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

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

NetSuite: Take advantage of NetSuite’s Flexible Financing Program: https://www.netsuite.com/ICED ZocDoc: Go to https://www.zocdoc.com/ICED and download the Zocdoc App for FREE Hillsdale College: Go to https://hillsdale.edu/ICH for FREE, easy to get started classes! Follow and subscribe to @VINwiki for more content! Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps : 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:14 - What cars are in the garage today? 00:04:01 - How many Lamborghinis has Ed owned? 00:04:53 - Thought process when buying a car 00:07:37 - First business venture 00:12:51 - Sponsor - Netsuite 00:14:06 - Rental car business in 2006 00:16:34 - Why did Ed start a rental car business? 00:22:49 - Craziest exotic rental story 00:27:39 - Why the car rental business is dead 00:31:58 - How to "legally" steal a car 00:34:24 - Sponsor - Zocdoc 00:35:59 - How to get a fake VIN 00:37:49 - What if you buy a stolen car? 00:45:40 - How to avoid tickets 00:49:24 - Jack's only ticket 00:59:55 - Fastest you've gone in a car 01:02:39 - Cars you’re excited for 01:02:59 - Sponsor - Hillsdale College 01:04:43 - How Ed got his job at Lamborghini 01:09:32 - Type of person who buys Lambos 01:23:25 - Fake buyers at the Lambo dealership 01:25:10 - Bad financial decisions buying luxury cars 01:29:03 - Financing problems with luxury cars 01:30:47 - Exotic car buyer trends 01:35:20 - Buying his Bugatti 01:40:51 - Bugatti maintenance cost 01:43:28 - Cost to maintain all vehicles 01:45:00 - Accidentally buying a Lambo 01:47:01 - Graham's Tesla Roadster 01:51:03 - Car you’ll never own 01:52:25 - Lowering ownership costs for dream cars 01:55:00 - Current car market thoughts 01:59:54 - Worst car ever made 02:00:49 - Rare car sleepers 02:04:08 - How do you invest your money? 02:07:03 - Raising kids without spoiling them 02:10:47 - Finding spirituality 02:18:09 - Advice for the youth *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I got to race a fighter jet in a brand new McLaren 765 LT. So what was the speed? 205. And the guy that had supplied the car, I was like, you know, do I need a helmet or a fire suit? He's like, no, man, if things go bad, that's not going to make any difference in this outcome. Maybe take us back to the beginning. I did not. Come from money.

I didn't have anybody hand me anything. I was always kind of chasing, well, how do self-made people do this? you buy these cars at a price where you can't possibly lose money. There's always a price where everything makes sense. Most of my wealth always came from buying these cars and flipping them or making them go up in value. And so it's granted me a little more license to buy cars more aggressively. As I look back on how difficult the early days of my career were,

it's easy to get demoralized and to think like there's no hope for me to achieve these dreams. that I've had. But there are also going to be profound advantages to being in the moment that you're at. And if you can find the ways to use those, you can be so powerful. So, Ed, thank you so much for coming in the ice coffee hour. We really appreciate it. Now, you've got to tell us about what cars are behind us right now. Well, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this for some time. I love your show. Yeah, we got some fun stuff. So right behind you is my newly acquired, but very much not brand new, Bugatti-Veyron Grand Sport. I bought it just about a month ago, and it was originally the Frankfurt

Motors Show car, and then Birdman owned it. He gave it to Justin Bieber as a present. Floyd Mayweather had it for a little while, and Little Luzi Vert still has my speed key, and I had always dreamt of having one ever since the car was announced over 20 years ago, and I am so glad to have made it home from Miami driving it. That's so cool. And then we got a spiker. Yes, I've always loved Spikers. I think they represent such an interesting approach to building supercars. Very bespoke, very unique, very rare, but such a cool driving experience. So that's a 2009-C-8 Laviette. And then behind me is the 2006 Gallardo that really was the car that started Car Trek, a show that I did with Tyler Hoover and Freddie Hernandez, both veterans of your show.

And certainly had a lot of fun. That one was in a Santa Monica mudslide. That spiker was quite neglected. This thing lives some hard days. But at the end of the day, I'm a lot of the day. always searching for the worst examples of the coolest cars. That's always kind of been my mindset. That and trying to look like I won the lottery 10 years ago tends to be the best way for me to avoid my greatest allergy, which is automotive depreciation. Yeah, you're very much 2004 rich, as they say. And I found out about that Facebook group recently. And now there's also recession rich, which I think I'm a little more recession rich than 2004 rich. But I got there and they're like, we've been waiting for you. And I'm like, all of this is because it's my people. I mean, they're just.

just celebrating all these escalades on spinners and all my car. It's amazing. That's so cool. But then you also have a few Lamborghinis that are currently in a shop, I see. Exactly. Very rare examples, though. Yeah. And so my favorite car of all time is a manual transmission, Lamborghini Mercioligo, LP640. And I fell in love with the cars when they were first released, set in records for the fastest, you know, times at Nardo and stuff like that. I remember reading all the automotive magazines because there was no real exposure to exotic cars back then when I was growing up in high school. And I just thought the mercy was perfect. And so the second iteration of that, the LP 640 that they made from 07 to 09 is my favorite. And the fact that you could get it with

a manual transmission, but not many people did. That became one of my obsessions while I was working at Lamborghini, Atlanta. And so I've had a bunch of them. I've had nine mercies so far. But right now I've got two. I've got a coop and a roadster of a manual LP 640. And there's only 23 U.S. coups and only 10 U.S. roadsters. So they're proper rare, which has been nice. Sometimes it's really cool when, you know, the car that you honestly love and always dreamt of also goes up in value once you buy it. And so that's been a lovely little twist in the story. Do you know how many Lamborghinis you have owned in your entire life? So I've had 64 cars in my life.

I'm able to keep that as a list on our Vinwiki app so I can go back and see what's happened to them since I sold them. Lambeaus had nine mercies, five Gallardoes, two Diablos. So, yeah, I mean, a bunch. And that's, you know, most of the wealth that I've ever accumulated has been in buying these cars and flipping them or making them go up in value. And so, you know, we were talking about cost bases and things like that. Like, it's all very, very low because they all represent a lot of transactions becoming whatever is here. So, I mean, I got rid of seven cars to buy that. And, you know, that's how the whole thing works.

Yeah, but hearing your stories, because I've watched your channel for probably. seven years, maybe eight years, since to the very beginning. You buy these cars at a price where you can't possibly lose money. Like, it seems as though the offering price is so good, and you'll only buy a car if it really makes sense. Is that true? Well, it is, and there's always a price where everything makes sense. And, you know, the thing that sellers are really bad at is disclosing everything that could devalue a car because they're worried about it. And as a car salesman, because I worked at Lamborghini, Atlanta from 09 to 15, you want to make the buyer use as little imagination as possible because those gaps that they're trying to fill in are the fear that keeps them from buying the car.

If it's terrible and you just tell them that it's terrible, they don't worry that you're lying to them because it sounds so bad. And so I was always very forthcoming, very honest, probably to a fault at times, but it just made it easier for people to commit. And that's the mindset that I have when I'm trying to lowball somebody on a car. It's not me trying to undervalue the car. It's me trying to cushion it by the things that I can't know are okay. And of course, as I learn more, I might become willing to pay more. But, you know, when people talk about making money on cars, they call them investments and things like that. And in most cases, that's not precisely what it is. Usually, it's an arbitrage. And so, you know, if you get an allocation for a brand new ultra rare Ferrari, people are, oh, this was a really

good investment. No, it wasn't. Like, it's an arbitrage because you are a very small market of people that were allocated this car, and you can choose if you want to burn the bridge with Ferrari to offer it it to the whole wide world, and they don't have the opportunity to buy the way that you do, and that creates a new market that has more ability to spend or more willingness to spend. And so what I'm doing in most cases is buying a car in such a dilapidated or horrible state that most people would just not consider it. And then I live in the margin between, utterly unacceptable and okay. That is where I like to be. I don't want it to be good. I don't even want it to be perfect. I'm not taking it to car shows to win anything. I'm taking it just to have fun,

rack up miles and never worry a thing about. And so, you know, I've had a lot of success in doing that and in figuring out just how little you can offer where they're not going to be so insulted that they hang up the phone, but that if you go with full commitment, I don't need an inspection. I don't need anything else. I mean, when I bought Missy Elliott Spiker right there, I knew that she hadn't seen it in five years. She said it wouldn't run. She didn't know why, probably just a dead battery and stale fluids and all this stuff. But I had no idea what level of reconditioning it would be required. And I was able to build in that much of a margin because given the circumstances of the way she wanted it sold, nobody else would have taken the deal or nobody would have bid it.

Maybe take us back to the beginning. Sure. You have some very interesting businesses that led you to this point. Yeah. So the first business was breeding albino iguanas in my parents' basement. How do you do that? Well, I just found... Explain the process to Jack. I found one for sale online, and then at one point, I had every known heterozygous for albinism iguana on the planet. And so I was not great at it, and I was not that much of a businessman, but I just thought it'd be super cool. So we had 36, six-foot-long lizards and cages in my parents' basement. How old are you? I must have been 14 or so. And kind of did it through high school. Well, you know, sold some of them, didn't make a ton of money, but learned a lot about,

you know, how you run a business, what accounting looks like, how you'd manage the books. And, you know, the fact that, you know, obviously, they only reproduce once a year. And so you'd have to plan for, you know, this is how much I might make and this is how much it takes to keep it all going. How much were they? They were at that point between $5,000 and $6,000 each. What? Yeah.

And so, obviously, the ones that aren't albino, but carry the gene, the heteroseinements, were a lot less valuable. And so we were able to, you know, make some. And I ended up selling the whole lot of, as I went off to college, to not Tiger King, but one of his friends. He was actually in one of the opening scenes of Tiger King. I'm like, there he is. And I hadn't talked to him in years. But he was able, he moved them all down to Florida. They were a little more prolific when able to live outside. As everybody in Florida knows, there's iguanas at every underpass. How do you get the first iguana, though? Like, how did that start to get like an albino of that? had a pet one for a while. And so, uh, and it was awesome, a great pet. And I, so I, I always thought,

oh, more reptiles. And I mean, as soon as I learned that you could have dinosaurs that fit in cages, I was sold on it as a kid. And so we had all sorts of weird stuff. And my parents were very overly indulgent in those kinds of ridiculous obsessions. And so I, uh, I learned a lot from, from them about, you know, some of the crazy things that were out there in the world. I mean, we were not wealthy, we were at any stretch. But we, they were able to, you know, show me like, this is that. And they weren't car people either. So I wasn't out wrenching with dad in the garage. This was something that really not until I could drive, I became obsessed with. And so just growing up and reading as much as I could and researching how businesses worked because I didn't come from

an entrepreneurial background or family. They had no idea. But they just were like, oh, well, this seems like a reasonable experiment for you to try and learn and fail and figure it out. So I don't know if that's, you know, skill or luck or whatever, but it was always just like, trying to figure out how to throttle and how to understand the risks involved with whatever it was you were trying to do. What was the profit margin of that whole business? Well, you know, what you look at you have no real cost in the egg, but, you know, when you can sell something for, you know, a thousand to $10,000, it's the problem was always figuring out the profitability afterwards and deciding if it was actually even worthwhile. And that's the way all farming works. Now, this is a very peculiar example of farming, but you watch Clarkson's farm, and they don't know if they're making money until long after a harvest and sale and figuring out all the logistics.

And so the same was true for my next real business, I suppose, which was much more legitimate than that, but was in college, I started an exotic car rental company. And, you know, you see so much on YouTube about people renting cars out on Turro and doing all these other things to try to make their car payments and stuff like that. But in 2006, after my sophomore year at Georgia Tech, that was a time when you could still get stated income loans for exotic cars. So as a 20-year-old, you just fell out the application and tell them what you thought you were going to make. And they would approve stuff. And so I bought my first Lamborghini at 20 years old. I didn't have enough money to make the first payment and immediately started a rental car company. And with that, the same issue was true.

You couldn't tell if you were actually making money really until you sold the car. You could generate revenue. You could get the cars out and make money, but you didn't know when they were going to break catastrophically. You didn't know how much they were going to depreciate. And so you knew what you had to make to make all your payments and pay all your bills each month. But you never really knew how profitable the business was, at least until tax time. And a lot of times until you actually disposed to the vehicle. How much was the Lambo?

I think it was $124,000. What did you say you were making on the stated income loan? Oh, probably 200. And, you know, it wasn't long before I was probably generating about that much revenue off the business. And so it was, you know, pro forma income. I now know what to say. But it was a very interesting time. But for the U.S. economy, obviously lending practices like that are a lot of the reasons why it fell apart. But it, you know, I paid all my bills and was able to generate just rock star car credit because I have multiple six-figure car loans at a time, paying them all perfectly. And so, you know, as I shut that down and then moved on into sales at the dealership, I had better car buying ability than almost all my customers because the banks would approve whatever I asked for because I'd proven that I could pay so much in car payments. And they didn't know necessarily that those were more of a business expense than personal because I'm on the loans for them. But before we answer that, you've got to ask yourself the question. What does the future hold for businesses?

Because if you ask nine different experts, you're probably going to get 10. different answers. The market's going to go up. It's going to go down. We're going to get a recession. We're not going to get a recession. Someone should really invent a crystal ball at this point. But until that happens, over 40,000 businesses have already been future-proofed by our sponsor, NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform. With one unified business management suite, you have just one source of truth, giving you all of the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're

closing the books in days, not weeks, you spend way less time looking backwards and way more time on what's next. So whether your company is earning millions or hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. And speaking of opportunity, right now you can download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning when you go to NetSuite.com slash iced. Again, the guide is free for you at netsuite.com slash iced. NetSuite.com slash ICED with the link down below in the description. Thank you so much NetSuite for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to the podcast. How was the rental car business? At the time, it was really, really good. And that is because, you know, in 06 to 08, when the market was really

blowing up, everybody wanted the latest, greatest, newest things, the depreciation and maintenance costs were really on the rise. And so people were using it as a very, very. viable ownership replacement concept. And those customers were amazing. They took really good care of the cars. They came back a lot. Very different than when I'd rent them for rap videos or, you know, people that were from out of town traveling and just want to go blast through the mountains and stuff like that. And we did that, but I was really much more dependent and much more focused on those ownership replacement clients that were going to be longer term, much more significant relationships. The problem was, as the economy fell apart and depreciation just wiped everything out, generally people were, that

anybody that cared about having a car was able to buy one for pennies on the dollar. And so those customers went away and it was just the people that mistreated stuff. And so around 2010, I ended up selling off the cars and selling the customer base kind of as a mailing list to a company that wanted to expand from Florida into the Atlanta market. And that's kind of how that ended. And at the time, I was kind of being courted to go sell cars at Ferrari of Atlanta and LaBrona and Atlanta and stuff like that. How much did you sell the business for? How much is something like that worth? less than 100 grand. I mean, I guess there's always this thought that made, I mean, the cars were obviously separate from that. And there was honestly not that much equity left in the cars because we put so many miles on them and stuff like that. And so it made me hyper conscious of the cost of utilization in a lot of these cars. And it took a while to be honest for the joy of it to return. Not that I didn't love the cars, but I would think, like, because I was pricing this to customers, like, well, if I drive this 25 miles to, and then from dinner and we go do something else.

