31. AI Aiding in Car Repair, Engineering Vehicles, Track Instructing w/ Michael Petersen

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast for Episode, what is this, 31, Sean?

Yes, sir.

I'm your host, Harris Minnox, AKA Minnoxide, and I'm a photographer, videographer, man of many automotive ambitions. And I'm here with my co-host.

Yeah, hey guys, my name is Sean Bryant. I drive a BMW 1M and a Durango Hellcat. You may have seen me around at some car meets, car shows, on rallies, I enjoy them all. And we're here today on the Minnoxide podcast, where we take you beyond the meet and introduce you to some of the drivers of some cars that you've seen around.

This intro is getting better. We've been experimenting forever and ever and ever.

It's all good, man.

It's one of those things. But nonetheless, today we have a special guest, a guest that actually reached out to me, Michael Petersen, who you've done many things over the years. You've spent a decade at Ford. You have been in the tech industry for 15 years and now you have this awesome AI, how do I even describe it? Software business that you're a co-founder of, which we will get into all of that here shortly. But I would love to kick off this podcast with just kind of introducing you, introducing yourself and take it from there.

Yeah. Well, you know, you guys are at an age where you grew up and for some reason, your parents planted this seed of gasoline in your veins somewhere and it continues to grow. And I probably had some of the same dynamics when I was young. My dad was a mechanic. And so to get to know my father, we would rebuild cars and so we rebuilt a couple of cars together. My father was a man of probably not a lot of words sometimes. And so to get to know him, I just spent time in the garage. And so I developed this love of cars like you guys did. And so that sent me to engineering school. And the first thing I did after engineering school here at Minnesota was I went off to Detroit and I worked at Ford. And so it was the same simple passion, which is I like cars. I want to dedicate a career to doing cars. And that's how I ended up in the automotive sector. And I've been related to the automotive sector, kind of the vehicle dynamic sector for the rest of my life in one way or the other. And now after many, many years in the sector, we're trying to bring together some of the best of what we know about vehicles, some of the best of what we know about the good dynamics and the bad dynamics in the automotive space, and some of the coolest technology that's out there to try to do something to actually disrupt the sector in a way for the betterment of everybody. Because I think the thing that most people find, you guys work on cars because you like to work on cars. It's fun, right? More horsepower, better traction, show them off at car meets, get them on the track, it's all awesome. But for the average person out there, when they have a vehicle and something goes sideways, and it will always go sideways because nothing's perfect, when they take that car in for service, it's generally not a very pleasant experience. And it's not that the dealership doesn't know what they do, it's that the pricing model that they have now for services of maintenance is so astronomically high for the average user out there that people just are afraid to bring it in and do proper maintenance and support. There's a huge chunk of the population that buys a new car every three years. Why do you think? Because the warranties run out. I mean, think about that as you go, well, the warranties run out, I need to go buy a new vehicle. Now, logically, I wouldn't support that if it makes them happy. Great. I think some people do that just because it's an excuse to buy a new car because they want one. But nevertheless, is that whole sector in maintenance support, you go in the dealership and sometimes it feels like you're stepping back in time 30 or 40 years based on the dynamics of kind of how they treat you, how they treat others, how they drive the upsell, the overall customer experience, there's a lot to be improved upon. So the question is, how can we improve that?

I think by making the user base a little bit more knowledgeable for one, because I think when I go in to get serviced, I already kind of have a general idea of what parts do and kind of like what I'm looking to get fixed. I don't just go in there blind and just like, give me an answer. Yeah, so I think being educated really helps the consumers.

Huge, absolutely.

So that would be like my thing would just be like, if my wife goes in, I'm probably going to go with her. Yes. So that they don't upsell her.

Yes.

And I know women are part of that demographic of like, they're not as knowledgeable as some men. So it's just their easier prey.

