so there's just even if you can steal stuff you can't really make that much for it so I mean people are selling a $50,000 Hellcat for $5,000 because somebody's just going to go joy ride it and do one of these takeover burnout sessions in the middle of an intersection and then you know crash it into whatever that's crazy okay while while you mention that the takeovers is that cuz i' I don't know if you guys got hit with this like algorithm get I hate them I hate those videos yeah because people are getting hurt man they're idiots they're standing in the middle of the thing as they're doing burnouts like filming it jumping up and down and they get hit I know but I also like I I'm mostly talking about like I saw videos of like this old dude who was like going out there and like walking out there like guys stop stop stop because it was like in front of his business and he like gets jumped or he gets hit by a car people that like get different algorithms ja the people that yeah the people that go though and they like walk by The Cars and try to jump over it and their feet kned out from them like that's I mean I don't know how you can ask for something more than something like that but I apparently those have been happening for a very long time they've just been like mainly more so mainstream recently well I mean there's always been street racing and things like that and that's not really what these are these are slideshows and just stunts and things like people like shutting down roads and it is really a cancer in the automotive scene because even though these people claim to be Enthusiast there are so many bad outcomes in terms of crashes in terms of injuries in terms of you know businesses that are massively disrupted or they crash into their buildings and things like that and so the crackdowns on these from a police perspective have gotten really really insane and one issue with it is that they're very hard to Define and so a lot of the laws that have been put into place could easily creep into almost any group drive or car show and the penalties are designed to be motivating and so they'll Seize Your car they will you know give you massive criminal penalties for doing this and I think that's fair if you're running the risk of running over children but at the same time if I'm just going out with a group of cars and driving uh you know to a destination or something like that again by the definition of what they're talking about it could be construed as this and then I could be facing some really really harsh penalties where there was no real exposure in terms of that kind of bad outcome yeah isn't reckless driving criminal it's a criminal charge yeah have you ever gotten a reckless driving or any sort of like like what's the the gnarliest thing that you've gotten in trouble for well I've been accused of reckless driving never convicted on paper from law enforcement but I have not been convicted of it yes and so usually there is a speed threshold in Most states where you could be faced with a charge of reckless driving um but in most states there has to be like a secondary condition that Under the Influence or yeah or like you know making an illegal maneuver running a red light stuff like that that that truly deems it as Reckless now you know there have been times where you know you're on like a Car Rally or something like that and people are going faster than normal in a group and you know you get pulled over together and sometimes the cops get really worked up and stuff like that but you know the cool thing is now most cops are real car guys and so they watch vinwiki and so when I get pulled over now it's probably a 5050 chance that they know who I am and and we do a lot of fundraising with different police organizations and stuff like that and so you know we've made a lot of videos about what to do when you get pulled over to minimize your risk of getting a ticket or getting a worse ticket and stuff like that and uh it can be you know there's a strategy what the top yeah the top tips because Graham's pretty good at this I've Graham's been over with me in the car before and he's like look I'm so so so sorry if there any way you just let me go and and I could just drive away opposite of what you're supposed to just ask I just full on admit and I tell my story like Hey listen I was showing Jack a house on zill and I was honest like I showed Jack this cool house on Zillow honestly I just I I wasn't looking down I was showing him this really cool house that I just came up on the market I it's not going to happen again it's not a regular occurrence I got a clean record can I just get a warning the cop just came back like here's your warning lucky day I appreciate the honesty you know go on your day so my Approach is a bit different uh and and but it is also not just shut up and let them do whatever they're going to do because a lot of people will tell you that a lot of lawyers will tell you that and that's not wrong you can always deal with it after the fact but de-escalating the situation initially is always the thing and so you know being a cop is a dangerous job there's they're they're far less equipped and uh than you we would hope in most cases and that's one of the things that we've learned in going out and visiting a lot of these police agencies and some of these fundraising things we've done but at the at the end of the day you just want to make their life as easy as possible so you want to make sure that when you pull over you get somewhere that's truly safe give them a huge buffer from having to stand in the road because it is a legitimate fear that they have of being hit while they're standing next to your car um do do not do anything else do not move put your hands on the top of the steering wheel and wait and put the window down and wait for them to come and when they do they're going to ask you for your license and your insurance and then you're going to say my license is in my back pocket my insurance and registration or in the glove box would you like me to reach for one of them first and they'll tell you and if you tell them that what you're going to do they know that you've probably spoken to somebody in law enforcement and then if they and it just relaxes them and it opens up the chance they may even ask you that you any friends that are cops and stuff like that and the more that you get them talking the better chance you have of something better happening and so if I get pulled over I don't care if it's in the middle of Baltimore I'm going to tell how beautiful this area is how much I love it this place is awesome I you know I'm obviously not from around here but this is great if you're in somewhere where it's actually pretty you're like man this you get to work here I mean this is like God's country like you you're the luckiest man alive to be able to just drive around here every day and they they're not expecting that it kind of puts them on their heels yeah it's been good like how long you been on the force how many you guys have sworn here and because if you say that how many do you have sworn that's how many sworn officers are employed by their jurisdiction and they love saying that there's not that many is a bit competitive and stuff like that and so if you ask them question about themselves they're not thinking about how mad they are at whatever they think they just saw you do and so I mean I I may I had plausible deniability here but I might have been trying to hide from a cop at one point in a trailer park and he might have found me and I uh at that point I'm out of the car checking the oil you know pretending like I meant to take three turns off the highway and they uh and he's you know comes in pretty hot and I'm just like man it is so pretty out here these roads are amazing and he ends up really kind of forgetting about the initial circumstance of why he was interested in finding out where I was and uh we had a good outcome there uh and so it was uh you know that's really it it's just talk to them like real people ask them questions about themselves care about what they're saying and and learn and in most cases you you can have a real discussion about what they what you may or may not have done and get a better outcome the only ticket I've ever got gotten and it made me wonder about this thing that I hear about called the police quotas how they need to write a certain amount of tickets I still don't know if if this is true sure it is so so basically I was coming up to a four-way stop it was 11:00 p.m. on a weekday and I was like 17 I just got my car come up to the stop don't make it a complete stop to the point where like you know your car like lurches forward or whatever and then I I guess I just went through the stop sign cop pulls me over he's very upset I'm profusely apologetic I'm petrified as well cuz you know I started driving fairly recently before that right and uh I learned that you can fight these tickets and plead guilty so you're not pleading not guilty but you're saying yeah I did it and then they usually reduce you know the ticket price because I didn't have a whole lot of money at the time and they usually offer you driving school which you can pay for which for the viewers listening here it decreases your insurance so they don't report it to the insurance or something like that so I did all of this I show up in court and I'm hoping he doesn't show up because also there's a chance they don't show up and then the ticket's just completely dismissed so I show up the guy obviously shows up I played guilty and the whole thing goes fine they reduce the ticket price everything goes as planned however as he was leaving the courthouse I was watching him because I was under the impression no one really comes to that full complete stop at a stop sign so I watch him leaving the courthouse and he just completely blazes through the stop sign on the way out of the courthouse getting me in trouble for doing exactly the same thing and I didn't Blaze through it I filmed it and I walked up to like the person the guard that was out outside of the courthouse and I said hey by the way like I have video evidence of the cop doing exactly what they accused me of doing is there anything like I can do with this or you know not pay the price show the judge anything and he's like h no you're just G to have to uh report that to the police department and there's nothing that did you report it no so D they're not going to do you going do anything exactly they're not going to do anything and I was just so frustrated too because for me that was a serious joke it was like $300 so so you filmed a cop and walked up to another cop asking if you could blackmail that cop into not having you get in trouble no no no it wasn't it wasn't blackmail it was it was the person that was like out it was the guard yeah of the a person of tremendous Authority in the matter yeah exactly so I wanted to just have a conversation with the judge that's all I want the an innocent little conversation about yeah yeah I I can see how that might not have worked yeah uh but in most cases yes if you go to court you can have better outcomes generally especially if it's in a jurisdiction that you're not local to I recommend using a lawyer uh there's a lot of them out there one of our sponsors is the ticket clinic and they have a nationwide network of lawyers because you know my Atlanta lawyer isn't licensed to practice in Nevada and so if I get a ticket out there I really want there's probably a local lawyer there that plays golf with the judge on Thursdays and just gets what he wants and you know and you can have a pretty good outcome I got stopped once I had a roof R te 12s and this was early in the days of us promoting the vinwiki app and I was going up to cars and& coffee in Charlotte and I got pulled over really really late at night and I was going pretty fast but I didn't think I was going like insanely fast and so I wasn't really paying as much of attention as I normally would I had a friend with me we were just kind of talking there was nobody else in the road and uh suddenly there's a cop behind me okay pull over and start talking to him and he's like any reason you're going so fast I was like we just trying to get up here for this car show in the morning and he's like well I just CL you at 126 and a 60 goodness gracious he said yeah that's what I said as you went by and I said well I'm sorry man I wasn't trying to go that fast you the car's fast and dark whatever and he's like um well got give him license and stuff like that and I told my friend I was like look when you get pulled over going twice the speed limit like bad things happen I'm probably going to go to jail and you're probably going to have to call my wife and bail me out and stuff like this and so um he came back and I said the other thing that sometimes happens is they do want to Rite a lot of tickets and so they'll come write you for everything and they'll give you like 10 tickets because it's not that cops necessarily all have quotas but there is generally a revenue expectation