I know exactly how much that cost. It cost me $5.72 a mile to operate one of these cars all in with gas, insurance, interest, cost of money, everything that it was. And I was like, man, I just, I don't know that I'm going to get that much joy out of it. Now, I've been able to reframe that and it had a much different approach, obviously, to buying the cars that I truly want to own personally versus what's the best for the rental fleet. But sometimes when you go pro in whatever your hobby or your passion is, you learn a different perspective on how to treat it as a business person rather than an enthusiast. And it can change the way that you love it.

Now, why did you decide to do a rental car business in the first place? What started that? Well, I'd become obsessed with exotic cars. You know, even back then, you think like up until that point in 2006, the total production of interesting cars from our favorite, you know, Italian and British automakers was nearly not. nothing relative to what they've built since then. And so you never saw them. But I was, you know, I'd read DuPont Registry and watch MTV Cribs and, you know, top gear and everything else that was available to consume to learn from beyond just reading the magazines that you'd always see.

And so I became obsessed with the idea of the cars and I was, how do you get to be around these cars? How do you get to use them whenever you want? And that was sort of the way that I found. And so at the time, the idea of an exotic car rental company was not common at all. And I had learned a little bit from the guys at Gotham Dream Cars, Noah and then Rob, who had started it. And I'd actually helped them locate the Gallardo that they bought because we had some mutual friends. And I knew they were in the market.

And you always wanted to find a higher mileage, more depreciated one for them to use. And so I'd learned some. There was one in Vegas. There was budget and Beverly Hills had a couple of Ferraris. And so it wasn't nearly as built out from a business perspective as the concept is today. And interestingly today, it's a total. crane wreck because everybody's figured out that the easiest thing to do is steal a rental car because all you have to do is take it to another county or another state and the cops don't even care about

getting it back. And so we deal with a lot of that on Vinwicki of people. What about the liability of running an exotic rental car business? Would people ever try to steal your vehicles or what if they ever crashed a car? Oh, they did. Yes. I mean, it's one of those things. You have to emotionally prepare yourself every time the car leaves for it to come back broken on a tow truck. And, I mean, at the time, they weren't as reliable as they are today. So you had faster clutch wear and things like that. And so, yeah, I had them crashed. I had them stolen.

And fortunately, you know, it ended up okay. It was in many ways the recognition of the risks that I was taking in that regard that started to sour my perspective, on the business. And so look for other ways to make money where other people were taking the risk for a little while. Did you get pretty good at gauging people? Like when they walked in, you're like, okay, I'm not going to rent you just because I think you're going to crash this car. Well, certainly. And as you talk to them on the phone, especially because they're usually internet leads and stuff like that, even at that point. Because I didn't have the money to have a proper storefront where you could just walk in and rent something. I was delivering these cars from a very small warehouse.

But you would, you'd have to ask them the right questions about what experiences they had in similar cars. You know, did they have any or had they ever been around one or was this their first introduction? How long you're going to have to explain to them how the car was. works, what they're really all about, how to treat it in order to maximize the life of everything that was consumable. And so, yeah, you had to ask hard questions to really get to the bottom of what they want to do with it. So hopefully they bring it back in as much of one piece as they can. What was the closest you had come to bankruptcy? Goodness. I mean, back then, we, I got married in 2009. We were so broke. I mean, it was like every month was like barely making

the payments, barely paying our bills. I mean, we would end months with, $8. And, you know, it was, it was a dark time in many, many ways. And, you know, when you think about skill versus luck, I mean, those would be very, there were a lot of unlucky outcomes that could have been much worse. And so, you know, it's, it's so hard to gauge there. But no, we, we had no money at all. And really just betting the farm over and over again. And it's certainly a risk profile that I wouldn't be comfortable with today. But back then, I mean, you know, I always thought as a college entrepreneur, there's no better time to go broke than when everybody else is also broke. You could just be broke with worse credit. And the best case in our is you're not broke. You have great credit and you're kind of prepared more for whatever comes next in life. Now, you know, there were some downsides there. I wasn't able to go, you know, study abroad or live quite the same college experience because I was working every weekend as hard as I could. But, you know. Did you ever miss a payment on anything or you always had perfect payment history? I never went more than 30 days late, which is when you start to see credit reporting. I definitely was a few days late.

You can blame it on the mail or whatever. It was because I needed to rent the car out the next day in order to be able to make the payment or the credit card processing was taking longer. So yeah, there were, and you'd have people bounce checks and there were tons of things. And, you know, a lot of times people approach me for young entrepreneur advice. And I try to be careful about, you know, what I tell them because what works for me, may not work for them. What would work for them? Probably wouldn't have worked for me. But I really should have spent some time working at Enterprise or Hertz or something like that for a summer just to see a little more of how these companies actually work rather than just diving in headfirst and

taking all the risk. Because when I started the company at 20 years old, I wasn't even old enough to rent a car. So I couldn't go rent a car if I traveled to another city because you'd be 25 in order for your insurance to go. It's crazy that you have to be 25 to rent a car like this, but you could buy it at 20 with stated income. It was a strange time. And certainly it's something that it's a good thing that you can't do that anymore because certainly most people were not making their payments and stuff like that. But then, yeah, that was it was such a weird time.

And it really, it was the peculiarities of that time that made the opportunity to sell cars a lot more interesting when I kept being offered the chance to do so. Because, you know, when I started in 2009, Lamborghini, Atlanta had only sold five new cars that year. And by the time I left, we were selling 70, 80 or so, so a pretty big change. A lot of it was the market was just a lot healthier. The products were a lot better, but significantly, it was just such a tough time. And I was much more interested in doing that than selling, say, Ferraris, where even in 2009, there was still a weight to get a 430 scooterie or a 16m or something like that. Whereas with Lamborghinis, everybody knew you could just walk in and buy one.

And so those were going to be harder to sell if I wanted to become good at it. It was better to start with something. And I was more passionate about certainly the V-12 cars from Lamborghini than some of the Ferraris. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. I want to get into the selling Lambos, but before we get into that, I was curious what stands out

to you is the craziest exotic car rental story. So the week I got married, I had rented out to actually a former Atlanta police officer, my Gallardo and a Ferrari 612 Sky Yeti than I had in the rental fleet. and he and his friend were going to be driving around. And I had told him like, hey, by Wednesday, they'd rent it over the week. And I said, you know, if you want to extend it for a day or two, that's fine. But by Wednesday, the cars have to be back. And every day he would show up. And even though the original payments, we always wanted him to be on credit cards,

but he kept bringing cash to continue it. And that was okay because I had, you know, a security deposit and stuff like that. And on Wednesday, he stopped answering the phone. And I'm like calling him every few hours, like, where are the cars? I'm tracking them. And the, the Gallardo had, the tracker had stopped in Midtown Atlanta. And so I went there and it was at a body shop and the whole front was knocked off of it. And I'm like, well, you guys are not going to repair this.

I don't know what he thought that he was going to somehow be able to get a new bumper and a hood and get this done in like a very short amount of time. But I had it moved to the body shop that I used. So at least that one was safe. But the tracker had gone dead on the 612, which should never have happened because there was an internal capacitance. but they weren't quite as advanced back then as they are now. And so I'm still calling them. And Thursday night, I'm actually at my bachelor party and I get a phone call from a number I didn't recognize.

But at that point, I'm answering anything trying to find these cars. And it was this woman. And she said that her husband had bought my car from my employee that day. And they had paid like a BMW 715, $15,000 in cash. And he was going to take payments for the rest of it. And I'm like, man, that's everything about that is just wrong. false and impossible. And she's like, well, we've got your car and we want our stuff back and we want to undo this deal. So, well, I definitely know we're going to undo whatever deal you think happened because

it wasn't a real deal that anybody had the opportunity to make. And she's like, well, I'm a lawyer and possession's nine-tenths of the law. And I'm like, no, you're not. And that's absolutely not true. It's a rental car. Possession is zero-tenths of ownership. Like, that's not how it works. And so she's like, well, he's your employee. And no, he's a customer. And I've got his driver's license right here. And so we went back and forth, and ultimately they didn't want to give it back because I couldn't find the renter because he had all their stuff. And they're hiding the car around town. And occasionally the tracker would blip or somebody would spot it. But again, the problem with the rental car industry is whenever it was rented in one county, but there was a problem in another county, it's not like proper theft.

It's theft by conversion, not grand theft auto. And so the cops are useless to help get it back. This is really a civil dispute. They were allowed to use your car. They're just using it in a different or longer way than you had intended for them to. And so it was such a nightmare. And I ended up the day of my wedding, I had no idea where the car was or how we were going to get it back. I knew that I had insurance.

But the thing about exotic car rental insurance is it was one of the hardest policies in the world to get. But if you ever file a claim, they'll non-renew you. And so I was like, well, I can at least get this. loan paid off, but then I have to go out of business and I can't pay the rest of the loans. And so it was a dark, dark place. And I had to go leave on our honeymoon and just leave. I called a lawyer that I could barely afford to pay him per hour. And I'm like, look, if you can just follow up on this while, I'm going to see if something happens, let it be the person they can give it to if they agree at whatever point. And I just had to, you know, turn it off and forget about it.

And a few days after we got back from the honeymoon, I finally got in touch with the customer who helped me get in touch with the guy who had bought it. The only thing he knew about this guy that he had sold my car to was that his name was Lucky. And Lucky wanted $5,000 for me to return it. And I didn't have $5,000. I asked the cops that I'd been talking to. Like, what should I do? And they go, ask Lucky if he'll take a check. And I said, I don't feel it's, I should remind you, Mr. Officer, that it's a felony to bounce a check knowing that it's not going to clear. I don't worry about it. It'll be fine. Like, maybe you can text me that. And so I, he, lucky, was happy to take a check.

I gave it, signed it in Mickey Mouse or whatever. And he, he took it right to the bank. The car was so dead at that point that I had to have it toad. So I was actually, I sat in a lot with him for a while. He had this old Maserati Quadra Porte that had been painted like seafone green. The paint was falling off of it. He was asking me for body shop advice and whatever. And I was just like smiling, trying to get my car loaded up.

And so we finally got it back. He got so mad at me, threatened to kill me over the bounce check. I'm like, dude, that was an extortion payment for the return of stolen property. Like, I am under no obligation to perform here. So have a nice life. And he never came back to kill me. So that was nice. But yeah.

Why is it such a bad business today? You mentioned that earlier that the car rental business is just, it doesn't work. Why is that? Because now they know that if they just take them across state lines, they can swap the vins, wrap them. They can get fake titles. There's a whole community around stealing all sorts of cars. They're on Facebook.

It's a pretty entertaining thing to watch. But they, so with Vinwicky, the way that we're tracking vehicles, a lot of, and the fact that I am pretty familiar with most of the people that are actively in the exotic car rental industry, there have been a few times over the years where we've been tasked to help people find these missing rental cars. And so I had done some consulting work with a company in Nashville about how to set things up, what kind of cars to target. I'd sold them some cars while I worked at the dealership. and we were trying to, you know, talk through some ideas that they had about expansion and more business, and they started to rent out a lot of people's cars that they didn't own. And that's where the wheels really start to fall off because there's just not enough profit in the business model for the owner to make some money and then the rental car company to make some money and other marketing costs and stuff like that.

And so they had a hurricane that this guy had rented and he was blasting from Nashville towards Atlanta. And so my friend called me at like three o'clock in the morning on the fourth of July. July 2017, I think it was. And he said that he saw that this car was being stolen and asked me to like, go get it. And I'm like, I'm not a repo, man. I don't work for your company. I'm in no standing to go take this car from whatever villain now has it. Like, and they had learned at that point that they've gotten fake insurance documents, a fake driver's license. And those have gotten so good that it can be hard to tell. And so ultimately, I chased the car around. I gave him a glimpse. file on my phone so you could see where my phone was. And then he could look at that and his tracker to tell how close I was getting and stuff like that. And so I chased it all around Atlanta for like two or three hours and ended up, it showed up at a shop right next to the body shop that I tended to use.

And it was odd because, yeah, like four or five in the morning, this car was, you know, in a lit up shop. And I'm like, I mean, I'm not walking in there as me. But I called the cops. I explained to them what was going on. I'd gotten out of bed. I didn't even have my driver's lights. I didn't have a wallet with me.

And I'm like, look, the car is in there. I know that you don't have probable cause to go in there because of the nature of theft by conversion and stuff like that. I said, but I bet the door's unlocked. Well, one of you just walk in there with me so that I don't get shot. And they did. And we walked in there and they pulled out the trunk liner. They were pulling out wires, cutting things out, all this stuff, trying to find the tracker so that they could then wrap the car, swap the in and then try to sell it to whomever wanted to just drive it, I guess, until the registration

expired. And I convinced them that they were in trouble, even though they really weren't, and they gave me the car back. And I kept it overnight and then got it back to the guys in Nashville. So they're not technically in trouble because you have to pay for your own lawyer to then be able to prove that and they can delay the court case month after month after month and just bleed you dry. Well, even then they would just have to pay for the extended rental and the extra miles. Like they had permission to use the car. But isn't there like in the contract? It's like, okay, you have to return it by this.

It reminds me of almost squatters rights, but for cars. In a way, yes. And like squatter cases, they were a nightmare because like if somebody was allowed in, you making them leave can be a very, very complicated thing. And so it's, it's, you know, something that you could probably try to criminally prosecute more so if for a fraud case. And that's what these are also because there's misrepresentation. And so that's where you do get some legs. But at the end of the day, these guys are just so happy to have their cars back that they, you know, they're just, that they just move on in most cases. Because it's, you're trying to get blood from Iraq. It's just you don't really even know where these people are, what they're going to do. And so after we made the video about recovering that car, I got within a week, a hundred calls of people that were missing cars in this exact circumstance. And so we actually, we started a WhatsApp chat. And. And every single day somebody does this to one of the rental car companies in, at least the southeast in California.

Can you walk me through how someone is able to steal a car and make it legal and resell it? He wants to be able to do this. I'm so curious how this is what it is. So like I bought, like step by step, like what they do. Well, so there are several cases where like I bought a Diablo Roadster at one point. And I bought it with no vins and no title. And this car had been a rental car. It had actually been stolen, taken to Hawaii, repainted.

