The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – One Mile at a Time by Edward M Rahill

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

One Mile at a Time by Edward M Rahill Amazon.com Edwardrahill.com Coming of age in rural New York in the 1960s, Ed found his way through a challenging childhood. Inspired by the life lessons shared by his grandmother, his experiences at a boy's high school, and then later at Notre Dame, he recounts how he cultivated the fortitude that would shape his life. His unique way of looking at the world, guided by tenacity and faith, gave him the confidence to take on the challenges life had to offer. It was then that destiny brought him the opportunity to compete in the road race of the century, a challenge he had dreamed of since he was a boy, at a time when he was emotionally unprepared. He was about to confront his fears and the deeper truths about the man he had become, the man he used to be, and the resilience he once had. Told with warmth, wisdom, and edge-of-your-seat car racing excitement, One Mile at a Time is a story about the gift of resilience, perseverance, and finding the courage to reengage in the face of impossible odds. About the author Ed Rahill, a Notre Dame graduate and a successful energy sector veteran, is not just a businessman but a record-holding endurance road racer with the fastest cross-country time from Boston to San Diego. His fascination with road racing sparked as a boy watching the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. The publication of his debut novel, One Mile at a Time, fulfills a commitment to his grandmother to break the cycle of unfulfilled dreams for his children’s generation. Currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia, Rahill, a father of four adult children, continues to embody resilience and ambition, setting sights on his next venture.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There are ladies and gentlemen. That makes it official. The Chris Voss Show is live 16 years, 2100 episodes, all that great stuff And eventually the audience has finally caught on that they should jump into the show But we've got to love the timing of the internet there So welcome to the show, go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrissvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrissvoss, chrissvoss1, the tiktokity And all those crazy places on the internet

Today we have an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking to him about his new book that came out June 15th, 2024 called One Mile at a Time, which is how we did 16 years and 2,100 episodes. Edward R. Rahill joins us on the show with us today. He is going to be talking about his amazing experience and insights in his new book. He is a Notre Dame graduate and successful energy sector veteran and is not just a businessman, but a record-holding endurance road racer with the fastest cross-country time from Boston to San Diego. His fascination with road racing sparked as a boy watching the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The publication of his debut book, One Mile at a Time, fulfills a commitment to his grandmother to break the cycle of unfulfilled dreams for his children's generation. Currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia, he's a father of four adult children who can use to resemble resilience and ambition, setting sights on his next venture. Welcome to the show, Ed. How are you? Thank you. And thank you to your audience for being here.

Thanks for coming. It's good to have you. So give us the dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on? My web page is Edward Rahill, R-A-H-I-L dot com. And I have basically author Edward Rahill on Facebook and author Edward Rahill on Instagram. So we have some very good sites there. And of course, the book is available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.

So we're pretty pleased. We have an e-book that just came out. I'm in the process of getting the book translated into Spanish and getting an audio book out first quarter of next year. And then we're going to, that's when we're going to start our really push for marketing the product, but we're excited about it. I'm excited to have an opportunity to be here and talk about it. We're excited to have you. Congratulations. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside the book it operates at two different levels we can talk about why and how why i've taken the path to market it this way the book on the surface really recounts the last great american road race ever

run called the four ball rally there were four of them in the 80s. And it marked the end of a tradition in American history that went all the way back to 1860. And so there's a little bit in the beginning, I give a history of where this whole concept of endurance road racing came from. It had European roots, but in America, it really only started to get noticed in 1860 with the Pony Express. Now, the Pony Express was not a race, but it was an attempt to ride across the continental United States as fast as he could to deliver the mail. And we all know that the Pony Express ended with the beginning of the Civil War and the tragedy that that was. But afterwards, there was a tremendous expansion into the West, and really the cowboy concept of person was born.

An independent person who owned his horse, owned his gun, owned his equipment and clothes, and would travel from spot to spot during a living. And this culture just loved the idea of cross-continental road racing. The average horse race starting in the 1870s was about 1,000 miles. And the last great American road race is called the Great Horse Race of 1893, in which riders rode on their own, choosing their own course on how to get their 1,000-mile trek to Chicago at the time when the World's Fair was occurring then and that Buffalo Bill Cody had his Wild West show.

And, of course, being the marketer that Cody was, he offered a gold-plated Colt 45 to the winner of the race, and the award was made. Wow. There you go. And so this has been going on now. Everyone remembers the movie cannonball run. Is this, was cannonball run based on this?