from traffic citations in any jurisdiction in any given period and so that's why you know we don't run cannonballs the last weekend of the month because there is more patrolling throughout the country and so he he comes back and just hands me a ticket not for reckless driving just for speeding at he didn't reduce it I'm like and you you you don't really want to negotiate on that one because like you know how low is it going to go he's not going to give it you know 14 over whatever but he R you for 120 yeah and so I uh I end up I'm like man this really is I do not have the money to pay for this thing right now it's going to be a problem and so I I got back and on Monday I started calling that you just Googled that County speeding ticket lawyer and I called three or four of them and they're all like yeah man we can't get it reduced enough to make any real difference like you're just going to have to go in and you know plead for mercy and that afternoon I got a phone call from a number in that area cod but not someone that i' call and he's like I heard you got a ticket I said I did yeah it's like is it 126 I said yeah um well I I practice in this area I got your number from somebody and I'm like okay he's like um I tell you what for 500 bucks I'll I'll work on it for you I can't make any promises and he said who is the cop and I said it was like I don't know I'll say Jay Smith it was not Jay Smith and and he's like oh I know him I know him let me give him a call and so he called me back 20 minutes later he's like he knew why I was calling he said you got my 126 guy he said I do I do he's like well what do you need it to be said well he told me if it's 14 over in Georgia that won't be any points he's like yeah it's fine whatever and so they just crossed it out they ended up writing 11 over and uh they sent it to me and they're like just go online and pay it like so what was the price difference between 11 over and twice the probably $5 $600 and so it was still worthwhile but the problem is like if I get a ticket for 126 on my driving record I won't be able to get insurance ever again so it's a big deal yeah yeah I've used uh shout out Anna with traffic ticket defenders in California and she's really helped there's one I got like a 90 something and a 70 I believe and she worked on this for like two years two years how much did that cost though the legal cost I paid $500 usually that's kind of right but the thing was I didn't want the point on my insurance I had a perfectly clean record never anything and I wanted to keep it that way just out of principle it's I I didn't want anything on my record but she was able to win it two years she worked on this thing just because apparently the cop was difficult and was really trying to like push this thing through yeah and a lot of times that's part of the strategy is they'll get the court dates delayed and post and stuff like that and there are a lot of techn alties um the the guy that runs the Ticket Clinic has been here to talk about you know some of the crazy things that they'll use in terms of the calibration of the devices and the ways things are measured and stuff like that and it's it's wild the different ways that they can and so that's why you can do it on your own if it's a really egregious offense you want to have a lawyer there but usually you can go in the same way that you did talk to the prosecutor or the solicitor and they'll offer some different options of like well if you plead guilty to this rules of the road violation or whatever it is then that doesn't really mean anything the find's similar you get to go home just don't do it again and that that happens a lot and in Georgia we're not a driver's license compact state and so a lot of times the records from other states don't come in and so like I've had a lot of tickets that got pled down to insignificant overages and uh that didn't matter for a long time but recently I guess they updated their computer systems and they have a lot more information and if they like spell your name wrong or anything like that too could that then be a reason to or like simple it can but again you're those you you'd want to talk to a lawyer before you start making that kind of an argument they spelled my name wrong on the ticket and I asked the judge I'm like does this mean anything can I get out in the room and they're like no that means nothing I'm like okay I plead guilty all right fine as you show up with the right make you're like I'm me and the cop that handed me this didn't spell it right so it might have been for somebody else mistaken identity saves me 20 bucks it's worth it hey absolutely I worked as a summer job at a racetrack up in brazzleton Road Atlanta and there was a guy there who uh just loved cars and just was the detailer and he would detail all the race cars and he told he was a great Storyteller and I his his wife was like a famous Christian musician and so he really didn't have to work he just kind of did it for fun but he told a story that in the early 90s he was taking care of this guy's car collection and he had 30 or so cars and as you I've got I think 11 now you start to realize like having somebody around to help fix stuff was more more and more necessary but that's all he did was take care of this guy's cars and he had just gotten a Corvette ZR1 and so his boss is like well why don't we take the Kos to pick up the ZR1 you can drive the lambo back and we'll see which one's faster and uh my buddy his name was Tony he uh they were racing down 400 our local Highway here and and he ran away from that uh Corvette real fast and he was coming down the hill at about 180 M hour and a cop came the other way and he's like ah I'm I I don't need to be running today I'll pull over so it takes the cop a while to come back around and uh the cop pulls up he's like uh why are you in such a hurry I don't know just trying to see what the car would do and he said well uh is this your car he said you know what it's not and he's like well who is it he said my boss he's like well what does your boss think of you driving it like this and uh he said uh at that second his boss blew past him on the side of the road when this Corvette he's like well that's him you can ask him right there and uh he ended up letting the boss go cuz he didn't have any clock on him but he's like um do you know how fast you were going I said I think I was going pretty quick and he's like well I'm I'm proud I'm glad you stopped because you know you can't outrun the radio and he's like I think I was doing about three miles a minute I had a pretty good shot outr running that radio but they gave him this massive F was like $5,000 in the early 90s and he couldn't get insurance for years years well good on him for stopping exactly yeah yeah I mean cuz it's long straight road back then they they'd have found him what's the fastest you've ever gone in a car oh so we got to film at an air strip in Louisiana for car trek and I got to race a fighter jet in a brand new McLaren 765 LT and it was like a 2 and a half mile Runway so that was plenty of time for the McLaren and with more arrow that top speed was a little lower it's 205 and we just got there and just set and the guy that organizes these kind of things that like air shows that had supplied the car he I was like you know do I need a helmet or a fire suit he's like nah man if things go bad that's not going to make any difference in this outcome that's insane yeah and it was cool because like it was a really you know well respected and highly acclaimed fighter pilot that was driving this old mig that we were racing and of course the plane is faster on the when it's in the air but on the ground it's not and so you know this was an air show stunt as well so we were kind of like trying to make it more of a race and and then we did this thing where we timed like so we'd come right by show Center at 205 mph made for some really good pictures and some uh fun memories so what was the speed 205 205 is that all it would do and it would just sit there and you could just feel the air pushing against every other horsepower that might have been available how'd that feel was it scary was it it's disorienting when you're on such a big Runway because it's like you know you don't have the sensation of speed of passing things you're just sensitive to like when do I have to start breaking and how hard uh but it was like in order there was so much math involved D in it from a stunt perspective that we had to you had to accelerate at exactly Full Throttle at and you know shift at these RPMs otherwise what we did in practice wouldn't have been exactly right and so got a few runs at it and uh and had a blast how do you break with a car going 200 miles an hour do you slam on the brakes cuz I'm yeah imag you slam the car just starts spitting out of control yeah because as as nicely as all cars we hope are set up they don't all break with exactly the same force on every corner every time and so no you'll you'll ease off the throttle and then let the car kind of settle and then firmly but consistently engage the brakes and not all and then with a McLaren you got to be really careful because at some point the air br will initiate and that will help a lot but they have a much stronger front brake bias out of the box because most of the rear braking actually comes from the a arrow and so it's uh it's a it was a little squiggly coming down but honestly the cars are so good um and that's why I kind of like cars that aren't so new is that they're not so perfect and that you know you're you're able to really enjoy the you know whoa that was a little more sketch than I thought it was going to be because you know you didn't die but you felt like you drove it a little more is there any car that's coming out that you're excited to see I mean I'm certainly excited about the GMA t-50s the the new Gordon Murray car effectively the modern iteration of the McLaren F1 which is my poster car forever I don't think I want to have enough money to be able to have a 20 million car but that's the only thing that's worth having $100 million for is to be able to have a McLaren F1 real quick here's a pop quiz what is the most valuable resource 3 2 1 it's time and unfortunately we are all way too familiar with how easy it is to just waste countless hours scrolling away our time on our phones but instead of spending your time unproductively you could be learning about history economics or the great works of literature for free with our sponsor Hillsdale College Hillsdale College is currently offering more than 40 free online courses in the most important and enduring subjects like you could learn about the meaning of the US Constitution the rise and fall of the Roman Republic or the history of mathematics and logic with Hillsdale College's online courses all available for free that is right to you heard that correctly it's totally free I personally recommend you guys sign up for economics 101 the principles of free market economics in this free course you will examine the foundational principles of the free market such as the relationship of supply and demand the failure of central planning the rise of macroeconomics under the influence of John M Ard can's and the 2008 financial crisis so I went to college and studied econ and yes now I am running my own business and some of the stuff I learned sure it does translate to the work I'm doing now but also it is not worth the exorbitant cost of tuition and also wherever you're staying so yes learn economics I do recommend that but if you're going to do it do it for free because paying for tuition is not very economical the course is also self-paced so you can start whenever and wherever enroll now in hillsdale's economics 101 course so go right now to hillsdale.edu to get started like I said there's no cost and it's really easy to begin at hillsdale.edu hillsdale.edu with the link Down Below in the description thank you Hillsdale College for sponsoring this episode and now let's get back to the podcast So speaking of cars like that how did you get the job working at Lamborghini cuz at that point you know everybody who was uh good enough at selling cars had generally g off to sell mortgages cuz it was a much better business in like 060708 and it was so hard to sell the cars that they were just looking for anybody and the fact that I had a little bit more of an understanding of the economics of ownership as that was becoming a much bigger part of the ways that they were talking people through the deals you really had to help them to understand how much this was going to cost them there was no longer this fantasy of like endless demand and endless availability of funds kind of a similar period to what we're having right now where you know in the wake of covid every new car sold out immediately there was no inventory cheap cars expensive cars whatever and uh so we were kind of In This Moment much like now where you really had to sell the car and and I loved that I I loved working deals and negotiating and and trying to help