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

Well, how does it feel to be wealthy now after after grinding that to this for so long it's better than before it is

I want to give you an intro because I've been a fan of yours forever and I in

2019 or 2020 when our podcast was much smaller. I told Sean about you

I go this guy Doug is very fascinating. I think you should launch like some type of like car website

I'm not sure then you did and then we talked about it

And I'm like I'm pretty sure this is gonna be huge and so I want to take a little bit

I want to take like 1% you know, I helped you succeed

I get a little bit of credit cuz I picked you you're my you're my horse and I bet there's something real

I'm sure we'll discuss this but there's something real about that like I tell all my

Friends now in this space like you need to start businesses like this will not last forever

You need to start businesses and I think smart people who look learn the business world kind of realize them

And you are my you are my guy and so for the audience who don't know

So Doug tomorrow has a it started as a you're just a youtuber

I guess I mean you're originally a journalist for a bunch of different websites where you would write these funny quirky

Blogs then you part laid that into a YouTube channel that I think now has like four million subscribers

But the reason why you're huge and lovable is for a few different reasons one

You dress really funny

So like you'll wear like khaki shorts like from the early 2000s with like a red polo shirt

And then your white undershirt will be longer than the sleeves of your polo shirt

So it's like hanging out those sleeves and like you just dressed like horribly even though your videos each get like two or three

Million views like you're on a Jay Leno's

Pod or you're on Jay Leno's YouTube like a few days ago and you're wearing so cony like running shoes

I'm like, what are you doing, dude?

Well, Jay Jay is not like Jay's dressing up, you know, so I feel like there's not a high bar there

Anyway, you're just like you're very likable because of the way you dress. You're very funny. You're very

Quirky because that's one of your things is talking about the quirks of it cars. You're very quirky

You're very relatable

And so you've grown this YouTube channel to like four million subscribers you launched this company called cars and bids which is like

Almost like eBay, but for different types of cars cars enthusiast so cars from the 80s 90s and early 2000s

And then recently you sold the majority of the business to churning group for around 40 million dollars

I believe when it was only like two or three years old. Yeah, I've bought cars from the website. So anyway, I'm a big fan

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you for having me

I am I just listened to so I just bought a car a couple months ago for three or three four months. Oh, and

It was your YouTube video that put me over the edge

I bought an escalade and I was looking for a review your review has 1.7 million views

I was like, okay, this got to be the best one

Like Sam said, I was surprised because I'm not a car guy at all

And also I had never seen your stuff. I had only heard Sam talk about you on the podcast

So I actually didn't put two two together that oh, that's the same guy that Sam's been talking about

Watch the video and I was like, I don't know why I trust this guy

What's the what's the key to to being the sort of likeable trustworthy guy? Is that just who you are?

Did you did you play anything up in your YouTube videos? Is there is there any strict strategy here or is it all just?

That's just who you were. No

That's a good question and and the answer is there is remarkably little strategy

I just in fact if you go and watch the videos from before I had a lot of subscribers, they're pretty much the same

So it's not like, you know, it's not like I knew what the hell I was doing when I had 200,000 subscribers

It's not like I knew where this was gonna go

but I really think I think one of the reasons though that I kind of did it this way is that a

Lot of people come to me and they're like, I'm gonna make the best car videos with 4k drones and high-quality

Sound and music and all this stuff and I just wanted to like kind of show people like you actually can do this

As long as the content is good

You can just do this like you can just do it in your garage. You're just using an iPhone, right?

Basically the shots where I'm like in them. There's like it's a cam. It's a Sony 4k camcorder

Which isn't cheap, but it's also not like a crazy camera and then an iPhone is yeah, half the video is done on my

And like you're editing if I remember correctly up until recently like until the startup cars and bids you're editing them and like they're not like

Good editing but in a way that makes it awesome. Like, you know what I mean? Like it's a very it's it's really funny

It's it's it's quirky. It was just simple. My goal was just always to like overload people with info and

Like cool stuff about the cars and they could decide if they decided that hey

This this quality is not good enough that they could go find somebody else

But like I always thought that I had the most info like the most like it like that when you bought that escalate like seeing how all that stuff

Works how it's how it's gonna fit together sitting inside it so many other people focus so much on like driving experience there

They do 45 40 like like 20 minute video and and 18 of the minutes are oh

Here's how it goes through the corners and I was just like, you know

Like let's show people the little ins and outs of the car

They are actually gonna buy and I think that that's like proved to be quite useful and you also have this thing at the end

I don't know if you saw the Sean, but like I watch every single one of his videos

And he has this thing at the end called a Doug score and if in Doug you kind of like

By the way, it seems like I'm like

Insulting you constantly, but in reality, I've been like love with you

But it's just it's just I don't I get what you're saying like yeah

The the quality was never the goal the goal was always like the quality of content, you know

Well, what I'm saying with you you have this thing called the Doug score

Which like I base my buying decisions off of like I've bought a bunch of cars

I've probably three or four cars off of your like you've driven, you know

hundreds of thousands of dollars of value like whoever my car from and

You have this thing called the Doug score at the end of every video and I went and googled and try to find it

And you could barely find it

It's like on a Google sheet and you have to click file make a copy so I could sort it because I'm trying to sort it

I'm like, you know what I mean? I'm like I won't because you have two categories

You have the weekend category, which is you know like a dad who wants to have fun

It's like McLaren's and shit like that and then you have a family or a daily category

Which is just like what's good for daily whatever in some days?

I'm like, you know, maybe I'm in the mood to buy like a fast car like let's go

Let's sort by speed in the category

Weekend yeah, and but I gotta like go to Excel and I've got to like do like a like a like a like a row freeze

Like it's so complicated. Why don't you make this more like robust?

It's a really this database could be a business in itself. I know I agree

I should do more with it to be fair the Doug score came out in like mid 17

And for the first two years, it wasn't really all that valuable because I didn't really have that many cars in it

And so like late 19 it starts to become pretty valuable and now there's got to be like a thousand data points in there

But what happened was I launched cars and beds. I just

Priorities had to kind of take shape and yeah

I probably should do more with that because I think it's valuable also

And I think the really valuable thing would be able to be to sort by like type of car

Like if you want a fast wagon put up all the fast wagons and then you can just have that

But that's something that you could do at home. I've decided I've decided I'm gonna just do the videos and spec

I'm a big fan of specialization

And so I decided I'm gonna do the videos and we're gonna let other people and sometimes people email me

They're like, I just did this great data project with all the Doug score data here

It is and I look at it and it's really cool. It's like I should be doing that

But I'm not at what point did you so the the show I mean your channel

Has it been growing very steadily and was it making enough income to live off of throughout his existence?

Yeah, so I launched the channel late 13

But the really big kind of turning point for the channel was in late 16. I flipped to two videos a week

And I don't know that necessarily that is the turning point anymore for a YouTube channel

but in 16 it had a big effect and

And almost right away after doing that. Yes, it became enough money to live on that

I did that made that switch in August of 16 and in December of 16

I made 20 grand and I was like, oh my god, like this is a thing. I did not what I didn't know was

Christmas the ad revenue is way higher at Christmas time

And so in January I made like eight grand and I was like, oh, well, I guess maybe this isn't a thing

I don't know what's going on

But that was one of the things I learned throughout and so yeah

Like pretty quickly it kind of grew at that point to become something I could live on and so when you were made that switch

You're like, all right

I'm gonna start doing two videos week. Is it because you had heard of the algorithm likes that or you just happened to do it

And saw a bump. What was the what was the reason because I always wonder with people who get started with content?

Like in retrospect in hindsight, it always makes sense. It's like, oh, of course people are gonna

Want to see a car before they kind of buy it or just like sit from the comfort of their home like get to see a

Review of a car that makes sense

YouTube's the biggest video platform. So whoever does it on YouTube's gonna benefit. There's gonna be lots of search volume

so they'll probably get views just by a search by the search of the name of the car and

Right, yeah, that video is probably gonna charge a premium or be worth a premium or maybe make money an affiliate or something

I don't know exactly what it is, but I can see how it'll make money

It all makes sense in hindsight at the time in 2013 when you start doing this

Did you think there's a business here and how did you get those initial views?

How did you get the initial momentum? Was it because of your following as a writer or was it separate?

