“Most People Are Broke!” Lamborghini Salesman Reveals Who ACTUALLY Buys Their Cars! | Ed Bolian

Northwest Registered Agent: Start Your LLC Today at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/ich NetSuite: Get Our FREE Business Guide at https://netsuite.com/ICED Monarch: Use code ICEDCOFFEE at https://monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50! Shopify: Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at https://shopify.com/ich Follow @VINwiki 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: [email protected] Apply for The Index Membership: https://entertheindex.com/ For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:00 - How Ed Made $7M Buying Cars 00:08:18 - Why Supercars Keep Climbing in Price 00:15:08 - Ed's Full Car Collection 00:16:21 - Sponsor: Northwest Registered Agent 00:17:27 - The Tax Trap & The Exotic Insurance Gap 00:23:24 - Looking Rich for Cheap & Cars That Scream "Broke" 00:30:33 - Sponsor: NetSuite & Monarch Money 00:33:07 - The Secret Formula for Predicting Which Cars Make Money 00:43:44 - The Car Market Bubble In 2026 + 2027 00:50:07 - Unreliable New Cars & Buying Unreliable Exotics 00:54:30 - Sponsor: Shopify 00:55:52 - Ferrari's Fake Manual & The Best Cheap Cars 01:01:54 - Guaranteed Financial Disasters 01:08:11 - How $60 Remote Inspections Save Money 01:16:02 - How to Never Lose Money on a Car & Negotiating 101 01:24:26 - How Much Car You Can Actually Afford 01:31:18 - The Perfect $1M Collection 01:38:38 - Experian Data & What Triggers the Next Recession 01:43:49 - Buy a House, Go to College 01:49:53 - Best & Worst Car YouTubers With Money *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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

  I have found that buying the worst examples of the coolest cars on earth tends to give me the opportunity to let them go up in value.

• 0:33Graham Stephan?

  What's the most you've lost on a car?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I've never lost money on a car.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  It never gets old. I probably spent about a million dollars on cars.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  The current collection's probably worth something like seven and a half or so.

• 0:52Graham Stephan?

  Wow.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  The cheapest way to buy a car isn't to pay the least amount of money. Everyone can afford to own a car that goes up in value.

• 0:58Graham Stephan?

  How do you effectively negotiate?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  I am fully committed to this offer. And if it blows up on the way past your mailbox, it's my problem.

• 1:07Graham Stephan?

  So who do you think of all the car YouTubers is the worst with money?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Well, there's one that comes to mind. Tyler is making terrible decisions, so we don't have to.

• 1:16Graham Stephan?

  If you have a really tiny penis, what's the best car that will make it appear bigger?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:30Graham Stephan?

  Ed Bolian, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  It's great to be back, or I get to be in your house this time rather than you coming to mine.

• 1:37Graham Stephan?

  So I've really been looking forward to this because you've been correct about nearly every single car that you've predicted is going to be going up in value. We're talking Lamborghinis, gated Mercia Lagos, Bugatti, your Spiker. You just told me that you doubled your money on that one, which is incredible. Your collection so far, to my knowledge, has made millions of dollars. And I'm curious how much money so far you've made buying these exotic cars.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  You know, it's hard to say because there's a lot of different, you know, variables. Cause I worked in the industry and so there's a lot of flips that are kind of unrealized. But I'd suppose in the last 20 years, I think I probably spent about a million dollars cumulatively on cars that became combined with loans and trades and things like that. And I guess the current collection's probably worth something like seven and a half or so.

• 2:25Graham Stephan?

  Wow.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Now, there's still some debt to handle related to that. But it certainly has gone in the right direction and generated a lot of equity. And you know, it's not like I can see the future, but there are patterns, right? And so that's really what the industry sort of demands and invites is some analysis of what works, what doesn't, and what the recipe sort of becomes.

• 2:46Graham Stephan?

  So have you now made more money on YouTube or investing in cars?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Well, if I were to totally go liquid, I guess it's cars.

• 2:54Graham Stephan?

  That is crazy because I feel like every single person we have on this podcast makes more from YouTube than their other thing that they're doing or known for.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Well, one aspect that's very critical to understand is that my content on VinWiki is not mostly me. I'm only maybe 10% of the content. And I am not forced to buy a lot more cars than I naturally would for the sake of content. So you know, Stradman is always buying, building, modifying, selling, perfecting, building like his version. Tyler is making terrible decisions, so we don't have to. Freddie is in these infinite projects. And so all of those models work really well for content. But sometimes they don't require or even allow cars that go up in value. And so the sustainability of VinWiki, keeping it very lean as a business, works because I'm not as beholden to what the cars are to make the content.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  The stories are, you know, are happened years, decades ago in many cases. And most of them, again, aren't about me or my cars. And so that's been great because I've been able to funnel a lot of the money into the cars, which I would have done with however the money comes in. But then I end up in fortunately a pretty good position.

• 4:01Graham Stephan?

  So one of the cars you recently purchased, I saw, was that red Bugatti. It is gorgeous. How expensive was a car? And most importantly, how expensive is that car to maintain? Also, you always say Bu-Gatti.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Bu.

• 4:15Graham Stephan?

  You always say.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Bugatti.

• 4:18Graham Stephan?

  What color is your Bugatti? You didn't hear that. Okay. How do you say, how are you supposed to say?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  The people from the factory just say Bugatti.

• 4:26Graham Stephan?

  Boo. It's Bugatti.

• 4:27Jack Selby?

  Dude, we've literally had this conversation before on the podcast.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Veyron is hard as well because if you, if you think about that as a French name, it would just be Veyron. But we're not going to say that because everybody would slap you in your own face. And so I think that it's Bugatti Veyron is seems to be the best way to say it. But anything works and.

• 4:45Graham Stephan?

  So it's really Bugatti?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:48Jack Selby?

  Like everyone says it aside from you.

• 4:49Graham Stephan?

  Oh my gosh.

• 4:50Jack Selby?

  It's really that way.

• 4:51Graham Stephan?

  It sounds improper to say Bugatti. Okay, whatever.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  And so I bought it about two years ago now for 1.45 million dollars. And the car was the Frankfurt Motor Show car. And then it was owned by Birdman of Cash Money Records. And he gave it to Justin Bieber. Bieber gave it back. It got repossessed. The bank sold it to Floyd Mayweather. He had delivered here in Vegas right before the Conor McGregor fight. And then it was sold to Little Uzi Vert and then a drug dealer in Miami and then me. And so I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I've put about, I don't know, 15, 16,000 miles on it over the course of those two years, which is wildly irresponsible from a value maintenance perspective, but I am loving it. The reason that it was especially cheap in that moment relative to the coupes.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  And I know it's ridiculous to say that one and a half million dollars is cheap, but that they had gone down about a million dollars because there's only 14 Bugatti Veyron Grand Sports, which is the removable roof, 1,000 horsepower variant in the U.S. And there's 58 worldwide. And so of those 14 U.S. cars, six of them transacted inside of a year, which is grossly beyond the number of transactions that can just crash a market. And so since they were long on, you know, advertised everywhere, it was easier to lowball them. And so I was able to get a really, really good deal. And once all of that inventory was absorbed into homes where they were going to stay for a while, that kind of allows them to return to the normal. Usually the open roof cars are about a million dollars more than the coupes.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And so one of these just sold for, I guess, 3.3 million.

• 6:23Graham Stephan?

  Is your car worth more because Justin Bieber owned it?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  It's very hard to say because you know, most celebrities and entertainers, hip hop artists, anybody like that, they don't have a reputation of taking good care of things. And so that would generally be a detraction. It is novel and it is interesting from like a Cars and Coffee story perspective. And so initially, no, but eventually, yes. So people are scared of that. But then once the cars are demonstrated to be okay, then the value can go back up because everybody's less worried about what might have happened. So I live car wise in the world between like totally unacceptable and okay. That's profitable. Okay to good is somewhat profitable. Good to perfect, you lose money.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  And perfect to like concour everything is, you're just in it for the recreation of it. You're losing tons and tons of money. And so I have found that buying the worst examples of the coolest cars on earth tends to give me the opportunity to let them go up in value. And that's where it's all come from.

• 7:26Graham Stephan?

  So how do you maintain the car cheaply?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  The best thing that you can actually do is drive it. And what I have found is that, you know, when I can put 5,000 to 10,000 miles on a bad car, it at least starts to validate what it really needs versus what it can probably not have to worry about. And it can give me the opportunity to cosmetically and mechanically recondition the car enough. And so since I bought it, I have spent maybe 50 to $60,000 on three oil changes, some CV boots, various sensors and things like that. Just throws a bunch of errors. This morning I was taking my kid to school in it and it threw every error. But that was just because it was mad because I've been driving my cheap Bentley too much lately. But generally, yeah, it hasn't been that bad.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Now, if you go perfectly by the book, it's about 20,000 to 25,000 for an annual service, about 40, 50,000 for a set of tires. They have just released a retrofit set of wheels that accommodate Sheeran sized tires, which I had already done through some fake Chinese wheels that I got for $500 each. And so I have gotten it pretty quickly into a form that it is reliable for long trips. I drove it back from Vegas last year. I've driven it to Miami a bunch of times. I've driven it out to Hilton Head and back. So I just drove it to Connecticut and back. So most of the miles are actually on really long trips.

• 8:43Graham Stephan?

  Should Graham drive his Ford GT more? It's so funny. We were talking about this in the car from the airport.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  So Graham has a Ford GT and how long have you owned it?

• 8:53Graham Stephan?

  Five years.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Okay. And what'd you pay for it?

• 8:56Graham Stephan?

  306,000.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  And how many miles are on it?

• 8:59Graham Stephan?

  7,700.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Okay. So a 5,000 to 10,000 mile Ford GT and yours is white. Yeah?

• 9:06Graham Stephan?

  Blue stripes.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Is 750 grand, give or take now. And the Ford GT market is one of the most unique exotic or supercar markets for a variety of reasons. One is there are a lot more of them than most cars that have had that kind of long-term value trajectory. Also, there are very few logical departure cars. And so it's not like this modern, you know, M3, GT3RS, SVJ Pagani, that everybody that's young, watching TikTok, wants to be their like life history in cars. When you have a Ford GT, generally people like it because they're very maintainable. They're very American, they're very simple, but they're very iconic, very cool.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  All the accolades that we'd like for a car to be while being manual, fast, makes a great noise. There's a lot of things to love about a Ford GT. But people who have them aren't like waiting for the chance to go out and buy a V12 Lamborghini or a mid-engine V8 Ferrari. They chose to buy the Ford GT and so they're not always tempted to trade it. So they're not shopping them all the time. They're also generally slightly older and they're very disciplined in their ownership. The other thing that's happened is that because there is a constant engagement in that market, they have gone up very incrementally rather than these huge jumps. So over the last six to 12 months, a lot of Ferraris with limited explanation have doubled or tripled in value.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  In those cases, everybody has to reevaluate like, am I going to own this car for so much more today than I paid a few years ago? And the answer for most of them is no, I'm ready to take that money and put it into whatever it can also represent. Ford GT guys don't have that because they have never just doubled in value in a short amount of time. They go up 10, 15% a year and, and that causes that kind of question. Should he drive it? Because if you've got a car that you paid 300 grand for and it's worth three quarters of a million dollars, well, that's a different thing. That is a different unit of money. And so the, the valid question is, well, I am rebuying the car every year as all these new results print.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  So should I just hold on to it as that store of value as opposed to the recreation you could have out of driving it?

• 11:20Jack Selby?