listen and understand what a buyer wanted and fitting that into the logic I needed them to accept in order to make the decision to buy what I had and what are the finances behind selling vehicles I feel like there are a lot of things that people think happen but don't actually happen I could be completely wrong here but I feel like the sales rep always goes they talk to the seller they have a base price that they can sell it at they're making a little bit on the spread but they can also sell it as high as they want and then they take that the larger portion of fat if there's you know more meat on the bone in the deal yes so there's a ton of different pay plans in card dealer ships uh for us it was a 25% Commission of the gross profit we didn't get paid anything on the back end the finance reserve and stuff like that cuz there's obviously dozens and dozens of ways that a car dealer can make money in a transaction but you know that spread between wholesale and Retail is going to create this theoretical margin that you could have and you want to retain as much gross profit as you can as a salesperson because you're making a big percentage of that it's very different than a real estate agent that's getting paid a percentage of the entire transaction value so a real estate agent really doesn't care how much they sell your house for they just want more deals because the difference their Commission of if they sell it for your asking price or 85% of that is not that big of a difference and so they just want an easy deal that gets done fast it's not they're not that heavily incentivized to maximize your selling price and so in the car business that matters a good bit more because you're getting paid lower dollar figures and and and you're being it's being calculated of of different values so you know we would probably average about six to eight percent as a gross margin and the dealership would usually a successful exotic car dealership is usually operating on a 1 to 3% net margin after everybody's paid out so they flow an insane amount of cash because the dollar amounts are so high but they're really not wildly profitable and it's very easy for them to take massive massive lumps and so when I join the dealership we would look at some of these deals that they' done in the prior year and they were losing 30,000 $40,000 $50,000 on a car because the market had shifted so abruptly in the early days of the recession that there was just nothing they could do and there were some unscrupulous and undor things that had happened with the dealership in the year prior of people that were trying to steal money and bury too much money in inventory and stuff like that and so that had exaggerated the problem to some extent but um yeah so and usually there's going to be some kind of a cap uh because if you if you can make a lot more than you know 10 or $20,000 on a car that's really because of the way the dealership works the opportunity that exists in the car being available to the market more so than your work as a salesperson and so our cap was uh $4,000 a car and usually dealerships have what's called pack meaning this is an non-commissionable portion of a profit that is assigned as a cost to any car in our case it was about 750 bucks and so I would always pencil the deals to make $16,750 cuz that was me getting every dollar and there were no non-commissionable dollars in this transaction and they didn't love that but nobody else was creating these margins and so uh you know I would sell usually anywhere from I don't know eight to 15 cars a month and you don't make you don't Max it out all that often but I think my best month ever was about 50 Grand and probably best year ever was about 350 and at the time I I don't know anybody at that point you know before 2015 that was making more than me selling exotic cars there might have been some smalltime Brokers that were just doing these Mass deals or stuff like that but um yeah I mean it was that was obviously massively more money than I ever thought I'd make in my life and so it was uh it was a very wild time so who's buying Lamborghinis what type of person walks in well you know there was always that stereotype of the Miami Vice you know chest hair and pet alligator and the white Blazer and I guess my top buttons don't tend to work as well as they should and I do have pet boa constrictor but that's not as accurate as it it seems like uh but I I would say that really it was small to medium-sized business owners that had grown up dreaming about the cars and weren't really sure what it took to afford them um I loved people that were financing cars because they traded a lot more often and it was a lot easier for them to accept a few hundred more dollars a month in their payment than having to pay a huge Delta when they would try to upgrade to the next thing um so I gravitated towards people that were very aspirational and didn't let mind massive car loans a lot like myself myself because I could speak with a lot of authority to that and you don't necessarily want to always think of your your selling to your peers or you're trying to be equal to your customer but you know like I did a sales training thing with an Audi dealership last week where you know they were really worried about as the car has got so much more expensive just what they would say and I'm like look they don't want you to be equal but they do want you to be the expert on this knowledge Gap that they have as they're honestly coming to a dealership trying to get advice and so you know I learned learned everything there was to know about exotic car financing I knew everything there was to know about the product and so they were never going to run into someone who was more equipped to help them through the transaction that they wanted to do uh after I left the dealership I got it seemed like every life insurance company wants a retired car salesman or no longer selling cars car salesman uh to come and sell this stuff and I'm like man I I get it and I know everybody needs life insurance but I've been selling stuff that people really really want but know they don't need and you want me to sell something that people know they probably need but they really don't want to deal with and I'm I'm not sure that's the sales paradigm shift that I'm really looking for right now but uh but yeah I mean that was really it is guys that you know have made their own money and want to go out and have this Trophy and have this experience and I always wanted them to go drive them as much as possible because that was always my personal mindset but uh but yeah what car were you driving at the time when I started I I didn't H I still had the rental car Fleet as I was was selling them off and then for a long time I just had an old Mercedes that I would drive around I was always trying to find one that was like depreciated enough or cheap enough or whatever and I I so I'm you know always trying to buy our trades and stuff like that with crazy car loans but in 2011 I kind of bought the first like personal car Lamborghini and it was a blue chaom 2004 Gallardo that came in on a tow truck and it was not running and it was in really rough condition and there were these two Asian truck drivers that didn't speak English and we they we thought they were kind of asking us to figure out what was wrong with the car we really didn't know and so we just ran it through the shop and it was leaking oil terribly brakes tires everything was spent clutch was gone but it was an okay car it was in one piece had I checked the Carfax it had a minor accident but didn't look too bad the paintwork was decent and but we really didn't know and they left us a phone number with this car and it was like did nobody answered or it didn't go through whatever and so a few days go by and this guy shows up and he goes do you all have a blue Lamborghini here that you're trying to fix and I'm like yeah we do and I would normally greet people that walk towards service and he said well um it's it's not mine but it belongs to my girlfriend's daughter and she's really attractive and I'm okay that will not change our level of service sir but it's always nice to know and I said can we speak to her he's like well no you can't talk to her but I'll get you in touch with her mom okay and so a couple days later I'd given my card is theom mom calls and she says that her daughter had gotten arrested for going 180 M hour in this car and I'm like wow okay well that's pretty meaningful but it meant that the car recently was able to go 180 mph which is promising thing and the car was so rough at that time like trying to sell bad condition exotic cars was nearly impossible because dealerships weren't trying to put much in inventory the economy was still recovering we couldn't sell the nice stuff much less like rats like this and so and that was so I was like man this thing might get cheap and I knew that if I was willing to try I was not going to be bidding against anybody and I also suspected that there was a good chance that whenever we found this girl that she was not going to be able to pay what was probably going to be a 20 to $30,000 service Bill and so the only way we were ever going to get the service business was for me to buy the car and finance it into Al loan because I didn't have the cash either and I could tell from the Carfax there was not a lean against it so a lot of times when you buy these cars cheap it doesn't matter if they're willing to let you have it cheap they can't pay off their loan that would have been much more and so it it was probably another week and this girl shows up and she was a prostitute and uh she was not appealing to my demographic I think you know as a Target whatever but she uh she came in and I actually found her social media profile and it said that she had 50-in hips so I mean this girl could take a break hula hooping I mean it was a Marvel of Science and so we're talking about the car and she said that she had bought it about a year earlier in cash in Miami and I came to find out it was cash that she had earned in three months of work so she was churning some business through and uh she was not in a position to do it but she did have the title and she uh she really she wanted to sell it and I had asked my boss like if I can buy it is that okay like you know sometimes that's iffy as a dealership employee if this is going to be all right and so he he's like yes sure if you can get it done and you'll give us a service business do whatever you want and so she wanted like 70,000 because you know she thinks well it'll be worth what I paid for not exactly there's also these other million things wrong with it and stuff like that and I explained her why it was less I offered her 30 grand and of course she was a shrewd negotiator so we met right smack dab in the middle at 30 grand and so I'm like all right well you know do you want to buy another car obviously if somebody just doesn't have a car and she's like well I'd really like a Bentley like Paris Hilton's a pink one I well they don't really paint them pink so we probably want to do that we could wrap a car let me look and we we could get at the time you could buy a kind of GT for probably 40 50 grand and I'm like well let's just go see if we can get you a loan for the rest and she's great she fills out our credit app she had her social security card with her and uh we pulled her credit and nobody had ever even looked at this girl's credit she had she she didn't even know have a bank account anything like that and I learned that in particular after we found out that there was nobody wanting to be the first person to loan her money in her short life at that point uh and because I like well we'll just give you a check and so I went back back to our office we cut her a check for 30 grand and I handed it to her and I as a car salesman had never had somebody look at me with less trust than when I told her that that piece of paper was the same thing as $30,000 and she's like what do I do with this you take it to your bank said what I said can you not just give me cash I said no we don't have cash here but I promise you it's it's it's good and she she left like super like uh suspicious there's no way this is money and uh you know it worked out we stayed in touch in fact she had the spare key to the car and she kept telling me she was going to bring it and she she never never would or she'd come up with some excuse and must have been three months later she texted me and she's like it's my birthday tomorrow do you still want that key I'm like again like I'm getting a lot of unrelated information in this deal and I said uh happy birthday and yes I'd love it and she's like well can I have $100 for it well it's not worth anything to anybody but me but you know what sure by you know by all means but I'll give you $100 if you have it here by close a business and she uh didn't show up of course but the next day her birthday she showed up and she uh and I don't know what she would call what she was wearing I would call it a basketball net It Holes