#69 - Ford's Future, A RAM SUV, The RAV4 GR, The BMW El Camino? & More!
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Concept
RestoMod
A RestoMod is an old car that has been fixed up and updated with newer parts to make it work better and be more comfortable, but it still looks like the original car.
Car
Ford Mustang
The Ford Mustang is a famous fast car that many people love because it looks cool and drives well. They are making a new version to make it better and more up-to-date.
Term
production built vehicle
A production built vehicle is a car made in large numbers that anyone can buy, not just a special or one-time car.
Car
Chevrolet Corvette
The Corvette is a famous fast sports car made by Chevrolet. People often compare other sports cars to it to see if they are as good or better.
Car
Golf Gtd
The Volkswagen Golf is a small car that is good for many uses. The GTD is a faster version that some people think is as exciting as very fast sports cars.
Car
Chevrolet Camaro
The Chevrolet Camaro is a popular fast car that people compare to the Mustang. It's known for being powerful and fun to drive.
Car
Ford F150S
The Ford F-150 is a very popular big truck that many people use for work and fun. They made it even stronger and faster by adding a special part called a supercharger.
Car
Ford Lobo
The Ford Lobo is a big truck sold in Mexico that is the same as the Ford F-150 in the U.S. Some versions cost a lot of money.
Car
F-150 Raptor R
The Ford F-150 is a big truck many people use for work and fun. The fastest versions can be very expensive.
Car
Ford Raptor R
The Ford Raptor R is a special version of a big truck made for going fast and handling rough roads. It's more powerful and better equipped than regular trucks.
Company
Texas Shockworks
Texas Shockworks is a company that makes parts to help trucks and other vehicles drive better, especially on rough roads.
Part
suspension setup
The suspension setup is how a truck's parts that help it bounce and stay steady are arranged. It helps the truck drive smoothly and handle bumps.
Term
horsepower
Horsepower tells you how strong a car's engine is and how much power it can make to help the car go faster.
Term
aftermarket
Aftermarket means parts or upgrades for a car that come from other companies, not the one that made the car, so you can change or improve your car.
Car
Ford Excursion
The Ford Excursion was a very big SUV that could carry lots of people and things. Some people think of it as a dream big car.
Term
Raptor paint job
A 'Raptor paint job' means the truck is painted in the special colors used on a fast and tough Ford truck called the Raptor.
Term
40-inch tires
These are very big tires, about 40 inches tall, that help the truck drive over rough ground and look tough.
Car
Dodge Charger
The Dodge Charger is a big, fast car that many people like because it looks strong and can go fast. They are bringing back a similar name called Ram Charger in the future.
Car
Jeep Grand Wagoneer
The Jeep Grand Wagoneer is a big, fancy SUV that is very comfortable and has lots of features. It's a new version of an old popular Jeep.
Car
Jeep Grand
The Jeep Grand Cherokee is a medium-sized SUV that can drive on rough roads and is comfortable inside. They might change its name or use a different name for a new similar SUV.
Concept
trim
A trim is a version of a car that has certain features or options. Some trims have more stuff or better equipment than others.
Car
Ram Laramie
The Ram Laramie is a fancy version of a Ram truck with nicer seats and more features than the basic truck.
Term
Good, better, best
Good, better, best means a company sells three versions of a car: a simple one, a nicer one, and the nicest one. It helps people pick what fits them.
Brand
Stellantis
Stellantis is a big company that owns many car brands like Ram and Jeep. They make lots of different cars and trucks.
Car
Dodge Ram
Ram trucks are big trucks used for heavy work and driving. They have had some trouble keeping prices and features competitive with other trucks.
Brand
Kia
Kia is a car company from South Korea that makes affordable and reliable cars with good warranties.
Car
Jeep Cherokee
The Jeep Cherokee is a small SUV that can go off-road but is also good for normal driving. Lately, it hasn't been as popular as before.
Car
Chrysler Pacifica
The Chrysler Pacifica is a big family van that can carry lots of people and stuff, but some people think it has problems and isn't as good as others.
Concept
refresh
A refresh means making a car look newer or better by changing some parts or features, but not making a completely new car.
Car
Ford Bronco Sport
The Ford Bronco Sport is a small SUV that can go off-road and is good for daily driving too.
Concept
weight class
Weight class means how heavy a car is compared to others, which can change how it drives.
Car
Hyundai Ioniq 6
The Hyundai Ioniq 6 is a new electric car that looks nice and uses little energy. The fast sport version is not as popular in the U.S.
Term
Car of the Year
Car of the Year is a prize that magazines give to the best new car each year. It means the car is really good in many ways.
Car
Porsche Taycan
The Porsche Taycan is a fast electric car made by Porsche. It runs on batteries instead of gas and is designed to be sporty and quick.
Car
Volkswagen Beetle
The Volkswagen Beetle is a small, round-shaped car that has been popular for many years. It looks different from most cars because of its unique shape.
Car
Toyota RAV4
The Toyota RAV4 is a small SUV that many people like because it is reliable and useful. A new faster and sportier version is coming soon.
Term
all-wheel drive
All-wheel drive means the car sends power to all four wheels to help it grip the road better, especially in rain or snow.
Car
Honda Crv
The Honda CR-V is a small SUV that many people buy because it is dependable and useful for everyday driving.
Term
EV
An EV is a car that runs on batteries and electricity instead of gas. It doesn't make smoke or pollution when you drive it.
Term
flat screen TVs
Some modern cars have many big screens inside that show things like maps, music, or car information, kind of like TVs.
Car
Mercedes-Benz Sclass
The Mercedes-Benz S-Class is a very fancy and comfortable car that many rich people like. They are making a new fast and sporty version with four doors.
Brand
Bentley
Bentley is a car company from Britain that makes very fancy and expensive cars with lots of comfort.
Car
Ford Taurus
The Taurus is a big car made by Ford that many families used to buy. It was comfortable and roomy but isn't made anymore because people started buying other types of cars.
Car
Toyota Camry
The Toyota Camry is a very popular car that many people use because it is reliable and good for everyday driving.
Car
Toyota Corolla
The Toyota Corolla is a small car that many people buy because it is cheap to own and works well for a long time.
Car
Honda Accord
The Honda Accord is a medium-sized car that many people like because it drives well and lasts a long time.
Car
Ford Ranchero
The Ford Ranchero was a car that also worked like a small truck, so you could carry things in the back but still drive like a car. It is an old model people remember fondly.
LIVE
The floor is yours, the floor is yours.
Yeah, I'm telling Rob,
I don't know when I'm going to get my flowers.
Late in 2024, ever since then on this podcast,
I've been stating that CEOs need to stop talking.
It's true.
Did you see the McDonald's thing?
Oh, the McDonald's, you mean all of them?
They all just hopped on the same,
I guess it's a challenge.
But let's be fair,
the McDonald's CEO looks like
he's never had a burger in his life.
We looks like there's a gun
being held to his head behind the camera.
It was a hostage.
This is a cry to all of you,
media and PR individuals.
I'm sure you're good at your jobs.
I don't know your jobs.
If the CEO doesn't want to have a real conversation,
then let him stay in the office.
Just leave him alone.
Leave him alone.
Not every CEO is going to be good in front of the camera.
And by the way, don't need him to be.
No.
Hire personalities,
hire people to go out and bang the drum.
Hire, how many food influencers are there
that are great on camera
that would be happy for you to pay them
10 grand a month to go around
and talk about the big arch?
Just hire Jordan Stallion.
Hire Jordan Stallion, let him know what you're up to.
Or Michael Jordan.
Maybe he needs some money.
Or Shaq, he'll do anything.
Yeah, Shaq will do it.
Yeah.
This is, you guys thought I was picking on car CEOs.