Yeah, that's exactly what happened and I actually got really lucky, you know, I never ever tell people to like work for

Like promotional value like a lot of times businesses will be like all instead of paying you in money

I'll pay you in, you know, like exposure and I think that's BS, but it actually worked for me

I wrote for Jalopnik, which at the time was a Gawker blog and was an incredibly popular one

it was the most popular car blog on the internet by far and

I started inserting my videos into those articles and that drove the articles drove people to videos

which then started to put me in the algorithm, which then started to get me subscribers and

Jalopnik was paying me. I swear to God twenty five dollars an article

Which was not real money, but like the value was in the number of people coming over to my YouTube

I didn't know that at the time, but in the years in the later years as as

2013 became 2015 it became clear to me like I think I'm actually a youtuber and not a writer

Like I think this is a reality now

And so when I decided to move to two a week what happened was I left Jalopnik to start a blog with auto trader with Cox Automotive and auto trader and

in order to promote that blog I decided I would be shooting more videos and

Within eight weeks I was I the video content was suddenly earning getting way more views and way more revenue than the than the writing content

And thankfully the video channel was your own right the video channel was your own even though these were guest blogs and other people's platforms

Yeah, the agreement with auto trader was that I would you know promote on my YouTube channel these this blog that we had started and

So I didn't realize that you've been doing this since 2013

I thought that I was like an og by like watching since like 17

Like so, I mean you've been grinding at this for yeah, but you pretty much are because initially I made videos with my my own cars and

Those just never got as much traction and what the big switch in 17 was I switched to doing reviews of cars and

Suddenly it was a lot less work because I didn't have to buy cars and then take on that personal financial risk

I would just like show up at a dude's house film his car and then peace out and that was a video

And there was like no that didn't cost me anything except like the gas to get there

And so that was that was a big change

It also allowed me to do more videos because you can just do more videos that way as opposed to your own cars

you have to kind of think up a new topic every week, which isn't always easy and

So in 17, I think that's when things really started to like really take off when I started to do like car reviews and especially new car reviews

That's what I realized like okay

That's where the money is and that's where the audience is but you make jokes sometimes where you're like

Like for example, I watched your I'm thinking about buying a defender a new one

And I like watched your video on it and you might make little jokes

You're like one day what I'm able to afford blank. I'll get it and I'm like seeing your videos

I'm like man. I think you could I bet you're making like

You know at least low-digit millions per year without cars and bids

I have to imagine this was significantly more lucrative than you like the vibe that you would joke about sort of but on the videos

But the thing that's I think important for people to understand

There's there's there's two components number one is you never know when it's gonna end and so like I yeah

I was making a lot of money, but

You never know when suddenly a

Competitor shows up and it can happen in a couple of months and suddenly you're now third fourth fifth in search and things are slowing down

And so you never really know like what that day is and so unlike maybe an attorney or a doctor where you have this jobs

You make a lot of money less than I was but you have a lot more job security over long term

For me it was like yeah, I have a lot of money

But I saved so much of it because I was always just terrified that you know

I never knew exactly what was gonna what was gonna happen. What about a money?

Did you feel like you kind of like you made it or you looked at the number and you were like I

Can't believe this is mine. I have this

Where where was the milestone for you that it was kind of like your holy shit moment?

Not until we closed the deal with the would turn in believe it or not. I I I just never

Earning on an annual or a monthly or a weekly basis like is just never to me

Like that's just there's always of some some fear in that you know

Like you're always just a little worried that the tap is gonna turn off

And so there was never a moment where I felt comfortable like spending or splurging on something which Sam goes back to your point like

Yeah, there were times when I said if I could afford this I would buy it

But like I probably could have afforded it

But could I have afforded it and then my business and then YouTube slows down and then I have to deal with the depreciation of it

Like a new Lambo would be cool, right?

But if that loses 200 grand in the first two years, I couldn't mentally justify that same with a new AMG wagon

I've always wanted one, but they were

$150,000 when they were new. Well, was I comfortable losing 50 grand in a year?

Mentally no because I was always afraid the tap might turn off, you know the YouTube channel

Did you and when originally when you launched cars and bids? I was a big fan of bring a trailer

Bring a trailer is similar to you different

Different audience, but I think I heard rumors that when they sold it was like 300 million dollars

And when you go to bring a trailer comm it looks just like a blog like it's a very like

It doesn't look like a sophisticated business and when in reality it is and when you launched I was like, yeah, this is awesome

But of course we'll do a lot of like critics were like well

But this this thing already exists and so like what insight did you have to go down this path?

And also, who did you partner with early on because I don't think that you're a tech person, right?

No, no not at all as you can see from my video editing and you have a usage of iMovie

No

Yeah, bring a trailer is it does exist and they're huge and they were huge then and they're even huger now

and

That was the hurdle what insight did we have none?

What were we thinking in retrospect? I honestly wonder like what what was going through our minds thinking we could compete with them

The only insight we had was that we had heard I

Love bring a trailer

I think they run a great business and they have some great cars and I have sold cars on there

Whatever, but I we had heard from that there was some dissatisfaction

I think at the end of the day bring a trailer had gotten so massive that like

Stuff was taking a long time to get listed there were like you said the quality of the it's a WordPress blog ultimately

It had caused people some issues you know and in sellers and buyers and the functionality of everything and we kind of thought to ourselves

Hey, we can do this in our minds better and we can make it modern

And so one of the big things that was our focus was doing cars just from the 1980s and up like more modern era cars

We thought hey if we come with a modern website and focus on a modern audience

Maybe we can kind of exist in a sort of a different space than bring a trailer where it's like more millennial younger people

focused on these types of cars and

I think that that has largely teased out although now we're starting to kind of eat some of the bring a trailer cars

We just posted a Lamborghini Kuntas on the site today like we're going down that road a little bit more

And who did you partner with early on? I mean I'm when I was doing research for the original pod

I remember I went to the person's LinkedIn. I was like I got to figure out who he's working with like so. Yeah

what was that relationship and

You know how did it come about? You know, it's an interesting thing. I get I had my email addresses in all my videos

It's like a yahoo. It's just

Right and to be clear like my personal email address is not on yahoo

But that's the email address for all the people who gonna send me emails because as you can imagine

When you post your email address that publicly you get some weird stuff going on, you know

Yeah, people think they know you what's it called people you know, we get that shot and I get all the time

What's it called a parasocial relationship? Right? That's exactly people email me and be like hey, man

I'm making 84 grand a year. I got two kids one of them's in private school thinking about leaving my wife

What car you think I should get and I'm like

It's true

But so I got it

I so I get random emails and so a viewer emailed me named Blake and he said hey

I know I know we live close by in San Diego. I have this car

You ever you know if you ever want to get dinner and this was before I had a kid and I I would I would meet up with random

We I did this many many times probably a hundred times

I met up with just random people on the internet

Just it was how I made friends when we were moved to new cities and so I met up with him

And I learned that he did something in tech which is how non-tech people view all tech people

you know and so and so

It hit me that I kind of wanted to do this only a couple of months after our meeting and I called him and I was like

Hey, I know you do something in tech. Can we do this?

And what do you think of this and he had actually just sold the car and bring a trailer and kind of recognized some of the deficiencies

And he said yeah, this is a great idea

And so we use some seed money from his company to kind of just get get off the ground and get started

And then we launched and and right away. We were quickly earning revenue and quickly profitable

Was any of the what was the split? So I always wanted this about creator kind of businesses where it's like

Are you just promotion or do you have to do anything with operations? Are you?

Do you have to put in money? What's the equity split?

How did you guys decide kind of rolls and then the the ownership split?

It was tough to decide and there was a lot of back and forth and it kind of almost killed the thing

But I ended up with with sort of a substantial majority because I was even though they had put down the money

I was coming with the audience and one of the interesting things I think about these businesses

You mentioned bring a trailer and how could you compete with it?

You would be shocked at how many other auction sites have shown up and failed

Since we launched

Most of them never even make it on anybody's radar

Of course we watch them like a hawk because it's like our business

But you'd be stunned at how many of these have shown up and we learned that like you can make a great product

And that's important and we did that but like having an audience showing up with an audience is so crucial for the success of this

And that's what caused all the other ones to fail and so

That as a result of that I think they understood that a large portion of the value at least initially was me

And so even though there was sort of a tangling in it

I ended up with with the majority and yes

I ended up doing an enormous amount of operations work like I was

Personally the first few weeks I was approving or denying all the cars that got submitted

We didn't know it would blow up so much right away is what you got a thought

I think you got a thousand in one day, right? It was like the craziest day of my life

We got a thousand and you give like a you give like a three sentence description of each car

Yeah, that was another thing what the hell was I thinking mirroring myself to that idea?