everywhere you could see everything she had a lot of interesting tattoos and interesting places that were probably uncomfortable to acquire and she walks in at the time there was this woman standing at our parts counter with this young kid she grabs this kid and screams and runs out another door and Kimmy walks up to me and she's loves to hug always want to H hug you first and so hey Kimmy what are you all dressed up for and she said it's my birthday I said well you're halfway to that outfit and uh I said you got the key she did and I went out and tried it and gave her money and I was like man did uh and you know we we had T had a lot of conversations at that point she was like commenting on my Instagram post she was really fond of the ones that had my large albino boa constrictor in but uh you know we were sitting at my desk talking I said Kimmy do you have butt implants like how does this happen and she's like no and she was so excited to like talk me through the science of this she's like I had a fat redistribution and this was before like the Kardashian world and we this was a thing and so she's like they made me gain 30 PBS and then they lipos suctioned it all out and they injected it she didn't have to move anything you could see the scar it must have been a jackhammer they put it in with and it was uh and I said wow and so not only did I get buy the cheapest gardo ever but I got to meet the recipient of such a pioneering medical procedure I would love to see her today have her back on the channel sof underbelly sort of interview how successful that surgery is you know after all this time has passed I asked her does it feel weird is it moving around like independent of the direction you travel but she she said it was all normal is I guess I don't I don't know but she so you know when I when we first started to record vinwiki stories I thought it was just going to be a promotional tool for the app that we'd released about a year prior and I we had a lot of ideas about what we might do with the content and I thought maybe I would give it to a friend of mine that had a car YouTube channel because at the time I knew like Doug deiro from college and I'd met Rob Freddy a few times and Freddy Hernandez and some of these guys and so I sold Rob Dom his Diablo while I was at the dealership he was the first person to ever list social media income on a credit application for me and I uh and so so I was I was trying to figure out like you know what we were going to do with it so I just called a bunch of friends we got a bunch of pizza and beer sat in the corner of the warehouse stack some stuff up in the corner hang some Edison bulbs and and see what happens and a friend of mine from church shot them all and edited them and so I had compiled most of my good car stories from the dealership as intros to the chapters of my book on setting the Cannonball record cuz really it was just a story of three sweaty guys going really fast and not getting caught across the country and so I I realized that's not really going to carry people's attention throughout you know 300 pages so I had written down like my 10 best stories as the openings to the chapters that would have something in common with whatever was happening at that moment in the journey so I'd I'd written out the story of buying that car and I so I had I think of the 25 probably seven or eight were my stories and I didn't know that anybody was going to watch them I figured we're going to release 25 of these things after all my friends said no we can't put them on their channels we started him on the vinwiki channel and I we start we I was like man if we got 2,000 views a video that would be amazing and I uh and we ended up getting almost a million views across those videos it started to grow really really well and some things like that got a lot more traction than I ever expected them to I'm like well I I I don't know if she's going to care that the story is out there and so a couple of years ago a friend of mine is like I want to go find her and I'm like okay probably better you than me given the chance that she could be upset about the way that I've described her and uh I thought I was diplomatic in it but who knows and so he goes out and he finds that she is currently incarcerated and for a uh another professional appearance we'll say and she uh was going to get out at a certain point so he starts like emailing her and I'm like the only thing I'd ask is like if she doesn't know about it don't tell her about it let's deal with it another day and it doesn't take long for him to ask her about you know what she did before and stuff like that and she volunteers that she had a Lamborghini and that apparently there's some guy named ed that talks about it on the internet so she had heard about apparently a guard recognized her from my description and uh asked her about it and and figured out that it was her and so she was very happy about it um she learned since then that like only fans have started and all our old friends are making a ton of money doing that and it was uh and so she wants to come on when she gets out and tell her side of the story which I think is going to be amazing um and uh yeah so it's the problem is like it's it's very hard to she she has a long sentence because of multiple accusations that uh has can maybe be shortened so we may do some fundraising to help uh not do an interview in jail that would make it even better so when I asked about it which maybe that means it was a little more than two years ago there were covid restrictions on visitation then she moved to a different place and stuff like that so I have not broached that recently um she did not want to do it in jail even though we talked through it because she wanted to get all doled up and and look more professional and I uh and so we have not come to such an arrangement but she's very excited to uh meet the audience imagine her on KB Hammer afterwards like doing the round promoting only fans she will you will blow up our only fans I have no idea how that translates but I it I mean she's a prime candidate so how many people walk into the Lamborghini dealership pretending to be rich pretending to be a buyer and what are the Tells yes absolutely people come in with their fake watches and you know overly designer clothes and that they're trying to pretend that they can buy something and they can't they're just trying to get a test drive or something like that and I can relate to that because I did that many times as a high schooler trying to go out and test drive interesting cars with with some success but you you can't let those people waste your time when you actually have a job to to do and it really doesn't take long in the way that you should sell a car to ask the right questions that they would just not have even thought about like how they're actually going to use the car how it relates to other goals that they have you know why they want it and what they believe it is versus what you have to explain it actually is and things like that and so if they if they're just itching to get in the car immediately let's let's go then you know that they weren't going to buy it anyway but if you can actually have a conversation with someone and they've got a a reasonable approach to the idea of purchasing this car in most cases you can end up with you know knowing really really quickly how hard it's going to be for them to do so now the ones that are stretching are the best kinds of customers the ones that can easily write the check are the hardest to motivate to actually do so but somebody who knows like look I may I may be hard to get finan because of this this and this and they're very forthcoming about that then those times you know you you do stand a really really good chance of getting this person into a car because it's you probably have more financing resources at your disposal than they may know about or things like that and so it's really just about asking a lot of questions and making sure that you're framing them in a very positive way and where their answers will become the reasons that you know they should want to purchase the car how often is it that someone comes in and you know they're just making a terrible financial decision that this person like can technically qualify but it's not smart whatsoever is that common and and has has there ever been a situation where you've just said hey man like we could get you this car but like you probably shouldn't do this well as you first framed that question I was going to say well in 2013 we got a McLaren franchise and so that early in mcclaren's current existence they were miserably unreliable cars and so they would all break always the failure rate of these cars in the first week of ownership where they may have come back in on a tow truck or at least had some very meaningful fault was 100% And so there when you would sell them in most cases they were pretty profitable deals because there was a lot of enthusiasm and excitement for the cars so you made good money but you knew like this was going to become a problem always and so in that regard there were times where people were buying cars that you knew were Troublesome and you would at least try to help them to understand that uh like I know that you love lotuses but the best way to sell someone an Elise is to try to talk them out of and you know you'll tell them hey you you know they're not super comfortable and they're not like easy to get into especially if you you know are part next to somebody like oh yeah I love that it's a race car it's like oh you know just remove everything then you know they're there's they're not that expensive in terms of Parts but they do go through like Tires and Brakes really fast oh yeah for handling you know that's that's awesome I love that I'm GNA I'm going to do it myself and I'm going stuff you know and it's it is a Honda motor but you know you want to make sure that uh it's it's maintainable or Toyota and stuff and they're like oh yeah that's so cool it's going to be more reliable it's going to go 100,000 miles I'm going to drive it all the time but you know like if you if you hurt the clamshell like it's really expensive so just make sure that you've got good insurance and just be careful like don't bump into stuff oh yeah yeah I love that so like and they're just talking themselves into it over and over and over again and it's like it they they always buy them like no one can go look at a Lotus and not buy it it's if unless it breaks while they're driving it or catches on fire which happens but in terms of like a financial decision where somebody is really in a rough spot again most of the time those people are stretching so hard to be able to buy these cars and they know and they're they're all well aware like I can't sell this car because I have so much negative equity that I'm rolling from the next one I had this guy nicest guy in the world um just had kind of a normal job you know made low six figures and had owned an Aston Martin DB9 for a really long time and we did a lot of long-term car financing um these like 12 year 15E loans and you know if the car doesn't go down in value that can be a great way to own it and so he owed effectively $100,000 on a $50,000 car because aston's depreciate like crazy and he didn't want to put much money down and so he just wanted to have a newer car and and that's a hard thing to do because effectively you know if you trade if you're trading a $50,000 car for $150,000 car you can adjust the number numbers up so you get a 100 for your trade and you pay 200 for the the new car and so you're still paying the same $100,000 Delta the bank doesn't that know that the numbers were different uh but that's too much to hide like hiding 20,000 maybe 30,000 maybe hiding 50 Grand takes some doing um and and we tried so many deals and I ended up selling him an Aston Martin vage when we got an incentive on those back in 2012 and he was the happiest guy in the world now he owed at that point at least a hundred more then that car was going to be worth immediately but he loved it and that that was his thing and he was going to probably pay it for 5 six 7 years and and he was fine with it so when you see people driving like really expensive exotic cars what percentage of those people have them financed and can barely afford them it's going to vary a little bit by market and by demographic um but I would say 75% are financed certainly in my in my sales experience 75% when you say 75 financed is that because that's the smart move to make because they got a low interest rate and it makes more sense to Arbitrage of the money or is that because they just can't afford it because they cannot afford it so a lot of people think that if you drive a superar generally speaking you're kind of loaded like that's I feel like a lot of especially a lot of I could be wrong here but like girls they'll see a guy driving a nice car they're like oh you know he's got money but you'd say that's generally not the greatest if you're driving a superar that's less than 