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
SEO specialists
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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About this episode
Ed Bolian shares his incredible journey from breeding iguanas in his parents' basement to becoming a prominent figure in the automotive world with a Bugatti Veyron in his garage. He recounts wild stories, including buying a Lamborghini from a prostitute and having a Ferrari stolen on his wedding day. Bolian discusses the evolution of his YouTube channel, VinWiki, and the importance of storytelling in the automotive community. He reflects on the challenges and triumphs of building his brand, the significance of calculated risks, and the lessons learned along the way.
From breeding lizards in his basement to setting the Cannonball Run record and owning a Bugatti, Ed Bolian’s story is unlike any other. In this raw conversation, Ed opens up about chasing impossible goals, building VinWiki, going broke, and finding purpose in cars, content, and family.
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