My First Million - Doug DeMuro: How A YouTube Car Reviewer Sold His Company For $40M

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Episode 456: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk to Doug DeMuro (@DougDeMuro) founder and creator of the popular YouTube channel Cars and Bids, about selling the majority of his company for $40 Milllion, competitors, and more. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter ----- Links: * Cars and Bids * Cars and Bids YouTube * Exotic Car Hacks * DrDisRespect * WhistlinDiesel * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (00:18) - Intro to Doug (03:28) - The key to building trust (08:50) - When was the turning point for your channel? (16:03) - Why did you think you could beat Bring A Trailer? (16:55) - How creator business partnerships work (31:25) - How does your brand change as you gain wealth? (49:20) - How does it feel to be wealthy? (54:30) - Doug's feud with Car Dealer Guy (01:09:30) - Will Doug ever fly private? (01:11:45) - Sam gets flustered by Doug ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Well, how does it feel to be wealthy now? After grinding out to this for so long. It's better than before. It is definitely nice. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. Doug, I want to give you an intro because I've been a fan of yours forever.

And I, in 2019 or 2020, when our podcast was much smaller, I told Sean about you. I go, this guy, Doug, is very fascinating. I think you should launch some type of like car website. I'm not sure. Then you did. And then we talked about it. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is going to be huge. And so I want to take a little bit.

I want to take like 1%. You know, I helped you succeed. I get a little bit of credit because I picked you. You're my, you're my horse that I bet on. You know, there's something real. I'm sure we'll discuss this, but there's something real about that. Like I tell all my friends now in this space, like you need to start businesses. Like this will not last forever.

You need to start businesses. And I think smart people who live in the business world kind of realize them. And you were my guy. And so for the audience who don't know, so Doug DeMorrow has a, it started as a, you're just a YouTuber, I guess. I mean, you were originally a journalist for a bunch of different websites where you would write these funny, quirky blogs.

Then you parlayed that into a YouTube channel that I think now has like 4 million subscribers. But the reason why you're huge and lovable is for a few different reasons. One, you dress really funny. So, like, you'll wear like khaki shorts like from the early 2000s, with like a red polo shirt and then your white undershirt will be longer than the sleeves of your polo shirt. So it's like hanging out with those sleeves and like you just dress like horribly, even though your videos each get like two or three million views. Like you're on Jay Leno's

pod or you're on Jay Leno's YouTube like a few days ago and you're wearing Soconi like running shoes. I'm like, what do you do it, dude? Well, Jay is not like Jay's dressing up, you know? So I feel like there's not a high bar there. Anyway, you're just like, you're very likable because of the way you dress. You're very funny. You're very quirky because that's one of your things is you talk about the quirks of it, cars. You're very quirky. You're very relatable.

And so you've grown this YouTube channel to like 4 million subscribers. You launched this company called Cars and Bids, which is like almost like eBay, but for different types of cars, cars enthusiasts. So cars from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. And then recently, you sold the majority of the business to Churning Group for around $40 million, I believe, when it was. only like two or three years old. And I've bought cars from the website.

So anyway, I'm a big fan. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you for having me on. I just listened to, so I just bought a car a couple months ago, three or three, four months ago. And it was your YouTube video that put me over the edge. So I bought a catalyte. I bought an escalade.

And I was looking for a review. Your review has 1.7 million views. I was like, okay, this got to be the best one. Like Sam said, I was surprised. Because I'm not a car guy at all. And also, I had never seen your stuff. I had only heard Sam talk about you on the podcast. So I actually didn't put two and two together that,

oh, that's the same guy that Sam's been talking about until I watched the video. And I was like, I don't know why. I trust this guy. What's the key to being the sort of likable, trustworthy guy? Is that just who you are? Did you play anything up in your YouTube videos? Is there any strategy here? Or is it all just, that's just who you were?

No. That's a good question. And the answer is there is remarkably little strategy. I just, in fact, if you go and watch the videos from before I had a lot of subscribers, they're pretty much the same. So it's not like, you know, it's not like I knew what the hell I was doing when I had 200,000 subscribers. It's not like I knew where this was going to go.

But I really think, I think one of the reasons, though, that I kind of did it this way is that a lot of people come to me and they're like, I'm going to make the best car videos with 4K drones and high-quality sound and music. and all this stuff. And I just wanted to like kind of show people like, you actually can do this. As long as the content is good, you can just do this.

Like you can just do it in your garage. You're just using an iPhone, right? Basically, the shots where I'm like in them, it's a cam, it's a Sony 4K camcorder, which isn't cheap, but it's also not like a crazy camera. And then an iPhone is,

yeah, half the video is done on an iPhone. And like you're editing, if I remember correctly, up until recently, like until the startup cars and bids, you're editing them. And like, they're not like good.

editing, but in a way, that makes it awesome. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's a very, it's, it's really funny. It's, it's, it's quirky. It was just simple. My goal was just always to, like, overload people with info and, like, cool stuff about the cars. And they could decide. If they decided that, hey, this, this quality's not good enough, then they could go find somebody else. But, like, I always felt that I had the most info. Like, the most, like, it, like, when you bought that escalate, like, seeing how all that stuff works, how it's, how it's going to fit together, sitting

inside it. So many other people focus so much on, like, driving experience. They do 45, like 20 minute video and 18 of the minutes are, oh, and here's how it goes through the corners. And I was just like, you know, like, let's show people the little ins and outs of the car they are actually going to buy. And I think that that's, like, proved to be quite useful. And you also have this thing at the end. I don't know if you saw this, Sean, but like I watch every single one of his videos. And he has this thing at the end called the Doug score. And if, in Doug, you kind of like, by the way, it seems like I'm like insulting you, kind of.

constantly, but in reality, I've been like love with you. But I mean, it's just, it's just, I don't, I get what you're saying. Like, yeah, the quality was never the goal. The goal was always like the quality of content, you know? Well, what I'm saying is, you have this thing called the Doug score, which like, I base my buying decisions off of. Like, I've bought a bunch of cars, probably three or four cars off your, like, you've driven, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of value, like to whoever I bought my car from.

And you have this thing called the Doug score at the end of every. every video. And I went and googled and tried to find it. And you could barely find it. It's like on a Google sheet. And you have to click file, make a copy so I could sort it. Because I'm trying to sort it. I'm like, you know what I mean? I'm like, because you have two categories. You have the weekend category, which is, you know, like a dad who wants to have fun. It's like McClarens and shit like that. And then you have a family or a daily category, which is just like what's good for daily, whatever. In some days, I'm like, you know, maybe I'm in the mood to buy like a fast car. Let's sort by speed in the category of weekend.

Yeah. But I got to go to Excel and I've got to like do like a like a like a like a row freeze. It's so complicated. Why don't you make this more like robust? It's a really this database could be a business in itself. I know. I agree. I should do more with it.

To be fair, the Doug score came out in like mid-17. And for the first two years, it wasn't really all that valuable because I didn't really have that many cars in it. And so like late 19. it starts to become pretty valuable. And now there's got to be like a thousand data points in there. But what happened was I launched cars and bids. I just priorities had to kind of take shape.

And yeah, I probably should do more with that because I think it's valuable also. And I think the really valuable thing would be able to be to sort by like type of car. Like if you want a fast wagon, put up all the fast wagons and then you can just have that. But that's something that you could do at home. I've decided I'm going to just do the videos. I'm a big fan of specialization. And so I decided I'm going to do the videos and we're going to let other people.

And sometimes people email me. They're like, I just did this great data project with all the Doug's score data. And here it is. And I look at it and it's really cool. And it's like, I should be doing that. But I'm not. At what point did you, so the show,

I mean, your channel has it been growing very steadily? And was it making enough income to live off of throughout his existence? Yeah. So I launched the channel in late 13. But the really big kind of turning point for the channel was in late 16. I flipped to two videos a week. And I don't know that necessarily that is the turning point anymore for a YouTube channel,

but in 16, it had a big effect. And almost right away after doing that, yes, it became enough money to live on. I made that switch in August of 16. And in December of 16, I made 20 grand. And I was like, oh my God, like this is a thing. What I didn't know was Christmas, the ad revenue is way higher at Christmas time. And so in January, I made like eight grand. And I was like, oh, well, I guess maybe this isn't a thing.

I don't know what's going on. But that was one of the things I learned throughout. And so, yeah, like pretty quickly, it kind of grew at that point to become something I could live off. And so when you were made that switch, you're like, all right, I'm going to start doing two videos. Is it because you had heard, oh, the algorithm likes that or you just happened to do it and saw a bump? What was the reason? Because I always wonder with people who get started with content, like in retrospect, in hindsight, it always makes sense.

It's like, oh, of course people are going to want to see a car before they kind of buy it or just like sit from the comfort of their home, get to see a review of a car. That makes sense.