5 years old you should not assume that person has a lot of money it is that is a really yeah if they're driving you know an iconic vintage or significant car something that's 10 20 30 40 years old for sure there's a really good chance because those are harder to finance but if they've got a brand new Huracan interesting didn't the Dave Ramsey like millionaire study show that most millionaires Drive Toyotas yeah Toyotas Hondas and the F-150 pickup trucks yeah but that data is massively skewed because most millionaires are retired fair so most millionaires are 60 plus years old if you ask what millionaires under the age of 40 drive it would be BMW's Mercedes Audi's I mean those three believe it or not the Tesla Model Y and model 3 were the most common in Reddit fat fire but that's skews to a lot of California Vancouver yeah right makes sense but yeah that was the most common what would you say are some trends that you've noticed amongst High net worth individuals buying exotic cars well you know it's it's a very indulgent thing right and and so generally speaking the VIN diagram of people that own exotic cars and good people don't intersect all that much and so it was a little bit of a difficult thing because obviously I loved the cars for my reasons some of which are obviously the vanity and status of it but much more significantly the experience of driving it the ways that they build performance the no the beauty the history the everything that they represent I mean I I love to be able to get in a car get it good enough to probably make it where I wanted to go and drive the wheels off of it and so you know I before they started to make SUVs I'd probably put more miles on Lamborghinis than just about anybody in the country and I because I just I love that I love to get in one drive to Miami drive it across country to me that is the best form of ownership you may not be going 200 M hour but you're just experiencing it in that way now most people people obviously aren't doing that they're trying to minimize their cost they're trying to you know take advantage of whatever and they really are trying to go show off in them and it can be a rather undesirable reflection of who a person is and I try to be conscious of that especially as I've got a bunch of them and I make sure that it's very clear look they're all broken they're all heavily financed and you know it's just it's a hard and they're the result of me doing this professionally for a long time and yes you can sit in it and yes I you can take it for right I used to let people borrow them um but I had to stop because they're all so broken that they would all break down so I went like 18 months where every single time I let somebody drive something it broke in like a rather meaningful way and it's not that I hold them responsible for it it's just awkward and inconvenient and so I kind of just had to say look I for a while at least I have to not do this um and so I don't let them drive them but at this but if we can take them somewhere do something by all means and I think having the right attitude about the cars is really what I what I learned was both necessary and the right way to go and you know if you try to treat these things as you know your treasure and they they they they cannot ever be imperfect it's just you get so uptight and so uncomfortable talking to me right now oh I I have learned a bit that that's we got to get you out of that mindset man you got to just get some rock chips like I uh I I I I've only owned one cosmetically perfect car cuz I had one repainted uh it was in terrible terrible shape it was a Lamborghini Saleo and I had it painted my favorite color which is Verde Draco on the car it's kind of a drab green and you can show a picture of it but I uh there were no cars built for the US in that color and so I couldn't just go buy one and I never get to buy based on color so the cheap cars are always black and so they either get wrapped like this gardo or they uh yeah stay black because they they look so pretty but they get dirty fast and so you know I I try to make people understand that you know the more you can drive them they're great and so like I don't have a clear bra on the Bugatti I can't wait till it's covered in rock chips and everybody sees it and immediately knows how much I've driven it why wouldn't you put a clear bra on it you're going to spend five grand doing that you know on the front part of the car maybe some of the sides why not just do that it seems like five grand would be better than Rock chips well first of all there's already some paint work on the car and so it it could stand to be you know repainted parts of it anyway but significantly like um if you ever go to montere car week there's a lot of amazing cars there but my favorite one is a guy from Boston that drives his Enzo there every year it's got 80 90,000 miles on it the windshield's got a crack across it the whole front's been just sand blasted off from all the rock chips and it's my favorite car cuz it's like this dude just loves using it and so I did clear bra after I repainted the car because it was truly perfect and much more significantly cuz I could never match the paint you know it was custom mixed to match this paint code and you know so I I didn't want to have to deal with ever doing that and that's why I clear BR every square inch of the car um but if I if I were to do it again I wouldn't because I would just I'd love I would love it if it had its last 20 30,000 miles of rock chips on it it is cool to look at a car like this and see that it's been used and see that you know the person is actually taking it out on the road see the paint chips and stuff like that yeah I love a perfect car but I love them you know worn in a bit more let's talk buying a Bugatti how did you go about buying this car what did you pay for it where' you find it in 2014 I bought my first manual lp640 I put nothing down I paid $215,000 for it and I ended up selling it about a two years later at for 350 so I made 135 Grand on that car and I was able to buy the worst one on Earth for 120 and it had been fraudulently reported stolen and crashed by a drunk 15-year-old it was was rough but I owned my dream car with a title made for effectively free I got the same car with a terrible history in the profit margin of the last deal and I had like a proper existential crisis because most of what I had done professionally was so that I could buy that car and I like why do I have to go to work again like I have my my I've got you know a young child and I need to pay my bills and stuff like that like I get that I should still work hard but that had been kind of my biggest why Beyond just being able to eat and have shelter and so shortly after having that car I actually decided you know what like I need another stupid car goal to be able to chase so that I'll work harder and I was like I told a friend I was like I think I'm going to buy a Bugatti and I I I didn't make the remotely I still don't make enough money to reasonably afford the car but I I I knew that it was a good goal to Chase and over the years since then I've tried to buy a bunch of them I tried to buy tigas after R got repoed I tried to buy the one that went to Galviston Bay I tried to buy if ever there's a bad one I'm trying to buy because I can't buy a nice one and so I I I came close several times with these crazy Finance schemes and all the ways that I could try but it just never really worked out and this car popped up a few months ago for sale and it it just had such an amazing back story with all the celebrities that had been with and I'm like I hadn't ever really thought that I'd get a a Grand Sport with the roof that comes off because they're a lot more rare they've generally been a lot more valuable but of the 14 Us cars that are Grand Sports um there's on six of them were on the market in the last year and that is far too many generally if 10 more than 10% of a car are ever on the market you're going to see a significant value change and so that number of cars being on the market drove the value of these down a million dollars and it got to where where they were actually being advertised for less than the coups and I'm like well this is awesome it's newer you get the updated wheels and tail lights and better suspension and stuff this is perfect and so I had been offering a lot less than they wanted for a long time and I I finally got them to uh to take the number and I paid 1.45 million for it but I had recently sold a blue manual lp640 that I'd kind of accidentally bought on cars and bids because I was running the bid up because I had several of them already and I like them to go up in value but the real end of all my cars going up in value was so that I'd be able to do this and so but that that car I paid 705 or 710 for it but that car represented a long line of Trades and so I bought a 360 for 31 Grand and then sold it and then I bought a $69,000 roof rt12s and sold it for $ 1554 then I bought $140,000 430 scooteria sold it for $190 something bought a Paris Hilton's SLR for 185 sold it for 320 bought a crashed Mercy SV out of Europe that was fixed for 320 sold it for 700 and then I bought this so I effectively had a $31,000 cost basis in this uh $700,000 Lamborghini so I had sold it and I had sold some other cars we had for car trek and other things like that and so with some loans and things like that I think I had like almost 600,000 in equity and then Premier Financial Services was there the rest how much is your payment on Bugatti it's like eight and change that's not terrible yeah especially when we when we heard that James was spending $30,000 month and oh I mean obviously James has been wildly successful in doing this and and he's the greatest success case of YouTube car content and I love it I can't fathom that I couldn't pay that um and and this is kind of one of these things where I can float it for a while something got to go to be able to continue to do so but I uh it it's one of those things that had always been the right goal and now I guess I have to figure out what to do next uh but it's it was it was the right thing to Chase and very motivating and you know you always have to wonder when you meet these heroes are they actually going to be worth it unfortunately I driven a good handful of Bugattis and I knew that I really really liked what the cars were um I love the way that James described it relative to the kig zegg because it is just a wild different experience the quality in a Bugatti relative to a Pagani the hyper cars from Ferrari Lamborghini Porsche everybody else it's it's really really a well-built car they are really usable they're comfortable it drives like a big Bentley most of the time until you really get into the throttle and and so I really like the way it is and now they have this stigma of course that everything on them is super duper expensive to address but those people have no idea what it cost to maintain a kig zeg because it's Preposterous no it is true though that this car is very expensive to maintain like how much is an oil change on a Bugatti well an oil change is 3 to four grand now an annual service which has a lot more things is like 20 um and there are Independents that are getting into the space that are making it less expensive to you know do certain things um there's a lot of parts that can fairly easily be rebuilt my front axle are leaking grease a little bit I can get those rebuilt rather than buying new ones for 30,000 bucks the tires are still a thing the tires are $45,000 uh and mine are a bit old and a bit worn out uh what I'm finding at the moment is that a lot of people take them off the cars when they're too old but not really that old and they buy new ones because these are owned by far richer people than me I think I'm the world's poorest Bugatti owner and I'm very pleased to keep that title and so there's workarounds for this stuff but most significantly I mean all my cars can be expensive to maintain but as long as the values Trend in the right directions it eventually offsets it you may end up having to put a lot of money on a credit card once in a while so you think this car is going to be going up in value over what period of time you know I I try to be cautious about things like that I do believe it will go up in value because there are so many people my age that are dreaming about these types of cars and I think for those of us that are kind of in the Top Gear Grand Turismo MTV Cribs dupon registry generation of car Enthusiast you know Inception I think we love the Ferraris Lamborghinis and things like that I think the people that are a little bit younger than us are very hypercar obsessed and I think that the ways that we love Diablos and Mercy's and kashes and things like that they're going to love Bugattis K and pagis and so I believe in the next crop of Big Value jumps these make a lot of sense um they have spent enough time cheaper than most people think they ought to be that it is the right recipe and I have benefited from a willingness to over