  That's really interesting because that's almost identical to what one of the best investors we've ever had on the podcast says, Chris Camillo. He says, your portfolio that you check your account every morning and all the stocks that appear there, that portfolio that you have, you choose to buy every single day. And you need to reflect every morning. If you had the amount of money that you have invested, would you pick this exact distribution and, and composition of stock? And so you're saying your approach to investing in cars is quite literally investing in cars. It's the exact same thing.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Well, it shifts. Most of the time, I hope people are buying cars because it's the car they really want to own. Because there's nearly no example of any car that has beaten the S and P 500 for more than a decade. You know, and generally that'll only be a short window of time where they do double, triple in value. And then there's negligible gains for a very, very long period of time. So you need to own something like that because you really, really do love it. Otherwise, as you've talked about, simplifying your life into very standard investments that are easy to monitor, easy to understand, easy to control is the path to peace. But cars are the path to fun. And so there's a lot to be said for, you know, having some allocation of, you know, money into cars.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  And that's one of the things that we are definitely seeing in certain segments of the market. You know, we were seeing an explosion of value, a lot like, but, but a bit different from what we saw from 2021 to 2023. In the wake of COVID, where there was a lot of cash in the market, there were also new car shortages. And there was just a lot of, you know, recreational enthusiasm, people picking up different hobbies, embracing, going on rallies or long road trips or drives or tracking, whatever they want to do with their cars. And so we saw a significant rise in the value of all interesting cars. What we've seen over the last, let's say 24 months is a, a very huge jump in the prices of proper rare stuff. Really, really good collector cars, Ford GTs are in there, but also Carrera GTs,

• 13:26Speaker 01

  all the V12 Lamborghinis, most of the numbered rare Ferraris, certainly things that are manual transmission, mechanically simple, easy to long-term maintain. But also even in some of these really rare hybridized, more modern cars, P1, 918, LaFerrari and things like that. And so that's been a little bit hard to understand because there hasn't been a more macroeconomic condition that seems to cause it. We just see these cars going up in value because clearly people are building collections. And collections of more modern supercars, these cars aren't as old as people who were collecting muscle cars or pre-war significant cars would really have focused on. So it's interesting, the time window in which these are going up.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And what we have seen is I think there's like 1800 US-based family offices that represent more than a hundred million dollars. And so a lot of these family offices are allowing younger generations to have a car portfolio. And as long as the cars meet certain reasonable criteria of rarity and significance and things like that, they kind of get to go into, you know, one of these dealers with a gone in 60 seconds looking shopping list and just say, I want one of everything. And they do that like every day, if you own like curated in Miami, he'll have a 24-year-old kid come in with a list of 30 million dollars worth of cars that wants it right now.

• 14:41Graham Stephan?

  And is that for an investment? Like his family office says, hey, we're going to allocate you 30 million, go and build us a car portfolio that might go up in value three to eight percent a year.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Something like that. I'm sure that they aren't tasked with the deployment there, but they're saying, we believe that this source of cars is probably responsible. And we don't mind you spending this amount of money on cars from them. And I mean, it's an amazing reputation to have for some of these sellers of cars, brokers of cars, dealers of cars. But that seems to be what is happening. And then when you overlay that with just infinite more debt available today, if you choose to scale your collection with leverage and which can obviously magnify the gains hugely like anything. But when you're, you know, you're not talking about two, three to one. I mean, you can talk 10 to one leverage in, you know, a traditional exotic car loan.

• 15:34Jack Selby?

  So what cars do you have in your collection right now?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  So I've got the Bugatti of 2012 Veyron Grand Sport. I've got two Lamborghini Murcielago LP640s. I would say that's my favorite car. And I've been telling everybody that they're going to go up in value for 12 years now. So it's not as though it just, you do it and then the next day the internet recognizes it. Like I have sold so many people that I believe in these cars and I've voted with my checkbook an awful lot and my credit score. And I love them. I think they're just the quintessential supercar in being big and crazy and loud and dramatic, but also very useful, maintainable. And so I've got an 07 manual LP640 coupe, the highest mileage one in the world. And I've got an 09 LP640 manual roadster, also the highest mileage one in the world and the one with the most accidents.

• 16:15Jack Selby?

  How many miles do they have on them?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  62 on the coupe, 25 on the roadster.

• 16:19Jack Selby?

  That's your entire collection of them.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Oh, I've got, no, it's not. I'm sorry.

• 16:23Graham Stephan?

  Keep going. I was about to say, listen.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I've also got the 1998 Diablo SV that was sold out of the Victoria's Secret Christmas catalog. I just sold my Spiker. I have got a cheap Bentley. I've got a cheap McLaren project we haven't talked about on my, on VinWiki yet, but it's coming. I've got an off-road Cayenne, my wife's got a Mercedes SUV. Oh, and I, I just bought another thing out of Europe and I won't say what that is yet, but it's, it's not that expensive, but it is awesome.

• 16:47Jack Selby?

  So if you had $7 million cash today, would you buy the exact same portfolio of cars you currently own?

• 16:53Graham Stephan?

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• 17:07Jack Selby?

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• 17:23Graham Stephan?

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• 17:29Jack Selby?

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• 17:38Graham Stephan?

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• 17:43Jack Selby?

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• 17:51Graham Stephan?

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• 17:58Jack Selby?

  So if you had $7 million cash today, would you buy the exact same portfolio of cars you currently own?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  That is a great question and it is exactly the right question to ask. And it is, yes, this is the stuff that I want. Fortunately, most of my cars are fairly liquid. And so, you know, when I look at asset distribution and net worth, would I like to have that much in cars? Probably not. That would be irresponsible. And I saw you got a little stand-up Dave Ramsey over there that he would scorn me for such things. But it does tend to make the content world go around. And so, but in terms of the cars, yeah, it's what I like.

• 18:32Jack Selby?

  What about you? So if your Ford GT is worth $750,000 and, and all of your other cars, that combined, let's just say like $850,000.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:41Jack Selby?

  Would you pick this exact same portfolio?

• 18:43Graham Stephan?

  Probably not.

• 18:44Jack Selby?

  What would you pick?

• 18:46Graham Stephan?

  And I had to buy, I probably wouldn't buy any cars. I'd be investing in index funds, real estate. I'm stuck with the cars because I bought them cheap. And you know, if I sell, I'm gonna have to pay tax on the gain. So I'm kind of locked into it and they're going up in value. So like, I don't want to take a tax hit. I don't need to roll it over into something else. And it stays allocated in cars. But I justify it now because I have the car in the background of every single one of my videos. So it's a bit of a prop. If it was just sitting in a garage, I would have probably sold it.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  It's not exactly a 1031 exchange for cars, but you can trade them. And generally it's, this may be, I'm not an accountant, but you don't necessarily need to realize the gain as long as they're, you know, same transactions, especially inside of a dealership. For the same reason that the numbers don't, when there's trades, the numbers don't have to reflect what actually is happening. That happens all the time to over allow to cover loan equity or negative equity. So let's say you wanted a different $750,000 car, like a 430 Scuderia, which is also doubled or tripled in value recently. You could trade them on paper at, you know, $300,000 and that shows no gain. And then they can ACV the car up on their side.

• 19:57Jack Selby?

  Yeah. What would you buy?

• 19:59Graham Stephan?

  The only car, if you said I had to get something else, I would trade my car for either a higher mileage Heritage Edition or GT. Or what I would do is trade my car for a no stripe for GT. Because I believe the no stripe cars are highly undervalued. Even if I got a no stripe car with 12,000 miles on it, slightly higher miles or something like that. I think the no stripe cars are going to hit a million dollars before anything else.

• 20:26Jack Selby?

  But you wouldn't, you wouldn't want to have any sort of supercar?

• 20:29Graham Stephan?

  No, I think nothing is as good as the Ford GT.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Well, in that case, you should definitely drive it. Because realistically, the amount of miles that you could possibly put on the car, even if you do break through eight, 10, 15.

• 20:45Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, it's 10. It's 10 I'm afraid of. It's 10 I'm afraid of, but then I don't want to crack nine because when you're at nine, then everyone's like, oh, I see what you're doing. Oh yeah, you're at 92. Okay. I see the game you've been playing. So, and I know I'm going to keep driving it a little bit. So.

• 21:01Jack Selby?

  How many miles are you at right now?

• 21:02Graham Stephan?

  77.

• 21:04Graham Stephan?

  So I'm going to hit eight in my ownership.

• 21:09Graham Stephan?

  74.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  So here's what's going to happen. So we are going, so generally I accumulate too many cars and then I want to sell them. And it's really inconvenient to try to sell a bunch of cars just because of the conversations and the access and everything like that. So I sell them all in auctions on site. So like last year I sold six cars in one week on Cars and Bids. And so we're going to do that again. In November on Cars and Bids, but rather than being all Ed cars, they're going to be just VinWiki story cars. And one of the ones that we're going to sell is one we pulled out of a barn. It's an 06 tungsten Ford GT and it's got a bunch of miles on it. And it has a salvage title and it's going to be cheap as one could possibly be, still more than you paid for yours.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  But you should buy it and, and just go put 10,000 miles on it that will have zero impact on the value. Decide then how much you want to own it and then either keep that one and sell the white one or sell it for what you paid for it.

• 22:07Graham Stephan?

  Oh, it sounds like a, it just sounds like a hassle. I don't want another thing.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Driving cars.

• 22:12Graham Stephan?

  Not, not really.

• 22:14Jack Selby?

  So what do you enjoy cars for?

• 22:16Graham Stephan?

  I like to look at them. To me, they're like, it's like a piece of art. It's like, it's like a sculpture.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  All these walls for posters around here.

• 22:22Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but, but a car for me is like, it's a, it's a work of just art. I love like sitting in the car. I love looking at the engine of it. I like the startup. I get anxious.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  About what?

• 22:35Graham Stephan?

  There's, there's now so much value in the cars that if something goes wrong on it or someone hits me, like I'm more than insured, but I don't want to deal with it. It's just, it's, I breathe a sigh of relief when I pull my car back into the garage, turn off the ignition, the garage goes down. I'm like, ah, good.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  We survive.

• 22:54Graham Stephan?

  Car's safe. How would you save money on insurance? If you want to really minimize your cost?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Of all the things to save money on, I would strongly recommend not insurance. The, there are collector car policies that are massively cheaper. And so if you can qualify for those based on the areas that you live in and the way you use the cars and the types of cars that you're insuring, that is a huge difference. I think I pay about 15 to $20,000 a month, or sorry, a year on insurance. And which is nothing relative to the value of all the cars, but that, that's because they know I can only crash one at a time. And so, and it doesn't specifically exclude my family, my wife from driving it, but she's not going to go drive them. She's welcome too, but that she, curbs come out of nowhere.

• 23:44Graham Stephan?

  So if someone wants to then look rich for cheap, what's the coolest car?

• 23:50Speaker 00

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• 24:15Graham Stephan?

  Bye.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  I mean, generally the, the easy answer is the cars that depreciate like crazy. Your Maseratis, your Aston Martins, things like that. The reality is, and this is the same way that you avoid the wrong stigma of the car that you show up in, is have a good story about it. Don't just go out chasing the most interesting thing that like you think gets the most clicks or views. Have something that really resonates with you about what the car is or what's rare about it or significant about it or unique about it. And that way like, and those cars tend to depreciate a lot less because they're usually a little bit older. And that actually is the cheapest way to do it. The cheapest way to buy a car isn't to pay the least amount of money.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  The cheapest way to own a car is to have the equity position reflect something positive when you're done with it. So it doesn't really matter what you pay, if it's going to go up in value. Everyone can afford to own a car that goes up in value. And so the, the, the best way to look like, you know, a baller on a budget is to buy something that's going the right way in value because of the factors that tend to make that happen.

• 25:22Graham Stephan?

  What car if someone has it just screams that they're broke?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Generally, anything like, I see people have brand new cars. Like if you drove up in a brand new Escalade electric car, like I know it's expensive, but like the amount of money that that's costing is just unconscionable. And I have a car that needs $50,000 tires. And I was, and I think those people are just so, that's, that's saying that they, they looked so rich to me. I mean, people that are broke, I, I don't know that.

• 25:55Graham Stephan?

  Chrysler 300.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Well, that's fair. I mean, but I, I don't know that we need to necessarily stigmatize that. I would say that there are cars that scream irresponsible. We all talk about the way that we love cars and the way I love cars is very different than the way that you love cars. And the fact that you love your current car in its state with its mileage and things. But it's so easy to be critical of that. And the, the audience will, when you say that you've owned the car for five years and put 300 miles on it, they're going to be like, you idiot. But you're not wrong. Whatever you mean, when you say that you love cars, you're right. And just because my brand of loving cars is different than yours, doesn't make me more right. It only makes me more right for me.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  And so it's so easy to see a car that is stanced out to the point that it can't move, or a truck that is pointed to the sky. So you can't see what you're about to run into. Or an Instagram tag on your, you know, quarter window and think that's dumb. And maybe it is for you, but like, I just was emceeing a, an Australian car show. These guys that import Holden's into the US. I don't particularly like these cars. I don't relate to these cars. I don't understand the economics of these cars, but the community of these people is unbelievable. And when we think about the loneliness epidemic in America and the world at large.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  And the reality is that you could buy a marketplace $3,300, 300C, put a stupid rap on it, put your Instagram handle on it and go, you know, cruise around anywhere and make a bunch of friends that are in your same socioeconomic situation, have your same free time, are complaining about the same kind of things and dealing with the same problems. You are going to make friends for less money than almost any hobby in the world. And the opportunity to just go out and make a questionable decision on a car and then meet people tomorrow, to me is one of the coolest things about the car world.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  And it won't, you're not going to do that and come hang out with me or you or anybody different, but you can target those kinds of people. The same way that you could, if you buy a track car and go to track days, or you go drive the same mountain roads, or you go to Cars and Coffee, or you join the Corvette Club and, you know, get your jean shorts and your white polo shirt and your New Balances. Like they, whatever it is that is kind of the standard issue expression of that niche of automotive culture is one of the most powerful social tools that I've ever seen. The people within those groups are having an experience that is desirable. And that needs to be fostered and available.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  And it is so easy to get trapped in your, you know, closed loop screen world, AI therapy, you know, just existence where you think there's no opportunity for me to go out there and have a different experience next weekend than I had this weekend. I'm trapped and you're not because there is this way and a million other ways to go out there and experience the world in a much more interesting fashion. And I think it behooves people to hear like, huh, that is a way that this is happening. That's different than just going out and meeting somebody in a chat room.

