Doug DeMuro on the Business of Reviewing Cars (Podcast)

not using that as hyperbole. Billions of views. He's pretty much driven every car under the sun, new cars, old cars, exotic cars, and has created a really fascinating business around filming himself doing car reviews. He's got a very charming sense of humor, especially in writing. It's quirky, kind of reminds me a little bit of Dave Barry. And he

also is really really insightful with automobiles. I don't know if it's by the end of each review he's convinced me or we just start in the same place, but I find him to be enormously insightful when it comes to the value of cars, what their strengths and weaknesses are. Hey, is this something you might want to pick up as a weekend driver, or is this a car you could take the kids back and forth with. It's just really interesting.

There's a whole universe of YouTube car folks, and some of them just deal with the craziest, most exotic stuff. Doug is very down to earth and he gets as excited about a Ferrari as the next guy. But he also can take you through, you know, something like the Ford Bronco or range Rover Volar and explain the advantages of him. If you're a car person, or if you're actually shopping for a car, go to his YouTube site, Doug Demorrow and just search for the car you're looking for.

I'm pretty positive you're gonna find something either identical to or similar to what you're looking for, and he could really share some insights as to that specific car. I could babble about this forever rather than do that with no further ado. My conversation with Doug Demurrow. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is Doug Tomorrow. He is a car reviewer, but not just any car reviewer. His YouTube

channel has three point seven million subscribers. His videos have been seen over one point one billion times. Each one averages about a two million view count per video. He has won numerous awards from YouTube and others, including the Gold Creator Award. He is the author of two books, Plays with Cars and Bumper to Bumper. Doug DeMuro, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. So let's get a little overview of of your career. You begin at Porsche as sort of a cubical drone

working spreadsheets. But but at least you've got a really nice company car, didn't you. Yeah, So I worked at Porsche. I was twenty one that I just graduated from college, and I had a nine eleven series of them. Actually, I had four nine eleven company cars during the time I worked during in a Panamara, and I only crashed two of those five cars. So it really it all worked out pretty well. I think that's a great percentage of Oh wait, you had four cars, so fifty throughout

two out of five two out. I crashed one of the nine elevens in one of the end u Panama. Now the nine eleven I read about was a rainstorm. You come around a turn and there's a tree down on the street. How did you how did you crash the Panama? Oh? That one, the Panamera was was not my fault. The guy pulled out in front of me, he like ran to stop sign. I also considered the nine eleven not to be my fault, you know, with a tree in the road. But my bosses didn't see

it that way. They were not in agreement with me. Was the tree falling just as you came around the corner or the road? But it was a dark road and it was a it was a sharp corner, and you just you couldn't avoid it, in my opinion, unless you were driving more slowly, which is what the officer would have said to me. I think, I think right, too fast for for road conditions. I we've all been there.

So you begin writing not long after your Porsche. You wrote for The Truth about Cars, which is a great blog. Way early that blog was telling people that GM was going to go bankrupt years in advance. They were dead right, you write, you wrote for gelot Nick what what led to this side gig? Well, you know it's interesting. I mean it was twenty one and I was working Porsche, and then it was twenty two and twenty three, and you know, I don't know. I was just at that age.

It's it's hard to sit next cubicle, you know. I just was thinking to myself, am I really going to do this forever? And it was cool having those cars, but they weren't mine, you know, they were rental cars, essential from the company that you had for six months, and then you get another one and I just remember after the you know, the third or fourth one, you pick it up and it's kind of lost its magic, and you think to yourself, is this really gonna be my whole life? You know? Am I going to be

driving other people's cars? And that's kind of the highlight of my life is picking up a new rented And so I started to kind of think about what do I want to do really? And I was actually writing already for auto traitor dot com, writing like just boring you generic car articles, you know, should you buy your car at the end of the leaves or whatever? And I just decided my wife and I were like, let's

just take this jump. So one day I quit and started. Yeah, I mean, she started writing a two cars about two weeks after I quit, and that began the That was the seed that throughout it. Now, I recall reading something of yours about the Chicago Auto Show that was surprisingly funny in a very Dave Barry like way. It had a sense of humor. It wasn't your straight here's the latest and greatest from hund right right. Yeah, I started I started going after kind of the more humorous slant

on it. You know, I had quit my job on the theory that I could make a living being funny with cars, even though no one had. That wasn't really a thing that existed. I have when I look back on it, it sounds like the craziest thing I've ever done in my life. But you know, I was twenty three, and it didn't really there were stakes were low, basically, and so I gave that a shot and then it you know that that kind of grew an audience around me.

Was that paying the bills? I mean writing profession correct? No. At the time, I was making all of my money from writing for Auto Trader. They were doing well and they needed a ton of content to sort of help drive traffic, search traffic and things to their car listing. And so I was writing the stuff that most people saw.

I was getting paid basically nothing for. But the stuff that I was getting paid for, you know, people weren't really seeing unless they were in market consumers, you know, trying to decide between like a RAP four and a CRV was that kind of stuff. So then you end up picking up a two sounds and in four ferrari three sixdina for about eighty thou dollars half down, half financed um with your parents co signing the loan. Tell us you're thinking behind that purchase. But that was also

one of the craziest things I ever done. I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea, but it turned out to me. My thinking was, you know, now if you go on YouTube, now there's an enormous amount of people who have really crazy cars and do videos about them. But back when I bought that car at the beginning of thirteen or not was the end of third But either way, people weren't doing that. YouTube was primarily confined to a bunch of teenagers kind of

screwing around, and they were very very very few. Like exotic car owners like that was out of the realm of a lot of what YouTube had, and so my thinking was at the time I was writing for Gelotnick, the popular you know, car block, it became clear to me that video was maybe something I should try. And I thought, you know, it would be a really good idea to have of something like this that would really

really attract people. And so my gamble was, if I buy this car, maybe I can get a lot of people you know, interested and excited and watching or reading my columns. Um and so that was the That was the theory. And yes, I had never financed a car before, so my parents had to cosign, even though I put half down, and my parents had to cosign the loan.

So the first video of yours, I think that caught my attention was you basically letting twenty friends and strangers drive the Ferrari and film it and basically capture their reactions. I suspect that video went pretty viral. I saw it on Business Insider. But in prepping for this, when I googled that video, a ton of places talked about that, was that your first really big video? Yeah, yeah it was, and like you said, it got kind of picked up everywhere.