And the CEOs probably think we're picking on them.
We are in 2026, not 2006.
Authenticity is what people are demanding of content.
And the McDonald's CEO showed you authenticity.
He doesn't eat burgers.
Okay, question for you.
Who did look like they did it best most of the time?
The Burger King, Burger King.
Really, I thought Wendy's kind of nailed it.
Yeah, Wendy's is good too.
It looked like he knew his way around the kitchen.
Like he genuinely knew what's up.
And by the way, since it's not live,
or I wouldn't have it live, once you saw it,
you just tell the CEO, we'll take it from here
and you never post it.
He'll never know if you did it or didn't anyway.
Exactly, two months later he's like,
how'd that video do?
You go, great, what good?
You know, why are we making things so difficult?
And I think a lot of it is we have lost common sense.
We have just lost it.
We just don't talk about it enough.
If you're not going to say things,
and I think we're gonna get to the Jim Farley thing,
once again, I'm really glad Jim Farley talks.
But boy, the end of this clip I think we're gonna share
shows again he is a disconnected, very rich man
who needs to worry about the operations of Ford,
which looks like it's going to be heading
like every other car company,
into a very, very tough time to navigate.
So do you need to be on camera?
No, go operate the business.
That's what you're getting paid a lot of money to do.
Okay, we'll get to Mr. Farley and it's funny
because he said, you know, CEOs of car companies
thinks we're only picking on them.
We'll get to you, don't worry.
We'll get to you later in the podcast.
But the Burger King, Wendy's,
the Big Arch, obviously McDonald's,
and there was one other one.
Now all of the comedy sketch kind of accounts
that do what they do that are replicating those.
I mean, that might be the best thing
that actually happens if we think about it.
Like maybe it actually kind of worked out
that more people are gonna be fighting
for who's got the best burger.
I agree, but I don't think it's ever good to look like
you don't even like your own product.
Yeah, for sure.
Now everybody's trying to throw this conspiracy theory
like McDonald's somehow did this on purpose.
Come on, this wasn't done on purpose.
Everyone's playing 40 chess, you just don't get it.
Yeah, yeah, they didn't do this on purpose.
Too many people looked at that video and hit post.
It's like, I don't know, man.
That's a lot of people that signed off on something
that, hey, take two, we can make up another big arch.
I mean, we can make up another one, take a bigger bite.
I mean, I'm not saying you have to bag the whole thing.
That probably wasn't the take I would use.
Well, not only do you not know burger content from CEOs,
but I'll tell you something else.
A wise friend once told me there are no bad cars,
just bad drivers and non-car people.
So apparently Nick's also not a car person.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's the dumbest comment ever.
There's a ton of bad cars that have been built.
That was wild.
That RestoMod video, by the way, probably the biggest,
oh no, no, no, second biggest video on YouTube now,
on that platform alone, crazy.
I think a lot of people struggle with listening.
Yeah, comprehension skills.
Comprehensions, I just don't think they'd do very well
on the reading and comprehension on the SAT.
Doesn't seem like that would be their strong suit.
What's the bottom of the IQ?
Is it like 54?
We got some sub fifties out there commenting on shit all the time.
We're tough.
It's a tough look for some of the people.
If you like them, man, you like them.
We explained, we didn't grow up with them.
We're seeing prices soften.
The RestoMods are going wild
because it's sort of the last ditch effort of that age group
to say, hey, I want to drive this around.
I got some money,
but there's just a complete misunderstanding.
And if you don't ever go look at the data,
you think you know what you're talking about.
The data tells the story.
It's a softening market.
The 40s and 50s, you can't give those cars away now,
for the most part.
Again, there's a few special ones
that are always gonna be worth money,
which we've said a million times.
The 60s and 70s are next.
I hate to break it to everybody.
They're next.
It's already showing signs of cracking.
And if there's any dip in asset prices,
S&P, home prices, whatever,
you're gonna see the bottom fall out
of the 60s and 70s market.
That's just how it's gonna go.
This leads perfectly into other things
that sounds like are in the past.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and queue up the video
that I woke up saying, oh, Jim.
Just laughing saying, oh, Jim.
Here we go.
Not like maybe a boss or a Cobra on the pipeline, okay.
No, we live in the future.
Oh, you live in the future?
We love all that, but, and we have so much history.
We may do a few of those,
but really, I think if you see how we built out Mustang,
you know, we're going in kind of a new, refreshed direction,
which is very much looking forward to a different standard.
And I think we have so many good regional historical brands
as well, FPV in Aussie, around the world.
We have a lot of very special regional performance brands.
That is interesting to me, actually,
bringing those to life
because they never were historical
or they were always kind of in the moment.
But I really, as a CEO, I love all those things.
I have a bunch of old Ford's that I love,
but I really want to live in the future.
We want to create, I once asked Carol Shelby,
Carol, what's your favorite car?
Next one.
He always said, next one.
Don't think there's no Shelby's.
They didn't renew the license.
Will you be a production built vehicle
to take on Corvette?
That's a good question.
You don't think GTD is Corvette?
The guy was like jaw-dropped.
This is, you don't think so for people that couldn't hear it.
The question was, are you going to make something
that rivals Corvette?
And he says, don't you think the GTD is a Corvette?
You can title it in 50 States.
You can buy Corvettes for 80 grills,
the GTD is $400 plus thousand dollars.
The comments were amazing, by the way, on this.
Yeah.
No, it's not a rival.
And by the way, I mean, all signs point
to Zora is going to be coming out
and it's going to be 1500 or so horsepower.
So GTD is going to be chasing that at this point.
For everybody that said that Jim Farley doesn't see Mustang
as a rival to Corvette, he does, number one.
They do talk about that internally.
So for all you pony car guys,
and it's different than Corvette,
it's different than this and it's different than that,
they don't see it that way inside of Ford.
They never have seen it that way.
They thought that was their answer to Corvette
this entire time.
What you believe as a Mustang guy
is not what they believe in that building.
And never have, they've always thought
that Corvette and Mustang were on this identical level.
Never has been, okay, in my book, in most of our books.
And now, his answer to Corvette is,
we have one car that's $450,000
and that's our rival to Corvette.
That doesn't even make any logical sense to say that.
It's interesting to look at and try to like map
where the positioning of those two companies are,
just globally or even just in the States,
like GM, you know, GM Chevy and Ford.
Who, what are they trying to go at?
In my mind, I try to work through this week over week,
like what are you trying to go after?
What are you trying to lead the people to believe
that you're going after?
What are you actually trying to deliver to the people?
Because on giving them what week
or what he's feeling like that week,
it sounds like it's completely just opposite directions
of car enthusiasts and general car buyers.
This is the problem of standing in front of press,
not realizing that you need to be,
if you're going to be having conversations,
you need to be having hour-long conversations.
They need to be thoughtful.
You need to be pushed.
You need to actually answer questions,
not just, you know, stand in front of a Ford sign
with your hands in your pocket, answering press questions.
Not that the press did anything wrong.
The guy asked the question he should have asked.
What's going on with Mustang?
You need another 20 minutes to flush out his idea on Mustang
for this to be valuable to even do it all.
Instead, you make a comment that GTD is Corvette.
It's the same thing.
Okay, bud, tell me where you guys are gonna go
after Corvette in the 60, 80, whatever,
your sales are plummeting of Mustang.
The C8 Corvette is as popular as it's ever been.
I mean, I just don't get this.
This style of communication where you've got like a Jim Farley
or name any other kind of CEO from the automotive world
in front of a panel of people,
like there's some kind of athlete,
which I also hate more than anything.
Interviewing an athlete like a baseball player
in the middle of an inning, like halfway through the game,
it's the most annoying thing.
