The Iced Coffee Hour - “They’re LIARS!” Steve Hamilton Exposes Fake Influencers, Ferrari Fraud, & Getting Sued
Episode Date: September 7, 2026Northwest Registered Agent: Level Up Your Business's Online Presence Today at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/ich Gusto: Try Gusto for FREE for 3 months at https://gusto.com/ICED Upwork: Post... your job free at http://upwork.com/COFFEE and connect with top talent to grow your business. Shopify: Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at https://shopify.com/ich Follow @TheHamiltonCollection Here! *𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗖𝗧 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛 𝗨𝗦* 𝗜𝗚: https://www.instagram.com/icedcoffeehour 𝗝𝗔𝗖𝗞: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby 𝗚𝗥𝗔𝗛𝗔𝗠: https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗽𝘀 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheIcedCoffeeHourClips 𝗫.𝗰𝗼𝗺: https://x.com/TheICHpodcast 𝗧𝗶𝗸𝗧𝗼𝗸: https://www.tiktok.com/@theicedcoffeehour 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆: https://open.spotify.com/show/5c2uoXBQkOjIiCOf60jJj7 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗲: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-iced-coffee-hour/id1515070058 For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: icedcoffeehourpartnerships@gmail.com Apply for The Index Membership: https://entertheindex.com/ For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:07 - "Are you on dr*gs?" 00:06:29 - Making $500M In Business 00:08:05 - What the car collection costs every month 00:10:08 - Fake bids, dealer games, and "this is a bubble" 00:15:57 - Sponsor: Northwest Registered Agent 00:16:59 - The Downsides Of Owning $30M+ Cars 00:21:19 - The $700,000 Koenigsegg Regera mistake 00:25:11 - Why he has no Ferraris and sold the Bugatti Chiron 00:31:25 - Sponsor: Gusto 00:33:09 - Sponsor: Upwork 00:34:28 - Are Car Companies LYING About Numbers?! 00:38:55 - The most undervalued car in the world 00:45:30 - How much you need to make to afford a McLaren 00:51:55 - Zero-depreciation cars and extended warranties 00:56:45 - Clout cars vs. cars nobody else has 00:58:52 - Sponsor: Shopify 01:00:23 - How he gets CRAZY license plates 01:04:35 - The HOA fined him $25,000 01:17:13 - His biggest financial mistake: an Arby's 01:22:59 - What his portfolio actually looks like 01:27:33 - Tariffs, oil prices, and industry headwinds 01:34:08 - How close he is to selling the company 01:40:31 - Which car YouTuber is worst with money 01:43:08 - TEASER NEXT EPISODE *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan & Jack Selby will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan & Jack Selby are 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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How about it?
$16,250,000.
I think this is a giant bubble that's about to burst.
The American auto market has gone high-end, making more profits by selling fewer, pricier cars.
And what's caused these values to go up so much?
Potential fake bids and bring a trailer and other stuff.
What's a car that you can't believe how expensive it's gotten?
75% of all of the hypercars right now.
With a lot of Ferrari, they were around 2 million, I think, to start.
And those are seven or eight million dollars now.
The Italians lie about production numbers.
Really?
Ferrari was one.
Pagani was one.
And there are probably others.
People would come in here and then I'd see them like sitting in my Lamborghini talking about like, here's how I invest money in Forex.
No way.
I invested in a...
Wow.
It failed after like one year.
So I'm still paying $11,000 a month for that lease.
How much have you explored selling the company recently?
One of the things I have, I think, is could be the next billion dollar idea.
Are you serious?
We're going to get really close in the next one to two years.
This is Steve Hamilton and welcome back to the iced coffee hour podcast, y'all.
I am excited to be here.
Steve, I've heard you've been up for three days straight.
What's up with that?
Let's just say a lot of coffee and a lot of...
High on life, huh?
Yeah, I mean life, yes.
Okay, we need to know what was going on in that video.
There were so many comments saying you look like you've been doing some...
Yeah.
Or drugs or something.
Yeah.
People were genuinely concerned.
They're like, whatever you're going through, I hope.
you're okay. And it's one of those where like, you're looking at the comments and you're like,
this is helping feed the view machine. So like you just don't hide. And we really don't hide comments either.
But yeah, you're right. Like I looked at myself in that video and I'm like, first of all, I've lost some
weight. Like I've been really focused on like portion control and eating better and getting my body
fit. So it doesn't help that my face is 10 pounds thinner. Second of all, I was using a teleprompter.
So that was like the really bad thing. And the teleprompter was set way too fast. Like I talk fast.
and the teleprompter was going like 40 words a minute.
So I'm like, I'm like, if I blinked once, you would miss the sentence.
I lost the word.
I was out of track.
I had to start over again.
So and then whatever else, I don't know.
Maybe I just, maybe I was really energetic that day or something.
But of course, like I'm like literally the most Charlie Church like peer guy.
Like I don't even drink alcohol.
I don't do drugs.
But like, but a drug addict would probably say the same thing.
Like, no, I don't do.
So there's no way to defend that other than to just acknowledge that, yeah, I did look.
But absolutely not the case.
It was hilarious, dude.
We were talking with the Strideman about it.
And, like, I could not stop laughing.
Oh, my God.
It looked, I mean, it looked very real.
But you look healthy, like seeing you in person.
Yeah.
In person, you're much calmer.
Yeah.
And you blink in person.
But it definitely was a high energy video.
And the problem is we don't usually use a teleprompter.
Like, it's rare unless I'm doing an ad because I don't know if you guys use teleprompters
for ads, but it's tough to remember a minute-long script.
Yeah.
And, uh, but that was a very like,
legalese video where we're suing
the association who happens to be 20 feet
down from me and I had to be very particular
about the way that I worded things so I definitely was
using a helipramper.
It's like the combination of being like a very like
eccentric like wealthy person.
Sure. I don't know. It was it just got me.
Yeah. We have to know though. Yeah. Are you on
GLP ones? Yes. Really?
Yeah. Yeah. So let me tell you.
Okay. It's funny because I was like I was like
it's going to get brought up and you guys bring it up
four minutes into the conversation.
It was not quite intended. But yeah.
So I did really well with like managing my diet.
I was on this yo-yo diet for the course of my entire life, basically.
I would get up to 225 pounds because I loved eating.
Like that was the goal.
I'm like, all right, I'm light again.
I'm going to get up to 225.
I'm going to eat whatever I want.
And then when I got up to 225, I'm going to diet again and get down to 190.
And I did that for 15 years.
I could diet.
I have no problem with it.
I would be super excited when I got to 190 because that meant I got to eat again.
Problem was it would take me one month to diet and then I could feast for six months.
And then it started being three months to diet.
Then I could feast for three months.
And it kind of inverted where it was taking me six months to diet.
And then I'd get a month of feasting.
So I'm like, how can I, I mean, I have the discipline to do this.
So I actually spoke with my doctor.
And I'm like, this is what it is.
Like, I love to eat.
And like, I eat a lot when I eat.
And he's like, that's actually what GLP ones are for.
He's like, they're not necessarily a diet drug.
They just control the binge eating portion of it.
Like they cut that binge out.
And he's like, you're actually a good candidate.
And I'm like, I thought he was going to talk me out of it.
And I just had to keep doing this yo-yo diet.
So, like, what the GLP one allows me to do is, I go eat whatever the hell I want.
I just eat less.
I eat 40% of what I would eat, and I eat whatever I want.
I know I had, like, four cookies last night at dinner.
But, like, that filled me, like, maybe before it would have been 10.
See, that sounds something that I need.
It sounds exactly.
I feel like everyone needs that, though.
I have the exact same thing where, like, if I really try, like, I can diet.
The problem is, like, on a random occasion, I just binge, like,
crazy like if there are cookies in front of me chips or like my my biggest nightmare because i'll just
keep going going going going and it was it was becoming like i was i was basically dieting on when i was
home so i probably have like a five or six to one home to vacation ratio so i would come home and
i would just have to diet and eat and then i would go on vacation eat whatever i want and it would make
home dreaded it would make it horrible i was just ketoing nonstop here and it was just horrible
and like it's almost like it wasn't for me to lose weight it was just so that i could eat whatever i want
and maintain where I was at.
So yeah, I started taking it when I was at like 190.
When you get used to it, it's a little tough at first.
Like there's some heartburn.
There is some queasiness that where you just innately will eat less.
So I drop like another 10 pounds and that's why I look a little bit lighter than I did.
But I've just kind of stayed there for a year.
I've stayed at like 180 pounds.
Wow.
And so what is it?
Zep bound.
It's the only one that's actually FDA approved at the time.
And I think they approved like the pill now.
So that's the only one that's, that one's been around for about 10 years.
Who knows?
Like hopefully I don't die of some crazy.
cancer in 10 years because of this, but like 20% of the population is on a GLP1.
So if- 20% of the population is- That's what they said. If you Google it, like it's, it's because there's-
I don't know, because I also heard 20% of women are on only fans that are college-aged.
And it seems like 20% is just across, 20% of adults are doing something.
When I talk to like the small populace of people that, that are, like, it's shocking how many
people just don't admit to doing it. And there's so many like basement pharmacies that provide it really
cheap where there's probably a large percentage of the people of that 20% that are just getting it
online and don't have prescription. So for those unfamiliar with who you are, how do you describe
what you do? Because we're in a warehouse right now. It's probably $30 million for the cars.
Yeah. So I started something out of my mom's apartment basically like it's all about identifying
opportunities or differentiating somehow, right? So in 2003, when I was 19, I basically realized that
there was a bridge that needed to be created between wheel manufacturers and the internet.
Drop shipping was in its infancy and didn't really exist amongst a lot of different like categories
of product. So I filled that gap in at the time. And I know drop shipping is stupid prevalent now and
everyone tries to do it. But back then it wasn't. So I would go in and talk wheel manufacturers
into selling to me this 19 year old kid and then I would go list them on the internet and then
drop ship them and eventually really quickly I started stocking them because I can get better deals.
From there it was like,
I'm going to add tires into the mix.
So we were the first people to ever mountain balance tires on eBay,
offer full wheel and tire packages.
And then I realized I needed to get off of eBay and create my own brand.
So we went and created Mr. Wheel Deal.
That was our first, like, e-commerce platform.
From then, it was just creating other brands that, like, segment other portions of the market.
With partners, we launched custom offsets, which is like truck heavy,
Fitman Industries, which is JDM Euro.
Then we started selling suspension, performance.
And then we started acquiring other companies like MA Performance in 2020, Vividest.
racing in 2025. So fast forward to today, it's about a half a billion in sales each year.
We've got around 500 employees and we pretty much sell everything, but we're still very much a
wheel entire company. Wheels are dominantly what we do. And obviously, you have a very strong
passion for cars. Last time we spoke, you said that your cars were costing you about $135,000
per month. I'm curious, how is that change? It depends on the month. I would say that 135 included
modifications that we would make, and those are pretty heavy. I think it's probably a little bit better
than that. We've gotten rid of some of the lemons of the collection and, and I hired a mechanic
actually here that works about 20 hours a week. He is an amazing human, actually, and he just
fixes stuff rapidly and really amazingly. So he's cheaper. He gets my stuff done faster. I think I'm
probably at, I don't know, 20 to 50K a month at this point. That's not bad. No, it's very, and a lot of
them are newer cars now, so they're under warranty. What's the most difficult car to maintain?
Let's look around. That is a great, I mean, it's, it's like the lump sum of everything is the
Any time we take we like to roll deep. You guys saw that last night, right? So we'll take six
classics out and two to three of them will be broken. So it's like, and especially the Mopar stuff,
like my Daytona and the Superbird are just notorious for oil leaks and breaking and being problems.
Of the super and hypercars, like your Porsches, your Bugatti are ironclad. I would say that,
God, we have a good assortment of vehicles. Like, Myra Mac has been a little bit problematic.
Like, it's still really good compared to what I had, but that one's probably of what I have left.
That one's probably a little bit more serviced than other cars, but it's still pretty reliable.
In terms of the total value, I heard you recently say it's valued about $30 million.
How much has that gone up in the last year?
It'd be hard to quantify, but like it's very possible that it's $35 to $40 million.
Like my yesco, I paid $3.5 million for.
Those are going for six.
Even my Superbird, that was a $600,000 car a year ago.
I've seen those roll for $900 to a million plus.
If there was a time to sell, it's probably now.
but like these are I have such a great spread of cars right now that it's just I got a role with it like I don't
buy them for investments I buy these cars for for happiness investments not for financial investments and that
drives Tommy who manages my collection crazy overall have you net made money or lost money buying cars
probably really close to break even if I had to guess and what's caused these values to go up so much
who knows uh they say that there are like some dealer to dealer things happening that seems suspicious
like potential fake bids and bring a trailer and other stuff uh who I know that
auto manufacturers like help at auction if they see that the value of their car is going too low,
they will suddenly throw in like a warranty last minute. And then if that doesn't work,
they will have one of their minions going bid. Like this is, this is, I don't want to even say
unsubstantiated because like I, I feel like I've verified a lot of this before and I've seen it,
I've seen it all happen in the real world. But like, I'm talking to this guy that has a hundred plus
million dollar collection and he's like, I'm reassessing my collection. Like I'm seeing how high these
cars are going for and that makes me want to start selling and profiting. And I'm like, if he's
thinking that if I'm if I'm struggling to be like I want to I don't even know if I want to
bring another hypercar into the collection like that that feels like the the very epitome and the
very definition of a bubble like when does it pop when do when does everyone start selling and
overload the market with inventory and then and then is there is it ripe for buyers that are
willing like me where they start seeing the price go down to I don't know it it feels very
suspicious what's happening right now what some people are saying is that the people buying these
cars, spending a million dollars, are not the type to need to sell it. And so if they overpay,
they might just keep it and it's forever off the market. And the people selling are really
the ones who bought it cheap years ago, not the people buying today. I hear that, but there's still
a very limited pool of buyers. Like, there's a lot of these hyper and super cars. Nothing like, you know,
there's probably more Ford Mustings in one model year than there are all hyper cars combined. But like,
there's still not that big of a buyer pool with this. Like, I just don't, I don't, I don't,
believe that because I've seen it through COVID. Like we've seen available buyers and and I can't
it just doesn't make sense. Like it something something's off. I don't know how else to explain it,
but I feel like if you're watching this now, watch it back in a year and let's see where the
market's at. And something strong tells me that there's going to be a big correction.
