We Almost Got Scammed

welcome back to the 49th ever episode of the iced coffee hour i'm craig and to date this podcast has made 55 706.93 oh my god that was great that was incredible thank you so much craig uh craig thank you so much for coming on the podcast gonna be a really fun episode because i feel like this is one of the few episodes that we've had someone on the podcast who's not on youtube is this the first one we've done for them oh my gosh it just might be christine christine is not on youtube oh but she's but she's like a public figure yeah she's on tv this is this is our first well does it count if my daughter has a youtube channel she's got i think 100 subscribers there we go that's pretty good yeah nice diamonds for kim everybody check her out nice i feel like we should probably get this out of the way but how did you two meet exactly and and what sparked your interest so much that you would like to extend an invitation for him to come on the plane yeah this is unusual by the way usually we reach out to other people to have on the podcast and it's us actively thinking oh who would be great for you know it would be great to have on oh we haven't had uh nato brian on an award let's get him on her yeah so this came about when i uh posted that i bought the ford gt and you sent me an instagram message and i don't did i respond to you before was this like a no because my my instagram dms get flooded and i think that sometimes i just sort by most recent and yours happened to come up and you had a few pictures up there right and so i looked at the pictures i think i was with jack at the time and i was telling you dude look at his collection so you have basically the same for gt that i do i i i did i bought it uh 2005 2006 and it had my vanity plate on it which is l-e-m-n-l-a-w that was it yeah so i sent it to you right away and i said graeme you're going to love your car i loved mine here's a picture yeah and you you were one of you yeah under your name he got right back to me and i said oh you like that let me show you some of the other cars that have worn this plate and i i think i flooded your box after that can we share some of those pictures on here sure okay yeah and i remember seeing these pictures and being like this is insane the car collection that you that you have had over the last i don't know how many years was incredible i mean this is like a dream garage that i feel like every teenager would want the cars that you now have but yeah but you sent all these pictures i was shown jack and then you responded back with this is what i do for a living if you if if you ever want to have me on the podcast let me know i thought it was just so interesting because it was so different than everyone else that we have on the on the channel of just like oh yeah i know i do youtube i'm in personal finance i'm investing this for us is such just a different perspective that i think is so important to have but this is a fun episode i think because one you're you have a legal background and you own the largest lemon law practice correct yes i'm a consumer attorney we have the largest automobile warranty practice lemon law in the nation for the last 30 plus years and i also do a lot of uh telephone consumer protection act cases uh which involve robocalls and how much can you collect per cause if fifteen hundred dollars you can make per phone call 500 to 1500 per call federal law you can also make a lot more than that in certain states like texas virginia missouri which have separate state laws wow could you tell us about that really quickly so those are the my auto warranty is expired i can't get them to stop calling me they're calling me all the time i could get them to pay me 500 to 1500. so right the types of calls we're talking about there's a couple different types under the telephone consumer protection act the first one is the one that you're referencing which were called do not call cases you put your name on the do not call registry uh with the fcc and you have uh the ftc rather and you have told them i don't want to get these calls and still companies use random dialers and they just keep calling numbers one after the next and oftentimes you get a robocall since you never gave your consent for those calls they're unlawful under the federal law between 500 and 1500 per call you're entitled to for each of those calls now the reason why it's this way is because you never agreed to those calls and because these companies are doing this thousands of times a day each company some of them to sell solar panels automobile warranties insurance you name it if they can sell it using a phone they're trying to do so and oftentimes you pick up the phone and then you're asked to wait or you hear a noise and you're waiting for somebody to pick up the phone whether in this country or some other country and it's just a process by which they try to wear you down and keep calling you until you buy their product wow how do you actually collect money i feel like these these businesses are structured in such a way where it's a shell company within a shell company and a trust and an offshore account and they're routing phone calls from like you know different ip addresses how do you actually locate who's calling you okay so like you i do this for a living so we know a lot of the bad actors there's always more every day but there are certainly occasions where we have to do a lot of investigation most of those overseas companies that call you are actually working for a company in the united states sometimes they're direct hires and they're working overseas sometimes they are subcontracted parties what they call marketing affiliates which is a fancy way of saying we're having them break the law for us and then the primary company claims well we didn't make the calls we're not responsible so that we have to prove that they are in fact responsible they knew what this company was doing or maybe if their contract said they're not supposed to be doing it um the lead company understands that the the parent company is going to tolerate it because it's going to help the bottom line wow why are we receiving so many of those auto warranty calls right now because like what you do for a living it makes money and if it makes money companies are going to do it until the cost of violating the law exceeds the money that they're making for example the average warranty company will make about 5 million a year in telephone calls wow so if they have to pay out 