I'm like, let the guys be in the flow of the game
for the entire game.
Even the post-game interviews are kind of dumb,
honestly, in my opinion.
Yes, outdated.
So outdated and not good.
Like the person usually asking a question
doesn't even sound enthusiastic
to be asking the questions.
No, and they're not asking anything
that you didn't watch in the game.
Yeah.
You know, why'd you throw three interceptions?
I don't know, man, he threw three interceptions.
We all watched it.
He obviously didn't see the linebacker drop into coverage.
So he threw it to him.
I mean, what do you need to talk to him about?
It's so dumb.
It's on tape as many coaches like to say,
you know, when it's on tape, but it's on tape.
Talking about practice?
Yeah, so I look at this and I go,
for all of you people that think we have been assessing
the way Mustang is viewed inside the Ford building,
he just told you he views it as the rival to Corvette.
It does not matter that you see it as a rival to Camaro,
or you see it as a rival to this or to that.
They see it as their rival to Corvette,
which is what we've said from the beginning.
And to say GTD out of your mouth,
and not even talk about the lower trims
that most people buy of Mustang,
and the lower trims that people buy of Corvette,
it shows a complete disconnect from reality.
And even at the beginning when he started saying like,
or the way he phrased it about like,
I live in the future or something like that.
And you even said while we were watching it,
like what's new about Mustang?
I took it initially that it's kind of in the past
and they're not really looking
at as Mustang being the future,
or Mustang as we know it.
And that could be a very possible thing,
but that's why you need an hour long conversation to go,
okay, man, I love that you guys are living
in the future thinking about new things.
So what's gonna replace Mustang?
That's the logical conversation to have.
You can't have it with him standing in front of a panel
with his, I'm gonna give you guys five minutes of sound bites.
I'm thrilled he does this,
because we just get to talk about it
for 13 minutes right now on the podcast.
Like, trust me, I don't want this to stop.
So nobody misunderstand me,
but this isn't helpful to anything.
And it oftentimes shows you that they really believe
that all of you are gonna buy a $450,000 GTD.
It's like, that's not gonna happen.
What they might be able to do, right?
They also announced this this week
that was making the rounds.
Ford brings three liter superchargers
to the V8 Mustangs and F-150s
to delivers up to 810 horsepower.
So now you can get a factory-backed $10,000,
three year 36,000 mile package.
Just out of curiosity, I mean,
what's that run the cost to of these platforms?
Are we now talking about F-150s
that are gonna be $103,000?
I mean, I think they use the Lobo as the example,
which is already a pretty expensive truck.
And the Raptor R already comes with one.
I'm gonna guess it's probably gonna be in the 80s.
But I mean, Raptor R is what, 125, 130?
Right.
I mean, and again, Raptor R is great.
And this performance that they're talking about,
getting 800 horsepower, that's great.
What do you have at the base level of your quote unquote,
what you deem to be your sports car rivaling Corvette?
It's not comparable.
It just isn't.
Not today, not right now, not in 2026.
Well, funny, we talk about Raptor R
to take a little side quest here.
I visited Texas Shockworks.
Some of y'all that follow the account on Instagram
saw that I was there doing a little bit of content
with Alex the owner.
We're gonna do some stuff on my Raptor.
And I learned some stuff about the Raptor R
in that suspension setup.
So we'll probably end up saving that for the video.
But it's funny that those great, awesome vehicles
that come out that cost so much money,
still could use some serious tweaking
from a company like that.
Because from a factory, it's still not quite
what perfect should be for that dollar amount.
So I'll just leave that cliffhanger there.
But it's crazy.
That's 100 plus thousand, $120,000 truck
that can still use some tweaking
because it's not quite what it needs to be
for that power and speed.
Yeah, because I think what I see out of things
like Raptor R is a lot of times
they just strap more horsepower to it
and there isn't a lot of updated bits otherwise.
Yeah, and even the updated bits still need refining,
I guess is the best way to put it.
When you make it, you know.
I could definitely see that.
Yeah, you start cranking up things at scale.
Some things will just kind of get left
for the aftermarket, which is good for the aftermarket.
But if you're buying it not wanting to do anything to it,
you're like, what the fuck is this?
I can spend another 10, 20 grand on my suspension now?
Yeah, no, it's a real thing.
And I'm gonna be interested to watch, you know,
this suspension company kind of walk everybody through.
And this is kind of our hope,
is to get with these companies that are very specialized,
that are doing things here in the States,
that you can kind of dive deep into and say,
let's listen to these people
that are around this specific part all day long.
Yeah, absolutely.
We actually, let's stay on forward.
I saw somebody sent me what they thought
would be Nick's dream excursion.
Now, if you saw it, don't mention it.
Let me pull the video up.
All right.
Yeah, I didn't see it.
Okay, good, let me pull it up for people.
I think this is sweet.
We might actually have to look at getting
an old one to do this too.
There's music, so I'm not gonna play the audio of it.
But this is a 2004 excursion,
but it's got a 22 front end.
Damn, that thing looks good.
Raptor paint job, 40-inch tires.
The tires kind of sit flush and not obnoxious.
Look at that color.
Yeah, man, that looks awesome.
That Raptor green.
And then you get to the interior.
Unfortunately, it's going through a car wash,
but we could use some hyperclean products on that.
Re-impulsors steering wheel.
Nice little simple screen.
Yeah, nice simple screen.
I forgot how big the center console was, by the way.
You could fit a baby inside that.
Yeah, literally.
You literally.
Oh, yeah.
Layers and layers.
This is all class, Rob.
This is all class, I agree with you.
Got the wood veneer on the top.
We got the cigarette lighter,
still works, look at the new upholstery.
Oh, yeah.
See, I don't know why you can't just do this
and stop saying that I stole your Raptor ID.
I don't know if you saw the Raptor video that we know.
Well, we know what happened, Rob.
We were all there.
By the way, when I inserted the 2004,
rather, 2024 clip, still looking young.
You're still, they look like you went younger in age.
Hey, I'm.
Isn't it weird?
I'm just, I just take peptides, you know?
Oh, it's gotta be.
TRT.
More stress, less sleep, all these things,
and yet somehow looked younger two years later almost.
Yeah.
14 months.
Yeah, look, you know, I'm on that RFK plan, you know?
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
If you know, you know.
Yeah, so.
Well, whatever you're doing, sir, keep it up.
Maybe we'll make a, we'll make an affiliate link
for whatever your stack is, whatever you're next taken.
We'll just make a little affiliate link for it.
Go to Ways2Well.com.
Probably literally it'll be Ways2Well.
Again, if you know, you know.
So shout out to the Colberson's family.
They have an Instagram account
and that's the family hauler.
Yeah, great family hauler, all time family hauler.
Great job.
By the way, would you not go to sleep early?
I know, well, actually you're an hour behind,
so I guess it wasn't too late last night,
but I woke up and was like, it's almost midnight.
Nick's over here just getting ready to roast Jim Farley.
No, four, I'm a four to six hour kind of guy sleep-wise.
Oh.
I get like eight hours and I feel pretty groggy.
Really?
Yeah.
How are you creeping on your, you know,
I don't want to give away age, you know?
Ladies don't give away their age,
but how are you living off of four hours?
It's just kind of how I'm built, you know?
I think it's, there's certain individuals
that need a lot of sleep
and I'm just not one of those guys.
Oh, okay.
Nice little chance there.
I just, look, we're gonna,
you're just gonna have to get tested, Rob.
I mean, this is the hook.
I had to go backwards.
I used to only sleep on three, you know,
go on three, four hours of sleep
and then somehow I got into the guy
that needed at least seven hours or so
and now when I try to test the waters,
I can dip my toe in and feel okay,
but if I do it more than two or three days in a row,
I'm fucked.