And before that, you know, I was posting the videos on Gelotnik, and so they were doing pretty well because there's a pretty good traffic there. There wasn't the time, and then it kind of started that video. Yeah, that video was like, oh my god, this this can happen. I didn't even realize, but people seem to think that was pretty crazy. And now that's another troke on YouTube. A lot of people do that, letting their friends drive there or whatever. It's not you know, you couldn't do

go viral with that content anymore. So after about a year with the Ferrari, you say, I know what's even less reliable and you go out and pick up Was it the Eston Martin after that? No? I think it's hard for me to remember now, which is funny because at the time it was so important to me. But I think right after the Ferrari, I had a Hummer. I had Hummer Hummer, which was just the biggest disaster

automobile that has ever existed. And I had a Nissan Skyline that I had imported some Japan, which was those two cars. That was all the audience, right. You had like the Japanese sports car crowd and then you had the old American truck crowd, and I was like, this is this is perfect. I can split the I can split the audience, and then somewhere in the middle there was a lotus Elites which you drove cross country. Yeah. I actually did that before I started even doing any

of this. I did that just for fun, and it was the most miserable experience I've ever had. I wish I had done it when I was writing about it and making videos, because because it really wasn't worth it to just do it. And for listeners. Doug is about six three, maybe even taller, and the Lotus is just tiny. The worst drives of my life. It also I discovered in the middle of the desert it didn't have air conditioning.

I did this in July and I didn't find out it didn't have air conditioning until day two when I was in the Mohabi desert. And I remember at one point I pulled over simply to get a bottle of water so I could pour it on myself. It was that level of comfort drenched. Now, if I recall also Aston Martin went back and forth across country. What was

that experience life? Yeah, you know, I wanted. I kept trying to figure out, well, I've done this, I've done that, how do I get even more reach, even more people make even more of an entertaining thing with these cars I'm buying. And so this Aston Martin at the time and probably still Aston Martin offered a one year warranty with unlimited mileage on their used car. And you know, Aston Martin and British as they don't have the greatest

reputation for reliability. So I thought, well, I'm gonna exploit the hell out of this. So I bought one. And yeah, I mean I drove it to thirty fourth States, to Canada twice DC and then sold it. But I'm almost twenty thousand miles in that car in a year. I have a picture of that car next to a Bison in North Dakota, which most Aston Martin owners don't have. And but it was pretty good. Actually, it was reasonably reliable. There were some hiccups at the beginning, but after that

it was cool. But I think a lot of people were interested in saying, hey, here's a used, you know, forty dollar exotic car. How bad really is it? And so I wanted to find out, and I guess they did. It turned out not to be that bad. It turned out not to be that bad. Yeah, So now you start buying other cars to do reviews. You had a Dodge Viper, you have the Ranger over, the Defender ninety,

the sixty three Wagon. When did you come to the realization that people really wanted to hear from an intelligent but fun car reviewer. You know, it's interesting. Initially I was buying all those cars just to make videos with. And since I have now kind of morphed into buying cars for myself and making videos of other cars for exactly the reason that you stayed, it became clear to me people really wanted to see the reviews, and obviously

I couldn't buy cars fast enough. And what became clear to me was that people wanted to see, you know, all sorts of different variety of interesting cars, and I could start to provide that, and yeah, I mean, I don't know, I it just sort of started to take off. It was one of those things where when you do YouTube, you just make a ton of different types of content and whatever gets the most popular you make more of that.

And that's exactly how I did it, you know. I I started making silly stuff with my own cars and reviewing other people's cars. Well, the reviews of the other people's cars. They got a little more popular, and so you know, started doing more of those and more of those, and the next thing, you know, you know, a billion views. Like you said, so you're armed with an Emory University degree in economics, you get a two thousand dollars worth of equipment, and you launch a YouTube channel that you

don't really think is the future of your career. It's just let me throw some some videos up here. How long before it became wildly successful, you know, it's interesting. My initial intent was, I I felt then and kind of still feel, that I was a better writer than a video person, and so the initial plan was that the videos would simply be a companion to my writing.

And I remember, in the summer of fifteen, um so that was about a year and a half after I started videos, I was I was looking at my articles, and my numbers on the articles were not that strong, and I happened to glance at my YouTube numbers at that time, and they were really strong, and I started to realize, oh, I'm getting more views on YouTube than in the article. This hadn't even occurred to me because

I was so laser focused on writing. And then the following summer sixteen, I started doing two videos per week, and that's really when things started taking off. When I started the consistent schedule and started to really focus on YouTube, that's when things really started to blow up. And in those were reviews as opposed to one of your early reviews back when you had the Ferrari cracked me up

was Ferrari's don't attract women. You you would put put parts the Ferrari in film people walking by women could not possibly care less. But when you reversed it and put a woman in a Ferrari, guys flocked to it like like like the strongest magnet in the world. And you know, guys always flock to these cars, you know, it's so funny. Men always think, I'll buy this car,

women I'll be all over me whatever. You know, who's actually all over you when you have a Ferrari is like teenage boys there point actually they take picture, you know, they're the ones that are and you know, guys just generally, but women generally don't really care that much on Its one of the things that I've learned. If you're buying a car to impress someone else, you're probably in the wrong you're barking up the wrong tree, to say the very least. So let's talk about some of the reviews

that you do. How do you go about selecting cars? What? What is it just a function of what's available, or are you thinking about a checklist and saying, you know, I really haven't test dro you know A four eight recently and it's been upgraded. Let me let me give that a shot. It's an interesting question. So when I first started, it was a function of what was available, and I remember people would reach out to me with like a Lamborghini, and I'd like, oh my gosh, a Lamborghini.

You know, I gotta go in film Matt, And I would. Now because the channel is so big, I still do it the same way, solicit people to get in touch with me, rather than me getting in touch with people, because I just think it's kind of entitled to call up someone or send an e those one and say hey, I'm I'm a guy on YouTube. Can I review your expensive car? It's easier to contact me. The channel is now so big that I get contacted about pretty much

every car that you could imagine. And so now yes, it's sort of like a checklist, like I know that X, Y, and Z cars performed well, so I make videos with those cars. New cars performed tremendously well, so I worked very closely with dealers and to an extent with automakers. I don't like doing it, but somewhat in order to make sure that you know, I have new cars right when they first come out, and then still some private owners, you know, I fill the last week I filed them.