But um what happened was when we first launched we had this we had this idea that in order to attract sellers

We would offer a thousand dollars for the first fifty cars on the site and five hundred dollars for the next fifty cars on the site

It was a brilliant idea

It was it was spending whatever that works out to be seventy five grand or whatever

But it was the greatest seventy five grand we ever spent because we got so many submissions right away, however

Then we had to deal with them and boy was that

Oh today and it was all me doing it basic. It's a nightmare

And what's the what's the business model the business model is you probably if I I don't remember exactly

But is it that buyers buyers of cars have to give you like three or four or five percent of the total purchase price?

That's right. Sellers pay nothing buyers pay four and a half percent

And now we've got a few other kind of drivers of revenue as well. There's a shipping component

We just launched inspections, which is really cool sellers can get their cars inspected

Which we have already seen increases the number of bids and the number the sale price. I mean, so that's I think it'd be a big

Benefit going forward

But mainly it's that yes that we get this buyers fee and then of course

We've now rolled up the businesses into one business that the YouTube channel and the auction site

And so obviously my content revenue is a is a part of the business to you and you did I believe in

2021 you did like something like 75 million in gross

Sales, yeah, that feels right. I should have looked at the numbers, but yeah

So you get this immediate surge of

Listings but you know getting a marketplace off the ground could be hard

But I suspect with your audience and it kind of just took off probably fairly quickly

What do you remember anything about that first month? What were the numbers? Oh, yeah, I'll never first car was your car, right?

The first car was my car. That's right. The first car was my car and I've since sold four or five

Although I haven't bought yet. I gotta do that

The first month was chaos, I mean, it's like you hear from any startup founder

Who's successful, right? Which is that that that it was absolute chaos

We had we had the good problem of not having planned for what would come

The success that came but the bad problem of then having to do it on the fly and we were hiring people like

Talking to them on a we didn't even have an office. It was COVID. We launched in June of 20

There were no offices. We did this we launched the whole business from a back patio

And so we're like talking to people in the pool

I mean this was the whole situation was a complete disaster and that month was definitely the most chaotic and most ridiculous of my entire

Life the first two months really and we started to build more of an infrastructure and more of a team and

That kind of started to make things easier

But I was still like in the ground on the trip in the on the ground in the trenches doing everything

Until the churn and investment came and we got a little more cash

And we could finally start like putting people in their roles and I could go back to my biggest asset to the business

Which is of course, you know doing a little bit about the sale. How'd that come about?

That's a high-stakes negotiation probably the biggest hand poker you've ever played

Tell us some fun stories about the the process and then the say the ultimate sale what went down

You know, I was really lucky that I had Blake who who has been in the kind of the business world the start-up world before and sort

Of held my hand through the process because I was just a clueless. I mean at the end of the day

I make YouTube videos for a living like I shouldn't be

Involved in any sort of high eight-figure private equity

Deal like that's not where I live, you know, I need people so they came to us and by the way

We hear your fidget spinner or whatever you got there on the mic

You're definitely this is a Toyota mega cruiser we they came to us and

You know, we had gotten as you can imagine. We had a lot of people reach out to us

Because we had kind of grown and it became clear quickly

And then the car market started to blow up and all these PEVC type firms were like we got to get it on this

We're gonna get on us today and here's this business is actually succeeding doing it and bring a trailer had just sold to Hearst

And so all these other companies were like, are we missing something?

We got to go again, then we know what's what's out there?

We could start it ourselves or this exists so we are getting a lot of reach outs

But we view it as like kind of BS. We were like we're too small to make this make sense to anybody

and so we kind of ignored them all but the churning group was really persistent and

Finally they kind of got intro to us through a friend and I thought to myself

Well, I can't say no to this call if it came through a friend. I'll just take it in every 10 minutes

and I'll hang up I took it in the car and

But they told me the most interesting thing

I wasn't familiar with the churning group

But they told me that they specifically work with creator-led businesses

And that was a huge like late-ball moment for me because my big fear of working with any PE or VC companies

They're gonna come in and they're gonna say we got to change this this and this on your YouTube channel

And it's gonna look like this now and this is how it's gonna work

And even if it was a big payday for me

I feel like I didn't want to have to explain to someone how YouTube works, you know

Like I just wanted I felt like I could do it better myself

But these guys knew already how it worked and they were gonna be like your your audience. It's already working

This isn't how we don't want to screw with anything and that was a big moment hearing that they like

Specialized in this and so going forward that that just sort of began the conversation and one thing led to another

They kind of went through here's how we might do it, you know, we kind of gave them some basic

They gave us a term sheet and it it it came to fruition

Were you able to take money off the table or did it go to the go to the business? Yeah, no

I took I took money off. I bought that career GT and and so it was a nice

It was a nice situation for me to be able to do that

Especially after a lot a lot of hard work and actually in the end

I feel like this is the best time because I got enough money that I can kind of chill a little bit

And I swear there's something nice about that in terms of running and operating a business like this

You make way more money when you have that like when you could chill a little bit, you know

Like the less you want it the more you get it. I feel like that's true

Like I feel like I'm I'm more relaxed I by

Focusing on like myself a little bit more and then I'm in a better mental state to like make better decisions and do more things

And in the end it's actually been beneficial even though you would think it would be the opposite if you're chasing money

You'd you'd work harder and maybe I did work harder, but I think I'm working better now

Have you ever heard the phrase a treat a mean keep them keen?

So like I remember when I was when I was like 16

I was like I was telling someone I was like I want to meet I was telling my a friend a girlfriend

Who was like this really pretty girl? I was like man

I want to meet more girls that she goes you got to treat them mean to keep them keen

You know the less you want it the more you got to get it and I was like, oh, thank you

Like so I tried way less hard and I got way more girls the same as true with money

I treat them I treat it mean and I keep it keen, you know that the money comes to me the more than I don't want it

That sounds like something an ant would say

No, 14 year old is hitting you with that quote when you say I want to meet more girls

Like man, I'm trying to try to meet these girls. I'm I read the book the game

I'm doing all the stuff. I'm trying I'm trying hard and she was like you got a treat of me to keep it keen

She's like he's got a care less, you know, nothing. We're still using that phrase all these years later

It's a how does this work though like if I'm this may be a question for for Mike and those guys at churnin

But like you buy a creator led business

Creator wants to go chill on the beach now. You gave him give him millions and millions of dollars

But you need their face still it's tied to their face

Is there like a long transition plan where you it's like blippy where they just changed out the guy a different guy came in

It started wearing the stuff on YouTube and everyone in the comments is like hey, that's not blippy

What's the plan, you know

You know, I've been on I've done a few podcasts and interviews and all sorts of things with after the steals closed and

You're I think about your question

Constantly and you're the first person on one of these who's actually asked it to me because yeah, I think they're nuts

I truly think they're crazy

If you really think about it

Like like the whole it's a great idea when it works and for them

It's worked wonderfully and I suspect that relates to the diligence they do

On the creator like they they know that I'm not gonna do that right because they know me

They got to know me through this process

It took like six eight months

And we really got to know each other and they realized I wasn't about to just bail and go sit on the beach

Or do something insane like start saying crazy stuff on twitter and get cancelled whatever they knew that

But like

I still if I were them I'd be terrified like they're making massive investments into businesses that have dudes like me

Who could just go off the rails one day and I think that is a crazy business model

but

They would retort by saying a we do the diligence, but also like this is how businesses are going to be like

Creators have these audiences. This is where people want to get their

Stuff whatever it is kitchen products cars doesn't matter

They want to get it from people who they love and who they care about mr. Beast burger all that stuff

and

So if you're gonna do it you got to take that risk and but the benefit is you don't have to spend a lot and like paid marketing

Because the audience is there and they want to be there

And so there's like a huge benefit to that but also a very scary potential product

We've had we've had mr. Beast on the pod. We recently did an episode with uh, danie austin who created a hair hair hair care

brand basically a scalp brand

um

Also doing really really well

What creator brands are awesome to you that you think they've done a good job at is there any that stand out or you took inspiration from

That's a good question

You know when we when we launched this when we came up with the idea and launched this in the summer of 19

It wasn't as common

Like it's having a creator kind of pivot into a brand was like less of a thing

A lot of guys were doing a lot of guys I say guys because it was car people

But just generally people were doing merch that was a big thing and some of them even had lines of products

Whatever, but they the pivoting of doing this has become more of a thing since then

And so I wouldn't say any of them were necessarily an inspiration

It was more that I was just terrified that I had this giant audience

And if I didn't do something with them they were going to start to go away eventually

And I had to do something and so that it was more based out of fear and anxiety than like than like being inspired by

Which is great

Um, but obviously since then a lot of others have come and and I give this advice to everybody

I know everybody in this space all of my car creator friends

I tell them like start a business start a business start a business

You never know when your audience is going to go away

Please like take your audience right now and start a business do something

And they they look at me like I'm not some of the time because they're like, what do you mean?