The, the, in the name and probably only cannonball run. And that's, that's, I'm going to go back a little bit more history, but we'll go straight in that Brock Yates, who was a hero of mine editor of car drivers started the the cannonball run in 1971 as the beginning of the protest that he personally had against restrictive road

basically laws including 55 mile an hour speed limit that was something he just it was a passion for him and we all know that it became a big passion for americans the old the old rock songs i can't drive 55 oh sammy hanger but he drove from new york to portofino hotel in la about 26 2700 miles and and and he did the with with about seven other cars and he basically set the whole stage going again but race had sent decades behind it in 1905 and look at the forward in my book i have a i'm standing in front of the monument erected by the state of oregon to honor the race and for two gentlemen that, basically in 1905,

took a 44-day trek from New York to Portland and won the first cross-continental road race, and that is what that plaque represents that the state set up. And they came in four days ahead of the next team member. So it continued to develop from a horse race to a cart race. Oh, wow. And the Cannonball Baker is a genuine human being who basically prided in driving cross-country as fast as he could in the 20s and 30s. And he was an amazing man, and that's where Brock Yates got the idea for Cannonball Run.

Oh, wow. Because he was honoring the races that had occurred previously. And he was a motorcycle racer. He got his first notice as a motorcycle racer. He ended up being president of NASCAR in his older age, but he graduated from motorcycles to automobiles. And that was where the cannonball Baker occurred when he arrived from LA into New York City driving a Stutz Bearcat.

And one of the New York Times or Post reporters basically gave him a nickname, Cannonball Baker. It's a train that would never you know that didn't stop for anybody there you go the train that didn't stop for anybody i was a fan of that movie and boy i mean there's so many great actors in those things but i always wanted that the black the black the black camaro well you're thinking about trans am smoking the bandit perhaps smoking the bandit that car that's the one i'm thinking of yeah i can't remember if it was in cannibal run i really

wasn't but they had a bunch of crazy cars i think if i remember so how tell us about your life how do you get down this how do you get down this road i always say but so there it is yeah Yeah. Okay. I'm trying. I'm going to kind of explain this in kind of a concise form. The book has two levels in it. The racing developed, which is a true story, and the documentation of I have 72 different newspapers in the back of the book documenting that I accomplished what I did, including the New York Times, Chicago Sun Times, UPI, back then they had UPI as well as AP. So the race is something that you go on the internet, you find out that I did it.

But that wasn't why I wrote this book. I wrote this book basically as a letter to my four children to basically explain to them who I am because I realized I had been so dedicated to my career and starting up a company and becoming CEO of and selling it that I don't think I spent enough time telling them about me. They, at that point, knew nothing about me prior to my marrying their mother. Oh, wow. And this whole book is part of that. And so, it was an attempt for me to do an outreach,

to be the father I should have been that I wanted to be. And it was only then that after asking for some very close friends to review it, I came back, this thing is a man script guy you've got to change your whole focus on this and one thing led to another i ended up befriending a gentleman named brian lachey who's was an adopted son of truman capote and he went he got the whole thing and i i shared it with him you know he was in he was in in holly Hollywood at a party and he called me up. He said, we have two producers who want to come out and talk to you about this right now. And that got me going a little bit. The book was really only in concept. And I called an attorney, basically a media attorney, and she said, don't you dare to talk to these guys.

She says, all they want to do is take the concept. Because at that time that I was doing this, Ford versus Ferrari was a big hit around the world. And they were looking for the next car hit. He said, but what they're going to do is they're going to buy the title, and they're going to buy your name, and then they're going to buy the title and they're going to buy your name and then they're going to write whatever they want. And I said, that's not the reason I wrote the book. And it really, there's the underlying theme that really underwrites the entire book and comes to a head at the end is that it's really a story about the human race and humans and how we are but members of what I call the relay team race of life.

It's a race where there are runners before you who run their lives, run the best they can. But as they come to the end of their turn, they suddenly realize that they have progeny they need to pass this knowledge on to. And that transfer is made to you. And then you run your life and live it the best you can, mistakes and victories. But there comes a time when we got to start thinking about what's our impact on the future of the human race? Because we have the ability to do that. You know, the only reason we're not living in caves is because one generation after another got smarter and smarter and smarter by learning, you know, from previous generations.