So what's your plan moving forward? Are you going to be buying or selling any of your cars? You said
you don't want to sell. Yeah. But what is what's your plan? So the great thing is like everything in our
channel, like, there's been a lot of luck. Like, oftentimes I realize that I'm playing chess without
even knowing I'm playing chess. Like, I just do things. And then I realize, well, like, I'm like,
really glad that I did that six months or a year ago. We've started shifting to buying new cars and
ordering a lot more new cars over the last three years. And so the benefit of that is I'm getting
these cars at sticker MSRP. And the moment that I get them, they're worth two to three million
dollars worth, more. But we've already established this relationship with manufacturers. So they're
continuing to allow us to buy them in MSRP. And by and large, I keep,
the cars for at least two years. So like the Hennessy, you buy it sticker. And that specific
model I know would go over what I paid for it. McClellan corporate was kind enough to give me the
788HS that's coming out. And I heard that those are selling for double sticker. The problem is,
again, they're all happiness investments. So like, I buy them because they look cool. They perform
cool. And so I don't get to utilize that oftentimes. Do you think that part of that abundance
and like yes mentality that you've had as an approach to life has actually made you more money?
or like, how does that express itself in like real world terms?
Because my experience of you and knowing your story, also, I mean, last night, we had,
you know, Graham's group, the index.
Yeah.
They came out here and you were like, oh yeah, everyone hop in a car.
We're going to take a dozen of these, 15 of these all to go to a place and like just
hop in the car.
It doesn't matter.
We're driving like $20 million probably worth of cars.
And you don't care.
I was in a mile three.
Yeah, I drove the Tesla.
You say yes to everything.
Like the YouTube channel was like, yeah, let's do it.
Like you want to collab?
Yes, let's do it.
It's just like a yes to everything.
Yeah, even for us, you gave Jack and I the Bugatti Shirang Keys.
All right, Jack has the Bugatti.
The best.
The best by so much.
I didn't want to say it was the best just because it's worth five times more,
more than five times more than anything else that we've driven.
But it truly is the best by miles.
And you said, here you go.
You could just take it out.
Yeah.
Be safe.
It's the net positive, like for everything.
like I just I don't want to say for you guys maybe not change because your group are guys that are a little bit more wealthy like they they could probably afford a super hypercar maybe not a hypercar maybe some of them I don't know I don't know them all enough but like probably all of them but I just gave perfect I just gave all of them experience that they may not be able to have they they maybe they're not the greatest example it was a lot of their first times ever driving supercar's oh yeah there we go let's so so we got to have what 12 15 people go experience a
brand new super hypercar for the first time. And the risk for me was maybe something gets
broken, which will happen in the course of every day driving. Really, the big risk is an accident
or spinning out. But like the probability of that happening, I think, is really low. And even
though one of your friends was really speeding, you got a ticket. But that's okay. Allegedly.
Allegedly speeding. So it's, it's just like it impacted these people so positively. And my risk,
I think, was relatively low for what everyone else got in return. So that's, that's kind of the
mentality there, I guess. Have you ever had an accident like that? Yes, we had someone pulled right out of my
neighborhood when we were going to do a celebratory dinner for hitting a million subs on the channel and
just pulled right in the traffic on some lady teaboned him and wrecked my McLarenceana. Insurance covered it,
but they dropped me later. So that was a whole battle trying to find out how to find new insurance and
getting that resolved. A bunch of little things have happened. Rarely it's negligence. Usually it's
just like chance. And so as long as it's not negligent, it's totally fine. And I'll keep
lending the cars out and letting people enjoy them. So do you think what makes you different and
uniquely successful is the yes mentality and just overall action? It seems like there's very
little time between like deciding you're going to do something and actually doing it.
Six years in, we finally got the domain, iced coffee hour podcast.com. And the only reason
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So do you think what makes you different
and uniquely successful is the yes mentality
and just overall action?
It seems like there's very little time
between deciding you're going to do something
and actually doing it.
Well, that's what makes an entrepreneur
a great entrepreneur is the ability to make a snap decision like that i've that i've read a bunch um is
is that snap decision always yes like yes you can do it and that may not be what makes a great entrepreneur
but i think that i'm just able to make that calculation like quick like i that's kind of the way
my heart is like i grew up with nothing and i always tell the story about how my we were at a car show
and my wife wanted to sit in a corvette and she was 15 i was 16 and the guy wouldn't let her
sitting and i'm like this is crazy like what is she going to do by sitting in your corvette so that kind
to birth of the idea. Like, if I'm, if I'm ever successful and able to have something like this
in abundance, like I'm going to share it with people. So it's, it's more just like, it's less about,
it is about the net positive decision, but it's more just like, what does it cost me? Why not,
why not let someone sit in the car? Why not set someone, let someone drive in the car? Like,
it's, it's fun and exciting for them. I just, I just don't care, I guess. It's fine.
Like, if something gets hurt or damaged, what, what does it matter? Yeah, but what's odd to me is
you've grown your wealth, I mean, relatively slowly, you've been working on this business.
Like you said since you were 19.
And a lot of the times the people that acquire their wealth slowly are very protective
of their wealth because they know how hard it is to grow a dollar.
Yeah.
For the first 15 years, I was very, I lived very conservatively.
Like relative to other income that people have in their homes and their cars, I was
very conservative.
It wasn't until I bought my first Lamborghini eventador in 2018.
So I was 15 years in business.
And I realized how well it kind of, how much people loved it.
like how much they enjoyed it.
And I'm like, this is kind of cool.
Like people love this event door.
They want to sit in it.
And I'm like, go drive it.
Go experience it.
Like, if this is something you won't experience in your life, like, you should.
What is it?
What harm is it to me if you go drive this thing for two miles?
And so that kind of started the mission.
Then I bought a McLarence 720S.
Then I bought a Porsche GT3RS and allowed me to kind of amplify the mission.
And then I kind of stepped away from work for a little bit and started the YouTube channel
because I had time.
And that really allowed me to like loudspeaker amplify the mission, buy more cars.
And so like the whole mission behind the channel is to do just that.
It's go to charitable shows, share the cars with the community.
Every cent that this channel is made to date has been donated.
We've donated almost a million dollars to charity at this point.
Like that's just the way that I'm wired.
And I think it has helped.
It's certainly helped along the way in business.
But like I'm not always just a yes man.
Like I know people tend to take advantage of you when you do that right.
But like, and that has happened to me plenty in my life.
But I also know when to pull back as well.
What are some of the downsides to owning so many cars like this?
It drives me crazy that there's always three to five in service.
I can't stand how often we have to maintain and fix them.
People constantly ask to drive them, which again is part of our mission.
But every day, like I got a kid from California saying, hey, could I borrow a car for prom?
And like, he's serious.
And I'm like, I can't ship you a Bugatti to California for you to go to prom.
I'm like, there's weirdly unrealistic expectations.
And in my heart, like, I want to help these people.
But, like, there's 20 of those a day, especially around dance season.
So it kind of puts you on this podium for everyone to see you.
And then I think more people kind of come to you as a source for money.
What's the most generous thing you've done with your cars?
The first thing that came to mind is when that lady teaboned the McLaren Senna,
she had a really lousy car.
It was sub-5,000-dollar car.
And, like, I knew that her insurance would probably give her,
or my insurance would probably give her a $2,000 check for whatever the value was.
So I just went and bought her a car.
I went and bought her like a brand new $40,000 Hyundai.
Wow.
That's my thing is, and I'm not going to go into like specifics,
but my thing is kind of buying people cars.
I've bought probably 20 plus cars for people in my family and my friend group.
And since that's what we do, like I love cars,
I think that's the way that I like to show my love for those that need it.
What's your favorite car to buy for somebody?
The Lexus NX.
I've bought several of those.
Like, it's just like this perfect size SUV and Lexus has such good UiX, such good driving experience.
I don't have one now, but I've always loved Lexus and I think that's such a great car.
And they used to be like five years ago, they were like 37 grand.
So it's like this SUV Lexus that was almost fully loaded just from factory for sub 40.
What's your least favorite car you've ever owned?
There's a few, but I mean, definitely my Konigzerigera.
Christian and I, we had a meeting at Car Week.
It was just me, Tommy Christian and his son.
And I think we went from 0% to like 10%, which we're certainly not where we were before,
but I just, that car, if I could go back and we made a really funny short form about it and me
doing like an interstellar thing. Like if I could go back, I was warned by everybody not to buy
that car. And I'm like, I'm like, how bad could this? How bad could a car be? Like I've had
everything at this point. But it was in the shop almost the entirety of my ownership. So what were
the cover-to-cover ownership costs, financials and just general like experience owning a Konexeg?
So, Konexag did help me along the way, but like, I don't care how much you help me if my car is bricked 22 out of 24 months.
Like, I appreciate it, but it doesn't matter if you're paying for my car to be serviced for three months and then I get it back for three days.
And it has to go back in the shop.
Like, thanks, but no thanks.
But I probably came out of pocket another $200,000 on top of that.
And then I took a $500,000 loss selling it.
So $700,000.
The current owner of the Konexag, what's their experience like?
I saw it in California.
I don't know who owns it, but I know that it sat in the dealer for a while, I think, getting serviced and fixed.
whatever. And I guess it did fine on a rally out there and maybe they put a few hundred miles on it,
which I was shocked because I didn't even abuse that thing. I drove it gently because I'm like,
I want to get 50 miles out of this so it doesn't break. Why to keep breaking? I've talked about
the Konegg's egg a lot and I'm trying not to like crap on the guys. I had a good productive
conversation with Christian, but I think the first maybe 25% of them just were very prototype.
Like they released essentially a prototype to the public and they had wiring demons. They had just
all kinds of issues and one little fray in like a wire can can be impossible for them to detect.
They can keep fixing things that they think cause it, but they're not the root cause.
So it just keeps shorting out of other things.
And that was kind of the problem with mine was there were things like window motors that
just kept breaking.
And I don't know if that was because of some freight or issue.
But like there were also other constant things that just broke and broke and broken,
broke and broke.
But I think at the core of the issue, I think was like the wiring harness, the general
wiring I'm told was very sloppy and bad early on. And that's like the, that's like the vertebrae,
the nervous system of the car. So if that's bad, like, what can you expect from a vehicle?
Which car do you drive the least out of all of your cars? Uh, I always have to like look at him.
I mean, the NSX there. I haven't driven it once, but you've never, you haven't driven it once?
Not since the, we rebuilt it. I drove it when I bought it, but it was like not wide bodied,
twin turboed air ride. So I have, I have yet to drive it. Like, I just don't like J.D.
cars. They're not my thing. How can you haven't driven it now, though? How long has it been like
operational? Six months? You're not curious? It's one of those cars where you buy it for the
channel. Like I was talking with Matt Armstrong and he said that he said it perfectly like don't buy a car
because you think it'll perform well. Like just buy something that you enjoy and and it'll show your
passion will show through it and it should perform well for you on the channel. Like that was that was a
channel investment and like it's not our it's not like what our demographic wants to see and I thought
it would be and it was just a mistake and I just don't want to drive it. How much have you put into it?
We had some help, but probably like 50 grand. It wasn't horrible. What are you going to do with it?
It's been up for sale for like four months. That's a very unique car. What are you listing it for?
120 right now? What's the lowest you would take? Maybe 110. It has a lot. I mean, it has, it's worth
every penny of that. There's none of these that exist with a Liberty Walk slammed. Does that add value? I feel
like people right now just want stock cars. By and large, when you do stuff like that, I don't think it adds value. I think you
typically spend 50 to 100 and you get 80% of that if you're lucky, right? So not really. No,
it probably hurt me. I just can't believe you haven't driven it once. It's been here for six months.
No desire. Zero desire. And that's when I sell stuff. Like when I'm looking at a car and I'm like,
I haven't driven that for a month and I have no desire to drive it, then it's time for it to go.
That's also interesting. I just noticed you have no Ferraris in here. I have one.
You have the one FFF. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it's the GTC which replaced you. The GtC for Luso.
So I think Ferrari is like a different culture of people.
And I don't mean that in a bad way.
I just think that like a Ferrari owner is different from everything else.
Like they're very like distinguished people.
This is not every Ferrari owner.
But like typically when I think of it and what I see out there is they're distinguished,
they'll play that game with Ferrari and go buy 20 cars so they can get Ferrari's next hyper
series.
They will attend all the rallies.
And it's just like not very counter my personality.
We used to have, I had a Bugatti Sharan SS that I sold.
I'm selling my Ramak.
Like, we're getting rid of boring cars.
And it's crazy to say that like a remack, the quickest car in the world is boring or the Bugatti, the highest top speed in the world.
But they are.
They're like, they're too refined.
They're too comfortable.
They're too quiet.
I like loud cars like the Hennessy Venom.
It's just, it sounds like a 60s muscle car.
It's loud, insane, fast, bold colored, huge spoiler.
It's so aggressive.
Bro, this thing, there's fire.
Oh, there's fire.
Like, that's the future of the collection.
I mean, it wasn't even two years ago last time we spoke, and I asked you,
if you could keep one single car aside from daily drivers, which one would it be?
And you're like, eh, probably the Bugatti Shiran SS.
And now here we are, and you've sold the car.
Yep.
Why did you sell the car?
It was boring, but I also needed cash to build a big project that we're doing.
So we're building a big car condo community in Florida, right in central Florida near Windermere.
and that's going to be where I live in the future for the majority of the year.
And I'm looking around at trying to find somewhere for my cars to be stored.
And there's nothing.
I'm like, I'm trying to find this crappy 5,000 square foot industrial building.
I don't care how old it is, how dingy it is.
And there's nothing.
And I'm like, man, if I could just find land and build something like,
I could probably make some pretty good money on this and solve a big problem within the community.
