VinWiki: Ed Bolian Reveals How His Insane Car Stories Bought Him A Bugatti Veyron

Those like riveting tails of buying a Lamborghini from a prostitute

or having your Ferrari stolen on your wedding day.

Ed Bolian, you have grown your YouTube channel

to north of two million subscribers.

It also allowed you to own many incredible cars.

I started my first business, which was breeding out

Bino Iguanas in my parents' basement.

I bought my first Lamborghini Gallardo when I was 20 years old.

Oh, that's Ed, the cannonball guy.

But he's actually a dear devil.

I've told about 3,500 car stories.

I need a stupid goal.

I need to buy a Bugatti.

The first time I got into that was, this thing is nuts.

Where does Vim Wickey go from where you currently are?

That's a great question, I think.

Ed, I'm not sure if I've ever had somebody as knowledgeable

as you about the legality and processes in the automotive world

and with so many incredible stories

sat on the other side of me in either one of my van studios.

You have grown your YouTube channel

to north of two million subscribers.

You've launched multiple businesses

and it has also allowed you to own many incredible cars,

ones that are completely my taste as well,

including a Bugatti Veyron.

So I'm going to start by asking you,

if you had to pick one single defining moment

from your earliest years that set you on that trajectory,

what would spring to mind?

Yeah, as I look back on my career in the automotive industry

and certainly the journey that I've had

in automotive content creation,

clearly it revolves around Cannonball

as kind of that initial point of radiation

in terms of both influence and the recruitment

of other people to show up and tell stories

on the Vim Wickey channel.

And so I think that so much of it

is that the perfect intersection

that Cannonball was in the 1970s

between automotive enthusiasts and journalists

or content creators of the day,

racing drivers, car dealers,

all kind of coming together for some insanity

and the stories that would come out of it.

And so when I was young, when I was in high school,

learning about the history of Cannonball,

that it wasn't just this goofy 1981 rat pack

and Burt Reynolds movie,

that it was a real thing that crazy people went out

and did and drove across the country

as fast as they possibly could.

I just thought it was the coolest thing ever.

It was the kind of thing that could kind of

turn your resume into a single word,

which I thought, you know,

as somebody who's trying to define themselves

in a world that I wasn't born into or led into,

it was like, that was the dream,

was for people just to say,

oh, that's Ed, the Cannonball guy.

And you know, I think being able to chase that dream

for the first 10 years of my working life,

because I kind of set the goal

when I'm 17, 18 years old and did it when I was 28,

you know, that's a time,

especially for guys where you're just really trying

to figure out who you are and how the world's gonna work

and how you're gonna grow into the person

you always dreamt you might become.

And so having a stupid, ridiculous goal like that,

that could kind of be that slow dripping faucet

in the back of your consciousness

that can kind of motivate you through

the dark times of self-doubt and uncertainty and pain

and just be that sort of like guiding light

of your professional ideas and career,

that was a huge blessing.

And when I wrote a book about it,

I started it with a letter to my son

because we got pregnant the month after I got home.

And so I started writing the book

right after we'd taken him home from the hospital.

And I said, you know, my hope is that you might one day

find your Cannonball.

I hope it's not anything like anything that I do,

but you find something that can kind of take you through

that chapter of your life when everything's hard,

when everything doesn't work,

but be that thing that kind of becomes that moment for you,

that the world starts to revolve around

from a professional perspective.

Even though you are talking about an automotive,

the first automotive kind of moments

that your life began with,

especially in terms of business and ideas,

before that, I'm gonna show you a photo

because we always dream of ending up at place X,

something to do with cars.

If that's your passion, it certainly is yours.

But sometimes people start at another place

and then are completely baffled

at how their story unwinds into the place

they always wanted it to become.

So I'm gonna start today with a picture.

And I want you to then tell the audience

what resonates in your mind from this picture.

What does this creature mean to you and your journey?

So that is Papaya, my middle school pet albino iguana.

And back in middle school, I started my first business,

which was breeding albino iguanas in my parents' basement.

And so we had 36 gigantic lizards

living down there at one point.

And not the most successful business,

but as we all dream of entrepreneurism in various ways,

that to me was the first one.

If anybody had told me that one day

you'd become famous for making video content,

I would have certainly expected to be

the next crocodile hunter

long before I'd be the next automotive presenter

of any kind.

And so I grew up loving dinosaurs as a little kid

and then I learned that there's stores

that sell little ones that you can bring home

and let it live in boxes in your room.

And so I've had a bunch of wild pets

and so now it's lower maintenance boa constrictors.

But yeah, that was the albino iguana breeding business.

Great white reptiles.

What would an albino iguana, albino iguana sell for?

They were about $5,000 to $10,000 back then.

And so I had one and then I had the offspring

in that one which are heterozygous for albinism.

And so at one point I had every known heterozygous

for albinism iguana on earth.

And so we bred a few of them

and then I actually sold them to a guy

who was recently arrested in conjunction

to some tiger king stuff.

But I think he's getting out soon.

Was there ever a part of your mind

that was like, I could be doing this forever then

with the animals?

Like continue selling these,

continue selling pets essentially.

Well, when you write a business plan

you think like this is gonna grow to the moon

and back and I'm gonna just be trippin' over

money and reptiles all over.

So I certainly had that thought.

But growing up I played a lot of high level basketball

and things like that and I ended up having

really bad knee issues in high school

and that ended the ability to think about

what basketball looked like for me in college

or beyond potentially.

And so I mean I grew up in middle school

playing with a little bronze a year older than me

but we'd see him at tournaments.

Dwight Howard ran off Morris Dosh Smith

and all these guys that went on

to great professional basketball careers

and I just couldn't, I had to have

six knee surgeries and things like that.

And so sometimes you run into a wall like that

in life or in your profession or in a relationship

and it invites you to step back

and think a little bit more about what else is out there.

And that was really the moment in my life

where I started to learn well there is so much

that can be done in the world of cars.

You know, when we say we love cars

that means something different to everybody.

I like selling bad cars and buying terrible cars

and I loved working at Lamborghini Atlanta

and doing all these things and that was,

and I never would have known about that

as a real viable career path before

when I was so distracted by other things in life

by reptiles and basketball and other things like that.

And so sometimes we do need that hard reset

to be able to invite the mental exploration

and the creative process into whatever might be next.

Because cars were your entertainment.

You were so passionate about them as you mentioned

like growing up being obsessed with cannonball, et cetera.

Yes. You never really looked at it

with that other pair of glasses

on that other perspective then.

Well, even from a recreational interest perspective,

it was really once that door closed that cars began.

And so I didn't grow up in a car loving family.

I was an eight years old reading magazines.

I was 15, 16, 18 years old

really getting engrossed in the hobby

and when you think about that being 20 to 25 years ago now,

it was such a different landscape

of what high end cars looked like.

I mean, there were more hundred thousand dollar cars

being built this month than existed back then.

So we're at car week right now

and we're tripping over Revuelto's

and things like that.

But back then, I mean, if you saw a 348 Ferrari,

it was a month changing ordeal

for it just to come by.

You just, in any big American city,

you didn't see exotic cars.

This institutionally was not a thing.