YouTube's the biggest video platform. So whoever does it on YouTube is going to benefit. There's going to be lots of search volume. So they'll probably get views just by the search of the name of the car. And yeah, that video is probably going to charge a premium or be worth a premium or maybe make money or something. I don't know exactly what it is,

but I can see how to make money. It all makes sense in hindsight. At the time in 2013, when you start doing this, did you think there's a business here? And how did you get those initial views? How did you get the initial momentum? Was it because of your following as a writer or was it separate? Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And I actually got really lucky.

You know, I never ever tell people to like work for like promotional value. Like a lot of times businesses will be like, instead of paying you in money, I'll pay you in, you know, like exposure. And I think that's BS. But it actually worked for me. I wrote for Jalapnik, which at the time. was a Gawker blog and was an incredibly popular one. It was the most popular car blog on the internet by far. And I started inserting my videos into those articles. And that drove, the articles drove people to the videos, which then started to put me in the algorithm, which then started to get me

subscribers. And Joe Opnik was paying me, I swear to got $25 an article, which was not real money, but like the value was in the number of people coming over to my YouTube. I didn't know that at the time. But in the years, in the later years, as 2013 became 2015, it became clear to me like, I think I'm actually a YouTuber and not a writer anymore. Like, I think this is a reality now. And so when I decided to move to two a week, what happened was I left Jolopnik to start a blog with Autotrater with Cox Automotive and Honor Trader. And in order to promote that blog, I decided I would be shooting more videos. And within eight weeks, the video content was suddenly earning, getting way more views and way more revenue than the writing content.

And thankfully, the video channel was your own, right? The video channel was your own, even though these were guest blogs on other people's platforms. Yeah, the agreement with AutoTrader was that I would, you know, promote on my YouTube channel this blog that we had started. And so I didn't realize that you've been doing this since 2013. I thought that I was like an OG by like watching since like 17. I mean, you've been grinding at this for a while. Yeah, but you pretty much are because initially I made videos with my own cars

and those just never got as much traction. And what the big switch in 17 was I switched to doing reviews of cars. And suddenly it was a lot less work because I didn't have to buy cars and then take on that personal financial risk. I would just like show up at a dude's house, film his car and then peace out. And that was a video. And there was like no, that didn't cost me anything except like the gas to get there. And so that was a big change. It also allowed me to do more videos because you can just

do more videos that way, as opposed to your own cars. You have to kind of think up a new topic every week, which isn't always easy. And so in 17, I think that's when things really started to like really take off when I started to do like car reviews and especially new car reviews. That's what I realized like, okay, that's where the money is and that's where the audience is. But you make jokes sometimes where you're like, like for example, I'm thinking about buying a defender, a new one. And I like watched your video on it and you might make little jokes. You're like, one day when I'm able to afford blank, I'll get it. And I'm like, seeing your videos, I'm like, man, I think you could, I bet you're making like,

you know, at least low digit millions per year without cars and bids. I have to imagine this was significantly more lucrative than you like the vibe that you would joke about on the videos. But the thing that's, I think, important for people to understand. There's, there's two components. Number one is you never know when it's going to end. And so like, yeah, I was making a. a lot of money. But you never know when suddenly a competitor shows up and it can happen in a

couple of months. And suddenly you're now third, fourth, fifth in search and things are slowing down. And so you never really know like what that day is. And so unlike maybe an attorney or a doctor where you have this job, you make a lot of money less than I was, but you have a lot more job security over long term. For me, it was like, yeah, I have a lot of money. But I saved so much of it because I was always just terrified that, you know, I never knew exactly what was going to, what was going to happen. What about a money did you feel like you kind of like you made it or you looked at the number and you were like, I can't believe this is mine. I have this. Where was the milestone for you that it was kind of like your holy shit moment? Not until we close the deal with with

Ternin, believe it or not. I just never earning on an annual or a monthly or a weekly basis is just never to me like there's always some some fear in that, you know, like you're always just a little worried that the tap is going to turn off. And so there was never a moment where I felt comfortable like spending or splurging on something, which Sam goes back to your point. Like, yeah, there were times when I said, if I could afford this, I would buy it. But like, I probably could have afforded it? But could I have afforded it? And then my business and then YouTube slows down and then I have to deal with the depreciation of it. Like a new Lambo would be cool, right? But if that loses 200 grand in the first two years, I couldn't mentally justify that.

Same with a new AMG wagon. I've always wanted one. But there were 150,000. when they were new. Well, was I comfortable losing 50 grand in a year? Mentally, no, because I was always afraid the tap might turn off, you know, at the YouTube channel. Did you, and when originally, when you launched cars and bids, I was a big fan of Bring a Trailer. Bring a trailer is similar to you, a different audience, but I think I heard rumors that when they sold, it was like $300 million. And when you go to Bringertrailer.com, it looks just like a blog. Like, it's a very, like, it doesn't look like a sophisticated business

and in reality it is. And when you launched, I was like, yeah, this is awesome. But of course, a lot of critics were like, well,

but this thing already exists. And so like, what insight did you have to go down this path? And also, who did you partner with early on? Because I don't think that you're a tech person, right? No,

no, not at all. As you can see from my video editing and heavy usage of eye movie. No, yeah, bring a trailer. is it does exist and they're huge

and they were huge then and they're even hugeer now. And that was the hurdle. What insight did we have? None. What were we thinking? In retrospect, I honestly wonder like what was going through our minds and we could compete with them. The only insight we had was that

we had heard, I love Bring a trailer and I think they run a great business and they have some great cars and I have sold cars on there and whatever. But we had heard that there was some dissatisfaction. I think at the end of the day, bring a trailer, gotten so massive that like stuff was taking a long time to get listed.

There were, like you said, the quality of the, it's a WordPress blog, ultimately. It had caused people some issues, you know, in sellers and buyers and the functionality of everything. And we kind of thought to ourselves, hey, we can do this in our minds better and we can make it modern. And so one of the big things that was our focus was doing cars just from the 1980s and up, like more modern era cars, we thought, hey, if we come with a modern website and focus on a, modern audience, maybe we can kind of exist in a sort of a different space than bring a trailer where it's like more millennial, younger people focused on these types of cars. And I think that

that has largely teased out, although now we're starting to kind of eat some of the bring a trailer cars. We just posted a Lamborghini kuntash on the site today. Like we're going down that road a little bit more. And who did you partner with earlier on? I mean, when I was doing research for the original pod, I remember I went to the person's LinkedIn. I was like, I got to figure out who he's working with. Blake. So, yeah, what was that? relationship and, you know, how did it come about? You know, it's an interesting thing. I get, my email address is in all my videos. It's like a Yahoo. It's just Doug DeMorra at Yahoo, right? And to be clear, like, my personal email address is not on Yahoo, but that's the email address for all the

people who are going to send me emails. Because as you can imagine, I get, when you post your email address that publicly, you get some weird stuff going on, you know? Yeah, people think they know you. What's it called people, you know, we get that, Sean and I get it all the time. What's it called a parissocial relationship? Right. That's exactly. People email me and be like, like, hey, man, I'm making $84,000 a year. I got two kids, one of them's in private school, thinking about leaving my wife, what car you think I should get? And I'm like, what are you doing this?

But so I got it. So I get random emails. And so a viewer emailed me named Blake. And he said, hey, I know we live close by in San Diego. I have this car. You ever, you know, if you ever want to get dinner. And this was before I had a kid. And I would meet up with random.

I did this many, many times, probably a hundred times. I met up with just random people on the internet. It was how I made friends when we moved to new cities. And so I met up with him and I learned that he did something in tech, which is how non-tech people view all tech people, you know? And so it hit me that I kind of wanted to do this only a couple of months after our meeting. And I called him and I was like, hey, I know you do something in tech. Can we do this?

And what do you think of this? And he had actually just sold a car and bring a trailer and kind of recognized some of the deficiencies. And he said, yeah, this is a great idea. And so we use some seed money from him. company to kind of just get off the ground and get started. And then we launched and right away, we were quickly earning revenue and quickly profitable. Was any of the, what was the split? So I always wondered this about creator kind of businesses where it's like, are you just

promotion or do you have to do anything with operations? Are you, do you have to put in money? What's the equity split? How did you guys decide kind of roles and then the ownership split? It was tough to decide. And there was a lot of back and forth. and it kind of almost killed the thing. But I ended up with sort of a substantial majority

because even though they had put down the money, I was coming with the audience. And one of the interesting things I think about these businesses, you mentioned bring a trailer and how could you compete with it? You would be shocked at how many other auction sites have shown up and failed since we launched. Most of them never even make it on anybody's radar. Of course, we watch them like a hawk because it's like our business,

but you'd be stunned at how many of these have shown up. And we learned that, like, you can make a great product, and that's important. And we did that. But, like, having an audience, showing up with an audience is so crucial for the success of this. And that's what caused all the other ones to fail. And so as a result of that, I think they understood that a large portion of the value, at least initially, was me. And so even though there was sort of a tangling in it, I ended up with the majority. And yes, I ended up doing an enormous amount of operations work.