• 29:16Graham Stephan?

  What's the best car to get girls?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Well, where are we going for sushi tonight? I guess the

• 29:22Jack Selby?

  G-Wagon.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  The girls do love a G-Wagon. They love a G-Wagon.

• 29:26Graham Stephan?

  I thought it would be a Range Rover.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  They love Range Rovers too. They do. My wife's had three of them. And I, so I, I literally started dating the girl that would become my wife, the same week that I incorporated my rental car company out of my dorm room and bought a Gallardo. And so I have never used the cars in that form because that was the last first date that I went on. But I, I would say that, you know, the brightly colored Lambos and things like that don't tend to work. But the, the bigger issue is like actually getting girls to even tolerate them, to be honest. And when I was selling cars at Lamborghini Atlanta, that was a huge thing. Like guys would come in like, how do I make my wife not hate the amount of money that I am spending on these cars?

• 30:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, the thing that I always said is let them drive them. Go somewhere where they're going to be very safe, where it's on a highway, wide open, good visibility, easy access, no lights, no turning, no curbs, no, nothing. Because the reason they don't like them is that they think that if they engage with them, that they'll ruin them for you. If your wife took your Ford GT out and curbed the wheel, that would be an incident. And whereas if you took her up to a nice mountain road and said, look, here's how the thing works. I just want you to experience why I like it for five miles. And if you say, I want to pull over and get out after, I'm going to be perfectly happy.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  But we're going to put you in a situation where it's very easy and I promise they'll love it. The cars are lovely. The first car my wife had driven was the $26,000 McLaren, like in a long, long time. She's driven a lot of the cars, but like she doesn't generally like it. And she loved it. She didn't know how the doors worked. She got stuck in the car. Friends had to call me, but it was, it was okay. And so, and she didn't run into anything. And I think that if you can create those kinds of opportunities, that's what girls love is being brought into this thing that's fun in a way that they can sort of dip their toe in and experience.

• 31:25Jack Selby?

  What car suggests that you're secretly wealthy?

• 31:27Graham Stephan?

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• 31:49Jack Selby?

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• 32:01Graham Stephan?

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• 32:08Jack Selby?

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• 32:18Graham Stephan?

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• 32:35Jack Selby?

  Again, that is netsuite.com/iced, or just click the link down below in the description. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/iced. Once again, that is netsuite.com/iced. So guys, it has been over seven years since I first started working with Graham, for free, by the way. And since then, I have invested, I kid you not, almost every single dollar that I've earned, which has let me buy my first house, including this warehouse that we're sitting in right now. But here's what nobody tells you. The more you build, the messier it gets to manage, which is exactly why we've partnered with Monarch.

• 33:05Graham Stephan?

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• 33:30Jack Selby?

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• 33:37Graham Stephan?

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• 33:44Jack Selby?

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• 33:50Graham Stephan?

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• 34:07Jack Selby?

  What car suggests that you're secretly wealthy?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Well, generally older cars that are going up in value. Like if you see someone with a manual Mercy or a, you know, an older Porsche that we know is rare and desirable. You know, you could see a sea of brand new cars and go, that dude knows what's up. Because he's not experiencing the same kinds of risks of these newer cars. He's got something really, really special. Somebody pulls up in a Ferrari 550 Barca, you, you need to pay attention. They're going to give you some advice.

• 34:37Graham Stephan?

  So when you look for cars that you feel are undervalued, that will be going up in price most likely in the next few years, what set of criteria do you look for?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  So the biggest criteria is always the buying power of the people who thought it was the coolest thing in the world when they were late teenagers. So that means that 15 to 20 years later is the ideal window for the people that had them on posters to start putting them in their garage. So that is usually the inflection point. We're seeing that a little earlier now for a lot of factors. But generally speaking, that's what I would have said. You know, my goal in general car ownership was always to avoid depreciation. And I used to say the best way to do that is to look like you won the lottery 10 years ago. And if you look like MTV Cribs 10 years ago, your cars are not going to go down in value. They may break all the time, but they will not go down in value.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  And so that was the way that I started to build equity, to be able to flip up, trade up and, and make some money.

• 35:38Jack Selby?

  When I was growing up, I loved cars, like loved cars. And then I got a little older and I started to work a little bit more and I started playing more pickleball. My passions went elsewhere. But this last week, I had a dream that I was driving a McLaren and I woke up and I wanted one so badly. And I have never, like, at least in the past, since I could afford a nice car, I haven't wanted one really that bad. Like I thought it would be cool to have a Gallardo or some sort of like cheaper supercar because like Graham says, owning a supercar in your twenties is cooler than your thirties. That's his opinion, not mine.

• 36:11Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, that's what I told him. I said, if you're going to do it, your twenties, it's unlike anything else. When you're 30, less special.

• 36:18Jack Selby?

  So, so I kind of sat on that and I'm like, okay, the only problem that I have is I do think that it is very like douchey to be driving, especially if you're in your twenties, a McLaren or like some sort of like supercar. I just don't, I

• 36:33Graham Stephan?

  Depends on the color. That's what I think.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  That is a factor. And there's also ways to do it right. You know, one of the myths that social media and content creation, you know, puts forward is that you need the biggest, baddest, latest, greatest, coolest thing to, if you, so if you want a McLaren, it's gotta be a 765 LT or whatever it is. No, it doesn't. It can be anything. And they, they exist. I bought one for $26,000 the other day.

• 37:06Graham Stephan?

  The other day? It's a McLaren?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a 2017 McLaren GT, uh, 570 GT. So the smaller GT. And I bought, I had to buy nine cars out of this collection, but when it all netted out, it was 26,000 bucks for this purple car. And it was great. I drove it around, my 11 year old drove it around the neighborhood. It was fun.

• 37:26Graham Stephan?

  Wait a second, now $26,000 for McLaren?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  It was in a flood. But

• 37:31Graham Stephan?

  But it, but it drove?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Ran and drove. I sold it for 75 grand and the engine blew up 1,200 miles later. But he tuned it overly. You don't, don't, don't buy a tuned McLaren.

• 37:40Graham Stephan?

  Wait a second. So you're saying you could have sold Jack a McLaren for 70 something thousand dollars?

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah.

• 37:46Jack Selby?

  Well, if you happen to find another cheap McLaren, like I, I've never been the type to, to think that I was going to actually buy one. But if the net cost after let's say three to five years, let's say I buy like a 650S, which is what Graham thinks I should buy.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:00Jack Selby?

  Maybe after three, four years, it could only cost me like 30,000 bucks.

• 38:04Graham Stephan?

  I think less than that.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  That's a comfortable downside, given that the car is already 11 years old.

• 38:10Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Um, and so like I said, look like you won lottery 10 years ago, you probably will experience no depreciation cost now. There, like I said, when I've said it earlier, it might break and they do break.

• 38:21Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  And they can be very expensive. So the risk of having $30,000 in repair costs is much higher than the risk of having $30,000 in depreciation, but it's cheaper to own than just about anything new.

• 38:35Graham Stephan?

  Do you agree with the 650S? You think that's a, that's a good car? It's reliable enough?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, they were so good. I sold them new. Uh, McLaren Atlanta, uh, worked there and so I, I love them. 12Cs are a little spotty, later ones, 13s, 14s. We're running one at Barrett Jackson. I am going to be repping it and making a video about it tomorrow. It's a 2013 12C that sold last year at Jackson Las Vegas for 115 grand, but it'll probably do a little less than that.

• 39:01Graham Stephan?

  So what cars today are on people's posters that you think 10 years from now will be collectible?

• 39:06Speaker 01

  So that was part of the reason why I stretched so hard to buy the Bugatti, because you know, people my age, I'm 40, grew up dreaming about Ferraris and Lamborghinis because they were much more rare. They didn't produce as many cars. And so that's why those are the cars that have continued to go up a lot. The people that are younger than me dreamt about hypercars. And so I believe that they aspire the way that I aspire to having a Murcielago, to have Bugatti, Pagani, Koenigsegg, and then the hypercars from, you know, McLaren P1, Porsche 918, LaFerrari and things like that. So I think that those cars are the ones that have nearly limitless upside in the way that Mercys have 10x'd over the last decade. And so, you know, I think that's real.

• 39:48Graham Stephan?

  So why don't you think they've gone up in value more than, I'm talking like Pagani, Koenigsegg? Because it seems like it's really just those two that are kind of etching up a little bit.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Well, they have gone up a little bit more predictably. The anomalies have been the less rare cars really in the last six months. Uh, we've seen this explosion of value in, you know, the special 911s that aren't actually that rare. And the mid-engine V8 Ferraris, 360, 430, 458, 488, F8, as well as, you know, F12, 812, they've all just doubled in value. Um, and so, you know, I think that when you look at the proper rare, proper significant stuff, they haven't moved quite so much. Um, which I think is, is interesting, but they're just rare enough. They don't transact as often. So it's not like one sells yesterday on Bring a Trailer and then everybody on AutoTrader just raises their prices so abruptly.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  You know, it's a, it's a different situation where they, they sell at Monterey auctions and those were all very, very successful. They sold $770 million worth of cars.

• 40:49Graham Stephan?

  So let's say I want to proceed with buying this McLaren. I don't have that kind of cash sitting around. I need to apply for a loan. What are the actual calculations behind what kind of car someone can afford?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  It's interesting because such a high percentage of these cars actually are financed. And there are different sort of seasons of how easy it is to do. And right now it is quite easy to get loans. Now, the interest rates right now are a little bit higher. You're probably going to pay six and a half to eight and a half percent on a used car loan for something that's more than five years old. Also, they generally don't do branded title cars, so no salvage titles. So like my $26,000 McLaren was not a financeable asset. But that's one of the reasons why it was extra cheap. Uh, but the easiest way to look at what it takes is to look at an ideal application. So ideally you're going to have a credit score over 740 that if it's anything beyond that, it doesn't actually help anymore.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Um, and you'll have comparable credit where you're not increasing beyond 50%. So if you want to get a $75,000 loan, you need to have had a $50,000 loan. And generally you'll need to prove, have verifiable income that is beyond the loan amount. So it's different than the way debt to income is calculated on like a real estate purchase or something like that. Um, and then, you know, terms can vary from anywhere from, you know, three years up to 12 and even 15 years on some much more expensive cars. Uh, and then they'll want the loan to value to be between 60 and 80%, so at least 20% down. Now, obviously very few loan applications line up perfectly with all of those.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  And so you can sort of make up for one by doing better in the other. So if you have a higher credit score or better comparable credit or more money down, you can overcome having, you know, a shortcoming in the other criteria.

• 42:39Graham Stephan?

  I remember something crazy, by the way, when I was 24, I wanted to buy this Lotus Exige S240 and it was a gorgeous car. I saw it immediately, had to have it. And, uh, I had never had a car loan before. And so I thought, oh, this would be easy. I'm just going to put like $20,000 down to finance it. Cause I wanted to like both build my credit, but also it wasn't that expensive to finance back then. I think this was like 2013 or 14.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:06Graham Stephan?

  And so I applied, I got denied, which is crazy because they said that I never had a car loan of this caliber before. And they had told me instead, if I had gotten a loan for like a Miata or a Honda S2000, I could work my way up. And then the dealer said, oh, we'll finance you. But I remember the interest rate being like 15%. It was like 15 to 17%. Is there financing? And I ended up just buying the car in cash, but I thought that was so stupid that you have to like build your way up these cars. I had no idea that was a thing.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  It's a thing. Well, and it hasn't always been a thing, but it very much was a thing in 2013. And it's again, important to zoom out a little bit and understand what's going on in the world where we're rebuilding from the financial crisis of 2008 to 2011. Really it was still kind of a big deal. And so at that point, yeah, banks were very, very few and far between that would take that kind of risk. It just being an older car. And yeah, because a few years earlier in 2006, I got a loan for a Lamborghini at 20 years old by just telling the bank how much money I made. And they didn't check anything, just like they didn't check real estate mortgage applications or anything like that. It was just, they call them liar loans or stated income loans.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  And so it was too easy and then maybe it got a little bit too hard. And, uh, and now I think we're kind of at a happy medium where the deal needs to line up somewhat. But you know, look, if you've got enough money down and you can't really prove your income or you've never done one, you can probably find a way.

• 44:36Graham Stephan?