They had figured out some way to get a title. There's a lot of different loopholes in different states about how you can get a bonded title or a mechanics lien title or a court issued title. And if there's not like a perfectly accessible police report or record of the car being stolen, a lot of times the people that issue those titles don't know. And so you can export them. You can do a lot of things. And then sometimes you can re-import them. So they'll pull the windshields out, put a new vent on there. And then they'll be able to, if they can get a title through some way or print a fake title, then

put it to a state that doesn't check as well. You can end up with a car. Now, one day, it generally catches up to them. And so you hear about these cars coming back. And so what had happened with this Diablo was that effectively this dealer had figured out what happened. And he was able to triangulate back to the original owner. buy them out of their ownership of it, and he legitimately owned the car.

That being said, I was going to have to go through a process of getting a bonded title and, you know, remaking the vans and stuff like that. And it happens. Like, you know, there's a lot of times where, oh, I did another one that we bought a cheap guy out of from the Virginia State Police impound. And it was 35 grand for what would have been a $130,000 car. And I would eat. But, you know, it ran and drove. and we ended up having a contest to see who would use it in the coolest way on the channel.

And so whoever came up with whatever the audience voted was like the best use of it, they could buy it from me for exactly what I paid for it. So I sold this woman in Arkansas, the car for $35,000 because she was going to turn it into the lambulance and take sick kids around at her hospital with it, which is awesome. And it still does that. Well, it doesn't run that well anymore, but they're working on it. But yeah, that was another car, no vent or the wrong vens. And so I just used a label maker, printed the right. vans for the police inspection and stuff like that, and we're able to get a title for it.

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it makes it so much easier. So just try it. Schedule the appointment. It'll be worth it. So stop putting off those doctor's appointments and get to Zocdoc.com slash iced to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. Again, that's ZOC, doc.com slash iced, Zocdoc.com slash iced with the link down below in the description. Thank you, Zoc doc, for sponsoring today's episode. And now let's get back to the podcast. How do you get a fake VIN? Do you just make something up? Yeah, a lot of times they just make them up. Yeah. Or, you know, in the best, the more legitimate cases, they'll find a crash car, take the vins off that and stuff like that. But it's still not allowed, but vins swapping. But yeah, in those cases, and yeah, we found one.

years of 2016, I guess it was. It was just an orange Gallardo in the Target parking lot next to my house. And this, I'd only been out of the dealership for about a year at that point. And I knew all the Lamborghinis that were in Georgia because I'd sold most of them and service the rest. And so I saw, we don't have an orange super legera. So I walked down and I'm taking pictures, going to post it our new Vin Wiki app that we'd launched.

And I look and I'm like, man, the VIN doesn't look right. It's in the wrong font. And so I took pictures because it was on a dealer tag and came to find out that it was a stolen car. Somebody had manually made a VIN and they've left a digit out. And I knew that the range of the serial number wasn't right for the year that it was. And no one else on earth would have ever found this car or cared enough to look. And they'd had it for years and years and years. But, of course, I got all interested.

And so I found out from it had been registered in California. And we had a list of all the 08 superligerers in the U.S. on VinWiki. And so I was able to say, all right, well, we can, we know it's one of the five colors. They only came in five colors. And so it's an orange car with ceramic brakes and a big wing. That narrowed it down to like five, pulled the car faxes on all of them. Only one had ever been reported stolen, figured out it was VIN 6668 and got in touch with the local cops. And they were like, we're, we've been investigating this from it. We're curious how you know all these things. But they were able to find it, find the dealer that the tag went to.

And they really raided them and got the car back. So what happens if you buy a stolen car unknowingly? Like you go and everything seems legitimate, you buy it at a fair price, you take possession of it, you drive it for a year. Everything seems fine. You register it. So most of the laws related to vehicle transactions are designed to protect the consumer, the buyer. So like if the dealer never provides you a title, you can get a title. In those cases, it favors the person who had the car stolen from them.

And so if you buy a car that was stolen and they come and find it, you may not have any criminal liability if you can prove that you didn't know that. But if you bought it for, you know, 20% of what it should have been worth, you have a harder case there. But no, you're going to have to give that car back and you will not see your money ever again. So if you pay, let's say, 50 grand for a car, you have to then go to the person you bought the car from to try to get your money back. Correct. Yeah. So and that person inevitably will have known they were selling you a sold car and you're not going to see. anything. Wow. It's crazy to me how common this is and how just people don't prosecute this or find out about it. I didn't know it was this prevalent. There's a Facebook group that I follow that's like selling cars with no titles. And sometimes it's just people selling cars from out

of their, they've got a loan and they can't pay off and they just want to. And you're, you're going to get the car seized by a repo agent before too terribly long. But since it's so easy to steal like Hellcats and Chrysler products. They're always on, I mean, like, you can buy a Hellcat for five grand, and they're like, you know, don't ask any questions. And I, I mean, I know they're all stolen. Yeah. But I've, like, I've thought a lot.

Like, what if I just go buy one? Like, they'll probably get killed in the process. But, like, I go drive it around for a little while. I'll start, if I'll find out who owns it and we'll make a video giving them their car back. Like, I'd pay for the $5,000. Why are Hellcats stolen that frequently? Because the keys are really easy to clone. It just takes a simple little.

phone app and it's... There's that Tommy G. video that was so amazing where he goes to a guy who steals cars from lots. And this guy comes in and within like 30 seconds to a minute can unlock any car. And he's using this thing that he bought online. It's like, you know, not quite

legal to sell, but they sell them online. Programs this thing. It's insane. He could start any car just remotely. Any car. Like, especially Audi's, I think, was one of the cars. He just... Yeah, and you're getting issues where a lot of them, they won't You can't insure them anymore because they're so easy to steal.

There were some Hyundai's like that. They're having issues, especially in Europe with certain Ferraris because the keys are so easy to clone. And yeah, they just want in 60 seconds. I absolutely love being able to unlock Tesla's from your phone. I think that is the coolest thing. And I also like the old cars that have the keypad where you can type in the pass code that then unlocks the car. I think both those things should be used more. If we're going to have Apple Payant our phone and it's as encrypted as it is and you can't like, you know, just go up to someone's phone and

steal their money by tapping your phone with theirs. I feel like we should be able to unlock cars with that. Tesla's just as easy to do that too, though. Is it actually? Yeah, I had a buddy who was able to show me this. He walked up and was like, is your car locked. And I'm like, yeah, he's like, watch this. I kid you not.

He just goes on his, he had like this little device within like two minutes by cars unlocked. What buddy? So he could break into every single Tesla. He's like this tech computer guy who's really big into like. Have you heard of this? Oh, I mean, yeah, stealing cars is considerably. easier. It's really just what you do with them afterwards. I mean, I've been

offered a lot of stolen cars that I knew were stolen and you can't do anything with them. So even if apart from the morality or legality, they're just useless because you can't take them anywhere. Somebody tried to sell me while I had the rental car company, a perfect 360 spider and they were like,

you just have to go get it. And I'm like, and it doesn't have a title. And I'm, well, it was on a farm in South Georgia and they had wrapped it in aluminum foil because they didn't want the track or they didn't know where it was or if it had one. And so they didn't want it to ping anywhere. And so a lot of times when people steal cars, they'll just pull them like around the corner and then watch them to see if somebody comes to get it. But they really didn't want

anybody to find it. So they had it for years that had been there. And I was like, well, there's nothing I can do with it. I have a 360 spider. I mean, it's got 100,000 miles on it. But like, I guess I could start swapping parts off and stuff. But I didn't have the money for a parts car. And so there's just, even if you can steal stuff, you can't really, make that much for it. So, I mean, people are selling a $50,000 hellcat for $5,000 because somebody's just going to go joyride it and do one of these takeover burnout sessions in the middle of an intersection and then, you know, crash it into whatever. That's crazy. Okay, while you mentioned that the takeovers, is that? Because I don't know if you guys got hit with this like algorithm.

Yeah, I love those videos. I hate them. Really? I hate those videos. Yeah, because people are getting hurt, man. They're idiots. They're standing in the middle of the thing as they're doing burnouts, like filming it jumping up and down and they get hit. I know, but I also, like, Like, I'm mostly talking about, like, I saw videos of like this old dude who was like going out there and like walking out there like, guys, stop, stop, stop. Because it was like in front of his business and he like gets jumped or he gets hit by car. People that like go. We're getting different algorithms, Jack. The people that go though and they like walk by the cars and try to jump over it.

Yes. That's what I'm seeing. Like that's, I mean, I don't know how you can ask for something more than something like that. But I apparently those have been happening for a very long time. they've just been like mainly more so mainstream recently well i mean there's always been street racing and things like that and that's not really what these are these are slideshows and just stunts and things like people like shutting down roads yeah and it is really a cancer in the automotive scene because even though these people claim to be enthusiasts there are so many bad outcomes in terms of

crashes in terms of injuries in terms of you know businesses that are massively disrupted or they crash into their buildings and things like that and so the crackdowns on these from a police perspective have gotten really, really insane. And one issue with it is that they're very hard to define. And so a lot of the laws that have been put into place could easily

creep into almost any group drive or car show. And the penalties are designed to be motivating. And so they'll seize your car. They will give you massive criminal penalties for doing this. And I think that's fair if you're running the risk of running

over children. But at the same time, if I'm just going out with a group of cars and driving to a destination or something like that, again, by the definition of what they're talking about, it could be construed as this. And then I could be facing some really, really harsh penalties where there was no real exposure in terms of that kind of bad outcome. Yeah. Isn't reckless driving criminal? It's a criminal charge? Yeah, in most states.

Have you ever gotten a reckless driving or any sort of like, like, what's the gnarliest thing that you've gotten in trouble for? Well, I've been accused of reckless driving. Never convicted. On paper from law enforcement, but I have not been convicted of it, yes. And so usually there is a speed threshold in most states where you could be faced with a charge of reckless driving. But in most states, there has to be like a secondary condition that under the influence or. Yeah. Or like, you know, making an illegal maneuver, running a red light, stuff like that, that truly deems it as reckless.

Now, you know, there have been times where, you know, you're on like a car rally or something like that. And people are going faster than normal in a group. And, you know, you get pulled over together. And sometimes the cops get really worked up and stuff like that. But, you know, the cool thing is now most cops are real car guys. And so they watch VinWiki. And so when I get pulled over now, it's probably a 50-50 chance that they know who I am. And we do a lot of fundraising with different police organizations and stuff like that.

And so, you know, we've made a lot of videos about what to do when you get pulled over to minimize your risk of getting a ticket or getting a worse ticket and stuff like that. And it can be, you know, there's a strategy. All right. So you got to share. Yeah. The top tips, because Graham's pretty good at this. Graham's been forward with me in the car before and he's like, look, I'm so, so, so sorry. Anyway, you just let me go. And I can just drive away. I'm not going to. I'm not going to. I just full on admit and I tell my story like, hey, listen, I was showing Jack a house on Zillow and I was honest. Like, I showed Jack this cool house on Zillow. Honestly, I just, I just, I I wasn't looking down.

I was showing in this really cool house that I just came up on the market. It's not going to happen again. It's not a regular occurrence. I got a clean record. Can I just get a warning? The cop just came back and was like, here's your warning. Lucky day. I appreciate the honesty.

You know, go on your day. So my approach is a bit different. But it is also not just shut up and let them do whatever they're going to do because a lot of people will tell you that. A lot of lawyers will tell you that. And that's not wrong. You can always deal with it after the fact. de-escalating the situation initially is always the thing. And so, you know, being a cop is a dangerous job. They're far less equipped than we would hope in most cases. And that's one of the

things that we've learned in going out and visiting a lot of these police agencies and some of these fundraising things that we've done. But at the at the end of the day, you just want to make their life as easy as possible. So you want to make sure that when you pull over, you get somewhere that's truly safe, give them a huge buffer from having to stand in the road because it is a legitimate fear that they have of being hit while they're standing next to your car. Do not do anything else. Do not move. Put your hands on the top of the steering wheel and wait and put the window down and wait for them to come. And when they do, they're going to ask you for your license and your insurance. And then you're going to say, my license is in my back pocket.

My insurance and registration are in the glove box. Would you like me to reach for one of them first? And they'll tell you. And if you tell them that what you're going to do, they know that you've probably spoken to somebody in law enforcement. And then if they, and it just relaxes them and it opens up the chance they may even ask you that, you know, any friends that are cops and stuff like that. And the more that you get them talking, the better chance you have of something better happening. And so if I get pulled over, I don't care if it's in the middle of Baltimore, I'm going to tell how beautiful this area is, how much I love it. This place is awesome. I'm, you know, I'm obviously not from around here. But this is great. If you're in somewhere where it's actually pretty,

you're like, man, you get to work here? I mean, this is like God's country. Like, you're the luckiest man alive. I'd be able to just drive around here every day. And they're not expecting that. It kind of puts them on their heels. Yeah, it's been good. Like, how long have you been on the force? How many you guys have sworn here? Because if you say that, how many do you have sworn? That's how many sworn officers are employed by their jurisdiction. And they love saying that there's not that many. He's a bit competitive and stuff like that. And so if you've asked them questions about themselves. They're not thinking about how mad they are at whatever they think they just saw you do.

And so, I mean, I may, I had plausible deniability here, but I might have been trying to hide from a cop at one point in a trailer park. And he might have found me. And I, at that point, I'm out of the car, checking the oil, you know, pretending like I meant to take three turns off the highway. And they, and he, you know, comes in pretty hot. And I'm just like, man, it is so pretty out. here. These roads are amazing. And he ends up really kind of forgetting about the initial circumstance of why he was interested in finding out where I was. And we had a good outcome there. And so it was, you know, that's really it. It's just talk to them like real people,

ask them questions about themselves, care about what they're saying and learn. And in most cases, you can have a real discussion about what you may or may not have done and get a better outcome. The only ticket I've ever gotten, and it made me wonder about this thing that I hear about called the police quotas, how they need to write a certain amount of tickets. I still don't know if this is true. Sure it is. So basically, I was coming up to a four-way stop. It was 11 p.m. on a weekday. And I was like 17.

I just got my car. Come up to the stop. Don't make it a complete stop to the point where, like, you know, your car like lurches for it or whatever. And then I guess I just went through the stop sign. Cop pulls me over. He's very upset. I'm profusely apologetic. petrified as well because I, you know, I started driving fairly recently before that.

And I learned that you can fight these tickets and plead guilty. So you're not pleading not guilty, but you're saying, yeah, I did it. And then they usually reduce, you know, the ticket price, because I didn't have a whole lot of money at the time. And they usually offer you driving school, which you can pay for, which for the viewers listening here, it decreases your insurance or they don't report it to the insurance or something like that. So I did all of this. I show up in court. And I'm hoping he doesn't show up because also there's a chance they don't show up. and then the tickets just completely dismissed. So I show up. The guy obviously shows up. I plead guilty. And the whole thing goes fine. They reduce the ticket price. Everything goes as planned. However, as he was leaving the courthouse, I was watching him because I was in the impression, no one really comes to that full complete stop at a stop sign. So I watch him leaving the courthouse and he just completely blazes through the stop sign. On the way out of the courthouse, getting me in trouble for doing exactly the same thing. And I didn't blaze through it. I filmed it. And I walked up to, like, the person, the guard that was outside of the courthouse.