Like, I was personally, the first few weeks, I was approving, denying all the cars that got submitted. We didn't know it would blow up so much right away, is what happened. I think you got a thousand in one day, right? It was like the craziest day of my life. We got a thousand. And you gave like a three-sentence description of each car. Yeah, that was another thing.

What the hell was I thinking marrying myself to that idea? But what happened was when we first launched, we had this, we had this idea that in order to attract sellers, we would offer $1,000 for the first 50 cars on the site and $500 for the next 50 cars on the site. It was a brilliant idea. It was spending whatever that works out to be $75,000 or whatever, but it was the greatest $75,000 we ever spent because we got so many submissions right away.

However, then we had to deal with them. And boy, was that. That was the day. And it was all me doing it, basically. It's a nightmare. And what's the business model? The business model is you probably, if I, I don't remember exactly, but is it that buyers of cars have to give you like three or four or five percent

of the total purchase price? That's right. Sellers pay nothing. buyers pay four and a half percent. And now we've got a few other kind of drivers of revenue as well. There's a shipping component. We just launched inspections, which is really cool. Sellers can get their cars inspected,

which we have already seen increases the number of bids and the sale price. That's, I think, going to be a big benefit going forward. But mainly it's that, yes, that we get this buyer's fee. And then, of course, we've now rolled up the businesses into one business, the YouTube channel and the auction site. And so obviously my content revenue is a part of the business, too. And you did, I believe in 2021, you did something like 75 million in gross sales. Yeah, that feels right.

I should have let's the numbers of front. It was like the first month. So you get this immediate surge of listings, but, you know, getting a marketplace off the ground could be hard, but I suspect with your audience and it kind of just took off probably fairly quickly. Do you remember anything about that first month? What were the numbers? Oh, yeah, I'll never forget it.

The first car was your car, right? The A and G. The first car was my car. That's right. The first car was my car. And I've since sold four or five, although I haven't bought yet. I got to do that. The first month was chaos.

I mean, it's like you hear from any startup founder who's successful, right? Which is that it was absolute chaos. We had the good problem of not having planned for what would come. the success that came, but the bad problem of then having to do it on the fly. And we were hiring people like talking to them on a, we didn't even have an office. It was COVID. We launched in June of 20.

There were no offices. We launched the whole business from my back patio. And so we're like talking to people in the pool. I mean, the whole situation was a complete disaster. And that month was definitely the most chaotic and most ridiculous of my entire life. The first two months, really. And we started to build more of an infrastructure and more of a team. And that kind of started to make things.

easier. But I was still like in the ground on the trench, in the, on the ground, in the trenches, doing everything until the churnin investment came. And we got a little more cash. And we could finally start like putting people in their roles. And I could go back to my biggest asset to the business, which is, of course, you know, doing the time. Talk a little bit about the sale. How'd that come about? That's a high stakes negotiation, probably the biggest hand poker you've ever played. Tell us some fun stories about the process and then the same, the ultimate sale, what went down. You know, I was really lucky that I had Blake, who has been in the kind of the business world, the startup world before and sort of held my hand through the process because I was just a clueless.

I mean, at the end of the day, I make YouTube videos for a living. Like, I shouldn't be involved at any sort of high eight-figure private equity deal. Like, that's not where I live, you know. I hate people. So they came to us and. And by the way, we hear your fidget spinner or whatever you got there on the mic. There you go. You're G-Wagon. This is a Toyota mega cruiser. They came to us and, you know, we had gotten, as you can imagine, we had a lot of people reach out to us because we had kind of grown and it became clear quickly. And then the car market started to blow up and all these P.E.VC. type firms were like, we got to get in on this. We got to get on this today. And here's this business that's actually succeeding doing it.

And bring a trailer had just sold to Hearst. And so all these other companies were like, Are we missing something? We got to go again. What's out there? We could start it ourselves or this exists. So we're getting a lot of reach-outs. But we viewed it as kind of BS. We were like, we're too small to make this make sense to anybody.

And so we kind of ignored them all. But the churning group was really persistent. And finally, they kind of got intro to us through a friend. And I thought to myself, well, I can't say no to this call. If it came through a friend, I'll just take it. It'll be 10 minutes and I'll hang up. I took it in a car. But they told me the most interesting.

thing, I wasn't familiar with the churning group, but they told me that they specifically work with creator-led businesses. And that was a huge, like, late-balled moment for me, because my big fear of working with any P-E or V-C companies, they're going to come in and they're going to say, we got to change this, this, this, and this on your YouTube channel, and it's going to look like this now, and this is how it's going to work. And even if it was a big payday for me, I feel like I didn't want to have to explain to someone how YouTube works, you know? Like, I just wanted, I felt like I could do it better myself. But these guys knew already how it worked. And they were going to be like, your audience, it's already working.

This isn't how, we don't want to screw with anything. And that was a big moment hearing that they like specialize in this. And so going forward, that just sort of began the conversation. And one thing led to another, they kind of went through. Here's how we might do it. You know, we kind of gave them some basics. They gave us a term sheet. And it came to fruition.

Were you able to take money off the table or did it go to the, go to the business? Yeah, no, I took, I took money off. I bought that career GT. and so it was a nice, it was a nice situation for me to be able to do that, especially after a lot, a lot of hard work. And actually, in the end, I feel like this is the best time because I got enough money that I can kind of chill a little bit. And I swear there's something nice about that in terms of running and operating a business

like this. You make way more money when you have that, like when you could chill a little bit. You know, like the less you want it, the more you get it. I feel like that's true. Like, I feel like I'm more relaxed. I'm focusing on like myself a little bit more. and then I'm in a better mental state to make better decisions and do more things.

And in the end, it's actually been beneficial, even though you would think it would be the opposite. If you're chasing money, you'd work harder. And maybe I did work harder, but I think I'm working better now. Have you heard the phrase, treat them mean, keep them keen? So, like, I remember when I was like 16, I was like, I was telling someone, I was like, I was telling my friend, a girlfriend,

who was like this really pretty girl. I was like, man, I want to meet more girls. And she goes, you got to treat them mean to keep them keen. You know, the less you want it, the more you're going to get it. And I was like, oh, thank you. Like, so I tried way less hard and I got way more girls. The same is true with money. I treat it mean and I keep it keen.

You know, the money comes to me the more than I don't want it. That sounds like something an aunt would say. No 14-year-old is hitting you with that quote when you say, I want to meet more girls. Yeah. She was like a, like, somewhere like a neighbor. You know, she was in like college at the time. And, yeah. And I was like.

Man, I'm trying to meet these girls. I read the book, the game. I'm doing all this stuff. I'm trying to try it hard. And she was like, you got to treat me to keep the keen. She's like, you just got to care less. You don't do nothing. We're still using that phrase all these years later.

It's still relevant. How does this work though? Like, if I'm, this may be a question for Mike and those guys at Ternan, but like you buy a creator-led business. Creator wants to go chill on the beach now. You give them millions and millions of dollars, but you need their face still. it's tied to their face.

Is there like a long transition plan where you, it's like blippy where they just changed out the guy. A different guy came in and started wearing the stuff on YouTube and everyone in the comments is like, hey, that's not blippy. What's the plan here? You know, I've been on, I've done a few podcasts and interviews and all sorts of things with after this deal is closed. And I think about your question constantly.

And you're the first person on one of these who's actually asked it to me. Because, yeah, I think they're not. I truly think they're crazy. Like, if you really think about it. Best answer. If you really think about it. Like, the whole, it's a great idea when it works. And for them, it's worked wonderfully.

And I suspect that relates to the diligence they do on the creator. Like, they know that I'm not going to do that, right? Because they know me. They got to know me through this process. It took like six, eight months. And we really got to know each other. And they realized I wasn't about to just bail and go sit on the beach or do something insane, like start saying crazy stuff on Twitter and get canceled, whatever.

They knew that. But like, I could. Like, I still, if I were them, I'd be terrified. Like, they're making massive investments into businesses that have dudes like me who could just go off the rails one day. And I think that is a crazy business model. But they would retort by saying, A, we do the diligence, but also, like, this is how businesses are going to be. Like, creators have these audiences. This is where people want to get their stuff, whatever it is.