leverage myself to buy my dream cars that I have been ahead of the curve enough that they've gone up in value the right ways and so if you stretch to buy the car you grew up dreaming about there's a pretty good chance there's a whole cohort of people with the same sentiment about that car and that you're going to be in a good position value-wise at some point as long as it's already a little old yeah what is the current cost to maintain all of your vehicles it's really not that bad I am currently doing engine outw work on all the V12 Lambos and that is bad um that will probably be all in for all three cars two Mercy's and a Diablo I you know retail at a dealership would probably be 250 for what I'm getting done which is really everything um and these are high mile warnout examples of each of these cars uh I'll probably with you know finding some cross reference Parts independent service lower hourly rates stuff like that some promotional consideration being in it I don't know exactly 60 something like that wow but you have to imagine that I have zero cost basis in my lp640 Coupe and it is worth almost a million and so it's not wrong for me to spend that kind of money to make them much more reliable cars and so that I make it the next place I try to take it but at the same time this thing um you know if let's just say worst case scenario is 100,000 a year if you did everything by the book for maintenance well I think the car will go up in value at least a million dollars over the next five years um and I won't have to spend nearly that much maintaining it and so I don't have any real fear of financial exposure there um there really is no world in which they go down certainly many many cars are going down in value right now and we noticed that but it's the newer stuff the Aventadors Huracan McLarens high-end Porsches stuff like that so how did you accidentally buy a Lamborghini oh on cars and bids yeah well so I knew the seller I knew what his reserve was I knew what he really wanted for the car and I was not bidding that high U and I expected that I would get out bid cuz I knew other people were interested the problem is when you offer a car very publicly for sale like that people who are hoping it will go up in value prefer not to buy them that publicly and so they can do really well or they can do really poorly and this was still the most expensive car to ever sell on cars and bids uh and so I had bid 710 I knew he wanted 750 I'm like he's not going to take that and then nobody bid for the last couple days and I takes down I'm like oh no oh man that was a and can you retract a bid or no no you can't um and I wanted the car for that cuz I knew that I would still make money off of it and I did I didn't make much because everybody knew what I'd paid uh but I I was like I don't I didn't have the money and so I uh I had to call the bank and get a loan real quick and it uh it worked out um but and it was a really really nice car I just already had two of them and I didn't need a third one what's the interest rate on a loan like that and they used to be great I mean you'd pay 3 4% but now everything's higher so it's it's in the eight Zone give or take have you ever lost money in a car no I'm not since the rental days how how do you do that because I like to look like I won the lottery more than 10 years ago and I buy the worst one I can find and people grossly undervalue the worst cars because they're really not that far away from being okay and once you do that and you make them all right and then you prove that you can put thousands and thousands of miles on it they are actually more valuable and I can then represent them better and and generally make money and trade up until I get something else I think the only car I've lost money on like outside of the daily driver of like the Tesla Model 3 uh the Tesla Roadster oh unfortunately uh good and bad so I bought that car originally from a $5,000 investment I made and this is just like I bought like little $5,000 blocks of Tesla stock back in 2019 when it was trading dirt cheap when people were fearing that they're going to go bankrupt and this is one of those $5,000 blocks that I sold for $130,000 and I sold at all of my Tesla stock at Peak at 314 to $320 a share uh so my cost basis was low but I figured I still believe in Tesla I still want to do something Tesla really related so I'm going to take that 130 and put it in a roadster so I could trade that instead of the stock the Roadster and I I figured for the next five years I think the Roadster is going to do better than the stock and for the first year the stock plummeted it went from 300 and something dollars to like $100 a share and I look like a genius because the the roadsters were all trading really well now they seem to all sell under 100 Grand so so far that's the first car that I think on paper I've lost money on well I think your GT will offset it unless you go drive it as much as I would encourage you to right but the Roadster is one of 26 ever made in yellow and I I'm told that only about 16 still exist that are not salvaged interesting Corvette owner math right there I like it um and and I think those cars have the potential to go up again I think there's the right level of enthusiasm obviously we're now what four years overdue on the next Road concept but maybe one day you know the the electric car thing has gotten interesting I actually leased my first car my and acquired my first new car and uh bought an electric car which are three things I probably thought I would never ever do in my whole life uh in uh January or February of this year there was a a weird mistake that Audi financial services and Audi Corporate made where they didn't talk back and forth enough and they put all these incentives on to emulate the tax re baites that are only available to americanmade electric cars now and so they had discounted these brand new RS Tron GTS these like $160,000 electric cars that no one was buying and they didn't tell Audi financial services and so Audi didn't adjust the lease residuals so the oneyear lease residual on this car was more than the purchase price and a friend of mine actually discovered this that I I worked with him at Lamborghini Atlanta he now runs out of Birmingham and he called me he's like Ed I had to call you cuz I I just I made an ed Bolan deal on these RS trons and I'm like I I don't think it's possible to make an ed Bolan deal on an electric car Nick and he's like oh no it's it's like that he explained I was like okay that's pretty darn awesome I said do I need to come get one he's like do you want one I said no he said well probably and so I uh I went over and I got two of them I got one for my wife and one for my editor and uh it's like it's effectively like $250 a month um and it's it's ridic I saw your video on this and immediately after your video I looked and I tried to find one cuz there were only like 139 of them in US inventory on February 1 and they had all sold within like a week of my video yes uh and it was real and the more interesting thing and really the only reason I actually wanted to do it because I wanted to watch them squirm at the end because it's a high seven low eight figure loss that Audi Financial Services will have to take at the end of this and they will not want to do it in a single month uh and so what I believe they will do is offer really really attractive used car leases on these cars as they come back in and so I think I'll be able to turn it in and then lease it back for even less money for the next year what's a car that you'll never own that you just think is either a terrible investment or just is horribly reliable just not a good drive well there's a lot of cars that I know are bad ideas to own but sometimes in the right circumstance it makes sense now you know I would not buy a a lot of boring commuter cars because there's I I don't I don't want that I I want to have a car that makes me question whether I'm going to make it there and makes it a real event every time I just drive to the coffee shop uh so I like cars that are miserable to use very uncomfortable very inconvenient because it makes me feel what I want to feel as a car Enthusiast and when people say they love cars everybody means something different when they do that I like taking broken cars on long road trips and a lot of people like having their car look perfect and knowing that it's whatever and nobody's wrong but I think that when when I think about the cars that I you know know I shouldn't buy a lot of times I want to invent a reason a lot of what car trek was was just the three of us thinking about like what about these cars that we know we shouldn't buy that would be fun so we did a Christmas special once where we secret Santa Style had to buy each other the most unreliable cars on earth and then we just went beating them around to see how long they last and it was a blast I mean it was more fun than we ever have in functional cars that's really cool so what's something that car enthusiasts could do to lower their cost of ownership to be able to buy their dream car well really familiarizing yourself with how the financing works is certainly the first step because if you can buy more aspirationally you do stand a better chance of the rest of the people that dream about those cars to catch up and that will force the market in the right direction um and really just focusing on what actually will happen when you buy these cars and so there's a lot of cars like this that people are really really scared of but in reality this car's barely been maintained there's nothing that wrong with it it needs things here and there and I'll do those as I need to but I've you know all the stuff that I'm now doing to the merciel go I should have done when I bought them 5 years ago but I couldn't afford it then and so I just kicked the can down the road and now I'm doing most of it CU it's in a better position to do so so I mean I think the more you can understand about the cars that you're dreaming about owning from what ownership is really like the more you can understand about how to finance them and just you know buying them at the right moment like you don't need to buy them when they're three four five years old if you start looking at 10 15 20 years old it it's real hard to lose money when you buy them right what would you say is a relatively inexpensive superar that is a somewhat safe bet doesn't requ ire a bunch of attention sure there's there's so many great examples lotuses are perfect examples they are pretty inexpensive to keep running they are headed in the right direction because they're so unrepeatable from a technological perspective you can't make cars that unsafe anymore and you can't make cars with that little technology anymore Freddy said that they're unreliable though um the eles aren't the aoras can be and the espre are very unreliable and so you still got to learn to buy the right one a 97 turbo is an $80,000 car that is as modern as you need anything to be even though it's 15 almost 20 years old it's a great car any Gallardo is wonderful even ones that have been in Santa Monica mud slides and mud all the way up to the tops of the doors especially the manual cars have all the right makings early R8s great cars uh pretty reliable the v10s have some you know inconvenient things like the AC compressors go out and they're really hard to get to stuff like that but over all there's so many great cars in that $50 to $150,000 Zone that people are paying more for that more than that for Suburbans and Escalades now and you can have a great car that's a whole lot of fun AMG GTS all sorts of stuff what are you noticing right now in the car market so there's been such an explosion of production in all of the exotic car manufacturers that it is a wildly different landscape you know every day they're making more $100,000 cars this year than existed 20 years ago so you look at how many million dooll cars there are on Earth you know I we did a a video back in 2018 uh trying to figure out how many there were at that point and we we tried to look back and think through how many were there in 2003 so 15 years prior to that and it was like just over a th000 in 2003 like right before the Enzo and the Cur GT and the SLR and it was about 25,000 in 18 and in 23 when we did it re did it last year it was uh almost 30,000 and so you think like every day there was another million doll car on Earth and so there was so much buying activity and so much frothiness in the market that everything went up and now the stuff that isn't actually that rare or that special is going down fast and so you know they made almost as many Aventadors as they did gardos and we think of them more like Mercy's but there's you know 12 and a half thousand Aventadors 4,99 marcelos there's actually a few less they didn't build all the VIN but I uh so anything that isn't that special or that people didn't buy as passionately like SF 90s and 812s and McLaren 720s and 750s and you know these cars vors they're they're going down fast with no bottom