And I think that's how a lot of my other business ideas and ventures came along was just solving a problem for myself.
And so we were lucky and blessed enough to find some land.
One of the parcels wasn't even for sale.
We just went and met with some very eccentric sellers, talked him into it.
Had a bunch of come-to-god meetings with the attorney when it almost fell apart last minute,
ended up closing in Denmark because we got a clear to close.
And I'm like, I'm not going to let this deal slip out of my hands.
Like, I will go find some followers that will help me meet.
They met me at the embassy, helped me sign and notarized documents.
And we got it done.
So I have the land.
I have the whole project that I'm going to present to the city.
They seemed very warm about the idea.
I just need to get their thumbs up
and then we break around
and build this community.
So what exactly is the idea?
Well, the first problem was that there just
is no place to store cars down there, right?
That's the biggest problem.
The second problem is that
the vast majority of car condos in the world
are ugly.
Like this community, I think,
is actually one of the top tier ones,
but it's, there's no real greenery.
When you get behind that gate,
there's no vegetation, no plants,
it's all just asphalt.
The buildings are tan.
They look like storage units.
They don't look like car condos.
And then they don't have a great club element
Like they built some goofy 5 o'clock tower that's like 1930s theme.
That's very fancy and bougie and nobody ever uses it.
So I'm like, I want to build something that has nature trails, a boardwalk, a lot of vegetation that's beautiful.
I want to build a clubhouse that's private, welcoming though, and has a pool and then have a strong sense of community and make the car condos like the exteriors look.
Like I took inspiration from Coda.
It's the Circuit of the Americas in Austin.
and they have beautiful exterior on their car condos.
And so taking a lot of inspiration from that,
but trying to make it even better than that.
So just elevating the experience.
We're kind of calling it a country club for cars, basically.
Do you have to apply to, like, buy one of the places?
Like, do you have to match the demographic?
Yeah, I mean, you have to have enough income.
Like, these will be probably around a million dollars a unit.
And it's, it's windermere reserve.com is where you can go sign up.
And I have, this is the only the second time I've really publicly talked about it,
other than our video, and I have 250, like, emails of interest,
and I have maybe 70 to 80 condos that we're going to do.
So I'm really pumped about how much interest has come through.
I love the idea.
But you know what?
They're building them now in Vegas.
What?
In Henderson, these car condos.
And they're selling for anywhere from 600 grand on the low end to about one and a half
on the high, depending on the square footage.
They're just like this.
It's like open at the bottom with a little loft, and you could, like, speck it out.
Yeah.
I think it's a huge opportunity, and people love them because you're not building a house.
with like multiple bathrooms, a full-blown kitchen, all these appliances, bedrooms.
It's like it's a warehouse with a loft.
It's really easy to construct.
And car people just are so excited for it.
And the loft can, like, we'll have kitchenettes in our loft.
We'll actually put ovens and, but it's not full-blown crazy kitchen.
It's the light version, right?
And then a little seating area.
And we're hoping to do third story bedrooms so that people can stay overnight.
And then the designer even suggested like above the third story to have a balcony or like,
a seating area up top, like a rooftop patio. And I'm like, that would be phenomenal. That's a
minimum cost option. So we're trying to make these as big and amazing as possible. And, you know,
that's, that's something that when I move down there, that's a community I want to be a part of.
That's, that's the goal. It's something that I'm excited to go to and enjoy with other people.
So what changed with the Sharon in the last year and a half of now? There's a point where like,
you also just get all the content. Like a lot of these cars are bought because A, I enjoy, but B, we need to create a content machine out of
of them and we kind of did everything that we could with that same with the remack the remack just beats
everything so like those two cars it's just there's not much more you can do and then and then i just
stopped driving it because there's more fun loud raw cars in here to drive so it just sat here and
then i realized gee it's been a month since i've driven the bugatti i should probably go drive it like
that's why i'm i'm going to drive it it's because it's sat for a month not because i want to drive it
so it's just the psyche of my brain like i there are some things that like i'm a lifer with like my
Of course my kids, like, I will always be endeared, love, be with them, but then some things I can just lose interest in immediately and move under the next thing.
Is there a single car that you have been a lifelong, like, endearing of it?
Running the podcast is honestly an absolute blast between filming with guests, travel, YouTube strategy.
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Is there a single car that you have been a lifelong, like, endeared of it?
Yeah, my Chevelle.
I've had that since my kids were tiny.
and it's been through four engines.
I just, I love my 67chvel.
I think my McLaren 765LT and my Hennessy Venom,
I think those are cars that I will have forever
because they're so special to me,
I have such special relationships with,
with either ownership or with local dealers,
and they're just such thrilling and exciting cars.
What's a car that you can't believe
how expensive it's gotten?
75% of all of the hypercars right now,
but I would say the 918 is 5 to 6 million for the YSAC.
Like, I sold mine for two a year and a half ago,
the La Ferrari.
That one's insane to me.
So they alleged that they produced 900 of these cars,
but realistically, if you go to certain websites,
there's 1,100 to 1,200 production.
Like, I haven't verified this.
I've only just went and seen, well, I mean,
I've visually verified it,
but I can't go and physically verify the vins on the cars,
but like, in my opinion,
the website tells a story that the Italians lie
about production numbers on really Ferrari was one,
Pagani was one,
and there are probably others,
but those were two big ones.
And they're producing 1,200-La Ferraris.
they were like around two million, I think, to start.
And those are seven or eight million dollars now for La Ferrari.
And it's just crazy to me when there's over a thousand of these.
How is that even possible?
Like, it's a fun car, but it's just insane to me that they're going for that much money.
What about the new Ferrari EV that just sold for $40 million?
Yeah, for $40 million.
Yeah, that my gut says that that was just a guy that had $40 million that he was going to donate anyway.
And it helped him get some positive news and some clout.
And he was going to do it, whatever that car was going through, he was going to bid $40 million.
I hate the new EV, though.
Like, I already didn't really like Ferrari.
And seeing that thing, that's, that's ugly.
And I had the SF 90 recently, and it's, it's like the most soulless.
That was probably top three for least favorite cars.
Yeah, like, I hated it.
Too many gadgets and gizmos in it.
Isn't that what Jeremy just bought?
Jeremy just bought that.
It's such a bad car.
A day ago, he posted the video, we'll put it up here, him pulling the thing off the car.
showing it.
When you look at the numbers of like zero to 60,
it's really fast, it's got a lot of, it looks cool.
So is a Model S.
You can go get a Model S plaid used for $45,000 and it'll smoke that.
Like if that's, if you want fast, like just go get a Tesla.
If you want, like, I think the, the dynamic of the hyper and supercar is turning very much
analog now because they're getting beat.
Like the Corvette just beat every car that exists.
And it's $250,000.
Like, in America, we just built this hybrid car that nothing can compete with.
Like, why even go for speed records at this point?
Why be Bugatti?
What matters if you can get beat by a car a tenth or a 15th of your price?
Now they're figuring out, okay, we have to be different.
How can we get that, like, ultra-rich segment?
And it's becoming analog.
Yeah, Hennessy Blackbird just came out.
And it's 800 horsepower naturally aspirated motor, nothing digital in it.
Gated six-speed transmission.
That's, I think that's the wave of the future with cars.
So don't you think that's one of the reasons why some of the older cars have spiked so much in value is purely because the new ones are kind of not as good?
Yeah, like the Ventador went crazy because the Ravolto is hybrid.
Yeah.
But the problem is what happens when they all start saying, okay, we're not going to do hybrid anymore.
We're going to do got.
What happens to all those cars that spiked because manufacturers started shifting to hybrid?
Like, Lamborghini is going to potentially revert back to, I was talking more about hypercar manufacturers when I said analog.
but like the supercar manufacturers are going to follow.
They have to differentiate themselves.
Again, they're going to get beat by every other car out there too.
So I think that they may revert back to naturally aspirated.
Wouldn't they just do what Porsche is doing and just offer both?
Like if you want the six speed gated, it's going to be X amount more.
Like you overpay now and they could upsell that.
And even the Hennessy Blackbird does offer like an automatic.
They offer a slightly less analog experience with their automatic transmission.
But like John was, he's like, well, if you want to order that, is like, well, we don't
expect a lot of them.
Like if you want to be that guy.
You can order it. So I think even some of the new real analog ones are going to be. Even the Pagani Utopia was like a, I was shocked. That one was announced like three years ago, four years ago. And they offered the six speed manual transmission and a hypercar at that time too. So maybe that was kind of the beginning of that happening and Pagani got on it super early. So what cars do you think are undervalued? Bugatti Varon by far. There's still one five to one seven million dollars for the 06 to 08. And I don't see how that car is like that car did break top speed record held it for a long time. And it's a I think it cost.
them $4 million to build each of those cars and they were selling them for two at the time.
They are a little bit to maintain, but there's enough of them out there where I think people
have figured out how to get it done. Bugatti offers it offers an extended warranty for I think
250 that'll cover it for four years. I'd have to check the numbers in that. But it's a criminally
underrated car that they built. I mean, I told you they built 1,200 of those La Friars. They built, I think,
350 or 400 of the Veyrons. And they're 1.5 million. It's shocking to me that they're that Jeep.
What should they be selling for? And you're five. If everything else is where they're at,
The Veyron's starting price should be $5 million.
I think it's criminally underrated.
And then you have the SVJs that are another criminally overrated car
where those are a million and a half.
And they built a thousand plus those.
It's just, I don't understand the market.
Let's say someone has $1.5 million to invest.
And they have a choice between the S&P 500 or it's the top-notch Bugatti.
Yeah.
What would you recommend?
It depends.
Are they strictly looking for a financial investment or haven where they're going to
that Veyron, they're not going to drive it, they don't care about the enjoyment of it.
Then I might say actually Veyron is the move.
Really?
Like legit, go by, if you have $15 million, go by 10 Veyron's, let them sit in your garage.
I think you're going to come out far more ahead in three to five years with that.
If you're going to drive it, then there's, then there's mileage that's going to hurt value a little bit.
You're going to have to maintain it.
If you buy it to drive it, you're also maybe going to get bored of it.
There's more thrilling cars for that much money.
So as strictly as an investment, yeah, that might be your best.
How many miles?
Like walk us through, in your opinion, what would be the best investment Bugatti?
You have to get into like their convertible model or like their Varon SS.
Those have already kind of went up in value there.
I think they're north of three.
But just like with any other car, the most special variant seem to be the one that
increased the most.
The 918 Y Sox seem to go a lot higher.
If there's some goofy Enzo that's a yellow instead of, you know, the super common red,
that one garners 50% more.
So I would have to say some of their later later models, if you're willing to spend a little
bit more. There's a beautiful Veyron, supercar Ron had a beautiful spec, and I forget which one is,
I even drove his, but like that one was, in my opinion, the most beautiful spec, and I think he paid
around two. It's probably already worth three now, and in five years, that one might be worth
eight. It seems like whatever Ed Bolian buys, give it five years, and he's always right.
Yeah. Oh, nice. It's largely the case with me, too. I just sell them before I, before, like,
I had the LaFriari. I had the 918. Like, I've had a lot of cars that have really gone up in value,
I sell them like right around what I paid for him. Maybe I make a little bit of money. But again,
they're not financial investments for me. So what else besides the Bugatti that you think is underrated?
Would have said the SENA a year ago, but that one went from $1 million to $3 million over the
course of a year. Everything is overvalued right now, man. Like there's five cars for every 95.
95 are overvalued. Five are probably undervalued. I, McLaren 720, 750. People always ask me if I
have like 250K, what car should I get? And I'm like, if you want reliability and a very fun driving
experience, get a Porsche G230RS. If you want relative reliability and you want the most fun possible
experience, in my opinion, it's the McLaren 720 or the 750. Like, they're highly tunable,
extremely good UI driving experiences. They're just such fun cars. So do you think any EV
supercars have any collectibility right now? No, no. The Romantic is the prime example. Like, I can't sell
that like in order to sell that I'd have to be about half of what I paid. I paid like two seven all in
with taxes. The highest offer and I've tried very hard is like one three on that car right now.
Those are and that's a car where I think when the market has gone broadly EV like that is a car
that might that might be the the F1 of the 90s that's worth 20 million like maybe that remack is
the five, 10 million dollar car in the future because it broke all these records like it was
the very first electric broadly built hypercar, but I'm not going to sit around for five or ten
years on that car to get that value out of it. I would argue that that is going to be the future
collectible because you're selling it. And it seems like you get these cars early, but then you
sell them early. As soon as you sell them, two, three years later, they spike. Yeah, but I don't want to
hold on them for two more years and not drive them. I don't know. It's just, it just doesn't make sense.
They got to be fun. I got to drive them. I have to utilize them. And we put a lot of miles on
these cars. Like, I mean, every, when I sell these cars, my average holding period for these cars
is probably two years. And the average mileage when I sell them is probably 10 to 12,000 miles,
which is insane for a hypercar. Like 5,000 miles a year when you have 20 cars in your collection
is insane. Which car manufacturer have you completely lost respect for? I think everyone thinks
the answer is Koenig, but I actually respect them because, like, if, let me just talk about that.
Like, the ESCO they delivered had some very big problems early on. We put a video how it, like,
leak brakes, the gyro was not working, but like, they took really good care of it in that first month.
They flew techs out multiple times. They did a lot of work on it, and it's actually been surprisingly
ironclad in the last three or four. There's some small issues with it now, but like I can still drive it.
As long as I can drive a car, I'm super happy with it. Like the regera would brick and it would shut off.
Like, you can't drive it. The ESCO has some small issues, but I can drive it. I can wait until the
big service to get that stuff addressed. I'm happy as a camper with that stuff. But, like,
Like, there's, there's one manufacturer that came to mine, and I can't, I can't actually even publicly
bash them because there was like a deal that we worked out, but, which sounds crazy, but it's a small
one and it's, it's irrelevant at this point.
Or which manufacturers, are you surprised that they even still exist?