And so I tell the story about how that worked for me. You guys aren't living in caves anymore? Well, I am. No, in Georgia, we've graduated from that. We've just gotten over Sherman down here. We're still in caves here in Utah. Those are good for EMP security reasons. We can get into that.

That's a separate company of mine. I'm sorry to interrupt you. I just had to get that joke in there. Go ahead. Oh, that's a separate company of mine i'm sorry to interrupt you i just had to get that joke in there go ahead oh it's a good it's a good joke but the long story is that i start out telling about how the race it became part of american culture for you know 100 120 years yeah and then i graduate to my life and what you know how and I was raised by my grandmother and she treated me very much like a son. I lived with her and she spent a lot of time telling me and preparing me for things. Seven, eight, nine years old, what do you mean I have to be prepared for when times

go bad? I didn't know what bad times were other than i had a fight in grade school or something and so it it was it was her she influenced me to the point that in the book you're going to see a point that is dead true we were we were broken down in illinois i had been arrested twice. Went in New York and taken to court. This is in the middle of the race. And then the second. Oh, yeah. I was handcuffed by the New York State Police.

Because they couldn't. Quickly. They couldn't lock on radar. Because we had radar jamming equipment. The car was running stealth. Second. The next thing is they want, but that's a federal law, not a state law.

They can't do anything about it. And then the second thing was that they look for your co-way ticket. We tossed that the second we got it to see your time stamp. And they went in and illegally searched the car and found a Bearcat scanner. You know what those are? Those are frequencies and radios. Yeah. They got my car. That's why I why i go in taken in front of a judge and the way that ended it's a funny story how it goes she's basically dressed in a summer dress saying i

have to go to a wedding in a couple hours so let's get to it and the the off the trooper made the case that i had been they had found a radio scanner where they had been listening to their broadcasts, and that was a violation of police safety. And she looked at me and asked me what I thought. And I'm standing with handcuffs behind me, okay? under the 1934 congressional act about radio broadcasts is that every American citizen is allowed to listen to any radio broadcast in the country. They're just not allowed to broadcast without a license. And she basically looked at me, eyes open wide. She looked at the trooper, looked back, smiled, cracking ear to ear. He's right. Get him back to his car now and that there was a lot of events like that that are kind of funny the the funniest one is i get arrested in ohio by ohio state trooper

for an illegal lane change and let's put it this way we had an awards banquet two months later he shows up with his wife to get his award oh my god this was a this was these are all true stories wow and and and it it was a it's it really was an adventure we called life yeah you know you know in today's world illegal lane chains you know i know some people on the road that would be on death row over illegal lane changes he said technically he asked me to step back to his car i had the license and registration out the window so he saw hands and he said he was walking to the car hey mr ray hill get out your car come back to mine how the hell do you know who i was and it turned out he showed me i and i have a copy of in the book and all points bulletin across the entire united states warning every trooper in the country that were coming and they were all preparing he said yeah this is my day off I volunteered for this one I heard about

holy crap yeah wow so you guys they were looking for you but they but he he started laughing after he said I know this hey Ed I just want you to know nothing personal but you know, I was trying to find a way to get arrested. But my, my radar gun said 56, but I've been doing this for 15 years. You're moving on. You're doing 120. He was right. And he said, I couldn't figure out how I could legally arrest you until you pulled off the road to wait for me without using your turn signal. Not using my turn signal was the violation. Wow. And he smiled. He says, you know, Ed, this is a little bit like Monopoly.

You're going to lose one turn. So I'm going to hold you for another 30 minutes and I'm going to let you go. And he had a real sense of humor about it. He was a great guy. And in the back of the book, I show a picture of me, Tim, and Roger standing there with a cake honoring the victory and his award as Super Trooper of the Year. I mean, it was a time when police were allowed to be more human than they are today. I'm not blaming police. Today, they're under an autocratic system where they have to look for a reason to write you a ticket.

If you've ever been pulled over, what does the police officer first say to you? Do you know why I stopped you? Or do you know why I pulled you over? That's part of an interrogation technique to find out if there's something else going on he can cite you on. And he's ordered to use those words. So it's not that he's trying to be a jerk. He's not at all. When he's off duty, he'd be a guy you'd have a beer with and have a pizza,

no problem at all. It's just that the system is becoming very inhuman in how we deal with police enforcement and the average citizen and traffic enforcement. So it's a great metaphor for life, one mile at a time, and what you're trying to leave behind your legacy to your children and stuff like that. Now, they don't do this race anymore. You raced the last series of the race? We were the last one.