And so when we start to understand

what that world has become since then

certainly has become much more to me

but has become much more to the world at large.

Have you always been obsessed with detail?

I look at traits that people may have had

when they were younger

that's actually become something so valuable for them

that money can't buy if someone was to try

and compete with them later in life.

And with you, the word detail always stands out to me

because everything seems so polished,

your content that you put out,

the professionalism you take in your background,

the shots and also your general knowledge of vehicles

which is what I put in the opening statement

in this podcast.

So like, would you say you've always been someone

that's a bit obsessed over the details of everything?

Well, that's all very kind of you to say.

I'm not sure it's always true

but I do appreciate the idea that you can break down

something that's big and hard to wrap your head around

by taking it into smaller bites

and understanding those details

in order to make it easier to overcome

because you take something big like driving

from New York to LA without becoming arrested

and then you start to think about,

well, how might I do that?

Well, it comes down to solving the route,

solving the timing, solving the car,

solving the countermeasures, solving the team,

taking all these little things

and each of those little problems

isn't that insurmountable.

When you put them all together

and you try to do it all at once, it is.

And so when we start to take any big problem

or big goal of buying some stupid car

or going on some stupid trip

or starting some crazy business,

in general, if you think about everything,

you can't do it.

But if you do break it down to the details

and you do the research to be able to understand

exactly what each entails,

you can probably figure out a path forward.

So what was the next business you launched

after the Pate Guarnas?

So after I went off to college at Georgia Tech,

I learned that it was a very different economic time.

This was 2006 or so

when I started an exotic car rental business.

And back then you could just tell banks,

at least in America, how much money you made

and they would believe you

and give you loans for things like Lamborghinis.

And so I bought my first Lamborghini Gallardo

when I was 20 years old.

I didn't have enough money left to make the first payment

and set up a little website and started renting it out.

And it was really the first exotic car rental business,

not in a huge city.

So there were businesses in LA, Miami, New York,

but to go to a kind of a secondary sized US city

like Atlanta, it was not as much of a thing

because while we have a great built-in demand

of like ownership replacement clients

in a city like Atlanta, we don't have the tourism

that would sustain a business like that

in some other cities.

And so I had been researching the business plan,

business idea for a while

and was familiar with people who were doing it

in other places.

And I thought, you know, this could work

and it really didn't work that well,

but it worked okay.

And I didn't go to completely broke

and they didn't steal all the cars.

And so it was one of those things

that you learned a lot.

And to me, if I look back on my career

and all those chapters of all the things

that have come to be my resume

or my LinkedIn profile now,

I think what I'm most proud of is the efficiency, right?

That I spent the right amount of time in each place

to learn what I could, to glean what I could

and to prepare myself for what was next.

And one of the most peculiar things about, you know,

being in positions like this

where people start asking me questions like this

is a lot of times it gets to like,

well, what would you tell your former self?

I don't fear to 18 years old, whatever it is.

It's so easy for me to answer that

because my answer is absolutely nothing.

Maybe buy some Bitcoin 20 years ago,

but it's really just make the mistakes,

be ready to learn from them

because there are so many things that I use today

and the things that I do, both for fun and for profit,

that sometimes at the same time,

that I would never have been able to do

if it hadn't been for the lessons learned

from the really dark, really difficult,

huge setback moments.

And I think it's having that attitude

of not being overwhelmed by the anxiety of what lays ahead

or the frustration with what just happened

but being willing to go just take the next step,

solve the next small problem.

Would you say you're a risk taker

or would you say that you're like a strategic risk taker?

I'm guessing you kind of like fill the sheet right up,

have everything in front of you before you execute.

I am definitely a risk taker.

I'd like to think that it's always calculated.

It most certainly isn't,

but I have always believed that a good answer now

is better than a perfect answer tomorrow.

The ability to just understand what you can,

act based on that, be ready to react

if it doesn't go the way you want it to

is better than spending so much time

breaking down every possible scenario

and generally talking yourself out

of the risk that you were about to take.

So is that when you, for example,

went and put yourself in Lamborghini

before starting a rental business,

like learning the ropes inside working for Lamborghini?

So that was backwards.

I actually went to work at Lamborghini Atlanta

after the rental business and that was because...

Not typically the way round people do things

when they've started a business.

So when I was struggling through the days

of the rental car company,

one thing that I understood was I would have benefited

greatly from spending a summer working at Hertz

or Enterprise or a normal rental car company

just to understand how the business works.

And so I thought, well, maybe the next chapter

is a dealership model or something like that.

So let me go work at a car dealership

to see what it's like,

to see if I ever want to own one

and the immediate answer was absolutely not.

But I did enjoy the day-to-day

transactional nature of car sales.

I thought that was a lot of fun.

And so I would say that I benefited a lot

from the chance to really see behind the curtain

of the industry from a dealership perspective

in terms of what my automotive identity and career

would sort of grow into.

And it has served me well

and it was certainly informed the idea

that I didn't want to be a lifer in the dealership world

and it was probably, yeah, it wasn't for me

and I wasn't for it.

How much did the experience in that dealership

benefit you and your business?

Well, it's benefited me a lot in the connections

that are made, there's no better networking

than an exotic car dealership

because you meet people from so many different backgrounds

and so many different moments of life

and so many different ideas about how the world works.

And so educationally, it was really, really valuable.

I certainly have got a lot of stories to tell

because there's no boring days in an exotic car dealership.

But I loved the mentalism of sales,

of like how I can speak to someone

and listen to what they're telling me that they need

but slowly move that towards the criteria

that I know are the right litmus test

or the right evaluative perspective

to get to the point of making a decision

to buy the car that I want you to buy.

And so it's really not that hard to just hear

because there's plenty of things to like

about every kind of car

and you can talk to anybody and anything

as long as you listen to them well enough

and use their words against them in that process.

And so I loved that.

And I would do that all the time

if it weren't for all the other mess

that it goes with selling cars that break tomorrow

and all the other things.

With selling a luxury exotic to somebody,

most of the time you want the entire client base

to come through the door to be able to buy it,

there's not really that many people that you go,

I'm definitely not going to sell it to them

unless you're talking about something extremely unique

that the person couldn't handle.

Compared with rentals,

where I'm guessing a lot of the clients that flood in,

there is that process of going,

whoa, hang on a second, I'm not sure

I want this guy taking my Lamborghini for a drive late.

Was that the biggest learning curve

was actually learning to deal

with the people in your business?

It's all people in every business.

Unless we're doing software sales to businesses,

at the end of the day,

you're going to be transacting with a clientele

and in the exotic car selling world,

what I learned very, very quickly is

it's a whole lot easier to sell someone

the second, third, fourth, fifth car

than it is to sell them the first.

And so the way that you cultivate

your existing customer base

is how you live and die in that world.

And in the rental car business,

it was really the same thing.

My greatest success from a profit perspective

was in the repeat business of people

who treated rentals as an ownership alternative.

And that's really how those two worlds intersected for me

was that, like I said, I started this

in a time where anybody could get debt for anything.

And then that was great as the world

kind of started to fall apart

and the economy starts to crumble,

depreciation gets out of hand,

ownership costs get out of hand,

then renting becomes an even more attractive option.