Yeah, you know what I like?
Weekend naps, you know, you know, weekend nap,
you know, will get me back right, you know?
I just think everybody's different,
but yeah, Rob goes to bed at like 4.30.
Is that true?
He's dinner at 3.30, he's in bed by 4.30 p.m.
Last night was our first scrimmage
of the baseball season, so I was out, it was,
I was out when you texted me actually,
what were we talking about?
We were talking about something that was unrelated.
Well, first of all, were you running track?
I mean, you were just sitting in the stands.
Hey, you know, sometimes you assist, all right?
Give me some slack here.
You were a third base coach and you got worn out.
I was with a couple of foul balls actually,
like at 12 U these things start really firing
and I'm like, this isn't the best place to be standing.
I was in God's country, came back,
it was about an hour, 10.30 here, about 11 in bed,
which is pretty, I mean, reasonable hour,
but still kind of late.
And then I wake up and at 11.40, I got texted me,
I'm like, this guy wasn't asleep yet?
Like, what are we doing?
Yeah, working dude, grinding.
No, god damn wire.
Over your Watson tiktok, making show notes of like,
okay, I was like, we got a, did you see
the end of the Jim Farley clip?
That's exactly what I wrote.
That was the text, wait till the end.
Yeah.
All right, let's take a shift to another one
of our favorite CEOs, not really so much him,
but his company.
Did you hear what Ram's gonna be bringing to the market?
Just Ram, the Ram brand.
Let's roll.
All right, here we go.
The 2028 Ram Charger.
We're bringing back the Ram charger name,
which is actually going to be a three row SUV.
That's a lot of chrome on the front.
Yeah, I know, that's all he kind of gave us right now.
And the color, like why would you do a silver color
if you're gonna show us all the chrome?
I don't know.
It's the little things.
You just, I don't know what you think of that.
I don't know, bro.
Price 65 to 100, but basically, and I wanted to ask you,
so if we all remember the Ram charger name,
goes way back, we're thinking big body SUV,
not trucks or anything else.
So they might bring it back.
Originally they were gonna make it into a 1500,
but after the 1500 Rev or R-E-V,
however you wanna pronounce it, was scrapped,
the nameplate might go to this Jeep Grand Wagoneer,
based SUV.
I gotta get your thoughts on this.
We don't have any other pictures, honestly, other than that.
The first thing that comes to my mind
has to be what comes to everybody's mind.
65 to 100 is kind of a wild,
you know, difference in price.
Let's play this game.
How many trims will there be of the 2028 Ram charger?
10.
10.
I'll say 10.
Gotta have 10 trims.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Eight, so I was close.
Pretty fucking close.
I remember when the Laramie was the top trim,
and now we got Rebel, Limited, Longhorn, and Tungsten.
Could you imagine a stupider name in Tungsten?
No, I can, I read that and I was like,
you could've just stopped at Longhorn.
Longhorn should've been your biggest one at least.
But yeah.
I'll put this to the audience.
Okay.
I really think you're gonna run into trouble
when you have eight trims of a new launch.
It should be three.
Good, better best.
Good, better best has worked throughout history
for 100 years.
They've abandoned that, which every car company has,
understandable, you know, everyone's doing it,
so we're gonna do it.
I just come back to Stellantis,
especially in the Dodge, Ram, Jeep world,
has really struggled at the price points
that they're talking about right here.
I just think this is the price point
that people trust this brand.
And that's what price points really are in my book.
Does a customer trust you at XYZ price point?
So a customer of Ferrari,
trust Ferrari at certain price points, okay?
If I launched a Ferrari today,
let's use any Ferrari being launched.
And they said, this Ferrari is gonna cost 7.3 million.
Unless it was something ungodly,
there's only gonna be five built,
nobody's gonna trust it at that price point.
But 350, 550, 700,000,
it's a trusted brand in those price points.
I don't know how Ram and Jeep,
and I think you can say this for some Ford products
and for some GM, some Chevy products.
You guys struggle when you get outside that price point
that people trust your brand.
That's a really great way to frame it.
It just, that's what people,
I think, don't put into context about price point.
Toyota is trusted at a certain price point.
Honda is trusted at a certain price point.
Hyundai, Kia, all these things have a certain price point
where you go, eh, it's worth a swing.
Right?
I mean, that's 65 to 100?
That doesn't feel like your price point.
That doesn't feel like where everybody trusts you right now.
And by the way, Jeep Cherokee, Jeep Wagoneer,
all of these things struggling
because it's at the wrong price point.
So it means that the customer doesn't trust you
at that price point.
But if your Jeep Cherokee was 42 to 60,
I guarantee you you'd sell more Jeep Cherokees,
not 65 to 85.
I'd be interested to hear why they made it a Ram product
and not a Dodge, which the Durango hasn't seen a refresh
since like 2013.
Yes, that's, I've said this before.
The Pacifica, Durango, Durango, they completely screwed up.
Say again?
Durango's been completely screwed up.
I mean, that was just a man, yes,
and that was mismanagement.
That's all that Durango has been is mismanagement.
Plain and simple, that part of the market is hot.
People want those types of vehicles.
You've mismanaged price, quality,
everything associated with that.
And like you said, why didn't you just do a Durango
and refresh it and go after that market
and fix your problem?
No, we're gonna add something new, okay?
And then you're gonna add it at a price
that I'm telling you your customers don't trust you at.
It's not rocket science.
The trust that they had that Dodge had from like 20,
we'll say like 12 to 18 or 15 to like 19
with the Durango brand was unmatched, right?
It looks great, had the power.
And then before that or around that time,
you also had the Nitro.
If they would have developed that into an escape killer
or Bronco Sport Killer and kept that in the lineup as well,
be doing great in our opinion.
And they just did away with it.
Yep, because they just wanted to go after,
just like a lot of brands, you know, Dodge and Ram
and Jeep are no different than what we see from other brands.
They just thought they're gonna go
into this high ticket market.
They're gonna produce less vehicles,
they're gonna make more profit.
They have quickly found out they're not making more profit.
They're not selling enough units.
And I mean, it's like what we saw with Wagoneer.
Wagoneer should have been a hit.
You brought this thing back,
you used the Wagoneer name, it should have been a hit.
Why wasn't it?
Price, that's it.
It wasn't that it looked bad.
Obviously we can get into the quality control issues,
but those are all defensible at a certain price point.
Hey, yeah, you're gonna buy this Wagoneer,
you're gonna have some problems here and there,
but you know, it's $52,000
and that's kind of what you get for $52,000.
104,000 and that customer's going,
yeah man, I don't think I should be dealing
with these types of problems.
And so they are completely,
for any of you in the combat sports,
there are weight classes for a reason.
And a lot of these companies are in,
it depends on which models you're talking about,
these models that they struggle with,
they are 100% of the time in the wrong weight class.
I'd love to be able to-
They are price wrong, they are quality controlled wrong,
everything.
As a couple of one-two dude bros
who just would love to promote American-made stuff
or things from America,
it's hard to like try to pitch anybody on these products
and look, we'll probably eventually end up
talking to people from these companies
as the show continues to grow.
And I want to, but there's only so many vehicles
from GM, Ford, Dodge, whatever, Chrysler
that you can point to your wife, your sister-in-law,
whoever and say, I take that over, whatever,
the Mazda, the Toyota, the Honda,
there's just not a lot of them guys.
It's unfortunate.
Yeah, it's well said.
It's not, a lot of things in life are
who gets the plot of the movie,
who's not getting the plot of the movie.
And it seems that Dodge and Ram, of course, Chrysler,
have for a very long time lost the plot of the movie.
They're using AI to rewrite the plot of their own movies
is what they're doing.