I'm already traveling five days a week filming and doing all this stuff and editing late at night doing

I you know, they're writing scripts. How can I start a business on top of that? And my answer is like

I don't know

But you got to you got to figure it out because that's the that's the next way to take what you're doing

Have you seen that? I want to ask you about two ideas. Have you seen have you guys seen um

What's it called? Uh exotic car hacks? I think it's called

No, dude, it's just the guy

I think that he's like playing a douche on tv

I think he's like trying to be an asshole like this so his whole he's definitely this guy's like a total jerk

But he uh

He's got this course. I think it's a course. I don't know if it's a community or it's a course

But you pay a little bit of money and he teaches you how to hack exotic cars, which I have not taken it

I think what it means is like you buy a car. That's like four or five years old usually around the $20,000

Uh or 20,000 mile range and then you drive it for one year and you could sell it and you have hopefully only

You know, you you've mostly broke even I think he also has a thing where you can like become a licensed dealer

Which I don't understand how that works

But I heard a rumor that he sold the course to pe. Is that true or trolley made up? I don't know. I I haven't heard that

Have you seen that shot? Yeah, you look at this guy now, but his youtube banner is like

Tim as a grand theft auto character

So that's that's solid to start and then I think you're right

It's basically like how he says learn how to buy sell and trade exotic cars for fun and profit

Uh, which honestly, it's a good good niche

Um, in fact, my only criticism of this guy is uh, he doesn't look douchey enough like once you go into the video

He's just like a guy wearing like a v-neck. He doesn't look like yeah, he's just kind of like

No, dude. He's like I watch the video

Like 10 times more jewelry than he's wearing like this guy

Like he needs to piss me off

But also make me want him right like that's the trick. Well

He was driving a Land Rover Defender and he goes see the problem with the Land Rover Defender is my watch is worth five times

This defender

He's a verbal douche

He goes even though it looks cool

I can't decide if I'm poor because five of these still wouldn't equal the price of my watch

Well, I think more people should do this. I so so Doug are uh one of the companies that built we got bought by twitch

When I was at twitch, you know, you spend a bunch of time on twitch and you see what people are doing

And it was like everybody's kind of doing a very similar thing. It's like

um

You know, there's like two classes of people

There's like, you know, really good at the game or three classes

They're really good at the game that people watch them because they're so awesome at the game

And they guys they have no personality

People just like them because their aim is good and then you have people that are super cute, right hot girls

They do well too

And then you have uh like the third group which is like super likable

Like kind of the group you're in I would I would say where it's like they're not they're not like the most technically

Good at the game, but they're likable. They're fun. They play a they're called a variety streamer

They stream of a bunch of different games to keep it interesting good good fan interaction

And then there was one guy that just took it a whole different direction. This guy doctor disrespect. Have you seen him?

Yeah, I've heard of him. So he created a whole character

He comes on and he he himself was like a college basketball player. So he's like six eight

So he's this huge guy

But he wears this like mullet wig

He wears like a bulletproof vest like a red bulletproof vest

He looks like a character from the 80s and he created his name

He created his thing doctor disrespect and then he has his like his catchphrases. He was basically a wrestling character

So he basically was like the rock where he would um

He had this persona and he had these catchphrases and then everybody his life became a character

His wife became a character like if she would come on the screen like you would never see her only her hand

And she would feed him while he was playing like feeding him grapes basically and he would do everything ridiculous

And then to add to that he would like go sit courtside at an mba game

But dressed fully as doctor disrespect and that investment of like that $5,000 courtside seat

Was actually really valuable to building this persona this brand of like and he always called himself the 1994 1995 two-time blockbuster

mba jam

Whatever like champion like he's got these like phrases that he would always go to

Just purposely trying to be hateable. Yeah, just trying to be like exactly

He created a whole character and he just stayed like when when floyd may when floyd mayweather became money mayweather

Exactly like i'm going full heal exactly

But even more like it was more like wrestling because he's got a costume also like on top of the whole thing

And I actually think that for content creators. It's surprising. You don't see more of this like yeah, that's such a good point

There are these archetypes like in wrestling you have the the faces the good guys

He got the heels the guys that are intentionally bad guys that are going to get a big following because you'll love to hate him

Floyd mayweather did this in boxing. He was not making any money

And he uh, he became floyd money mayweather this obnoxious

Arrogant, you know money in your face guy

Then he started getting really really popular because people wanted to see him lose

And there's this guy in the ufc that did the same thing

He uh, he was basically about to get cut the ufc told him you're too boring. We're gonna cut you

And so that night he went on and he just started saying all this offensive stuff on the microphone

Against brazilians and this one fighter and whatever and they were like well now

We got to keep them to fight that guy because he just created a feud and he's like this guy just took it

To the like to you know to level 10 of being this heel

I'm surprised there's not more of this on youtube, you know the best car guy who's doing that right now is this guy whistling diesel

Have you ever seen his I love whistling diesel? I heard that he's a sweetheart by the way

There is no car content creator who I like more than whistling diesel. I've never met him

Tell Sean tell Sean what he does dude

It's the it's like mr. Beast but like for cars and he and he just does things that make people hate him

So he buys a Ferrari to destroy it and he put it, you know, you know, you can buy those as an example

You know, you can buy those garage bubbles like like boomers have the you know, they put their old Corvette in them inside their garage

It's like a it's like an inflatable bubble that makes sure nobody ever touches the car

He bought one of those for his Ferrari and just started throwing stuff at it ladders and shovels and

And anything he could sledgehammers saw to see if it worked. He would off-road the Ferrari

He put giant 20 foot tall wagon wheels on his tesla. I mean all sorts of just dumb stuff

And I just am obsessed with it. I'm like, this is the kind of content. I wish I was making

How does he how does this guy afford it?

I assume

I assume he's doing the same thing that mr. Beast is doing where he's taking basically all of the money that he's pulling in from revenue and from

You know

Placement ad placements and just putting it right back into doing more dumb crap

Like he dropped the g-wagon into a house when he was in the g-wagon. I mean everything. It's just incredible. It's incredible content

It's uh, what are some of the titles using $35,000 Nike air mags as work boots

So he bought extremely rare extremely expensive shoes to just sit great around in the mud with them doing work

Uh, there's extreme school bus off-roading. It takes a bus and he's just like flying around

But it's also number one. So I guess that's a series. I guess there's gonna be a lot more of those

To come driving a tesla upside down

Prudency is 10 foot tall wheels

Okay, I don't know what that is. That's that's amazing. But each of these has like five to 10 million views

So they're incredible. It's incredible content

And he's just this kid from like indiana or like rural pennsylvania

He just if he wasn't doing this, he'd be like driving a truck, you know

But instead he like decided to become hateful on on youtube and he's killing it and I love

No, he's great. I love to see people hate him. There is nothing more fun than these people

That guy's so irresponsible

And it's like, yeah, let's get fun. It's youtube. Yeah, you're supposed to be responsible

So it's a little bit like a like a $250,000 g-wagon and which is like everyone says it's an off-road vehicle

But like no one drives a g-wagon off-road and he like, you know destroys it

Like the point where it's smoking and he just annihilates this g-wagon

How much revenue do you think that this guy's channel makes so I want to know if he is if he is putting all of it

Back into the videos. I want to know how much that budget is

He's getting 20 million views a month. So I suspect he's probably pulling in

You know

Yeah

One to two million a month and then he does ad placements and they must get tons of money because his views get so

His videos get so many views wait at 20 million views a month. You think he's making

Let me rephrase million

It's in I don't know in in his in his world

I don't know because his audience is good as I suspect you're very different from mine

My audience doing car reviews is really high

Dollar content because you're in market car shoppers and that is a very desirable demographic for advertisers

Whistlin diesel's probably there's probably a lot of kids

There's probably more foreign audience than mine. So probably doesn't make as much

But he's probably doing all right and plus he lives in the middle of nowhere in like world pennsylvania