500 000 in violations they don't love it but they do it wow i don't even understand like what are they selling because i'm not i don't receive any of these calls well um you should feel fortunate you don't i mean i get tons of calls from like kelly blue book who calls me all the time i have a totally random number that's not associated with me at all it's it's just like a burner phone basically i i receive phone calls on that number i'm not on any list at all what is it like what do they do we want to let you know your auto warranty is expiring please press zero to be connected with and like that's pretty much it so basically graham would approach you and he'd say like hey i got a phone call from like a robo-caller trying to take you know money from me for an auto warranty can you get me fifteen hundred dollars is that how it works so much easier than that it could be a call or a text do you ever get these crazy texts uh matthew mcconaughey says he's not going to marry her and then there's a link and you click on the link and it goes to some company that's trying to sell you some rewards product let me see really quick if i could find a thing uh let's see renew your warranty before we close the file yes if you're interested in renewing your auto warranty now please press five now or press nine to be removed from our list oh wow see and and i've heard by the way that if you pick up then you're on a separate list of people who actually pick up the phone is that true well it's different companies do things different ways it depends on how the computer is programmed generally speaking they will call until they take you off a list so you're in there and if you get a recall you're going to continue to get calls unless you're removed from the list the way that happens normally in our case is when we sue we demand that the client's phone number is taken off the list in some cases we know the company we don't put that in the release because we know they're going to call again and we just file a second claim do you have to prove that they have called you multiple times and you've asked to be removed from the list but they continue to call you like how do you delineate between like okay you can charge 1500 from these people and give it to you versus no you can't they're not breaking the law yet that's a great question so typically speaking the first calls free or the first text is free some companies have adapted to being sued by only sending one text but they'll send you one text a variety of different times in a variety different messages and they're hoping you don't take action other companies are just looking at the model and we make five million dollars a year we pay 500 000 in settlements let's keep doing it until it's no longer profitable and from i tell these companies up front listen i'm a consumer lawyer and i want to protect my client from these calls but i understand your business reason for calling these people you're making money understand that like a postage stamp or or uh some other feed that a business incurs is overhead i'm part of the overhead if you're going to do that can this is something that a person can do on their own or is it something where you need to hire an attorney to represent you the answer to that question is a lot of people are doing this on their own and they're successful i i know people who have made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this on their own wow either with help yeah uh from companies that are uh providing packages that they sell for you know forty fifty dollars to help inform people and equip them to go after the callers or the texters and i belong to a number of groups where we discuss you know what are you seeing with this company what are you seeing with that company i'm dealing with such and such is that a legitimate person what do you think i should recover so we do share that information because even though these are not my clients i want to help them get their recoveries now is this something where somebody can almost entrap some of these people in the sense that you get like a new phone number and you purposely put your put your number out there as much as possible and then receive these calls in and just be like i've seen you you you you can you do that there are absolutely those people out there there's a lot of successful people at that wow we try to filter out those cases coming into our firm because what we try to do is we try to help victims turn something that's really upsetting them into something that has at least been worth their while to pursue and to stop for people who go out of their way to create phone numbers i know people have many phone numbers so yes there are people who have done that very very successfully um small percentage of people the vast number of people are not those types of people ah jack you can't do that i know that was sounding like a good business side hustle like things you could do on a weekend is just go get a phone get a phone number like a google voice number start making in the calls you know you don't have to that's the whole point we're all getting these robocalls right so if you just make it instead of a a side hustle if you just make it like a in my way hustle you know this is getting in my way yeah i'm gonna take action i'll do it a couple times get used to it every time i get a call i'm gonna go after these people it will definitely profit you and it will be legitimate you don't have to make anything up to turn along could you like mediate right because i obviously i'm not an attorney but what if they call me and i say like and i i get into contact with them and i say look can we mediate and you give me 750 instead of me getting a lawyer and then we charge you like 1500 or do they never do that and you always have to utilize a lawyer to actually like sue them okay so it's like going to the bar and asking somebody if you can buy them a drink you don't know your answer you're going to get unless you ask right you never succeed anytime you don't do something but if you try you might get what you want some people are very successful at getting reduced recoveries uh some companies will some companies won't and um you never know until you ask it does happen though and how many what percentage of these companies are us-based the vast majority of them really yeah the vast majority like 98 wow so let's just run through like a scenario right so i get a phone call and it says scam likely and then i answer it and then it's