That would be Konexeg, like, it's, it's with all the problems that they had, they just have
such great branding and a loyal following base that, like, their, they're amazing marketing,
branding, and innovative tech is really helping lead them.
but usually if you if you build a product that that breaks a lot and is notoriously unreliable like
consistently for a long period of time that's the end but but they've they've gotten better
they've built really cool cars and they've gotten better and they've turned it into more reliable
company so somehow they rode that that long wave and and like I want them to succeed I've always said
like build me a great car and I will be your biggest advocate and my my tone is already very
different than it was nine months ago and I crashed out on them and and so like I want to be their
advocate. I want this Yesco to continue to perform well because then I will, I will be a positive
vocal advocate for them. If there was one car manufacturer that you could only ever drive for the
rest of your life, what would it be? McClaren. I love my Hennessy. It's my favorite car in the
collection, but McLaren is, they just build the, like the broad profile of all their cars is just
they're the most fun cars. They're the best cars, in my opinion. How does someone know they have enough
money to be able to buy a McLaren? Like, is there a net worth or income? I mean, net worth is one thing.
right like because a lot of my money's tied up in my company like but but like disposable let's say let's talk
about like income annually i mean you can get that mcclaren for probably you're probably like 75 grand to
seventy five hundred dollars a month and so you need to i mean if you're taking a five six year loan on a
250k car even if it's five grand a month that's that's a pretty steep payment so you really need to be
making at least two to 250 a month but not have not be crazy over levered with house and other stuff like
probably the value of the car is what your annual income should be.
So you need to be making like $3 million a year.
No, he meant to say a month.
For a hyper, for a hyper car, maybe.
Well, he just, no, he said $250,000 a year.
Well, $250,000.
Oh, that's per year.
Yeah, maybe it's one-to-one is where you should be.
A one-to-one ratio, if you're going to have a Bugatti charon at $3 million,
you probably should make around the same of what that cars worth.
You should.
But that's a good bridge into the leasing thing.
like there's guys out there that are that are like I just learned a lot of this and it's crazy to me
and I think I think this might be what's manipulating market values too where they can just go list
cars really really really high and set the market or a lot of them are even buying all of the
inventory so it's like I'm going to go and buy all of the Bugatti charans that exist I'm going to
list them stupid high so I'm the only one in the country selling them because inventory is scarce
right now and so I'm going to I'm going to be the guy that I
all four of these, I'm going to set the market at whatever it is. And I'm going to continue
actually getting these people in on three to four month leases. So I'm going to charge them $60,000 a
month for their car so they can go use it for their course program or whatever it is. There's
stupid amount of this happening right now. And then they go and they go and make it look like
these cars are very affordable. They help go push their courses. And those course people get a lot
a followers, a lot of influence from what happens, and then the car disappears, like four months
later. Have you had people that sell courses approach you to try to rent your cars?
It's not anybody well-known, but all the time people would come in here and then I'd see them
sitting in my Lamborghini talking about like, here's how I invest money in Forex. And I'm like,
no, that I hate, that I will not allow. So like, I will kick them out of my, I'm like,
don't use my 20-year plus years of earnings to flex and fake what you're doing. There's nothing more
that drives me crazy than people trying to use my collection for their own larping essentially right they're
using my collection for their clout i'm more than happy to share the cars with anybody that wants a fun
experience but there's plenty of people that come in here and do that and i'm like you got to get out
and some of them try to get close with my my team and then you'll realize like i don't realize it right away
and then i'm like why is this guy frequently asking you to go out in the event at or henry like
why is why is he hanging out with you a little bit more than usual like why am i starting to see videos
of him like flex and stuff on
his page with my cars and that's a problem.
So in terms of the leasing,
how exactly does that work
in the back end?
What I heard is they put a lot of money up front.
They're basically not putting an investment in the car.
They're getting nothing out of the car.
It's, I'm willing to go spend a half a million dollars
over the course of three to six months
because it's going to double my sub count
and it's going to drive significantly more volume
in people that sign up for the course.
So it's, I think some of these people
putting up $250,000 to $500,000 down,
then they're paying $60,000.
I heard it's some absurd amount of money,
and then they get it for six months,
and they just get as much usage and content as they can out of it.
So what that does is it allows these guys
to keep listing the cars really high
because they know that they're just going to lease the cars
and perceptually to the public.
Wow, Bugatti's are $5 million or $4 million now.
Wow, this guy that sells classes can afford one of these,
and then they just keep like doing a lease.
in the background and then you just turn the car in after six months.
So my understanding was that these leases were actually kind of sales, structured as leases,
so you'd be able to write off all the payment.
But building equity in the car.
And then because they technically do own the car, they are responsible for the diminished value at the time they go and get that to someone else.
So if the car goes from $2 million to $1.8, they have to come out of pocket the $1.8 or they continue making payments.
I wish I knew how these were structured.
I've done leases like that myself.
I don't have any.
Actually, I do have a lease.
I have a lease on my yesco.
I basically went and the other $1.5 million of it, ebbs and flows of cash.
I had to go take a lease out on that.
But I pretty much own all of these in cash with the exception of that 1.5 lease.
I don't think I have any other lease on anything that's here right now.
But I had a lot of money output for cars on order.
I have five to $7 million that manufacturers have been sitting on for up to years and years and years.
The Jamera, they've had my, I think, 300K deposit for six years now.
And so sometimes, yeah, I'll be.
like, okay, there's not infinite money.
I need to go bridge the gap.
And so I know those are structured that way.
I don't know how these other guys are structuring it because it sounds very different to me.
But yeah, these other ones are structured intelligently where it's essentially a lease to own.
And because it says it's a leash, you're allowed to write it off for tax purposes because
it's harder to write off an actual finance car, I guess.
Yes.
The government scrutinizes that a lot more and people don't usually pass that sniff test.
If you have a deposit to purchase a car for six years,
years. That's $300,000. What do you think of the chances of you actually getting that car?
Hi, hi. But like the roadster I've had on deposit for like, what, when did they do those posits?
2018 or 19? I've had that one, they've had, they've had 50k of my money forever. I think they're
going to deliver it, right? And but I think the real question is, what if they don't, do they pay you
interest on your money? And they probably don't, right? Like that 50 should be 100. After eight or
nine years, that should be 100k of my money. If they get me just my 50K back, that's a problem.
but I think it's high probability.
I've never had an auto manufacturer not deliver.
The ESCO I waited five years for, but they got it to me.
Most car manufacturers are actually probably a two to three year window.
It's not short.
Which car manufacturer are you most bullish on?
Like, you think that they're going to continually stay on the cutting edge and put out
better and better and better cars?
I think, I think McLaren is.
Like, I'm not trying to, like, I'm not trying to put them on this pedestal.
but like they are releasing a lot of really cool cars.
They have a big color palette that they offer.
They're fun and exciting cars.
They're quick.
I put money down on my W1 a year and a half ago, I think,
and it'll get it delivered in sub two years.
My 7-8HS that they just launched a month ago,
I think I'm going to have that six, seven months after, stupid 6-7,
six, seven months after I put the money down.
And my spec is insane.
It's the most bold, crazy spec we've ever done.
But I think it's the coolest spec I have ever done in my life.
And like, I hate to say it, but, but I hate to, like, sound like a broken record, but
McLaren is doing it right right now.
What would you recommend for someone who wants as little depreciation as possible?
Porsche GT3RS.
Every one since, like, 07 has maintained whatever their MSRP is or above it.
And they're highly reliable.
That is the best car if you want something that's reliable, that's going to hold its value,
and that's going to deliver a fun experience.
Is there a certain year that's going to be better than others?
I think the newest year, if you can get one, it's sticker.
Of course, that's it, because those are still going like a hundred plus above sticker.
But I really like the 2019, the 991-2.
It's one I've had two of.
I had the lizard green and I have a Miami Blue Wysak now.
And it's one that's just stuck to its value.
Like, it's just hell.
Actually, it's a little higher than it was, but they're still affordable.
Like the newest model are like 350 to 400.
The older model from 19 are like 250, but they drive near the same.
Like they're 90% the same car.
The newer one just has somewhere arrow and looks different.
But like if you blindfolded me and put me in the other car, it'd be hard for me
to differentiate the driving experience.
Is it ever worth it to buy the extended warranty?
In some cases, the La Ferrari,
they offered me a two-year full drive-chain warranty for $30,000.
This was on a $3 million car at the time.
So 1%.
I think that you would do it.
You know, if you have a $100,000 car and they say for $1,000,
we'll give you a full piece of mind for two years.
Of course you would do that.
I was the most shocked by the car.
That shows how much they must believe in that car.
Maybe that car has been very reliable and mine was too.
So did you ever use the 30,000?
I don't think I had to.
I think I sold it before I could do it.
But by and large, extended warranties, I think it really depends on the price, but I feel like
they're usually a little bit too overinflated.
But like, if you're that supercar guy that's buying a car beyond your means and if that
thing breaks and it's going to sit in your garage for six months because you can't fix
it, then yeah, you should probably find a way to work that into financing.
What other cars do you believe you're going to be going up in value a lot over the next 10 years?
I mean, everything's already gone up.
I think it's more about what's going down.
Graham's just trying to figure out what car he should.
Yeah, yeah.
He's really.
What's a buy?
What do you think about Graham's current collection?
If you were to rate it, one to ten, what would you rate it?
I mean, it's phenomenal.
I'd give it a seven.
Like, it's great.
What could take it to a nine?
30 million dollars.
Really, it would take 30 million to go from the seven to a nine.
Yeah, it's the battle between like, how do you value your collection?
Is it, is it clout?
Is it driveability?
is it strictly just what's going to increase the most in value?
And for me, it's, like, candidly, it's clout and driveability are the two most important things
that you have to have for a YouTube channel.
So you think his collection is a little boring, maybe?
I think it's fun.
You still have the 4GT, right?
I do.
Yeah, that's a phenomenal car.
4GT, Tesla Roadster, 2010, which may or may not be for sale.
I'm still debating that.
And those haven't really popped either.
They're still going for 40 to 60, right?
It depends on the car.
Mine is one of 26 that was ever made in a year.
yellow. So it's the rarest color.
Got it. Those overall have sold more just because of the color itself. So I'm guessing it's a
little more than that. But yeah, I was I was hoping that car would be a $200,000 car.
Yeah. And it has not reached that. It's got to get there. It has to get there. There's so few of
those built relative to the S, the X, especially the three in the Y. Like that's that's a car with
that's a car I've been following on Bring a Traylor for a year. Now I'm waiting for the right
one to go through and buy one. It's funny that maybe we should talk about after. I would,
I would 100% tell.
I just spent 15 grand shipping this thing to Seattle.
They did a new like, you know, internals of the battery shipped it back.
So I just spent money on this.
Ah, ah.
And you're like, I still want to sell it.
It is pristine.
It's, I never drive it.
I was talking to a lot of these guys.
I'm like, I never drive the cars because they work from home.
If I do drive, it's usually for like a podcast or a podcast guest or Jack and I are
driving to L.A.
and like sometimes Jack will drive, a few times I'll drive.
So it's not often.
And then I sit there and I have to shuffle cars to like get one out of the garage.
Like imagine you have to get that car out in the corner.
You have to shuffle the whole thing.
It's a pain in the life.
And like, eh, I may as well does not drive it.
It's a total pain.
It depends.
Like, cloud is important.
If you're on YouTube, there's a certain level of clout and recognition that you want to have, right?
Like there's always an element of I want to, I want to be known.
I want to be public.
But you hope that you can spread a good message and connect
people and deliver something awesome to people. Like if you can do both of those, which you guys do
well, then it's a win-win. So like, you got to bring like a Lamborghini to the collection. Like,
that's, that is the, that is the pinnacle clout car for someone that's, I did mention a McLaren and
then at Porsche G2.5, but if you have 250K and in clout is your most important thing, which I know
you didn't say that was, but like, that's the car when you throw a hurricane in the mix or you can
get a, an eventador, maybe around, I don't know what the eventadors have popped to, but
300. Oh, they're still, okay, good, because pre-CO, they got sub-300.
during COVID, they went up to 350, even up to 400.
And then I think they corrected themselves.
So it's really an Eventador or Huracan.
That's kind of the best clout.
I don't like the cloud cars.
Because as soon as a lot of people have them are like, oh, you have this car.
I don't like it.
Too many people have something.
I just am not into it.
I like the cars that no one else has it.
No one else on YouTube, really besides like a few car guys, have the 4GT.
Almost no one has a Tesla Roadster.
I think I'm the only one.
Very, yeah, very little.
And then almost no one has the Lotus of O'ORA GTC.
Like, no one.
So I like the oddballs.
And, like, the TWR Supercat that I have in order is one of those.
It's a Jaguar XJS that has a naturally aspirated V12 in it.
You can get one of those cars.
The XJS is for $15,000 to $20,000, which is, it's because they're so terribly unreliable.
But then TWR takes them and wide-bodies them and makes them into this, like, supercharged beast machine.
And for me, they're still, like, $500,000 plus dollars, but it's,
such a cool and unique looking car.
When you say that for me, I think that's my car of the one that nobody has on social media
that really is just going to be thrilling and fun.
I get to spec myself.
And then the BAC mono that I bought that from Houston Cross store right there in Vegas.
And that's a car that's, you know, upper 100s for the non-type bar.
The type bar is upper 200s.
And that's a really fun and unique car.
You just can't have a passenger in it.
I noticed on a lot of these cars, too, you have really incredible license plates.
And I'm so curious how you're able to get these plates.
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I noticed on a lot of these cars, too, you have really incredible license plates, and I'm so curious how you're able to get these plates.
I know the lady's name at the Illinois Secretary of State is Caroline Shirley.
I only know this because I always get a letter from her or a call on what does this mean?
What does THC BBC mean?
And I'm like, oh, it's the Hamilton Collection.
And BBC means big black Cadillac.
I'm like, what else would it mean?
And she's like, nope.
And I had to turn it.
That was one that slipped through and I had to turn it in.
I think that we try to use like modern lingo where the one that I think a lot of people that make the decisions are like 30, 40 something people like my
We did BBC on the Revolto.
B, B, B, B, we must have some obsession with BBC.
We told you about our mascot here.
Yes.