Kitchen products, cars, doesn't matter. They want to get it from people who they love. and who they care about, Mr. Beast Burger, all that stuff. And so if you're going to do it, you've got to take that risk. But the benefit is you don't have to spend a lot in paid marketing because the audience is there and they want to be there. And so there's like a huge benefit to that, but also a very scary potential product. We've had Mr. Beast on the pod.

We recently did an episode with Danny Austin, who created a hair care brand, basically a scalp brand. also doing really, really well. What creator brands are awesome to you that you think have done a good job? Is there any of that stand out or you took inspiration from? That's a good question.

You know, when we launched this, when we came up with the idea and launched this in the summer of 19, it wasn't as common. Having a creator kind of pivot into a brand was like less of a thing. A lot of guys were doing, a lot of guys,

I say guys, because it was car people, but just generally, people were doing merge. That was a big thing. And some of them even had lines of products, whatever, but the pivoting of doing this has become more of a thing since then. And so I wouldn't say any of them necessarily an inspiration. It was more that I was

just terrified that I had this giant audience. And if I didn't do something with them, they were going to start to go away eventually. And I had to do something. And so it was more based out of fear and anxiety than like being inspired by someone, which is great. But obviously since then a lot of others have come. And I give this advice to everybody I know, everybody in this space, all of my car creator friends, I tell them like, start a business, start a business. You never know when your audience is going to go away. Please, like, take your audience right now and start a business, do something.

And they look at me like I'm nuts some of the time because they're like, what do you mean? I'm already traveling five days a week, filming and doing all this stuff and editing, late at night, doing, you know, writing scripts. How can I start a business on top of that? And my answer is like, I don't know, but you got to figure it out because that's the next way to take what you're doing. Have you seen, I want to ask you about two ideas.

Have you guys seen, what's it called? Exotic Car Hacks, I think it's called? No. Dude, it's this, the guy, I think that he's like playing a douche on TV. I think he's like trying to be an asshole. Like his, so his whole, he's definitely, this guy's like a total jerk. But he, he's got this course. I think it's a course.

I don't know if it's a community or it's a course. But you pay a little bit of money and he teaches you how to hack, exotic cars, which I have not taken it. I think what it means is like you buy a car that's like four or five years old, usually around the $20,000 or $20,000 mile range. And then you drive it for one year and you could sell it and you have hopefully only, you know, you've mostly broke even. I think he also has a thing where you can like become a licensed dealer, which I don't understand how that works. But I heard a rumor that he sold the course to PE. Is that true or totally made up? I don't know. I haven't heard that.

Have you seen that, Sean? Yeah, are you looking at this guy now? But his YouTube banner is like, it's him as a Grand Theft Auto character. So that's solid to start. And then I think you're right. It's basically like how it says,

learn how to buy, sell, and trade exotic cars for fun and profit. Honestly, it's a good niche. In fact, my only criticism of this guy is he doesn't look dushy enough.

Like, once you go into the video, he's just like a guy wearing like a V-neck. He doesn't look like, He's just kind of like... No, dude, he's like... He needs... He needs...

He needs... Like, ten times more jewelry than he's wearing. Like, this guy... He needs to piss me off, but also make me want him, right? Like, that's the trick. Well, he was driving a Land Rover defender,

and he goes, see, the problem with the Land Rover defender is my watch is worth five times this defender. So maybe I think the audio. He's a verbal dude. He goes, even though it looks cool, I can't decide if I'm poor because five of these still wouldn't,

equal the price of my watch. Well, I think more people should do this. So, Doug, one of the companies that I built, we got bought by Twitch. When I was at Twitch, you know, you spent a bunch of time on Twitch and you see what people are doing. And it was like, everybody's kind of doing a very similar thing. It's like, you know, there's like two classes of people. There's like, you know, really good at the game.

Three classes. They're really good at the game. People watch them because they're so awesome at the game. And they guys, they have no personality. People just like them because their aim is good. And then you have people that are. super cute, right? Hot girls, they do well too.

And then you have, like the third group, which is like super likable, like kind of the group you're in, I would say, where it's like, they're not like the most technically good at the game, but they're likable,

they're fun, they're called a variety streamer. They stream a bunch of different games. They keep an interesting, good, good fan interaction. And then there was one guy that just took it in a whole different direction,

this guy, Dr. Disrespect. Have you seen him? Yeah, I've heard of him. So he created a whole character. He comes on, and he himself was like a college basketball player, so he's like 6-8.

So he's this huge guy, but he wears this like mullet wig. He wears like a bulletproof vest, like a red bulletproof vest. He looks like a character from the 80s, and he created his name, he created his thing, Dr. Disrespect.

And then he has his catchphrases. He was basically a wrestling character. So he basically was like the rock where he would, he had this persona and he had these catch phrases. And then everybody has life became a character. His wife became a character. Like if you would come on the screen, like you would never see her only,

her hand and she would feed him while he was playing like feeding him grapes basically and he would do everything ridiculous and then to add to that he would like go sit courtside at an NBA game but dressed fully as Dr. Disrespect and that investment of like that $5,000 court side seat was actually really valuable to building this persona this brand of like and he always called himself in the 1994 995 two-time blockbuster NBA Jam whatever like champion like he's got these like phrase that he would always go to just purposely try to be hateable yeah just trying to be like, exactly. He created a whole character and he just stayed.

Like when Floyd Mayweather became Money Mayweather. Exactly. I'm going full heel. Exactly. But even more like it was more like wrestling because he's got a costume also, like on top of the whole thing. And I actually think that for content creators, it's surprising you don't see more of this. Yeah, that's such a good point.

There are these archetypes. Like in wrestling, you have the faces, the good guys. You got the heels, the guys that are intentionally bad guys that are going to get a big following because you'll love to hate him. Floyd Mayweather did this in boxing. He was not making any money. And he became Floyd Money, Mayweather, this obnoxious, arrogant, you know, money in your face guy. Then he started getting really, really popular because people wanted to see him lose.

And there's a guy in the UFC that did the same thing. He was basically about to get cut. The UFC told him, you're too boring, we're going to cut you. And so that night, he went on and he just started saying all this offensive stuff on the microphone against Brazilians and this one fighter and whatever. and they were like, well, now we got to keep him to fight that guy because he just created a feud. And he was like, this guy just took it to level 10 of being this heel.

I'm surprised there's not more of this on YouTube. You know, the best car guy who's doing that right now is this guy, Whistling Diesel. Have you ever seen his content? I love Whistling Diesel. I heard that he's a sweetheart, by the way. There is no car content creator who I like more than Whistling Diesel. I've never met him. Tell Sean what he does.

This dude, it's like Mr. Beast, but like for cars, and he just does things that make people hate him. So he buys a Ferrari to destroy it. And he put it, you know, you know, you can buy those, as an example, you know, you can buy those garage bubbles, like, like boomers have the, you know, they put their old Corvette in them inside their garage. It's like a, it's like an inflatable bubble that makes sure nobody ever touches the car. He bought one of those for his Ferrari and just started throwing stuff at it, ladders and shovels and anything he could, sledgehammers and soft to see if it worked. It would off-road the Ferrari. He put giant 20-foot-tall wagon wheels on his Tesla. I mean, all sorts of

just dumb stuff. And I just am obsessed with it. I'm like, this is the kind of content I wish I was making. How does this guy afford it? I assume he's doing the same thing that Mr. Beast is doing where he's taking basically all of the money that he's pulling in from revenue and from, you know, placement, ad placements and just putting it right back into doing more dumb crap. Like, he dropped the G-wagon into a house when he was in the G-WAT. I mean, everything. It's just incredible. It's incredible content.

It's so cool. What are some of the titles? Using $35,000 Nike Air Mags as workboots. So he bought extremely rare, extremely expensive shoes. That's a great video. Walking around in the mud with them doing work. There's extreme school bus offroading. It takes a bus and he's just like flying around.

But it's also number one. So I guess that's a series. I guess there's going to be a lot more of those to come. Driving a Tesla upside down. Perlously, 10 foot tall wheels. Okay, I don't even know what that is. That's amazing. But each of these has like five to 10 million views.

They're incredible. It's incredible content. And he's just this kid from like Indiana or like rural Pennsylvania. He just, if he wasn't doing this, he'd be like driving a truck, you know. But instead he like decided to become hateful on YouTube and he's killing it. And I love to see people hate him. There is nothing more fun than these people. That guy is so irresponsible.

And it's like, yeah, that's. It's YouTube. Yeah, you're supposed to be irresponsible. He took like a $250,000 G-wagon, which is like everyone says it's an off-road vehicle, but like no one drives a G-wagon off-road. And he like, you know, destroys it, like to the point where it's smoking and he just annihilates this G-wagon. How much revenue do you think that this guy's channel makes? So I want to know if he is putting all of it back into the videos, I want to know how much that

budget is. He's getting 20 million views a month. So I suspect he's probably pulling in, you know, yeah, one to two million a month. And then he does ad placements and they must get tons of money because his views get so, his videos get so many views. Wait, at 20 million views a month, you think he's making up worth of the $2 million? It's in, I don't know. In his, in his world, I don't know, because his audience is, I suspect, very different from mine.

