My Ozempic weight loss experience...SO FAR, plus, how we determine what your car is worth
My Car Guru Podcast
My Car Guru PodcastJan 2, 2026
My Ozempic weight loss experience...SO FAR, plus, how we determine what your car is worth
Annotations will appear as you listen
0:00
23:24
Car
2025 Nissan Aria
The 2025 Nissan Aria is a new electric SUV from Nissan. It's designed to be spacious and efficient, making it a good choice for families or anyone needing a versatile vehicle.
The Nissan Ariya is a new electric SUV that runs on batteries instead of gasoline. It's designed to be eco-friendly and has a lot of modern features, making it a good option for people looking for a clean and stylish vehicle.
Depreciation is how much a car loses its value as it gets older. When car dealers buy cars, they can lose money if they have to sell them for less than they paid because the cars aren't worth as much anymore.
JD Power is a company that collects information about cars and gives ratings. It helps people understand which cars are good or bad based on what other owners say.
NADA is an organization that helps car dealers and buyers understand how much cars are worth. They have a book that lists prices for different used cars.
The Kia K5 is a car model that is a mid-size sedan. It has a stylish look and comes with various engine options and tech features, making it a popular choice among buyers.
Actual Cash Value (ACV) is how much a car is worth right now, considering how much it has depreciated since it was bought. It's what you would get if you sold the car or if your insurance paid you after an accident.
After-market items are things you can buy for your car that didn’t come with it when you bought it. This includes things like extra warranties or accessories.
The Ford Mustang is a popular sports car that has been around for a long time. It's known for being fast and stylish, making it a favorite among car enthusiasts and a symbol of American car culture.
The Ford Escape is a small SUV that many people buy because it's affordable and practical. It's good for families or anyone who needs a bit more space than a regular car.
The Ford Bronco Sport is a small SUV that can handle rough terrain, making it great for outdoor adventures. It's built on the same platform as the Ford Escape but is more rugged.
The Nissan Versa is a small, inexpensive car that many people buy because it's affordable and gets good gas mileage. It's great for anyone looking for a budget-friendly vehicle.
Carfax is a company that helps you check a car's history. They can tell you if the car has been in accidents or if there are any problems with its title.
The My Car Guru guidebook is a helpful book that gives you advice on buying cars and getting car repairs. It can help you know what to look for when you're shopping for a car.
A body shop is a place where cars go to get fixed after they've been in accidents. They repair the outside of the car, making it look new again.
LIVE
Hey folks, this is Lenny Lawson, the car guru and your Ozympic guinea pig.
Yep.
That's me.
I've been taking the drug Ozympic to lose the weight that I gained when I had my hip
replaced twice in the 18 month period.
It wasn't a tremendous amount of weight, but it was enough to know that I was pushing the
limits of my size 38 pants.
That's never happened in my life.
I've always been like a 36 or a 37 inch waist.
But see, I don't get fat down there anyway.
Really?
My fatness is up high.
Isn't that interesting?
You know, people have different types of body structure and the fat goes where it wants
to go.
Well, all I know or all I knew was that 234 pounds was too much.
My cardiologist agreed.
So I started the shots.
So how do I like it?
Well, I don't like how it makes me feel because I feel a little, I don't know, just slightly
off, a little woozy at times.
And, of course, I don't like that.
It's almost like I've been on a ride at the fair and I just got off and I don't feel
100% good.
My first shot was 0.25 milliliters.
And initially that, well, let's say I gave it to myself about 730 in the morning.
And then when I got to work, I started feeling a little lightheaded about an hour later.
But other than that, I didn't feel anything all week.
No appetite changes.
Matter of fact, I wanted more food.
And then the, let's see, the second was 0.25.
About the same.
Still eating like a horse.
Then I took the 0.50 and everything changed.
All of a sudden, I wasn't hungry.
And if I fixed my normal, like a bowl of cereal, a cinnamon toast crunch, I'd eat half of it
because I was done.