And I said, hey, by the way, like, I have video evidence of the cop doing exactly what they accused me of doing. Is there anything like I can do with this or, you know, not pay the price, show the judge, anything? And he's like, no, you're just going to have to report that to the police department. And there's nothing that you know. Did you report it? No. So you. Because they're not going to do.

They're not going to do anything. Exactly. They're not going to do anything. And I was just so frustrated. too because for me that was a serious it was like $300. So you filmed a cop and walked up to another cop asking if you could blackmail

that cop into not having you get in trouble No no no it wasn't blackmail it was it was the person that was like out It was the guard yeah of the person of tremendous authority in the matter Yeah exactly so I wanted to just have a conversation with the joke That's all I want An innocent little conversation about yeah Yeah I can see how that might not have worked yeah But in most cases, yes, if you go to court, you can have better outcomes.

Generally, especially if it's in a jurisdiction that you're not local to, I recommend using a lawyer. There's a lot of them out there. One of our sponsors is the ticket clinic, and they have a nationwide network of lawyers because, you know, my Atlanta lawyer isn't licensed to practice in Nevada. And so if I get a ticket out there, I really want, there's probably a local lawyer there that plays golf with the judge on Thursdays and just gets what he wants. and you can have a pretty good outcome. I got stopped once. I had a R.T.12S. And this was early in the days of us promoting the VinWiki app.

And I was going up to Cars and Coffee in Charlotte. And I got pulled over really, really late at night. And I was going pretty fast, but I didn't think I was going, like, insanely fast. And so I wasn't really paying as much of attention as I normally would. I had a friend with me, we were just kind of talking. There was nobody else in the road. And suddenly there's a cop behind me. Well, okay.

Pull over and start talking to him. And he's like, any reason you're going so fast? I was just trying to get up here for this car show in the morning. And he's like, well, I just clocked you at 126 and a 60. Goodness gracious. He said, yeah, that's what I said. And I said, well, I'm sorry, man. I wouldn't try to go that fast.

And the car's fast and dark, whatever. And he's like, well, I give him the license and stuff like that. And I told my friend, I was like, look, when you get pulled over going twice the speed limit, like bad things happen, I'm probably going to go to jail. And you're probably going to have to call my wife and bail me out and stuff like this. So he came back and I said the other thing that sometimes happens is they do want to write a lot of tickets. And so they'll come write you for everything. And they'll give you like 10 tickets because it's not that cops necessarily all have quotas,

but there is generally a revenue expectation from traffic citations in any jurisdiction in any given period. And so that's why, you know, we don't run cannonballs last weekend of the month because there is more patrolling throughout the country. And so he comes back. just hands me a ticket. Not for reckless driving, just for speeding. He didn't reduce it. I'm like, and you don't really want to negotiate on that one because like, you know, how low is it going to go? He's not going to give it, you know, 14 over or whatever. But he wrote you for 120. Yeah. And so I, uh, I ended up, I'm like, man, this really, I did not have the money to pay for this thing right now. This is going to be a problem. And so I got back. And on Monday, I started calling that, you just Google that county speeding ticket.

lawyer and I called three or four of them and they're all like yeah man we can't get it reduced enough to make any real difference like you're just going to go in there and you know plead for mercy and that afternoon I got a phone call from a number in that area code but not someone that I call and he's like I heard you got a ticket I said I did yeah it's like is it 126 I said yeah um well I I practice in this area I got your number from somebody I'm like okay he's like I'll tell you what for 500 bucks I'll I'll work on it for you I can't make any promises and he said, who was the cop? And I said, it was like, I don't know.

I'll say Jay Smith. It was not Jay Smith. And he's like, oh, I know him. I know him. Let me give him a call. And so he called me back 20 minutes later. He's like, he knew why I was calling. He said, you got my 126 guy?

He said, I do. I do. He's like, well, what do you need it to be? He said, well, he told me if it's 14 over in Georgia, that won't be any points. He's like, yeah, it's fine, whatever. And so they just crossed it out. They ended up writing 11 over. and they sent it to me and they're like

just go online and pay it. So what was the price difference between 11 over and twice the same? Probably five, $600. And so it was still worthwhile. But the problem is like, if I get a ticket for 126 on my driving record,

I won't be able to get insurance ever again. So it's a big deal. Yeah, I've used shout out Anna with traffic ticket defenders in California and she's really helped. There's one I got like a 90-something and a 70.

I believe, and she worked on this for like two years. Two years. How much did that cost, though? Legal cost. I paid $500. Usually that's kind of, right. But the thing was, I didn't want the point on my insurance. I had a perfectly clean record, never anything, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Just out of principle. I didn't want anything on my record, but she was able to win it. Two years she worked on this thing. Just because apparently the cop was difficult and was really trying to. going to push this thing through. Yeah, and a lot of times that's part of the strategy is they'll get the court dates delayed and postpone and stuff like that. And there are a lot of technicalities.

The guy that runs a ticket clinic has been here to talk about, you know, some of the crazy things that they'll use in terms of the calibration of the devices and the ways things are measured and stuff like that. And it's wild the different ways that they can. And so that's why you can do it on your own. If it's a really egregious offense, you want to have a lawyer there. But usually you can go in the same way that you did, talk to the prosecutor. or the solicitor, and they'll offer some different options of like, well, if you plead guilty to

this rules of the road violation or whatever it is, then that doesn't really mean anything. They find similar, you get to go home, just don't do it again. And that happens a lot. And in Georgia, we're not a driver's license compact state. And so a lot of times the records from other states don't come in. And so, like, I've had a lot of tickets that got pled down to insignificant overages. And that didn't matter for a long time, but recently, I guess they updated their community. computer systems and they have a lot more information. And if they like spell your name wrong or anything like that too, could that then be a reason to, or like simple? It can, but again, you're, you know, you'd want to talk to a lawyer before you start making that kind of an argument.

They spelled my name wrong in the ticket and I asked the judge. I'm like, does this mean anything? Can I get out of this thing? And they're like, no, that means nothing. I'm like, okay, I plead guilty. All right, fine. As you show up with the right make model, you're like, I'm me and the cop that handed me this. didn't spell it right, so it might have been for somebody else. If it saves me 20 bucks, it's worth it. Hey, absolutely. Absolutely. That's funny.

I worked as a summer job at a racetrack up in Brasleton Road, Atlanta, and there was a guy there who just loved cars and just was the detailer, and he would detail all the race cars. And he was a great storyteller. And his wife was like a famous Christian musician, and so he really didn't have to work. He just kind of did it for fun. But he told a story that in the early 90s, he was taking care. of this guy's car collection and he had 30 or so cars and as you i've got i think 11 now you start to

realize like having somebody around to help fix stuff is more and more and more necessary but that's all he did was take care of this guy's cars and he had just gotten a corvette zr one and so his boss is like well why don't we take the kuntosh to pick up the zr one you can drive lamo back and we'll see which one's faster and uh my buddy his name was tony he uh they were racing down 400 our local highway here and and he ran away from that uh Corvette real fast. And he was coming down the hill at about 180 miles an hour. And a cop came the other way. And he's like, I don't know. I don't need to be running today. I'll pull over. So it takes the cop a while to come back around. And the cop pulls up. He's like, why are you in such a hurry? He's. I don't know, just trying to see what the car would do. And he said, well, is this your car? He said, you know what? He's like, well, who is it? He said, my boss. He's like, well, what does your boss think of you driving it like this? And he said, at that second, his boss blew past him on the side of the road in this Corvette. He's like, well, that's him.

You can ask him right there. And he ended up letting the boss go because he didn't have any clock on him. But he's like, do you know how fast you were going? I think I was going pretty quick. And he's like, well, I'm glad you stopped because, you know, you can't outrun the radio. And he's like, I think I was doing about three miles a minute. I had a pretty good shot out running that radio. But they gave him this massive fines.

It was like $5,000 in the early 90s. And he couldn't get insurance for years and years. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void. And it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us. Because local news is big news.

Choose news, not noise. CBC News Well, got on him for stopping. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because it's long straight road back then. They'd have found him.

What's the fastest you've ever gone in a car? Oh, so we got to film at an airstrip in Louisiana for Car Trek. And I got to race a fighter jet in a brand new McLaren 765 LT. And it was like a two and a half mile runway. So that was plenty of time for the McLaren. And with more arrow, the top speed was a little lower. It's 205. And we just got there and just set.

And the guy that organizes these kind of things that like air shows that had supplied the car, I was like, you know, do I need a helmet or a fire suit? He's like, no, man, if things go bad, that's not going to make any difference in this outcome. That's insane. Yeah. And it was cool because like it was a really, you know, well respected and highly acclaimed fighter pilot that was driving this old mig that we were racing. And of course, the plane is faster on the, when it's in the air, but on the ground, it's not. And so, you know, this was an air show stunt as well. So we were kind of like trying to make it more of a race.

And then we did this thing where we timed. So we'd come right by show center at 205 miles an hour. Made for some really good pictures and some fun memories. So what was the speed? 205. 205 was the top speed. Yeah, that was all it would do. And it would just sit there and you could just feel the air pushing against every other horsepower that might have been available.

How'd that feel? Was it scary? It's disorienting when you're on such a big runway because it's like, you know, you don't have the sensation of speed of passing. things. You're just sensitive to like, when do I have to start braking and how hard? But it was like in order, there was so much math involved in it from a stunt perspective that we had to, you had to accelerate at exactly full throttle at and, you know, shift at these RPMs. Otherwise, what we did in practice wouldn't have been exactly right. And so got a few runs at it and had a blast. How do you break with a car going 200 miles an hour? Do you slam on the brakes? Yeah, because then eventually you slam the car to start spitting out of control.

Yeah, because as nicely as all cars we hope are set up, they don't all break with exactly the same force on every corner every time. And so, no, you'll ease off the throttle and then let the car kind of settle and then firmly but consistently engage the brakes and not all. And then with a McLaren, you've got to be really careful because at some point the air brake will initiate and that will help a lot. but they have a much stronger front brake bias out of the box because most of the rear braking actually comes from the arrow. And so it's a, it was a little squiggly coming down, but honestly the cars are so good. And that's why I kind of like cars that aren't so new is that they're not so perfect. And that, you know, you're able to really enjoy the, you know, whoa, that was a little more sketch than I thought it was going to be. Because, you know, you didn't die, but you felt like you drove it a little more.

Is there any car that's coming out that you're excited to see? I mean, I'm certainly excited about the GMA, T50s, the new Gordon-Murie car. Effectively, the modern iteration of the McLaren F1, which is my poster car forever. I don't think I want to have enough money to be able to have a $20 million car, but that's the only thing that's worth having $100 million for is to be able to have a McLaren F1. Real quick, here's a pop quiz. What is the most valuable resource? Three, two, one, it's time.

And unfortunately, we are all way too familiar with how easy it is to just waste countless hours scrolling away our time on our phones, but instead of spending your time unproductively, you could be learning about history, economics, or the great works of literature for free with our sponsor, Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College is currently offering more than 40 free online courses in the most important and enduring subjects. Like you could learn about the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of mathematics and logic with Hillsdale College's online courses all available for free. That is right, to hear that correctly, it's totally free. I personally recommend.

you guys sign up for Economics 101, the principles of free market economics. In this free course, you will examine the foundational principles of the free market, such as the relationship of supply and demand, the failure of central planning, the rise of macroeconomics under the influence of John Maynard Keynes and the 2008 financial crisis. So I went to college and studied econ, and yes, now I am running my own business and some of the stuff I learned, sure, it does translate to the work I'm doing now, but also it is not worth the exorbitant cost of tuition and also wherever you're staying. So yes, learn economics. I do recommend that, but if you're going to do it, do it for free because paying for tuition is not very economical. The course is also self-paced

so you can start whenever and wherever, and roll now in Hillsdale's Economics 101 course. So go right now to Hillsdale.edu-I-CH to get started. Like I said, there's no cost, and it's really easy to begin at Hillsdale.edu-I-CH, Hillsdale.edu-Sash, Hillsdale.edu-I-CH with the link down below in the description. Thank you Hillsdale College for sponsoring this episode, and now let's get back to the podcast. So speaking of cars like that, how did you get the job working at Lamborghini? Because at that point, you know, everybody who was good enough at selling cars had generally gone off to sell mortgages because it was a much better business in like 0607-08. And it was so hard to sell the cars that they were just looking for anybody. And the fact that I had a little bit

more of an understanding of the economics of ownership as that was becoming a much bigger part of the ways that they were talking people through the deals, you really had to help them to understand how much this was going to cost them. There was no longer this fantasy of like endless demand and endless availability of funds, kind of a similar period to what we're having right now where, you know, in the wake of COVID, every new car sold out immediately. There was no inventory, cheap cars, expensive cars, whatever. And so we were kind of in the this moment, much like now, where you really had to sell the car. And I love that. I loved working deals and negotiating and trying to help listen and understand what a buyer wanted and

fitting that into the logic I needed them to accept in order to make the decision to buy what I had. And what are the finances behind selling vehicles? I feel like there are a lot of things that people think happen, but don't actually happen. I could be completely wrong here, but I feel like the sales rep always goes. They talk to the seller. They have a base price that they can sell it at. They're making a little bit on the spread, but they can also sell it as high as they want.

And then they take that the larger portion of fat if there's more meat on the bone in the deal. Yeah, so there's a ton of different pay plans in car dealerships. For us, it was a 25% commission of the gross profit. We didn't get paid anything on the back end, the finance reserve and stuff like that. Because there's obviously dozens and dozens of ways that a car dealer can make money in a transaction.

But, you know, that spread between wholesale and retail is going to create this theoretical margin that you could have. And you want to retain as much gross profit as you can as a salesperson because you're making a big percentage of that. It's very different than a real estate agent that's getting paid a percentage of the entire transaction value. So a real estate agent really doesn't care how much they sell your house for. They just want more deals because the difference in their commission of if they sell it for your asking price or 85% of that is not that big of a difference. And so they just want an easy deal that gets done fast. They're not that heavily incentivized to maximize your selling price. And so in the car business, that matters a good bit more because you're getting paid lower dollar figures.