I hasn't gone up yet, but I filmed the six Nissan Maxima. Occasionally, there are cars that I just personally have an interest in, and you know, I filmed three new models that week, and I'm kind of I just want to do something weird and solve these things like that. But it's it's it's less and less common. The new

cars is what people mostly want to see. In prepping for this, like normally I watched your videos of the cars I wanna learn about or see, but in prepping for this, I looked at just some horrific cars that you reviewed, whether it was the what was the name of the Cadillac Convertible before the SLR, the the the Alante. I just did the all just just such the worst GM garbage and you you did a Buick Riata with

that crazy touch screen. Even when GM got was ahead of the curve with the technology, they found a way to mess it up. But you also do, like, you know, pretty new stuff. You did the g Gladiator, You did, you know, anytime you did the most recent Hie output version of the range of Avlar, like you do pretty mainstream cars, not just exotists. Yeah. No, It's got to the point where now I tried to film if there's any new car that has even a little bit littlest bit of buzz around it, I do try to make

sure I have a video on it. It's just important to do. And and honestly, my channel is kind of a weird one because I'm I'm split between enthusiasts and in market shoppers, And so I'll review. I'll put up a review of like a Toyota Venza, and people are the Highlander and people will be like, why are you reviewing this pizza crap? But actually that video end up getting a million views or a million and a half

because people are still buying it. Well, then the next day I have to put up a video of you know, an old whatever, of course, and then the enthusiasts come back and I lose the in market stoppers and it's kind of a it's a thin line to walk, and you know, you get criticism on YouTube no matter what you do. So let's talk about those new cars. We'll talk about the exotics later. What sort of prep where do you do when you're getting ready to go out and shoot a car for the day. Take us through

your process. What do you do to get to prepare so you know at the start of it, I I write a script, and I don't script the whole video. You know, most of my video I go through kind of the little quirks of the car. I don't script script that because it's difficult to know what those things will be until I kind of get to the car. But I script the intro. In the outro and you can see me standing next to the car talking, that's all been scripted. The actual quirks and features of the car.

I just have to kind of figure out what I'm there because it's just too difficult to figure that stuff out until you're really up close with the car. And as a result, filming a car can take six seven hours because you spend two three hours just kind of pouring over every button, every feature, the owner's manual, all that stuff to figure out where everything is and how it all works. And so that's pretty much the process. There's not that much prep at the beginning, but when

you're actually there, it's really kind of intense. And I don't think, you know, if people see it on the screen, and I kind of kind of a goofy. I was these stupid clothes and people just think it's easy, and it's a little bit harder than you might realize. How did the Doug score come about? I assume you throw that in afterwards. You take notes, and you do that in prep. You're not doing it on the fly while

you're recording. So Doug score quirks and features, and of course this is a how did these hallmarks of your videos come about? The Dug score came about because I was realizing that people weren't watching the end of the videos. It's interesting the way my videos worked. I spent twenty minutes talking about the little quirks of the car and

only about five minutes driving the car. And the reason I started doing that was because usually by the time I had gotten a car, other people who were better than the reviewing cars had driven it already, and so people weren't didn't care what I had to say about the drive. They only cared about the quirks. And so I thought, well, I got to get people finished watching these videos somehow, and so I put in the Doug Score and and that has really blown up the you know,

the rate to people. People sometimes people hip stuff just to go to that and see, like where I put it against other car. You don't have the Doug score online anywhere like every now and then. I'm I don't want to have to pull up a video search to the end if I'm just looking for something specific. In the prep for this, I was surprised that the Doug Score does not seem to exist anywhere other than mentioned in the video. Unless I'm missed. It is on my website.

I have to do better about making this clear because I get this question off. It is on my website. If you go to doug euro dot com, you can put on Doug Score and the whole sheet is there. It's like a Google dot It's actually kind of interesting. You can copy and paste it into an Excel and manipulate it. And I get people every couple of weeks emailing me and saying, hey, here's some weird, you know, cool metrics I just did with the Doug score and

that sort of thing. And it's always interesting kind of to see how it's shaking down because I don't do that much analytics with it. Well you should, because that's a lot of data across a lot of cars. The interesting thing it has really become. Initially it was just kind of this interesting way to get people to watch

the videos. Now it's become actually useful information because in a lot of car segments, I've reviewed all of the vehicles, and so it's like, here's something you can actually use to maybe, you know, compare stuff and to be fair to you. Normally, when I look at rating systems, I'm pretty critical and you know, waving them off. I don't

disagree with you all that often. Every now and then I think I would be a little more generous in the utility usefulness of certain exotic cars, because if you're going out and buying a four hundred thousand dollar car, you're not bringing stuff home from walmartin It's not so so saying the car has a small trunk. It's like, well, but this is not their only car. They're not taking it home from the supermarket. But for the most part, I usually don't disagree with you, other than a point

or two this way or that. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I think it's it took a lot of time to kind of refine it them. We've gone through several refinements, but now I think it's kind of dialed in. When when did you come to the realization that YouTube video reviews of automobiles could be a full time job. I remember the day it was. I was driving that Aston

Martin across the country and on the way back. At the time, I lived in Philadelphia and my my wife had a family reunion in California, and I thought, well, I have this unlimited malage warty, I might as well just drive this thing out there and back. And on the way back, she flew by the way. She was not involved. She hadn't wanted me to do it. But on the way back I did meet up with my fans,

and I did one in in. I had never been to North Dakota, so I went like the northern route back and I went to Boise and then Fargo and then Chicago and then Minneapolis and Cleveland, and I assumed at the time that maybe a few dozen people would show k to these things, and I still to this day, remember it was Minneapolis. I pulled in, there were hundreds

and hundreds of people. The Oscar meyer Weener mobile showed up, and it was unbelievable, but it was just an incredible It's of course with COVID, he can't even imagine such an event now, but it was this unbelievable thing that all these people, all these fans, were so excited, and it poured that night and everyone still came out. And I called my wife on the way home from that and said, I think this may actually be a career.

Like I think I might actually be able to do something out of this and not have to go to law school or whatever the prevailing thought was the time, like, this may actually work. It was only when I finally saw that display of people that night that I kind of realized this was maybe the future. Let's put these numbers into a little perspective, put a little flesh on the bones. The numbers I'm gonna throw out are are pretty general. They're available online from all sorts of other

sites that tell you how to be a YouTuber. But typically if you're up to one to two million page views for per month or video views per month, that should throw off somewhere between a quarter million and half a million per year. Are these sites bullpark right or are they Is that too broader range? Yeah, and it is these sites often they do offer really broad ranges. But you know, it's interesting the way that YouTube works.