I didn't know it, but it came to a head. And it came to a head in the United States because the year before, I also ran the race. NBC Nightly News implanted a reporter with us. Douglas Tyker, that name you may have heard, did the entire section. And they covered point-to-point, Basso, San we did the entire section and they covered point to point basso san diego the entire race they had a six minute segment out of their 22 minute broadcast on it to give you an idea and and brock had was broke out was still alive he was he was doing it and they're laughing about it and you know you know and said about the traffic ticks and everything but that showed a different attitude

in the country towards adventurism independence and free spirit yeah that's what this country is built on what it exactly and i'm trying to explain to people the 20th century why we went from a bunch of of insignificant you know horse riding cowboys in the 1860s to becoming the most dominant society in the world in the in the by 1880 and by 1990 and 2000 and a lot of and my premise is that it was because of the way people came to this country and viewed their lives, the responsibility of their lives, and the responsibility to make something of themselves. Yesterday, I just did a podcast, an international one, according to Dubai India. And they were asking me questions about American society and how did you get here and all that. And I used these analogies to explain the talk.

And he was trying to understand. I said, we still have it today. I said, do you know Elon Musk is an immigrant? And he just opened his eyes. But it's something that you get the most growth and development out of individualism rather than centralized government. That was the point I was making. Really, it's true. You know, when I was a teenager, I was looking at, or an early a teenager I was looking at or an early businessman I was looking at you know I grew up looking at Russia and America and there was a competition back then of who

You know had the best form of government and the best spirit. I guess you'd say for for their people and You know I just realized that you know with communism everyone gets the same check It's it's a death of the human spirits no matter how hard you work you get the same and there's no real recognition for excelling or working hard or making a difference and in america there is and that's really the the secret sauce to america is that having that freedom and having that ability to you know technically there's kind of no limit on how high you can go. And the human spirit flourishes in that environment where, you know, in a contained, you know, you can only go so far environment, you know, it kills the human spirit. So it flourishes and society flourishes because society is composed of individuals.

When we view a society as a collective, you're taking away an individual's personal responsibility. I don't have to worry about that beggar on the street the government will take care of. I mean, that's what centralized socialism does. It takes away the individual responsibility for their own lives. I don't have to work hard because I'm going to get guaranteed whatever. And I think that that was something I was trying to say. When my grandmother was married to my, this is where my grandmother, she's important to the story. Her mother came over from Ireland at Ellis Island in the 1880s at 14 years old, had a

job and taken to Buffalo, New York, where she was a maid on Delaware Avenue. And she spent her entire career as the maid in that home. She did get married and had several children, among which was my grandmother, Anne. And they had a tough life. At fifth grade, my grandmother had to leave school to go to work to help support the family. And you know what? Her job was to walk the railroad yards in South Buffalo to pick up free coal to sell. And she told me that was considered a good job. Wow. And so she got to that point. And when we come to the chain of broken dreams and her trying to get me to try to break that chain,

she basically had her dream. She had four children. She was a stay-at-home mom. My grandfather was 36 and just a go-getter, convinced Ford Motor to give him a dealership. Two years later, he dies of appendicitis. Oh, wow. And the business is barely breaking in because it's a startup. And she has no education, doesn't know very little about the automobile business. Four kids that she has to feed. There's no welfare.

There's none of that going on. And to compound it, two weeks later, Ford sent out their district manager and said, we're going to reauthorize the franchise to a man who knows how to run this. And taking that away from her. And in the book, I can explain how to do it, but I'll say the crescendo for her, I have a copy of the telegram sent from Detroit, from Ford, to her, congratulating her on being a dealer of the year. And then copying all the other dealerships in upstate New York saying, and this is exactly what the senior vice president said, you know, I'm starting to think what we need to do to get results is to hire more single mothers of four kids to run these things. And that was 18 months after they were trying to take it away from her. And I talk a lot about what she did in those 18 months to make it happen, but it was tenacity,

never giving up. We're not, you know, I don't care how many times you get, you get knocked down. It's, you get back up. The resiliency is, and that's the character she was trying to show me by explaining her life, which you could talk to me. And the, the reason why I have the story of the race became so prominent. It was going back to my young childhood in the middle of the night in Illinois. My partner had passed off from exhaustion, literally, and looking to give up. And it was going back with those memories that caused me to say, screw it. I don't give a damn. I'm going to do this one mile at a time. I had 2,000 miles to go.