But as it bottomed out, say around 2009, 2010,

that was the point in which anybody

who still had good credit left in the United States

could buy a Lamborghini for pennies on the dollar.

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What is a story that stands out to you

as maybe one of the biggest educational processes,

maybe from a client

at the beginning of that rental car journey?

So I had customers

that would obviously pretend these were theirs, right?

That that would rent them once, twice a month,

take them to the same kinds of shows and events

and I recognized that that was the perfect client

because they took care of them.

They weren't gonna be out doing donuts in a car

that they were saying was theirs

and they learned the cars more,

they took better care of them

both by knowing them better

and by being more conscientious

and so I realized that kind of gravitating towards

a little bit more of a membership concept

even though that wasn't very well developed

as it is today, made a lot of sense

and so I think seeing that

as well as obviously all the rap videos

and all the things that we would inevitably do

being based in Atlanta

was kind of starting to understand,

all right, these are the clients

that are gonna sustain this business long term.

And do those types of people treat the cars like shit?

Like how quickly did you

like see something come back and think,

oh my God, have they really done this?

You have to be emotionally prepared

every time a car goes out

that it's gonna come back in half on a truck

and so it's one of those businesses

where you can't become terribly emotionally invested

in the quality or the condition of the cars

because it won't stay that way for long

and I loved that

because what I was always fascinated with

as I grew to love high-end cars

was really the people that were able to drive them a lot

not the people that had the newest, coolest thing

to bring to a car show

but the people that you would see

with the ones covered in bugs, covered in dirt,

high miles, you know,

that you knew they really weren't that concerned about it

and I don't know where that general idea came from

cause I can't point to something where in my childhood

my family or myself were like so conscious

of the condition of something

and so concerned about imperfecting it

but to me, I just, I love not caring about stuff

that's really cool.

That is where we're extremely similar

and I have the exact same concept.

I'm lucky enough to have a Huracan Performante.

I've now had it four years, 30,000 miles on the clock

and luckily the same gearbox and engine

but I totally get what you're getting at

which is the point of there's having a car and owning it

and then dealing with like restrictions

and maybe when you feel like you're buying something

so amazing but then you're restricted

to do a certain amount of mileage,

treat it a certain way, not go on tracks,

you might bin it

and then there's kind of a bad result to that

versus a full ownership experience of no restrictions,

no anything, it's a completely different thing

but I guess the people that were renting the cars

had more of a narrower field of view

of what they could do with them.

Like would you restrict them

and stuff like that as well?

We had mileage limits just to keep people

from totally running up the miles

and generally geographic limits

and not taking them out of the state

and stuff like that

which in my area was not that big of a restriction,

it was all generally standard practice

but I think that they certainly the goal was

from a customer experience perspective

to give them a totally worry-free experience in a car, right?

They're not worried about how much it costs to insure

or fix or how much the clutch wear is gonna be

or anything like that.

We're just building it all into one number,

put your credit card down, sign and go have fun

and if you can really allow that to happen

and it doesn't always work that way

because they do break

and you have to hold people responsible

for things that they break

that aren't just wear and tear,

it can be a really, really fun experience

and I think that guilt-free opportunity

to be out there with some of these cars

was something that I was chasing

from a personal perspective as well.

Now I had no alternative way to own and experience

and afford these cars other than letting people

take them out every weekend and trash them

but it worked because I had a whole bunch of them around

which was really always the goal

is how do I get close to these cars?

That was my next question

is when did one become two and two become three?

So I bought the first one the summer

after my sophomore year of college

and then that winter bought the first Ferrari,

bought another one about six months later

so generally about every six months

I'd be in a position to add another car

and by add I mean find another bank stupid enough

to write me a loan for the next one

that was very little equity building here.

Would your future picture of what you were able to do

just get bigger and bigger and bigger

every time you added another vehicle to the fleet?

Would it add even more fuel to the fire

to grow a bigger business, a bigger business

or bigger business or was there a point

that the stress of so many would get to you?

What you realize very quickly is that the mental image

of the perfect business is one of every kind of car

all parked up in front of a business

with shiny signs and a pretty office and a nice desk

and then you realize wait a minute that's not it at all

that sure I could get a Bentley

but nobody's gonna rent it unless they know

they can't rent the Ferrari or the Lamborghini

so it was really just those two marks of cars

that made any sense for inventory

and you realize that you have more cars

but you only see them together

when you're not making any money

and so the mental image of the business

was in fact quite contradictory

to what really success looked like

and I think there are so many things that we go into

believing that success is one thing

but then learning very immediately that no

you were that assumption was very wrong

success exists and it's possible

but it looks like this.

When you could actually get out in your cars yourself

and get to those events and see the cars that were driven

how the owners intended them to be driven

were you fascinated in the stories

behind those individuals back then

and like how they were able to do that

like would you be the guy like mingling

and talking to everyone when you went to those events

like just consuming as much information as you could?

I was always fascinated by the stories

that got people into whatever position they had

to have these kind of cars

because I did not have some schema to follow

or some roadmap that was gonna lead me to that destination

and so I loved it.

I loved the businesses that they had started

and the ways that they had grown them

and the point at which they felt like they could afford it

and the ways that I as a sales person

eventually could help them do that

because that journey continued

into the exotic car selling world

as it was in the renting

and kind of peer relationships

that I might have felt like I had

but to me especially at that period of time

so now we're moving into like 2010, 11, 12

at which point you can't sell luxury assets in the US

it's just in the whole world it's all terrible

and so we've got credit crisis, debt crisis

all the things happening

and so they asked me to come and help them

try to sell cars

because when I started at Lamborghini Atlanta

at the very end of 2009

they'd sold five new cars that year

and by the time I left in 2015

we were selling 80, 100

and which is obviously a radical difference

but it's much more reflective of the economic times

and the five is the desperation

that existed in that place

Many of you might not know this

but away from the recordings that I do

in my van studios

I've actually got a digital marketing agency

now we specialize in a lot of automotive clients

but we cover everything really

our team is made up of PPC specialists

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and the most talented designers I've ever seen

which have done work like the Starnagloss website

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we've actually just built icon box

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Had you ever been on camera up to that point?

No, no

I hadn't done any camera work

I never thought I was a storyteller

or a speaker of any kind of sort

Do you remember the first time you did go on camera?

I made some very rudimentary videos

driving cars around to try to experiment with that

as a customer tool

or in the very early days of YouTube

but it was they didn't go anywhere

it was certainly not a career path back then 2011, 12, 13

so the idea of like making videos recreationally

wasn't that much of a thing

I was featured on an MTV True Life documentary in 2004

for a New York to LA rally that I went on

as kind of like a senior trip

getting out of high school

where they followed three teams

that were driving on this rally

and it was not really

I mean it was MTV content

so of this 42 minute show

probably eight to 10 minutes was about me

and it was not really interview based

it was much more just kind of candid moments

that they had strung into something

that felt a little bit like reality

and I certainly didn't come away from that

thinking oh I looked good doing that

it was one of those things that was like

well that was a cool thing that exists out there

in the world but I

it was not by any means an archetype

to what then Wiki would become

or anything like that

Did you ever have that moment though

where a friend or someone said to you

when they had seen you maybe in front of camera

you're like really good at this

like the way you can tell a story

construct something together

like you should do this

or did that like all come from within

No it didn't happen until we started

telling stories on Vin Wiki

And why did that happen?