My audience doing car reviews is really high dollar content because you're in market car shoppers. and that is a very desirable demographic for advertisers. Whistling Diesel is probably, there's probably a lot of kids. There's probably more foreign audience than mine. So it probably doesn't make as much. But he's probably doing all right. Plus, he lives in the middle of nowhere in like World Pennsylvania.

So his cost of living is like, he's good. What would a good CPM be from AdSense for your YouTube video? That's a good question. I don't remember anymore. I actually calculated CPM in this completely different way because I never understood why it was views like dollars per thousand views. It never really made sense to me. So I started calculated at the number of views I had to get to earn a dollar.

And so good for me was a video that broke 100 with the 100 marks. So less than 100 views to earn a dollar. And there were a lot of videos, especially in December when ad rates were strong that were pulling in that. That's so funny. That's how you calculated. That actually makes a lot of sense. It makes more sense to me. Yeah, like I feel like everything you've told me so far is like just a guy like sort of using his intuition.

like you're just like well like I had a friend that was like I had a friend that would do this he'd be like you know he would keep like his money like instead of like going to a bank setting a bank count and like oh you should invest it he's like no I have three shoeboxes and like shoebox one is spend money and shoebox two is save money and he like credit his own bank count in my dorm room and he was just like yeah like you know but you if you're going to move one to this box you got to put two in the other box. I'm like, dude,

I think you're actually just using the normal like personal finance rules, but you just are, but you backed into them. Yeah, you backed into them like a guy, like,

you know, like a caveman like just sort of discovering fire here. That's probably true for me. But I will say like in my, in my view, that's kind of how YouTube was from like 13 to 19.

Before like a lot of big businesses started showing up and really maximizing the hell out of everything, I think it was a lot of people just kind of randomly using intuition to like make decisions. And it was like, okay, that video did well. So I'm going to try this video.

Instead of like really thinking through, okay, the thumbnail should say this, at this pixel and all that, which is how a lot of creators do it now, it was a lot of just like, let's give this a shot. And for some people it worked out, and those are the people that you end up talking to. And for some people, it didn't. And those are the ones who sizzled out. Did you and do you now have a video team? I read somewhere that you were editing up, you were editing them up until cars and bids.

And then now you just have an editor. But like, is that true? Or do you have like a booker? Because I know you're on the road or at least you said one annual wrap-up. You're like, I traveled like, you know, most weeks. Yeah, well, when I lived in Philly, I was traveling a ton because of the weather.

But now I'm in California. It's gotten a lot easier. Yeah, so it was just me. So I launched the channel in 13. We went to two videos a week in 16. It was just me up until we launched. The Royal We. The Royal We.

You're saying we. Yeah. We, my family, I think of my wife as part of this because, boy, has that been a journey for her. But, so, so, So I launched the channel in 13 and there have always been kind of people around,

friends who helped shoot things, that kind of thing. So there's a we can put it to that too. But mostly it was just me. And then in March of 20, when we all launched cars and bids, I realized like that week that I was never going to be able

to edit another video again. And so I called a guy who had emailed me like a year before. Like, hey, you need an editor? And I always kind of ignore those emails. And I was like, are you still available? And can you start today? And his answer was, yeah.

And he's still my editor. It's been now over three years. You just had a baby. And, but now we have more people also because we're going to start doing more content. And so we hired like a video kind of content manager who's going to oversee. I think it's going to be multiple channels, mine like Carson Bids channel. And then like new creators come in and stuff. And I just don't have the wherewith all the bandwidth, especially because I want to continue doing what I'm doing.

And I just don't really have the ability to like also manage a whole thing in addition. Have you guys heard of more plates, more dates? Have you know who that is, Doug? All right, so his name's Derek. He's probably maybe as famous as you, but in like the fitness genre. He's like on Joe Rogan and stuff, whatever. And he has a great video, but his video, A, you don't know his last name. You just know it's Derek at More Plates More Dates.

And B, his videos, it's just him like on a camera, kind of like you are right now, but it's just a plain white background. Like it looks like you're just at like he's in like a college dorm or he's just like in his house. goofing around, but his videos get millions and millions of views. And I heard a rumor that now his businesses are making many, many tens of millions a year in revenue. But the room that he originally started this YouTube video or this YouTube channel, it was just like a shitty old apartment when he didn't have a lot of money. And they took the wall out of the apartment. And he has since moved to a significantly larger, very nice home. But they try to transpose it

so it looks exactly like the old one. And that's kind of like what you have to do. So they don't want people to think, like, oh, Derek is like killing him now. He's unrelatable. And that's sort of like, I imagine you've kind of lucked in to this situation where it's like, oh, my whole schick is that like I'm quirky and the videos aren't well edited. Therefore, I can keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger without like doing anything that's sophisticated. There is a component of that. Also, that it's worked.

So like, in a sense, I don't really want to change it that much because as much as that is kind of like the stick, it's like also been successful. But yeah, it's kind of one, I want to drawback of this, and I think about Jerry Seinfeld a lot when I think about this. Seinfeld's humor is all based on a normal guy doing stuff. He's no longer and hasn't been for decades, a normal guy. And I bet it's gotten harder for him to make jokes like, hey, you ever get to the FBI or the private plane, you know, and it's late. And you're like, day, like, you can't. I said, how do you do that?

And so for me, I'm like, it hasn't gotten harder, but I do feel sad that like I'm no longer like your neighbor who's like, here's how you should think of this car. here's how I think of this car. Now I'm a guy who's got, you know, a career GT or will Ford. And it's like, okay, well, maybe he's not quite as, you know, when he talks about supercars being slow, it's like, well, screw this guy, you know, because it's a little bit less relatable.

But I still like to think that I'm, you know, in Chris Rock's most recent comedy special, he says, I'm rich, but I identify as poor. And I kind of like feel that way to an extent because, like, this didn't, I didn't start this way. Like, I still, I still wear these stupid clothes because, like, that's what I wear. It's not like I've like, Sean, I'm not like wearing like high-end stuff.

And then when the camera turns off, like that's just who I am. And so I think to an extent, it's still pretty genuine. By the way, Sean, a Carrera GT, it's like a one point something million dollar car. It's like a car enthusiast love it. It's like a lot of people stream car. Doug, but you're the type of guy who like, I imagine shows up in a million and a half dollar car wearing cargo shorts. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

A white t-shirt that's dirty and old new balance. He's got like an act. You got to be the only guy in the coverage of over three and a half pockets per, per leg. That's exactly right. I drive it everywhere I go. I wear my stupid shorts and t-shirt. And like, you can think what you want. I'm driving career a T-T.

Yeah. And I don't know if you've seen this, Sean, but on his videos, the true fans, they'll put stuff at the top of video. Like, Doug's the type of guy who licks his finger before he turns the page on his iPad. Like, he's got these like. People think I'm like this geeky, like, cautious person, which is probably accurate, to be honest. At the end of the day, people are like, the quirks and features thing, what a great idea. This wasn't an idea.

I really just love seeing how buttons work in cars. That is genuinely, and you know what's funny? Like, I shoot all these videos now for the site. You know, we're selling cars on the site, and they're new cars that are going to have big audiences. And, like, I show up to film and I, like, still have this feeling in me every single time. I'm shooting an accurate NSX right after this. And I still have this feeling like, I'm really excited to see the quirks of this car. Like, it's still in my mind after all these years.

And so I feel like I'm probably doing the right job. Does it, well, how does it feel to be wealthy now? After grinding out of this for so long. It's better than before. It is definitely nice. Aside from that car, I didn't like splurge on anything. I kind of like live a certain life and that's sort of how it's going to be. But, but it is nice to.

have a little, I think I am a little bit more anxious about money than a lot of people, and it's nice to not have any of that anxiety more. And I'll tell you, it came at the perfect time because I just had a boy, and, like, it's amazing to be able to, like, detach and just, like, be with him without having to worry about, like, grinding for the next video, every little dollar, you know, that I place this thing perfectly in this video. It's, it's like an amazing sequence of events. Do you think, how big is this business going to get? I mean, I think, by the way, Sean, have you seen Bring a trailer? It's basically like a blog.

I think it is actually, in fact, WordPress blog. By the way, the whole time we've been doing this interview, I've also just been shopping cars and bids. So I'm like currently like my finger is hovering over this 1994 Toyota high a super custom wagon. I can just buy this van for $5,000 and I'm very, very tempted to do this. This is a pretty sweet looking van. I don't know why I want this, but I really, really want it. It's awesome.