  So what is your overall thought right now in the car market?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  I think that there's a lot of cars that are legitimately not desirable by the normal standards of rarity and significance. And, you know, condition that, that are, that have gone up in value a lot and that's troublesome. We know there's people that are saying that there's market manipulation afoot and things like that. And I don't actually believe that's happening too terribly because nobody's going to go out there and try to manipulate the market on 488s. That's just not, they may, you know, there's 20,000 of them. Nobody cares. And so I think that it is genuine money, kind of dumb money. These aren't going into big collections. These aren't people buying their fifth Ferrari that are coming out on Bring a Trailer and doubling the market because they just know that they're only overpaying by one bid. These are real buyers.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And that seems fragile because, you know, if you said, if you offered every owner of a 488, $550,000 for their car, they're all going to say yes, because they all paid $220,000 like two years ago. So that I don't have a lot of confidence in. The really rare and significant stuff, I think is bulletproof. I think there are so many factors, uh, like we talked about these big family office mega wealth people going in. The transfer of wealth is unbelievable right now. Uh, I had asked Super Chat GPT, how many Americans are going to inherit more than $2 million this year? And it was 55,000. So when you think about like the number of what you would say dumb money transactions on Bring a Trailer is maybe 200

• 46:08Speaker 01

  cars have sold in ways that don't exactly make sense, that certainly could be explained just by that factor. So when you add that to more debt available as people are leveraging up their collections and getting more cars, as well as just this, I mean, obviously the IPOs of some of these giant companies are printing crazy. I mean, I think there were 600 people in Austin that made more than a hundred million dollars.

• 46:31Graham Stephan?

  Wow.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  On the SpaceX IPO. So, I mean, that's all of the demand for interesting car allocations to that area in Texas.

• 46:39Graham Stephan?

  What's interesting is that it seems as though the car market is tracking the same, just put this together, with Pokemon prices.

• 47:13Graham Stephan?

  I kid you not, when you look at the graph of Pokemon and then it dipped. We saw a similar dip in 2022 and the market corrected. It's going back up and what do cars do? They're going back up too. I'm just saying, I believe the two could be correlated in some way or another. And we have to dig deeper to see what's driving this. Is it euphoria? Is it the stock market is doing well and people are overconfident? Is it people investing in this? Because they think it's going to be the next big asset class. And so therefore they could spend more on it, justifying this as like, okay, I'm gonna, it's going to be an investment.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  How old are Pokemon cards? 20, 25 years old?

• 47:49Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:50Graham Stephan?

  It just had their late 20 something anniversary.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  So it's fair to argue that the people that grew up enjoying these things are now in a much better place and can afford to engage recreationally.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Sure, that, you know, that would also follow that 20 year old exotic cars are going up in value, which they very much are. And so it's probably sound. What else would trend that way? Certain video games potentially. I mean, you could say that Grand Theft Auto getting popular again, you know, could correlate to the same people that were playing the early versions of the game and are excited again. But yeah, that's a thing.

• 48:27Graham Stephan?

  Part of me thinks that it's just AI is going to disrupt the market so much that it's even hard to know which stocks are going to end up being the winners and which ones the losers. Cause companies can now be built up this quickly. Companies can be killed this quickly if they don't adopt AI. And so maybe all of these people that have all of this money on the back, like, I mean, the rich are getting richer. They don't know what to do with their money. They don't necessarily want to buy stocks at this point. They want to buy something that can't necessarily be affected, duplicated, replicated by AI.

• 48:56Jack Selby?

  So maybe the tangible asset.

• 48:58Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Jack Selby?

  If the wealthy continue to get wealthier, then something that cannot be bought with like, you know, like traded on an exchange or something, something that like a collection.

• 49:10Graham Stephan?

  It's a physical, it's a physical thing.

• 49:11Jack Selby?

  You know what I was thinking? I wondered how much would it cost to purchase a poster? Or some sort of like collection of every single autograph of every single president? And apparently the autographs themselves are not that expensive. If you collect it, put them all together in a nice display, it could actually be like a profitable endeavor. I think that that could actually be a decent investment, similar to Pokemon cards, because there's like somewhat of an art to it. There's, there's, you have to work kind of hard for it.

• 49:39Graham Stephan?

  So what's so funny is that I looked into autographs, certain autographs. It's really hard to authenticate each one. So if you were able to do the work and authenticate each autograph, then I think you would have something there.

• 49:50Jack Selby?

  But that, like, that'd be really, really, really.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  In your research, how much would it cost to get all, you know?

• 49:58Jack Selby?

  The cost would be anywhere between like 30 and 80,000. Really not that expensive. A lot of presidents autographs are just going to be like a couple hundred bucks. And then some of the older ones, like an actual George Washington autograph can be anywhere from five to 10,000.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Okay. And have you found any examples of someone selling their collection?

• 50:17Jack Selby?

  No. Interesting. But that would be like, you could probably put it all together. Let's just say, worst case scenario, a hundred thousand dollars. Some guy who's got a billion dollars or like hundreds of millions, tens of millions, that's like a history fanatic or like America fanatic. They would probably pay a few hundred thousand dollars. I feel like to have every single US president, how cool is that?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Well, in the car world, there's always this like rich guy in Dubai idea that like somebody's gonna swoop in and buy my car for way more than it's worth.

• 50:44Graham Stephan?

  Some guy in Dubai is gonna buy it.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Is gonna buy it. And so, you know, the person who is going to pay two or 300,000 for something that can be assembled for 80,000, maybe that is the convenience fee, right? That he could.

• 50:56Graham Stephan?

  The authentication is kind of the main obstacle.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Right. But if you paid somebody a hundred thousand dollars as a broker to go out and buy it, they could, they could do what you did, right? So sometimes things are worth, you know, what they're worth on their own merit. And then sometimes they're worth relative to what it takes to produce them. And so if there is theoretically a supply of these things, then you're, you know, you're going to make money from the convenience and the artistry of it and how it's displayed. But I think it's a fascinating idea. More of an arbitrage than a profit, but I like it.

• 51:26Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think of the new car market right now and the new cars coming up?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  The very unreliable. And so you're, you're dealing with a lot of cars that don't have as much longevity. Cars that are built with different priorities in mind and they are not selling well. So new car sales across almost all marks is a pretty, are down.

• 51:43Graham Stephan?

  What make is doing it right?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Porsche is certainly doing it right from a curation of the demand of their customer base to the extent that they're getting pretty exasperated with having to buy a Macan to get a GT3 RS or, you know, all the things that they have to do. But when, when it comes to really maximizing profit, Porsche and Ferrari are doing a really, really good job. Ferrari has, is sort of built, especially over the last 25 to 30 years, a customer base that knows that they're not allowed to say no to anything if they want to maintain their status. And they have done probably about as good a job as anybody, short of maybe Hermes or whatever with these but purses to make sure they extract as many dollars as possible out of all of their customers. So like the unit profit is unbelievable.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  That those two are definitely doing it right, although you would say that most of their latest offerings were less desirable than the one, there's less enthusiasm for them versus, but they're still selling them all.

• 52:40Graham Stephan?

  How do you think AI is going to affect the new productions of cars in the next five or so years?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  You know, it's so easy to say that AI is going to flip over the whole sandbox and that nothing in life is going to look the same five, 10, 20 years from now. And there's an easy argument to be made that that's possible. Life doesn't feel the same as it did two years ago, as AI has proliferated and improved. But I don't necessarily think that a lot of the stuff that we just enjoy doing is going to change. Are we going to have more of an opportunity to do things we enjoy? Probably. You know, if I was going to start a business today, it would be in recreation. We would go under the assumption that as unemployment skyrockets and as we have, you know, potentially

• 53:28Speaker 01

  an era, an age of abundance or potentially, you know, we're all just waiting to die. I think that, you know, sports leagues for old people seems, pickleball does seem like the space, right? For entrepreneurism and opportunity. But I think in the car world, we're going to see a lot of efficiencies in production. We're going to see a lot of deficiencies in creativity and in really relating to your customer base. So you're going to have something that makes sense on paper, but really isn't what anybody wants. And, you know, I run into this issue anytime I get a car that's too good. So I bought a 2014 Bentley Flying Spur about three months ago.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  And it was a $220,000 car and I bought it for 15,000 bucks with 100,000 miles on it. And it was a rat piece of junk, but after about $10,000 invested in it, it's amazing. And I love it. And it's so comfortable and easy. And I had two big trips last week. I drove it 2,500 miles and I should have driven my much more interesting cars that I don't mind putting miles on. But I don't, because I go out there and there's an option of sitting in this massaging seat, comfortable Bentley with working air conditioning and good visibility. And I just drive it and I'll sell it because I don't want cars that good, because I love terrible cars. I enjoy the masochism of driving uncomfortable, interesting cars that allow me to feel driving.

• 54:52Jack Selby?

  When do you think we'll get to a point where different car makes will intentionally decrease the quality? Or increase the rawness of the cars that they produce? Because we were speaking to someone recently, I think it was Steve Hamilton, that like all of these luxury car makers or, you know, supercar makers, hypercars, they're all kind of becoming the same thing. Where you're just like throwing as much horsepower in there. Every car make can now produce a car that goes zero to 60 under three seconds. So like, at what point are you going to see car makes try something totally unique? Or intentionally kind of inhibit some aspect of their car? So it's not too perfect for the real car enthusiasts.

• 55:28Graham Stephan?

  You know what this reminds me of? I know we've seen this. When you look at old McDonald's and old Taco Bells and like Burger Kings, they used to be such unique buildings. And now they're all the box. Everyone has just done the box because when they move out, they could just move a new one in. And they realized it's too expensive to build out these custom McDonald's with the things or whatever. That's how it's kind of becoming with cars, it seems. And really quick, you gotta be honest with me here. Somewhere in your phone is a notes app with at least three business ideas in it. And those ideas could turn into real businesses, but you're just held up on the first step. However, that first step is actually very straightforward when today's sponsor Shopify handles it for you. Every single thing that you need to start selling is included and ready to go from day one.

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• 57:00Graham Stephan?

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• 57:09Graham Stephan?

  And they realized it's too expensive to build out these custom McDonald's with the things or whatever. That's how it's kind of becoming with cars, it seems.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  And that may be true. So it's interesting because we've seen some efforts in that way. We've seen Porsche go all manual on certain cars and those cars sell out instantaneously. They are certainly demanded by the audience. We saw McLaren just released a very limited run, very expensive, nearly $2 million manual car that still uses their twin turbo V8. And then we saw Ferrari want to make a manual and they sort of couldn't because the cars have gotten so advanced technologically that it wouldn't have worked well with the E diff and with the lightweight internals that they're building these cars with. So they made one that they call the Manwale and it's the 12 cylinder. It's a stick, but it's fake.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  The gear shift is essentially buttons where you move it and it tells it to go into first and then into second. And there is a clutch pedal and it is actually programmed to stall, but it's very patronizing to those of us that love manual cars because like we love them because of the purity and the efficiency and the simplicity mechanically. And, you know, look, I think younger kids care a lot less about manual cars, but we care about them a lot. And I think it's interesting to see those different effects that we may be in some cases like Ferrari is just too far past their ability to give people what they actually want. And you may just run into sort of the wagon dilemma where they just stop existing. So enthusiasts always scream, we want wagons, we want wagons.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  And they don't buy them new, they buy used cars. So, you know, I love manual V12 cars, but I don't buy new cars. So no, they don't care about me. My opinion does not matter to these companies. And so if, if all we're willing to do is buy them, once they're depreciated 80%, then we really don't count. Right? Your opinion doesn't matter in that case.

• 59:06Graham Stephan?

  You know what I think is going to happen? And people are going to be so pissed off at this, but I think we're going in the subscription revenue model. Where do you want your car to drive more than 80 miles an hour? That'll be $10 a month. Do you want heated seats? That'll be $15 a month. Do you want to unlock your car? Do the remote start? They're already doing that. That's going to be $15 a month. Do you want Sentry on your car? So you could see it, that'll be $20 a month. And then pretty soon you could pick and choose every little feature and add a price to it. Everything windshield protection is now a thing. I got a pop up on my Tesla app. Do you want windshield protection? $23 a month. What?

• 59:47Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Graham Stephan?

  That's expensive.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Well, they've always had insurance plans for in windshields. And so where it's, it's not like they are actually keeping the rocks away. At that point, they will just, that's a, an insurance policy.

• 59:59Jack Selby?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:00Graham Stephan?

  But that's just, I just did.

• 1:00:01Jack Selby?

  That sounds expensive for windshield protection.

• 1:00:03Graham Stephan?

  No, because replacing the windshield is $2,500 on a Tesla. It's, it's a lot of money. But my point being is I think we're going in the subscription revenue model where you want remote start. Five bucks a month. And pretty soon it's like.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Television.

• 1:00:19Graham Stephan?