And it's BBS, S-E, and that one slipped through, even though when you say it, it's BBC.
So I think it's just being creative and sneaky.
Huge wang on the McLarenceana.
They probably didn't even know what that meant, but like a wang means a wiener.
And then everything is wiener related, isn't it?
What's the obsession with wiener?
I don't know.
I think it's because everyone always assumes you have like a small wiener.
we're like, we're either saying, no, we have a big weaner or we're saying we're affirming,
yes, it is. So we did small peepee on my resvani. We did small de on my Ferrari. That's my crew
car. So I put the small de. I remember we're in our crew car. Isn't it funny that Ferrari GTC for
Luso is our crew car? But that's what they drive to run errands. And like, I remember seeing these
girls behind us just like snickering and laughing. And I felt like so humbled because they're
laughing because my license plate says we all have a small. I can't believe that you're able to get away
Me neither. There's the wall of license plates over there.
Like I'm looking at all of these cop lover.
Yeah, that one, that one was, that one makes sense.
The box one backwards.
Like, they didn't catch that.
I don't know if you saw that one the third from the right on the top one.
Oh, no, I didn't see that.
Is it cracked?
Yeah, uh, crack.
That was for the, yeah, there's a small peepy one.
Small de is up there.
ORA.
The aura makes sense.
That one's not that bad.
There's been some interesting ones that are still on the vehicles.
What's the one you wished you could have gotten that they denied?
Oh, GTA, IRL.
I'm like, Grand Theft Auto in real life.
I'm like, because everyone always says,
bros live in like Grand Theft Auto garage in real life or Forza.
So we're like, oh, that would be a great license play, GTA IRL.
And they denied it.
Like she asked me, she's like, what is GTA?
And I had to find a website that didn't show that it meant Grand Theft Auto.
I tried to, I had to go to a website that just showed the acronym.
And I'm like, here, it's a video game called GTA.
And she must have done more diligence.
And she's like, nope, not happening.
I didn't think that would be like bad.
Yeah, of all of the one.
No, that's the one that gets rejected.
I know, and that one would have been so cool to have in here, but...
You're going to have everyone now going to their state's website to try to get GTA IRL.
And hopefully they can get it.
Hopefully their state passes, because I think it's reasonable.
If it's in Nevada, I think you should get it.
Why me?
What about you?
I mean, I could...
I don't want to put that on like a Tesla Model 3.
It'd be even funnier on Model 3.
What am I going to go?
What am I going on?
my $2,000, like $3,000.
I'm going to look for it.
I'm going to look for it.
Okay.
If it's available, I'll get it.
It's funny.
You say Tesla because, like, my daily is a cyber truck.
And if I had to keep one car, it's, it's that out of all of the cars.
I love my, it's very drivable, right?
And then my son has a Model 3.
My other son, Jack, who's about to be driving as a Model X.
My wife has a lucid gravity.
Like, I have this whole collection of loud, wild cars, and every one of us that drive in the house have an electric car.
Why is that?
Because they're just so much more convenient.
The tech is so good, especially in a tech.
I mean, you have multiple tests.
It's just so reliable.
And the auto pilot has gotten crazy good in the last year.
If you have the new hardware from 22 on up, it's, I'm leaving my driveway, clicking it on
going an hour into the city and stop and go traffic all the way to my destination.
And it's parking me in a parking lot, like insane.
It's also really nice for me not to have the maintenance on it.
Even when you, there's so much less parts for them to have to fix.
And even when you do, you just go drop it off and they get it done.
No, they come to your house now.
Oh, yeah, sometimes.
Yeah.
It's incredible.
We had some bigger jobs that they had to do.
But you drop it off.
You don't have to see a human, which is kind of,
Tesla's very anti-personal communication.
It's like, cool, you want to buy a car?
Order it online.
Oh, you're ready to pick it up?
We're going to have it parked in a spot for you.
Click your screen for a video if you need to learn anything.
That's like very impersonal, but I guess if you're that good of a company, you don't need to be personal.
So I saw recently one of your videos, you're doing a flip.
Yeah.
The guy flipped over one of the cars and the HOA was upset.
And you made this whole response to the HOA.
What happened?
What's the current status of that?
So Frankie LaPena, he's the guy in TikTok that has the big booty and does.
every stunt known to man.
And he just came here and he practiced for,
he actually imported snow from Michigan
because there was no snow left here.
Right outside of my window,
he built the snow ramp.
He was testing it safely for like five to six hours,
test runs, test runs, test runs.
And then he finally took the Koenigieg
pulling the snowboard and he jumped it.
Low speed, very, very like,
like two out of ten in terms of what he's done.
Like he's a very talented stuntman.
He said he's never injured himself in any stunt,
which I find crazy,
of the stuff he does is is a 10 out of 10 like insanity and the HOA didn't like it now nobody came out
to say anything during that six hour period uh but somehow they caught wind of it even though people
come in and out of this community all the time the HOA is feet away from my door after they're like
we don't want him to post a video of it and i'm like i'll let him know but he he's his own channel
like he spent a lot of time and resources doing that he drove out of here from michigan he had to
He had to spend the night prior, like, shoveling snow into his truck.
I'm like, I'll let him know, but I can't promise anything.
And then I conveyed that to him, but I'm, but he still posted it, which I told him, like,
at the end of the day, like, it's your decision.
Like, I can't tell you not to post it.
And like, I still love Frankie.
He's a good dude.
And he's been an advocate for me as I battle with the HOA, but they really didn't like that.
And so they, they're worried that it was going to increase their insurance costs or their
insurance was going to drop them.
And, like, it's still been six months.
And no word from.
insurance like nothing's happened and they so they find me $25,000 and like according to the stipulation
of the HOA agreements like they can't really find me above and beyond 250 and they're trying to pull some
caveat in the language there that they're able to go claim this $25,000 and then but it was all it was all
total BS so I said there's no way I'm going to pay that fine like I'm just not going to pay it I'll
sue you guys and I just didn't agree with it and so they they then reduced it
it to 5K, which I thought was cool, but then they're like, but if our insurance does drop us,
you're responsible for all of our lost car show revenue in perpetuity. And they said they make
$185,000 a year from their car shows, which I think is crazy that they're profiting off of
car shows because it's very counter-Hamilton collection. How do they profit from the car shows?
Well, they charge a lot of money and they do bring a lot of people into here. Okay.
That's really the gist of it, right? So I'm like, I'm not going to, what am I going to be on the
hook for 10 years of lost car show revenue? Like, that's insane. You took it from 25,000.
to $1 to $2 million potential dollars.
And who's to say that you lost insurance because you're holding car shows?
You have cars weaving in and out of hordes of children and people.
You have golf carts that crashed into electrical junction boxes that were driven by kids.
Like the amount of exposure, you have guys fixing cars in your parking lot.
You got a guy sitting under a truck fixing cars.
Wouldn't that be more threatening to their insurance?
That's what I'm saying.
It depends who's filming it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You don't want the insurance coming.
Great point about that.
Don't let me forget about it.
So one of the stipulations was I also can't film is something nobody else has a stipulation to.
So I'm like, that sounds kind of damaging to me because that's my business.
Like we film here all the time.
We intro videos.
We're doing stuff.
And they said you can't film.
I think it was outside of the premises.
But like we drive our cars out of here.
Like that's that is a primary traffic and cash driver to the business.
And it's crazy.
Like why why can't I film me driving in a car out of your community?
What harm is that doing?
really they just have a personal vendetta against me that's what i genuinely think it is i think these
are tiny weinered guys that uh just don't like that we have a social media channel that it's done
really well because of our awesome followers and uh they just have a chip on their shoulder about us i don't know
i don't know what it is how many people are in this h-o way it's i think the board has like eight people
and so these guys all just agreed most likely that they just want to come after you basically
I think there's like two or three that are really anti-Hamilton collection, and they're the guys with the tiniest weaners.
Was the wiener tiny because of the jump, or was it always tiny?
I think it was always tiny.
I'm pretty sure it was always really, really tiny.
But that's what caused it to be exposed as tiny.
I suppose, yeah.
There's something they're trying to overcompensate for.
But aren't we all trying to overcompensate for something as I sit behind a $30 million-dollar collection?
You should be brothers in arms with them.
I should, yeah.
The tiny weiner brother.
Yeah. Do they know your wiener is just as tiny?
I'll have to show on Monday and we'll find out.
All of a sudden, all the fees dropped.
They're like, let's go.
We're like, listen, man, we're fine.
We had no idea you're one of us.
The small weiner dab up, it's a special one that I'll have to, maybe I'll have to show you guys.
You'll have to, we'll have to see you first.
Are you, how are you going to solve the situation?
I mean, they just got served with, well, not served.
I just sent them the complaint.
So it's like this, this phase of you send them the full,
legal complaint, but I haven't filed it yet. I let them review it for two weeks. They can
see how much work and effort we put into the complaint and they can make a decision if they
want me to go ahead and officially sue them. They just won't respond or they won't agree. Or they
can reduce and either drop the fine or reduce it to something that's like of this earth and that
will close the matter. So I think they have days left to reply to me and then I'll just sue them. I don't
care. I've already spent $25,000 in legal fee. Sounds great. Like I'm like a guy that will, if I feel
like I've been wronged. I will spend, it sounds stupid and I don't mean it to sound arrogant,
but like I will spend $100,000 to remedy a $5,000 issue if I think I've been extremely
wronged just to prove a point to people. It's rare that I have to do it. But isn't your piece of mind
and just going about your day worth more than like the... This is his peace of mind. Yeah, this is,
yeah. Yeah, this is. But I'm just saying, but like you're fortunate enough to have like so many
great things going on where it's like, hey, if it's a little inconvenience today, it's like,
not the end of the world and life goes on and sure they might have gotten one up on you but like
in the big picture yeah i would agree if if i got a ticket in some city in california and i was doing
this but i have to deal with this community and these people every day so like i don't want to set
a precedent by being the guy that that just bowed down to them and paid the fine because what are
they what are they going to do if something else small happens like if i mistakenly chirped the wheels
taking a corner out of here are they going to find me fifty thousand dollars uh because i'd
skid it a little bit turning. Like, I think it sets a dangerous precedent by succumbing to them. And I also
think they genuinely, there's malice and they genuinely have it out for me. So it'd be different if the
situation was different. If I, if I genuinely, if I crashed into a building and they wanted to find me
and I had to pay for the damage, that's fine. But no harm was caused to any people, any property.
It was cleaned up. Nobody came out here during the six hour period. We've done stunts like this
in my unit, outside of the unit, Frankie has filmed before. No,
verbal anything. So like we've we've already set a precedent that we do stuff like this.
Also, I think to defend the people that may have access to less resources, because I'm kind of
thinking I'm a member of an HOA where I live in Vegas. And let's just say the HOA started being really
aggressive with fees or doing some things that I kind of disagree with. Maybe I didn't necessarily
have the resources to fight it. But someone else in the community did. I feel like, okay, wow,
like now I feel a little bit more protected or insulated from some sort of like governor around me
trying to like exercise control or like, you know, I would say too much power.
Agreed. Yeah. So maybe we'll help other people within the community and maybe some people
are advocating for us to win this because it means they'll be better protected in the future for
sure. Would it ever get to a point where you'd have to move? I'm listing this unit up for sale anyway.
Like I don't I don't want to be, I don't want to be part of a community where I feel unwelcome.
There's plenty of good people in here. But like there's also a lot of back talk that happens.
like I don't I think by and large we do very good for the community like it's kind of what we do
do is counter to what a lot of people in there do now a lot of people do share the garages they're kind
but like not everybody we share them we let people sit in the cars um we let people use this unit
for various events we've even let the HOA use this for a christmas party like two years ago like
I didn't charge them anything like that's just what we do and a lot of these people are
condescending to people that are less fortunate and they talk about those people behind their backs
and they refer to them as, it's just, it's toxic.
And I don't want to be part of a culture like that.
I think as I'm building this in Florida,
like my message is like unity, be open.
Like people can do what they want with their cars and their units,
but like at the end of the day,
they should be willing to share, be open, be kind to people.
And so I'm hoping that that's a fresh start,
but I can very much see me pulling away from this community.
At what point do you think your detachment from money started?
Because it seems like you don't make a lot of decisions
based solely off of like R-O-I,
Like you were saying, you'd spend $100,000 in order to fight a $5,000 thing just based off of principle.
Sure.
Was it a financial thing?
Was it a mentality thing?
There's multiple layers to that.
I would say, like, I always flew regular class up until, like, 2020.
And I'm just like, why, what benefit does it give me sitting in the big seats?
And then now I'll, now I'll kind of, it's probably two to one ratio first class to regular class.
And that's more relative to income.
Like that's not going to hurt me going to spending this money on.
I think about it and I'm like, God, this lawyer is kind of, he's kind of charged me like 25 grand up to this point just to file a legal complaint feels expensive.
So I am, I am scrutinizing that.
And there is a point where if I'm 300 grand into this, I'm like, yeah, I kind of messed up.
I shouldn't have done this.
I don't think it's going to get there at all.
I think we've done most of the work up front.
But, but like there is a very different mindset that I have than I did five years ago where where I'm like, I have a list of 20 things to do on my house right now.
we've been in it for five years and I realize there's a lot of maintenance that I need to do.
I've kind of shuttered and back in the day, it'd be a couple things at a time and I'd get three quotes
for everything. I'd be bargaining and I'm just going to like, I'm just going to one guy that I've
used in the past. I'm not even really scrutinizing the guy and I'm just at the point where I'm like,
this guy's not making as much money as I am. He wants $3,000 to epoxy the foundation of my house.
Like, I'm not going to nickel and dime him for another $500. I just don't care. Like I'll
just give him the $3,000. It'll make him a better person. It'll give him a better person. It'll give
him more income and I just like I'm not really scrutinizing a lot of things. There is some stuff I
scrutinize where I'm very close and I know like shipping carriers I have an abundance of shipping
carriers that we have accessible to us. I know what it cost me to ship a car to California.