And so I, any kind of meal like that, it was just, it just wasn't as appealing.
Everything tasted the same.
But it definitely does affect your appetite.
Now my, well, I hate to get gross here, but my gastrointestinal behavior has been normal.
A lot of people have, you know, different kinds of side effects.
Mine, mine were pretty light in that regard.
And then my second shot was 0.50.
And same thing, just a little, like right now, I feel just a little off.
Like I'm maybe 90% here and 10% of me is somewhere else.
So that's how I feel.
Oh, how much weight have I lost?
About eight pounds.
So that's pretty good.
When I started though, I was down a little bit.
I was down to about 230.
So now I'm at 222.
And I really want to get to 210 or less.
That's my goal.
And I don't want to get ozepic face.
My wife said, I don't want you to get ozepic face.
I said, what's that?
And that's where you look like you're, you know, you lose a lot of weight in your face
and you get real drawn looking.
Well, I don't look that good anyway.
So a little drawn and going to kill me.
So anyway, I'm perfectly willing to be your guinea pig on this.
Now, if I was morbidly obese, I'd be on it in a heartbeat because it's really not that
hard and you will lose your appetite.
You won't want to eat as much.
The nurse that gave me my first shot, she had to show me how to do it, which the shots
are very easy and painless.
That needle is so small and it only goes in about, I'd say a quarter of an inch, maybe?
And so it's really easy to do.
I've never given myself a shot before.
I was scared the first time, so I had her do it.
She said her daughter has been on it for, I think, six months and has lost 65 pounds.
So it's, it's worth looking at.
So this information is brought to you by my car guru, where we talk cars and other stuff
occasionally.
Okay, so what's going on in the automotive world?
Well, 2025 ended with a bang.
At least it did for us.
We had a flood of customers come in to buy cars.
Now, we were really pushing our Nissan brand because we had some big incentives hanging
out there for us if we hit our goal and we blew it away.
So that's a good feeling, even though my Tennessee Vols lost.
Not real happy about that, but so did Alabama.
Could not believe Alabama got murdered in the Rose Bowl.
That was ridiculous.
And Mississippi, beating Georgia, how about them apples?
But here I've gone off topic again.
That happens around the holidays.
So what's happening in the automotive world?
What's going to happen with EVs in 2026?
They aren't going to sell.
Now there's some hardcore diehards that have already had Teslas and so forth.
I think Tesla, I think the bloom is off the rose for Tesla.
Don't you?
I think Elon really screwed up from a business standpoint when he decided to jump on the
Donald J. Trump campaign.
Now, I'm glad he did because that helped Trump get elected and some of you may not
like my opinion on that, but you know, everybody's entitled to opinion, right?
You don't have to hate him for it.
I don't hate you if you disagree.
Can't we have a nice discussion?
I just don't really do it anymore.
I don't talk politics anymore.
So Tesla got the bad end of the deal when, when Musk decided to become political because
they pretty much lost a lot of their liberal minded customers and there weren't
that many conservative minded customers behind Teslas.
I have to say that because they, they aren't EV fans in general.
There are exceptions, but EVs in general are not going to do well because of the loss of
the $7,500 tax credit.
That's a pretty big rebate.
Now I've got one EV left.
It's a 2025 Nissan Aria and you know, it's a little SUV.
It's not too small, about mid-sized, about the same size as a Ford Edge or maybe a Honda
Passport, something like that.
A Toyota Highlander, well no, more like a RAV4 and it really drives good and it gets great
gas mileage.
You never need gas, but we haven't been able to sell it now.
We had this thing at the end of the year, if there's outstanding vehicles that are on
the ground that shouldn't be since it is 2026 and this is a 2025 model.
It ages out and Nissan settles up with us with the final rebates.
And so they gave us $10,000 to apply to the purchase of this vehicle.
And if you want an EV, I will take off another $10,000.
How's that sound?