  Pretty soon it's going to be like, you're going to spend more money on the subscription than you would on the car payment itself. That's where I think it's heading.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  There's a good chance of that. Yes, potentially. And we're also going to get eventually into the era where it's pure coach building, where there's just a chassis. And then all you're paying for is the body, the interior and the infotainment. Because beyond that, every car is the same through electrification and things like that.

• 1:00:44Jack Selby?

  If someone has a minimal budget, but they want a great car, what do you think they should buy? And I'm talking minimal budget, like let's say a few thousand bucks.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  At a few thousand dollars, you're not really paying for the car. You're paying for the last 18 months of maintenance. So you're going to try to find a car that has recently had brakes, tires, plugs, coils, fluids done. Because that's, you know, when you start trying to now buy a two or $3,000 car, that's what matters. And so documenting that as a seller, that's how you sell them is you take the fear out of buying a cheap car like that. When you start thinking about trying to, we, we've done this with, you know, various car trucks and things like that where we'll buy, you know, $1,500 cars and they're, they're all junk. Like especially if you try to get an interesting $1,500 car, that's not a Honda or a Nissan or whatever.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  So yeah, they're, they're junk, but they're a whole lot of fun. We, uh, we bought an SLK, an Audi TT and a old, old Supra and drove them from Hoovy's house in Kansas, all the way down to Galveston. And then I drove TT into the Galveston Bay. And, uh, and it drove right out and I drove it home 14 hours. So it's, uh, you can make them last sometimes, but not.

• 1:01:55Jack Selby?

  If someone wants the cheapest possible car over the course of their, the entire ownership, what would it be? In terms of maintenance reliability, like this car could last them 40 years. Like what is a bulletproof cheap car?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Well, the cheapest car to own is always the one you already have. And so the, the way to minimize your ownership cost in cars is to love the cars that you have enough to keep them. And so to be willing to endure driving it that long. When you start thinking about trying to put two, three, four, 500,000 miles on a car, that's getting harder and harder. Because there's just a lot of issues with cylinder linings and lubrication that are a lot worse now than they were across all manufacturers. A decade or so ago. So I don't actually know that I would start with a brand new car with that aim. It would probably be a Porsche.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  To be honest with you, I think Porsches are the best built automobiles right now. They're not the most interesting, but if you were, if you actually wanted to put 250,000 miles on anything interesting, yeah. Otherwise your, your normal Hondas, Toyotas.

• 1:03:02Jack Selby?

  You'd say Honda and Toyota are the most reliable cars.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Probably. This is not my expertise. I don't think about these problems often, but yes, historically speaking, if you look at consumer reports and all these things, that tends to be the case.

• 1:03:13Graham Stephan?

  And so what cars today are guaranteed to be financial disasters?

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Virtually any new car that you can walk in and buy is going to depreciate. And usually in a fairly predictable measure, 1% a month is always the plus or minus for depreciation. If you look at lease residuals or anything like that, like a good lease is less than 1% including taxes and everything a month. That's pretty rare. We are seeing unbelievable depreciation in electric cars right now. Where Teslas and, you know, all the electric European cars are just in some cases, sub 50% residual value in 12 to 24.

• 1:03:55Graham Stephan?

  Why is that?

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Well, lease incentives is the reason for that, because it's so cheap to buy new ones. You know, under Obama, after Clash, after Cash for Clunkers and all these things where we, he was really trying to get some traction for electric cars. Where we had lease deals on Nissan Leafs for 100, 150 bucks a month. Everybody bought them. They sold a million of these things and they had like 80 miles of electric range. Well, the problem is if a brand new car that was $35,000 is 100 bucks a month. How much is a used one worth?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Well, a hundred dollars a month is the payment on like five grand. And so they're worth like $5,000. And so in those cases, you literally had like 80% depreciation on these cars inside of 24 months. Because there was zero demand. The only people that wanted to use one just didn't have enough credit to get the hundred dollar lease or the hundred and 50 dollar lease. If you wanted heated seats, um, you know, that kind of thing. And so, you know, those are the cars. Yes, modern electric cars are guaranteed to depreciate to nothing.

• 1:05:01Jack Selby?

  Who is even buying new cars in 2026? Like I, in my entire life, the only new cars that I have ever known about being purchased is I stupidly bought my Tesla new. And Graham, you bought a new Tesla?

• 1:05:17Graham Stephan?

  Yes, but because it made so much financial sense.

• 1:05:20Jack Selby?

  Right, right, but I'm, I'm just saying you like new cars, like, oh, I guess Jeremy, Jeremy bought a Ferrari, right? Was that new?

• 1:05:26Graham Stephan?

  No, that was used. He bought them both used.

• 1:05:28Jack Selby?

  Who is buying new cars today?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  In some cases, they're buying new cars because the slightly used ones that still have the features and the reliability that they think they want are too close. Cause there's not as much initial depreciation because of used car leasing, because of extended warranty costs, because of, you know, a lot of factors that they can, that manufacturers can do to short-term bolster the value of depreciating cars. Uh, and so there are situations where it just makes more sense to buy something new because the amount that you're saving, let's say it's a lot less than 10%. So certain things like Escalades and GMC Yukons for a long time and Tahos didn't depreciate all that much. So really you didn't pay that much extra to get a new one. And most of the V8 engines that they put in the cars in the last decade are going to fail.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  And so it was really, really important to have a warranty. And so those are calculations where people can very rationally end up buying a new car. There's also situations where you plan to rely on goodwill from manufacturers and lemon law risks and things like that, that can make sense to buy new cars, even when you naturally wouldn't. But in reality, there is enough demand and leasing is one of the biggest things about it. Where people are leasing these cars because they want to have something new. The same way they want to have a new phone in two years is that they like to just trade in and out. And they insist on having the latest, greatest thing. And they consider that to be a reasonable expense, um, you know, amongst their entire financial portfolio.

• 1:06:54Graham Stephan?

  What's crazy, I was looking at upgrading my Tesla and getting a new one. And when I'm looking at the used values of Teslas right now, I'm talking about the new redesigns, like 2024 newer. They're selling for almost the same price as a new one would cost.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  In Model Y or?

• 1:07:10Graham Stephan?

  Model Y, Model 3 performance specifically, and the Model X and S have now shot up in value about 20%.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Cause they were discontinued, yes. And look, Tesla is an interesting company and we have no idea what the future holds. But I, uh, I, I think it's going to be a fun one to watch. Uh, you know, whenever you're talking about trading from, you know, your current car to a newer version of the same thing. You have to value those marginal gains so much. So like people come up to me all the time and they're like, you know, are you sad that the cars that you love aren't made anymore? No, I'm not sad. I like having goals where the goalpost doesn't move. I like having a dream car that, you know, is, is its own thing. And I don't have to think, oh man, I hope they don't add CarPlay next year. Cause then I'll have to buy the new model year.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Cause I, no, none of my car radios work, but I don't care. I like to have like a finite target that I can, that I can aim for and strive for.

• 1:08:11Jack Selby?

  So what is your dream car?

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  My dream car really is a Murcielago. And when I bought my first one, I had like a proper identity crisis of like, well, why do I have to keep going to work? I mean, I still owed 12 years of payments on this car, let's be honest. But I was like, that was the dream was like to have this car and I've got one and I've had nine since then, because I love them that much. You know, when that was, that was the dream car. When we really started to gain some traction with VinWiki and I knew that I needed to like bear down and really, you know, grind at this stuff. I said, you know what, I, the only way I'm going to do a good job at this is if I have a stupid car goal. So I was like, I'm going to buy a Bugatti. And I, uh, I, I was like, well, that sounds like a, you know, stupid idea. How in the world am I going to buy a million dollar car?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Uh, but having that as kind of this background dripping faucet of a motivating goal, uh, you know, made me work harder. And when I bought it, I was like, well, darn it, you know, what am I going to do now? Cause I don't. Want a Valkyrie or some of these other great cars that people are well justified in wanting. I'd like a McLaren F1, but I don't really want to have enough money to have a thirty, forty million dollar car because that has other issues in your life that I'd prefer to avoid. So I don't know, I'm, I'm, I'm beyond content is the answer. And I, I love the stuff that I currently have.

• 1:09:29Graham Stephan?

  So what should people look for when they're buying a used car?

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Generally just getting a good inspection is enough and it's really a lot simpler than people think. We use a company called Lemon Squad where they can get out and inspect a car usually within like twenty-four hours, no matter where it is. It's kind of a gig economy solution. But you know, if you have time, take it to somebody who really knows these cars and have it looked at. It's not that expensive and it saves you. It, it more than pays for itself in the negotiating leverage to be able to say, well, I now know that this professional has evaluated that it needs this, that and this, and now I should owe you less for this car. And they can't argue with you because you've proven it.

• 1:10:07Graham Stephan?

  How much should an inspection cost?

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  I mean, Lemon Squad can be, you know, two hundred dollars or less. They can do it live from your phone if you need it done right then for like sixty bucks. And so you can just FaceTime a professional mechanic who will let you walk around the car and say, all right, open the hood, look at this, show me this, you know, and.

• 1:10:26Graham Stephan?

  I have problems with my cars that I don't, I'm not trying to sell them, but I would love to figure out. I took it to the, I took it to actual shop and they couldn't figure it out.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Call them sixty bucks.

• 1:10:36Graham Stephan?

  Holy moly. How accurate is that? Because I feel like the mechanics actually go in there and they like. It's the combobulator. That's what's broken on the car. But they open up the combobulator and they're able to see all the things, the widgets in the combobulator to know that, oh, that, that thing is broken.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Well, my Uber today on the way to the Atlanta airport had a roaring differential. I mean, it is going to grenade momentarily. And I'm not going to tell this guy that the way he earns a living is like that he desperately needs.

• 1:11:07Graham Stephan?

  Why wouldn't you tell him? I would tell him.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Oh, because they, they, nobody likes to hear that kind of thing. I don't know. Maybe I should have told him. I don't know.

• 1:11:13Graham Stephan?

  I would have told, you could message him and just, because what if he's in the middle of a ride and his whole thing blows up in the middle of the freeway?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  He wasn't unaware. The noise was profound.

• 1:11:23Graham Stephan?

  But maybe the bad hearing or something. Anyway.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll send him a message.

• 1:11:27Graham Stephan?

  Sweaty tires, you know, kind of sound system.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  I am not a mechanic. I am a, I pay mechanics and but it's not that hard to diagnose cars. And they could at least narrow it down to the three possible things that adds some AI and you're going to have a good day. So yeah, uh, by all means, somebody can remote diagnose your car.

• 1:11:48Graham Stephan?

  Where do you find the best deals?

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  I find the best deals in situations where I am not competing with people, where I will find that a car is available in a circumstance that would alienate most buyers. So my twenty-six thousand dollar McLaren, once again, it came with nine cars that I had to buy out of an estate. And so I bought three Corvettes and a Mustang and an R8 and an I8.

• 1:12:11Graham Stephan?

  Were they all flooded?

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  This guy was real high up at LabCorp and he was their CIO. And he had retired and started watching VinWiki videos. And it became a huge fan. It was like, Ed buys these terrible cars. I should do that too. And he bought them all. I mean, he bought a warehouse full of these things. And so then not because of that, he, uh, I got connected after he'd passed unfortunately because of cancer. And so his wife contacted a local Kia dealer asking how to sell all these salvage title exotic cars. And that person only knew to ask Ed Bolian. So he sent me a message and said, Ed, what do you do? And I told him, I said, well, generally you tell me what they are. You ask for a lot of money.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  I offer a little bit of money and we meet right smack dab in the middle at my original offer and I come get them. And he goes, oh, okay, we could do that. And so he asked for a bunch of money. I told him what I thought they were all worth, blind. I, I don't need any information. I'll tell you what, I know they can't be worth less than. And I, uh, and he said, all right, if you'll wire the money and come get them, you can have them tomorrow. So I get a bunch of trucks, we go up there and get them. We got all nine cars. I actually bought three and then they, they were so pleased with that. I bought the other six.

• 1:13:25Graham Stephan?

  Wait a second. So are you going to keep any of the cars for yourself or are you going to, they're already sold?

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gave one to my editor. He was, he took a new job and as a parting gift, I gave, let him pick and he chose a Corvette. I had already sold a couple of the R8 and the I8 to friends.

• 1:13:40Graham Stephan?

  You didn't call me.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  The, uh, well, they're all going to come up for sale in November. So they're going to come back around.

• 1:13:46Graham Stephan?