If someone comes in at $4,000, I'm going to be like that's too expensive. Like I can use 10 other
carriers and get this for $2,000. But the mindset has definitely changed over the last five years
on I just don't care as much. I do care. I just don't care as much. Was it an intentional thing
or was it more of a subconscious change
that kind of just gradually started changing
and then you observed it later?
And like I said, was it like a number thing
or how did you know you were there?
I don't know.
I think it was gradual.
But I remember my wife, we were at a restaurant
and she's like, she's tipping.
Like I always tip 20%.
And I'm like, I still think that that's a,
that's slightly above it.
I don't think everyone tips 20,
but that's probably in the realm of the average,
it's toward the high end of average.
So it's still average in.
I would say average is probably 15 to 18%.
Got it.
So yeah, so exactly.
It's on the high end of the average.
right? And then there's 25, 30. And then she's writing like 40% tips. And I'm like,
Kirland like, it feels like, but then I'm like, well, this, this server is probably making
$20 to $30 an hour all in if they're lucky. And they're really doing the majority of the work.
Like, we should be compensating these people better. So, so like that was kind of one of the
triggers that changed the mindset. And so now the tip is 50 to 100% no matter where I go.
Unless the service, if the lowest I'll leave is 20 and the service has to be atrocious for me
to leave 20. But everywhere else, it's 50% that I go. And if it's, if it's like a cheap place,
like a Waffle House, I always leave them $100. So if it's a $50 check, I love Waffle House.
I love the people there are just a different breed of people. And I love, like, I'm like a blue
collar person type of guy. I will, I'd rather hang out with a bunch of blue collar folk than
white collar folk all day long. I don't know why. I just feel like they're far more relatable to me.
And so if my check's 50 bucks at Waffle House, they're getting 100 bucks no matter what.
And so there's just been little things that I've made realizations along the way,
that it's my way of kind of giving back the best that I can.
What's been your biggest financial mistake that most people don't know about?
I invested in an Arby's.
And I'm like, what the fudge did I invest in an Arby's?
I don't even really care for Arby's.
Like, who says, I want to go to Arby's tonight?
Nobody says they want to go out of the fast food restaurants.
Yes.
Like Arby's?
Why Arby's?
They had those good, like, it was like a pulled beef, something or other like a barbecue.
When's the last time you ate it?
I know.
It's been over 10 years.
He's like 19.
I don't mind Arby's, but like, I need to make sure that I'm not necessarily passionate,
but that like I really like what it is that I'm doing.
And I had two partners that basically had this deal all lined up and they just needed like a financial arm.
They were going to operate and run it.
And I'm like, cool.
Like they pitched the world to me.
And they're like, you just got to.
And so the problem with that is that it's like a 12-year lease that I signed up for,
and the Arby's failed very quickly.
And it failed after like one year.
So I'm still paying $11,000 a month for that lease for the next like seven years.
Are you serious?
Can you sublease it?
I did sub-lease it.
Now, I was paying that forever and I finally found a sub-leasy about six months ago.
But there's no even.
And that's the other thing is like-
But you're basically the guarantor of that lease.
So if they leave, now you're responsible again for the payments.
Yeah, exactly.
until they find someone else.
Unless I want to sue the sub because they're also tied to me.
But like I almost don't have the heart.
I don't need like,
it's crazy to say this.
But like I hate my landlords because of that.
Like I asked them for a buyout.
I'm like,
let me give you $200,000.
That's almost two years of lease.
And they,
they realize that I'm such a cash cow and that I can afford and ride this out for 10
years that there's like,
there's nothing.
They refuse to offer a buyout,
which is just such so crappy of people to do that in my opinion.
I don't even think I could sue these guys
that are leasing from me now if they decided to
I hope they're not watching because like I'm saying
creating a bad foundation here
but like I just don't think I don't think I can be like
I'm going to go after you because
there's a good chance I have more than them
and it just doesn't seem fair to do that.
I think I would just suck it back up.
I don't think so because like just because you have more than them
does it like they still probably have more than a lot of other people.
Yeah.
And so like as long as your past kind of that critical mass
like a lot of people will
use their money to like exercise their power.
Yeah.
Like in good ways and bad ways.
Sure.
And so it's a decision for you, you know, use it to exercise good or?
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's tough.
It's tough with that.
But that was probably it because think about that over the long term, right?
$10,000 a month times at the time, 10 more years of payments.
And they escalate rent escalations too.
So I'm a million dollars plus in the whole.
What about the other people who did the Arby's with you?
Are they shipping in?
Bankruptcy, nothing.
No, not at all.
How's your relationship with them?
I don't hate them.
Like,
I don't,
I don't like them.
I don't really talk to them unless I need tax info from four years ago that,
uh,
might have gotten misplaced or something,
but like,
I wish them the best.
I would never open a business with them again.
Um,
but like,
and that's another example.
Like,
I could sue them and go after them,
but like,
I know that they have significantly less than I do.
So like what,
what,
what,
what,
what,
it's not going to,
this 10 grand sounds like a lot of money.
It's not going to,
of money, but at the end of the day, it's not impacting me that bad. So I'll just ride it out
and I'll make their lives easier, even though they brought me into this mess.
See, my mindset has always been, because I've gone into business with people and lost.
Yeah. And as much as I would want to blame, like, oh, it's because of them and they did this.
And at the end of the day, like, I was also the one who, like, decided to like, I made the decision
to do that. And that's on me. And I can't, you know, even though I think they might be more responsible.
I was the one.
The buck stops with me at the end of the day.
And like, I just got to live with that.
Yeah, and I'll still be accountable.
Like, I could have said no.
I could have said no.
And part of it might have been me being a yes man.
And that's why I got stuck in this mess.
Like, would the Arby's have changed my life at the time?
Absolutely not.
It just felt like another leg to stand on when in fact it was a broken leg.
It wasn't a good leg.
But I'm,
but I'm with you.
Like I have accountability towards it as well.
And that's probably driving some of the reason why I'm just footing it and dealing with it.
Why did the Arby's fail?
Because it's Arby's.
Did you not think this in the beginning?
It's like, yo, it's an Arby's?
Like, did no, did you have anyone you talk to?
No, I should have.
And they just said, dude, this is Arby's we're talking about it.
I know, I know, I know.
I should have.
Did you like Arby's?
Like, I like their roast beef sandwiches.
Just their plain beef and their curly fries are delicious.
But like, it's number like 57 on the list of fast food that I'm going to go to.
When's last time you had Arby's?
Five years ago.
I never even
I never even went to my Arby's after it open
Not after it opened
I went to the one they were like doing their grand opening
But like after that I'd never visited it
Would you go to another Arbys or is it forever ruined
If I was super hungry and there was like
No exit for the next 10 miles
And this exit only had an Arbys and like
A subway and a Subway and a Chipotle
Because I hate Chipotle and Subway
If it was like those three
Then I'd go to Arbys
Why do you hate Chipotle and Subway?
They're disgusting
It smells I can't stand it
I love Subway.
I get sick every time I go to Chipotle and it just...
You get E. coli when you go to Chipotle?
What's that?
E coli.
I don't know.
I hope not.
I just feel like...
Oh, that's the new thing.
Oh, the Echolai thing.
Yes.
I love Taco Bell, which makes no sense because Chipotle is better than...
I actually think in terms of flavor Taco Bell is much better than Chipotle and Subway.
Thank you.
I think people go to Subway because they think it's healthy and people go to Chipotle because it is healthy.
Yeah, that's fair.
And Taco Bell will clean you out.
Yeah.
So that's also...
It flushes the system.
Yes.
It's like a cleanse.
It is good.
Yeah.
So what does your portfolio look like today?
You'd be surprised.
It's largely stock in my company and cars.
Like I'm an idiot where I bought depreciating assets.
I still have quite a bit of property that I own.
I probably have, I mean, I sold at one point.
I had like, I don't know, 75 doors.
But now I think I own eight properties.
And so there's still, I don't know, $40 million worth of property that I have.
I have mortgages on some of that, but I do have a lot of equity. I have my cars. I have
significant value in my business. And then I have very limited amounts in stocks and like probably
a million dollars in stocks and the kid's stuff. Why'd you sell your real estate?
Like de-stressing. Part of that was the Arby's Clothes. I sold seven pet supplies plus stores that I
had. I sold a lot of my properties. I look back and I don't know how I managed all of that stuff.
Like mentally, I just don't want that much stress. We've created enough value in the, in the wheelbook.
businesses where I don't I don't need all of those other legs to stand on. Even if crap hits the fans
now and everything went away, like I have enough to live comfortably on for the rest of my life. So I'm
like, why am I still filling my life with all of these stressors when I'm okay now? So it just
sold it. Did you end up making money in real estate when all of a sudden? Oh yeah. I made money on
like I've been really good with real estate. Like the opposite of cars where I broke even, right? I break even
on cars. I've done very well with real estate. I want most. What made you do so well in real estate? Just timing.
like I don't I would uh do most of my purchases around a big market correction so I did a lot of
purchases from like 09 to 12 where I'm buying 135,000 dollar houses that I later sold for like
350. There are old dingy apartments in nice areas. So I essentially would wait till someone moved out.
I'd make the unit real nice and then rent it for significantly higher and apartment buildings get their
valuation out of the percent of income that you make like sure some people might be like okay
that apartment building is million dollars. That doesn't make sense.
to I, but like, really, it's just most people look for a six to eight percent cap rate. And
if I can create significant more rent income, then it just increases the value of the building,
even if the building is in the same shape that it was theoretically, right? So I would go, I had a team
of actually three carpenters on staff that we would go in and fix up properties full time,
because again, I had a bunch of properties at the time. And then I would sell the buildings for
like 2x of what I paid and I would only put, you know, 10%. If you could go back in time,
Do you think it would have been wiser to just focus all of your efforts on the wheel business?
No, because that didn't take away.
And that stuff didn't really take away from it.
I always, my business gets all of my attention first and then everything else is secondary.
So I will work to the bone on the primary business and then I will fill in the gaps of time with the other stuff.
You don't think that you could deliver higher returns, though, using that extra time to think of more ideas at the wheel business.
We have such a big and great and competent team.
I mean, a lot of guys are five to ten to ten to twenty,
like we have 500 people. I have a full C-suite. I'm one of five owners. Like we have a lot of really
brilliant great minds at our organization. So like I can I can brainstorm and come up with ideas and
we have a fabulous team that can execute them. And I'm not like putting myself on the same plane at all
as Elon because he is he is a brilliant guy. But like that's that's kind of his method. Right.
Like he he comes up with the idea. He he is intimately involved with the team in the early stages.
And from what everything I've read and I've heard, then he empowers the team to go and do it.
Like, he's the idea guy.
He'll be boots on the ground and in the trenches when he needs to be.
But then he trusts his team to go and develop and create wacky new crazy ideas that change society.
Again, I'm not comparing myself to that, but like in a small.
Basically the same thing.
Yeah, I'm basically in a small micro way where I'm one trillionth of his net worth.
That would only put me in a dollar.
So maybe not.
But in my own micro way, I try to like emulate that.
Like I help be one of the idea guys.
We have a lot of really phenomenal.
ideas rolling out on our websites. We just did a new UIX revamp that I think is brilliant. And my team
took a lot of my advice and direction on a lot of the projects and they executed it very, very
nicely. How is your business doing now with tariffs? Hey, by the way, really quick, if you want extra
content just like this as well as early access and a bonus post show posted every single week,
feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that as well as early
access to everything else that we post, along with priority responses to all of your comments.
So if that sounds cool, feel free to join.
Would love to have you on board.
Thanks so much.
We'll get back to the podcast now.
How is your business doing now with tariffs?
There's so many headwinds in the automotive businesses.
Like, we, you know, we grew 35 to 50% for almost 20 straight years.
There was a COVID correction when stimulus money ran out and just a lot where we shrunk.
It's crazy to go from 35 to 50.
Actually, in 20, I think we grew 70%.
and then to go from that,
and then you have 2022 where you're down like 4%.
I'm like, it's so weird.
It was usually you think it'd be like,
okay, you only get you're 20% or 15,
but you go down after that.
Just very strange correction period.
So that happened for a couple years.
And then the last few years we've been up like mid single digits,
which also is kind of hard to deal with.
And I think that that's kind of like,
I think that's been very large industry wide.
I think they're a slightly less enthusiast than there were.
So you got to fight harder to get some of that market share.
I think there's less disposable income.
I think Walmart just reported their, they were still up 2%,
but they just reported their worst quarter in quite some time.
That just came out a few days ago, I think.
It seems like there's something like that that comes up every six months where we're like,
cool, we're in the green, we're in the clear, we can expect some growth.
Oh, great.
Tariffs just hit that just raised prices 10 to 20 to 50%.
Now we've got to deal with that.
Oh, great.
We just bombed Iran.
Oil prices are high.
What is the first demographic that stops buying when oil prices hit truck owners?
What is our biggest source of revenue truck owners?
So it's like, it's like you keep getting like hit.
I'm thankful that we're growing given market constraints and conditions.
And wheel and tires are like, largely wheels are like ancillary spends.
They're, their luxury spends.
And so in, I don't think we have a down economy by any means, but it doesn't feel like,
it doesn't feel the same that it did back in the day.
I don't feel like people are as prone to customize their vehicles.
Manufacturers are delivering much nicer wheels with vehicles.
Like my Escalade V had 22-inch black chrome wheels on it.
I'm like, I don't even want to change these.
These look nice.
And there's a lot of cars that look like that.
So there's just constant headwinds.
And as a business owner, you have to learn how to adapt to that, attack different market segments.
And I think we've done a lot of that focus in the last year and that's going to start paying
its dividends in the coming year.
Do you ever get knockoffs coming from China where they basically just see your design and just say, oh, we could we could do the same thing and then they offer it like half the price?
That's like the wheel industry in a nutshell.
Like that's, it's of our own proprietary brands.
We have three Anthem Arcanovia.
Not really.
There's not really people like just copy pasting them, but there's, it's so hard to differentiate a wheel when there are a million plus different skews.
But there are plenty of brands that that are what they call rep brands where they launch a whole new line of five wheels and they're basically just.
replicas of other wheels from other manufacturers, and they just sell them a lot cheaper,
and they do really well.