That's $20,000 off on a Nissan Aria at Gateway Nissan, Greenville, Tennessee.
Okay, I'll be back in just one minute.
You know, that's the best way to buy a car.
Just wait until nobody wants them.
And then they're cheap, real cheap.
I wish they'd put some big rebates on some of this other stuff though.
You know, something may sell in like Texas or California or New York or Virginia or whatever,
but here in East Tennessee, it just doesn't sell.
And that's kind of a problem if you've got 30 of them in stock.
So those particular vehicles, we either have to trade them out to another dealer
who's willing to take them and there aren't many takers right now.
Or we have to sell them.
And the only way to do that is to cut, cut, cut.
I mean, that's what any business does.
I mean, if you're running a food stand.
Well, I look at the car business a lot like a fruit stand.
And, you know, first couple of days, everything's fine.
Those apples look good, the peaches look really good, they're nice and firm, oranges look good.
But after two, three days, they start to get a little soft and then the prices, you know,
you'll see the little X's on the price and they'll say now only.
And then they X through that and then they say now only because that fruit doesn't stay good
for long and ends up getting thrown out.
We can't throw out cars.
Well, I guess we could, but it would be financially irresponsible.
So we just cut the prices until they sell.
My dad used to say there's a rear end for every seat.
So ultimately, whether it's online or somebody driving by the lot,
somebody's going to buy it because it's just going to make sense to do so.
So that's where we are right now.
We don't have a whole lot of those.
I said, you know, 30 of them, we only have about 10 problem vehicles right now,
new vehicles that are going to go sometime in January at some price to somebody with a rear end.
And that's got to happen.
Now, used cars have been very volatile in the last year.
They've gone up, they've gone down.
You know, anytime we go to the auction and buy cars and bring them back,
we've got to sell those things in 30 to 45 days.
If we don't, in the car business, we use this term.
We're killed in those cars.
And so there were some four and $5,000 losses that I took at the end of the year,
just to get rid of some cars that we had purchased at the auction.
What do you call that?
Depreciation.
It happens to car dealers too.
Now, new cars sitting out there on the lot.
They don't really depreciate.
It's just that people just stop buying them and they have to increase the rebates
until somebody does buy them, or we have to increase our discounts until somebody does buy them.
Used cars aren't the same way.
They have a book value.
It could be KBB, Kelly Blue Book, or it could be JD Power, which used to be the yellow book,
the NADA, National Auto Dealers Association book.
I hate acronyms, don't you?
I'll try not to use any more.
And then you have the black book, and then we get these market reports from the auction companies
that tell us what cars are bringing at the auction.
So there's a lot of different sources out there, but what you see is they're going down.
Now, another source of information that we have is called DealerLink.
Good name for a dealer, isn't it?
It helps us evaluate used vehicles.
So let's say that you come to my dealership and you say, hey, Lenny, what's my car worth?
Now, I guess just like anything, no human really knows what it's worth.
It's an estimate.
It's a guess.
But we try to guess intelligently with accurate information from all these different sources.
So the first thing we do is open your driver's door.
Weird place to start, huh?
But there's a bar code that's on the door jam.
And so we use our scanner and we open the DealerLink app.
We scan that bar code and magically goes into this system.
It tells us exactly what your vehicle is.
We have to add the options that it has.
We have to subtract any damage that it has.
Let's say the tires are worn out.
It's got a star in the windshield.
Got a big blood stain in the back seat.
Well, let's not say that.
We already did say it.
Let's say it has excessive miles.
So all of that will impact the value of the vehicle.
So we put all that information in there and then it gives us the various book values.
It gives us four book values.
It gives us the market value, which is a combination of everything that's out there
on the internet, very similar to that vehicle.
And it gives us wholesale, gives us trade-in, loan value, and retail value.
And so we look at all those.
Another thing we look at is how fast does this type of vehicle move in this market?
And that's a grade from A to F.