Yeah.
They're making AI slop out of their own movies.
Yeah, why not?
Why not?
Everyone else is doing it.
Claude bot, Claude bot.
That's so funny.
I'm gonna clip that.
That's gonna be, you know what I'm gonna start doing?
I'm gonna start doing drop sound drops on the show.
Would you be opposed to that?
Would you be opposed?
I mean, dude, I grew up listening to Howard Stern,
of course, I'd be on it.
Wait a minute.
Can you hear this?
Can you hear that?
Oh, I don't wanna play that.
Can you hear that noise?
Yeah, a little bit.
Hey, we've got Nick Walters on the show today, everybody.
Coming to you from Las Vegas on the strip.
All right, I'm gonna start recording clips from the show
and making them into sound drops.
That's hilarious.
I love that stuff.
I know there's a couple of people
that had irks out there in the world,
but I've always thought that was like a really cool part
of like radio and, you know.
I mean, if you ever listened to Stern back in the day,
it was all that, amen.
All right, fantastic.
Let's take a trip here down EV world
because we haven't really talked about it in this episode.
Hyundai, they're killing the Ioniq 6 in the States,
but not the N model Ioniq.
And that car, I mean, all the N models always got praise.
I think it even got a car of the year last year,
if I'm not mistaken, from car and driver.
Yeah, over the Porsche ST.
Right.
Okay, makes sense.
What, oh, again, AI just wrote these articles
and they said, fuck it, we'll run with it.
You know, I don't know if there's really much to say about it.
It kind of looks like a Honda
and kind of looks like little Taycan-ish.
And like a long Beetle.
A long Beetle.
It does look like, it looks like an Apple mouse.
It looks like the Mac mouse.
Yeah, good call, good call.
I'm not surprised.
I mean, come on, look at this.
This almost looks like a new insight
that Honda would have made years back.
It's really funny because if you followed
the Ioniq EV press coverage,
you would have all assumed,
all of us would have assumed
that they were selling millions upon millions of these
and these things were gonna take over
the car world in America.
I mean, that's the way the Ioniq was covered.
I mean, top to bottom.
And as you can see, that's just not the case.
I mean, it was never gonna be the case,
but there were certainly people pushing like this
was some big jump in life altering thing done by Hyundai.
Mainly because of the end models and-
Kind of budget Tesla-ish,
if you look at it from like you squint your eyes a little bit.
Yeah, I'm not even saying it's bad for what it is.
I can guarantee and I'm not up to date on the pricing,
but you only cancel something if it's not selling
and it usually doesn't sell because it's priced wrong.
So the end model, also more extreme suspension,
setup, huge brakes, sticky Pirelli tires
will cost roughly $70,000.
That's a lot.
That's a lot.
Okay, I mean, more power to you.
I could buy a lot of great cars for 70.
Geez, that's crazy.
We did that last week.
We did two car garage solutions
where you could get a lot of cars for under 60,
much less, you know, 70.
You get a two car solution easily for under 70
that you would have a lot of fun with.
Well, speaking of a really interesting company
and brand and stories and getting the plot of them and all,
2026 Toyota RAV4 GR.
I think my sister-in-law might love to trade in her base RAV4
for a RAV4 GR for $40,000 or more.
It does look good, actually.
Almost hot hattish, you know?
Yeah, that looks really good.
How many people in the RAV4 market are looking for a GR?
I can't think of one.
I mean, would you know anybody?
No, I wouldn't either.
But people are gonna buy this.
I mean, we know that the one thing Toyota has
over just about every brand, I would say every brand
that's making this level of vehicle
is their customers are gonna buy this.
Can we build a cult the size of Toyota?
I mean, I'd love to just build a clutch culture cult
that is as unwavering as these people.
Shout out to you.
By the way, it doesn't even matter if the engines blow up.
No, yeah, or the transmission sucks.
I think it's gonna have a CVT, actually.
Oh, that's not good.
Yeah, CVT, all-wheel drive, you know.
CVT's one of those things that works awesome in theory,
but always breaks.
Always.
And it's $51,000.
It's not a bad price.
Does it have?
It's not a bad price.
It's not a bad price when you're comparing it
to the shit we just looked at for 70.
So my question is, are they building up
because they dropped the Highlander news,
which I think caught a lot of people off guard,
including us.
I didn't think they'd ever mess
with the Highlander brand at all.
Looks like they're gonna go really heavy
in the Highlander brand EV.
I wonder if they're gonna start beefing up
RAV4 to take the place of,
and kind of, we've said this about Toyota.
They have a lot of cars that overlap.
They overlap price-wise.
So you would assume that some of this is simplification,
I would guess.
Not a bad, not a bad price.
Because RAV4, when it first dropped, was really small.
Yeah.
It's not small anymore.
But then again, all of them, right?
What was it?
I guess CRV is the other one that I can think of.
I mean, they were like shoeboxes.
Yeah, and that's gotten bigger.
And now you have Pilot in this next class of vehicle
with it expanding its size and its footprint.
So I wonder if some of the RAV4 stuff we're gonna see
is to kind of replace what they feel like
the Highlander is.
Because I'm not really clear.
If you guys know this, I understand.
I'm not big in the Highlander market, right?
My understanding is most people think
the Highlander could go all EV.
And there's gonna be nothing else built.
I find that hard to believe.
Yeah, considering you couldn't keep them on the lots,
as it is.
So, and I doubt that that's how this is gonna play out.
I think it'd be hard to, quote unquote,
kill the Highlander as a whole.
But I mean, people are definitely talking as though
that's what's happening.
I got a little pallet to cleanse your 4-year.
Since you know a lot about car washes,
washing cars, maintaining them,
I got a question for you after this.
I'm gonna say, I'm not gonna play the audio
because it's just really loud and unnecessary.
But did you by chance see the gentleman that took his truck?
Oh, with the barbed wire?
Dude, it was just, I'm not gonna play the audio,
but if you haven't seen it,
this guy went through a car wash with fencing.
Luckily it wasn't barbed wire.
It just looks like regular fencing without the barbs.
And it is everywhere all over the machine,
all over the car wash.
His face is priceless too.
He's like, oh no.
I don't think this is a good look for you truck guys.
Oh my God, how do you manage to turn this on the truck guys?
I mean, Rob's a truck guy now.
You got 15 of them.
Yeah, well, for work.
Mine's for work, not just for driving back and forth.
My life is work.
I don't hope you know that.
My life is work.
Okay, you're just in there with your laptop working.
It's like a superintendent.
I got it.
This is one of the craziest things you'll ever see.
I mean, this guy basically tore down
an entire car wash with the back of his truck.
I mean, he basically dismantled an entire car wash.
And for those that don't know,
this equipment, it ain't cheap.
No, dude.
So I gotta imagine there's gonna be some lawsuits flying
and some insurance and some different things involved here
to get this financially settled.
Well, you know what?
If we're being fair to the truck guy,
there's usually an attendant there that looks in the back.
There's not anything to lose shit here to fly.
Yeah, not here.
Yeah, yeah, no.
Private equities involved in car washes now,
but there's a lot of car washes with no human beings.
All the ones being built here.
How did I not think of that?
You're right.
Again, PE over here, just doing the Lord's work.
Yeah, well, I don't know if everybody has seen it.
Like private equity is what makes up 71%
of all the biggest bankruptcies of companies.
When you see videos, we're like,
oh, like I think what was the latest thing food was?
We kicked the show off talking about burgers.
Oh, your boy Jersey Mike's.
Yes, okay.
8 billion.
Yeah, honestly, not gonna lie,
I've never had a Jersey Mike's sub before,
but I hear the limit.
Wow, that's crazy.
That is crazy.
What are you talking?