like a robocolor like what do i do from there well there's a variety of things there's technologies fortunately on every cell phone that allow you to record screenshots of text let's say or recall or record conversations using an app and you might say well wait a second a lot of states don't let me do that you have to get somebody's permission to record generally speaking not if the call is coming in to you because it's an unsolicited sales call and you're trying to identify the caller your purpose is legitimate to record you're like look i've gotten calls from this company before i want to find out who they are they never tell me who they are and i'm doing this for forensic reasons to identify the company because they by the way they will always deny that they called you if you don't have proof always so if you get a call and you send a letter and you don't have proof a screenshot which could be spoofed or a recording um they're going to just deny it and so what we can do as lawyers that the individual can't do is to forensically trace where that calls come from right so basically you get the call and then you have to send a letter to the company yes okay so i didn't answer your question i'll get to it now yes so if you can identify the company let's say it's john's warranty company you say john you know i'd like to to talk to you about this warranty that you're calling me about can you give me more information and they're really they're experts at not giving you the information they know what you're thinking perhaps so sometimes what you do is you buy the product you buy the 600 warranty and i'll tell you a way to do that and not get hurt but let's say you buy that and you're like wait a second i just i just dropped 600 on this once you buy that warranty you know who sold it to you it's on your credit card now you might say but i don't have the opportunity to spend all this money on these calls for people knowing my credit card information there are uh apps available one is is called the cash app where you can have a zero balance but still have the card so when they try to charge the purchase and it doesn't go through you still get the information of the company that tried to charge the card wow what was that sponsor we did for that privacy privacy guys yeah if you haven't already download sign up for privacy.com it's an amazing service are they sponsoring this but they're darn they're they're great services i know they are like i use them here all the time so it's actually an amazing this would have been such a great plug for that because you're able to create these these basically one-off numbers it's a it's a burner it's a basically a burner debit card and you can create like 15 of them a month sure and then you could just cancel it with the click of a button right set transaction limits and do all that that's exactly the type of service we're talking about wow it turns the tables on the people who think that they're immune from being responsible and when you turn the tables on them they pay they know because the last thing they want is to shut down the machine that's making them all these millions of dollars a year are these warranties actually legitimate or are they all just scams that's so i was wondering like what actually happens when you buy it what if it's a great product yeah like it saves you so much money because it's usually auto warranty yes and an answer to your question in my experience this is the part of my practice where i can answer definitively as an expert um these warranties really are not that great okay most of them they'll say whatever they need to say to you on the phone to sell you the warranty but when you get the information sent to you after you buy the warranty it's lots of disclaimers and lots of limitations now the good part about it is under federal law if you're not provided a copy of what you're buying before the transaction goes through none of the limitations are enforceable so if i sell you a warranty and i've promised you all these different things or even if i haven't but i told you it's a full warranty and then you pay for it you get the warranty in the mail or it's sent to you online and you see all these limitations all those limitations are ineffective because you were not provided the right to see what the limitations were before you made the purchase so what if what if they call gram and they're like hey uh you know we want to sell you a warranty for your car six hundred dollars and graham's like okay and then he does it for his ford gt and then he crashes his ford gt and yeah warranty that would be an insurance issue it would be like if the engine breaks so what is it what does a warranty even mean it's actually not a warranty under federal law it's really a service contract they call it a warranty because everybody knows what a warranty is very few people know what a service contract is under the law service contract is like toilet paper compared to the finest egyptian thread towel of a warranty there's an analogy again so i love this we gotta get better at these announcements i know yeah so do i agree with my wife so um so basically service contracts are not what people want to buy usually subprime lenders and subprime buyers are the ones who are most victimized by these service contracts because they really believe they're buying insurance they're buying some type of protection and the vast majority of cases when they have a claim it's a big game you know allegedly you're calling the administrator the warranty to have your claim covered all the administrators doing is calling back the dealership that sold you the warranty or the company that sold you the warranty and asking them what they want you to do and then they trickle the communication back to you and say oh i'm sorry it's been denied but they'll pay you something and then the person takes whatever's offered so it's a big scam wow it's pretty much like a vast majority of them are just scams i use the word scam to say that what you think you're buying and what you're actually sold are two different things so in that definition yeah that's what i'm going to say do they tell you something yeah very a lawyer think this yeah yeah you know you have a lot of followers people are watching this and i don't want them to get the wrong impressions i understand yeah so they are selling you something what they're selling you you don't know until you get the the terms has ever been thought about doing like a class action getting