And it's being calculated of different values. So, you know, we would probably average about 6 to 8 percent as a gross margin. And the dealership would usually, a successful exotic car dealership is usually, operating on a one to three percent net margin after everybody's paid out. So they flow an insane amount of cash because the dollar amounts are so high, but they're really not wildly profitable. And it's very easy for them to take massive, massive lumps. And so when I joined the dealership, we would look at some of these deals that they'd done in the prior year and they were losing $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 on a car because the market had shifted so abruptly in the early days

of the recession that there was just nothing they could do. And there were some unscrupulous and underwort things that had happened with the dealership in the year prior of people that were trying to steal money and bury too much money in inventory and stuff like that. And so that had exaggerated the problem to some extent. But yeah, so and usually there's going to be some kind of a cap. Because if you if you can make a lot more than, you know, 10 or 20,000 dollars on a car, that's really because of the way the dealership works and the opportunity that exists in the car being available to the market more so than your work as a salesperson. And so, So our cap was $4,000 a car.

And usually dealerships have what's called PAC, meaning this is a non-commissionable portion of a profit that is assigned as a cost to any car. In our case, it was about $750. And so I would always pencil the deals to make $16,750 because that was me getting every dollar. And there were no non-commissionable dollars in this transaction. And they didn't love that, but nobody else was creating these margins. And so, you know, I would sell usually anywhere from, I don't know, eight to 15 cars a month. And you don't make, you don't max it out all that often.

But I think my best month ever was about 50 grand. And probably the best year ever was about 350. And at the time, I didn't, I don't know anybody at that point, you know, before 2015 that was making more than me selling exotic cars. There might have been some small time brokers that were just doing these massive deals or stuff like that. But, yeah, I mean, it was that was. Obviously, massively more money than I ever thought I'd make in my life. And so it was a very wild time. So who's buying Lamborghinis?

What type of person walks in? Well, you know, there was always that stereotype of the Miami Vice, you know, chest hair and pet alligator and a white blazer. And I guess my top buttons don't tend to work as well as they should. And I do have a pet boa constrictor. But that's not as accurate as it seems like. But I would say that really it was small to medium-sized business owners. that had grown up dreaming about the cars and weren't really sure what it took to afford them. I loved people that were financing cars because they traded a lot more often and it was a lot easier

for them to accept a few hundred more dollars a month in their payment than having to pay a huge delta when they would try to upgrade to the next thing. So I gravitated towards people that were very aspirational and didn't mind massive car loans a lot like myself because I could speak with a lot of authority to that. And you don't necessarily want to always think of your selling to your peers or you're trying to be equal to your customer. But, you know, like I did a sales training thing with an Audi dealership last week where, you know, they were really worried about as the cars got so much more expensive, just what they would say. And I'm like, look, they don't want you to be equal, but they do want you to be the expert on this knowledge gap that they have as they're honestly coming to a dealership trying to get advice. And so, you know, I learned everything there was to know about exotic car financing.

I knew everything that wasn't about the product. And so they were never going to run into someone who was more equipped to help them through the transaction that they wanted to do. After I left the dealership, it seemed like every life insurance company wants a retired car salesman or no longer selling cars car salesman to come and sell their stuff. And I'm like, man, I get it. And I know everybody needs life insurance. But I've been selling stuff that people really, really want, but no, they don't need. And you want me to sell something that people know they probably need. but they really don't want to deal with.

And I'm not sure that's the sales paradigm shift that I'm really looking for right now. But yeah, I mean, that was really it is guys that, you know, have made their own money and want to go out and have this trophy and have this experience. And I always wanted them to go drive them as much as possible because that was always my personal mindset. But, but yeah. What car were you driving at the time? When I started, I didn't have, I still had the rental car fleet as I was selling them off. And then for a long time, I just had an old Mercedes that I would drive around.

I was always trying to find one that was like depreciated enough or cheap enough or whatever. And I, so I'm, you know, always trying to buy our trades and stuff like that with crazy car loans. But in 2011, I kind of bought the first like personal car Lamborghini. And it was a blue Chalume 2004 Gallardo that came in on a tow truck. And it was not running and it was in really rough condition. and there were these two Asian truck drivers that didn't speak English, and we thought they were kind of asking us to figure out what was wrong with the car. We really didn't know.

And so we just ran it through the shop, and it was leaking oil terribly, brakes, tires, everything was spent, clutch was gone. But it was an okay car. It was in one piece. I checked the Carfax. It had a minor accident, but didn't look too bad. The paintwork was decent. But we really didn't know.

And they'd left us a phone number with this car. And it was like, nobody answered or it didn't go through, whatever. a few days go by and this guy shows up and he goes do you all have a blue Lamborghini here that you're trying to fix and I'm like yeah we do and I would normally greet people that walk towards service and he said well it's it's not mine but it belongs to my girlfriend's daughter and she's really attractive and I'm okay that will not change our level of service sir but it's always nice to know and I said can we speak to her he's like well no you can't talk to her but I'll get you in touch with

her mom okay and so a couple days later I'd give him my card is the mom calls and she says that her daughter had gotten arrested for going 180 miles an hour in this car. And I'm like, wow, okay, well, that's pretty meaningful. But it meant that the car recently was able to go 180 miles an hour, which is a promising thing. And the car was so rough at that time, like trying to sell bad condition exotic cars was nearly impossible. Because dealerships weren't trying to put much in inventory. The economy was still recovering. We couldn't sell the nice stuff, much less like rats like this.

And so, and that was so I was like, man, this thing might get cheap. And I knew that if I was willing to try, I was not going to be bidding against anybody. And I also suspected that there was a good chance that whenever we found this girl that she was not going to be able to pay what was probably going to be a $20,000 to $30,000 service bill. And so the only way we were ever going to get the service business was for me to buy the car and finance it into a loan. So I didn't have the cash either. And I could tell from the Carfax that there was not a lien against it. So a lot of times when you buy these cars cheap, it doesn't matter if they're willing to let you have it cheap, they can't pay off their loan. that would have been much more.

And so it was probably another week, and this girl shows up. And she was a prostitute. And she was not appealing to my demographic, I think, as a target, whatever. But she came in, and I actually found her social media profile, and it said that she had 50-inch hips. So, I mean, this girl could take a break hula hooping. I mean, it was a marvel of science. And so we're talking about the car, and she said that she had bought it about a year earlier in cash in Miami. And I came to find out it was cash that she had earned in three months

of work. So she was churning some business. And she was not in a position to do it, but she did have the title. And she wanted to sell it. And I had asked my boss, like, if I can buy it, is that okay? Like, you know, sometimes that's if he is a dealership employee, if this is going to be all right. And so he, he's like, yes, sure. If you can get it done and you'll give us a service business, do whatever you want. And so. She wanted like 70,000 because, you know, she thinks, well, it'll be worth what I paid for. Not exactly. There's also these other million things wrong with it and stuff like that.

And I explained her why it was less. I offered her 30 grand. And of course, she was a shrewd negotiator. So we met right smack dab in the middle at 30 grand. And so I'm like, all right, well, you know, do you want to buy another car? Obviously, if somebody just doesn't have a car. And she's like, well, I'd really like a Bentley like Paris Hilton's a pink one. I said, well, they don't really paint them pink.

So we probably want to do that. we could wrap a car. Let me look. At the time, you could buy a Continental GT for probably 40, 50 grand. And I'm like, well, let's just go see if we can get you a loan for the rest. And she's great. She fills out our credit half. She had her social security card with her. And we pulled her credit. And nobody had ever even looked at this girl's credit. She didn't even know, she had a bank account, anything like that. And I learned that in particular after we found out that there was nobody wanting to be the first person to loan her money in her short life at that point. And so I was like, well, we'll just give you a check. And so I went back to our office.

We cut her a check for 30 grand. And I handed it to her. And I, as a car salesman, had never had somebody look at me with less trust than when I told her that that piece of paper was the same thing as $30,000. And she's like, what do I do with this? You take it to your bank. I said, can you not just give me cash? I said, no, we don't have cash here. But I promise you, it's good.

And she left like super like suspicious. Like there's no way this is money. And, you know, it worked out. We stayed in touch. In fact, she had the spare key to the car. And she kept telling me she was going to bring it. And she never never would or she come up with some excuse. And it must have been three months later.

She texted me and she's like, it's my birthday tomorrow. Do you still want that key? Again, like I'm getting a lot of unrelated information in this deal. And I said, happy birthday. And yes, I'd love. love it. And she's like, well, can I have $100 for it? Well, it's not worth anything to anybody but me. But you know what? Sure. By all means. But I'll give you $100 if you have it here by close a business. And she didn't show up, of course. But the next day, her birthday, she showed up

and she, I don't know what she would call what she was wearing. I would call it a basketball net. It holes everywhere. You could see everything. She had a lot of interesting tattoos and interesting places that were probably uncomfortable to acquire. And she walks in, at the time, there was this woman standing at our parts counter with this young kid. She grabs this kid and screams and runs out at another door. And Kimmy walks up to me and she loves to hug. I always want to hug you first.

And so, hey, Kimmy, what are you all dressed up for? And she said, this is my birthday. And said, well, you're halfway to that outfit. And I said, you got the key? She did. And I went out and tried it and gave her money. And I was like, man, did. And, you know, we had had.

a lot of conversations at that point. She was like commenting on my Instagram post. She was really fond of the ones that had my large albino boa constrictor in. But, you know, we were sitting at my desk talking. I said, Kimmy, do you have butt implants? Like, how does this happen? And she's like,

no. And she was so excited to like, talk me through the science of this. She's like, I had a fat redistribution. And this was before like the Kardashian world and this was a thing. And so she's like, they made me gain 30 pounds. And then they liposuctioned it all out. And they injected it.

She didn't have to move anything. You could see the scar. It must have been a jackhammer they put it in with. And it was, and I said, wow. And so not only did I buy the cheapest Gallardo ever, but I got to meet the recipient of such a pioneering medical procedure. I would love to see her today. I would back on the channel, like a soft white underbelly sort of interview.

How successful that surgery is, you know, after all this time has passed. I asked her, does it feel weird? Is it moving around, like, independent of the direction you travel? but she said it was normalish, I guess. I don't know. But so, you know, when I, when we first started to record Vinwicky Stories, I thought it was just going to be a promotional tool for the app that we'd released about a year prior. And we had a lot of ideas about what we might do with the content.

And I thought maybe I would give it to a friend of mine that had a car YouTube channel. Because at the time I knew, like Doug DeMiro from college, and I'd met Rob Freddie a few times and Freddie Hernandez and some of these guys. And so I sold Rob Dom, his Diablo while I was at the dealer. He was the first person to ever list social media income on a credit application for me. And so I was trying to figure out like, you know, what we were going to do with it. So I just called a bunch of friends. We got a bunch of pizza and beer, set in the corner of the warehouse, stack some stuff up in the corner, hang some medicine bulbs and see what happens. And a friend of mine from church shot them all and edited them.

And so I had compiled most of my good car stories from the dealership as intros to the chat. of my book on setting the cannonball record because really it was just a story of three sweaty guys going really fast and not getting caught across the country. And so I realized that's not really going to carry people's attention throughout, you know, 300 pages. So I had written down like my 10 best stories as the openings to the chapters that would have something in common with whatever was happening at that moment in the journey. So I'd written out the story of buying that car. And I had, I think of the 25, probably 7 or 8 were my stories. And I didn't know. that anybody was going to watch him. I figured we're going to release 25 of these things after all my

friends said no, we can't put them on their channels. We started them on the Vinwicki channel. And I was like, man, if we got 2,000 views of video, that would be amazing. And we ended up getting almost a million views across those videos and it started to grow really, really well. And some things like that got a lot more traction than I ever expected them to. I'm like, well, I don't know if she's going to care that the story is out. out there. And so a couple of years ago, a friend of mine is like, I want to go find her. And I'm like, okay, probably better you than me, given the chance that she could be upset about the way that I've described her. And I thought I was diplomatic in it, but who knows? And so he goes out and he finds

that she is currently incarcerated and for another professional appearance, we'll say. And she was going to get out at a certain point. So he starts like emailing her. And I'm like, the only thing I'd ask is like, if she doesn't know about it, don't tell her about it. Let's deal with it another day. And it doesn't take long for him to ask her about, you know, what she did before and stuff like that. And she volunteers that she had a Lamborghini and that apparently there's some guy named Ed that talks about it on the internet. So she had heard about, apparently a guard recognized her from my description and asked her about it and figured out that it was her. And, and, and she had heard about it. And. And, And so she was very happy about it. She'd learned since then that like only fans have started and all her old friends or make a ton of money doing that. And it was, and so she wants to come on when she gets out and tell her side of the story, which I think is going to be amazing. And yeah, so the problem is like it's very hard. She has a long sentence because of multiple accusations that can maybe be shortened. So we may do some fundraising to help free Kimmy.

You're not doing an interview in jail. That would make it even better. So when I asked about it, which maybe that means it was a little more than two years ago, there were COVID restrictions on visitation. Then she moved to a different place and stuff like that. So I have not broached that recently. She did not want to do it in jail, even though we talked through it because she wanted to get all dolled up and look more professional. And so we have not come to such an arrangement.

but she's very excited to meet the audience. Imagine her on Caleb Hammer afterwards, like doing the rounds promoting only fans. She will, you will blow up her only fans. I have no idea how that translates, but I mean, she's a prime candidate. So how many people walk into the Lamborghini dealership pretending to be rich, pretending to be a buyer?