Whoa, you literally moved back in your chair.
What are you talking about?
Jersey Mike's is great.
Okay, I've heard this.
I just, I don't know.
What are you eating over there?
Subway?
Quiznos?
We don't have Quiznos.
Oh, that's unfortunate.
I like Quiznos.
Okay.
Last time I had Quiznos was at Barrett Jackson
because I couldn't believe there's a Quiznos there.
Hey, that's actually,
that was probably the best part of being there.
What about Firehouse?
Firehouse subs?
It's okay.
I mean, we have Firehouse everywhere out here.
It's okay.
So, what is Mike's way?
It's just the way that they dress it,
like onions, lettuce, oil and vinegar,
you know, oregano, that it's just,
it's just like the way they dress up the sub.
Is it like doused in some sort of like a jus or?
No, it's just like oil and vinegar.
They take this shaker of oil and vinegar.
So as I started reading more of the PE stories
about Jersey Mike's and the whole thing,
you and someone else that I know loved Jersey,
apparently loved Jersey Mike's,
and there's a guy that was making sketches
where he'd go into Quiznos and he'd be like very like
quagmire from a family guy kind of about it.
Like, hey, tell Mike I'm giving him consent
to have a Mike's way, you know, shit like that.
So he'd go to different locations
and just get the whole staff cracking up,
like, hey, make sure when I get a Mike's way,
he gives it to me good, you know, shit like that.
It was so funny.
I gotta find that video.
Yeah, we just gotta hope that PE doesn't ruin Jersey Mike's,
but I think all signs point to they will.
All signs point to you're going to Quiznos.
We're gonna have to build Quiznos.
All signs point to we're finding a new sub shop.
For sure.
Are you private equity owned?
Yes or no?
You gotta ask that when you walk in.
What, okay, so is there like a specialty?
A lot of people you travel a lot,
but they have like a specialty sub place
or like sandwich shop.
Is there something like that in Vegas
people should visit if they go?
No, man, there's nothing.
I mean, not that I visit.
I'm sure.
I've kind of, you know, we've talked about this, man.
It's so expensive to go out.
Like we've really like honed in on let's eat at home.
Agreed.
You know, let's, let's, let's order.
I'd rather order, you know, stuff from ranches
and spend my money that way.
But yeah, I mean, if Jersey Mike's is really close
to my house, if I want a sub, I'm going to Jersey Mike.
No subway?
Is that completely out of the question?
No, sub is out.
I can't even tell you a lot.
I mean, it's gotta be seven, eight, nine years
since I've had a subway sub.
Yeah, probably more than that, honestly.
Yeah, probably.
It's got a weird vibe ever since, you know, everything.
It just always had a weird flavor.
It did.
I mean, that was the yoga mats we were eating.
We didn't know that at the time.
That's the yoga mat.
All right, let's turn back into cars.
Let's go back into cars.
AMG, Electric Super Sedan reveals the interior.
Have you seen this thing?
No.
We got one, two.
We got about too many flat screen TVs.
Let's give them one piece of credit.
At least it's buried in the dash.
That's true.
It's not up here of where the river mirror would be.
Or you can't see half your windshield.
Looks like an S-Class.
It's gonna be a new AMGT four-door.
We got a couple more picks here.
The interior.
Looks good.
Yeah, the interior looks sweet.
You gotta give them credit.
Looks better than that iPhone Ferrari interior
that they had designed.
Yeah, that's right.
That was legitimate.
Hey, we got the guy that did Apple's design.
We can tell you got that guy.
It looked like an Apple Watch was on your dash.
Yes, we got it, dude.
You guys put a quote-unquote vintage steering wheel
and thought we wouldn't see the rest of it.
Yeah, it looks good.
Actually looks really good.
Gotta give them some credit.
This looks a lot better than most.
Yeah.
Hey, you gotta love the carbon fiber accents.
You being genuine right now or no?
It's better than black piano trim.
Oh God, is that not the worst interior feature we ever got?
It's the worst.
It's the worst.
It's kind of cool.
The Mercedes-Benz have always been one of my favorites.
You gotta give them credit.
We bag on things that need bagged on.
This isn't one of those things.
It looks okay.
They did a good job.
Diamond door paneling too, always such a nice touch.
Yeah, makes you feel like you're in a Bentley when you aren't.
Well, in your mind you can be in whatever you want,
remember?
You believe it, it's not a lie.
Yeah, hey, the steering wheel looks great.
That looks awesome, yeah.
I don't know about the 5,000 buttons,
but the steering wheel itself looks good.
Yeah, I like the circular push buttons.
It makes you feel like you're in a Porsche.
Hey man, can we stop preparing Mercedes right now
to these other better brands?
Hey, I'm just trying to help you.
I'm just giving people reference
because maybe they aren't watching on YouTube.
I mean, if you're in the market for one
of these level of cars, the last real listener
was the listener, Nicole, who bought the Porsche.
What would you buy in the, I will say,
three to four years of range?
If you had to buy a four door, because this was
example, it was as a four door, like a four door luxury.
I think you're in M7 S-Class.
We never talked about M7s.
Yeah, M7.
If I was going to buy the newest M7,
I would be game for that, for sure.
I don't even have it pulled up, but actually I will real quick.
Audi quietly kills the A8 orders in Germany.
Yeah, I heard that.
Yeah, let me just pull this up because I had it here
and I wasn't too sure, because this is another one,
big hauler we'd never really talk about.
It's looked the same for 1,000 years,
but I think it looks good still, honestly.
Yeah, it's always looked good.
I think the sedan market's over.
It sucks, man.
It sucks because it's just everything so,
looks, every company's doing the same thing,
which, I mean, we all understand why.
They don't want to really veer from what everybody else is doing.
But you got to like that the S-Class is around.
It does seem like, I mean, at least I hope
that they're committed to it.
It looks like, you know, like M7 and 7 Series
is going to, you know, stick around.
But, you know, these big body sedans are gone.
Like, you know, most brands are just,
you know, like we talked about this before,
like Ford Taurus.
It just feels like it should exist.
What do you think's gonna come back into favor?
Like, we talked about things that go in and out of favor.
It seems like,
I think companies like Ford have talked about
taking something like a four-door sedan,
and I get it's not an S-Class or M7 or anything like that,
but just a four-door sedan that can transport people around.
I mean, Camry is still so popular.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Camry is extremely popular.
So why you wouldn't, you know,
try to build a really reliable, you know,
vehicle like Camry and so it doesn't,
I think so many of these companies get so scatterbrained
that they see sales fall and they go,
we're just gonna kill it.
You know, and it's like, well, just make it better.
You know, just make it more reliable.
Build a history with the car because,
I mean, Camry and Corolla still sell like hotcakes.
Yep.
You know, so you've basically abandoned
and given these companies like Toyota just,
I mean, the Honda Accord, you know,
how do you let these guys just exist
and you guys just don't have any answer
because you're like, oh, we don't wanna do it.
It's like, that's a really stupid reason.
And even though it's so popular,
that design language of that,
of the Accord specifically needs to be studied
because you go back five, six, seven years
and it was so sweet, so hot, kind of looked out-ish.
And then now it's like one of the ugliest sedans
you'll ever see.
Yeah, it's, they did, but because they have the reputation
that we built you a reliable car, they still get sales.
Now, they're not getting sales on the level of Camry,
but I just think abandoning four-door sedans
because we say everybody's buying an SUV
and then you can point to Camry and Corolla and go,
well, that's not exactly true.
It's true.
I mean, if you build something that people trust,
they still buy it.
But I think that's what these companies just don't see.
They don't see that a lot of things get killed off
because maybe you didn't have the best offering at the time.
Let me give you a curveball here.