The site's awesome. I'm looking at, you have this like three-wheeler, a Vanderhall, because I was looking at a Morgan three-wheeler. Can I buy this car or do I need to close this tab? It's buy or close the tab. Those are my two options. Right. Right. Exactly.

That's kind of the fun of it. Well, you, you, bring a trailer, which was before you guys, it was basically just a blog. I don't know if you know the show on, but the guy who started, his name was, one guy's name was Randy, but the other partner was Gentry Underwood, who started mailbox. That's that company that sold, I think, for $100 million pre-launch to, to, Dropbox. And I emailed him because you used to have Throttle Yard, which was that for motorcycles. It had all this stuff. And I was like, tell me about this business. Bring a trailer. And he says, it's the hardest slog. It was the hardest thing ever to get going. It took years and years and years. And then I heard a rumor that it sold for many hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you know what it's

for it, Doug? I have an idea, but I'm not going to speculate on Randy's business. Was it to private equity or who bought it? Hurst. Hearst Media bought like half of it is our understanding. Am I often saying that I I think the valuation was in the hundreds of millions but I don't I don't know exactly how much anybody ended up with or whatever but they did well Randy

killed it they're killing it now the sale was was by the car business standards the sale was relatively early in the sense that they sold kind of right before things went crazy in 21 and they've ramped they and us I mean as a function of this

market that's been so crazy have ramped like crazy since then. And so I think the business is worth quite a lot more now, I suspect. What do you think is going to happen with you guys? I mean, do you think, like, are you thinking, you know, this is a, a multi-billion dollar opportunity? I don't know. I honestly, I never thought it would get here. Don't you have to make it that now? If you, if you, I think you sold, I don't know what you sold. You sold. It's just a majority, majority for 40 million, which I, you know, that puts the valuation in the 60 to 80 million range, I imagine. I mean, you need like a, I imagine they're looking for like a 500 million plus outcome.

I think we'd all be happy at 500 million. I don't, and I think that there's a pathway to get there. And frankly, I think Bring a trailer has shown that. And I think that also the reality of this space is that this is how it's going. Like, the internet made it easier to buy and sell cars.

Obviously, it used to be in the newspaper, and that was kind of a disaster with low information on both sides and everything. And now the internet shows up, Craigsaw shows up, that's one thing. And now people are starting. to realize that there is significant value in these auction sites because sellers can amplify. They can get to a much larger audience than they could on their own website or an auto trader. And buyers can get a larger selection, frankly, than having to visit every single dealer's website and every single whatever or go to physical auctions like MECOM and those are,

what are you going to show up there? You know, like that's not realistic for a lot of people. This is kind of becoming the new wave. So I honestly don't know. I think if you had asked Randy eight years ago, he never would have thought his business would have gotten this big. But the market is growing along with these businesses. Another interesting person in your space,

who I think that you have a feud with, but I don't know why. But when Sean bought his car, he watched your video, and then he DMed this guy named car dealer guy. Is that what it's called? Yeah, car dealership guy. Car dealership guy.

So basically the story behind this is Sean and I have been obsessed with, so Sean and I are both popular on Twitter. We've been obsessed with this idea of like, look, there's going to be a billionaire, a YouTuber, Mr. Bees at least is getting there. It might be around that. We've seen that happen on Facebook. We've seen a billion-dollar companies on Facebook. We've seen that on Instagram. No one's done it on Twitter, but it will happen. And in particular, we're interested in these, like, there's like these guys, like, there's like the strip mall guy. He talks about investing in

strip malls. There's the watch guy who talks about old watches. And we're like, what's going to happen with these, quote, guys? Like, what are they going to do? And then there's the anonymous car dealer guy. And I think Sean like DMed him asking like which car should I buy. And he told him to get the Cadillac and then you watched your review and then he just wired some guy money and got the Cadillac. What do you think? First of all, I don't know

why I mean. I said, I want to buy this car. I'm looking for this car. Can you find it for me and buy it for me and get it to my house? And I don't want to do any work. And he did he did exactly that. Okay. Here's the, they'll tell you the genesis of the feud. And then I'll tell you what I think of that. Here's the thing about success on Twitter

for one of those guys and I love all those guy tweet Twitters. I think they're all really interesting, including Cardi Leadership Guy. But the problem is, in order to be successful on Twitter, and I have a suspicion that this is even more true in the new age of Twitter,

you've got to be really controversial and you've got to be pretty like, I wouldn't say blasphemous, but you've got to be like out there with like your takes and your opinions because that amplifies more. And I think Facebook, years ago that like they can do that,

but that doesn't necessarily lead to a great community. And a lot of times there was all this election misinformation or all this fear-moggering. And so they, like, dialed back some of that. And it sounds to me like Twitter right now is actually magnifying it. Like, it seems every crazy take is at the top with all these engagements and that's what they're trying to maximize for.

And the problem that I have with car dealership guy is that like his, if you read his post, some of them are just like the most insane thing stuff you'll ever read. Like the reason we got into the feud was I, he posted like, Ford has done this crazy thing. They're going to go out of business. It's going to be the worst thing in the world.

And I'm like, this is so insane. And I went into the data of what he was talking about. And Ford had to do some big write down on some investment this year. And so their profits were low. And he didn't mention that. He only mentioned that the profits were off 80% compared to last year. And it was like maybe a little bit more content. Or he'll say like, lease, lease, I forget what it's called when you can't pay a lease.

But lease delinquency is like at this time, which is the highest. it's ever been, which means in four months, something like this. Everything is going to blow up. And I think the problem I have with all of those guy accounts is precisely. And so I called him out on this Ford thing. And we got into a little tiff. And unfortunately for him, everyone who was replying agreed with me once they saw the data. And so he blocked me.

And then I realized, though, I'm not the only person he has blocked. A lot of my card journalist friends who I suspect have also tried to add context at various times. He has blocked them also. And so what I suspect happens is he's like kind of tried to create a little bit of an echo chamber around himself because that's what makes you popular on Twitter now. If you go into somebody's tweets and you see that they have a lot of like, well, that's amazing types of replies. They're going to continue to get magnified and get blown out. And I think that people who have a lot of dissent, it starts to become a little bit cloudier. But if you see somebody as like a real icon where everybody's

agreeing with him, then it continues to make him scene more and more like elevated. And so I suspect he's blocking the people who disagree. And so I like the idea of that Twitter account, but I think in order to be popular on, I don't even dislike him. I dislike the concept of, in order to be popular on Twitter, you kind of have to just keep going controversial and these crazy takes. And that's really the only way to make it work. And I think that that's less true on the other platforms. Yeah, I think that's true. We have a friend named Nick who owns, or part owns an agency that outsources a lot of like assistant, like executive assistant work to the Philippines. And do these tweets where he brags about paying his workers $5 an hour and how that empowers them

and everything like that, which like is or is not true. I imagine it is true. But he says it in such a way where he knows people are going to get angry and share it. And at the bottom of the tweet, he'd be like, by the way, if this actually interests you, you could like sign up here. And so he'll like tweet something that gets like, it'll go, it goes viral every time. Like, it'll get like, you know, 50,000 likes and like, you know, three or four or 500 quotes of like people saying, this guy is such a douche, can you believe how tone deaf he is, whatever. And then he'll like text us. He goes, made 50 grand today.

Exactly. That's the problem I have with Twitter, at least right now. I think it's definitely gone to more of a controversy sells kind of thing. You can't just be like a nice dude and do well on Twitter right now. You have to have like takes that are controversial and kind of ridiculous in order to get anywhere. And I'm just, I don't know, it's a shame. I want to ask you one last inside baseball question, which was, Sean, you probably don't, this probably doesn't entirely interest you, but maybe, I think it would for you, Doug,

have you noticed that a lot of car museums are non-profits? So, for example, there's like the Barber museum in, I think Alabama, yeah, where, so it's a nonprofit. You can go on and like see their financials and everything. And I have a feeling, and this is like an interesting tax hack, but I don't know if it's true. I have a feeling. What they do is they sell a business, sort of like we've all done, and what you've recently done, Doug. And they put their money. I think in some type of like donor advised fund, which is like you can give away a certain amount of money to certified nonprofits and then reduce your tax burden.

And I have a feeling what they're doing is they're setting up their car museum as a nonprofit. And like the barber guy, I believe he set up the barber museum after he sold, I think like a dairy company for like a billion dollars. He had like a milk and dairy business. I have a feeling what they do is they make a big sale, a big equity sale in their business.

and they put a certain amount of proceeds into a donor-advised fund, of which they then put into a nonprofit that they own, and that's where they go and buy all their cars, and they let people come and see their cars and whatever. I have a feeling that's what's happening. I don't know. I've just been, like, looking around this. I think that's what's happening.