  Now the deal's done. Now the deal's done, man.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Well, and I actually, I, I thought a lot about that because I get endless requests for people like, hey, help me buy a car. And AI has not perfectly solved how I scale myself in that way yet. And so I, I was like, all right, let's use these cars as an experiment to see how this would work. Because I would love to just have, uh, I don't know what the best platform to use, a Patreon where you pay a hundred dollars a month. And I love all my cars. I'm not really looking to buy anything, but I get opportunities to buy something every day. I'm just going to put them all in a chat and you guys can just go buy them. I don't care. I don't need to make money on them or anything. You're paying for the access.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  I'm not making any representation of the cars other than this came across my desk. Here you go. And so I kind of did that. I guess I sent the list of these cars out to some friends. And like, the first one was like, well, what recourse do we have? And I'm like, none. It's a branded title car in, you know, North Carolina. Like, no, it's, we bought, you know, I was like, you cannot buy it because I'm going to buy it anyway, but like, that's not really how this is supposed to work. And then another one was like, well, you know, what is your mechanic going to do to it before I buy it for the price that I've already agreed to? I'm like, uh, nothing. It's, it's very much as is. And so it was, and, and they were not, they just don't think about buying cars the way that I do. And they shouldn't because it's stupid.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  And I, I understand that like, you know, it, it's not for everyone. And I'm trying to sort of figure out, I, I don't actually think my idea there would work because I think everybody would end up taking risks they probably shouldn't and winding up with cars that are worse. And sometimes they're better, sometimes they're worse. But you know, like when I bought my cheap Bentley, I drove it back and the guy had badly welded a wheel and it broke. But I carry a big box of everything that you could, you just to get somewhere. And so I've got to JB weld this wheel in a parking lot of a Love's and then air it back up. And nobody's going to do that. They're going to end up with a very expensive tow bill from somewhere in West Georgia that they don't even know where to take it. And then when it shows up, they don't have any paperwork yet to process.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  And I enjoy that mess because I've kind of built out the way it works, but it's not like a silver bullet to great deals.

• 1:16:05Graham Stephan?

  Got it. Okay. That makes sense. But please pass.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  I'll be happy to.

• 1:16:09Graham Stephan?

  Please keep us in mind. If you get a cool Audi R8. Yeah, I like the R8. He likes the I8 too. I'm iffy on the I8.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  So the R8 was like mid fifties, but it had a hundred and six thousand miles. And again, totally unknown, been sitting for a year, you know, by the time they got around to executing probate and selling stuff. You know, there was an I8, but it, you know, we, fortunately it was actually a really nice car, but we had to buy it thinking it's going to need a battery and all the things which could be in, you know, in.

• 1:16:39Graham Stephan?

  How much was the I8?

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Twenties.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  I think, yeah.

• 1:16:44Graham Stephan?

  I feel like I take the risk. Anything in the twenties, I'll risk it.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  So if you bought a car.

• 1:16:49Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  And it was twenty-five thousand bucks and maybe a great one's sixty. But you got to spend twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars and you still wind up on it. And, and then so you got fifty grand in a branded title car and the car's down for six months and you're like, why did I do this? And you got to pay cash and you got to pay before you see it. You know, it's not, it's not just an assembly line at the used car factory of all these great deals that just happened to go underwater at some point 10 years ago. That happens sometimes, but a lot of times you're like, oh, wow. This thing doesn't work at all.

• 1:17:22Graham Stephan?

  Okay. What's the most you've lost on a car?

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  I've never lost money on a car. Not that, I mean, cars that we like destroyed for production that were very inexpensive. I guess I've lost some money on it. I lost one when Freddie sold it on my behalf without my permission, but I let him know that that was unacceptable. My, you know, wife's daily driver cars have lost money, I guess, but like, not on like a, a car that I buy for fun or for content or.

• 1:17:47Graham Stephan?

  So how could other people then not ever lose money in a car?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Generally know everything that can go wrong about a car and create a margin between what you'll pay and what that could manifest as. So I have enough, you know, the worst thing that could happen on a twenty-six thousand dollar McLaren is that the engine blows up, which only happens like forty percent of the time. And so I was like, well, you know, I could buy an engine for probably thirty to forty thousand bucks. At that point, I'm going to retail out of this car. I may not make that much, but it'll be okay. So it's the ability to make the right offer and then put that offer to the right seller who for whatever reason isn't willing to or able to engage in a more competitive sales process.

• 1:18:31Graham Stephan?

  Why doesn't Hoovy's Garage follow your advice?

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Because it's not that entertaining to watch things go really, really well. We watch Tyler because he goes out and buys the cheapest example of whatever, when the next cheapest would have been a good car, but he buys the worst one. So we can learn all of the bad things that would happen and that is a really entertaining product. And then he spends money fixing it and then that becomes a problem. And then he's the dumbest automotive channel in all of YouTube that we've come to know and love, and it goes really well.

• 1:19:00Graham Stephan?

  What do you think of online auction sites like Bring a Trailer and Cars and Bids?

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  They're wonderful. They, they operate on a little bit of a new fallacy that most cars are not actually seven or 10 day liquid. They have been for the last seven or eight years because of unique things that again are macroeconomic trends where there's a lot more liquidity, there's a lot more enthusiasm and things like that. But they sort of represent a very, very hard to.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  Quantify reality. They're very good ways to liquidate cars. It is important to engage with them in the right way, to represent your car the right way, take the right pictures, get the right inspections done, do all the stuff beforehand to make sure that your car brings the most money. But the fact that they have solved the critical mass attention issue, that there are enough bidders and things like that on there, you know, to me is awesome. We've had a lot of sponsors on VinWiki of these different upstart car companies or auction companies. And it is, it's really, really hard. Like it's probably the most expensive cost of user acquisition that I've ever seen in the automotive world. You know, short of finding a brand new Rolls Royce buyer, I don't know that you could have to spend much more money. I think right now, based on what I've seen, it's probably between

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  fifteen and twenty thousand dollars of marketing expense to acquire a true retail value winning bidder that has seven days of discovery on a car remotely. When we started doing it with another one, it was probably five thousand dollars. And, and I can see that based on what they spend with me and the number of really successful things they have. Now, that's discounting the customer lifetime value, which is significant because most people end up buying five, six, seven cars there. It becomes a habit. So I think they can break even or beyond that if they're only making a five to seven percent, you know, fee on top of that. But yeah, it's, it's a very competitive space and no one's really been able to do it without a pre-existing social audience.

• 1:21:00Graham Stephan?

  And when you buy a car, how do you effectively negotiate? Like, what are the strategies that you use? Not just coming up with the price and this is what it is minus forty percent. How do you schmooze?

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  So that's the problem is most people think, oh, I'm just gonna lowball them. I'm gonna give them an unqualified, low casual offer and just see what they say. Like, oh, you're asking a hundred thousand. Well, you'd take sixty, right? No, like that's, but if I come in and I'm like, look, I totally understand that a hundred thousand dollars is reasonable. And if you can find someone who wants that exact spec right now and can manage to, you know, either get it financed or pay cash, likely have to pay cash because of all these circumstances that makes it more desirable to me. And, you know, doesn't require any reconditioning, then sure, that makes sense. But look, let's be honest, I know that it needs these three things because all of them need these three things. And I'm not gonna make us go through all the hoops and get it trucked across town to get it inspected to prove it.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  I am willing to fully commit at a number that accommodates for the risk that I'd be taking. And I'm not gonna need anything beyond this. If you say yes, I'm wiring the money right now. I am fully committed to this offer. And it is less than I know you want, but it'll be the easiest transaction you've ever had. And I'm never gonna call you unless you wanna know what happened to it. And if it blows up on the way past your mailbox, it's my problem. They're gonna go, wow, that sounds like a really nice way to sell a car. And this guy really seems to know what he's doing. And the only way he's gonna talk me into paying more is like, well, I can prove that it doesn't need this, or I can prove that it won't need that. And then we start to have a little bit of a different discussion.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  But that's how you negotiate. You negotiate from a point of a hundred percent commitment.

• 1:22:41Graham Stephan?

  Do you do this over the phone or in person? And what's the difference between the two?

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  Usually over the phone. If you negotiate in person, you're too committed. Like, they know that you, you've driven, you've traveled, like, you're not gonna go home without this car. So you need to know when, so I like to buy them cheap enough that it's reasonable to do it blind.

• 1:23:01Graham Stephan?

  So let's just say I'm browsing Facebook Marketplace, because this is what I've been doing. And it's not worked. I've been looking at really good deals for like twenty twenty-two to twenty twenty-four Tesla Model S and X. And I know exactly where they sell. I know the market really well based on the mileage. And usually what I'll do is I'll lowball ten to fifteen percent below. But I'll send them a message saying, hey, I'll pay you this. And if you agree to it, I'll come and pick it up right now, cash buyer. But everyone said no. So am I doing it wrong? Should I be getting a phone number first? Like, hey, I got a few questions, would love to chat over the phone? And then pitch it over the phone? Like, do you think that makes that big of a difference?

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think you need to think about why someone is taking a fairly new Tesla to Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Marketplace is where you go buy some real junk. And I like that. I spend a lot of time there. But I don't go there thinking like, I'm gonna buy a great car today. I'm gonna buy a two hundred thousand mile Maserati that runs on half the motor. Like, that's what I'm gonna do. And then I'm probably gonna, I know I'm gonna have to push it somewhere sometime. If, uh, if they're advertising a twenty twenty-two Tesla on Marketplace, they owe too much money and they have to get that amount of money in order to pay their loan off. That's the only circumstance where they're gonna have it. Otherwise, it would have taken...

• 1:24:21Graham Stephan?

  See, I see somewhere it says like upgraded to a Cybertruck, selling this.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Because they, they didn't wanna take the trade allowance. Yeah. So if they, they're not willing to take what it's actually worth, so they're out there looking for that rich guy in Dubai or that rich YouTuber from Vegas to come in, to come in and overpay for it because they, they have this hope that they're gonna get that last dollar out of it.

• 1:24:42Graham Stephan?

  So if I wanna buy a private party specifically, because there's no sales tax in Vegas for private party, used car transactions, where do I go?

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  That is, that's a fun wrinkle because that might motivate people that they think that they're not getting, because you do get trade credits on dealer transactions, correct? So they've given, they decided that even seven, eight percent more than what I was being allowed on the trade was not enough. So private parties, I mean, you can sort by private party listings on all...

• 1:25:12Graham Stephan?

  There's so few of them, which is weird.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  It is strange, which means that dealers know they have to pay more. And so we had that in Georgia twenty years ago. It was only sales tax on new and used through dealers. And so it was a huge disadvantage and the dealers lobby hard to have sales taxes instituted on private party transactions to avoid this dilemma. And, but, you know, it does create this spread of like, it's, you, you're buying cars for less at dealers than you would pay it for a private party because it still makes sense.

• 1:25:44Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. So when you worked at a Lamborghini dealer, what did the best customers do different from everyone else?

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  The best customers focus on the value delta of the way that they're experiencing it to make a hobby that they really like most sustainable. In my opinion. Now, the customers that do things differently, that just come in and trade every six months for whatever it costs, because that's the adventure they wanna go on, or they come in and they spec two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of options on a car because that's the way that they feel that they've expressed their love of the automobile most, are also right. But when I put the, the people that I admired and I wanted to emulate in my own ownership, it was the people that were really conscious of the economics of it. And, and that's the reason they asked me to come work at the store because, you know,

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  in working in the rental car industry, I knew exactly how much it costs to put every single mile on each of these cars. All factors in because that is the only way I could know if I was ever gonna make any money. And so they wanted that applied to the broader scope of like multi-year ownership so I could help people counsel through the inevitable depreciation that was, because I started there in oh nine. So these were unsellable automobiles.

• 1:26:57Graham Stephan?

  How much wiggle room is there actually in price on a Ferrari or a Lamborghini?

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  That totally depends. Generally, the spread between invoice and MSRP on most new cars is gonna be between eight and fifteen percent. There will be periodic incentives, rebates, things like that that could go beyond that. That's on new cars. Most used car dealers start from about an eight to ten percent margin and will end up making one to three percent net after everything's paid out. Now, that doesn't mean that you can negotiate all of it away because they actually have to generate some gross profit to keep the lights on. And so, you know, generally speaking, you know, wiggle room is probably going to be on the order of, you know, five to twenty percent depending on the car.

• 1:27:40Jack Selby?

  What percent of the people that bought Lamborghinis at the Lamborghini dealership, would you say was a financially irresponsible move for them to purchase that car?

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

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• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  So that would mean that they were buying beyond what they could likely sustainably afford? Because you could say that, you know, someone that I knew was going to lose $100,000 on a car. Well, if they're worth $100 million, that doesn't really matter. So, but people who were stretching a lot to where if the car broke in a meaningful way, or if the car depreciated beyond what might be anticipated, that could become really problematic. That was probably 20 to 25%?

• 1:29:11Graham Stephan?

  That's not that bad, actually. 20 to 25%. If someone is going to purchase a car, what percentage of their income do you think like it should max at?