And what are the tells? Yes, absolutely. People come in with their fake watches and, you know, overly designer clothes and that they're trying to pretend that they can buy something and they can't. They're just trying to get a test driver. or something like that. And I can relate to that because I did that many times as a high schooler

trying to go out and test drive interesting cars with some success. But you can't let those people waste your time when you actually have a job to do. And it really doesn't take long in the way that you should sell a car to ask the right questions that they would just not have even thought about, like how they're actually going to use the car, how it relates to other goals that they have, you know, why they want it and what they believe it is versus what you have to explain it actually is and things like that. And so if they, if they're just itching to get in the car immediately, let's let's go, then, you know, they weren't going to buy it anyway. But if you can actually have a conversation with someone and they've got a reasonable approach to the idea of purchasing

this car, in most cases, you can end up with, you know, knowing really, really quickly how hard it's going to be for them to do so. Now, the ones that are stretching are the best kinds of customers. The ones that can easily write the check are the hardest to motivate to actually do so. But somebody who knows like, look, I may be hard to get financed because of this, this and this, and they're very forthcoming about that. Then those times, you know, you do stand a really, really good chance of getting this person into a car because you probably have more financing resources at your disposal than they may know about or things like that. And so it's really just about asking a lot of questions and making sure that you're framing them in a very positive way

and where their answers will become the reasons that you know they should want to purchase the car. How often is it that someone comes in and you know they're just making a terrible financial decision that this person like can technically qualify but it's not smart whatsoever? Is that common? And has there ever been a situation where you've just said, hey man, like we could get you this car, but like you probably shouldn't do this? Well, as you first frame that question, I was going to say, well, in 2013 we got a McLaren franchise. And so that early in McLaren's current existence, they were miserably unreliable cars. And so they would all break, always. The failure rate of these cars in the first week of ownership where they may have come back in on a tow truck or at least had some very meaningful fault was 100%. And so there, when you would sell them, in most cases, they were pretty profitable deals because there was a lot of enthusiasm and excitement for the car.

so you made good money, but you knew like this was going to become a problem always. And so in that regard, there were times where people were buying cars that you knew were troublesome. And you would at least try to help them to understand that. Like, I know that you love lotuses. But the best way to sell someone on a lease is to try to talk them out of it. And, you know, you'll tell them, hey, you know, they're not super comfortable and they're not like easy to get into, especially if you, you know, are parked next to somebody like, oh, yeah, I love that. that as a car. It's like, oh, you know, just remove everything. And then, you know,

there's, they're not that expensive in terms of parts, but they do go through like tires and brakes really fast. Oh, yeah, for handling, you know, that's awesome. I love that. I'm going to, I'm going to do it myself and I'm a stuff. And, you know, and it's, it is a Honda motor, but, you know, you want to make sure that it's, it's maintainable or Toyota and stuff. And they're like, oh, yeah, that's so cool. It's going to be more reliable. It's going to go 100,000 miles. I'm to drive it all the time. But you know, like if you hurt the clamshell, like it's really expensive. So just make sure that you've got good insurance and just be careful. Like, don't bump into stuff. Oh yeah, yeah. I love that. So light. And they're just talking themselves into it over and

over and over again. And it's like it, they always buy them. Like no one can go look at a lotus and not buy it. It's unless it breaks while they're driving it or catches on fire, which happens. But in terms of like a financial decision where somebody is really in a rough spot. Again, most of the time those people are stretching so hard to be able to buy these cars. And they know. And they're all well aware. Like, I can't sell this car because I have so much negative equity that I'm rolling from the next one. I had this guy, nicest guy in the world.

Just had kind of a normal job, you know, made low six figures and had owned an Aston Martin DB9 for a really long time. And we did a lot of really long term car financing, these like 12 year, 15 year loans. And, you know, if the car doesn't go down in value, that can be a great way to own it. And so he owed effectively $100,000 on a $50,000 car because Aston's depreciate like crazy. And he didn't want to put much money down. And so he just wanted to have a newer car. And that's a hard thing to do because effectively, you know, if you trade, if you're trading a $50,000 car for a $150,000 car, you can adjust the numbers up.

So you get 100 for your trade and you pay $200 for the new car. And so you're still paying the same $100,000 delta. The bank doesn't know that the numbers were different. But that's too much to hide. Like hiding 20,000, maybe, 30,000 maybe. Hiding 50 grand takes some doing. And we tried so many deals. And I ended up selling him and asked to Martin Varage when we got an incentive on those back in 2012.

And he was the happiest guy in the world. Now, he owed at that point at least 100 more than that car was going to be worth immediately. But he loved it. And that was his thing. And he was going to probably pay it for five, six, seven years. And he was fine with it. Square knows that in hospitality, efficiency is everything. That's why the system lets you take payments.

Track sales, handle inventory. Managed staff, send invoices, and keep up with finances all in one place. Fly through orders with zero mistakes. Get the data you need and keep everything working together. So you're ready for whatever's next. Learn more about their customizable plans at squareup.com. So when you see people driving like really expensive exotic cars, what percentage of those people have them financed and can barely afford them? It's going to vary a little bit by market and by demographic.

But I would say 75% are financed. Certainly in my sales experience, 75%. When you say 75 financed, is that because that's the smart move to make because they got a low interest rate and it makes more sense to arbitrage of the money? Or is that because they just can't afford it? No, because they cannot afford it. So a lot of people think that if you drive a supercar, generally speaking, you're kind of loaded. Like that's, I feel like a lot of, especially a lot of, I could be wrong here, but like girls, they'll see a guy driving a nice car like, oh, you know, he's got money. But you'd say that's generally not the greatest.

If you're driving a supercar that's less than five years old, you should not assume that that person has a lot of money. Really? Yeah. If they're driving, you know, an iconic vintage or significant car, something that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 40 years. years old for sure. There's a really good chance because those are harder to finance. But if they've got a brand new Huracon, interesting. Didn't the Dave Ramsey like millionaire study show that most millionaires drive Toyotas? Yeah, Toyota's, Honda's and the F-150 pickup trucks. Yeah, but that data is massively skewed because most millionaires are retired. Fair. So most millionaires are 60 plus years old. If you ask what millionaires under the age of 40

drive. It would be BMW's Mercedes, Saudis. I mean, those three brands. Believe it not, the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 were the most common in Reddit Fat Fire. But that skews to a lot of California, Vancouver. Right. But yeah, that was the most common.

What would you say are some trends that you've noticed amongst high net worth individuals buying exotic cars? Well, you know, it's a very indulgent thing, right? And so generally speaking, the Venn diagram of people that own exotic cars and good people don't intersect all that much.

And so it was a little bit of a difficult thing because obviously I loved the cars for my reasons, some of which are obviously the vanity and status of it, but much more significantly, the experience of driving it, the ways that they build performance, the noise, the beauty, the history, the everything that they represent. I mean, I love to be able to get in a car, get it good enough to probably make it where I wanted to go and drive the wheels off of it. And so, you know, I, before they started to make SUVs, I'd probably put more miles on

Lamborghinis than just about anybody in the country. And I, because I just, I love that. I love to get in one, drive to Miami, drive it across the country. To me, that is the best form of ownership. You may not be going 200 miles an hour, but you're just experiencing it in that way. Now, most people obviously aren't doing that. They're trying to minimize their cost. They're trying to, you know, take advantage of whatever.

and they really are trying to go show off in them. And it can be a rather undesirable reflection of who a person is. And I try to be conscious of that, especially as I've got a bunch of them, and I make sure that it's very clear, look, they're all broken. They're all heavily financed. You know, it's just, it's a hard, and they're the result of me doing this professionally for a long time. And yes, you can sit in it.

And yes, you can take it for a right. I used to let people borrow them, but I had to stop because they're all so broken that they would all break down. So I went like 18 months for every single time. I let somebody drive something it broke in a rather meaningful way. And it's not that I hold them responsible for it.

It's just awkward and inconvenient. And so I kind of just had to say, look, for a while at least I have to not do this. And so I don't let them drive them, but if we can take them somewhere, do something by all means. And I think having the right attitude about the cars is really what I learned was both necessary

and the right way to go. And, you know, if you try to treat these things as, you know, your treasure and they cannot ever be imperfect, it's just you get so uptight and so uncomfortable. Talking to me right now. Oh, I have learned a bit that that's, we got to get you out of that mindset, man. You've got to just get some rock chips. Like, I, I've only owned one cosmetically perfect car because I had one repainted. It was in terrible, terrible shape. It was a Lamborghini mercilio, and I had it painted my favorite color, which is Verde Draco on the car.

It's kind of a drab green and you can show a picture of it. But there were no cars built for the U.S. in that color. And so I couldn't just go buy one and I never get to buy based on color. So the cheap cars are always black. And so they either get wrapped like this Gallardo or they stay black because they look so pretty. But they get dirty fast. And so, you know, I try to make people understand that, you know, the more you can drive them, they're great. And so like I don't have a clear bra on the Bugatti.

I can't wait until it's covered in rock chips. and everybody sees it and immediately knows how much I've driven it. But why wouldn't you put a clear bra on it? You're going to spend five grand doing that, you know, on the front part of the car, maybe some of the sides. Why not just do that? It seems like five grand would be better than rock chips. Well, first of all, there's already some paint work on the car. And so it could stand to be, you know, repainted parts of it anyway.

Yeah. But significantly, like, if you ever go to Monterey Car Week, there's a lot of amazing cars there. But my favorite one is a guy from Boston that drives his Enzo there every year. It's got 80, 90,000 miles on it. The windshield's got a crack across it. The whole front's been just sandblasted off from all the rock chips. And it's my favorite car because it's like this dude just loves using it. And so I did ClearBraw after I repainted the car because it was truly perfect and much more significantly because I could never match the paint.

You know, it was custom mixed to match this paint code. And, you know, so I didn't want to have to deal with ever doing that. And that's why I clear broad every square inch of the car. But if I, if I were to do it again, I wouldn't because I would just, I'd love it if it had its last 20, 30,000 miles of rock chips on it. It is cool to look at a car like this and see that it's been used and see that, you know, the person is actually taking it out on the road, see the paint chips and stuff like that. Yeah, I love a perfect car, but I love them, you know, worn in a bit more.

Let's talk about buying a Bugatti. How did you go about buying this car? What'd you pay for it? Where'd you find it? In 2014, I bought my first manual LP 640. I put nothing down. I paid $215,000 for it. And I ended up selling it about two years later for $350.

So I made $135 grand on that car. And I was able to buy the worst one on earth for $120. And it had been fraudulently reported stolen and crashed by a drunk 15 year old and it was rough but I owned my dream car with a title made for effectively free I got the same car with a terrible history in the profit margin of the last deal and I had like a proper existential crisis because most of what I had done professionally was so that I could buy that car and I'm going to have to go to work again like I have my I've got a young child and I need to pay my bills and stuff like that. I get that I should still work hard, but that had been kind of my

biggest why beyond just being able to eat and have shelter. And so shortly after having that car, I actually decided, you know what, like, I need another stupid car goal to be able to chase so that I'll work harder. And I was like, I told a friend, I was like, I think I'm going to buy a Bugatti. And now I, I didn't make the remotely. I still don't make enough money to reasonably afford the car. But I knew that it was a good goal to chase. And over the years since that I've tried to buy a bunch of them. I tried to buy Taigas after it got repoed. I tried to buy the one that went to Galveston Bay. I tried to buy. If ever there's a bad one, I'm trying to buy. Because I can't buy a nice one. And so I came close several times with these crazy finance schemes

and all the ways that I could try. But it just never really worked out. And this car popped up a few months ago for sale and it just had such an amazing backstory with all the celebrities that had been with. And I'm like, I hadn't ever really thought that I'd get a grand sport with the roof that comes off because they're a lot more rare. They've generally been a lot more valuable. But of the 14 U.S. cars that are grand sports, six of them were on the market in the last year. And that is far too many. Generally, if more than 10% of a car are ever on the market, you're going to see a significant value change. And so that number of cars being on the market, drove the value of these down a million dollars.

And it got to where they were actually being advertised for less than the coops. And I'm like, well, this is awesome. It's newer. You get the updated wheels and taillights and better suspension and stuff. This is perfect. And so I had been offering a lot less than they wanted for a long time. And I finally got them to take the number. And I paid $1.45 million for it.

But I had recently sold a blue manual LP640 that I'd kind of. I accidentally bought on cars and bids because I was running the bid up because I had several of them already and I liked them to go up in value. But the real end of all my cars going up in value was so that I'd be able to do this. And so, but that car, I paid 705 or 710 for it. But that car represented a long line of trades. And so I bought a 360 for 31 grand and then sold it. And then I bought a $69,000 roof, RT12S and sold it for 154. Then I bought $140,000 for 30 scuderias. sold it for 190 something. Bought a Paris Hilton's SLR for 185, sold it for 320,

bought a crashed Mercy SV out of Europe that was fixed for 320, sold it for 700, and then I bought this. So I effectively had a $31,000 cost basis in this $700,000 Lamborghini. So I had sold it and I had sold some other cars that we had for Car Trek and other things like that. And so with some loans and things like that, I think I had like almost 600,000 in equity. And then Premier Financial Services was there for the rest. How much is your payment done to Begotti?

It's like eight and change. That's not terrible. Yeah. Especially when we heard that James was spending $30,000, $35,000 a month. And, oh, I mean, obviously James has been wildly successful in doing this. And he's the greatest success case of YouTube car content. And I love it. I can't fathom that. I couldn't pay that. And this is kind of one of these things where I can float it for a while. Something's got to go to be able to continue to do so. But it's one of those things that had always been the right goal. And now I guess I have to figure out what to do next. But it's, it was the right thing to chase and very motivating. And you know, you always have to wonder when you meet these heroes, are they actually going to be worth it? Unfortunately, I had driven a good handful of Bugatti's. I knew that I really, really liked what the cars were.

I love the way that James described it relative to the Koenigzeg, because it is just a wildly different experience. The quality in a Bugatti, relative to a Pagani, the hypercars from Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, Lamborghini, Porsche, everybody else, it's really, really a well-built car. They are really usable. They're comfortable. It drives like a big Bentley most of the time until you really get into the throttle. And so I really like the way it is. And now they have this stigma, of course, that everything on them is super-duper expensive to address. But those people have no idea what it costs to maintain a conic-sig because it's preposterous.

Now, it is true, though, that this car is very expensive to maintain. Like, how much is an oil change on Iboggi? Well, an oil change is three to four grand. Now, an annual service, which has a lot more things, is like 20. And there are independents that are getting into the space that are, making it less expensive to do certain things. There's a lot of parts that can fairly easily be rebuilt. My front axles are leaking grease a little bit. I can get those rebuilt rather than buying new ones for $30,000. The tires are still a thing. The tires are $45,000. And mine are a bit old

and a bit worn out. What I'm finding at the moment is that a lot of people take them off the cars when they're too old, but not really that old. And they buy new ones because these are owned by far richer people than me. I think I'm the world's poorest Bugatti owner, and I'm very pleased to keep that title. And so there's workarounds for this stuff. But most significantly, I mean, all my cars can be expensive to maintain. But as long as the values trend in the right directions, it eventually offsets it. You may end up having to put a lot of money on a credit card once in a while.

So you think this car is going to be going up in value over? what period of time? You know, I try to be cautious about things like that. I do believe it will go up in value because there are so many people my age that are dreaming about these types of cars. And I think for those of us that are kind of in the Top Gear, Grand Turismo, MTV Cribs, DuPont Registry, Generation of Car Enthusiast, you know, Inception, I think we love the Ferrari's Lamborghinis and things like that.

I think the people that are a little bit younger than us are very hypercar obsessed. And I think that the ways that we love Diablos and mercies and Kuntoshes and things like that, they're going to love Bugatti's, Koniguanza, and Paghanes. And so I believe in the next crop of big value jumps, these make a lot of sense. They have spent enough time cheaper than most people think they ought to be that it is the right recipe. And I have benefited from a willingness to over leverage myself to buy my dream cars that I have been ahead of the curve enough that they've gone up in value the right ways. And so if you stretch to buy the car you grew up dreaming about, there's a pretty good chance. There's a whole cohort of people with the same sentiment about that car and that you're going to be in a good position value-wise at some point, as long as it's already a little old.