insight and like I i' I've thought a little bit about trying to buy an Aventador but I get so scared when that they're going to take my offers that I'm just like man I I just I can't stand card appreciation and so I have not there's no rush to do so um but yeah the the car market in general is softening new car inventory is becoming a lot more available but it's the the high-end stuff every month there's a new record yeah it seems like Tesla prices are falling dramatically like I'm watching cars in bids yeah like probably twice a day is browsing for fun but I'm seeing almost brand new Tesla Model S plaids that are selling half of what they would have cost a year ago half in a lot of high-end electric cars we are seeing 50% residuals in one to two years so you're talking about cars that are losing four to 5% of their value a month that's insane um I and I don't I don't really know how we wrap our heads around that I mean it it's a lot of wealth that is being evaporated and or it's not it's not being evaporated it's going straight to these manufacturers who are heavily government funded and it's a it's a dark time because these cars have no bottom in value because they will require insanely expensive battery replacement and it's it's a tough thing so I I don't know what the future is for electric car vehicle electric car values but we should probably uh all be careful what cars do you think are the best investments today the best car Investments are the cars you really want to own there are nearly no examples of cars beating the stock market for more than 5 years at a time certainly none that have ever done it for 10 years at a time and so when you start thinking about what an investment should do in terms of performance it's unlikely that a car is going to do that now there are obviously safer cars to put your money in from a res residual value perspective and that usually is 10 to 20y Old really rare and really interesting manual transmission cars um I think the manual transmission elitism is probably going to wne over the next 10 years because there are so few people that still know how to drive them um in the same way that like pre-war cars are finicky enough that there's a lot of more modern car enthusiasts that don't tolerate what ownership would look like and so I I think that's the right way to approach it is that if there is a car that you actually want to own and you will enjoy Bo as an alternative asset class you're not wrong to go out and buy one but the only reason that I have you know probably turned I don't know a million dollars of car purchases and payments and repairs over the last 10 to 15 years into probably about five million or $6 million of value today with some debt attached to it is you know just because it's been my job I mean whether or not it was exactly my job I've treated it as you know one of the ways that I'm going to build wealth to ultimately retire one day is in the form of a car collection what do you think is the worst car ever made the worst cars are just the boring ones the ones that don't make you excited to take it somewhere I mean I think that there are unreliable cars there are difficult cars there are cars that are expensive to keep up but that doesn't make them bad I think the cars that I just don't have any interest in are the ones that are your Nissan ultimas that you're just trying to get a to B in not that there's anything wrong with that but you know in the same way that I don't care what designer makes my clothes because that's not something that I find enjoyment out of if you tried to let someone who doesn't like cars use one of mine as a way to get around they would abandon it on the side of the road or they break down and not be able to get where they wanted so it's it's one of these things that it's so hard to prescribe your own preferences and ideas onto someone else because we've all got different mindsets about how we want to use it what is a rare car that not many people know is rare or maybe something that you would say is underappreciated in today's market so when I first started to figure out that Lamborghini merciel go with a manual transmission were a lot more rare than people thought the thinking had been that 10% of the production was probably manual but the factory kept no records of this they had no way to find out I asked them repeatedly everybody I could like how many of these did you make and they yeah probably not that many but we don't know and so the theory had been that there were probably like 200 in the US and it turned out that there were only 33 and so when I discovered that by manually going through all my records and everything that I could find obviously I was the only person at a moment that knew this and I was ahead of the curve because I financed the nicest one that I could find and without putting anything down and that worked out really really well um spikers are a great example there were not really good records of exactly how many cars they ever made where they ended up where they moved to how many still ran stuff like that but you know even when you start to look at Le let's just say less special versions of a Diablo like there's only 343 Diablo SVS ever made that's the same number as there are duesenbergs so people don't think of an SV as being the best one but they are proper rare all of them are rare and so when you start thinking about cars today if they make 500 or 700 or500 that seems really really rare but in reality like so many older cars barely even exist and not and not even that old you know manual transmission LP generation gallardos there's just over 50 of in the US probably 300 worldwide I mean that's that's really really rare much more rare than a La Ferrari uh and I think there's a lot of examples like that that people could dig up and be in the right spot with what do you think of the SLS AMG I love what the car stands for I love it as a continuation of the 300sl goal Wing I hate the way they feel to sit in the ergonomics are really poor the visibility is really bad um they they make a great noise and a lot of the technology is very nice because it's not so insane that it's going to be wildly problematic down the road um I I've I don't fit in them all that well at 6'5 and so I I've never really cared to own one but it is one of those cars that you could love and it be exactly the right dream car the production numbers make sense the usability makes sense everything's great about it if it fits what you want to do with it what about as an investment no there's there's just too many of them to really have a reliable investment your car the Ford GT is a true anomaly because it's the first time that a car that's that common has actually ascended in value to the Now by Common we're talking about 4,500 examples of the 4D GT the SLS AMG I think is is pry similar yeah I think it's I think they actually made less I think slightly less there's yeah there's fewer sls's there's fewer slrs um it's it's just it's awesome but the the reason is that it's the only uh us car that kind of fits into that class and so if there's any nationalism or patri patriotism it makes sense to Aspire to have get the Ford how do you invest your money today is it mostly in cars yeah it is it is grossly disproportionate and irresponsible in cars you know I have always been very insistent on tracking my net worth because most of my wealth always came from Real Estate and cars going up in value you know you see a lot in the Exotic Car space of generational wealth and insane privilege and the people that are out there spending crazy money on cars are doing so with money that they didn't earn I did not come from money I didn't have anybody hand me anything from a business or opportunity your financial perspective to be able to do this and so I was always kind of chasing like well how do self-made people do this and the real thing that I landed on was just avoid depreciation and so but watching them go up the only way that I could ever tell each year if I was really getting ahead is if the stuff that I was building equity in was also building its own Equity by going up in value and so I've always made it a good practice to sort of track you know where my net worth was and I it was wild when you know as you start to you know make a name for yourself on the internet the first suggested Google result was always Ed Bolan Networth and I'm like oh man so I I made a video and obviously didn't divulge everything but I I danced around it a bit but I think that you know when I I've always tried to always to save money because my parents taught me that that's the only hope for retirement in their minds was to and I I try to do that as hands off as possible by by just dumping what I can into a mutual fund you know whatever's left over um or you know with some kind of a financial manager and I've gone through a few different iterations there but I don't pick stocks I don't day trade I've never met somebody that was really happy that did that for very long and so I uh I kind of just rely on that I mean my biggest wins have always been in cars and so you know you get a lot of advice to just do what you're good at and and so it's granted me a little more license to buy cars more aggressively but uh but yeah I I try you know to diversify between the equity that I've got in my home and the equity that I've got in my cars and the Investments that I have but it it's it's never as round as it ought to be and what about the revenue where's all the revenue coming from for me the uh so in you know for anybody that's making content you get platform Revenue you get brand deal Revenue you get merch revenue and then hopefully the activities that you're documenting earn some money and you know I saw stradman mention that over the last four or five years his revenue is very flat and mine is too but it always comes from a different place you know one year you make it on YouTube one year you make it on brand deals one year you make it on Facebook one year the cars just do well and so I would say the same thing that I don't make nearly the money that he does but it's it's always about the same so while we're on that topic how do you make sure your kids don't grow up spoiled because that's something we were kind of talking about last night interestingly enough and it seems like a lot of people who come from nothing and now have something like this had that concern of like my kids are not going to have the same struggle as me yeah so that is the monster in my closet it is what the only thing that keeps me up at night is how do I raise well adjusted kids because I know that even though I didn't come from money I was always a a couple steps away from being a character in a British crime movie like I mean like it there's just so many things and in seeing the children of the people that I was selling cars to not to disparage them but a lot of them had a lot of problems you know teenage pregnancies drug addiction things like that and I am terrified of those outcomes like most parents would be fortunately I can attribute most of the optical success to the jobs and that and and explain that they're all broken and they're all heavily leveraged and all the things and so I it can all go away very quickly and I certainly exist where there's a rip cord of like look if things start to go pear-shaped we're got called to missions in Africa everything gets sold or shoved in a storage container and we're going to go see the world in a different light and I I think that you know we've got an amazing group of friends that are in that same season of life raising young children and and trying to trying to instill the right values and we've got a great church that we're members of and just trying to keep the right perspective and in the same way that you have to keep the right perspective on how you use the stuff that you have that it's not this cherished treasure that it's okay for it to get hurt that the kids can jump around and climb on the seats and whatever when they come over and do that I don't care and if you know everything's been hurt before it can be fixed again and and I think just trying to maintain that mindset while also fostering their ability to dream when I wrote the book about the Cannonball record I opened it with a short letter to my son and I said effectively as your father the only thing that really matters to me is that you come to understand that God loves you more than I ever could and if you can understand the Salvation that's available through the life death and resurrection of Jesus then I've taught you everything that I have to do but beyond that if I can teach you one more thing it's what's in this book and it's that I was so fortunate as a young person to stumble upon the idea of canonball that could be the the perfect manifestation of who I wanted to prove to myself that I was as a car Enthusiast as a problem solver as you know somebody who could evaluate and hopefully in the right ways risk uh it was it was the Super Bowl of being me and I I don't expect it to be cannibal I don't