Like I looked at a vehicle the other day.
It was a, let's say, what was it, a Kia K5.
And it didn't just have an F. It had an F minus.
That's just a really bad, I didn't know you could get a grade like an F minus.
That would be such an insult.
Isn't F bad enough?
I guess not for a Kia K5.
And so the thing had a decent book value.
I think it was in the mid 20s.
The lady had paid over 40,000 for it in 2024.
That's a pretty serious depreciation, isn't it?
When you'd like to know that, had it financed for a long time,
but had paid it aggressively down when one payment was due, she would pay two or three.
So because she had aggressively paid for this vehicle,
then her payoff was right at what the ACV, the actual, there we go with acronyms again.
The actual cash value was on her vehicle.
What is actual cash value, Lenny?
That's the number that we are willing to buy her vehicle for.
Because when you trade something in, I know it sounds weird, I'm trading it in.
You take it off of the new one.
Really, we're buying your vehicle and giving you a dollar credit for it
versus the one that you're buying.
That's why I tell people to use the four targets when they're
trying to buy a new car, negotiate the selling price of the vehicle,
forget about the trade-in, forget about the payments,
and then find out what your trade-in, what they're willing to pay you for your trade-in,
then negotiate the terms of the loan, then negotiate the after-markets like warranties
and stuff. You got to do those four things separately.
A good friend of mine listens to this show all the time.
He said, Lenny, you really beat that four target horse to death.
I said, well, you have to.
People forget, and different people are coming in listening to the podcast.
So back off.
He's only been a friend since I was in the sixth grade,
so he feels pretty free to let me have it.
He says, well, you ought to avoid redundancy.
And I said, listen, when you're talking about car business and cars and buying and selling
and trading and all the stuff that we talk about and the history of cars and whatever,
I said, when you do 500 shows, you're going to repeat yourself occasionally.
So cut me a little slack, long-time friend from West Virginia.
Okay, what else?
Oh, yeah. So I'm sending my nephew, Max Lawson, the third son of my brother,
grandson of my dad, all Max Lawsons.
I avoided that moniker.
I was named after both my grandfathers, Leonard and Blaine.
Okay, so anyway, I'm sending Max and another employee of ours
to the NADA convention.
That's the, sorry, another acronym,
National Auto Dealers Association Convention in Nolans.
Or is it Las Vegas?
I can't remember.
I think it's Las Vegas.
And so they're going to Las Vegas for one reason,
to learn what we need to learn about integrating artificial intelligence into our business model.
This is, everything I read, this is a big deal.
I know it's a big deal because I use it.
I use artificial intelligence because I don't have enough regular intelligence.
And it is very handy for me.
My wife gets on me all the time.
What are you doing that again for?
Well, because it's accurate.
How do you know?
Well, because it's going on to the worldwide web just like Google does.
She's really not that forceful about it.
But she won't use it.
She's again it, as they say around here.
Again it, but I use it for all kinds of things.
If I were you, I'd try it.
Just download the chat GPT app on your iPhone or your Android device and try it out.
You can use it for a lot of things.
I use it just instead of Google because I want direct information.
What did I put in there today?
Let me get my phone out.
I can't remember what I said.
I had to find out something very important.
Oh yeah, I wanted to find out in the state of Tennessee
if you lay somebody off or send them packing.
Under what circumstances can they collect unemployment compensation?
Because, well, I'm not going to get into any details because I don't want to get sued.
But there are many circumstances that if you write it down on their termination papers
that they can't get unemployment.
That wasn't really what I wanted to do for this person.
I wanted them to be able to get unemployment,
even though it comes out of my unemployment account.
Because of longevity as far as the working here.
I'm not going to talk any more about the reasons that they're not working here.
But that's what I use chat GPT for.
And I use it for so many other things.
I ask a lot of health questions.
I ask car questions.
I ask vehicle questions.
Like we've got a guy wanting to trade in a saline Mustang.