I've been very surprised to learn that some channels make a ton more money because of the type of content they do, and some make a ton less because of the type of content they do. It all depends on who your viewers off. And then there's a lot of YouTubers in addition, who do a lot of paid advertisements, which I've generally avoided. I do like endorsements, Yeah, I really really have to. I feel that my ethics as

a journalist, it's important to very much minimalize this. Occasionally I get an offer I can't refuse, and I've done maybe three, but most guys do want every video, and so you can make a lot more money that way. But I've also always tried to play the long game here, and I think that by doing ads like that, you kind of people don't want to watch your content as much of every time they turn it on. There's a minute, you know, ad for a shaving thing. But anyway, you

can make pretty good money. It's gone pretty well, quite quite interesting. So let's talk a little bit about buying and selling cars online. I just sold an SL this summer on eBay. Coincidentally what I paid for it seventeen years ago, six s L. I got my R A on Bring a Trailer. I found my wife's M three convertible on car Gurus. I don't remember how I found the M six. It might have been car Gurus, but um that also was in Indianapolis. Had a flight in

Indianapolis and drive at home. But it's not just car guys buying cars online, it's everybody. How has the Internet changed how we buy cars these days? Yeah, I mean it's just that's just it, right, Like no one is not using the internet pretty much to find cars. The days of leafing through Auto Trader magazine or the back

of the newspaper. That's how I bought cars when I was, you know, just just graduating from high school and often and that's what you do, if you remember, you'd have to try to fit like they charge you by the letter, so you have to try to fit like PW for power windows and pl That was how it was back then, but now the Internet is everything. It's so much easier to get a ton of high resolution photos and is a lot more information available to the buyer to what

they're actually buying. I couldn't agree with you more. I had the same experience you had on Craigslist with every crazy SOB story coming out. Could you hold the note on this car? Will will take it from you? Like, yeah, sure, I'm gonna do that right, It's pretty hilarious. So there's a ton of transactions taking place, both auctions and just regular sales. What motivated you to launch cars and Bits?

You know? One of the things that I started to realize is that there's a large segment of the car enthusiast community, especially in terms of selling and buying, that is devoted to what I consider to be sort of vintage cars, which include stuff going into the seventies, sixties, seventies, fifties.

That's where it is perceived, especially in the cars world, that all the money is and I am very well aware being my age, but also because I know a lot of other people who are enthusiasts that there are, and it's an underserved community of people who are interested

in cars from the eighties and up. Those people are kind of ignored in the cool car space, and I decided, you know, it would be cool to have a site that just sold cars two you know, from that era, basically the nineteen eighties and up, and so that's kind of that was what we wanted to do, and I think, you know, we executed it, and it's done reasonably well so far, I hope. Well, it's certainly an interesting site. I think that you've made some improvements over many of

the other auction sites. I mean, eBay is kind of a mess, but even compare to something like Bring Bring a Trailer, you have a lot of really interesting I would call them upgrades, some innovations that that are pretty intriguing. Tell us what you think is the most distinguishing characteristic about cars and bids beyond just the fact that it's eighties to present. Yeah, I think I think there's a few.

That's obviously, the biggest one to me is that the specific focus which I think attracts generally like younger people are people who are morested in that world But the other stuff is I think the site is really clean and easy to use like a modern website. Is some of them editors eBay like you mentioned Bring to Taylor, I just don't think it's quite as easy to navigate

on as and as clean and simple. And my team, the designers and the engineers who created it, the developers, did an incredibly good job of making it like a modern website since we knew we would probably have a younger audience, And to me, that's probably the easiest thing just there the biggest differentiator, just the simplicity and ease of navigation on the site and using it and seeing the cars and being able to kind of see everything displayed and it's not it's just very simple to use.

And there's more stuff that's going to come out as we grow that's going to make it even easier to navigate. So it's important, I think, to make something like that, and especially when you take a look at the competitors and just geared for not really kind of the modern the modern auction buyer. I would say, so, what's your role on the site presently you were the founder or a co founder? Are you just marketing and strategy or or how involved in the day to day are you? Well,

actually it's finishing, I uh, incredibly involved. So we've launched the site, we didn't realize how successful it would be, and so we just weren't ready with with employees. I think we finally have the team in place. Now it's been two months since we launched. I think we're finally read a three months rather, I think we're finally ready to take on the volume and and sort of start ramping things up. But if initially I was doing everything,

it was a disaster. I still am doing most of the reserve setting of the cars that come in, since that's such a giant driver of revenue, you know, making sure the cars have the right reserve prices so they'll actually sell. And then I add a little Doug's take to every listing that goes up, and I personally write each one sort of my thoughts on that particular car

and that car's placed in the market. And then yes, marketing and strategy is sort of my big contribution to the site, since that's run best at So what are the goals for the site? How many cars do you hope to auction each week? And what sort of dollar volume do you think you can move It's a good question. I mean, we're not sure. We hope and we believe that there's a market for i don't know, fifty auctions a week something like that. Yeah, I really want to

be the premier place for cars from this era. If you're looking for an eighties enough car cars and did go there, you'll find a wide variety. We've done a good job with that, but I think I really want to kind of ramp it up and make sure that basically anything you might want is available on the side of any time, and if it isn't, well, checked back

next week. So I'm hoping to be able to really kind of scale it and get it to a point where it is the default for people looking for a car from this There so two nuts and bolts questions about the operations of the site. One is the reserve price. You point out that cars without reserve have a tendency to attract a lot of interest. I was always curious why the option doesn't exist for a seller to allow

the reserve number to drop mid auction. Not not necessarily that reserve has been met, but if an auction is attracting a lot of attention, to just say we're making this now a reserve US auction to see see what that does to the bidding. It's interesting. So if if a seller reaches out to us during the auction says they want to simply remove their reserve, we have honored

those requests. So a few cars have actually flipped to no reserve during the auction, and but we generally tell sellers not to reveal their reserve during the auction because one of the things that we've found is when someone says, oh, the reserve is X amount, it makes the bidders feel that the car is only worth X amount, and so they get kind of disappointed or sort of slow down their bidding or just stop bidding all together once it gets close or hits that number because they no longer

think they're getting any form of a deal. Whereas if the reserve is sort of sitting there in the background, you don't know it. People just bid what they think the cars work, which, frankly, objectively, is how a marketplace like that out of work. People pay what they're willing to pay, and whoever pays them, you know, pays the most. That's it. That's the person who wins. And so when you say, oh, the reserve thirties, didns start taking a Well,

thirty is gonna pay thirty three. But now that I know that the seller only thinks it's worth thirty, I'm not going a bit. And so we try to would try to really coach the sellers. Don't reveal your reserve, but if they're willing to pull the reserve completely off,

then yes, we generally honored those requests. In our opinions, those auctions probably should have been no reserve from the beginning, but it's very difficult to explain to sellers, hey, you're gonna get more money if you got no reserve cars. Like we just had an Audi R eight. He pulled the reserve off in the last day, and it's like that guy should have gone no reserve from the beginning. It was a really nice car. It was because they

gonna get a lot of us. But people say to me, well, what if it only gets into a thousand dollars And I'm like, well, you know that hasn't happened yet, even for no reserve or reserve car. It hasn't. It hasn't occurred yet. We have a lot of traffic of the sides, well, as possible, but it's very, very unlikely that people have a hard time taking that point. And I understand, Yeah, I saw that, right. Was one of the first years with the dual clutch. If I remember not a manual,

I can't. I can't remember. I think the one that the reserve was pulled off was a seventeen. It was a it was a second gender. Okay. The way I end up bidding on cars typically is I'll try and ballpark what fair value is, and then I'll bid up to below. And then you'd be surprised how often you're either the winner of the auction or high bid reserve not met. And then you speak to the uh the sellar and there you know, two above high price, and even if I'm on the low end, they're just not realistic.