And so has your revenue basically probably stayed around the same then since the last time
we spoke? I think you said it was at 350.
We've acquired companies, so we're like, I think we're going to be north of 400 this
year. And the crazy thing is, like, you know about like multiple arbitrage where you buy
companies and the more companies you buy if you can integrate them well, you get a bigger
multiplier, right? A multiplier in a $100 million company at 8% profit is lower than a multiplier at a
$500 million company at 8% profit because people are attracted to bigger companies that are profitable.
So we've done some of that with a few of the acquisitions and that's helped us get north of
I don't count when I say single mid single digit growth.
I don't count that free bolt on growth.
If you count the free bolt on growth, it's double digit.
But to me that feels like cheating when you're like, well, we grew 10%, but we bought, we bought
some of that last year.
Like that feels like cheating.
But honestly in the PE world, they don't like, they value that from all the conversations I've had,
it's valued about 80% as strongly as organic natural growth.
Like they actually see a lot of value in you acquiring and bolting it because that's what
PE firms do.
They try to buy a plethora of companies, combine them in some cases, or encourage companies
that they buy to buy other companies to create value.
So it's definitely a strategy of ours to keep doing that.
What does your day-to-day look like?
Like, how much are you working and what are you working on?
I put about 10 to 15 hours a week into my YouTube channel.
And a lot of that's travel and other stuff.
My day is very much spent.
like meeting with people. I do get in the trenches on supply chain. I enjoy talking to a lot of our
suppliers, especially our big ones, and negotiating with them and making sure that we have
cogs reduction, but also grow them as a result where it's a good symbiotic relationship.
I manage those projects throughout the day where I check in on stuff. But it's a lot of like email
project management. Like my email inbox is is my day to day. And the great thing about that is I can be
flexible and kind of cut it up throughout the day to get it done. But it's it's really like just
getting tasks done on email, meeting with people in person and video meetings. So you work a lot?
Yeah. I probably still put 55 hours in a week, which it is not a lot. For me, that's not a lot.
But that for the average person, I think that's a lot. But for me that it feels balanced because I can
integrate a lot of family time into that and time with my wife. Do you think that you need to be
putting in 55 plus hours and go through very aggressive
work phases where you're putting in like, you know, 70, 80 hours a week in order to be
this successful.
Absolutely, yeah.
And I actually do like I say that, but actually right now I'm probably in that 70 hour phase
because I'm meeting with a lot of new suppliers and that's a lot of work to meet with them,
to follow up with them, to make sure we're doing the tactics that we said would grow them
to implement price changes.
Like my team does in the background, but I'm like quarterbacking a lot of this.
They like, it really helps when the owner of,
a 500 person company is on the phone with these suppliers.
Like it carries a lot of weight in their perception and what can get done to grow them.
So when I do that, those are the 70 plus hour weeks, but they grow sales and they significantly reduce our cost of goods sold.
So like absolutely, but there are other times where you're solving like production problems or other issues.
Like our warehouse almost fell apart in 2020.
I think I was the only one that could rescue it.
I hate to say it, but I had to go out there.
I was working 100 hour weeks.
I worked Mother's Day, all Mother's Day.
I'm like, I'm sorry, Carolyn.
And she understood it because she's the greatest human alive,
but I had to work that entire day.
And like, if I hadn't done that, I don't think we exist right now.
So there are times where you have to do it just because you're at a critical crossroads,
make or break.
And then there are times where you see opportunity and you can sit back and kind of not work
that much and not utilize all the opportunity.
Or you can be like, if I work 80 hours, I'm going to get significant growth out of this.
And anytime there's that opportunity, I will take it.
How much have you explored selling the company recently?
I would say, like, we know what value we want, and we don't think we're there, but we think we're close.
And I feel like I legit have been saying that for two years because we're still getting that single digit growth.
All I need to do, like, we have a great foundation.
All I need to do is, I think that once we implement some of these huge projects that we've worked, we have a team of 30 different web developers, AI people.
Like, we're unlike, I think, most wheel companies.
Like, most wheel guys don't have 40 people in market.
Like, we are, for all intents and purposes, a tech company and a market.
marketing company that happened to sell automotive parts. And these guys have been hard at work on a lot
of these big projects. And I think as these launch, we're going to get really close in the next one to
two years. So, but you can't say what these, what these projects are. I really can't, but the UiX
is, was a huge. We hadn't updated our UiX in like eight years, which is insane. And it's just such a
cleaner flow that like offers guaranteed fit man. It just, it's really a seamless flow to put for you to
put wheels and tires on your vehicle. You feel very confident about what you bought. You get a huge
easy to read a sort.
We have AI filtering,
which is really neat.
I got inspired by Cars.com
where you can just type in 2005 Hummer H2,
less than 30,000 miles black.
Just type all that in, free form,
and then it just filters you right to that.
And I'm like, this is, I love that.
This is crazy.
It's so much,
otherwise you do drop downs.
You'd have to do filtering beyond it.
Like, it'd be two minutes to get to those results before,
and now it's instant.
So we implemented a lot of that,
that filtering and that tactics in our wheel store.
And it's just some great tools like that,
that increase usability.
And some of the,
stuff we have are going to vastly, one of the things I have, I think, is could be the next billion
dollar idea. And I can't talk about it now, but we're just, I'm really excited because during those
shrinking years, it was about stability fixing the foundation, turn off all growth projects.
The two years after that, call it 24, 25. It was more like implement some growth projects,
but nothing too crazy. Late 25, 26 has been about, okay, cool, 80% growth, 20% stability.
Like, we're stable. We're good. So this is the exciting time when everybody is working on
growth projects. And we've only, that's 12 to 18 months of that,
where prior to that it was all stability and conservatism just to make sure that we
were going to be good. So this is the exciting time when we know that the fruits of our labor
will be utilized soon. And what would you do after you sell it? I think that I'll be locked up
in an employment agreement. Like I'll always, I'll always meet up with investment makers and
they've, I get invited to conventions all the time and I'll go to some of them. And I feel like the
the PE guys that talk to me make it very clear I'll need to stick around with the organization for
four years and I'm fine with that. I love doing what I'm doing. There's there's genuinely not a day
that I wake up where I dread it because like I think what we do is so fun. It's, it's enthusiasts
automotive parts. Like it's wheels. People love wheels, exhaust systems. Like, it's not, I'm not selling
like screws or like gaskets. Like it's fun stuff. I think no matter what, I'm still with a company,
call it four to six years. Totally fine with that. But I think I go get a beach house in Florida.
I think I permanently move to Florida and just
do more things that I'm excited about.
Like, the last time I stepped away from the company a little bit,
I got my pilot's license.
I started my YouTube channel.
Maybe it's focusing more on the YouTube channel.
Like, I know that there's a one-to-one correlation with YouTube subgrowth and consistent videos.
Like, maybe it's doing that.
It probably is doing that, focusing more on YouTube, which sounds crazy because that's not going to drive
much revenue, but yeah, just living life easier.
How much do you think your YouTube channel has affected
your tire business.
I think it's been a really positive thing.
Like, there's always risk where people see your
your wealth is exposed and you might get an adverse reaction.
But I think people see the mission of the channel.
They know that, like, I'm a good guy.
I'm genuinely like, I don't want to like,
shoot my own horn, but like, I think I present as a humble guy
and I really try to be nice and kind to everybody.
And I think people see, like, what you see on YouTube is who I am.
Like, I'm a goofy, quirky guy that likes to fart.
And I just like to communicate and level with people
and share my stuff. Like, that's just the way that I am. And I think people see the true me and that
helps. It's also connected us with a bunch of influencers that we advertise on that we didn't,
we could not even touch before. The Whistland Diesels of the world, the Cletus McFarland's,
we already had a relationship with the Seaboys, but it strengthens that. Like, there's a lot of,
the Amelia Hartford, like, there's a lot of people that are willing to work with us because of, of this
connection. And it's open up a lot of doors for us. And then I can advertise. Whenever we don't
have an ad partner on a video, like, I'm going to, I try to integrate, hey guys, buy from Fitman Industries.com,
you need some wheels and tires. That's where I got my wheels. I'll try to plug that whenever I can.
What do you still frugal about? Like, I'm an experience guy. So if it's, this is, it's kind of
anything that's not travel, experience, or car. Like, I'm wearing your pants. I showed up here in shorts,
and it was crotch-shot, crotch-shot city. So, like, my shoes are just regular Nike's. My shirt is
an Abercrombie shirt that was $40. Like, my watch is a $60 watch. Like, really,
it's it's my clothing and the way that I present myself I'm very frugal about like I don't I don't
need to look like I hate people that just flex the way that they look even though I'm driving in cars
it feels like contradictory but I just want to walk around and look like I'm a normal guy but also go
enjoy time in hypercars so it's probably my clothing and how I present myself at what point do you
think you felt financially secure I mean when you grow up with nothing like my first month of doing
this. I made, I think, $6,000
my first month, and that's what I'd made the
probably the prior year.
So, like, it just felt, I felt really good
about what, even though there were many points
along the way where it's like, if I took this one path,
we ceased to exist and I, and I always
took the right path. But,
like, I felt really good
right away. However, when we started
getting business valuations during the COVID
time frame, when all, everyone was
20x, and one of the companies
valued us at a billion dollars at that time,
I feel pretty financially secure right now when they're throwing out billion.
And one of them even offered us like a 20% stake.
So they offered us at $200 million.
They get a 20% stake.
However, the clawback, like they expected 35 to 50% growth.
And we're like, in our minds, we're like, well, we're going to do that.
Like, we can do that.
But they would have owned 100% of my company at that $200 million because they would have clawed back every bit of it.
We wouldn't have hit their growth targets over the next five years.
So I'm glad we didn't do it.
Yeah.
Because we would have short sold ourselves.
What car YouTuber is the worst with money?
Steve Hamilton
Honestly
You can't name yourself
Okay
But it really is me
Why would you say you're bad with money?
I think you have a great collection
That's gone up in value quite a bit
Like I would say you're actually pretty smart
I'm modifying these
We're putting way too many miles on them
We're like
We're doing stupid stuff
Like the channel hurts the values of the cars
If it's a Steve Hamilton car
Like that inherently drops at 5%
But I think you're good with money
Like I think of all of the car
YouTubers, who am I not necessarily who will have the most because obviously you will have the
most because of your business and all that. But like who's going to have a higher growth rate?
I think you're going to probably have the highest like net worth growth rate. Maybe. I think that they're
all, they all have to be. Most of them, this is their primary business, right? Like the Matt Armstrongs
of the world. Houston does have a, like, his channel is very secondary to what he does. But I think he's
really good about his cars. He buys them cheap. He tries to buy stuff off. I'm like, no, bro. I'm not
going to, I'm not going to buy that car from you for that much money. That's insane. I'm not going to
sell this car to you for that little money, but he finds the deals.
Like, Stradman does his best? I don't know that anyone's bad. I'm trying to think,
like, Schme is really focused on his stuff. I mean, Stradman always talks about the Agira,
his Konexeg. That was on the podcast that we did with him, that was one of it. So I love
James and Stradman, but I know he's made some bad financial investments, much like we have.
And so he's the one that comes to mind because most recently he's the one that stuck out the most
in that Aguirre example. He couldn't sell it. He lost a lot of money. He thought it would be a good thing
for his channel, but he gets as much views out of the Lamborghini.
And that put him in a lot of, I think it was a $30,000 a month payment on that thing.
And so maybe James.
Who's the best?
I mean, probably Houston Costa.
What makes him so good with money?
Because he's cheap.
We're talking about just on cars, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's like, no, no, I don't think we're talking just on cars.
I think we're talking about like car, who is best investing in cars.
Who is the most financial literacy in like, yeah, but they're all to do with cars at the end of the day.
If we're talking about cars, yeah, but if we're talking about financial literacy, it'd have to be like a, if I can't include myself, it'd have to be like a supercar Ron who's, he's got a decent size channel, but he's not as known as strabment.
Like, because it'd have to be a business guy first, right? I know Schmey does his own thing with real estate, but he's very, I feel like he's very private about what he does beyond the scenes.
But I know that his channel, like, I know what YouTube pays and I know you can't afford his collection value with YouTube revenue alone.
So, like, he must be, it's really who has.
the best like manny coachman it's it's it's really who is who is channel is secondary like i literally
did a google search not that i believe this google search at all and i was just like oh how much money
do you think custom offsets makes yeah and it was like uh probably like 15 million dollars and i was
like top line uh it just said 15 million oh weird and then i said like what do you think of the
chances that this business makes 350 million dollars in revenue it said zero to one percent
yeah well custom offsets is is about that's one of the many brands that's one of the many brands
and I think that one drives about $200 million of top line.
So, again, all of the channels combined do the north of 400.
But Custom offices is our biggest driver of traffic.
But yeah, it sounds like, even if you had asked it 200 million,
it probably would have told you 1 to 2%.
It would have been wrong.
But I don't know why that, like, why that shows up so incorrectly.
Well, the more I taught, like, I'm talking about it now.
So AI, I bet you if you check, they read everything.
They analyze every video.
The more input that you give to the AI machine, the better that it does.
and they're probably going to scrape this video.
And in two months, you'll probably look it up and it'll say.
But even so, we spoke about this in the last podcast that we did.
Yeah, well, I mean, we threw around some numbers and stuff.
And for me, it was just absurd that it was, it was that incorrect.
And then I just did a simple Google search.
It's like a 300,000 square foot warehouse.
I'm like, there's just no way that a business makes like $5, 10 million.
Yeah.
Has a 300,000 square.
No chance.
Yeah, they would be absorbed.
All of that would be absorbed in just building costs, right?
Until just recently, it was pulling from Reddit.
Chad, GBT, actually just stopped.
doing that, which is crazy.
Oh, did they?
That was their, like, primary source?
They were pulling a lot from Reddit.
I read about that.
I remember them touting that they're going to be doing that.
And even Google, I think, does that as well,
especially for reviews and other stuff.
Yeah.
AI's getting stupid smart, though.