everyone together like i've seen those um i i can never pronounce this mesothelioma i can't i could never mesothelioma yes first classes right first has there ever been somebody who would do something like this for a commercial saying if you've received these you know robocalls please call us we want to know your information with mesothelioma there's actually i almost did it myself yeah there's there's a fund that was created many many years ago by the courts by which claimants who meet certain standards can get a recovery from the fund that's been established for these types of cases these are really based upon pursuing claims thinking that the company you're suing is going to have the resources to pay the result so recently there was a case that was finally upheld um at the highest level that involved directv that had made i think it was something like 750 million dollars worth of penalties in the tcpa they were sued for a class action they were trying to avoid liability they're trying to blame the insurance company they're trying to do a bunch of different things and ultimately they said hey this is just too much for the harm that we caused the statute is unconstitutional and the court said no you know you've done this you'll pay now directv has the money they're owned by at t now they sure do but the average company will have far more liability dollars at stake than they have resources to pay what they often do i know one company i just took a 100 000 default judgment against one of these warranty companies last week i'll send you a copy uh where the company all they do is they change names of the company and they go back into business under a different name this particular company is owned by somebody who has a very checkered history uh criminal history of people around this person and there's a lot of question marks about this person but it's a big money maker yeah who starts these up people who want to make money and don't want to do it the way that perhaps you want to do it the way i want to do it wow they want to get as much as they can spend as little as possible and not let anything get in their way unless somebody stops them interesting so you tell me if i receive a phone call asking for an auto warranty all i have to do is call you and then you can bring me money well if you had you been listening to me and my great analogies you would have known that what i said is you have to make a recording of these calls um right right document these calls i'm not trying to chastise you i'm just trying to be clear like it's not as easy as all that right if you have documentation or call us and we'll tell you what we need from you and and we've had clients who we've sent back to get this information and they've contacted us again a month or two later and gotten us exactly what we needed um yes the answer is yes we tell people if you're going to get a a text message please before that message expires hit the record button on your screen if it's an iphone for example or use an android app there's there's a couple of them out there record yourself pressing the button on that link see where it goes to it's going to be a different company it's going to be a different entity scroll down to the bottom slowly and show me the name of the company at the bottom of that message then yes the answer is yes i can help you i wish i'm going to get one of these calls during the podcast i would love that that would make the episode if if just i'm putting it out in the universe right now if we could receive a call like that during this episode i will be so happy hey the statute really does things more than just give people money that they they think that they're they're getting something for nothing i've had clients who've received so many of these calls and of course these are the extreme cases but i've had a client uh who actually went off of government assistance got a new house and got a ramp because they were handicapped got a ramp to their house because i got them so much money wow i hope that's not one now but yes it does happen and for those stories you really are so happy because their lives are different than what yours is and what mine is and you know you've made a difference it really is a nice thing to be able to take such a horrible um set of circumstances being bombarded by collection calls for a medical problem that wasn't your fault and be able to turn that all around and put somebody into their own position of owning their house that's accessible for them that they don't know anybody any money for they're not going to be on the government assistance anymore and they're moving forward with their life that's incredible it really was a great story for us and we have a couple of them like that um a lot of these cases i will say a lot of these cases do arise from medical debt and so people who get themselves in a situation either because they had a medical problem or maybe an employment problem they lost their job they can't pay their bills anymore they're getting these calls they've told the company to stop calling and they continue to call them got it how did you get involved in this so like i said earlier i had a saline mustang that i bought and probably paid every penny that i should have or more to buy this car as my first new vehicle which year was it it was 1989. is that the one with the bar the the roll cage bar over the top oh my sticker on the side yeah yeah i love those it was a great car and uh i was in law school and ford had a paint process back then where they decided to skip the primer to save money and they thought this would be great yeah you could save all this money saline jesus okay the stickers came off the car the paint came off the car i had them repainted they were glad to do it fine the second time that they returned that they didn't fix it properly and the paint was still coming off i reached out and i said you need to buy this car back they said up this is a lease vehicle pennsylvania doesn't cover leases and anyway we've already tried to fix it forget about it so i got the name of the person i was dealing with i will only say his first name was drew he's probably watching because he's retired now and um hey drew ice drew make sure to hit the like button if you haven't done that already and get your free stock down below in the description it's worth all the way up to 50 you may as well do it it's free money there you go joe i gave you something back savage you know we got to do the other glasses [Laughter] so so i told drew i thought you were tired here's my name here's i'm in law school you're going to remember my name in the future and i graduated law school i opened my own practice shortly thereafter and i started taking lemon law cases and drew was somebody i have deposed probably a hundred times over the years no way a lot to drew i i thank you drew took care of me i took care of drew but it was never voluntarily uh what is depose the pose means i took his his deposition under his foreign testimony about oh wow so if a client had a car problem yeah we the manufacturer would appoint an expert or a representative to talk about it and to tell you why it's not a lemon and because i'm a car guy i've worked as a mechanic i've been a car guy my whole life like you i knew when somebody was telling me something that wasn't true and i could dissect it and turn it around on them which was pretty novel back then because most lawyers are not car people so we were able to call them out on their answers and win case as a matter of fact it took the better part of 10 years before i lost my first lemon low case but um that's how it all started and because the law allows the manufacturer forces the manufacturer to pay attorney's fees my marketing concept everybody's got a marketing concept was hey consumer if i can't help you i'm not going to get paid but if i can help you you're going to get your money back you're not going to pay me anything and so i wrote a radio advertisement shortly thereafter on a sports radio station in philadelphia and i listened to that first advertisement air with my partner bob bob silverman and um before the advertisement ended this is back in the 19 early 1990s we got our first call before the ad ended and we had 40 cases after the first month wow we had a lot more cases after six months and we very quickly became the largest in the united states i at the inception of the internet i bought lemonlaw.com and 1-800 lemon law is our phone number wow and we have been you know i guess i'm two to my own horn um we have been the largest lemon law practice in the country ever since i feel like we should also explain lemon law yeah could you so a lemon law is basically you bought a car and the car has a warranty we've had that word before and the car is not repaired under warranty within a reasonable period of time every state has a lemon law some are better than others generally speaking if the manufacturer through its authorized dealership has not resolved the problems within a certain period of time or certain number of repair attempts or even if the parts are on order and haven't yet arrived the clock ticks against the manufacturer and you can assert a claim either for a full refund minus a small offset for use or you can ask for a new car your choice and and get a brand new car um and so what we can do is help people get what they paid for that's what it's all about i bought this great car with this great warranty in some cases like some of these career manufacturers are offering 10-year warranties and in year eight they're getting a claim because they've consistently had these problems with the car and the manufacturer said hey this is an eight-year-old car we're not paying any legal claim and we respond with yeah but you issued a 10-year warranty and all these claims have been covered under warranty you haven't fixed this car throughout that whole period of time we've got to client a new car or a refund that's incredible my initial understanding of lemon law was that if you have the same issue three times or it's been if the car has been in the service shop for so many days then it qualifies is there a rule of thumb like that so your your reading is correct however i want to be very clear on this it's not the same problem it's the same complaint dealers and manufacturers are trained to write repair invoices to avoid lemon law liability they might call it something different each time you bring it in and yet you've complained of the same problem so the repair invoice may not bear a resemblance to what you've actually told them and they're trying to avoid the liability so i tell people if you said my car doesn't shift right three times and one time they write test drive car car operating the specifications second one uh test drive car they all operate that way third one uh car shifted normally it's all the same complaint what the dealer does to address the problem is what the warranty is providing you the right to have done so if they choose not to do anything other than test drive the car that's on the dealer and the manufacturer they could have put the car on the lift they could have pulled parts apart they could have investigated it because you have the right to it under the warranty but they don't because the monetary compensation for a dealership is not there unless they find the problem if they can't find the problem in a certain period of time they're not going to get paid what do you think the dealer is going to do or they know that a car has a problem that's common to all these vehicles or most of them and there's no fix so they'll send you on your way saying there's nothing wrong with your car or they're all operating the same way or the manufacturer is aware of the problem how does that resolve your problem the law steps in and says no you can't you can't respond that way to people they paid for something you issued a warranty you failed give them a new car or refund their choice and you have to pay attorney's fees manufacturer because you're not really stepping up for these people what made you so uniquely successful above all other lemon law practices well like you and like graham i love what i do i could talk cars all day long um i i usually do to a fault and much to my family's uh dismay i love cars anything with an engine mostly cars motorcycles and so when you have a passion for something and you've heard this before when you have a passion for something whether it be real estate or cars or something else it's really not work if you somebody presents you with a a rubik's cube problem and says can you can you fix this and you love doing it there's an analogy by the way so you do them take note of this so that's that's what it is i just love what i do and and so does my partner he's he's fantastic at it and and so as our staff our entire staff we have about 50 people working for us we cover about 48 states the united states and uh that's what we'd love to do we love to tell the manufacturers