What have you thought historically
of things like the El Camino or the Ranchero and that?
Love the El Camino.
Oh, fantastic.
Okay, then you're gonna love this.
So this is maybe one of the weirdest builds I've ever seen,
but somebody took an M4 and made it into basically an El Camino.
Look how cool that is.
That is real cool.
Check this out.
I'm gonna go through the pictures if you guys are watching.
That front end is so egregious.
You don't like it?
He hasn't grown on you yet?
No, the pig nose, no, it has not grown on me.
Look at that.
That's incredible.
Yeah, right.
I've seen people do this with chargers, like Dodge stuff,
but that's kind of cool.
That's sick.
Real sick.
That, again, no company's gonna make that.
It's for sale, by the way, 145 grand.
I might say that that's a little much for what you've done here,
but I get you put a lot of work into it,
but I mean, that's incredibly cool.
That is really cool.
That's one of those things like that's incredibly cool.
Imagine rolling up to your plumbing gig
and you're in that thing.
Dude, rolling up anywhere.
I'd make an excuse to go anywhere.
I'd sign up for extra pickups at the school line
just to walk through the back loop of the kid's school.
I would.
Any excuse of driving.
Hey, whoever did the work,
that's top flight design work
to make it look the way they did.
A applause to you.
Let me ask you this, because I had the crazy experience.
I've had nothing but good experiences
with driving the Raptor, again, attention,
people enjoying it or whatever,
and no aggressive drivers towards me
until two nights ago.
It was a 2015 or so, Colorado, Chevy Colorado,
the four-door one with racing stripes.
So he knew he was, look, Rob had an alarm go off.
I have alarms all day long.
I get alarms, I have maybe eight or nine alarms set up.
I told you my life was hard, it's hard working.
Hey, adults put their phone on vibrate, just so we're clear.
It was on silent, but alarms can't be silenced
because I'll forget to look.
Don't judge me, okay, back to my story.
To top it off, this truck had the nuts hanging
on the back of it as well.
Zip-zagging in and out of, I was like, oh my God, I can't.
And then he starts to slow down,
and then I'm like, oh, come on, man, what are we doing here?
You have any similar stories?
Racing stripes.
Colorado.
Nuts hanging down.
That's a hard-o move if you've ever seen them.
That was the, I mean, the only excuse could be
if the guy was like 17, 18, I'd be like,
hey, man, we've all been there.
We've all done dumb stuff.
If he hadn't ran the light, and then I saw him at the light,
because once he probably realized how I wasn't interacting,
he was gonna be an idiot.
When we got to the light, he just blew through the light,
which again, terrible idea.
If he turned out to be like a 40-year-old in that,
oh my God, it would have crushed myself beforehand.
And you know he was, and you know he was.
I know.
Yeah, no, we are in traffic hell over here.
So the times I have to travel, I don't get a lot of space.
It's only getting worse, by the way, for you.
Oh, buddy, it's, I need people to stop coming here.
Do not come.
Do not come.
Yeah, we need to shut the borders down for real.
It is, it is, from where I was when I came to this town
to now, it is night and day, the traffic situation.
You can't even open it up.
If you're on the BMW, can you get to the second gear?
No, you gotta be like five o'clock in the morning.
How many years have you been there, in Vegas?
Over a decade.
Yeah, I mean, so pretty close to what, 15?
Oh, damn.
15 years.
I mean, it was, here's the craziest part about it is
that it's this thing that you see, and many of you
are seeing this with you, you know, whatever town
or city you're in, is just every place is growing.
And I keep wondering, where is everybody coming from?
Like.
I wonder.
What is going on?
Yeah.
But you can't just say in Nevada, it's like, oh well,
everybody's coming from California.
It's like, dude, you'd take half the state
for what is supposedly coming into Vegas now.
You know, like, that's not all that it is.
It is just, it's unbelievable.
So yeah, you gotta drive either late at night,
early morning, you know, to get any kind of freeway fun
out here.
That sucks.
Let's land the plane with a conversation.
I told Nick I wanted to bring up,
give him another curveball here.
I was doing some analytic downloading
of our social platforms.
And so we're at 14 months of doing the show
and combined through everything we've done
between 15 and 20 million views across short form content.
Okay.
And you were telling me the other day,
it was a fun call where you were like, you know,
I kind of don't have anything to watch on my YouTube, right?
Or even across most social platforms,
if you have the downtime or whatever to hop on,
what do you think one of the numbers
that I just found out earlier this week?
And then two, at the same time,
there's also nothing for you to watch.
I'm not telling Nick.
I think you've just become the producer of content.
So being the consumer of content
isn't quite what it was before.
I do think we're at an inflection point.
I think you're starting to hear,
especially on the automotive side,
I really am appreciative.
There's a lot of men and women
that have been doing content a very long time now.
You know, they got a decade or more under their belt
of doing high level content,
whether they worked for companies,
now they're on their own.
They're terrific on camera, they're entertaining.
You're starting to hear them talk,
I think more and more from the consumer's perspective,
which is, what are the next steps?
Because we went through,
basically everything was a vlog low production,
which was probably what, a seven, eight year run,
you know, 10 year run of low production.
And now we're like at the 10 year mark
of extremely high production.
Cost where we turned social media into television
for a lot of channels.
I think everybody's trying to figure out
what the next real move is,
because you can't go back to extremely low quality,
people aren't gonna watch it.
Right, right.
And everything's in 4K and every, you know,
so you're not gonna go backwards,
but I am finding it interesting to listen to a lot of these,
you know, again, highly experienced people,
just admit like they don't really know
what the next move is.
And I think that's why I'm struggling
to like follow the same creators,
because I think everybody's in a transition period.
Yeah.
And I can be subscribed to a lot of things.
And for some reason, I can just go like 10 days
with nothing to watch.
Damn.
I just don't see how that's possible.
We might, and this has been talked about for a long time,
where like the notifications,
like would you rely on being notified of new drops,
or would you go through your subscription panel
and see what's going on?
No, what I would do is,
and this is another topic,
I think I always went to the feed of like YouTube,
you know, where they pop up all your stuff.
And if one of your subscriptions had a new release,
it would show up.
I wonder if that algorithm has gotten worse.
That's what I'm thinking.
You know, that Google just hasn't, you know,
really stayed up with, you know, like,
I was listening to somebody who is really,
really high up executive at some type of platform,
I forget, like what Netflix does,
nobody else has been able to replicate.
Like with their algorithm of putting things in front of you
that they know you'll like.
Like that's Netflix's big advantage according to this guy.
It's like, their algorithm is so good,
they will have the stuff you like,
they will throw stuff in front of you
that they know you'll like.
And that's sort of their huge leg up
is this homepage that they have.
Is that true?
I mean, that's his take,
and he's an executive in this world, I'm not.
So I got to take him at his word,
but I do feel like that's what I see on YouTube,
is I go, why does my homepage suck?
Like, why is there nothing to watch?
What did the next Netflix guy give credit to like AI,
or was it just something he was just kind of?
No, I think from the beginning,
that's what they invested in.
I think they invested in that algorithm of knowing
what you watch and whatever they've developed.
Because if you go to Peacock,
or you go to Hulu, it's way worse than Netflix.
I mean, it's not as intuitive as Netflix
and the user experience.
And the numbers kind of bear it out
with the global growth of Netflix and subscriptions
that that's what's driving people to Netflix.
It's not just that they have all of this better content
because you and I can go to Netflix
and not have anything to watch.
And many of you probably experienced that,
but they just do a better job of presenting things to you
that they think you'll like based off of what you've watched,
what you've interacted with,
what you've watched the most hours of.
And I think YouTube is kind of struggling,
at least my YouTube seems to be struggling
of getting things in front of me
that I actually want to watch.