But most of the time it looks like so this is a good math question. What percentage of reserved bidding auctions actually go through through to a sale. It's something like sixty about two thirds, And obviously it's the no reserve, right, yeah, exactly, So our still rate is just the But then a good portion of those reserve auctions are deals are made

after the fact. You just didn't have maybe the bidder in the room at that time to you know, get the number up there, or maybe the seller just besides the okay, I'll go a little lower. I just want to think on But that's that's maybe once a day we do one of those are once a couple of days. Typically they're they're they're hitting their numbers and you know, I don't know. I We're doing our We do our best with the sellers to try to get them into

a reasonable ballpark. It's amazing to me how many sellers ask for high retail as their reserve price, and I'm like, that's not how this works, you know. And then they get upset and they're like, well you won't give me you know, the car car is worth you know, the nicest one on auto trators listed for forty This guy wants to forty one reserves right, and he says, you won't let me sell the car at the price I want. Well, there's a lot of sight you can do that. You know,

I'm standing your way here. It's just kind of but a lot of sellers are realistic and they understand that, hey, the reserve is kind of the bottom I'm willing to accept bibs could go a lot higher, and we've had a lot of very happy sellers where they put a certain reserve on the bids went thousands over and it just worked out for him. And I try to explain that to people, but again it's it's it's hard. Every

seller is different. Yeah, the the endowment effect is everybody believes that because they own it, it's got a bigger value. Imagine trying to sell a house where somebody lived for thirty years, brought their kids up, have all their memories. They're good luck getting those people to be rational terms and it's similar to that in a lot of ways exactly. So probably the most similar site to yours is Bring a Trailer, which has been around for a good couple

of years. They were recently sold. What what are the long term plans with cars and bids? You know, my partner and I discussed this a lot. Um. I don't know. Obviously, if the right offer comes during the right time, you know, that's something we would consider. UM. But also it's a it's a good business, you know, we don't hold the cars. We've already done a lot of the really heavy lifting

creating the website. UM. In the marketplace and the terms and and you know, kind of figuring out a lot of the problems that have come up, and now we have playbooks for them. And I'm not really sure. I mean, our goal was to first see if it would work, and it did, and now the next question is like

what can we do to innovate and throw it? And I think once we've gotten to the point where we've made some cool new features come out that even enhance the experience, but further and we grow it to a point that we're really happy with, I think then we start thinking, Okay, what's next. Do we expand to you know, beyond cars? Do we expand to older cars? Do we expand to whatever? Or do we look for a buyer or whatever. I don't know, but I think that's a

long way off. I think we have a long way to go before we feel comfortable that we're where we really want to be with it. Um. I think there's a long, long term play in there. Quite fascinating. So I know you cover a lot of exotic cars, but you also cover a lot of new cars that have come out. Tell us some of your favorite regular cars, if if Uncle Fred or your sisters, you know, husband says, hey, I just need a regular hauler for going back and forth to work to the train station to target. What

sort of cars do you recommend for those people? You know what's funny when people come to me with that kind of request, I try to steer them in whichever direction they're already thinking, because I don't want to get blamed. So they're thinking Honda c RV. I'm like, yes, that is it. That's the one you want to put that up. You can fit two baby seats and a ton of of packages in the back of that, right, I mean,

that's a little tiny for a family. People come to me and they're very distressed and they say, what do I get the Highlander or the Pilot or the Explorer? And the truth is, when you're looking at a car like that that you're just gonna abuse and uses a family car, it doesn't really matter all that much. They're all good. You know, there was a day not that long ago where cars there were some really bad cars,

and that's not really the case anymore. And I always tell people, look, go to the dealer, you play with the screen thing. That's a big component of cars now, you know, drive them, see how they feel and my views are I can generally point them in a certain direction, but I also don't want to be I don't want to get upset and and and also there's all the studies out that say that's some large portion of consumers will change their entire automotive purchase if if a different

cars available in the color they want. And it's like, well that that kind of goes to show you this people. People don't really care, maybe as much as we might think for for cars like that. But there are a lot of good cars out right now. I've been really surprised with modern Ford models, the new Ford Explorers, really great, really impressive car. It's just really amazing to me how

good modern cars are in general. This the technology that they now include, the features of the conveniences, it's really quite something. And which is one of the reasons why I kind of tell people it's hard to really go wrong. If someone is going in kind of a wrong direction, there may be thinking that's a b C. That's when you start to step in and give them some better

guid but you really get that and full disclosure. Many years ago, many many years ago, I had the Eagle Talent t S. I o Will drive, which was effectively mister product. I saw one on your site in red and black that other than the interior color identical to the one I had, And to be fair, it was a pretty decent car for years. Yeah no, hey Tavis, she was a great automaker at one point. But things

have changed. But that car, I mean, they're so hard in that particular one that you're talking about sold for like four dollars, and it's so hard to find a nice condition anymore. There's such a cool cars those those yeah, yeah, well, and they're impossible to find, man, because as you know, they were all modified, either the first owner modified it or resold it to some kid who was the second owner who modified it and then blew up the engine.

And so finding one of those in nice shape is impossible. Now, so let's talk about fun weekend cars. If someone said, hey, I'm looking for something used that I could toss around, take on drives out into the country or a long weekend, but I want to stick shift and I want to have a little fun, what sort of car would you send that person looking at? Well, I generally courses are popular in that segment for a reason. It kind of depends on their budget. Obviously, in Miata, if you if

your budget, you know, under twenty, Theatas are great. They're just there's so much fun, and they're very underrated even by modern by by by a general public, they're very underrated. People think they're just cards for you know, people to drive around in their hair fly. It's they're actually funny, good sports cars. And then you know, then you can start getting into use Caymans and Boxers. I prefer convertibles, and so I always kind of tell people to go

after that stuff. Then you get more expensive than that, you know, you use nine eleven that sort of thing. But there's a reason that Porsches are so good, and people have always kind of idolized the idea of owning a Porsche, and so they're always tending into that, especially when they find out they can pick up used ones and they're pretty reliable. It makes sense. That's kind of

what I generally tell people in that world. So let me push back a little bit on some of your reviews on some of the sort of fastback SUVs and crossovers. You don't like X four s or Xexes, or the Mercedes g L E s and even the Lambeau US you kinda mocked the way it looks, you know, I I saw your review of the most recent I think it was either the Denali or the Yukon and and I think GMC's new tagline should be we build rectangles.