why they're wrong and we love to explain it to the judges how did you get into law in the first place did you always know you wanted to be a lawyer absolutely not did you always know you wanted to be a youtuber no no but you fell into it you love it right so um you could probably see it in my eyes now you're getting me started yeah um basically it started with my my father mother who felt it uh i was really good at presenting myself and really bad accepting no for an answer much like you i'm sure and um they said you really should go to law school and it never hit my radar i wanted to go to wall street i wanted to to do something long financial minds this is the mid 1980s so a decision had to be made and my parents said listen go to law school don't practice if you don't want to it's good to have graduated law school and have that on your resume wherever you go whatever you do so i did and i had been married previously my wife at the time had gotten pregnant around the time i was graduating law school and so guess what i was not going to be a working lawyer i had to pay some bills and i found lemon law through my experience in law school and i thought nobody's doing this there was no internet by the way for you for you to there actually was a time before internet and the world was a crazy place yeah listen if we wanted to watch a movie you had to go down to the store blockbuster yes yes yes and that was that was in the advanced times that's when it was easy to do right something i haven't mentioned you i actually wrote the nation's first computer lemon law bill in 1999. and microsoft came in and killed it in our pennsylvania house of representatives what were you trying to accomplish like a computer has an issue it's not fixed they're taking too long they give you another computer there was a company back then called gateway i don't know if you remember it yes we used to have a one of those gateway could be we had a big thing on the floor and then the big you know computer they were very successful very quickly remember that they were primarily competitors with dell and compact right and although dell had one too gateway had an arbitration provision in their agreements for with consumers that was so burdensome and so onerous as to what you had to do to get relief from the company if you weren't happy with them fixing your computer that i decided to write a bill for the house of representatives in pennsylvania that forced them to do better than what their arbitration procedures forced consumers to do you had to go to a certain place i think it was illinois to file a claim it didn't matter where you were from you had to file it in illinois appear in illinois pay 2 500 for the right to have your claim heard you couldn't file in court it was an arbitration provision which is one of the reasons why attorneys hate arbitration provisions uh plaintiff slurs and that's why it was written it got introduced microsoft appeared with some other companies and squashed it they spent way too much money they knew what was going to happen if this first law got passed but at the time on the west coast there were companies there was a cable show called silicon spin on tech tv and john devorak who is a computer world uh reporter he was the host of the show and he got wind of what i had introduced and he started inviting me out monthly as the expert on law and computers this is you know brand new stuff at the time nobody really had done it so i had been on that show probably 10 or 15 times before it finally went off the air we just couldn't get that computer lemon law off the ground fortunately there are other laws federal laws the magnus moss warranty act for warranties which we use with lemon law which you can use for any product over twenty five and you can enforce warranties that way through lawsuits under federal law that's incredible where are you investing all of this money as you're making it well up until about 10 years ago in a divorce that changed things but uh in the last 10 or 12 years um i am like you i'm a big advocate of tech and i try to seek out things that i really love and invest in them i've been a huge supporter and a stockholder of well not huge for them huge for me in tesla and apple which my my two biggies that i love okay um i feel that what elon has done with the company and listen we we sue tesla every now and then so you know for me to invest that's right i believe in that company okay they're not a bad company they're a little new to the game but um they're not really a car company they're a tech company so uh just fascinated with the whole idea taking what is impossible and what people tell you you can't do which is what i faced for many years um and turning it into something that has value to people and revolutionizing the world which is what tesla's done when did you start investing in tesla 2013 or 14 i guess it was no so like right after they went public yes yes i bought a little bit and i wasn't sure and then i got one of their cars i got the model s the p90d yeah and loved the car but more um then in 2017 i i was a little concerned was going back and forth quite a bit so i divested myself of it for a time then i got back in about three months later and i've held on to it since how's that been for you i'm not complaining jack wants to know what what your percentage gain is i could already tell and jack is going to tell you about his dogecoin experience well i think dogecoin probably did better for you a lot better yeah yeah but who would you rather have in the long term dogecoin no i'm getting tesla watch dogecoin outperform though we could look back at this in five years maybe dogecoin is like ten dollars and tesla's like fifteen hundred i'm like eight thousand percent in like six months that is amazing and those stories happen all the time it's a question of identifying which ones right would you sell would you if you're up 8 000 in dogecoin would you sell it well at my age i'm not your age so if it's putting me in a position where life is going to change uh by selling it i probably would consider selling it but i'm not in that position right now where i i feel that i'm ready to retire that i want to retire so to me it's just having confidence in the company and and watching what they do and watching how they perform they're still on paper probably six years ahead of everybody else from what i'm reading and when you're that much ahead in an emerging technology that people are have accepted and and are moving