Well so after I was at the dealership

and realized that work in 80 hours a week

and knowing that I didn't want my boss's job

or his boss's job or to own the place

I knew that I needed to do something else

and so in 2015 I left the dealership

and fairly shortly after a few months later

I got some friends together

and we started an app called Vin Wiki

the idea of that being that it's a crowd sourced

vehicle history reporting platform

kind of like a social version of car facts

or auto check or red check

or any of these things that you'll have

over in Europe

and the US has better built out

vehicle history than most other countries

but it's still tough

and so it felt like a good opportunity

that kind of was based on

some behaviors and ideas

that I'd used in selling cars at the dealership

and we started it with different friends

that had different development skill sets

one guy could build a website

one guy could build a mobile app

one guy could do the back end

I could do some marketing

we had some cars take the shows

and stuff like that

and it didn't grow

you know you think you're a technology entrepreneur

and you're gonna tap that first domino

and a butterfly's gonna flap its wings in Kansas

and everybody's gonna download it

and tell their friends

and that's not what happens at all

it happens once you reach this

ridiculously high critical mass

of self-replicating users

that we were not close to

so about a year in

the other guys had gone back to their day jobs

and I was like well I don't know what we're gonna do

and I'm going broke pretty fast

and so I said well we haven't really tried

that much on YouTube

and I know this is kind of a thing

and through some of the cannonball stuff

that had happened while I was at the dealership

I'd gotten to know

Freddie Tavares and Doug Demiro

and Rob Dom and TJ Hunt

and Rob Ferretti

and some of the guys Matt Farah

of that era of car YouTube

and I knew there was an opportunity there

primarily because I was talking to Doug Demiro one day

and he was you know doing all these car reviews

and kind of had moved a lot of the Jalopnik audience

to his personal YouTube page

which was just a failure of imagination

on the part of Jalopnik

that that was even a thing

and I said hey when you do these reviews

will you just like

show that you're posting in the Vinwiki app

like a list of all the cars you've reviewed

which other people do on his behalf now

but he was like oh no I couldn't possibly do that

I don't want to delegitimize myself to my audience

and I've known this guy for a long time at this point

I'm like Doug did you just hear yourself say that

like out loud like delegitimize yourself

to a YouTube audience

and and he's like no man it's like this

I'm making more money on YouTube

than I am writing articles for Jalopnik

now Jalopnik was paying like 150 bucks in articles

so that wasn't hard to accomplish

but I was still like that doesn't even make sense

and it was really like one of those

Wolf of Wall Street moments

I'm like you showed me a paste up

and I'll quit my job that I don't have right now

and so I uh we went out and I was like

look let's just do stories

and at that time there wasn't podcasting

the idea of like a guest appearing on a channel

wasn't a thing Joe Rogan wasn't making podcasts

so this is the summer of 2017

and my thought was that we would make

Vinwiki car stories and give them

to an existing youtuber

so I was like I'm going to shoot these things

I'm going to put them in a drop box

and I'm going to send a link to all these guys

all of them have channels

and one of them is going to say sure

I don't mind having an extra show

every once every week or a few days

and it'll be like the Vinwiki car stories

on Doug DeMiro's channel

and they all said no

they were like we don't we don't want any

or free content

I'm like why so will people subscribe to us

they want to come see us

that's what it's all about

did you feel quite hurt by that at any point

like like just digging a little bit deeper

is like when you see those guys

you've built relationships

you think oh yeah we're all going in this direction

oh what no

well I wasn't hurt because I understood their logic

and I did though have the belief

that they were wrong

and so that simply meant

I needed to take that next step

take that next risk

and see if my theory was right

that people did have a fascination

with these just crazy car stories

that they wouldn't hear

unless they ran into somebody at a bar

or at a car show or wherever else

and so the idea that you could sort of

take these stories and make them bigger

than themselves

and expose them to a broader audience

I thought was fascinating

and so we shot the first 25 of them in a day

the first idea was this

you know I was going to take a bus

or like an RV around to car shows

because like who's going to come to my studio

in Atlanta and record these things

and we were going to shoot

I had more of an idea

like a big comfy chair

with like you know

like maybe a rocking chair or something

but it was probably you know

the like this

where the mics are all set up

the cameras are all set up

you just press a button and go

you have more buttons than I do

but I

we ended up just doing it at my warehouse

and it just got a bunch of pizza and beer

had people come out and tell stories

and then everybody said no

you can't release them on our channel

so we just released them on a Vinwiki channel

and fairly quickly people were like

wow those are you know very good

now my stories were generally

from my time in the exotic car

selling business

some from the rental stuff

but most of it was in selling

and when I wrote the book

about the cannonball record

I realized this is a fairly boring tale

of three sweaty guys going really fast

getting away with it

and then accomplishing something that

at the end nobody even knew what we were doing

and that wasn't that entertaining

and so in order to carry people

through the journey that I had

in that decade of planning and saving

and trying to figure out exactly how to do this

I was connecting those dots

to more immediate moments

and more recent stories from selling cars

so I had kind of packaged my like

10 best car selling stories

and written them out

and I thought that would probably help

and so I knew what my stories were

and I thought them through

when I started to tell them

and there was a

there was an interview that I had heard

from Alex Roy at one point

somebody was asking him

he was the guy who held the cannonball record before me

and he has a legendary car story

about being pulled over during the promotional tour

for his book

and it's amazing

and it's called the lot of evidence story

and they had said

hey will you tell us the lot of evidence story

and I'm like oh yeah that's a good story

and then he said well it takes about eight and a half minutes

to tell that story

do we have enough time on this whatever format

and I hear that and I'm like

who on earth knows how long

their stories are

and I'm like he recorded it

and made it better

I'm like that's awesome

and so that was like a real lightbulb moment for me

in the thought process of like

we can make stories better

we can make them the best version of themselves

so that not only are we happy

that it's becoming like a blown up version

of like a post that could live in our VinWiki app

but even better than that

it's something that the person who's coming

and giving of their time

that they're really proud of

that they can share with the world

and so they're gonna share it to their audience

whoever that is

and we're gonna get this content

and it's gonna help promote the app

this seems like the perfect recipe

and it didn't immediately come together that way

but it did you know

open up the chance for

I could maybe tell 100 people at a car show

or you know a few people in a room

but now I can tell millions of people at the same time

where did the ability to say

they're wrong come from

because when you talk about the other youtube is saying

oh yeah it's not for me

and I'm not sure it'll work and

where did the internal confidence come from

in you to go

no I'm right

I believe in myself

like we know

that you had a lot of iguanas in the basement

when you were younger

but we don't know much else

and what was it that

went in the oven

the ingredients that form the ability to think like that

because that to a lot of people

would be a would be a roadblock moment you know

some of those points

that they wouldn't take that next step forward

the video wouldn't be uploaded

the channel wouldn't be started

the first subscriber wouldn't come so

what do you think has cultivated that

at some point I became of the opinion that most people

exaggerate the risks

and exaggerate the points of possible failure

in the problems that they think they might want to solve

and if you just start by not being afraid

in most cases

you'll get past that first set of obstacles

that just rules out 99% of your competition

and so when it comes to buying a terrible car

or going on some stupid trip

or doing something that you wouldn't

that most people won't try

the reason they won't try

probably isn't how terribly difficult it actually is

or how expensive it is

or anything like that

it's that there's some part of that process

that they just can't wrap their head around

and so if you don't try

and you just kind of move

all right well I'm going to do that

then you start just solving the problem

and I realized like

and what they ran into is

I have an audience that wants to see me

I know that if I make the same kind of content tomorrow

I'll probably see the same result

I like the current results

so I'm going to stay there

so I see their calculation

and I see why they wouldn't want

this new free different content

just handed to them to make revenue off of

but if I get past that

and I think well

the platform inherently likes more content

it likes higher quality content

it likes an immediate delivery

on an initial title and thumbnail premise

which they weren't always doing in their vlogs

that took them to 10 different places

and different adventures

and I said this is a different product

but I think it works

and it did

and they weren't necessarily surprised

that it worked on its own

but I saw I think for years

they'd maintain

maybe even today they would maintain

that it wouldn't have fit in well

alongside their regularly scheduled content

and you look at Doug DeMiro's channel today

where they've added the podcast

through cars and bids and things like that

they've had to carve that out

because it does interfere

with the general car reviews

and things that he's done

and so they weren't really wrong

I was wrong about that being my best path forward

and fortunately we were able to gain an audience

get views and eventually make a little bit of money

and it makes my Bugatti payment

some months now

it's funny you mentioned Bugatti

because I remember watching this piece of content

I can't remember who it was or where

but it was talking about someone

that had gone to their first dinner

with a load of other Bugatti owners

and they come away from it thinking

it would almost be impossible

if I went broke and I could still go to that dinner

to not walk away

and make some sort of money

from some opportunity or something

just the people that you surround yourself with

in that world can be different gravy

and you have spoke about network

right from the beginning of this conversation

and you also used to attend lots of events

from the age of 20

from getting one of those first cars

do you think you sometimes

almost get so motivated

by the people around you

and the networks and the conversations

that you can lose touch of reality

of like how a lot of other people think

and then that makes what you're all doing

a little bit easier

so I'm saying from

if you can get in the doors

that may be open from your earliest years

maybe from 20

do you think that's helped your mindset

make a lot of those big things seem smaller

just because that's how all the people that you know think

perhaps but I was always approaching even their hobbies

with a more you know risk-taking attitude

right so when they were all trying to buy

like cars that have warranties

and low miles I'm like

what if it was crashed three times

that would make it cheaper

and so I don't know that it was necessarily

a keeping up with the Joneses

to the phrase we'd use mentality

I think much more it was like

all right I see how all these people are doing it

and I know why they're taking that path

but I actually think there's some shortcuts

or some cheat codes

to achieving a similar result to what they have

because if I pull up

in a salvage title Lamborghini

next to one that nobody knows that

unless I tell them

and it might be a crazy story

and that would be more fun

because my payoff of delivering that story

at cars and coffee

after I've driven it covered in bugs

and definitely needing to be washed

that might be better

and I think people enjoy that more

and so it was really again

I talked about the efficiency of this

leading to that, to that, to that

and I think you know some of the attitudes

that I've had in car ownership

and in the curation of car stories

is based a lot on seeing how most people

do it

and that's satisfying to them

I'm not discounting the way that they do it

because most people couldn't buy a car

that you have to drive around all these problems

and that require all these extra

you know reminders

in order to make sure that it doesn't explode

they wouldn't enjoy that

I do because I can think through

all right don't don't worry about that gauge

because that doesn't work

and don't worry about that

because we're going to fix it later

and just just go drive and have fun

and so I think being able to synthesize

the attitudes of a group

and realize well this seems very satisfying

to that person

this seems very interesting to that person

this seems like it would appeal

to this aspect of my persona

and that becomes the recipe for my path forward

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do you remember the first time that you got