Yeah. What does the current cost to maintain all of your vehicles? It's really not that bad. I am currently doing engine outwork on all the V12 Lambos, and that is bad. That will probably be all in for all three cars, two mercies and a Diablo. You know, retail at a dealership would probably be 250 for what I'm getting done, which is really everything. And these are high mile worn out examples of each of these cars. I'll probably with, you know, finding some cross-reference parts, independent service, lower hourly rates, stuff like that, some promotional consideration be in it, I don't know, is that 60, something like that.

How? But you have to imagine that I have zero cost basis in my LP640 coupe, and it is worth almost a million dollars. And so it's not wrong for me to spend that kind of money to make them much more reliable cars and so that I make it the next place I try to take it. But at the same time, this thing, you know, if let's just say, worst case scenario is 100,000 a year, if you did everything by the book for maintenance, well, I think the car will go up in value at least a million dollars over the next five years. And I won't have to spend nearly that much maintaining it. And so I don't have any real fear of financial exposure there. There really is no world in which they go down. Certainly many, many cars are going down in value right now. And we notice that. But it's the newer stuff. eventadors hurricanes McLaren's high-end Porsche's stuff like that so how did you accidentally buy a Lamborghini oh on cars and bids yeah well so I knew the seller I knew

what his reserve was I knew what he really wanted for the car and I was not bidding that high and I expected that I would get out bid because I knew other people were interested the problem is when you offer a car very publicly for sale like that people who are hoping it will go up in value prefer not to buy them that publicly and so they can do really well or they can do really poorly. And this was still the most expensive car to ever sell on cars and bids. And so I had bid 710. I knew he wanted $7.50.

I'm like, he's not going to take that. And then nobody bid for the last couple days. And it takes down. I'm like, oh, no. Oh, man. That was a. Can you retract to bid or no? No, you can't.

And I wanted the car for that because I knew that I would still make money off of it. And I did. I didn't make much because everybody knew what I'd be. paid. But I was like, I didn't have the money. And so I had to call bank and get a loan real quick. And it worked out. And it was a really, really nice car. I just already had two of them. And I didn't need a third one. What's the interest rate on a loan like that? And they used to be great. I mean, you'd pay three, four percent. But now everything's higher. So it's in the eight zone, give or take. Have you ever lost money in a car? No. Not since the

real days. do you do that? Because I like to look like I won the lottery more than 10 years ago, and I buy the worst one I can find. And people grossly undervalue the worst cars because they're really not that far away from being okay. And once you do that and you make them all right, and then you prove that you can put thousands and thousands of miles on it, they are actually more valuable. And I can then represent them better and generally make money and trade up until I get something else. I think the only car I've lost money on, like outside of the daily driver of like the Tesla Mall 3, the Tesla Roadster.

Oh. Unfortunately, good and bad. So I bought that car originally from a $5,000 investment I made. And this is just like I bought like little $5,000 blocks of Tesla stock back in 2019 when it was trading dirt cheap when people were fearing that they're going to go bankrupt. And this is one of those $5,000 blocks that I sold for $130,000. And I sold all of my Tesla stock at peak at $314 to $320 a share. So my cost basis was low, but I figured I still believe in Tesla. I still want to do something Tesla related. So I'm going to take that 130 and put it in a roadster. So I could trade that

instead of the stock, the roadster, and I figured for the next five years, I think the roadster is going to do better than the stock. And for the first year, the stock plummeted. It went from $300 and something dollars to like $100 a share. And I looked like a genius because the roadsters were all trading really well. Now they seem to all sell under $100,000. So so far, that's the first car that I think on paper I've lost money on. Well, I think your GT will offset it unless you go drive it as much as I would encourage you to. Right. But the roadster, is one of 26 ever made in yellow. And I'm told that only about 16 still exist that are not salvaged. Interesting. That's a Corvette owner math right there. I like it. And I think those cars have the potential to go up again.

I think there's the right level of enthusiasm. Obviously, we're now, what, four years overdue on the next Roadster concept, but maybe one day. You know, the electric car thing has gotten interesting. I actually leased my first car and acquired my first new car and bought an electric car, which are three things I probably thought I would never ever do my whole life. In January or February this year, there was a weird mistake that Audi financial services and Audi corporate made where they didn't talk back and forth enough. And they put all these incentives on to emulate the tax rebates that are only available to American-made electric cars now.

And so they had discounted these brand new RSE-E-Ts, these like $160,000 electric cars that no one was buying. And they didn't tell Audi financial services. And so Audi didn't adjust the lease residuals. So the one-year lease residual on this car was more than the purchase price. And a friend of mine actually discovered this, that I worked with him at Lamborghini Atlanta. He now runs Audi of Birmingham. And he called me. He's like, Ed, I had to call you because I made an Ed Bolian deal on these RSE-Trons.

And I'm like, I don't think it's possible to make an Ed Bolian deal on an electric car, Nick. And he's like, oh, no, it's like, he explained it. I was like, okay, that's pretty darn awesome. I said, do I need to come get one? He's like, do you want one? I said, no. He said, well, probably. And so I went over and I got two of them.

I got one for my wife and one for my editor. And it's effectively like $250 a month. And it's ridiculous. I saw your video on this. And immediately after your video, I looked and I tried to find one. Because there were only like 139 of them in U.S. inventory on February 1 and they had all sold within like a week of my video. And it was real. And the more interesting thing.

And really, the only reason I actually wanted to do it because I wanted to watch them squirm at the end because it's high, seven, low eight figure loss that Audi financial services will have to take at the end of this. And they will not want to do it in a single month. And so what I believe they will do is offer really, really attractive used car leases on these cars as they come back in. And so I think I'll be able to turn it in and then lease it back for even less money for the next year. What's a car that you'll never own that you just think is either a terrible investment or just is horribly reliable, just not a good drive? Well, there's a lot of cars that I know are bad ideas to own, but sometimes in the right circumstance, it makes sense. Now, you know, I would not buy a lot of boring commuter cars because there's, I don't want that. I want to have a car that makes me question whether I'm going to make it there and makes it a real event every time I just drive to the coffee shop. So I like cars that are miserable to use, very uncomfortable, very inconvenient. because it makes me feel what I want to feel as a car enthusiast. And when people say they love cars, everybody means something different when they do that.

I like taking broken cars on long road trips. And a lot of people like having their car look perfect and knowing that it's whatever. And nobody's wrong. But I think that when I think about the cars that I, you know, know, know I shouldn't buy, a lot of times I want to invent a reason. A lot of what car trek was was just the three of us thinking about like, what about these cars that we know we shouldn't buy that would be fun? So we did a Christmas special once where we Secret Santa style had to buy each other the most unreliable cars on Earth.

And then we just went and beating them around to see how long they last. And it was a blast. I mean, it's more fun than we ever have in functional cars. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel.

in one spot and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. That's really cool. So what's something that car enthusiasts could do to lower their cost of ownership to be able to buy their dream car? Well, really familiarizing yourself with how the financing works is certainly the first step.

Because if you can buy more aspirationally, you do stand a better chance of the rest of the people that dream about those cars to catch up, and that will force the market in the right direction. And really just focusing on what actually will happen when you buy these cars. And so there's a lot of cars like this that people are really, really scared of. But in reality, this car's barely been maintained. There's nothing that wrong with it. It needs things here and there, and I'll do those as I need to. But I've, you know, all the stuff that I'm now doing to the Mercieli goes, I should have done when I bought them five years ago, but I couldn't afford it then. And so I just kicked a can down the road. And now I'm doing most of it because it's in a better

position to do so. So, I mean, I think the more you can understand about the cars that you're dreaming about owning from what ownership is really like, the more you can understand about how to finance them and just, you know, buying them at the right moment. Like you don't need to buy them when they're three, four, five years old. If you start looking at 10, 15, 20 years old, it's real hard to lose money when you buy them right. What would you say is a relatively inexpensive super car that is a somewhat safe bet doesn't require a bunch of attention? Sure. There's so many great examples. Lotuses are perfect examples. They are pretty inexpensive to keep running. They are headed in the right direction because they're so unrepeatable from a technological perspective.

You can't make cars that unsafe anymore. And you can't make cars with that little technology anymore. Freddie said that they're unreliable, though. The elices aren't. The avoras can be, and the esprees are very unreliable. And so you still got to learn to buy the right one. A 997 turbo is an $80,000 car that is as modern as you need anything to be, even though it's 15, almost 20 years old. That's a great car. Any Gallardo is wonderful, even ones that have been in Santa Monica mudslides and mud all the way up to the top of the doors, especially the manual cars, have all the right makings.

early R8s, great cars, pretty reliable. The V10s have some, you know, inconvenient things like the AC compressors go out and they're really hard to get to, stuff like that. But overall, there's so many great cars in that $50,000 to $150,000 zone that people are paying more for that, more than that for Suburbanes and Escalades now. And you can have a great car that's a whole lot of fun, AMGGGTs, all sorts of stuff. What are you noticing right now in the car market? So there's been such an explosion of production in all of the exotic car manufacturers that it is a wildly different landscape every day. They're making more $100,000 cars this year than existed 20 years ago. So you look at how many million dollars there are on Earth. We did a video back in 2018 trying to figure out how many there were at that point. And we tried to look back and think through how many were there in 2003, so 15 years prior to that.

And it was like just over 1,000 in 2003, like right before the Enzo and the Curvy GT and the SLR. And it was about 25,000 in 18. And in 23, when we did it, we did it last year, it was almost 30,000. And so you think like every day there was another million dollar car on Earth. And so there was so much buying activity and so much frothiness. the market that everything went up and now the stuff that isn't actually that rare or that special is going down fast. And so, you know, they made almost as many eventadors as they did Gallardo. And we think of them more like mercies, but there's, you know, 12.5,000 eventadors,

4,099 mercilios. There's actually a few less. They didn't build all the vins. But I, so anything that isn't that special or that people didn't buy as past. like SF 90s and 812s and McLaren's 720s and 750s. And, you know, these cars, eventadors, they're going down fast with no bottom insight. And like, I've thought a little bit about trying to buy an eventador, but I get so scared that they're going to take my offers. I'm just like, man, I just, I can't stand car depreciation.

And so I have not, there's no rush to do so. But yeah, the car market in general is softening. New car inventory is becoming a lot more available. But it's the high-end stuff every month there's a new record. It seems like Tesla prices are falling dramatically. Like I'm watching cars and bids. Yeah. Like probably twice a day.

It's like browsing for fun. But I'm seeing almost brand new Tesla Model S plaids that are selling half of what they would have cost a year ago. Half. In a lot of high-end electric cars, we are. seeing 50% residuals in one to two years. So you're talking about cars that are losing 4 to 5% of their value a month. That's insane. And I don't really know how we wrap our heads around that.

I mean, it's a lot of wealth that is being evaporated. It's not being evaporated. It's going straight to these manufacturers who are heavily government funded. and it's a dark time because these cars have no bottom in value because they will require insanely expensive battery replacement and it's a tough thing. So I don't know what the future is for electric car values, but we should probably all be careful. What cars do you think are the best investments today? The best car investments are the cars you really want to own. There are nearly no examples of cars beating the stock market for more than five years at a time,

certainly none that have ever done it for 10 years at a time. And so when you start thinking about what an investment should do in terms of performance, it's unlikely that a car is going to do that. Now, there are obviously safer cars to put your money in from a residual value perspective, and that usually is 10 to 20-year-old, really rare and really interesting manual transmission cars. I think the manual transmission elitism is probably going to wane over the next 10 years because there are so few people that still know how to drive them. In the same way that like pre-war cars are finicky enough that there's a lot of more modern car enthusiasts that don't tolerate what ownership would look like. And so I think that's the right way to approach it is that if there is a car that you actually want to own and you will enjoy as an alternative asset class, you're not wrong to go out and buy one.

But the only reason that I have probably turned, I don't know, a million dollars of car purchases and payments and repairs over the last 10 to 15 years into probably about $5 million or $6 million of value today with some debt attached to it is, you know, just because it's been my job. I mean, whether or not it was exactly my job, I've treated it as, you know, one of the ways that I'm. going to build wealth to ultimately retire one day is in the form of a car collection. What do you think is the worst car ever made? The worst cars are just the boring ones, the ones that don't make you excited to take it somewhere. I mean, I think that there are unreliable cars, there are difficult cars, there are cars that are expensive to keep up, but that doesn't make them bad.

I think the cars that I just don't have any interest in are the ones that are your Nissan Ultima's that you're just trying to get A to B in. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but in the same way that I don't care what designer makes my clothes, because that's not something that I find enjoyment out of. If you tried to let someone who doesn't like cars use one of mine as a way to get around, they would abandon it on the side of the road. Or they break down and not be able to get where they want. And so it's one of these things that it's so hard to prescribe your own preferences and ideas onto someone else because we've all got different mindsets about how we want to use it. What is a rare car that not many people know is rare? Or maybe something that you would say is underappreciated in today's market. So when I first started to figure out that Lamborghini Mercilogos with a manual transmission were a lot more rare than people thought, the thinking had been that 10% of the production was probably manual.

But the factory kept no records of this. They had no way to find out. I asked them repeatedly, everybody I could, like, how many of these did you make? And I probably not that many, but we don't know. And so the theory had been that. there were probably like 200 in the U.S. and it turned out that there were only 33. And so when I discovered that by manually going through all my records and everything that I could find, obviously I was the only person at a moment that knew this and I was ahead of the curve because I financed the nicest one that I could find without putting anything down. And that worked out really, really well.

Spikers are a great example. There were not really good records of exactly how many cars they'd ever made. where they ended up, where they moved to, how many still ran, stuff like that. But even when you start to look at, let's just say less special versions of a Diablo, like there's only 343 Diablo SVs ever made. That's the same number as there are Dozenbergs. So people don't think of an SV as being the best one, but they are proper rare. All of them are rare.

And so when you start thinking about cars today, if they make 500 or 700 or 1,500, or 1,500, that seems really, really rare. But in reality, like, so many older cars barely even exist. And not even that old. You know, manual transmission LP generation Gallardo's. There's just over 50 of in the U.S., probably 300 worldwide. I mean, that's really, really rare, much more rare than a La Ferrari. And I think there's a lot of examples like that that people could dig up and be in the right spot with.

What do you think of the SLSAMG? I love what the car stands for. I love it as a continuation of the 300 SEL goal. wing. I hate the way they feel to sit in. The ergonomics are really poor. The visibility is really bad. They make a great noise and a lot of the technology is very nice because it's not so insane that it's going to be wildly problematic down the road. I don't fit in them all that well at six foot five. And so I've never really cared to own one. But it is one of those cars that you could love and it be exactly the right dream car. production numbers make sense. The usability makes sense. Everything's great about it if it fits what you want to do with it. What about as an investment?