And I was going to do it one mile at a time. And that's where the emphasis of the book came from. And I just drove like a bat out of hell. You know, from, I think from St. Louis to Adrian, Texas, I averaged about 128 miles an hour and from illinois to san diego including construction and all the problems we have with slowing things down the traffic averaged 104 that's with all those stops and including that wow and and i never knew i was going to win it was just all about keeping the faith that i at least did not give up. And I tell you, we came close. And 30 cars started and only 11 finished.

A lot of them gave up because this was the most aggressive national police enforcement in the country that had never been done before. We were, I mean, they were tracking us. They knew who we were. It was a, it really was an exhausting experience. It's the establishment. It was. Breaking the rules.

I had a role back when we were still seriously running the race, never run a cop police car. That rule was broken in Southern California against the helicopters, a Chip Bell 206. And it was quite an experience because we ran that thing, and we won that one. And next thing you know, we're in San Diego at 5 o'clock at the hotel, and I'm driving in with Tim. Oh, Tim, he wakes up. So he says, can I drive the car in because you know he wanted to i said sure he proceeds to speed up the ramp too fast the brakes are shot and he drives into a telephone

pole and and and so i'm there bitching at him this is my car you son of a bitch and all of a sudden i look over there's all these vans and tv cameras and and about 120 people cheering with drinks in their hands. We were the first ones in. I didn't know that. And it was by 10 minutes, by the way. If I had backed off even for 10 more minutes to feel sorry for myself back in Missouri, never would have won the thing. Wow. That's that close.

Perseverance and, and yeah, 10 minutes. I mean, sometimes that's the difference between winning and coming in second. It's just the timing. And that's a lesson in life. Oh yeah.

Really? There are too many, there are many times in your life. I examine mine where there have been other 10 minutes over 3,000 miles that made a difference. And I have failed at times. I'm a human being. At times I just say, what the hell? And I wake up about it and say, you know, if I had just pushed a little bit more.

But I take that as a learning experience. And ultimately, I'm hoping to pass that knowledge on to my kids. And the reason why I'm going to see that I can get this to be a movie is I'd like to make a statement to other Americans of what we were and what we could be again. And I think that's the point is that we need to understand that it all comes down to you as an individual. And my grandmother had a hundred sayings, a lot of them in the back of the book in a quote section. But she used to tell me, you know, Mick, my middle name is Michael, she called me Mick. You need to understand something.

You need to take care of yourself in life because you can't take care of the ones you love if you don't. I mean, those are the types of knowledge. You need to take care of yourself in life because you can't take care of the ones you love if you don't. And I mean, those are the types of knowledge she had to take care of herself so she could save the business. And, you know, she the kids grew up without her around, but she she had to do what she had to do to save the business, to save the family. And, you know, there's and there's other things that are kind of interesting that we could get into sometime. But she had that tremendous impact because she had the vision in her life to try to be that baton holder, handing off the baton to me so that I learned what she learned, what she went through, the mistakes she made, and how she fixed it. And that is the kind of thing I feel i want i think we're losing that in this country and i'm kind of hoping that we can get it back and so the race is a metaphor for that but it is filled with a lot of funny and amazing things that even when i look back today i

i have to go back look at some of the newspaper articles back then just to reconfirm it all happened. There you go. You were there. It happened. And you won. As we go out, give people a final pitch on where to buy the book, where to find out more on your website, the.com, all that good stuff. Thank you, Chris. The book is One Mile at a Time by Edward Rahill, R-A-H-I-L-L. It can be found on Amazon, and your bookstore will have it in their file if they don't have it in stock.

My webpage is edwardrahill.com. The Facebook and Instagram social media, which I've had some excellent help on, is authoredwardrayhill.com. Within those two platforms, I am in the process of looking for a national PR firm that I want to employ to try to get the book marketed in a way that I feel it should be. And also, it's a stepping stone for me to be able to have negotiating power about a potential moving going forward it's not it's not that i don't deny them that they can go and change and make things you know you can't take this whole book and put it into two you know 90 or 120 minutes you have to cut stuff out but i want the message that if there's a fortitude that happens

and there's an existence our success very often has something to do with the people who came before us. Definitely. That's the message. There you go. Thank you very much for coming to the show. It sounds like a fun read and a great capture of a time in life that, I don't know, maybe we should do it again. We should start this race, do an annual one again. Have you ever thought about trying to get one?