There's another guy who I think you had on, his YouTube channel is like, here's my $20 million car collection. He's a young guy that has a tire store. And he keeps saying in his YouTube videos, I buy these cars so everyone can enjoy it. And I have a feeling he's doing the same thing as well. You're talking about Hoovie, I think, Hoovie's garage.

I can't remember. He's in San Diego and he has a tire store. It's an interesting idea. It's an interesting idea. I think I need a larger exit before I can make that happen. But that is a great place to, a great way to justify a vehicle collection. I think it's not that you donate the money.

I think you have to donate the asset or your shares to the DAF first. But if you control it and you work in the museum is yours, what do you care? So I just asked, I asked BARD the new Google AI. I said, explain how rich people use nonprofit museums to avoid paying taxes. Here's what it says.

It says that a way that rich people use nonprofit museums to avoid paying taxes to create a donor advised fund, DAF. A DAF is a charitable giving account. It allows a donor's to make a one-time or recurring distribution of cash or appreciated assets and receive an immediate tax deduction. But, so basically, the donor donates art to, like, for example,

donor donates Art2 Museum. They receive an immediate tax deduction for the full appraise value of the art. However, the museum does not have to sell the art and they can instead display it as their own collection. They can avoid paying capital gains on the appreciation of the art. And so I think I've seen

this where people basically have like a quote unquote public museum like in their backyard. And I wonder how who dictates what the appraised price. But also like how many hours does the museum have to be open to justify that? Probably no one's checking on that.

45 minutes a year. Like, could you say that like, because this is Doug's Porsche, it is now worth an additional 20% increase? You know what I mean? Like, I wonder, like, what the appraised value is. But I had a feeling that's what's happening, which seems like a wonderful hack for Cardiners, because you can now. Totally.

Would that mean that your purchase price is effectively like 37% or however, whatever your taxes, 50%? Although, I'll tell you, I've been to that barber museum. And it is quite an operation. And so if that's true, there's probably such a massive spend at the beginning to get, if you do it legally. 50 million, I believe. I went and looked up all his numbers.

I think he seed funded it with 40 or something million. And it makes around 50 million a year. Man, that's crazy. Nonprofits, you can go and look up all the information. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's the Peterson Museum in L.A. There's a few other ones. And you could actually go and look at all the, you can look at their financials.

and you could figure out, because that was my dream. I was like, if I get, you know, a $500 million exit, like, it would be awesome to have this playground. But, yeah, I've already done all the math and, like, looked into all this. That's what we got to do. That's an interesting thing. Never considered it, but will in the future.

Well, Doug, we appreciate you coming on. Hopefully, you realize I'm legitimately a huge fan. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. Talk to you. And maybe Sean's not an example. exactly a car guy, but maybe he will become one now. I appreciate that I legitimately have only watched one of your videos, but it did lead me to buy a car.

So, you know, good job. Enjoy that escalate. It's going to be great. Oh, well. It's only got a 66 on the Doug score. Now I'm thinking, oh, maybe I should have. Pretty good. The best car ever got like a 73.

The six cars higher than it. And so I'm like, am I the kind of guy who just buys the seventh best car? No, but for like full-sized luxury SUVs, I bet it's at the very, it is probably my favorite. It is probably my favorite if you're going to go down that route. That's a bit of a risky car to drive around the Bay Area where everybody else is in electric cars. You're getting like 12 miles per gallon, you know? Oh, yeah, I love it. But I asked him, Doug, I go, so do you have like the self-driving stuff?

And you're like, I don't know, do I? And I was like, that's like the whole point of that. It's the whole point. That's the whole point of that escalate is that it has like. The car you drive for you. Isn't that in the Bay? That's what you want. The point of it is that it fits multiple.

car seats and as huge amount of trunk space. That's the point, actually. Yeah, you didn't even know. I'm not trying to self-driving car my kids right now. No, it works a little. The system you have in that car is the best system of all, of all. It's better than Tesla's self-driving? How is that possible?

For sure. Unquestionable. It came from Cruz. The Cadillac system lets you be totally hands-off. Tesla system is not even, I would say, in the top four anymore. But Cadillac system is especially good. It lets you be fully hands-off as long as you want. provided that you're looking ahead.

You can be hands off and you have to be on a mapped road, but that's like every highway. If you're on a mapped road, which like the five and you're looking ahead, you can just sit there and. Yeah, but like, I won't give you ideas about stuff you can do,

but you don't have to be driving. I know you're the car guy, so let me just, but I am the tech guy and I just don't understand how Cadillac could possibly have better self-driving car software. They bought Cruise. They brought your buddy's company, Cruz.

You remember them? Of course. You seem in safer. They bought cruise. cruise, GM bought cruise, GM owns Cadillac. But Cruz is not, like, Cruz was not the top of the top, right? Like, that wasn't. They are some of, I mean, you'll see cruises.

In San Francisco now, you can rent a cruise taxi. Bro, you've seen those cruises at the intersection. They don't know what the hell to do at any intersection. Have you driven around San Francisco? Well, I wouldn't trust it. That's the thing about it. The Cadillac Super Cruise system works best on, and mostly only on freeways. I don't even use, because I have a pretty good system.

I have a new Mercedes that has a great system, too. and I don't use it. Once I get off the freeway, I'm driving. And that's true of the Tesla's also. They say full self-driving, but we've seen all those videos, we're like,

car. Yeah. I wouldn't trust it. Off freeway, we're still in a kind of a wild west situation. You didn't look at the Defender, Sean? You weren't a Defender guy? Is that a Marvel movie?

What do you know what you're talking about? The Defenders? What are we talking about here? That's the level we're at here with Sean. I DMed a guy and told him to buy me a car. That's the level of research I did. I picked a car that I heard of from rap videos, dude. That was my research.

What about a minivan? Did you consider a minivan at all? I wanted a minivan. My preference was a minivan. My wife vetoed it because she was like, because I'm just like cars stressed me out. Nice car stressed me out. So I just wanted something I wouldn't be stressed about that was super functional.

I was like, what if we just go the other way? What if we just zag here when everybody's ziggin? And we go get like the most functional, most spacious, minivan that I'm not going to worry about anywhere. I can park it anywhere and I'm just not going to care what happens to this car. And it's just going to be this like transport closet for me and my kids' mess. And that's what I was interested in.

But my wife was like, cool, we're not doing that. I recommend minivans to everybody now. Everybody with multiple kids. I got a buddy who has three kids and I was just like, you need a van. He's like, what SUV can I get? I was like, you need a van. He was like, oh, I can get three car seats in my car. What's a good minivan for me?

The sienna is the one you want. That's the one everybody gets right now. That's the Toyota Sienna. that's the one you want. Dude, those are so lame. It is slow and it is lame, but it is, if you have, especially three and up children,

three numbers, three kids are more, you just have to. Getting car seats into an SUV, like, it's just, I just want like the Crox version of a car. That is exactly that.

But Crocs are cool. Yeah, I'm betting that the minivan will make a crox like comeback. No, you made the right choice with the escalate. Although, that's like $130,000 dollar SUV, which kind of defeats the.

purpose of not worrying about it. Yeah. I got overrode by, I got vetoed by my wife and had to buy a good car that I do have to worry about a little bit. And what do you own right now, Doug? I didn't know you owned another Mercedes. You have the defender. My main normal car, I have a E-class station wagon. So AMG or not an AMG? No, just an E-450. Plebe. Dude, we had this exit. We had this giant exit. We got all this money. And I went out and bought a used non-AMG

E-class station wagon. That is who I am at heart. No, the real reason I did that is because I love the AMG wagon, but ultimately I now have a 4GT, a Carrera GT, and then two crazy convertible SUVs. And my view was, I don't need to be getting seven miles per gallon and doing zero to 60

and three seconds in my daily driver. It's just not, it's, I'm good. I've got cars that can do all that. And so I just bought a regular one. Also, the regular ones are just as fast now as the AMG ones were only a few years ago. So it's fine. It's comfortable.

And it's so nice. Do you still draw, I mean, I watched one of your things and you're like, I drove this car cross-country six times in the last like two years. Why are you driving cross-country versus flying? When the summer, we live in Massachusetts. And so I drive all the way across the country every summer and all the way across at the beginning of the fall every single year. I've done this now three times.

This will be my fourth. I'm leaving in 30 days from today. And I, we just, it's a whole summer. So you need a call. You need your dog. We have a lot of stuff. And it's just the easiest way to get everything there. Unless I can afford to fly private, which I cannot.

This is that. So by the way, I do the same thing. I spend my summers in New York and my wife flies and me and my dog drive. There you get, oh. I found another person who does this. When will you be wealthy enough to fly private, you think? When are you going to feel comfortable? Do you know what it costs?