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  I would say that the banks rule at the loan amount, the cumulative amount of all your car loans should probably be less than you make in a year. And that's excessive by most financial advisor standards. But if you're in that zone, you're probably not, again, at risk of a terrible maintenance event or additional depreciation really crippling you.

• 1:29:41Graham Stephan?

  Wait, explain that again?

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  If your total loan amount, you have a $100,000 loan, you should make a hundred grand a year.

• 1:29:47Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Graham Stephan?

  What type of customers most frequently buying a Lamborghini? Is it someone worth $3,030,000, $300,000?

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  It's lower than you would think. In that, and it's gotten a little bit stronger because the new car sales have gone up a lot since I was there. But generally, I would say that the people were probably $1 to $2 million net worth that were buying $100,000 to $200,000 cars.

• 1:30:12Graham Stephan?

  So in order to just buy a Lamborghini, you'd probably say this person needs to make at least $200,000 a year?

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Well, given that most, you know, new Lamborghinis are now $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, $600,000, I would say that you probably need to make at least half a million dollars a year to go buy a brand new one. You want to buy a used Gallardo for a hundred grand, you could make $75,000 a year and not have any real risk. I mean, that needs to be your only vice.

• 1:30:35Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  Right? And that's one of the things, like, if you have a real job, you can have one vice. It could be eating really nice food, traveling a lot, doing, you know, Pokemon cards, whatever. Or it could be a heavily depreciated, interesting car.

• 1:30:50Graham Stephan?

  What would you say is your vice?

• 1:30:53Graham Stephan?

  I just like working. I don't know. I like working and saving. I don't, I don't have a vice.

• 1:30:59Jack Selby?

  Like a financial vice, there's not nothing that you're willing?

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  What's the most money you spent on a single thing or event in the last 12 or 18 months?

• 1:31:07Graham Stephan?

  Well, it was that Heritage Auctions. It was a three-piece storyboard set, the key scene from Nightmare Before Christmas.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:16Graham Stephan?

  Where Jack and Sally hold hands on top of the hill. That was it.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  How much was it?

• 1:31:21Graham Stephan?

  Under $20,000.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Okay. If you think about the last five years, are most of the similar magnitude purchases art or, you know, significant collectibles?

• 1:31:31Graham Stephan?

  I don't really spend, like, I only spend money if I feel like it's gonna be an investment. Yeah. Like, if I, if I bought this thing, I bought it because I liked it, but I also bought it because I felt like it's underappreciated, undervalued, and I can't see why I wouldn't sell for triple. So that's how I look at it. I don't like buying things where I know the money's just gone.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  So what's the last thing that you bought with no concern of its future value? Or an experience that you spent money on?

• 1:31:57Graham Stephan?

  First-class plane ticket.

• 1:32:00Jack Selby?

  I would say the aquarium, you know?

• 1:32:02Graham Stephan?

  No, but that's not, it's 20, 30 bucks here, and that's a cleaner shrimp. I mean, it's not like-

• 1:32:07Jack Selby?

  Well, I meant the, the actual purchase of the aquarium itself.

• 1:32:10Graham Stephan?

  Uh, yeah, but that was six years ago. I would say a first-class plane ticket, that was the last time I had spent money where I did not think of an- Even then, I thought of an ROI. It was like, if I could get work done, I could make that back at least. And then it's a free flight.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:32:26Graham Stephan?

  But everything is an ROI.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  How much do you have in the aquarium?

• 1:32:30Graham Stephan?

  50 grand, give or take.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:32Graham Stephan?

  And that's probably worth now 12.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Right. So that is a vice, that's a hobby. And I think it's a wonderful hobby. I've got an expensive boa constrictor. And so I agree that that can be a really, really lovely thing that can add value to your life and peace as you stare at it. And so that would be a good example. And like, that's a huge expense, right? Lighting, like $50,000, $40,000 on fire is a lot. You need to derive value. And so for that, you could have owned a very, a couple of very interesting cars in that same time and delta. And, you know, and, but you, you could do that on, that's a lot. But I mean, you could do that on a $50,000 to $100,000 salary over time if you saved and if you were disciplined.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  And so, but if you did that, you would need to not travel in first class and things like that. And so I think the same is true for interesting cars, that you can own one for a lot less than you would think. You just do have to discipline yourself in the rest of life's asset allocation.

• 1:33:33Graham Stephan?

  So if someone gave you a million dollars to build a perfect five-car collection, and what would it be? 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. So if someone gave you a million dollars to build a perfect five-car collection, and what would it be?

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  I would buy a, an edgy e-gear Lamborghini Murcielago for, let's say, 300 grand. I would buy a Mercedes McLaren SLR for about 300 grand. I would buy a manual transmission Ferrari 360. So I'd have a manual open-top car for 150. And I'd have 250 left to spend.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  And I'd, I'd want some kind of a, probably an S-Class of some sort to drive around, or a Bentley that's depreciated. And something for the family. If it was gonna be something else interesting, I'd probably buy a 911 variant that I could just beat on. But yeah, that'd kind of be it.

• 1:34:49Graham Stephan?

  The one I really like, when you said Bentley, the Bentley Bentaygas.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Graham Stephan?

  Like a 2017, I'm seeing them now in the 60s.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. You can buy them in the 30s if you're crazy enough.

• 1:34:59Graham Stephan?

  Is that a bad car to buy?

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:35:01Graham Stephan?

  Why?

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Because they, they will mechanically total themselves. Meaning that when things go badly, you can't justify fixing them for the eventual value that they still have. I still love them. I own the same thing as a sedan. And it is, uh, it's not responsible. But, you know, it, they're lovely cars. And same, same Range Rovers, any of these things, same thing.

• 1:35:27Graham Stephan?

  In terms of resale, how much does a unique spec matter?

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  That's a really, really hard thing, because you can look at certain cars where special specs can double the value. Having to paint a sample 918 or Carrera GT doubles the value at the moment, which is really hard to say. But there is a seven-figure desirability delta between colors. But the market right now is saying that it is. I don't view that as long-term sustainable. As cars get really valuable, we see more of a compression across specs that people just, if, if one is available, they do that. You know, so it's, it's generally not that big of a deal. Used car buyers have a preference towards spec.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  But like, if you were really faced with an apples-to-apples delta to go from a 7,000-mile white GT to pay another $400,000, $500,000 for a Heritage car? I don't think you're gonna do it. Maybe 100 grand, 200 grand, which still feels crazy because it's paint and you could wrap it for five grand to look the same way. But people do. And it is, in those cases, a reasonable store of value, and they're probably gonna get it back. And so that's the kind of thing that you would justify, and I would struggle hard. Because you see that, and you're right, that if that is the primary focus for the ownership, that this is just kind of a, you know, it's a wash. I'm gonna pay the delta that the market has. I expect that delta to prevail over time.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm right to do it. I would say I can't possibly get the marginal enjoyment out of that color, and so I'm just gonna buy it. That's why I have a red over red Bugatti with red wheels.

• 1:37:02Graham Stephan?

  But are certain colors getting a premium right now? It seems like for Ferrari, it's yellow.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Yellow is bigger than red. Green is bigger than everything. Orange doesn't work for Ferraris because they always look like a, just a picture's unsaturated because everybody thinks it's red. But on a Lamborghini, uh, green is a 20 to 30% premium. Orange is up there. And so, yes, there are certainly situations where that happens.

• 1:37:25Graham Stephan?

  And what about people trying to deduct cars on taxes? Cause we recently posted with Stradman, got in trouble deducting cars as props, but then paying tax on it when he realized the gain, but he would be just rolling it into future cars.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  So again, I'm not an accountant and you know,

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  realizing automotive gains is a really difficult thing to do for any accountant, because there are obviously expenses that could offset them, but you're not really supposed to do that as a normal tax return. And so I would say everybody defer there. I am comfortable with basis shifting in trades, particularly given the fact that it's totally legal for paperwork to reflect different values if there is, as long as the actual cash outlay delta is well documented. You know, I, there's, it's also perfectly reasonable for people to treat themselves more as dealers, where they can treat the, the gains more as revenue or income as opposed to, and then the basis being the expense of the car.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of ways that you can do it and get away with it. I think entirely legally, but you know, if you're going to out, go out there and realize a bunch of gains, you do need to plan to, to pay for it.

• 1:38:41Graham Stephan?

  Steve Hamilton alleged that Ferrari and Pagani understate their car counts, their manufacturer counts. Do you think that there's any validity to that claim? Or do you think that that's false?

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely true. Um, it's very well documented. I built an app for it. And so like, for instance, Ferrari said they made 399 Ferrari Enzos plus one for the Pope. And there's well over 500 of them in our app. So they, you know, undercounted by more than 25%. Uh, that's happened a lot. And that's why they now don't have a number out of, uh, you know, a lot Ferrari just said, limited to 499, uh, and they'll do that forever. That now they say one of 799 or whatever they're making.

• 1:39:24Graham Stephan?

  So when did they stop doing that and actually sticking with the number? Was it the Barca?

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  550 Barca's, uh, Super Americas were numbered, um, and 599 SA Aperitas, uh, were numbered. And there are some of their duplicates of certain.

• 1:39:39Graham Stephan?

  No.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  Out of 80. Yeah, there's like, you know, multiples.

• 1:39:43Graham Stephan?

  So what's that?

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Of course, there's like zero and zero, zero and zero, zero, zero is prototypes.

• 1:39:48Graham Stephan?

  No.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. With like F50s, they had post-production prototypes because they just wanted to build some more.

• 1:39:53Graham Stephan?

  Is that legal?

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  No, it is fraud, but uh, what are you, you're going to sue them?

• 1:40:01Graham Stephan?

  For an extra car?

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  You're going to sue Ferrari for defrauding you on your car that was immediately worth a million dollars over MSRP, that it should have been worth more than a million dollars over MSRP. And you're going to have a jury of your peers hear that case and say that, yeah, you're right. You deserved more profit, guy that's rich. I think they're pretty safe. And it's the same way as like, you know, you're not allowed to sell your car. You're allowed to sell your car whenever you want. No, you know, limitation of your ability to sell your car is remotely enforceable legally. But people sign these contracts that again are unenforceable because that's the requirement of the manufacturer. If they sell them, they just don't get any more cars from that manufacturer.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  So it's internally enforced.

• 1:40:50Graham Stephan?

  That's so interesting. You were telling us before the podcast that you have data on the general car loan market and how much equity certain people have in cars. And, and this whole fascinating financial system behind the car market. Could you expand a little bit on that?

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  So I'm always been fascinated by the data and the economics of how car ownership fundamentally works. And so I have been working with Experian and Autocheck, which is unique because they have an auto data set in Autocheck, which is much like Carfax, but they're Experian, they're a credit bureau. So they know everything. And so we've been trying to understand what can be revealed and what cannot. And so I'm going to work on some content with them because I just think it's the most fascinating thing in the world to understand like what percentage of buyers of each type of car are financing them, leasing them, paying cash, things like that. So well, uh, I'll pull some of it out and we'll make a VinWiki video here after that.

• 1:41:45Graham Stephan?

  I would love to hear about it.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:48Graham Stephan?

  Can you reveal one of the most shocking statistics that you found?

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  It looks like I'm the only person to used car lease a Bugatti in the last five years.

• 1:41:59Graham Stephan?

  Really? So explain, explain the mechanics behind this.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was able to get some data about like new car leasing versus, and it was like 0.5% of used Bugattis are structured as a lease. And maybe it was just me and Hookey because he did lease his through Premier Financial as well. Um, and so, you know, to me, that's really interesting because there's not that many transactions.

• 1:42:19Graham Stephan?

  That's got to be you. So you are.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So sometimes you see a data set and you're like, well, I know who that one was. And so it was me.

• 1:42:25Graham Stephan?

  Is there anything that you see that worries you about the car market crashing? We see so much right now about like upside down loans and negative equity in these cars. And people can't afford to get rid of them.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  That will impact the new car market. It doesn't really impact the world that I play in, but yes, there is the perfect storm for catastrophic depreciation in some new cars, which, you know, fortunately, all that means is that some people will not be able to trade as fast or as often as they might like to.

• 1:42:53Graham Stephan?

  Is there a chance though, they just stop making the payments?

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Of course. Yeah. But again, the magnitude of that exposure isn't that great. Even, you know, for the banks to absorb a 10, 20% negative equity. It's not like the housing market in 2008 where, you know, you could have billions or trillions of dollars worth of exposure. It's not that bad.

• 1:43:14Graham Stephan?

  Is there any car that's in a bubble right now that you disagree with?