So his cost of living is like he's good

What would a good cpm be from ad sense for your youtube video? That's a good question. I don't remember anymore

I actually calculated cpm in this completely different way because I never understood why it was views like dollars per thousand views

It never really made sense to me

So I started calculating the number of views I had to get to earn a dollar

And so good for me was a video that broke a hundred with the hundred marks

So less than a hundred views to earn a dollar

And there were there were a lot of videos

Especially in december when ad rates were strong that were that were pulling in that that's so funny that that's how you calculated

That makes it actually makes a lot of sense because it makes more sense to me

Yeah, like I feel like everything you've told me so far is like

Just a guy like sort of using his intuition

like

Like you're just like well like uh, like I had a friend that was like I had a friend that would do this he'd be like, um

You know it like he would keep like his money like instead of like going to a bank setting a bank account and like oh

You should invest it

He's like no I have three shoeboxes and like shoebox one is spend money and shoebox two is save money

And he like credit his own bank account in my dorm room and he was just like yeah

Like you know, but you if you're gonna move one to this box

You got to put two in the other box

And he's just like I'm like dude

I think you're actually just using the normal like personal finance rules

But you just are you but you're backed into the you back into them like a guy like you know

Like a caveman like just sort of discovering fire here. It's probably true for me

But I will say like in my in my view

That's kind of how youtube was it from like 13 to 19

The before like a lot of big businesses started showing up and really

Maximizing the hell out of everything

I think it was a lot of people just kind of randomly using intuition to like make decisions

And it was like okay that video did well

So i'm gonna try this video instead of like really thinking through okay

The thumbnail should say this at this pixel and all that which is how we a lot of creators do it now

It was a lot of just like

Let's give this a shot and for some people it worked out and those are the people that you end up talking to

And for some people it didn't and those are the ones who

Sizzled out did you and do you now have a video team?

I read somewhere that you were editing up

You're editing them up until cars and bids and then now you just have an editor

But like is that true or do you have like a booker because I know you're on the road or at least you've said one annual wrap up

You're like I traveled like

You know most weeks

Yeah, well when I lived in Philly, I was traveling a ton because of the weather

But now i'm in california. It's gotten a lot easier. Um, yeah, so it was just me

So I launched the channel in 13 weeks went to two videos a week in 16

It was just me up until we launched the royal we the royal we you're saying we yeah

We when we I my family I think of my wife as part of this because boy has that been a journey for her

but um

so

so I launched the channel in 13 and

There have always been kind of people around friends who help shoot things that kind of thing

So there's a we can put her to that too

But mostly it was just me and then in march of 20 when we all launched cars and bids

I realized like that week that I was never going to be able to edit another video again

And so I called a guy who had emailed me like a year before like hey

I did an editor and I was kind of ignore those emails and I was like are you still available and can you start today?

And his answer was yeah, and he's still my editor. Uh, it's been now over three years. You just had a baby

and um

But now we have more people also because we're going to start doing more content

And so we hired like a big video kind of content manager who's going to oversee

I think it's going to be multiple channels mine like cars and bids channel

And then like new creators come in and stuff and I just don't have the where with all the bandwidth

Especially because I want to continue doing what I'm doing

And I just don't really have the ability to like also manage a whole thing in addition

Have you guys heard of uh more plates more dates? Have you know who that is?

All right, so his name's Derek. He's probably

Maybe as famous as you but in like the fitness genre. He's like on Joe Rogan and stuff whatever

And he's has a great video, but his video a you don't know his last name

You just know it's Derek at more plates more dates and b

His videos it's just him like on a camera kind of like you are right now

But it's just a plain white background

Like it looks like you're just at like like he's in like a college dorm or he's just like in his house

Just goofing around but his videos get millions of millions of views

And I heard a rumor

That now his businesses are making many many tens of millions a year in revenue

But the room that he originally started this youtube video or this youtube channel

It was just like a like a shitty old apartment when he didn't have a lot of money

And they took the wall out of the apartment and he has since moved to a significantly larger very nice home

But they try to transpose it so it looks exactly like the old one

And that's kind of like what you have to do so like they don't want people to think like oh Derek is like killing now

He's unrelatable and that's sort of like I imagine you've kind of lucked in to this situation where it's like

Oh, my whole shtick is that like I'm quirky and the videos aren't well edited

Therefore I could keep you bigger and bigger and bigger without like doing anything that's sophisticated. There is a component of that

Also that it's worked so like in a sense

I don't really want to change it that much because as much as that is kind of like that that's a shtick

It's like also

It's been successful

Um, but yeah, it's kind of one one drawback of this and I think about jury sign for a lot when I think about this

Seinfeld's humor is all based on a normal guy doing stuff

He's no longer and hasn't been for decades a normal guy and I bet it's gotten harder for him to make jokes like

Hey, you ever get to the fbo the private plane, you know, and it's late and you're like day

Like you can't I saw how do you do that?

And so for me, I'm like it's it it hasn't gotten harder

But I do feel sad that like I'm no longer like your neighbor who's like

Here's how you should think of this car because here's how I think of this car

Now I'm a guy who's got you know a career gt or and it's like okay

Well, maybe he's not quite as you know when he talks about supercars being slow. It's like well screw this guy

You know because it's a little bit less relatable

but I still like to think that I'm

You know in chris rocks most recent comedy special

He says I'm rich but I identify as poor and I kind of like feel that way to an extent because like this didn't

I didn't start this way like I still remember I still wear these stupid clothes because like that's what I wear

It's not like I've like

I'm not like wearing like high-end stuff and then when the camera turns off like that's just who I am

And so I think to an extent it's still it's still pretty genuine. By the way Sean a career gt. It's like a one-point something million dollar car

It's like a the car enthusiasts love it. It's like a lot of people stream car dug

but you're the type of guy who like

Uh, I imagine shows up in a million and a half dollar car wearing cargo shorts

Yeah, oh, yeah a white t-shirt. That's dirty and all new balances. You gotta be the only guy

over three and a half pockets per

Per leg. It's exactly. I drive it everywhere. I go. I wear my stupid shorts and t-shirt and like you can think what you want

I'm driving career gts

And I don't know if you've seen this Sean, but on his videos the true fans

They'll put stuff at the top of video like Doug's the type of guy to licks his finger before he turns the page on his iPad

Like he's got

He's got like this geeky like cautious person, which is probably accurate to be honest

I just love at the end of the day people are like the quirks and features thing. What a great idea

Like this wasn't an idea. I really just love like seeing how buttons work in cars

Like that is genuinely and you know, what's funny like I shoot all these videos now for the site

You know we're selling cars on the site and they're new cars that are gonna have big audiences and

Like I show up to film and I like still have this feeling in me every single time shooting an accurate nsx right after this

And I still this feeling like I'm really excited to see the quirks of this car

Like it's still in my mind after all these years. And so I feel like I'm probably doing the right the right job

Does it uh, well, how does it feel to be wealthy now?

After after grinding out to this for so long. It's better than before it is it is definitely not

Aside from that car, I didn't like splurge on anything

I kind of like live a certain life and that's sort of how it's gonna be

But um, but it is nice to have a little I think I am a little bit more anxious about money than a lot of people

And it's nice to not have any of that anxiety and more and I'll tell you it came at the perfect time because I just had a boy

and like it's amazing to be able to like

Detach and just like be with him without having to worry about like grinding for the next video every little dollar

You know that I place this thing perfectly in this video

Um, it's an it's like an amazing sequence of events. Do you think um, how big is this business gonna get?

I mean, I think I

By the way, Sean, have you seen bring a trailer? It's basically like yeah a blog. I think it is actually in fact

We're press it's a lot of guys. Yeah, by the way the whole time we've been doing this interview

I've also just been shopping cars and bids

So I'm like currently like my finger is hovering over this 1994 tell you to hire a super custom wagon

This I can just buy this van for $5,000 and I'm very very tempted to do this. This is a pretty sweet-looking van

I don't know why I want this, but I really really want it

It's awesome. The site's awesome. I'm looking at uh, you have this like three-wheeler a vander hall because I was looking at a

Morgan three-wheeler

Do I need to close this tab if buy or close the tab those are my two options

Right, right exactly. That's kind of the fun of it. Well, you you bring a trailer which was before you guys

It was basically just a blog. I don't know if you know the show but the guy who started his name is

One guy's name is randy, but the other partner was Gentry Underwood who started Mailbox

That's that company that sold I think for a hundred million dollars pre-launched to Dropbox

And I emailed him because he used to have throttle yard, which was that for motorcycles

They had all the stuff and I was like tell me about this business

Bring a trailer and he says it's the hardest slog

Like it was the hardest thing ever to get going it took years and years and years

And then I heard a rumor that it sold for many hundreds of millions of dollars

Do you know what it sold for Doug? I have an idea, but I don't I'm not gonna speculate on randy's business

Was it to uh private equity or who bought it Hurst Hurst media bought like half of that is our understanding

Am I often saying that I that like it's probably valuation was in the hundreds of millions

But I don't I don't know exactly how much anybody ended up with or whatever, but um, but they did well randy killed it

They're killing it now the the sale was was um

By the car business standards the sale was relatively early

Um in the sense that they sold kind of right before things went crazy in 21 and they've ramped they and us

I mean as a function of this market that's been so crazy have ramped like crazy since then

And so I think the business is worth quite a lot more now. I suspect what do you think is going to happen with you guys?