your first significant

all for Wall Street paycheck moment from YouTube

um well there hasn't yeah i mean i there hasn't been one yet

guys driving a red Bugatti

you know it's all been you know very incremental

was there one that made you realize

that you were on a path

that was going to lead you to serious success

so we started in the summer probably around like

I remember it's a holidays like Thanksgiving Christmas

I that was the first day we made a hundred dollars

in ads since money and I was like

that is how much a substitute teacher makes

I have a job

and it had been probably two years

since I made my last dollar at the dealership

it was not like a seamless easy process

and I was bleeding money faster than you could possibly imagine

from just doing all the stuff to market the

the app which was not making any money or going anywhere really

and so it was getting a little desperate

and I remember that moment where it was like wait a minute

this could become like a little bit of a job

and that was exciting to me

I never fancied that it might be like a path to owning

more cars or doing more things

I always thought that it was just going to be this

you know momentary

flash in the pan sort of idea

because it was something you enjoyed doing as well

it was but I wasn't out there like trying to make it about me

like for the first probably two years

one video a week was me from one of my stories

and in my experience of now doing about I don't know

3,500 car stories since 2017 for you know

I would say most people that have spent a decade in the car business

have 10 to 15 good stories

the kind of stories they've told before

what happens is they come to me they'll record five or six

they'll go okay

they'll get some attention they love that

they like the form the stories take

the next five are great

because they really thought about it

but they don't over script it that becomes a problem

but they think it through and those are great

then they want to keep doing it

but there's just nothing there

and a lot of times the community of

vinwiki storytellers has become quite a thing

and so they all know each other

they all they're all going on road trips together

having fun it's awesome

and I love love love that about it

but now they want to go have adventures together

and come tell the stories about them

it's the most expected

and I'm like these are all just like kumbaya

here's how good my life has turned out to be moments like

we liked it when your car broke down

and the dog got sick

and so you know it's like that that's all the

those are the stories that people appreciate

because of what you've had to overcome

what you learned that the external validity

that the story can take

and so it's it's a challenge

for a lot of the guys that have had great

because their stories are amazing

but now things are better

and life isn't as complicated

and the cars aren't quite as broken

and the roads aren't quite as hard

and that's that's an interesting phenomenon that we see

so because I'd done so many crazy things in the car business

I had more

I probably had 50 good car stories

I've told about 250

but a lot of those now are like life updates

and garage updates

and new car purchases and stuff like that

that are not those like riveting tails

of buying a Lamborghini from a prostitute

or having your Ferrari stolen on your wedding day

or any of those things that were like legitimately

I think probably pretty good stories

it's funny because you talk about the Doug DeMiro moment

where like I'm not uploading it on my channel

and it's almost the same thing

because you come to this moment where you're like

yes I know you've done really well

but I think that's where like I've got to draw the line

it's really hard sometimes for people to understand

or to have the ability to say no

but you say you've always had that kind of ability to like

almost call it and say like that's enough for now

well I think being able to for anyone to stop

while they're ahead is important right

the the abilities for us to to say like

all right that's that's where this part of my life ends

and you know I knew when the iguana business needed to end

I knew when the rental business needed to end

I knew when the dealership business needed to end

and and that's hard because generally I didn't know

what was next in those stories

and fortunately I haven't found that

been wiki needs to end just yet

but there will come a day where it's just run its course

and it's done what it is and it's better to exist

in the state that it is than to become what's next

or or to you know gradually change

a bigger change is necessary or whatever it becomes

who knows have you always been good at predicting

what story would fly and what story would flop

like come away from turning off the record

button on the camera and going that's a million views

or has it always been like really hard to predict

it's always the one that you think is going to be

like meh versus the one that you think is going to fly

early on it was very surprising

I had no idea what was going to work or what wasn't

and you know as you get to different

subscriber and viewership thresholds

Google will give you like contacts that you can call

or set up a time with and talk to about stuff

and I remember one time the girl told me saying

we've looked through all of your successful videos

and we really think you need to find more stories

about stolen cars crashed exotic cars and prostitutes

I said you you understand those don't just walk in my door

like was this YouTube yeah they told me that

and I said I get that I've seen that they get views

it doesn't happen every moment so it's what year

would that have been oh that would have been

I don't know probably 21 20 20 20 yeah everything

that you can read when monetizing a video

basically says not to do those things yeah

but it was like you just back then nobody knew

and I'm still nobody knows I would say today

I have a pretty good handle on what a video is going to do

and like most legacy automotive creators people

have been doing this for more than five years

we do see some view retraction where it is focal

on a very specific portion of our subscriber base

that are the people that show up every day

and then you can tell when something gets served

algorithmically to more of your subscribed audience

more of your unsubscribed audience and things like that

so you do see the patterns that start to emerge

and I've enjoyed the business aspect of YouTube a lot

in terms of how we serve the right brands

how we make sure that all the stakeholders benefit

from whatever it is we're trying to do

how you run merch how you make content just to me that's fun

like seeing this as a way that you can show up here

in the course of a week churn out

what could become six months worth of content

to me that's beautiful and it's a it's a lovely treatment of

the business in the industry

in 21 22 on that timeline that we're kind of going along

was the app and the web platform out earning the channel

or was the channel vastly out earning those platforms

the app still has not made money for for a variety of reasons

so that the app has never made more money than the media brand

and it actually business wise we had to separate them

due to the confusion from a growth perspective

and potential fundraising opportunities

and things that we still haven't realized with the app

but the it's an interesting thing because our app has now

coming up on nine ten years of linear growth

which never happens with a technology company

you either don't grow or you grow exponentially

because your success is in a great product

that people like and they evangelize

and they tell the world about our success is marketing

so marketing turns into new downloads new users

but it's just a nice straight line

and that means that we are a total failure

when it comes to making the product as good as it could be

because we built it all that time ago