And if you're not interested in like a big, boring box, well something like forget the Lambeau, but something like the X four or there's a smaller version of the g l E that has a little style and a little pizzazz. And it's not quite a full blown suv, which you may not need, and it's not quite a full station wagon. It's somewhere in between. What what's your beef with those those cars? Well, don't you think there's a there's a medium between a box like a tahoe and a and

an X four. I mean, what's wrong with the next three? I can get an Next three. They're great and they're more practical. They're prettier than they used to be. The first gen X three's were just got awful, although you could get them with a stick. When our mechanics went back, I replaced it with an X four because you know, I have to. I have two big dogs. We go out to the beach on the weekends, getting the older

dog in and out of the back seat. It can't be too hot, so that kind of eliminated the X five. The X three was like and the g l E was a little over the top for my taste. I thought it was a bit much. This is about the same size as the station wagon, maybe a little touch bigger, but it drives, you know. The McCann drove like a sports car and and ate up tires and breaks like

a sports car. Also, the X four seems to be like a reasonable compromise between I don't want a giant sport you, but I need occasionally to throw a bunch of stuff in the back, and this sort of for me anyway, just split the difference. I don't mind, truthfully how they look as much because I don't really like to judge cars on styling. That's kind of a people can do what they want there. But to me, the problem is you could have an X three you get

more cargo space from a cubic perspective the four. The floor is the same surface area, but it's taller in the back obviously, and it's cheaper and you're not robbing your self many rear feet room, and so to me, it's like obvious, I would just I wouldn't even consider

an Explore. I would step right to the X three. Now, the market seems to agree with you, surely, surely, based on a number of X fours and g LC coops and all those things I'm starting to see around The automakers have done a good job creating demands of those cars, and people are interested in them. But I just find it to be so strange. Now. I think part of it is that people don't want like you kind of implied, people don't want the same boring STUV over and over again.

So it was up to the automakers to think, how can we, you know, make it more interesting? And so that's how we got Explore X six vehicles like that. Yeah, we went to the dealer and the we got a quote on the M four point oh X four and then a pretty nicely optioned X three. And then I went to a broker and got a quote. Here here the options I must have, here, the options i'd like to have, here, the color combinations i'd like. And he came back with the lease price. And this is the

only call. We lease everything else we own. That was the same as the dealer quote for the X three. It made it a very easy um decision. So when I see the car, and and I never loved the X six, I thought the X six was a goofy compromise. The new X six is kind of nice. Also, you know, the origin like six was quite a stretch. The newer one is a lot more of a rational looking car. I think I kind of dialed it back a little bit. I've always said that the new X six was like

the old xix asking permission. It's it's like it's made a little bit, a little bit not it's not quite as as aggressive and as eager as the old one, but maybe that's a good thing. But also, the X six when it first came out, it was a really big departure, right it was the first of the coupe SUVs, and so it was everybody's like, what are they thinking? Well, now it's become a little more accepted, and so I think there's also a component of you know, our minds

that has become a more reasonable car. So let's talk about some of the crazier cars you've reviewed and enjoyed. La Ferrari Bugatti, viron McLaren Senna, Tona's Toni sag Gara what and that's just like the tip of the uh Iceberg tell us some of the most memorable million dollar cars you got to drive the Bugatti Chirone, which is Buggatti's current, you know, expensive sports car. That was probably the most memorable. I mean, that's I think three million plies.

It's also just the coolest thing. The Coni cigs are cool, but I still can't shake the feeling that it's just an ultimate small volume manufacturer that just sort of build a few of these, you know, Buggatti is like a legit company that's pumping these things out. Not that not pumping them out, but they built a few hundred. And it's just so amazing what the engineering it was capable of, that it could go so fast and have so much

power and also be luxurious. I mean he drives that car, it feels like you're sitting at a Bentley and then you accelerate and it feels like you're driving a race car. I mean, it's really impressive that they were able to make all of that happen. And so that's just a really special car. And drive that around. I film that video in Toronto and driving that around, people just freak out. They get excited. They Bugatti, you know in that car.

When I was a kid, the Veyron and then now the Shearon was like the car, you know, the car you want. I just think emotionally, that's a really cool car. But I mean, they're all insane. Pagani. Pagani makes them like cars are essentially high quality jewelry. Every little button and feature and switches perfectly chiseled and aluminum and incredible weight. They think about ever, even when you put on the hazard lights, how does that feel? And blah blah blah.

It's incredible craftsmanship and they're all incredible. It's a really amazing thing. Is just the sheer number of million dollar cars that exist, which is now quite a few. What is going on with the run of new Ferraris that we've seen coming out. Are they in danger of becoming a high volume retailer? How many Ferraris are they going to continue to crank out going forward? You know, it's

interesting questions. I mean that that is a big issue that they're going to contend with over the next few decades. You know, the end zo Era he died in about cars fon that are wherever uniformly considered to be special. The company has sort of ramped up ever since then, and in the last two years especially, they've really ramped up, and they're now going to be creating an suv, which is to a lot of their consumers it's sort of sacrilege.

And I know a lot of there's a lot of discontent among Ferrari people about the new you know, the new guard of Ferrari people. Um. And the cars are just a lot more accessible. It used to be that you had to know what you were doing in order to drive one, and that's not the case anymore. They have automatic transmissions, they're very easy to As long as you have the money, you can you can buy one and drive it. So yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens to Ferrari long term. Does the

brand start to become devalued due to their production. Well, it seemed to work for Porsche, didn't. The cay En kind of save the company. But you can't just live on nine elevens forever, can you. Yeah? There was a time in the nineties where Porsche was like, I don't want to say, hours away from bankruptcy, but certainly months and they really had to kind of band together. And yeah, you create a diversify the lineup. You couldn't just exist on a couple of sports cars anymore. And so yeah, Kayane.

You know, they did some special projects for Mercedes Bans and for Audi. They built some of their cars to make some money, and then you know, they said we needed we need a smaller sports car, which became the Boxer. That helped we needed suv and and so there's some benefits there. But Porsche was never quite the brand that Ferrari wasn't, So Ferrari is a little bit more specialness. A lot of the reason people pay those kind of prices is because they don't expect to see one every day.