I mean, do you think like

Are you thinking you know, this is a a multi-billion dollar opportunity?

I don't know. I honestly I never thought I would get here

Don't you have to make it that now if you if you I think you sold

I don't know what you sold you sold it's just said majority majority for 40 million, which I

You know that puts the valuation in the 60 to 80 million range. I imagine I mean you need like a

I imagine they're looking for like a 500 million plus outcome then

I think I think we'd all be happy at 500 million

I don't I but and I think that there's a pathway to get there and frankly

I think bring a trailer shown that and I think that also the

um

Reality of this space is that this is how it's going like

The internet made it easier to buy and sell cars

Obviously it used to be in the newspaper and that was kind of a disaster with low information on both sides and everything

And now the internet shows up craigslist shows up

That's one thing and now people are starting to realize that there is significant value in these auction sites because

Sellers can amplify

They can get you know to a much larger audience than they could on their own website or an auto trader and buyers

Can get a larger selection frankly than having to visit every single dealer's website and every single whatever or go to physical

Auctions like me come and those are you know, what are you going to show up there?

You know like that's not realistic for a lot of people. This is kind of becoming the new wave

So I honestly don't know. I think if you had asked randy

Eight years ago. He never would have thought his business would have gotten this big and

But this is the market is growing along with these businesses

Another interesting person in your space who I think that you have a feud with but I don't know why

But when shawn bought his car, I think he d he watched your video and then he dm'd this guy named

Car dealer guy. Is that what it's called a car dealership guy?

Car dealership guy. So basically the story behind this is shawn and I have been obsessed with so shawn and I are both popular on

Twitter

We've been obsessed with this idea of like look there's going to be a billionaire youtuber mr. B's at least is getting there

It might be around that

There we've seen that happen on facebook. We've seen billion dollar companies start on facebook

We've seen that on instagram no one's done it on twitter, but it will happen and in particular

We're interested in these like there's like these guys called like the guys

So there's like the strip mall guy he talks about investing in strip malls

There's the watch guy who talks about old watches and we're like what's going to happen with these

Quote guys like what are they what are they going to do and then there's the anonymous car dealer guy

And I think shawn like dm'd him asking like which car should I buy and he told him to get the catalac

And then you watch your review and then you just wired some guy money and got the catalac

What do you think first of all? I don't know why

I said I want to buy this car. I'm looking for this car

Can you find it for me and buy it for me and get it to my house?

And I don't want to do any work and he did he did exactly that

Um, okay, here's here's the they'll tell you the genesis of the feud and then I'll tell you what I think of that

um

Here's the thing about success on twitter

for for one of those guys

And I love all those guy

Tweet twitters. I think they're all really interesting including car dealership guy

But the problem is in order to be successful on twitter and I have a suspicion that this is even more true in the new age of twitter

You got to be really controversial and you got to be pretty like I wouldn't say blasphemous

But you got to be like out there with like your takes and your opinions because that amplifies more

And I think facebook found out years ago that like they can do that

But that doesn't necessarily lead to a great community and a lot of times

There was all this election misinformation or all this fear mongering and so they like dialed back some of that

And it sounds to me like twitter right now is actually magnifying it

Like it seems every crazy take is at the top with all these engagements

And that's what they're trying to maximize for and the problem that I have with car dealership guy is that like his

If you read his post some of them are just like the most insane

Like I think stuff you'll ever read like the reason we got into the feud was I he posted like

Ford has done this crazy thing. They're gonna go out of business. It's gonna be the worst thing in the world

And I'm like this is this is so insane

And I went into the data of what he was talking about and ford had to do some big write down on some investment this year

And so their profits were low and he didn't mention that he only mentioned that the profits were off 80% compared to last year

And it was like maybe a little bit more fun. I'll say like he'll say like uh, uh lease lease

I forget what it's called when you can't pay release but uh

Link lease delinquency is like at this time, which is the highest it's ever been

Which means in four months something like everything is going to blow up

And I think the problem I have with all of those guy accounts is precisely that and so I

I called him out on this ford bang and we got into a little a little tiff and

Unfortunately for him everyone who was replying agreed with me once they saw the data and so he blocked me

And so and then but and then I realized though. I'm not the only person he has blocked

He a lot of my car journalists friends who I suspect have also tried to add context at various times

He has blocked them also

And so what I suspect happens is he's like kind of tried to create a little bit of an echo chamber around himself

Because that's what makes you popular on twitter now

If you go into somebody's tweets and you see that they have a lot of like well, that's amazing types of replies

They're going to continue to get magnified and get blown out and I think that people who have a lot of descent

It starts to become a little bit cloudier

And but if you see somebody is like a real

Icon where everybody's agreeing with him then it continues to make him seem more and more like elevated and I so

I suspect he's blocking the people who disagree and so

I I in an idea I like the idea of that twitter account

But I think in order to be popular on I don't I don't even dislike him

I dislike the concept of in order to be popular on twitter

You kind of have to just keep going controversial and these crazy takes

And that's really the only way to like make it work

And I think that that's less true on the other platforms

Yeah, I I think that's true. We have a friend named nick who owns

Or part owns an agency that outsources a lot of like

Assistant like executive assistant work to the philippines

And he'll do these tweets where he brags about paying his workers five dollars an hour

And how that empowers them and and everything like that which like is or is not true

I imagine it is true

But he says it in such a way where he knows people are going to get angry and share it

And at the bottom of the tweet who'd be like by the way, uh, if this actually interests you

You could like sign up here

And so he'll like tweet something that gets like it'll go it goes viral every time like it'll get like, you know

50,000 likes and like, you know

Three or four or 500 quotes of like people saying this guy is such a douche

Can you believe how tone deaf he is whatever and then he'll like text us he goes made 50 grand a day

Exactly. That's that's the problem. I have with twitter at least right now. I think it's definitely going to more of a

Controversy cells kind of thing. You can't just be like a nice dude and do well on twitter right now

You have to have like takes that are controversial and kind of ridiculous

In order to get anywhere and I'm just I don't it's a shame

I want to ask you one one last inside baseball question, which it was

Sean you probably don't this probably doesn't entirely interest you but maybe I think it would for you dug

Have you noticed that a lot of car museums are nonprofits?

So for example, there's like the barber museum in I think Alabama

Yeah, where so it's a nonprofit you can go on and like see their financials and everything

And I have a feeling and this is like an interesting tax hack, but I don't know if it's true

I have a feeling what they do

Is they sell a business sort of like we've all done and what you've recently done dug and they put their money

I think in some type of like donor

Advised fun, which is like you can

Give away a certain amount of money to certified nonprofits and then reduce your tax burden

And I have a feeling what they're doing is they're setting up their car museum as a nonprofit

And like the barber guy, I believe he set up the barber museum after he sold

I think like a dairy company for like a billion dollars. He had like a milk and dairy business

I have a feeling what they do is they make a big sale a big equity sale in their business

And they put a certain amount of proceeds into a donor advice fund

Of which they then put into a nonprofit that they own and that's where they go and buy all their cars

And they let people come and see their cars and whatever. I have a feeling. That's what's happening. I don't I don't know

I've just been like looking around this. I think that's what's happening. There's another guy who I think you had on

He's his youtube channel is like here's my 20 million dollar car collection. He's a young guy that has like a tire store

And he keeps saying in his youtube videos. I buy these cars so everyone can enjoy it

And I have a feel like he's doing the same thing as well. You're talking about hoovy. I think hoovy's garage

I I can't remember. He's in san diego. He has a tire store. It's an interesting idea

It's an interesting idea

I think I need a larger exit before I can make that happen

But that is a great place to a great way to justify a vehicle collection. I think it's not that you donate the money

I think you have to donate the asset or your shares to the daff first

But if you but if you control it and you work in the museum is yours, what do you care?