No. There's just too many of them to really have a reliable investment. Your car, the Ford GT, is a true anomaly because it's the first time that a car that's that common has actually ascended in value to the degree. Now, by common, we're talking about 4,500 examples of the Ford GT. The SLSAMG, I think, is pretty similar. Yeah. I think. I think. I think it's, I think they actually made less. I think slightly less. Yeah, there's fewer SLSs, there's fewer SLRs. It's, it's just, it's awesome. But the, the reason is that it's the only U.S. car that kind of fits into that class. And so if there's any nationalism or patriotism, it makes sense to aspire to have it. Get the Ford. How do you invest your money today? Is it mostly in cars? Yeah, it is, it is grossly disproportionate and irresponsible in cars. You know, I have always been very insistent on tracking my net worth because most of my wealth always came from real estate and cars going up in value. You know, you see a lot in the exotic car space of generational

wealth and insane privilege and the people that are out there spending crazy money on cars are doing so with money that they didn't earn. I did not come from money. I didn't have anybody hand me anything from a business or opportunity or financial perspective to be able to do this. And so I was always kind of chasing like, well, how do self-made people do this? And the real thing that I landed on was just avoid depreciation. And so, but watching them go up, the only way that I could ever tell each year if I was really getting ahead is if the stuff that I was building equity in was also building its own equity by going up in value. And so I've always made it a good practice to sort of track, you know, where my net worth was. And it was wild when,

you know, as you start to, you know, make a name for yourself on the internet, the first suggested Google result was always Ed Bolian net worth. And I'm like, oh, man, so I made a video and obviously didn't divulge everything, but I danced around it a bit. But I think that, you know, when I, I've always tried to always to save money, because my parents taught me that. That's the only hope for retirement in their minds was to, and I try to do that as hands off as possible by just dumping what I can into a mutual fund, you know, whatever's left over or, you know, with some kind of a financial manager. And I've gone through a few different iterations there. But I don't pick stocks. I don't day trade. I've never met somebody that was really happy that did that for very long. And so I

kind of just rely on that. I mean, my biggest wins have always been in cars. And so, you know, you get a lot of advice to just do what you're good at. And so it's granted me a little more license to buy cars more aggressively. But yeah, I try to diversify between the equity that I've got in my home and the equity that I've gotten my cars and the investments that I have, but it's never as round as it ought to be. And what about the revenue? Where's all of the revenue coming from? For me, so anybody that's making content, you get platform revenue, you get brand deal revenue, you get merch revenue and then hopefully the activities that you're documenting earn some money. And, you know, I saw Stradman mention that over the last four or five years, his revenue is very flat.

And mine is too, but it always comes from a different place. You know, one year you make it on YouTube, one year you make it on brand deals, one year you make it on Facebook. One year, the cars just do well. And so I would say the same thing that I don't make nearly the money that he does, but it's always about the same. So while we're on that topic, how do you make sure your kids don't grow up spoiled? Because that's something we were kind of talking about last night, interestingly enough. And it seems like a lot of people who come from nothing and now have something like this had that concern of like my kids are not going to have the same struggle as me. Yeah.

So that is the monster in my closet. It is what the only thing that keeps me up at night is how do I raise well adjusted kids? Because I know that even though I didn't come from money, I was always a couple steps away from being. a character in a British crime movie. Like, I mean, like, there's just so many things. And in seeing the children of the people that I was selling cars to, not to disparage them, but a lot of them had a lot of problems. You know, teenage pregnancies, drug addiction, things like that.

And I am terrified of those outcomes like most parents would be. Fortunately, I can attribute most of the optical success to the jobs and that, and explain that they're all broken and they're all broken and they're all heavily leveraged and all the things. And so it can all go away very quickly. And I certainly exist where there's a rip cord of like, look, if things start to go pear-shaped work, got called to missions in Africa, everything gets sold or shoved in a storage container. And we're going to go see the world in a different light. And I think that, you know, we've got an amazing group of friends that are in that same season of life, raising young children, and and try.

trying to instill the right values and we've got a great church that we're members of and just trying to keep the right perspective. And in the same way that you have to keep the right perspective on how you use the stuff that you have, that it's not this cherished treasure, that it's okay for it to get hurt, that the kids can jump around and climb on the seats and whatever when they come over and do that, I don't care. And if, you know, everything's been hurt before, it can be fixed again. And I think just trying to maintain that mindset. also fostering their ability to dream, when I wrote the book about the cannonball record, I opened it with a short letter to my son. And I said, effectively, as your father, the only

thing that really matters to me is that you come to understand that God loves you more than I ever could. And that if you can understand the salvation that's available through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, then I've taught you everything that I have to do. But beyond that, If I can teach you one more thing, it's what's in this book. And it's that I was so fortunate as a young person to stumble upon the idea of Cannonball that could be the perfect manifestation of who I wanted to prove to myself that I was. As a car enthusiast, as a problem solver, as somebody who could evaluate and hopefully in the right ways risk, it was the Super Bowl of being me.

and I don't expect it to be cannibal. I don't expect it to be cars. I don't expect it to be lizards. Whatever your thing becomes, my hope is your dad is that you find that. And that's what can kind of be that distraction in the back of your mind, that goal that's so far out there that you don't know how you're going to do it, how you're going to afford it,

how you're going to get there. But when you reach that finish line, you know, I'll be even happier than you are. And I think that's, I hope. that the opportunities that I give him and the experiences that we show him and my daughter as well, that we're pointing them towards finding those passions and those motivations that can carry you

to whatever the ending point is. How did you find spirituality? Were you raised like this? I grew up in a church and certainly was introduced to it. I explored and read and researched a lot of other religions as well, trying to find peace in that. And I think that, you know, I'm extremely blessed. The best thing my parents ever did for me was introduced me to the church and people in church and mentors and things like that that that I found a lot of growth opportunity and value in. But beyond that, I think that as I really started to test my faith and, you know, run into issues that weren't as cut and dry and as easy to understand just from the Bible or required some interpretation, they showed me people to talk to.

and I did that. I did as much digging and research to try to find the peace that we all want in spiritual aspects of life and found it. And so it's a lifelong pursuit. But again, it's like when you choose that as an anchor in some of the more relationships and, you know, things that you do in your life, it offers so much perspective. Tithing is the same way, right? I mean, my parents were always very diligent about tithing. I saw that. I'm like, wow, you know, why are you just given 10% your money away mindlessly to the church?

But as you experience it yourself, first of all, it does open up some amazing blessings and the ways that you can benefit in terms of making more money. The more I tie, the more I make always. And you'll hear most people say that about charitable giving is that the more you give, the more you end up, it just goes around. But I think also the perspective that you can have on money, when you are making the first thing that happens is that goes out every month, then the rest of the month kind of falls in place. And I think having that attitude, our stuff, our opportunities,

our gifts aren't really our own, gives you the opportunity to really have an interesting perspective on that. When I was at the dealership and really around all rich people, you find some really unhealthy attitudes about money. And my much more than a focus, on investments or net worth or anything like that, I saw so many people so worried about such small amounts of money, particularly relative to what they had, that I developed this idea personally that I didn't want to care about how much money I had. I wanted to focus on how much money I choose to not care about. And if I can make that number, go up. Not irresponsibly, but if I can make that number climb, my happiness will go up.

If I choose to not care about $100, then everything that doesn't cost $100, I just choose not to think about. If I can get that number up to $500, then there's a whole lot of problems, a whole lot of things that could break on a whole lot of stuff, a whole lot of unexpected cost or whatever, that I choose not to care about it. And usually, you know, it's like about how much money you can make in a day is kind of what I saw it gravitating towards. And that's probably stretching it a little hard. But I wanted to stretch it really hard because if I could, you know, and there were times I was like, I need to dial this back a little bit. Like, that was a really rough month. But really, it never bit me. And my thought has always been like, if I could get that number to $5,000 or $10,000,

like, I wouldn't worry about anything. I mean, like a math. Imagine like the transmission goes out on a normal car or air conditioning unit goes out in your house. If you were able to not care about that at all and you just were like, all right, it'll work. I mean, we're just going to do it. Imagine the bliss walking through life with that kind of mindset. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community.

Ooh. Then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever. center. An IG Private Wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that

puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IDPrivatewealth.com. We were calculating on the way here. The rental car is charging us at this point, 75 cents a mile, and we're trying to calculate if it was deeper. We're trying to calculate? I was trying to calculate. If it would be

cheaper to drive the car to the airport and pay the 75 cents a mile or drop it off here and get an Uber to the airport. So what he was essentially doing was he was driving the rental car and he said, Jack, can you find out how much the Uber is going to cost? And I kind of thought, well, it doesn't really matter because we're going to pay it, right? And then he said, well, no, not necessarily. I look. The Uber's like, what was it, $30, $40? $40? Right. $30.40. And then he said, well, now how many miles is it to the airport? And I said, okay. here we go. And so I found out it was like 30, 40 miles or something like that. And then I'm like,

so it's like essentially the same price, probably. I don't know. 75 cents a mile versus about a dollar a mile. Yeah. And I said like, Graham, you know, I would rather just not be doing all of these calculations when we're, you know, getting ready to, you know, film the show. You know, I'm kind of in the zone right now. I just don't want to be distracted by something like this. I'm like, it maybe is a difference of a few And he said, well, is your time that you're spending right now doing nothing worth more or less than a few dollars? He said that to me. So what I'm saying is that your retort is, is your mental well-being and peaceful quality of life also worth two or three dollars? Because I just think of opportunity cost.

If I'm at a red light, my time is worth zero. So if I could do a calculation that saves $3 at the time I'm at a red light, extrapolate that over every single red light that I hit while driving. Imagine that every time you get to a red light, you do a calculation. But I think there needs to save $3, save $3 for a time that you're just sitting at a red light. But then you're never present. Like you're always doing something rather than just kind of existing, which I think there's a lot of value in that. And I think as a friend, you tend to try to fill your time always, like minute by. minute with things. And I don't, if it works for you, it works for you, but I have a hard time

believing it works. What do you think, Ed? If that, it's a recreation at that point, right? If that is how you like to spend your time, there's nothing wrong with that. And, you know, it's, it's no different than couponing or working credit card points. These are all things that people spend a lot of time to achieve a financial outcome that they view as being worthwhile. And I mean, obviously, I waste a lot of money on a lot of stuff that it ends up being a lot less gluttonous than it looks like because it all works out in the wash when I sell them. But I think that, you know, again, it's hard to prescribe advice of, you know, like Dave Ramsey saying, you know, get out of debt, avoid all this stuff. Well, some people just want to live and have their stuff and they're going to make, they're going to work harder to make their payments. and they can have a healthy mindset about this stuff.

Many people can't. And it just comes down to discipline. And I think that the more that we can instill that in our kids, and I will say that at the moment that you have children, you'll enjoy those quiet stoplight moments a lot more than you do now. But it's, yeah, I mean, if that's the way you want to spend your time, knock yourself out. I told him from now on I should probably be doing the driving so he can do

run his little calculations. Yeah. What is your advice to young people today? I think that my advice to young people is really to seize whatever opportunities they find. And so we've talked a lot about privilege and what that looks like and what that means. And I developed a perspective on that as I looked back on how difficult the early days of my career were. So I graduated from college in 2008 amidst a recession, unemployment. for graduates of Georgia Tech was 55%. So I had six roommates. One of us got a real job. You know,

one was substitute teachings, a couple went to grad school. I'm living in my warehouse, renting out cars that I can barely make the payments on. And, you know, so that was really hard. And if you did get a job, your starting salary was like 50 grand with a college degree. And that was a tough thing to kind of wrap your head around. Like, what does that really look like for the future? But at the same time, you know, we all kind of got our lives together. And a couple years later, we bought our first house. And, you know, that was at the bottom of the real estate market, which was a huge opportunity. And we weren't making student loan payments because I was born in Georgia. The lottery at the time paid for all of tuition, room, board, books, food, everything. If you had a B average and went to an in-state school. So I got a $150,000 education for free. That has. house that we bought, had $250,000 and found equity. I was not a real estate investor, but everybody's house went up in value for the next 10 years. And the stock market from its bottom when we started throwing in $2, $500 a month, whatever you could manage, you know,

was returned 14% a year for a decade. And so every dollar became four and every payment became three. And it was like at 28 years old, that is like a million dollars of net worth that I should have had through the privilege of being born in Georgia in 1985. And I didn't have that because I'd, you know, spin it on cars. We were at that point depreciating and stuff like that. But, you know, and then you extrapolate a million dollar net worth at 28 years old to retiring at 65. That's $30 million. So if I retire, which is, you know, I am well on track to do with less than $30 million. I have underachieved for the privilege of being born when and where I was,

regardless of who my parents were. Now, I mean, so what all that means is that as young people today are entering a world of rampant inflation, high interest rates, preposterously expensive housing cost and all this stuff, it's easy to get demoralized and to think like, man, there's no hope for me to achieve these dreams that I've had. But there are also going to be profound advantages to being in the moment that you're at. And if you can find the ways to use those, you can be so powerful. For instance, if you graduated high school today, the people who will be your first bosses are objectively the least motivated and least hardworking people that the workforce has ever seen.

So your ability to jump past them when you just get in there and decide I'm going to work so hard and take every opportunity that I have and rise as fast as I can in this organization and be loyal to a company that expects that from no one right now. You can stand out much more than I could have entering the workforce as I did. And, you know, yeah, everything's expensive, but your starting salaries are triple what they were 15, 20 years ago. And that's a whole lot ahead of the inflation. And so I think that, you know, if you can step back, and this may take a decade when you just think like, all right, well, I was doing what I could. And then you realize, wow, that was a really unique advantage that I had. And, you know, I'm glad I either made the best

of it or I saw him make the best of it. And that really worked out well for him. And I've got to keep that kind of ear to the ground of what'll work. I think that's a great piece of advice. That hard work is now like so much more difficult to come by. Yeah. And you could just use that as to your advantage. And what a wild concept. Like, you know, be willing to stay late when somebody has to. Be willing to, you know, not take your day off sometimes. You know, don't clock out at 459 p.m. or whenever it is, you know, don't mind going into the office when everybody insists on working remotely.

There are so many things that you can do as an employee as a team player to go above and beyond. And that is not the working mindset right now. It's what's in it for me. And then look, that's not new. It's not that only, you know, people of, you know, that are between 20 and 40 are in that, you know, headspace. But it's, it certainly is a thing. Ed, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

I'm going to link to all of your channels down below in the description. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us out. Thank you for dinner last night, by the way. Hey, I appreciate you coming to town. Get home safe. Yeah, thank you. We definitely want to come back.

It's a beautiful area. Just us driving around here. we were complimenting all the houses are so manicured, everything is gorgeous. We also drove from Nashville. We did. To Georgia, guys. We did that for you. For you guys.

So if you haven't hit the like button and subscribed already, now is your chance. It's free. Just subscribe. That would mean the world to us. Make it all worth it. Thank you.