Maybe they'll let you. about turning it uh let me you know i i still am like the amateur racing but like with skip barber or one lap they do one in the in the atlanta race of course we have down here but i've got to be honest with myself i mean i you know that with in my 68 shelby you know 500 i missed some ships now that i never would have missed when I was 30. And I just got to be honest about whether I would want to do it again, not because the amount of energy and perseverance in this book after I had completed my almost thousand mile run by myself, averaging 128. It took six, seven hours. In Le Mans, they switch every four hours because it's too exhausting.

I literally had to be lifted out of the car seat by my partner and put into the passenger seat because I had nothing left. The legs were like jelly. And I'm sitting there quivering. But the amount of adrenaline I had applied to make that race happen and put us back into it was something I was able to do at 30. I can't do it now. And so I don't want to compete against those guys. It's for somebody else, the next generation to do it.

I think you should oversee it. I would love to help that, but we need to understand, just like I said, the message of the book is we need to hand off the baton. I'm hoping that this book encourages some people, whether it's doing a race or going and trying to start a business or taking a chance on something like that, to have the courage to go do it. And understanding, you know, if you don't make a change in your life nothing's going to change but if you take a chance it just might change yeah and guess what what's the worst thing that can happen you don't make it and you've and you're and you're disappointed and and and and sad about the fact that didn't work out but you're probably right back to where you were if you didn't try at all that's true and sometimes it's all about that timing you know I remember one time we we were gonna change the name to our mortgage

company to from it was ace mortgage and we'd started that for the first 30 days and we didn't know was happy with the name and so I was like fuck it and so we came up with Park Place mortgage it was available and it's a great name because Boardwalk, Park Place Mortgage. And I walked in very early in the morning as soon as they opened to register the name of the company, the new name of the company, Park Place Mortgage. A week or two later, we got a letter from the department of, we had all this stuff printed up and I was really excited to have the name we got a letter from the department of business licensing that someone had beat us to the punch by a half an hour and and had submitted the name and therefore it was no longer ours it was theirs and so at first i was like you know ready to give up and go fuck it. We got screwed there but then I was like wait, I I was there at the open I was there when the gate went up and

So I challenged it and I had my time stamp and their time stamp and I went to the thing and said hey And it was by like 10 minutes And I had beaten them to the punch and turns it turns out it was ours and not theirs. You were over 10 minutes. Yeah, it went down to, it was like 10 or 15 minutes or something, if I recall. It was really close.

It was like minutes, and they'd walked in behind me, and somebody had chosen the wrong Victor, and there's lots of, what are some other examples? Some other examples of minutes are, I think, wasn't there a person who walked in with the patent for the phone, but he was, you know, a little bit later than Graham Bell? Yes.

Oh, my God. You know, you're catching, that's the kind of stuff I remember from history. I learned that about 30 years ago. But that's really, that's really, maybe when we write a book is connections and how lessons in life about how just a moment in time makes a difference. Yeah. Timing is everything. Yep. Yep. That's what my girlfriend says all the time.

Anyway, thank you for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. And it's been a sight I love fun read and harking me back to the great days of cannonball run and those firebirds said that black firebird and gold firebird that was right now you did the second run in a Camaro did you not or I did it in the Pontiac Firebird the brand new one that I had a 78 I ran I built myself the next one was a brand new one I bought that it looks like a Camaro. That's what's cool.

Camaros and Pontiac. It's a great car. In the book, if you go through it a little bit, I have a picture of it. The car was part of my deal with General Motors Proving Grounds to basically buy a GM car. And if I bought the right one, they were going to build it for me. So it looked like an average car, but it was not. And I mean, it had a 2.99 drag coefficient. Horses today don't have 2.99. That's the amount of drag of a car going through the wind. I mean, its body was designed for 200 miles an hour. We never got above 180, but the point, and I really didn't ever want to because there comes a point where a car can go airborne on you. They turn into an

airplane. And so I've always felt it wasn't about getting the needle to 200. It was about making sure we get past the guy we're trying to be yeah and and so that that but i'm sorry i digressed i went but this is this has been fun and i really enjoyed it thank you very much thank you folks pick up the book wherever fine books are sold out june 15 2024 it's called one mile at a time edward m ray hill has been on the show with us today thanks for watching for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortress chris fa Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Foss. Chris Foss, one of the TikTok and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.