I just asked

I asked barred the new google ai I said explain how rich people use nonprofit museums to avoid paying taxes

Here's what it says

It says that uh

A way that rich people use nonprofit museums to avoid paying taxes to create a donor advice fund daff

The daff is a charitable giving account

It allows the donors to make a one-time or recurring distribution of cash or appreciated assets and receive an immediate tax deduction

but

um

So basically the donor donates art tube like for example donor donates art to museum

They receive an immediate tax deduction for the full appraised value of the art

However, the museum does not have to sell the art and they can instead display it as their own collection

They can avoid paying capital gains on the on the appreciation of the art

um

And so I think I've seen this where people basically have like a quote-unquote public museum like in their backyard

uh

It's like and I wonder how who what who dictates what is the monitoring

the price but also like

How how many hours does the museum have to be open to justify that's probably

Checking on that probably yeah 45 minutes a year

Like like could you say that like because this is Doug's Porsche?

It is now worth an additional 20 increase. You know what I mean? Like I wonder I wonder like what the appraise value is

But I had a feeling that's what's happening

Which seems like a wonderful hack for cardiners because you can now I get would that mean that your your purchase price is effectively like

37 percent or however, whatever your taxes, uh, 50

I've been to that barber museum and it is quite an operation. And so if that's true

There's probably such a massive spend at the beginning to get if you do it. It was it was 50 50 million, I believe

Uh, I went and looked up his all his numbers. I think he seedfunded it with 40 or something million and it makes around 50 million a year

Um, and man, that's crazy non-profits. You can go and look up all the information. Yeah

There's like I think there's the peterson museum and la there's a few other ones

And you could actually go and look at all the um, you can look at their financials

And you could figure out because I that was my dream was I was like if I get you know a 500 million dollar exit

I like it would be awesome. This is what I'm doing. Yeah this playground

Um, but yeah, I've already done all the math and like looked into all this. That's what we got to do

That's an interesting thing never considered it, but we'll

In the future

Well, Doug, we appreciate you coming on. I hopefully uh, uh, you realize I'm I'm legitimately a huge fan. So yeah, I appreciate that

to actually talk to you and um

Maybe uh, Sean's not exactly a car guy, but maybe he will become now

I hope you appreciate that I legitimately have only watched one of your videos, but it did lead me to buy a car

So, you know, enjoy that s plane. It's gonna be great

Oh, well, it's only got a 66 on the dug score. Now. I'm thinking. Oh, that's good. Maybe that's pretty good

The best car ever got like a 73

There's six cars higher than it. And so I'm like, am I the kind of guy who just buys the seventh best car?

No, but for the science luxury suvs

I bet it's at the very it is probably my favorite if you're gonna go down that route

Um, it's a that's a that's a bit of a risky car to drive around the bay area where everybody else is in electric cars

You're getting like 12 miles per gallon, you know. Oh, yeah, I love it. It's

It uh, I asked him Doug I go

So do you have like the self-driving stuff? And you're like, I don't know. Do I and I was like, that's like the whole point of that

It's the whole point. That's the whole point of that escalate is that it has like drive for you

Isn't that in the bay? That's what you want. The point

The point of it is that it fits

Multiple car seats and as huge amount of trunk space. That's that's the point actually

Yeah, you didn't even know I'm not trying to self-driving car my kids

The system you have in that car is the best system of all of all it's better than tesla self-driving. How is that possible?

Absolutely, unquestionable because it came from cruise

The Cadillac system lets you be totally hands-off

Tesla system is not even and I would say in the top four anymore

But Cadillac system is especially good

It lets you be fully hands-off as long as you want provided that you're looking ahead

You can be hands-off and and you have to be on a mapped road

But that's like every highway if you're if you're on a mapped road, which like the five and you're looking ahead

You can just sit there and yeah, but like I will give you ideas about stuff you can do

But you don't have to be driving. I know you're the car guy. So let me just

But I am the tech guy and I just don't understand how Cadillac could possibly have better

Self-driving car software. They bought cruise. They brought your buddy's company, uh cruise, you know remember them?

Of course, of course. You see them and say they they bought cruise

GM bought cruise GM owns Cadillac

But cruise is not like cruise was not the top of the top, right? Like that that wasn't they

They are some of I mean you'll see cruises in san francisco now you can rent a cruise

Bro, you've seen those cruises at the intersection. They don't know what the hell to do at any interstate

Have you seen me driven around san francisco? Well, I wouldn't trust it

That's the thing about it the the Cadillac super cruise system works best on and mostly only on freeways

I don't even use because I have a pretty good system

I have a new Mercedes that has a great system too and I don't use it once I get off the freeway

I'm driving myself and that's true of the Tesla's also they say full self-driving, but we've seen all those seen those videos

We're the car. Yeah, all the people I wouldn't trust it off freeway. We're still in a kind of a wild west situation

You didn't look at the defender Sean. You weren't you weren't you weren't a defender guy

Marvel movie. What do you know what you're talking about?

The defenders. What are we talking about here?

That's the level we're at here with Sean I DM'd a guy and told him to buy me a car. That's the level of research I did

I picked you didn't look at anything else you looked at rap videos dude

That was my research

What about a minivan? Did you consider a minivan at all or did you I wanted a minivan?

My preference was a minivan my wife vetoed it because she was like

Because I'm just like car and car stressed me out. Nice car stressed me out

So I just wanted something I wouldn't be stressed about that was super functional

It's like, what if we just go the other way?

What if we just zag here when everybody's ziggin and we we go get like

The most functional most spacious ugliest minivan that I'm not going to worry about

Anywhere I could park it anywhere and I'm just not going to care what happens to this car

And it's just going to be this like transport closet for me and my kids mess

And that's what I was interested in but my wife was like cool. We're not doing that

I recommend minivans to everybody now everybody with multiple kids

I got a buddy who has three kids and I was just like you need a van. He's like what SUV can I get?

I was like you need a van. He was like, oh, I can get three car seats in my car

What's a good minivan for me? The sienna is the one you want. That's the one everybody gets right now

That's at the Toyota sienna. That's the one you want

Dude, this is so lame

Low and it is lame, but it is if you have if especially three it up children

Three numbers three kids or more you you have to getting car seats into an SUV like that. It's just I just want like the crocs version of a car

Yeah, that is exactly that but crocs are cool. Yeah, I'm betting that the minivan will make to make a crocs like come back

No, you made the right choice with the escalate. Although that's like 130 thousand dollar SUV, which kind of defeats the purpose of

Not worrying about it. Uh, yeah, again, I got overrode by my I got vetoed by my wife

And had to buy a good car that I do have to worry about a little bit

And what what do you own right now Doug? I didn't know you owned another Mercedes. You have the defender

My main normal car. I have a

E class station wagon

So AMG or not an AMG. No, just an E 450

plebe

Dude, we had this exit

We had this giant exit that got all this money and I went out and bought a used non AMG

E class station wagon. That is who I am at heart

Um, no, the real reason I did that is because I love the AMG wagon

But ultimately I now have a 4 GT a Carrera GT and then two crazy convertible SUVs

And my view was I don't need to be getting seven miles per gallon and doing zero to 60 in three seconds in my daily driver

It's just not it's

I'm good

I've got cars that can do all that and so I just bought a regular one

Also, the regular ones are just as fast now as the AMG ones were only a few years ago

So I'm I'm it's it's fine. It's comfortable. You should fit so nice. Do you still draw?

I mean, I I watched one of your things and you're like, I drove this car cross country six times in the last like two years

Why are you driving cross country versus flying?

When the summer we live in Massachusetts

And so I drive all the way across the country every summer

And all the way across at the beginning of the fall every single year. I've done this now

Three times this would be my fourth. I'm good living in 30 days from today

And uh, I we just it's a whole summer. So you need a car. You need your dog

We have a lot of stuff and it's just the easiest way to get everything there until unless I can afford to fly private

Which I cannot

This is that

When um, so by the way, I do the same thing

I I spend my summers in New York and my wife flies and me and my dog drive

There you go. I'm finally I found another I found another person who does this

What when will you be wealthy enough to fly private? You think when are you gonna feel never you know the cost?