we can't afford to rebuild it right now

and so it's a very interesting and challenging dynamic

for the business to take of

and and I continue to romanticize what one day

the app can become because it is an amazing resource

it's the largest free database of automotive information

that's available worldwide

it's got 160 million cars in a database

that anybody can just type in and post to

and so I love that and one day at scale

it might be really valuable

but what I focus on now is just making sure

that it stays alive and we keep telling good stories

in what year did your brain realize

there could be a very real life story

in you purchasing a hypercar

because I mean owning a Lamborghini at 20 is one thing

and it's not just been

they're not just going to focus on the fact

that you literally got a Bugatti Bayron

which is insane because there's been so many also

notable incredible cars that have formed

the cars that you've owned

I think as 2024 you'd had 64

am I right

yeah

but when did you think that you could take the step

into a hypercar

why was that significant for you

is there something like you'd always wanted

since you first saw it launched in 2006 or

it was even when they announced it in 2003

I thought it was just the coolest idea

and we were you know at that point

just starting to increase like the awareness of

an F40, F50, McLaren F1

I mean you know now it seems crazy

that these cars would be so you know

undervalued at one point

but I was talking over dinner with a guy

that about McLaren F1

that we're doing some content with

that you know sold for about $600,000 in 2004

and it's now worth north of 20 million I suppose

and you know that's crazy

and that's hard to wrap your head around

but I was like well you have to understand

back then $600,000 for a car was nuts

and not much more nuts than $20 million for a car today

well just on that I have my own very small story

which was I grew up in the building world

and one of our customers

which is the builders merchant

he bought a McLaren F1

there we go

because he had a very successful year in trading

I remember this I must have only been like

well I 12 when I heard this story

and what was really significant to my dad

who told me the stories

it was one of his best customers

in a really affluent area of Surrey in England

and he had this great big building yard

and he bought the F1

I want to say for $350,000

and he sold it for $650,000 or $700,000

and he was over the moon

and he said to my dad

can you believe that I've just profited

an amount of money on the car

that my entire company would make in a year

but obviously he's then now come to see

and later like what that car would have become

when you like hear that

and hear the stories of F1s from your part

do you think that like the Veyron

in the back of your mind has that same potential

is that what also gets you excited about it

a bit of that

but you know the reason the Veyron mattered

to me from a personal journey perspective

was that working in the rental car business

and working in the dealership world

I was always chasing the ability to own

and use and drive the cars personally

now in the dealership world

you get to drive a lot of cars

but it never felt the same as if you

your name was either on the title

or on the loan documents

and so chasing the next car

was always a big part of my personal journey

in terms of the profession of the car industry

and so I always wanted to have the next car

and to me the end all be all holy grail car

was a manual transmission Lamborghini Marcella ago

I thought that was the greatest thing

I remember when they first came out

and the I was 16 years old in 2001

and so I see the road test and road and track

and they're breaking all these speed records

and it's just perfect

and I'm like that's what I want

and it wasn't a good rental car

it wasn't the right thing to have in that

and so when I started to work in the dealership

I was like how do I buy a Marci

and I remember the first time

that we had a manual transmission version

of an LP640 coming on consignment

I came off the truck

I'm like I'm gonna run this thing around the block

and just see how it is

and I came back and I was like

that is the greatest car that's ever been built

and my boss was like with a stick

and I was like yeah

and he's like because at that point you know

in the 2000s

you couldn't make cars faster

by giving them bigger engines

because they had to become so much heavier

so you had to start making them faster

with transmissions

and so that's one of the reasons why

F1 technology became so heavily deployed

into road cars was because

they wanted to make these cars go faster

0 to 60

and have better lap times

and that was really the only way that they could do it

because they're having to put so many airbags in

and so many different safety systems

and the prevalence of all-wheel drive

was increasing and stuff like that

and so if you wanted to make a mercy faster

the gearbox was the only place you could really do it

and so we thought that it was a 90% take rate

for sequentials

turns out it was a 99%

and so they

but nobody knew this

like the fact

the factory had no records

they had no no one had any idea

how many of these were out there

it was all just guess

and so I knew that

I would occasionally have people say

I'd rather have a manual transmission car

and you know at that point

I couldn't afford to buy them

but there was no premium

I mean you know we were selling that car

for probably less than you would have paid

for an e-gear car

back in 2011-2012

and so I owned a couple of e-gear LP640s

with gigantic 12-year loans before that

and then one came up for sale in 2014

and I bought it

and I remember I paid $215,000 for this car

and in a conversation here at Car Week over dinner

somebody asked what it would bring

I was like easily $2 million today

no question at all

so in the same way as your father's friend

who was like you know

oh I had a huge win

I made a lot of money on that car

enough to buy the worst example

of a manual transmission LP640

with just the profit

I mean I had a very branded title

it was crashed by a terrorist drug dealer

15-year-old kid

you defined them

I do

I do and I loved that car a lot

but the moment that I had

the real dream car

the manual LP640

in my garage

with the giant loan in my name

I had like a proper existential work crisis

I'm like well why am I going to go to work tomorrow

like I have my car

I mean I got to feed my family and stuff like that

but like that seems dumb

and so I fortunately

motivated myself to go do it

at least for a little while

I mean I did quit a year later

but I realized

when Venwicky started to gain traction

I said

I need a stupid goal

in order to keep working as hard as I want to

so I just had this moment like

I need to buy a Bugatti

and that sort of became

this stupid goal

now it still took another five years

but it was the right thing

to make me work harder

and keep good credit

and keep doing all the things

and you know

but I tried to buy a lot of really really bad Bugatti's

along that road

and one of them finally worked out

how did it feel

driving that down the road

like you talk so logically

and with so much like precision

but you have that proper giddy moment

of like I've actually done this

like how did it make you feel

so I had almost bought a supersport

the year prior

and that I went down

I test drove it

I was going to have to sell like five cars

in order to make it work

and I was excited to do so

but it was it was much more money

than I ended up spending on my grand sport

and I was like

this is this is really like a dumb idea

but I like a dumb idea

and I was I was really trying to wrap my head around it

and I drove it

and sometimes you drive a car

and it's you know

it's a meeting your hero's moment

and it it lives up to it

and I came away like

I love it