forward with i'm sure some cars might drive different people prefer that but overall what the company has done is tremendous and to convert it to roof uh installations and to sell the energy back to the grid and to deliver cable and internet and spacex and on and on it goes who knows if uh boring company is going to be successful but you never bet against elon yeah i hope it is they're coming out with that loop here in vegas right have you seen that i've heard about it i don't know much about it you gotta watch that they have like a two-minute commercial it's like a like a new segment where they're starting at the las vegas convention center and basically creating this whole loop around the las vegas strip where you could get in your car right now somebody's driving the car but you'll get in the car like a taxi it goes underground right and you would have this 20-minute drive with traffic that's done in like two minutes right i heard about in california the way that tesla was going to do it is primarily offered to tesla owners first where you would drive your tesla into this tube and it would take you wherever you were supposed to go but if they open it up to other cars i can see why that would be really really successful right yeah i was disappointed so they tried that uh they tried the loop initially in the boring company in hawthorne and then he wanted permission from the city of los angeles to put it underneath the 405 freeway starting in culver city i was so excited because where this loop would start was like two minutes away from a house that i own right there and i was so excited that like wow my place is going to be right in the middle of like where all this is going los angeles shut it down they did not want him going underneath the 405 freeway and that would have been huge i mean this was like the part of los angeles and throw up one of these one of these clips here if you type in 405 freeway traffic like thanksgiving you'll see this whole thing it's a sea of just red from all the tail lights he wanted to go underneath that and create this this just incredible tunnel that would save everybody probably an hour and they said no the great thing about tesla is they have they're in a position that most innovators throughout history are not and that is innovators are usually opposed by the establishment almost always and they don't have the resources to fight if elon wants to make an issue of something he's so uh ingrained himself in our culture and in his finances in his capital that uh he could he could change mind if he wanted to what do you think about tesla investing in bitcoin i thought it was genius actually i watched your video on that a few months ago um what it's done is two things first of all it's legitimized something which a lot of people have such as myself has you know been interested in but kind of stayed away from because i don't understand it as well as i need to to make a significant splash in it i'm not really uh you know i really concern myself with thousand and two thousand dollar investment so i like if i was going to do it i would do it significantly and i don't know enough i want to do it i will do it um but what elon did was basically legitimize the concept and by putting tesla in it what he said is we are so vested in it for ourselves and for the future that everybody who likes tesla is probably going to like the idea too because they tend to do what elon wants so i thought it was genius and sure enough it went up right away didn't yeah yeah i would almost recommend almost not i don't want to say i would recommend everybody but i see the potential in having like one two three percent of a portfolio in bitcoin so far i've had a fantastic experience of that now obviously it's gonna go down at some point and then maybe it doesn't look so good but i don't know i i am always willing to take the risk for one to two percent that it turns out huge and even if i lose two percent so be it but i'd rather be in it than out of it at this point i actually agree i saw your video a couple i guess it was a month or so ago right now and i you you really what i like about your videos and what i like about your your content is that it gets me thinking and looking at the next level that i need to investigate to consider what you've come up with and i agree with you certainly every portfolio needs diversification and what could be more diverse than something as high-risk high-reward as that i also though however at least historically have been um concerned about making sure that i don't make a foolish investment and so i've come around to the idea i just have to decide where i want to put it yeah the one guest who i most identify with tell me it's me kevin i wish i wish it was you okay um what i what i really identify with is james from stradman yeah because he loves what he does and he's a nicer guy than i'll ever be but he loves what he does and he's incredibly successful because his love shines through on everything that he does in his videos that's somewhat akin to what i feel about lemon law and my other consumer practices which is i've always defended the little guy i always fight for the underdog it gives me great satisfaction to say to a company that tells me you know we're not going to do this or we're not going to honor that to force them to yeah and and i think that when you love something it comes across it comes through it certainly does with stradman it certainly does with you i mean your videos are always produced and thanks and detailed in a way that you get so much content in such a short period of time that if you finish watching the video and move on to the next round thinking about what really happened or writing something down you're not giving it the credit it's due because it really can be life-changing to adjust yourself as a matter of fact where i really started enjoying your videos my son was graduating law school a couple of years ago and i sent him a link to one of your videos i said this is a guy who's not that much older than you that i want you to pay attention to because he's got the right ideas and instead of buying the biggest the best the fanciest the you know the most flashy think about that four dollar cup of coffee being you know 600 in a few years that you're giving up by having that cup of coffee yeah and he has he's done that and uh i think that's what you really do for a lot of younger people is that you provide them a way to have accessible information and a different