expect it to be cars I don't expect it to be lizards I whatever your thing becomes my hope as your dad is that you find that and and that's what can kind of be that distraction in the back of your mind that goal that's so far out there that you don't know how you're going to do it how you're going to afford it how you're going to get there but when you reach that Finish Line it you know I'll be even happier than you are and I think that's I I hope that the opportunities that I give him and the experiences that we show him and my daughter as well but that we're that we're pointing them towards finding those passions and those motivations that can you to whatever the ending point is how did you find spirituality were you raised like this I I grew up in a church and certainly was introduced to it I explored and read and researched a lot of other religions as well trying to find peace in that and I think that you know I'm extremely blessed the the best thing my parents ever did for me was introduced me to the church and people in church and mentors and things like that that I found a lot of growth opportunity and value in but beyond that I I think that as I really started to test my faith and you know run into issues that weren't as cut and dry and as easy to understand just from the Bible or required some interpretation they showed me people to talk to and and uh I did that I I did as much digging and research to try to find the peace that we all want in spiritual aspects of life and found it and so it's a lifelong Pursuit but again it's like when you when you choose that that as an anchor in some of the more relationships and you know things that you do in your life it offers so much perspective tithing is the same way right I mean my parents were always very diligent about tithing and I saw that I'm like wow you know why are you just giving 10% of your money away mindlessly to the church and you know but as you experience it yourself um first of all it does open up some amazing blessings and the ways that you can benefit in terms of making more money the more I tithe the more I make always um and you'll hear most people say that about charitable giving is that the more you give the more you end up it just goes around but I think also the perspective that you can have on money bit when you are making the the first thing that happens is that goes out every month then the rest of the month kind of Falls in place and I think having that attitude that our stuff our opportunities or gifts aren't really our own gives you the opportunity to really have an interesting perspective on that when I was at the dealership and really around all rich people you find some really unhealthy attitudes about money and my much more than a focus on investments or net worth or anything like that I I saw so many people so worried about such small amounts of money particularly relative to what they had that I developed this idea personally that I didn't want to care about how much money I had I wanted to focus on how much money I choose to not care about and if I can make that number go up not irresponsibly but if I can make that number climb my happiness will go up if I choose to not care about $100 then everything that doesn't cost $100 I just choose not to think about if I can get that number up to $500 then there's a whole lot of problems a whole lot of things that could break on a whole lot of stuff a whole lot of unexpected cost or whatever that I just I choose not to care about it and usually you know it's like about how much money you can make in a day is kind of what I saw it gravitating towards and that's probably stretching it a little hard but I wanted to stretch it really hard because if I could you know and there were times I was like I need to dial this back a little bit like that was a really rough month but really it never bit me and my thought is always been like if I could get that number to $5,000 or $10,000 like I wouldn't worry about anything I mean like imagine like the transmission goes out on a normal car or air conditioning unit goes out in your house if you were able to not care about that at all and you just were like all right it'll work I mean we're just going to do it imagine the Bliss walking through life with that kind of mindset who you calculating on the way here uh the rental car is charging us at this point 75 cents a Mile and we were trying to calculate if it was cheaper try toate I was trying to calculate if it would be cheaper to drive the car to the airport and pay the 75 cents a mile or drop it off here and get an Uber to the airport so what he was essentially doing was he was driving the rental car and he said Jack can you find out how much the Uber is going to cost and I kind of thought well it doesn't really matter because we're going to pay it right and then he said well no not necessarily I look the Uber's like what was it $0 $404 right 30 40 bucks and then he said well now how many miles is it to the airport and I said okay here we go and so I found out it was like 30 40 miles or something like that and then I'm like so it's like essentially the same price probably I don't know 75 cents a mile versus about a dollar a mile yeah and I said like Graham you know I I would rather just not be doing all of these calculations when we're you know go getting ready to you know film the show you know I'm kind of in the zone right now I just don't want to be distracted by something like this I'm like it maybe is a difference of a few dollars and he said well is your time that you're spending right now doing nothing worth more or less than a few dollars he said that to me well and then so so what I'm saying is that your rort is is your mental well-being and peaceful quality of life also worth two or three um because I just think of opportunity cost if I'm if I if I'm at a red light my time is worth zero so if I could do a calcul that saves $3 at the time I'm at a red light extrapolate that over every single red light that I hit while driving imagine that every time you get to a red light you do a calculation save save $3 for a time that you're just sitting at a but then you're never present like you're always doing something rather than just kind of existing which I think there's a lot of value in that and I think as a friend you tend to try to fill your time always like minute by minute with things and I don't if it works for you it works for you but I have a hard time believing it works what do you think Ed if that it's a recreation at that point right if that is how you like to spend your time there's nothing wrong with that um and you know it's it's no different than couponing or working credit card points these are all things that people spend a lot of time to achieve a financial outcome that they view as being worthwhile and I mean obvious viously I waste a lot of money on a lot of stuff that it ends up being a lot less gluttonous than it looks like because it all works out in the wash when they when I sell them but I I think that you know it again it's hard to prescribe advice of you know like Dave Ram saying you know get out of debt avoid all this stuff well some people just want to live and have their stuff and they're going to make they're going to work harder to make their payments and they you know and they can have a healthy mindset about this stuff um um many people can't and it just comes down to discipline and I think that you know the more that we can instill that in our kids and I will say that at the moment that you have children you're uh you'll enjoy those quiet stoplight moments a lot more than you do now but it's uh yeah I mean if that's the way you want to spend your time knock yourself out I told him from now on I should probably be doing the driving so he can do run his own calulations my calculations yeah what is your advice to young people today I think that my advice to young people is is really to seize whatever opportunities they find and so we've talked a lot about about privilege and what that looks like and what that means and I developed a perspective on that as as I looked back on how difficult the early days of my career were so I graduated from college in 2008 amidst a recession unemployment for graduates of Georgia Tech was 55% so I had six roommates one of us got a real job you know one was substitute teachings couple went to grad school I'm living in my warehouse renting out cars that I can barely make the payments on um and you know so that was really hard and if you did get a job your starting salary was like 50 Grand with a college degree and and that was a a tough thing to kind of wrap your head around like what does that really look like for the future but at the same time you know we all kind of got our lives together and a couple years later we bought our first house and you know that was at the bottom of the real estate market which was a huge opportunity and we weren't making student loan payments because I was born in Georgia the lottery at the time paid for all of tuition room board books food everything um if you had a b average and went to an instate school so I got $150,000 education for free that house that we bought had $250,000 in found Equity I was not a real estate investor but everybody's house went up in value for the next 10 years and the stock market from its bottom when we started you know throwing in2 three $500 a month whatever you could manage um you know was a returned 14% a year for a decade and so every dollar became four and every payment became three and it was like at 28 years old that um is like a million dollars of net worth that I should have had through the privilege of being born in Georgia in 1985 and I didn't have that because I'd you know spend it on cars were at that point depreciating and stuff like that but you know and then you extrapolate a million dollar net worth at 28 years old to retiring at 65 that's $30 million so if I retire which I am well on track to do with less than $30 million I have underachieved for the privilege of being born when and where I was regardless of who my parents were now I mean so what all that means is that as young people today are entering a world of rampant inflation High interest rates preposterously expensive housing cost and all this stuff it's easy to get demoralized and to think like man there there's no hope for me to achieve these dreams that I've had but there are also going to be profound advantages to being in the moment that you're at and if you can find the ways to use those you can be so powerful for instance if you graduated high school today the people who will be your first bosses are objectively the least motivated and least hardworking people that the workforce has ever seen so your ability to jump past them when you just get in there and decide I'm going to work so hard and take every opportunity that I have and Rise as fast as I can in this organization and be loyal to a company that expects that from no one right now you can stand out much more than I could have entering the workforce as I did and you know yeah everything's expensive but your starting salaries are triple what they were 15 20 years ago and that's a whole lot ahead of the inflation and so I think that you know if you can step back and this may take a decade when you just think like all right well I was doing what I could and then you realize wow that was a really unique advantage that I had and you know I'm glad I either made the best of it or I saw him make the best of it and that really worked out well for him and I've got to keep that kind of ear to the ground of what'll work I think that's a great piece of advice that hard work is now like so much more difficult to come by yeah and you could just use that as to your advantage and what a wild concept like you know be willing to stay late when somebody has to be willing to you know not take your day off sometimes you know don't clock out at 4:59 p.m. or whenever it is you know don't mind going into the office when everybody insists on working remotely there are so many things that you can do as an employee as a team player to to go above and beyond and that is not the working mindset right now it's what's in it for me and then look that's not new it's not that only you know people of you know that are between 20 and 40 are in that you know headspace but it's uh it certainly is a thing Ed thank you so much for coming on I really appreciate it I'm going to link to all of your channels Down Below in the description thank you thank you for inviting us out thank you for dinner last night by the way hey I appreciate you coming to town get home safe yeah thank you we definitely want to come back it's a beautiful area just us driving around here we were complimenting all the houses are so manicured everything is gorgeous we also drove from Nashville we did to Georgia guys we did that for you for you guys so if you haven't hit the like button and subscribed already now is your chance it's free just subscribe that would mean the world to us make it all worth it thank you