it's what I need it to be

I didn't come away like

I can't live without that thing

but I was like this that makes sense

if I can get it all together

and for various reasons

that deal fell apart

but doing the

the one that I ended up buying with

that has the removable roof

like hearing the four turbochargers

spooling up right behind your head

the first time I got into that was like

this thing is nuts

and I was over the moon

and I mean giddy schoolgirl going crazy

and so that was everything I dreamt

it could be

and it was made better

because it was the Frankfurt Motor Show car

that bird man owned

and gave it to Bieber

and sold it to Mayweather

and sold it to little Lucy Burton

and just true you know

and it was

I loved the story of the car

even though you love the story of the car

was that like a big part before

you actually committed to the purchase

was thinking about

how many stories

could come from the car

that you were looking at buying

was that part of the decision making process

so I learned very early on

in making YouTube content

that there is no financial model

that justifies the purchase of a car

in what I do now

Freddie and Tyler can make

videos enough to say

all right well I can make six videos

about this car

or Freddie can make 400 videos

about a flooded P1

and one day it's going to pay for itself right

and so I knew that like

it doesn't make sense

but I like to buy cars

that I believe will theoretically

go up in value one day

and that makes the world go around

in my financial world

and so I believed that

of the 14 grand sports

that were brought to the U.S.

the fact that six of them

went to market inside of 12 months

meant that the market had been pushed down

and that once those were all absorbed

in place that they would go up

and that was true

Was it a bigger achievement for you

mentally getting that Veyron

or hitting your first million subscribers on YouTube?

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The Veyron was a bigger achievement

only because reaching two million subscribers

was above your deal than one million subscribers

because back when we started

for reasons none of us understand

your daily subscriber growth was like

somewhat guaranteed

It just happened

like every day

regardless of how many views you got

you just ended up with another 1500 or 2000 subscribers

It was the way the algorithms worked

And these days people think they're paying for it

when they hit subscribe

even though they're not

but it's almost that transactional moment in there

So from zero to a million subscribers

was like a super linear line

it was very predictable

like I knew the day it was going to happen

and it kind of did

Getting the next million was actually quite challenging

because everything changed in the way that YouTube worked

It never matters because your views

are totally independent

of the number of subscribers that you have

But I would say that the

I had built up in my own mind

and in our audience

that like one day it's going to buy a Bugatti

enough that like it was a thing

And so you know

that was one of those things

that one of those goals

that like was as good as it needed to be

Now am I personally as proud of that

as I was for cartwheeling

the profit from a really nice manual LP640

into owning the worst one on earth for free?

No

Like being able to own my dream car

for no money outlaid

even though it's the worst example

but the first time I ever had the title

to one in my hands

like that was it

like that was the coolest thing

it was like the first time I felt like

doesn't matter what happens in my life

nobody can take my mercy away

that was epic

as I limped it across from driving it

2500 miles from Vegas to Atlanta

because I couldn't afford to ship it

and you know the air conditioning didn't work

and the seatbelt was ding in the whole time

it was like it was a nightmare

but it was a great car

Have you had people say to you

Oh but I've seen these quotes

like the average Bugatti owner has like

40 houses and two helicopters

and a private jet and this and that

do you think it's true?

Well I'm bringing that average down a lot

so maybe I mean

I don't understand how it works

and I am definitely the world's poorest

Bugatti owner and I'm very pleased with that

I you know I just bought some

3700 dollar Chinese wheels

to put normal tires on it

and it drives great

so I love the car

I use it as much as I possibly can

I put about 4000 miles on it this year

which I was a little bit ashamed of

it should have been more than that

but I needed tires

and I couldn't pay $40,000 for PAX tires

but now we seem to have solved that

so maybe 10,000 miles this year

I'm going to drive it all I can

The problem with making content is that

I end up having to buy a lot of cheaper cars

and stuff for car trek and other things that we do

and it takes up a lot of the miles

that I would be driving in

the Lamborghinis of the Ferrari

and just that I can't

because I've got to make these cars work

and so hopefully there's less of those projects

in the next 12, 18 months

and I can put more miles on it

Where does Vim Wickey go

from where you currently are?

What's the next thing?

Like throughout your journey

you've always been focused on

the next thing or when's right to end it

Do you have that insight?

You've just ticked off owning a hypercar

that you had as a goal for five years

like where does your brain go next?

That's a great question

I think as we find

that you've got some level of success

but perhaps that it's sunsetting

on some time horizon

it's not tomorrow

it may not be a year or five years from now

but it's

you know I've felt for a while

that I might be closer to the end

than the beginning of Vim Wickey

and there's no exploration on it

it's not like there's this onus

on me to like shut it down

I just feel like I'm so pleased

that we've been able to put so many great stories out there

and invite the audience along

and invite so many of the audience

to come in and tell their own stories

and so that means the world to me

So I think that there is a logic

that prevails on YouTube

that at some point you have to pivot

and you have to do some different style of content

and I don't know how much

I necessarily believe that

I mean I've seen plenty of people

take that approach

and take these huge production risks

and spin up all this ability

or this you know talent

and employees and all this stuff

and sometimes it works

but most of the time it doesn't

because the audience did

as I was told by Demiro and everybody else

they came for a reason

and when you start serving them

something different

they're not necessarily going to react

the way you think they ought to

and so I think we have to be proper stewards

of the audience's attention

and that can mean

that we owe them something more

something different

and so what we've done

me and Tyler Hoover

Who's Garage and Freddie Tavares Hernandez

is we've played fake top gear

and we make Car Trek series

where we'll set out a buying challenge

and go buy some crazy car

and go on some adventures and film

and it is more fun than it looks

and so I'm very happy with that

because it's like a

mini series concept

that we spend infinitely more money

than we would on our normal day to day content

but it puts us in a situation

where we can give the audience

something different

that is produced differently

financed differently

shot differently

and feels very different

than what they get every day

but they can sort of like

come together

and have this special experience

I've been pleased with that approach

and I hope we get to continue

on those fun adventures

and it seems we shall

but in terms of totally changing

Vin Wickey or thinking about

what Vin Wickey becomes

jury's still out

Is there a guest

that you wouldn't sign off

your journey with Vin Wickey

in the future happy

if you hadn't had them on

to tell us a particular story?