Let me tell you a story. Probably 30 grand from L.A. to S.F. So this is the thing. We go to Nantucket. So I, so that's like the, I'm at like the polls of the country. San Diego is the extreme southwest. Nantecate is basically the extreme Northeast. So, I generally fly first class now.

That is one of the splurges that I do. And so a first class ticket across the country is $1,000 or whatever. And I'm like, thousand bucks. This is great. And I thought to myself, fine flying first class for a thousand bucks. I bet I can fly private for like, you know, three, four thousand. I bet that's what it cost. This was me of, of naive Doug, thinking,

hey, it's probably only a few grand more. You know what? How much more could it be? And the answer is, I looked it up, $55,000 direct from San Diego to Nantucket. And so the answer to your question, when will I be able to fly private? Never. My dog and I will always pile into the car and end up refueling at these sketchy gas stations in New Mexico and Oklahoma.

That will be our lives for years. How often are people recognizing you on these road trips at gas stations all the time, I imagine? No, it's rare on the train. rips. And I'm like, I'm like obsessive about getting there quickly. Like, I just go. I don't ever stop and like look at people or chat. But in life, like, yeah, all the time, obviously. And it's, it's always nice. It's always good interactions with people. Well, dude, this is awesome. We appreciate it. You want to shout anything out where people should find you or where to reach you or whatever? Cars and bids. No, we've talked about it. People can, people will figure it out.

Well, dude, thanks for doing this, man. We'll, we'll, we'll pimp out your Twitter. YouTube channel, cars and bids. And you're the best, man. I've been a fan for years. It's awesome to finally talk. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. And congrats on all the success,

even though you've been at it for, you know, Doug, I've never seen Sam like this. He is just fawning. He can't stop. He's just like, listen, man, if you want a carpool cross country sometime, I love our dogs can sit in the back. We can sit in the front.

It'll be amazing. Yeah, you need a friend. I got a friend. I'll be your friend if you need one. I'm glad to have you on the pod. There were friends now, right? Would that be fair to say? Would that be a reach or would that be okay?

Sam, I'm legitimately, I'm thrilled to find someone else who does this drive and we should be in contact about that at the very least. I have become like a student of this drive. Yeah, yeah. We can start there. I'm happy to start there. We could do that.

The funniest thing, by the way, we just did a live show in Austin and like, Sam is like the opposite of this when someone's a big fan of San. They know everything about them. They've been a fan for years, been following them. They've kind of fallen over them. Huge turn off to Sam.

But when it's somebody, he does the exact same thing to other people, this is hilarious to me. I had this happen to me. I met Jerry Seinfeldt like a year ago. And Jerry tells me that he watches all my videos. And at this point, I've had people coming up to me on the street for a year. I've had some of the interaction, you know, great. Some of them don't.

And I know exactly what to say, what I'm expecting someone to say, to have it go great, you know? And I meet Jared. He's like, I watch all your videos. And I'm like, uh, uh, do you like Porsche? Like, I don't know how I just like, I can't believe I've screwed this up after having so much.

Well, by the way, I know we keep like, we tried wrapping this up and then we kept going. So like, I just really acknowledge that because I actually do kind of want to hear about this. Jay Leno, I don't know if you know about this, Sean, but Jay Leno's like car guy. Yeah, I know that part. Doesn't he have like four or five airplane hangers?

What was that like? Oh, I've been there now three or four times. It is incredible. Yeah, he's got like four. One of them might be an airplane hanger, but it's mostly just like buildings. It's like in an office park. It's next to an airport, but they're not.

But anyway, they're giant buildings. Yeah, I would say maybe six of them. One is just like a machine shop. It's incredible. I mean, his collection is truly unbelievable. One of the coolest things I'll ever see. Oh, yeah. Hundreds of millions.

You think so? Well, he's got a McLaren F1. That in itself is probably worth 40, maybe 50 at this point. A McLaren F1 is worth 40 or 50 million now? Wow. Yeah. That's pretty crazy. Yeah.

At his, it's like, his is like a one-owner car. He said at 25 years. He told me he paid 800 for it or 6, 700. That's insane to me. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that the car Elon had that he crashed? Have you seen a, Sean, do you know what weather tech is?

It's like, it's like, you buy. car and you like get like the mats which is like one of those businesses like yeti where you're like there's no way a cooler company is going to be big and turns out this thing's just massive and the reason you know it's massive is i think it's privately owned but they sponsor all this stuff which you have to have a big budget for but the owner bought a Ferrari 250 what's called a gTO for 80 million dollars which is like i think the most expensive car sale ever yeah and that's how you know this company is killing it that the owner of the privately health company has enough cash to spend on an 80 million car that's just going to sit, you know, it's ridiculous.

I mean, it's like a crazy thing. And so Jay has one that's worth 40 or 50. That's got to be in the top 10 of like most valuable cars. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. And by far the most valuable, like, modern car. And he told me the most unbelievable story about this car that he bought it. He paid 600 and he told me he's driving through L.A. There's only 64 of them.

He's driving through L.A. And he sees another one. What was he driving it? This was when he had bought it. And he's driving through L.A. and he sees another one. So this is 97-98. He says another one just street parked in front of a house.

And he's like, what? And so he goes up and rings the doorbell and meets the guy. And he says hi to the guy. They exchange in FOIA. We both got McLaren F-1s in L.A. And he told me that the guy calls him a year later and says, Jay, you'll never believe it. I sold mine.

And I got $800,000. I made $200,000. And Jay's like, I think I'm going to hang on to mine a little longer. And now it's worth $40. And that's a lesson in regret. Who's going to buy a $40 million car? I mean, how many people in the world do you think would do that? Are there only like a thousand people?

I reviewed Jays and I asked him, and I had to cut this out of the video because it was quite an interesting segment, but I asked him, I was like, what do you think of the other owners of this car? And he thought for a long time and gave a very measured response.

And I thought to myself, like, reading between the lines, what he was trying to say is, there are a bunch of jerks who have money. They're not car enthusiasts. Like, that car has become the type of thing you buy if you just want like a trophy, rather than if you actually care about cars.

Whereas when it was 600, 800 grand, there were enough car people who could afford it that maybe they'd get into the mechanics and do the work themselves, which Jay values very heavily. But now it's just a bunch of rich guys who want to brag. And that's why he doesn't own Ferrari, because in order to buy the fancy Ferrari,

you have to buy an entry-level Ferrari and you get on a wait list and they release them like a Rolex almost. And he's like, no, fuck that. Even though I'm a rich guy, I'm a man of the people. I'm not getting on a wait list to buy a million dollar car. There's got to be 75 cars in that,

maybe 100 cars in that collection and not one Ferrari. That's insane. How many people can afford a $40 million F1 or McLaren? Nobody. And the ones who can, servicing it as a nightmare, it's done on some MS DOS-based. I mean, the whole thing is like a total mess. But it's the coolest thing in the world, you know?

And if you're a rich guy and you have all the rich guy cars, like the Carrar GT and the F40, you're not a really rich guy unless you got a McLarenv1. Then you don't even need the other cars. You're just like, yeah, I win. Where do you keep your, how much is your monthly insurance

for a million dollar Porsche? Not as much as you think. I think it's only a thousand a month to insure that car. Do you even drive it? Do you drive on a day, like on a Friday night or once a month? I take it to cars and coffee

once a week, basically. But other than that, my wife still hasn't even ridden in it. Like, it's just, it's not something I'm, I've driven it a thousand miles since I bought it four months ago, which is actually pretty good. But like, it's a terrifying thing to drive a car that's worth a million dollars. Like, anybody could hit you. And then it's like, okay, well, this is not going to be good for anybody. Like, that person's bankrupt now because their insurance limit is way below this.

And my insurer is going to sue them. And like, the whole thing is just, it's just a scary. I love driving it. I truly believe it's the greatest driving car. Are you happy you own that car? It sounds like it might be not so fun to own that. that car. No, no. I, when I take it out, which is very rare, but when I take it out on early mornings before people are up, when it's still cool, and I can take it into the mountains and

like really enjoy it, which I've done now three or four times, then it is so rewarding and so incredible. And I truly, truly believe that it is, and I've driven them all, the greatest driving car that has ever been made. And so like, to that extent, it's worth it, for sure. Okay. This is actually the end of the podcast now. All right. That's it. Sam. Sam, he's not going to be your bestie. He's not going to be your best friend. Yeah, yeah. Give it time, bro.

Give it time. It takes time. We'll build a relationship. I've already got this planned out. It's going to happen to be in your town next week. Oh, hey, I'm just in town. Just hoping we could hang. I flew out here for this.

Oh, you're not in L.A. You're in San Diego. I'll be there tomorrow, too. Thanks, Doug. We appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, guys. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.