Is there anything that you wanted to discuss?
I think for YouTube, we're at a crossroads right now.
Like, we are, I think it's worth talking about, like,
YouTube changes every three to six months,
And we have to constantly have come to God meetings and we do that.
And we're always able to change the style of our content.
If you use a very business mindset, you can do really well on YouTube.
There's a lot of people that channel kind of fizzles out.
And we've always rode those storms and done really well.
And it feels like we're largely to crossroads right now where we pivoted.
Took huge inspiration from Matt Armstrong.
He is the greatest storyteller on YouTube, probably the greatest automotive influencer right now.
And so we started telling stories on our YouTube videos.
And it's done really, really well for us.
but we feel like we've hit that ceiling of subscriber penetration
where we need to either shift the content that we're doing
to be more like, how do you,
like Matt Armstrong's are multi-part series.
They bring people in.
People hit the subscribe button because the journey is unfinished.
We are giving people something that took a year to do
to build spec, visit factory, do a car all in one video.
So we're not really given them a reason to hit that subscribe button
because we're giving them too much.
Why does the subscriber count matter?
This is just my own, my own,
my own personal thing is like this is my YouTube channel is secondary to me it's it's a hobby but I have
to win at it on both facets I have to get good views and I have to have high subcont or I'll stop
and I've always said that to them like I will and I'm at a point now where we we've always turned around views if
views get in the trenches which they'll do for two months we'll sit down we'll revamp and we always get the
we'll have banger videos come out if you want to grow your subscribers the best thing that you have to do is
unfortunately like play the game but playing the game is sometimes not very far
fun at all. Like that means you have to make YouTube shorts that like that like and if you want any more
then you subscribe and like and you have to like close to two million subscribers. The entire purpose of
the short is to get subscribers. Like people do that and they can get over a million subscribers from
one effective short. But then again, that's just like not very fun. But they've throttled even that.
I think that shorts growth was tremendous for two years and we still have high performing shorts and
I don't think that they're the submachine that they used to be. So like that was a pivot a year ago.
it's, or two years ago, it was, okay, YouTube, YouTube is really pushing shorts. They're really
giving subs from that. So let's put a lot of focus on high quality, consistent that. But I, I think
that they've really dethrottled that. And so now it's, now, I think I know what I need to do,
but the reason why I'm at a crossroads is, and Matt Armstrong stayed with us at Monterey for three
days. And he is a great inspiration. And it's like, I need to be, I've always been told I need
to be consistent. But consistency, I didn't realize how important it was for sub count. I, I started
looking up on AI talking to him, it's like the attention span is barely more than a week.
Some people have beat this. Like the Whistland Diesels of the world still get five to 10 million
views of video and sometimes you won't drop one for a for a month, right? But there's still
significant importance in being consistent weekly. The Seaboys are pinnacle example of it.
Matt Armstrong, pinnacle example where Cletus McFarland, great example where like they have
this cult following and it's because they're so consistent and they stay true to their viewers.
So I have to be more involved in the channel. I have to start posting every two, we do every three weeks,
every two weeks and then every week.
So I'm actually to crossroads where it's,
am I going to stop my channel?
Are we going to go out where I feel like we're kind of at a peak on top?
We've done really well over the course of four and a half years
to get to 2.2 million subs, right?
Like I think that's great in the YouTube world,
especially in something that's overcrowded with automotive influencers.
So we're having a come to God meeting tomorrow.
It's how do we get to this, how do we get to this increased sub count?
I'll tell you, subcount does not matter at all.
I think you're focused on the wrong metric.
It's like all these other things matter
and you're focused on the one thing that does not matter
that's not going to move the needle.
That's you're putting all your attention on the wrong place.
I agree.
Viewership is more important, right?
But also, YouTube is now starting to test in certain phones.
Yeah.
Removing the sub count entirely.
Where you just see the video, a thumbnail title,
it doesn't matter how many subs you have.
They're moving away from that.
They're really just pushing the best content possible.
Which makes sense.
And I think we're delivering much better content.
So the only way to do it.
In my opinion, if you want to grow the channel, is making broader topics that appeal to more people,
doing more shorts and more collaborations.
Clabs, I agree with all of that.
I think we continue nailing down storytelling.
Clabs are huge.
We went on Cletus's channel and got 30,000 subs over the course of a week.
It was insane.
So I think that.
Also, the one moment that really sticks out to me was you with David Dobrick,
scraping your car.
I mean, that was probably the best thing to happen to the channel.
Because I remember everyone was sharing that and talking about it.
So unfortunately, the more you do that sort of stuff, like, shocking content.
But then it's a game of like you just keep spiraling further and further down.
And people force it.
Like the more that I shoot, though, the more that stuff's going to pop up.
The more that I'm out creating content, the more controversy other stuff like that.
I got a great.
This is a banger video for you.
You put people behind the wheel of these car for the first time.
but you screen them ahead of time
to make sure they're going to have a good reaction.
Some people are just terrible on camera.
But like imagine you get a 19-year-old girl
behind this car who's never driven stick before.
Yeah.
And it's just you get a reaction driving a $2 million car.
Yeah.
Like stuff like that is so appealing to every
because everyone would be curious like what's the reaction.
Putting a grandma.
Like I'm talking, she's 80 years old.
In the Hennessy venom.
In the Hennessy.
Yeah, it sounds dangerous.
And she sits in there and you turn it on and she,
her eyes lied out.
She's like, this is crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
Like that sort of stuff, like wholesome stuff that just people would genuinely want to tune in.
And as a short, I could easily get five to 10 million views.
Easy.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, that's a short machine.
But it's also long form of like, we're going to get a few people in these cars in the middle of like everything else that you're doing.
Well, when Matt had told me like, it's less important about like when he stopped focusing on cars that he thought would do good and just started focusing on cars that he wanted to get.
It made me think like, and I don't know this is the right idea, but like, I'm wondering if we, if we go find a family in need or someone that is like stage four cancer and there's always a car that they wanted to have.
It's a 69 Mustang Mach 1.
It's something.
And then we tell the story of us finding the people, finding the car, fixing up whatever needs to be done.
And then the second portion of the video is us sharing it with them, letting them experience that.
Unfortunately, that's not going to do well for the algorithm unless that's something that you genuinely just want to do.
anyway and it's spreading the message, but I would not ever look at that as like, that's good for the
channel.
Yeah.
People want to see hyper and supergris.
What would do better is if you go on Facebook marketplace and you say, we're going to find
the cheapest car and see what happens.
Yeah.
Like the cheapest S-class Mercedes is down the street.
It's $6,000.
We have no idea what's wrong.
Let's just show up and see.
And you bring cash and you try to like haggle the deal and then you see how far it goes until it breaks.
Like that would do well for views.
Or putting like putting like a horrible engine in a hypercar or like vice versa, like getting like the cheapest car like a $1,500 car and putting like the craziest.
We were going to work with Matt on swapping out the drive train on the rigera. He was warm to it and putting like an LS1 in my Koenig, which would have made it a very drivable car.
But I'm like that would probably been really good for him, really good for us.
Because he's always said the Konigzeg is the end all be all.
Like he's like, I want to get a Konigzeb, but you can't find them wrecked for whatever reason.
you just can't get your whole.
So that would have been a good one.
Oh, another one.
These do well is,
let's just say you have a real Lamborghini Diablo.
Yeah.
You get a replica.
And you see just how good of a replica that one is compared to the real thing.
And you could frame it like,
these cars have been going up in value too much and now I don't want to put miles.
So we're going to find a replica version of it.
And just piece that thing to get.
People are so fascinated by replicas.
That I've seen do well as well as like people call an Uber and you pick them up as an actual
Uber driver in hyper.
in hypercars.
We looked at that too.
It's been overdone now.
I don't think it.
Yeah.
Every time I see it.
Just did one with a Pagani and you did one with Howie Mandel.
Everything has to be extreme now on YouTube.
Yeah.
Like everybody has done everything to the max to the extreme.
So it's so hard to do anything at this point.
I'm just trying to find something that is related.
Like the me going and buying a 69 Mustang Mach 1 is not relatable to our viewers because
they want to see hyper and supercars.
And I agree with that.
I'm trying to think like what is a series that I can do.
do weekly where everything we do now is like subchannel stuff like taking a card delivery is our
content's very inconsistent like we're doing drag races and then we're taking car delivery like a lot of
people don't find success in being very inconsistent in the type of content they're putting out but
we've been lucky to find success yeah but yours is personality based I feel like I watch your channel
more so for you than like the car sure so I think you make it focused on you another concept would
be putting a really loud exhaust and seeing how long it takes you until you get pulled over
and just do you have a timer at the bottom.
It's like, all right, we're 20 minutes out.
22 minutes.
It took us.
Let's see if we could beat that record.
People would love that.
Like stupid stuff.
Yes.
Like, oh, and by the way, for YouTube, unfortunately, the more mind-numbing it is,
the less people have to think, the better it's going to do.
Agreed, yeah.
Yeah, I agreed.
It's good, good advice.
You guys should drop a comment below if there's any series or recurring thing you guys
would love to see on the channel.
Just let me know.
I'll read each and every one of these comments.
It could be specking Graham and Jack's new,
Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Let's go.
Think of all the views you would get.
I already did that and we did it on a mansory.
It did really well, actually.
I saw one video of an old couple recently specking out this Rolls-Royce or it was
a Bentley or something and they got it delivered.
And it was because it was so out of touch though, but it got millions of views when
the wife's like, oh, I don't know.
I kind of like the purple over the blue and we want this headliner.
She's talking about the wood inserts on the thing.
It sounds like out of touch.
Oh, honey, it's only $70,000.
That's really not that bad.
And he's like, no, it's not that.
Unrelatable and out of touch.
Yeah.
But it was great.
But then they got it delivered,
and she talks about how much she loves her,
like Rolls Royce or something like that.
She closed a good story.
She did.
So stuff like that.
Yeah.
We just feel like rid of crossroads and stuff.
We're going to figure it out.
I'm sure that you will.
The only thing that I would say is, like,
I would hesitate to see what someone else is doing
and how they're finding success with, like,
specific thing and like trying to do that because I think that you're also in a very unique position
yeah of having access to the capital that you have access to like the collection that you have
like I do think it would be great if you could come up with your own unique thing yeah and I'm like
I could go buy a rec to Bugatti and build it but then yeah then everyone's gonna say you're
trying to be mad armstrong and I'm not gonna I don't have the time to go fix that so like it's
it's not as even as genuine like he's good at what he does he's talented guy is relatable
and so yeah you're right I agree 100% on that it has be something new just like a business
idea like if it is something that someone's doing do it way better and
otherwise find something new and unique that will engage viewers. So that's that's the decision right
there. Could do something like a like a pimp my ride for like a high schooler or something like that.
Like they bring in their car. You know that they're like a car fanatic or like you do it for a
subscriber and you like make it a really cool way. Like the pit my ride concept. We would do even the
Mustang mock idea I gave was for a subscriber. I just I don't know if if it doesn't test well with
your initial viewers then it doesn't it typically won't perform well at all right. Like your initial
viewers are the loyal super hypercar. So I'm like pigeonholed in the.
this, it needs to be super hypercar related or it won't do well with my first subset of viewers.
And then YouTube is very unlikely to expand it from there.
That's not necessarily true.
You don't think so?
No, the algorithm will test it originally with your viewers, but a good video generally
will do well.
That's fair.
So, but it's like, yeah, it may just not perform with the type of people that you may want
it to perform with.
Sure.
Yeah.
Which I'm okay with.
So thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
And for all the channel members out there, Steve is going to be giving us a full tour
of his entire collection here, showing you the ins and outs.
So for all of the channel members out there, that is now live.
It's fun, you know what, in fact, we're going to put a little teaser right here.
He's turned more heads than anything else in the collection.
There's 10 in the world, maybe four of them in the USA.
We also tune this, it pops.
Whenever you shift and go on the second year, it's just pop, pop, blah, blah, and shoots fire.
I haven't even made my...
Delivery public at, so you guys are actually the first to really see that.
And so these are the first cars to ever break the 200-mile-an-hour lap, very...
at NASCAR.
One of the neatest cars in the collection,
the whole top pops up like a Jetson spaceship.
For anyone who's not subscribed to you, by the way,
we'll link to all of your info down below in the description.
We got to get your subscriber count up.
It doesn't matter, but for everyone watching,
seriously, go on subscribe.
It's really cool content.
And you were so generous, by the way,
with us last night with the index.
Link down below in the description.
But for allowing us to go and drive these cars
and experience it.
For a lot of these people,
they've never driven a car like this,
even close.
Maybe one, Andy, Andy has.
But besides Andy,
it's such a cool experience.
And for me, too, to be able to, like,
even be in a passenger seat
or to drive the GT3RS was insane.
So I really appreciate that.
Appreciate you guys for coming out.
Cool.
Thanks again.
Until next time.
I think GTA is a magical moment for our culture.
So what's your biggest trade coming up?
Like, he's going to do phenomenal.
What about...
I'm not excited about...
I don't own any right now, but I still think the main trade is on take two.
What are your thoughts like...
I love to see falling here.
I don't know when I'm going to make my big move to heavily lever back into it,
but it's probably going to happen at some point in the next few months.
Elon Musk, the world's richest person, has also become the world's first trillionaire.
The system is rigged.
At what point, though, does the wealth gap get so big that all of a sudden something has
to break. And every civilization that has rose has fallen because of a growing wealth gap.
Over 40% of us are unfamiliar with Roth IRAs, money market accounts, and high-yield savings.
It is profitable to keep you financially stupid. Most Americans today would rather look rich than
be rich. Do you have an investing belief that people would disagree with? Yeah, half...
Warren Buffett would hate that. So what do you think is the biggest risk for the economy that no one is
going to see coming? Right now we have about 40 trillion.
of national debt. We are spending about two trillion dollars a year that we don't have right now.
Some people say that AI is going to boost productivity to the point where all of a sudden
the national debt is not going to matter as much as it does today. I can't predict the future.
All I can do is look at history. And while history doesn't exactly repeat itself, it does rhyme.