Well we'll see if that continued. We're talking about a number of multimillion dollar cars. And if money was no object, what would you put in your garage next to the for g T If money was no object, I would get a Ferrari F forty, which I think is a

great car. But my all time favorite vehicle is the Porsche Career A GT, which is the car that Paul Walker, you know, was writing in when he died and that is I think the most special car ever made, the best car ever made, because we write a sports car of all time, and I would love to have one of those. But at the current going rate of seven hundred to eight hundred thousand, I think it'll be a

while before that happened. Affordable reasonable and and I have to tell you as somebody, as someone who's not a Giant nine eleven fan, I find them to look a little froggy. The career GT is a beautiful car. Yeah, very special car. So let's go through a few other beautiful cars. You basically talked me out of the Aston Martin repeated, which have become incredibly reasonable. Every now and then I'll throw a tweet up today in depreciation and show a two hundred thousand Allar car being sold for

forty five dollars used. I can't get past that Gorman NAV system. It just kills the whole car for me. Yeah, I know, I know it was. You know, Aston Martin has always played the role of the small volume brother to the real automakers who are trying to sell you know, high, high expensive cars. And they have this amazing brand name

and this amazing beautiful car. It's been very difficult for them to create technology that Bowld Mercedes Bands, Bentley, or or for even Ferrari with a big parent company, and so they always end up with stuff like that, and there's always these achilles heel. Even when Aston Martin started making reliable cars, the technology was still out on trash

and that's a tough one. Yeah, you get in that car and you see that, and it's like, well, it looks like the kind of thing my grandma stuck on our dashboard, you know, so she wouldn't get lost, you know, in two thousand four that in that level. So let's talk a little bit about some of the older trucks. We We just saw the refresh of the Jeep Wrangler. Next I think it's June, the new Bronco will come out,

which I think they did a spectacular job on. I've always been a fan of the Toyota FJ forties, which I'd love to replace the Rubicon with. But but you went full insanity and got a Defender ninety, a truck that I've always liked but been horrified to own. What has your experience with the Defender been, like, you know,

it's interesting. The Defender is a very special car, and everywhere I go people come up to me and talk to me about it, and they always tell me they want one, and I always tell them, you don't actually want one. What you want is a range rover feeling car that looks like this, but in reality, this thing drives like a piece of crap, which is what it is.

I always tell people, if the worlds, it's the worst like comfort and quality per dollar because Defenders North American spect Defenders, they only made about seven thousand of them, and the cost of them is now anywhere between maybe fifty and eighty thousand ballarts, and it's an enormous amount of money to pay for what is ultimately one of the great bad cars. I mean, it really is. Even the hard top ones. You're getting wet when you're driving into the rain. You know it's a disaster. And I

explained this table. But I am an enthusiast of this car. I love this car. I grew up wanting one, and so it makes sense for someone who's really into it. But anybody who's even slightly less than really into it probably shouldn't get one because they're gonna get tired of it quickly. And this is what ultimately happens with these defenders.

Rich guys by them, they think they're cool, they've always wanted one, and then after about a year they're like, boy, this is a piece of crap and they just move it on. And then you know, the next rich guy comes in and he brings it to his house in Vermont and and drives it for a summer and then Okay, it's piece of crap, and then he sells it, and then it's in the Outer Banks for a couple of years, and then that guy's tires of it. It's very difficult to actually want to want to use and enjoy that

car unless you're really into it. Your spare tire cover says Luke's Diner on it. And the first time I noticed that, I say, wait, Gilmore Girls, what's that about? And then I go to your Twitter description and you literally have fan of the Gilmore Girls in your Twitter description. You have to explain, what on earth is that doing that.

I love Gilmore Girls. I think it is one of the I love Anything with Community and the television show both movie Anything with Community like a good And they lived in this cute little town that was just the best little community, and I think it's like the greatest thing on what every pree or four years, I watched the entire series. You know again. I started the first

episode and watched all the way through. Now, one interesting Gilmore Girl's anecdote, I have tracked down the original jeep Wrangler that was used in that television show and it was purchased after the show ended at a charity auction, and that person still owns it and they own it in a small town in Connecticut, which is where the show takes place. And I have done everything I can to reach out to this person and try to buy it from him. I sent letters, and I've sent contacted

on Facebook, and it doesn't get seen. And so I'm terrified that I won't end up with this car. But I really really wanted. I think it's the great of the ultimate Gilmore Girls fan accessory, and I think I'd be perfect, perfect to own it. So when this show first came out, I never saw it. I never heard

of it. I never thought of it. And during lockdown when it first began, my wife and I just randomly because her sister loved the show, started watching it, and not only did we get into it, we watched one or two a night for the whole first just like eight seasons, for the first three or four months of lockdown. And I was really sad when it to see it end because it was just perfect escapism from the troubles

of the world. It's a small town. Everybody is humorous, it it has flavors of other you know, the dialogue is kind of like West Wing. I don't know if you're old enough to remember Northern Exposure, which is another quirky town only in Alaska. But it was perfect lockdown escapism, right exactly. That's a that's that's a good way to put it. I hadn't thought about that, but that is exactly what it is. People who are just yeah, they're friendly, they like each other, they care about each other. It

is a good break from the current situation. So as long as we're talking trucks and and TV, what are your thoughts on the f J forty from the seven news or eighties. I've always thought that was a solid reliable choice for terrorists and drug lords. Yeah, for a long time, those are great. You know, all these all these older SUVs have become so thought after now to really really really become a big, big thing everybody disposed of these vehicles during the seventies and eighties because they

didn't they were just trucks. To use them. You drove on the beach, you drove him with the mountains, you went hunting in them. Well, now there's the ones that are left are so desirable, and the FJA forty has become, you know, one of the really cool ones. It being the original land cruiser. Those people get to sneer at people with newer ones and say, I don't need all that comfort. It's a special It's it's very, very exciting

all of these things are there. It's just amazing to me what the old STUV market has become in the last ten year. I have a buddy who imports defenders from Spain because he's got family there, and I mentioned my interest in f j's and it turned out that he had a family member in Colombia, and so we looked online at a bunch of places. We had him is the local go over to the refurb shop in in Columbia, look at a bunch of cars, talked to

the owner. They turned out to have mutual acquaintances, and we picked two cars to refurb in South American and bring to New York. He wanted a red one. I wanted the light blue one. The red one was refurbed and shipped, and when they were about to start on the light blue one, pandemic hit. So I was unable to bring my car in. But his car is here, and it drives and and he loves it. He got the soft top. He could not possibly be more thrilled with it. And it's about so much around. It's not fast,

but it's so much fun. It's actually nicer driving than my jeep Rubicon, which incidentally is a salvage title, which I wanted to ask you about. So I bought a flood car and all in, replacing all the electricals, replacing the fuse, the three fuse box, the three wiring harnesses, pretty much anything that plugged in. All in. I bought a year old car for twenty grand when they were going for thirty five, and I've put thirty thousand miles on it. I ended up replacing the radio and parking break.