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Like I said, a lot of the cars that have really exploded in the last little while are, are situations where the market or the owners of those cars at large would not turn down the recent highest price if they were offered it. And so that means that theoretically they're going to start trying to sell a lot of cars. And so if F12s are actually worth $500,000 when they were worth $200,000 last year, that has to equalize, right? Because people aren't going to rebuy their car at that number tomorrow if they have the option. And so those are bubbles, right? That something's got to give either there has to be a continuous flood of, you know,

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  new interest in the cars, or they've got to get to a point where, um, you know, the market comes back down and the bubble pops. Uh, but I don't think it's going to pop that dramatically. I think it's just going to be like, oh yeah, they're only worth what they were worth yesterday, plus a little bit.

• 1:44:15Graham Stephan?

  So if we hit a recession, what do you think happens first?

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  I don't think cars are the, you know, canary in the coal mine for a recession. Um, I think, you know, home inventory is always a good thing, but the, the canary in the coal mine for the next recession is going to be unemployment. If, if AI causes unemployment, which we know it does, we don't know the extent to which it is. But you know, if we start to get to a point where there is nine, 10, 12% unemployment, especially as we even contemplate what 20, 25% unemployment would look like, which is what some of these guys are forecasting, that's where you start to really, really worry. Um, you know, I think there are other interesting indicators of, you know, if we start to see lower aspiration, right?

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  If people just become a lot more content to not work hard or accumulate any wealth, they become very apathetic and lazy is not the right word, but it just becomes trendier to not care about anything aspirational. That's horrifying, right? Cause then you don't have a labor market. You don't have people that are willing to work hard, all that.

• 1:45:23Graham Stephan?

  It's already starting.

• 1:45:29Graham Stephan?

  I was going to ask you if you thought that it was already starting.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Oh, because you're so lazy. Is that what you're pointing at?

• 1:45:33Graham Stephan?

  That's not a joke.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  This guy not pulling his weight. I see it. Yeah. I mean, you've been a lot, way more words tonight. But you know, I think yes, there is a lot of that starting. And what I hope is that Gen Alpha recognizes this and they, they start to enter a workforce where, you know, there's just a vacuum of motivation and they can just supersede their bosses and their bosses' bosses so fast just by working hard and trying. And I think that's the biggest opportunity for young people today.

• 1:46:03Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. What do you think is the future for our economy in the next five years?

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  I am probably not the right person to ask.

• 1:46:10Graham Stephan?

  You are, you are the right person to ask.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  I think there are so many trends that are wildly troubling. Things like you should not buy a house, you should rent. Maybe economically, this can be justified, but there is no greater creation of wealth in the history of the world than the equity component, principal payment of the component of your mortgage payment. You, yes, you could be disciplined and save that exact amount in a good investment product over time and come out ahead, but the likelihood that you will do that without fail is zero. The likelihood that you will make your mortgage payment is really, really high.

• 1:46:51Speaker 01

  And so, yes, there might be a net loss or a parasitic effect, but like, people should buy homes. It is the, there's a reason that most millionaires are homeowners and it's not because they're wealthy enough to buy homes. It's because long-term equity payments matter. So things like that, this drive, this idea that you should not go to college. Well, sure, it's really hard to justify $250,000 in student loans over time. But at the same time, having adulthood with training wheels for a few years after you're 18 years old versus going out in the workforce has a lot of value. And so I think that's something where, you know, we need to start reevaluating some of

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  these popular, you know, meme-worthy social trends that work well in infographics and say, you know what, maybe that's not actually good for society for us to move in certain directions when we extrapolate over decades and generations.

• 1:47:48Graham Stephan?

  So what's your advice to your own children in terms of what they should be doing in the future?

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Well, none of the jobs that I've pretty much had even existed when I was their age. And so I get invited to a lot more career days as a YouTuber than a used car salesman. And, and that's one of the things we talk about is like, you know, most of the things that you're going to end up making money doing are jobs that don't exist yet. So adaptability is the most valuable commodity. The ability to say, all right, this is the landscape that I am facing and these are the things that I may want to accomplish. And how do I overlay that with the talents and the gifts that I have and the things that I've learned to create opportunity? Because it's not going to look like it did for, you know, my parents' generation, certainly most of the people my age, where you just kind of enter the work, you go to a job fair, pass out some resumes, get a real job, you know, picket fence and all.

• 1:48:38Graham Stephan?

  And how do you teach them that quality?

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  You put them in uncomfortable situations where they have to adapt. You celebrate the times where they didn't know exactly how to succeed, but they prevailed. They overcame. You give them adversity so that they can have a little bit of a, you know, shallower pool sometimes when they jump in. Uh, and again, I think you just hope and pray.

• 1:48:59Graham Stephan?

  And what's your long-term plan with VinWiki?

• 1:49:03Speaker 00

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• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting because, you know, we've been making content nearly daily for about the same amount of time and seeing what's happened in the space over that period is so wild. I think that, you know, the opportunity when we first started was like, you could almost make a living. And then it became, well, you could make a pretty decent living. And then it became, well, you might be able to even support a, a co-star or a staff or a facility or something like that. Or maybe you could buy a Bugatti with a giant irresponsible loan. Like, that didn't exist when we started. And so now that does exist. And then now we're kind of going, I think the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction where the appeal of calling yourself a content creator or YouTuber is so high that people are coming in and like, as long as I can like pay my bills, I'm happy to do it.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  And so they're making content that's really, really good and relatively inexpensive. And so it's noisy, but for good reason. The platforms are working. They're getting the opportunity. They are out there making, you know, $5,000 to $10,000 a month making content. And that's amazing, but you know, that doesn't support all of the infrastructure. And so, you know, when I think about the future of VinWiki, I think about it kind of in the same way, in the context of content creation to say that, you know, it's going to change. We are the old people in the room and we see in most cases, some decline in viewership, 10, 20, 30% relative to what it was, maybe at its high five, four, three years ago. And I think that that's okay.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  I think we all have kind of a life cycle and that may result in reinvention. It may result in some experimentation. It may result in, you know, just saying it's been amazing and I see no reason not to keep making the next podcast or inviting the next guest to tell a car story. And that we just sort of ride it into whatever that becomes. I think as the noise goes up, the dedication also goes up. The people that, you know, want to walk up to you in an event or the guy that sees you at the airport says, man, I just love your content. I love what you're doing. I appreciate you putting it out there and the things that you stand for. And so, you know, to me, that's really the future is we, we continue doing it.

• 1:51:59Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  Cause it's, it's working so far.

• 1:52:01Graham Stephan?

  And I think the future for you, by the way, is in your back catalog videos because a lot of them don't have you in it. And my gosh, I mean, the amount of value that someone would be able to get by owning your back catalog.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  Well, and there have been different places that pop up to do that, to pay you money for that sort of thing. I've loved that because they all call, because VinWiki is enough not me that as they think about the value in the automotive vertical, they, they find me and we talk about it. And so seeing all the different ways that people are offering, you know, debt products, equity products, repurposing products, platform deployment and all that, I think is really, really interesting because it is, like you say, that is the way that we make the most of the opportunity. And I kind of view it on two fronts. Like, yes, I need to extract the most value as one can because it is my career, but I also need to be the right steward of the audience's attention to know that like, to do well by the storytellers and to do well by what we're doing. That's why we try to, you know, raise the stakes with Car Trek and other, you know,

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  car buying and other things like that, the adventures, but also just to make sure that there's value.

• 1:53:03Graham Stephan?

  So who do you think of all of the car YouTubers is the worst with money?

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  Well, there's one that comes to mind. But, you know, I'd, I'd like to think there's a bigger picture where that he's really going to put it together. Um, and that will, uh, yeah, certainly run to second place, which is also pretty easy to define. Uh, but, you know, I think that it's, it's interesting because all of our content has different demands, right? Of what people are there to see. You know, sometimes they want to see you be really, really smart and sometimes they don't. And sometimes they want to see you buy really, really good cars and sometimes they don't. And sometimes they think you're really going to put your life together and make all the right decisions and sometimes you don't.

• 1:53:40Graham Stephan?

  So who is it?

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  I don't know. I can't really put a pace on it.

• 1:53:44Graham Stephan?

  Okay. Cool. That's fair. Who is the best with money?

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Daddy Doug. It's always Doug, Doug Demiro is certainly kind of beaten the game in this form. And I think it's great to see that. I think, you know, you look at the success of Hoonigan, uh, is also great. The guys that started Donut did really well. In most of those cases, post-acquisition, it's not as good. And I think that is sort of the biggest thing that the industry would solve is to try to figure out like, you know, well, what do we offer in terms of a transitional plan or an opportunity to scale that really makes the most sense?

• 1:54:19Graham Stephan?

  Cool. Perfect. Thank you.

• 1:54:21Jack Selby?

  You want to come say hi?

• 1:54:24Graham Stephan?

  Look who we have here. Wow.

• 1:54:27Speaker 05

  How did Mr. Bullion do this?

• 1:54:28Graham Stephan?

  It was great.

• 1:54:29Speaker 05

  Rubbish.

• 1:54:30Graham Stephan?

  Fantastic. Terrible. There's, there's very few people who are as good as a, in the warehouse. Speaker is, yeah, really. No ums, no ahs.

• 1:54:38Speaker 05

  Example of what to do versus what not to do when I show up, basically, right?

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  Every story needs a bookend.

• 1:54:44Graham Stephan?

  Are you guys wearing matching watches?

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  Oh goodness.

• 1:54:46Graham Stephan?

  Look at this.

• 1:54:47Speaker 05

  I got a GMT.

• 1:54:49Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. Pretty close.

• 1:54:51Graham Stephan?

  You should have worn your subject.

• 1:54:52Jack Selby?

  I know, I didn't know.

• 1:54:53Graham Stephan?

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  Send the memo out.

• 1:54:56Graham Stephan?

  Well, so explain what brings you to Vegas?

• 1:54:58Speaker 05

  I got this guy hired at Barrett-Jackson.

• 1:55:01Graham Stephan?

  You got him a job.

• 1:55:01Speaker 05

  Had to work with me. Kind of the old guard, some of the old guard there, uh, they're busy. They have other things going on. So, uh, got Ed for Las Vegas for the, uh, the auction first time. So he'll be up on the block with me doing commentary on TV. So it's television, Ed, it's live.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  We're not accustomed to such things.

• 1:55:17Graham Stephan?

  Are you, are you nervous going live like this?

• 1:55:20Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:55:20Graham Stephan?

  How many cars do you think Tyler is going to buy?

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  Two. Too many is how many he's going to buy. But, uh, he will, they have, they have never lost money hiring Tyler. I can tell you that much.

• 1:55:33Graham Stephan?

  Is it, is it true that he's going to spend the money back on the cars?

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  Oh, and more, always. Yes. They, they give you a line of credit, Tyler? It's available. They got, I'm sure they got a table for it.

• 1:55:45Graham Stephan?

  Oh my gosh. Cool. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. Thank you for doing this and coming out to Vegas, filming with us.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  It's worked great.

• 1:55:53Graham Stephan?

  To all of your information down below in the description. And for the video that we do together, I'll link to it as well.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.

• 1:56:00Graham Stephan?

  Oh, and by the way, for all the channel members out there, huge thank you. If you want to see our next episode that's already live early for channel members, here's the trailer for it.

• 1:56:10Speaker 06

  Elon Musk, the world's richest person, has also become the world's first trillionaire.

• 1:56:15Speaker 07

  And every civilization that has rose has fallen because of a growing wealth gap.

• 1:56:21Graham Stephan?

  At what point though, does the wealth gap get so big that all of a sudden something has to break?

• 1:56:26Speaker 07

  It is profitable to keep you financially stupid. It is profitable to keep you poor. Most Americans today would rather look rich than be rich.

• 1:56:35Speaker 06

  Over 40% of us are unfamiliar with Roth IRAs, money market accounts and high-yield savings.

• 1:56:40Speaker 07

  It is so rigged, it is unfair. It is rigged towards investors.

• 1:56:44Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think is the biggest risk for the economy that no one is going to see coming?

• 1:56:49Speaker 07

  Right now, we have about $40 trillion of national debt. We are spending about $2 trillion a year that we don't have right now.

• 1:56:56Graham Stephan?

  Do you think it's a negative that right now stocks are near their all-time highs?

• 1:57:00Speaker 07

  The best investors, because don't sell.

• 1:57:05Graham Stephan?

  And what can the average person do to protect themselves?

• 1:57:08Speaker 07

  You're one paycheck away from your family being broke because if you want to be rich...

• 1:57:16Graham Stephan?

  It's incredible. We had so much fun filming it. So with that said, enjoy, and that's ready to watch right now.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Cool. Thanks so much. Till next time. I think GTA is a magical moment for our culture.

• 1:57:29Graham Stephan?

  So what's your biggest trade coming up?

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  Like, it's going to do phenomenal.

• 1:57:35Graham Stephan?

  What about?

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  I'm not excited about, I don't own any right now, but I still think the main trade is on take two.

• 1:57:43Graham Stephan?

  What are your thoughts on?

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58:11Speaker 06

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