thought process than what the instagram world currently wants people to think what would your advice be for me i'm curious um well i know you enjoy life um and i know that you enjoy life a lot and the ford gt certainly i think is you're you're toeing the water on something that you really enjoy and you're allowing yourself perhaps reluctantly allowing yourself for yourself there are so many opportunities uh with cars where you can do something similar own something and pay virtually nothing for it because when you're done with it it can sell for a significant amount of what you've paid if not more your car a ferrari 812 super fast something like that where the investment is similar the joy you can have for it is great you don't have to write it off you don't have to do anything with it but when you sell it it's going to cost you less money than it would to own you know a brand new uh small sport utility vehicle that has heavy depreciation why not if you're a car person why not do that more if that's what gives you pleasure right so that would be my my first piece of advice the other one is how old are you now graham 30. okay i'm 57. literally like that you're gonna be my age and you think you're gonna laugh at it right now i believe it it happened i believe it yeah whatever life has in store for you you're going to snap your fingers you're going to be my age you'll be too old for some things and not ready for others and you want to make sure that you've enjoyed life to the fullest and whatever that means for you do it now because you don't know what's going to happen in the future you don't know who's going to be around you you don't know what life's going to present to you if you love cars make it a bigger part of your life give yourself that um time to yourself because it will charge up what you do behind the camera and in front of the camera yeah i think that was the aquarium for me that was something that i've wanted to do for like 15 years set up an aquarium like that if that's the pleasure that you get from it absolutely i mean you have the resources of course to do whatever you want to do whether it's climb mount everest or get a fish tank you know whatever it is you'd like to do but do it like my in my life i've gotten my black belt in martial arts as a challenge i've become a deep-sea diver as a challenge scuba diver i've jumped out of airplanes as a challenge got my pilot's license i think the challenges are so important because you've achieved a level of success where if you don't keep your edge and you don't always have something out there that's challenging you in a different way you may find yourself becoming stale you may find yourself looking at it as a job when really it's not a job it's your passion it's just you're doing it every day you need something to kind of break it up a little bit yeah that's been challenging for me to keep up the same schedule and uh and not feel like i'm falling behind on that especially with the youtube algorithm i feel like it really rewards consistency and like putting out more content even last night we had we had a uh guys night where we went to the casino jack won some money i won some money alex once that was the first night that we've really gone out at least for me like three weeks four weeks and how did it feel it was fun it was fun but i was ready to get back and be like you know getting early more early nights like midnight getting early nights and then you know start today okay so you did that last night you're at it again earlier today to my point it kind of cleanses your soul a little bit gets you back to what you like with a fresh light you're not looking at it as a you know lifting heavy weight you're looking at it as something i'm ready for i can do this it should be fun from the heart i can tell you i really identify with what you're doing on this channel and your other channels i so admire you for what you're doing at such a young age um i know you've had big people on big guests and small guests and other guests keep doing what you're doing you're on the right track i i'm i'm really happy to have met you and i'm really excited and thankful that you've invited me on of course um to that end i actually uh have something for you today oh yes and i don't know where it is oh you know what i left it in the kitchen let me grab it wow that's so neat around the world in a ford gt almost and then ford gt the complete owner's experience this is this is perfect thank you so much my pleasure wow oh i love this that's really cool yeah oh gosh but yeah you have to take it to heart if you're gonna travel with the ford gt make it part of your life pick a place and go there wow and don't be afraid about the car getting damaged or you know flecks of paint coming off just enjoy the car that's hard for me to do i am so careful with that thing like every little bit and i have yet to drive it by the way okay so second piece of advice i've not driven it yeah well that's probably not a bad thing sometimes but yeah piece of advice i've had so many cars that's not a brag that's a statement and the reason i'm telling you that is because at the end of the day unless it's truly a museum piece which i've had use them they run better when you use them they give you more pleasure when you use them and they can always be repaired if there's a problem you're going to get such a small percentage of joy out of it by letting it sit compared to what you're going to get by enjoying it yeah and and you've got the car you've got a great investment there and it's going to be fun to drive use it it's an easy car to drive long distance too it's not a bad car for that i was going to take it out tomorrow morning there you go so that'll be my first time driving it so with that said you guys thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it thank you so much for coming on this is a fun episode so if you guys like this episode want to see more like it make sure to destroy the like button subscribe we'll link to your information down below in the description if you want that and make sure by the way take your free stock down below in the description public is going to give you a free stock of your choice all the way up to 50 you may as well do that it's free money takes you like two minutes and i'm posting all my stocks on there so if you want to be a part of it link down below thank you guys so much for watching and until next time welcome back to the 49th ever episode of the iced coffee hour okay