And it basically, it's a company, saline, S-A-L-E-E-N,
that does serious modifications or did.
I don't even know if they're still in business or not.
But you could order a Ford Mustang from the factory,
have it drop shipped to the saline factory.
They would put superchargers on them and change the suspension,
all kinds of performance gear.
And then they would ship it to the dealership and you would sell it to the customer.
Well, I got a guy wanting to sell us one.
I've never traded for one or owned one.
So I wanted to do some research.
So I just asked chat GPT.
I said, give me the different models of the saline Mustang,
especially in 2008 and what the different packages were.
Boom.
There it was.
All the different packages, what the values are,
what they cost when they were new.
You know, I could have done that in Google,
but I would have to type the question in Google.
Then it would give me a bunch of different options to choose from
that I could drill down into.
I'd have to drill and drill and drill.
And I just would rather have the answer to the question.
And there it was.
Now, Google is using AI as well.
That's the first thing that pops up on Google now is the AI answer.
So I guess I could still use Google, but I'm tired of Google.
I like chat GPT.
Chat GPT will also rewrite commercials.
Like if I have a commercial I'm really struggling with that needs to go on the air
and I just cannot get it done.
Then it will rewrite it and make it sound pretty good.
And then it'll ask me, hey, you want a 30 second version?
Now that's cool.
I'll be back in just a minute.
Okay, I am back.
Well, I got some bad news last week.
No more Ford Escape gets over with.
So at the Ford Motor Company, we don't have an inexpensive SUV anymore.
See how they're going to do that?
Because the escape is the is the platform for the Bronco Sport and the Ford Maverick.
They share that platform.
Hopefully they'll come out with something else that is, you know,
mid twenties or less that we can sell to folks.
Nissan decided to eliminate the Nissan Versa, the cheapest car or let's say,
let me rephrase the least expensive car sold in the United States.
It's going bye bye.
So why, why eliminate these inexpensive vehicles?
Because they can't make any money selling them.
They just can't.
I learned many years ago when I was a Chevrolet dealer that it cost Chevrolet
about the same to build a new Silverado pickup truck as it did a Chevy Cavalier.
People say, well, there's no way.
Well, there is a way.
The labor is the same as far as overall labor cost and the materials are only slightly different.
It's a marginal increase in material, a little bit more metal, but less wiring in many cases.
So the manufacturers don't like cheap vehicles.
They like expensive vehicles.
They like a lot of options on vehicles.
There's got to be some kind of a tipping point here.
We need inexpensive cars so people can afford them.
You know, stretching out these payments to 84 months and, you know, 10 years,
it's just, it's not sustainable.
But I'm along for the ride, just like you are.
If I can help you in any way, call me 423-552-2020 or send me a text.
Send me your VIN number and I'll give you the history of your vehicle or a vehicle
that you're thinking about buying.
It's nice to know what it's worth before you buy it and if it's been totaled or had accident history,
you would have to pay car fax for that.
You don't have to pay me anything.
I just need your VIN number and I'll get back with you.
Also, if you need a copy of the My Car Guru guidebook,
that's pretty much a complete synopsis of what the typical things I talk about.
And you can use that when you go to buy a car or get automotive service.
Need to pick out a body shop to fix your wreck.
It's very handy.
Send me your email address to 423-552-2020 or send your physical address to my telephone operator.
Just call it 423-639-5151.
She'll take it down, give it to me, I'll print it out and put it in the mail.
How's that?
Well, thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.
About this episode
Lenny Lawson shares his personal journey with Ozempic for weight loss after gaining some pounds post-surgery. He discusses the effects of the medication, including appetite changes and weight loss progress. Transitioning to automotive topics, he highlights the current state of the car market, including challenges with EV sales and the importance of accurate vehicle valuations. Lenny explains how he determines car values using various resources and stresses the need for affordable vehicles in the market. He also touches on the use of AI in the automotive industry.