Let me tell you a story. This is probably 30 grand from la to sf or la to

So this is the thing I we go to nand second

So I so that's like the I'm at like the poles of the country

San Diego is the extreme southwest and second is basically the extreme northeast. So um,

I I generally fly first class now

That is one of the splurges that I do and so a first class ticket across the country is a thousand bucks or whatever

And I'm like thousand bucks. This is great. And I thought to myself frontline first class for a thousand bucks

I bet I can fly private for like, you know, three four thousand. I bet that's what I cost

This was me of of uh naive dug thinking. Hey, it's probably only a few grand more

You know what how much more could it be? And the answer is I looked it up

$55,000 direct from San Diego to nantucket. And so the answer to your question

When will I be able to fly private?

Never my dog and I will always pile into the car and end up refueling at these sketchy gas stations in New Mexico and Oklahoma

That will be our lives

How often are people uh recognizing you on these road trips at gas stations all the time?

No, it's rare on the trips

And I'm and I'm like I'm like

Obsessive about getting there quickly like I just go. I don't ever stop and like look at people or chat

But in life like yeah all the time obviously and it's it's always nice. It's always good interactions with people

Well, dude, this is awesome. We appreciate it man

You want to shout anything out where people should find you or whether reach you or whatever cars and bids

No, we've talked about every people can people figure it out. Well, dude, thanks for doing this man

Yeah, we'll we'll pimp out your twitter the youtube channel cars and bids and uh, you're the best man

I've been a fan for years. It's awesome finally. Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me and congrats on the all the success

Even though you've been out of her, you know, I've never seen sam like this. He is just fawning. He can't stop

He's just like listen, man. If you want a carpool cross country sometime

I I'd love our dogs can sit in the back. We can sit in the front. It'll be amazing

Yeah, you need a friend. I got a friend. I'll be your friend if you need one

I'd have you on the pod. They were friends now, right? Would that be fair to say?

Legitimately, I'm thrilled to find someone else who does this drive and we should be in contact about that at the very least

I have become like a student

Yeah, yeah, we could start there

I'm happy to start there. We could do that

The funniest thing by the way Doug we just did a live show in Austin and like

Sam is is like the opposite of this when someone's a big fan of sam. They know everything about him

They've been a fan for years been following them. They've kind of fallen over him huge turnoff to sam

But when it's somebody he does the exact same thing to other people. This is hilarious to me

You know, I had this I had this happen to me to I met Jerry Seinfeld

Like a year ago and Jerry tells me that he watches all my videos

And over at this point, I've had people coming up to me on the street for a year

I like I've had some of the interaction go great. Some of them don't and I know exactly what to say

What when I'm expecting someone to say to have it go great, you know, and I meet Jerry

He's like I watch all your videos and I'm like, uh

Uh

Do you like courses?

I'm like, I can't believe I've screwed this up after having so much

Well, and by the way, I know we keep like we tried wrapping this up and then we kept going

So like I just like knowledge that because I actually do kind of want to hear about this Jay Leno

I don't know if you know about this shaman, but Jay Leno's like car guy. Yeah

Doesn't he have like

Four or five airplane hangers. Is that what was that like? Oh, it's incredible. I've been there now three or four times

It is incredible. Um, yeah, he's got like four

One of them might be an airplane hanger, but it's mostly just like buildings. It's like in an office park

It's next to an airport, but they're if they're not, um, but anyway, they're giant buildings. Yeah

I would say maybe six of them. One is just like a machine shop

It's incredible. I mean his collection is truly unbelievable. One of the coolest things I've ever seen

Oh

Hundreds of millions. Do you think so? Well, he's got a mclaren f1 that in itself is probably worth 40

Um, maybe 50 at this point a mclaren f1 is worth 40 or 50 million now. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. Yeah

At his he's it's like but his is like a one-on-one or car. He's at 25 years. He told me he paid 800 for it or 600 700

That's insane to me

Yeah, that is. Yeah, that is the car elan had that he crashed

Have you seen a shaman? Do you know what weather tech is? It's like

Uh, it's like you buy a car and you like get like the mats

Which is like one of those businesses like yeti where you're like

There's no way a cooler company is going to be big and turns out this thing is just massive

And the reason you know it's massive is I think it's privately owned

But they sponsor all this stuff which you have to have a big budget for but the owner bought a ferrari

250 or so a gto for 80 million dollars, which is like I think the most expensive car sale ever

And that's how you know this company is killing it that the owner of the privately health company has enough cash

Just been on an 80 million dollar car. That's just gonna sit, you know, it's it's ridiculous

I mean

It's like a crazy thing and so j has one that's worth 40 or 50

That's gotta be in the top 10 of like most valuable cars. Oh, yeah

Yeah, for sure and by far the most valuable like modern car and um

He told me the most unbelievable story about this car that he bought it

He paid 600 and he told me he's driving through la

There's only 64 of them. He's driving through la and um, he sees another was he driving it

This was when it was when he had bought it and he's driving through la and he sees another one

So this is 97 98. He's another one just street parked in front of a house and he's like

What and so he goes up and rings the doorbell and meets the guy and like he says hi to the guy

They make exchange in polio. We both got mclaren f1s and la

And he told me that the guy calls him a year later and says j you'll never believe it. I sold mine

And I made I got 800 thousand dollars. I made 200 grand

And j's like I think I'm gonna hang on to mine a little longer and now it's worth 40

And that's a lesson

Who who's gonna buy a 40 million dollar car? I mean, how many people in the world do you think would do that?

Are there only like a thousand people?

I reviewed j's and and I asked him and I had to cut this out of the video because it was quite an interesting segment

But like I asked him I was like, what do you think of the other owners of this car?

and he thought for a long time and gave a very measured response and I thought to myself like

What reading between the lines what he was trying to say is there are a bunch of jerks who have money

They're not car enthusiasts like that car has become the type of thing you buy if you just want like a trophy rather than

If you actually care about cars whereas when it was 600 800 grand

There were enough car people who could afford it that maybe they'd get into the mechanics and do the work themselves

Which j values very heavily, but now it's just a bunch of rich guys who want to brag

And that's why he doesn't uh own ferrari because in order to buy the fancy ferrari

You have to buy an entry level ferrari and you get on a waitlist and they like release them like a like a Rolex almost

And he's like, no fuck that even though i'm a rich guy

I'm a man of the people i'm not getting on a waitlist to buy a million dollar car

There's got to be 75 cars in that maybe a hundred cars in that collection and not one ferrari

That's insane. How many people can afford it?

40 million dollar f1 or uh mclaren

Nobody and the ones who can servicing it as a nightmare. It's done on some like

ms. DOS based. I mean the whole thing is like a total mess

But it's the coolest thing in the world, you know, and if you're a rich guy and you have all the rich guy cars like the creer gt and the f40

You're not a really rich guy unless you got a mclaren f1 then you then you don't even need the other cars

You're just like yeah, I win

Keep your how much is your monthly insurance for a million dollar Porsche not as much as you think

I think it's only a thousand a month to ensure that car

um

Do you even drive it? Do you drive it on a day like on a friday night or

Once a month I take it to cars and coffee once a week basically

But other than that my like my wife still hasn't even ridden in it. Like it's just it's not something i

I've driven at a thousand miles since I bought it four months ago, which is actually pretty good

But like it's a terrifying thing to drive a car that's worth a million dollars like anybody could hit you and then it's like

Okay, well

This is not going to be good for anybody like that person bankrupt now

Because their insurance limit is way below this and my insurer is going to sue them and like the whole thing is just

it's just a scary

I love driving it. I truly believe it's the greatest. Are you happy you own that car?

Sounds like might be not so fun to own that car

No, no, I I went when I take it out

Which is very rare

But when I take it out on early mornings before people are up when it's still cool

And I can take it into the mountains and like really enjoy it which i've done now three or four times

Then it is so rewarding and so incredible and I truly truly believe that it is and I've driven them all

The greatest driving car that has ever been made and so like to that extent it's worth it for sure

Okay, that's exactly the end of the podcast now

All right, that's it sam sam you he's not you're not gonna be your bestie. He's not gonna be your best friend

Yeah, yeah, give it time bro. Give it time. It takes time. We'll build a relationship. I've already got this planned out

Sam's gonna happen to be in your town next week. Oh, hey, I'm just in town just

I was hoping we could hang I flew out here for this

Oh, you're not now lay you're in cn d a go. That's weird. I'm gonna be here tomorrow too

Uh, thanks Doug. We appreciate it. Yeah, thanks guys

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to

I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel never looking back

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.