I think that you know

we've had a handful of Vin Wickey's

storytellers pass away

and most recently

it was Rob Pitts

Rabbit

who was certainly

the most beloved Vin Wickey

storyteller

We paid a tribute to him at SEMA

last year

and he was amazing

and I think

seeing him

in the last few months

which is now about a year ago

having so much peace

because he knew

that every day

someone was going to see

one of his stories

for the first time

was so powerful to me

that

he'd been able to

immortalize his own

epic tales of the car business

and exploits and deals

and all these things

and you know

there were

Eric Keller from EAG

one of the greatest

BMW experts in the world

died in a motorcycle accident

but he

had told so many great stories

on Vin Wickey

and sold so many epic cars

through his dealership

and built something

really really meaningful

and I think the fact

that we can be a small part

of that relationship

that someone can build

with an audience that

they certainly could have found

in other ways

but that we can be that bridge

to that kind of storytelling outlet

to me has been really really satisfying

Has that though also been

the hardest part

of this journey with Vin Wickey

saying goodbye to people

that you've known

come on the channel

what has been the toughest thing

to get over?

I think the toughest thing

to get over

with social media content creation

is that you are

inadequately compensated

for the invitation

for everyone to be able to

tell you how they feel

and the privacy that you give up

I consider it all

to be very worth it

but early on in particular

that was a big challenge

is that I am opening myself up

for people to go into the comments

and say whatever they feel like

and then I also

have people that want to come up

and talk to me at any moment

and that is wonderful

I consider myself to be exactly

the right amount of famous

like enough that if I'm at a car show

I'm going to shake some extra hands

and take some pictures

and have some fun

but if I'm walking through the airport

it's only a few people

and that's all well and good

and if I'm with my family

it's all respectful

and our audience is amazing

and so but I think that

that was a really hard thing

early on to warm up to

and now like if we bring a female

guest on

it's toxic always

and it's just you know

things like that

that you just can't really get around

if you invite people to comment on

the internet

it goes

poorly sometimes

do you have guests that have been

like super stoked

to come on and tell some stories

and then the stories have gone live

and then maybe they've been

attacked in the comments section

and I'll

I know that's going to happen

and I'll tell them

that it's going to happen

and I'll say don't read the comments

they don't reflect

at all the demeanor of the audience

and that's very true

but because I mean

you can look at a video

that has a 98% like ratio

and there will be 50 vitriolic comments

that are just filth

but you know

but at its worst at the beginning then

when you say that that was something

hard to get over

how would that that physically look

like you put a video live

the comments come through

like what would it

what would it do to you

I think it would just

be a you know

the problem is you give it too much credit

you you read too much into it

when again it's hard to say

98% of the people like this video

those 20 people really seem to dislike it

me or whatever we were talking about

and so I

I have to decide what matters

in this equation

because the idea the business matters

getting it done

making more videos matters

like I want to do those things

but I have to decide

what credence do I give

what attention do I give

to this pain point

and the answer is very little

don't worry about it

you shrug it off and just

up both the rest of the comments

and make it all go away

but that's a tough

tough thing for any content creator

I think to to mute out enough

what's your next Bugatti moment

well I've got young children now

so my next Bugatti moment

is them going into well-functioning adulthood

and that's not as entertaining

from an audience perspective

but I think that the

challenges that we have

of trying to blend work

and the rest of life

becomes a little harder

when we earn a living off of social media

and when the garage is full

of broken supercars

I think that

I become the

you know try to be conscious

of the fact that

you know

the world of exotic car owners

and like really good people

doesn't intersect

all that greatly it does

and there's plenty of great people

in our community and in our world

and then out here at these shows and events

but it's it can stack the deck against us

when it comes to

the rest of the relationships

that we hold dear

and I think that we have to compartmentalize

our aspirations

our passions our goals

our diversions

whatever we want to be doing

with what that means

to the other people around us

and I think trying to find

that balance

will be the quest of the next

you know 10-15 years of my life

Have you always been content

where you are?

No

I would say that

finding contentment

has always been a challenge

and spirituality helps there

I'm trying to be as outspoken

a Christian as I possibly can be

and finding peace

in my relationship with Christ

is really what puts all of that

into perspective

and it's a very important part

of my life

and I think the fact that

God gives us the opportunities

to have these crazy experiences

and be able to tell people

and meet people

and do things

and bond through them

is one of the most beautiful things

about creation

but I also think that

the ability to find contentment

is something that is beautiful

when we can manage it

and to understand

that making the most out of today

and being as gracious

and appreciative of the opportunities

that we have

is really what makes it all

make sense

and as I walk into my garage now

and I'm like holy cow

they still haven't repossessed

all these cars

I feel so blessed

and so fortunate

and it's getting to the point

where I'm like

I don't really have a lot more goals

out there

and that's a new place

like I said

I had to set an arbitrary goal

of going out to buy a Bugatti

last time I felt that way

but it's different now

and I'm trying to figure that out

because I couldn't be any happier

with the current lineup of cars

and I just want to go drive them all

and I hope that I didn't have time

to drive one out here

all the way to California

but that takes an extra couple of days

when you don't go at cannonball speeds

and so I think just

it's hard to know what's next

but contentment is always a challenge

I didn't want this story

to be something individual

like the content that you put out

on your channel

that story that is perfectly 10 minutes

to do with the title

and the thumbnail

sure

because that is what

you're so good at doing

I wanted this story to be about you

and your journey of how the hell

you got from selling iguanas

in the basement

to where you are today

as a Bugatti Veyron owner

and multiple business owner

and passionate family man

so I thank you very much

for coming and spending time

in my flickery van

in the middle of a car park

somewhere in Monterey during car week

I hope you enjoy the whole of car week

is there anything in particular

you're getting up to

you're very excited about

well I have made it here

in a car that very short time

ago did not work

I have got the 1998 Lamborghini Diablo

victorious secret edition

that we are going to be parading

around car week

hopefully functionally this week

but it got legally registered

about I don't know 72 hours ago

and it is it is here

it is filthy

but it is going to go several places

well I hope you enjoy your car week

thank you for coming

I'm ready to six out

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thanks for having me

Lamborghini Gallardo

Bugatti Veyron

Revueltos

Lamborghini Huracan

Mclaren F1

Ferrari F40

Ferrari F50

Toyota A90

Mercury Monterey

Lamborghini Diablo

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