When you talk about quality,
like going back in bad quality, that's unacceptable, right?
We got the 4K, we got the good audio.
You can't go back in that sense of quality,
but then overall the production
of what it is that you're putting together,
maybe it degrades a little bit and goes back to,
like I'm imagining Seinfeld in 4K
and that's kind of what's gonna be entertaining again,
like simple, it's kind of podcasting is what it is.
But if you were to say,
what is the most type of entertaining thing right now?
Cause we all know Nick likes foolish stuff, all right?
We know what Nick likes, but like what,
cause we're gonna take a couple of swings here
at different types of content for the channel.
Stuff with the Raptor, guest shows,
and in talking to those people as well,
hopefully we get new ideas of like,
what that next kind of thing is,
but do you have any kind of inkling for you personally,
what that might be?
I'm just trying to think,
what is the reason that I'm following you?
Right?
And I think a lot of people got sucked into
very, very high production,
and that's not the reason I started following them.
I followed them because I'm starting to follow
this guy, I don't want to say who it is,
cause I haven't watched him long enough
where he's just kind of working on cars in his garage,
and he does it in a very relatable way.
But if he starts to jump up and get out of that,
a lot of times that kind of turns off the beginning crowd.
You and I are talking about somebody on YouTube
that seems to be going away from authentic
and into more clickbait.
We were talking about this earlier this week.
I think clickbait will always work, obviously.
I just think most guys that have their head on their shoulders
and don't have tons of time
and just want to watch the people that they watch.
The other thing is, I think it's really hard
to produce content, so it's taking everybody longer.
So they're doing less drops.
And you and I have talked about some creators
that we really like, and we're like,
man, they just need to kind of like drop,
just hang it out with them in the garage.
So I think that stuff is going to come back
where it's just lower production,
but you do have the 4K camera, you do have the microphone.
But I see why everybody's scared to take a step back
because they think it's going to drown their channel.
Yeah, which is why I'm glad.
That's why I said we're in a transition period here.
For sure, and that's why I'm glad we started
with the hang concept, like in the bio, in the description,
saying it even on the show.
I think that's what most people want,
and when it starts moving further and further away
from a hang, and it's more of a produced piece of content,
it seems like it's not really what I'm interested in.
Yeah, and I think it's a lot of fun
to look at it as a transition period,
but I think right now it is kind of depressing
because you want to be able to watch something, right?
But you go, I kind of understand it
because I just think everybody's scared to make a move
because this algorithm thing is a big weight
on top of everybody that you start messing up your algorithm
as a creator, you could lose everything, right?
Like you may never get it back.
And so I think everybody is very, very cognizant.
Number one, you can't spend tons of money to produce content.
If you spend a ton of money,
there is a very clear end in sight.
Some people can do it for a year, two years, five years,
but that is going to come to an end
because you're going to wake up and you're going to go,
where'd all the money go?
And I think that's what we're seeing,
is that as people are getting paid less for advertising,
as all of this stuff is starting to become commoditized,
so to speak, the next 10 years doesn't look
like the previous 10.
And so all of these different things, I think,
and I'd be curious what our audience thinks is just like,
we thought there were not very many people
just speaking how we all talk privately.
That was sort of the idea of the show.
I think when you're talking about a show being launched
and being in the millions upon millions of views this quickly,
we were somewhat correct on that.
I agree.
People just want to hear guys that talk like we all talk.
And I think that's what everybody's finding,
but they're wondering how to do it.
Yeah, and I think money, I'll leave my part here,
is that money in the system,
especially for the advertising side of it,
we'll just talk about YouTube.
I know that TikTok has its own thing
and Meta barely pays creators out anything,
but there's only so much money going into that system
compared to 10, 15 years ago.
So kind of like when you look at the corporate world,
when you ascend up the corporate ladder
and you start being costing the company a lot of money,
and then you can get somebody who's maybe not necessarily
entry level, but that's made a couple levels below you
to pay them way less to do just as good of work,
there's a term for that.
Like you kind of age yourself out of corporate
depending on who you are,
and you're standing with the leadership at these companies.
For creators, if you can generate the audience,
keep the eyeballs on their platform,
and do it at a fraction of the price,
there's still gonna be money in there for you,
but it's not gonna be some of these people
without naming names that are claiming
300,000, half a million per month
off of their channel revenue,
that's outside of brand deals,
like I don't know how much,
good for them that they were able to do it,
but if you wanna do it like us,
and just start making content and getting eyeballs
and attention and building an audience,
you can still do it and probably make money at it,
it's just not gonna be to the level
of half a million dollars.
Let's be clear about our story.
We make money in the car business.
Exactly, and that's a good point.
It's not for the ad revenue.
This is when anybody says,
you have these guys that say in the comments,
well, you're just a podcaster,
it's like, no, I mean, this is just kind of something we do.
This isn't our day job.
There's a lot of people that rely on this.
And that's why you hear all these crazy ads of shit,
you know, these people don't use,
which by the way is working less and less.
So when those advertising agencies realize,
I can't have this automotive guy doing factor meals
when he's overweight and he doesn't really use the product
and it's not really his crowd.
And that's not, when all of that stuff starts
to get put together with data,
those guys are gonna go away too, right?
Those advertisers are gonna go away.
And many of them have already.
I mean, if anybody remembers the energy drink craze
where they'd have all of these chicks on Instagram
pushing bang energy, that went away, you know what I mean?
Like that company, that company sold
and was like, yeah, we're not doing that anymore.
You know what I mean?
Like this is just kind of how this stuff works.
And I think it's going to be an interesting,
I think the most interesting thing is gonna be the next
24 to 36 months.
Absolutely.
Because if the economy tightens, which it is,
if people really start digging into numbers and going,
you know, and I know how I feel as a listener,
I've told everybody here,
the advertising on podcasting has gotten out of control.
I mean, it's just simply out of control.
I mean, I know why people do it.
I'm not bashing it, but advertising products
you don't believe in because you need a paycheck
is also not the answer that this was all supposed
to end up at, but that's where we are today.
That's for sure.
Absolutely.
Well, with that said, the guest show will launch next week
with the first guest.
I'm not sure who's gonna be the first one that I release,
but look out for that.
So keep a really close eye on our socials,
obviously on the podcast feed,
and we'll see everybody next week.
All right, guys.
See ya.
About this episode
The hosts dive into the awkwardness of CEOs, especially in the automotive and food industries, struggling with authentic communication, highlighting the recent McDonald's CEO video as a prime example. They critique Ford CEO Jim Farley’s comments on Mustang and Corvette rivalry, revealing a disconnect between Ford’s internal views and enthusiast perceptions. The discussion touches on market trends, including the softening classic car market and the challenges automakers face in aligning brand messaging with consumer expectations. Humor and candid opinions underscore the conversation about authenticity, marketing, and the future direction of iconic car brands.
40-inch tires
aftermarket
all wheel drive
Bentley
car of the year
EV
flat screen TVs
Good, better, best
horsepower
Kia
Chevrolet Camaro
Chevrolet Corvette
Chrysler Pacifica
Dodge Charger
Dodge Ram
Ford Bronco Sport
Ford Excursion
Ford F-150
Ford Lobo
Ford Mustang
Ford Ranchero
Ford Taurus
Honda Accord
Honda CR-V
Hyundai Ioniq 6
Jeep Cherokee
Jeep Grand Cherokee
Jeep Grand Wagoneer
Mercedes-Benz S-Class
Porsche Taycan
Ram 1500
Toyota Camry
Toyota Corolla
Toyota RAV4
Volkswagen Beetle
Volkswagen Golf
Original notes
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Clutch Culture Podcast
Robert Garza & Nick Walters
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61:09