Kind of rusted I replaced that, But I know you hang with a lot of people that are big fans of salvage titles, including some exotic salvage titles. What sort of advice do you give to people who want to buy one of the crazier cars that might have been smashed up or stolen and driven off the road. What do you say to people say, hey, I could afford a Lambeau. I would generally tell people that that's fine if you know what you're doing. You're in the cars, you kind of have an idea of what to expect.

I mean, I wouldn't just tell it to someone who's looking for a bargain Lambeau to go and get one with a salvage or a rebuilt title, because at the end of the day, a lot of stuff could crop up. You really want to do a good job of figuring out before you buy the car, what's what's what's going on with it, what works, what doesn't, what to look for, especially if car it's been in a flood, because there's you know, lest come moments, was it a salt water flow?

That's sort of thing You definitely don't want to do it unless you have a pretty good idea of what you're doing. People see some of these prices and they get all excited and then they don't really realize how bad it could be. If you don't take the right precaution. That's that's that's generally what I would probably say to people. And also it can be more difficult to get financed and insured on some of these cars, especially super high value stuff, if it has you know, prior flowed, tired,

serious accident. That's sort of thing. So I know I only have you for a finite amount of time. Let's jump to our speed round. These are the questions we ask all of our guests, and let's start with what are you watching these days? What are you streaming? Give us your favorite Netflix or Amazon Prime shows? You know, it's interesting. For years, I never really watched TV, and so I Try'm trying to catch up on all the important shows. So right now I'm watching Desperate Housewives, which

is like ages old. But I don't make I I only I only recently saw the Sopranos. I'm just I'm trying to catch up. That's that's my goal. Really. I enjoy mostly just my The idea of an entertaining night for me is sitting in front of the computer on Wikipedia and reading about various learning about various things. And that's how I spend most of my time. That's pretty hilarious. Who Wikipedia for fun and entertainment? The other night I spent about three hours on the Titanic Wikipedia and all

of this associated Wikipedia articles. That's my version of a fun evening, believe it or not. So one of the things I've been doing for the past I don't know how many years is just on the blog throwing up a car could be new, could be old, and I always just use it as an excuse to do some research into that car. And I have to tell you, I am shocked at the quality and depth of the

information available on Wikipedia. And before people say, oh, all that stuff is wrong, you could go to the original source. Who were your early mentors, who helped influence your career, whether it was as a journalist or as a YouTuber, um you know. I think the guest early influence was you know, top Gear, which is true for almost all of us, um you know who are on YouTube right now watching those guys on that show. It was so special and so exciting, and I think we all kind

of wanted to do that ourselves. And I think that was like the really really my foundational like this is the coolest thing. That was definitely the biggest influence and they were pretty hilarious. I know, you got to meet Brian May. What was that like, James May? Yeah, it was amazing. It was like you know, I mean, it was like meeting your heroes. And he was great. He was super nice. He was a really really good guy.

We ended up chetting for a long time and about cars and everything, and I mean, how you know, for a guy who grew up with that show and who's kind of life has been Okay, I'm gonna do fund stuff with cars too. That was one of the coolest things that could even imagine. And Jay Lenna also you got to play with Jay Lenos McLaren f one, right, Yeah, that was really something that was quite a car and Jays and not afraid of driving the hell out of it, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. What

is that up to? That's a million or ten millions, some crazy number. So I think over that. I think the last one that's told was like twelve. But you know, Jay's is special because it's Jay's and he's it's basically a one owner car, and you know, I think Here's would be even more money than that. It's a pretty crazy thing to think about. So what are you reading these days. Tell us some of your favorite books. You've written two of them. What what do you like to

do to keep your brain occupied? You know, interesting, I mentioned the Wikipedia article thing earlier. I also love reading long form articles. The website long form dot org has all these like long form journalism. It's like my favorite thing in the world, and I read pretty much every single long form on there. I'm obsessed with that. In terms of books, I don't read that many books. I'm usually into these longer articles where I can learn more in like an hour. But um, I just finished reading

a book called Evicted by Matthew Desmond. I'm really into housing and housing policy and affordable how is and building stuff and hate all these anti building, an anti not in my neighborhood kind of people, and so I'm I'm into that sort of thing my one political stance. Um. But other than that, I'm not really that it's mostly

long form journalism. Quite interesting. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate who was interested in a career involving automobiles, whether it was journalism or YouTube or or anything like that. You know, it's an interesting question. I mean, people are asking me, Oh, you know, what can I do? How can I get started? What should I do? And and it's I got lucky because I started in thirteen and it was a lot easier then. And I don't know what I would do now, but

I know it would be a lot more difficult. But the advice that I always give to people generally is, you know, hey, don't stop. You have to kind of persevere because early on it's difficult and it may seem like it's going to be a disaster. But if you can outlast people, that may help. And you know, people always asking well how can I get access to cars?

That sort of thing? Just what you have? Try to find some interesting niche angle on what you have and make that you know you're saying, make it fun and maybe you'll start to attract an audience and go there. And and the other really important piece of advice I always trying to get to everybody is makes the kind of content that your audience wants, not what you want. That's the real goal. People will always get caught up and I want to drive this cool car or I

want to check out this cool car. Well does your audience want you to do that? And if not, maybe that experience shouldn't be what you do, and maybe you should have staid, you know, go at a different angle or something like that. And our last speed round question, what do you know about the world of videos and automobiles and pretty much everything that you wish you knew a dozen years or so ago when you were first

getting started out in terms of video production. I guess I wish I knew just that you that it's doable, that it's not that it's not something that you need an enormous amount of effort and equipment and professionals for that. You know you can do it. As people say, if I could do it, anyone can, Well, let's good to me. I had no clue what I was doing initially, but

I made it work. And that's kind of the biggest piece of advice I would have is that it's you don't need a zillion dollar budget to go into this world. You just need to make good content. And that's the real, the real key, I think quite fascinating. We have been speaking with Doug Demorrow, who is the co founder of Cars and Bids and the host of the Doug Demorrow channel on YouTube. Doug, thank you so much for being

so generous with your time. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out all of our previous three hundred and forty such prior discussions we've had. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, wherever finer podcasts are found. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Check out my weekly column you can find that on Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. Be sure to give us a review on Apple iTunes. Sign up

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