It's true. And you hate to sound like a sexist, and that's certainly not the case. But we can look at the demographics of people and their behaviors. Within our sector, it tends to be, for whatever reason, male dominated. And when we look at the mechanics, 98% of the mechanics in the country are male. 2% are female. In fact, we actually have one mechanic on our staff who's female. And she's great, but she's kind of rare, right? One out of 50. When I was at Ford 30 years ago, it was the same thing. Is they wanted to have more female engineers and female leaders, but there just weren't that many women coming out of the trade school and coming out of engineering programs. So you can try to promote them and catalyze them and encourage them. That's great. But a lot of this goes all the way back to STEM, which is how do you get people excited about these things when they're five and six and 10 and 15 years old? I'm sure if you both look back on your lives, is there were certain points in your life where all of a sudden you went, hey, these cars are pretty cool. This is great, right? Do we need to balance that out and try to give those same opportunities to women? Absolutely, we should. I don't think it's gonna always be exactly the same because there's differences in STEM band and women, and that's fine. But the net of it, because there are so many men in the industry as a whole, I think when women do go to a dealership or a shop, they feel more vulnerable. And we've done a lot of market research on this and our perceptions are absolutely accurate. In fact, we found that when we look at people that go to a shop, about 70% of them, like 63% of them come out and when they leave the shop, they have feelings of anxiety, tension, nervousness, not because there's anything painful about it. It's just the fact that they feel like they're at risk of becoming the next victim. In fact, especially on females, they would rather go to the dentist than they would to bring their car into the shop. I mean, how embarrassing is that?

I started getting scared of the dentist my last visit. My last visit, I got a little nervous, but that's completely reasonable though, because when you go in there, like for example, when I had some issues with my car, and granted, I went to a reliable shop, my neighbor, it's not a dealership shop, but it's like, even then it's like, oh man, what else are they gonna find over there? And I feel like sometimes, like, okay, perfect example, my dad brought his car to the dealership yesterday, and then he gets a video back from Mercedes, and they're listing off all these things that are wrong. They did a whole inspection or whatever, because that's part of the sales model. It's like, I'm gonna look over the whole car. You brought it in for a check engine light, which is what happened. Turns out it was just a spark plug, but nonetheless, come around the whole thing and it's like, all right, well, here's a list of things you need to do. Some things that it's not even time for. It's like 40% break life or whatever. It's like, you should probably do these now, is what they said. It's like, let's not rush this.

And so the question is, how do you defend against this? And I think, Sean, you were saying the same thing, which is, how do you get the right information out there? And I have no idea what they told you that was wrong with your dad's Mercedes. But the reason they do the video walk around it's not to help you, it's to help sell you on what needs to be done. You know, and there's great examples of this, is you may have, we see this often, is you may have a slight leak at a pinion seal in the rear main or on the driveshaft or even around the transmission pan or the oil pan. A small leak, and you can clearly see that with the dust and the oil and you look at it and go, oh boy, there's a leak here. It's easy to take pictures of that and say, boy, we should change this seal. Now you will know as well as I do, if your rear differential leaks one drop per month or per week, after you don't look at it for a while, it's gonna look like a big spot, but it's gonna last effectively forever. Check the fluid once a year and you're gonna be fine. To the average person that doesn't know that, it's easy to say, well, you should change your rear rental seal and we, you know, rear differential seal and that's $900. Would you like us to proceed? And make no mistake that they all know what the right words are to make sure that you can go drive the upsell. And many of them are, well, you know, it's not absolutely necessary, but if you're concerned about safety, it might be something you wanna keep in mind. Or, you know, it should be fine, we just can't make any guarantees. If you wanna be cautious, let's go ahead and change this out now. They know the risk elements and they're trying to play on your fears. And so one of the things that we even do on our website is when we identify a problem, we always have a solution. And within that though, if we say, hey, this is the actual problem, we'll tell you statistically what the risk is that it's gonna fail in the next thousand miles, right? Is it one out of a thousand? Is it one out of 10,000? Is it one out of a hundred thousand? Is it 40%? But giving you some accurate numbers so you can analyze that risk and make a smarter decision. A dealership's never gonna do that. And in fact, we have a team of engineers and mechanics and we'll get into these debates at time in a healthy way about really, is this problem a big deal or not? Even mechanics have been trained their entire career is, well, if it looks like it might be a risk, let's get that changed out right away. So they tend to be, well, let's just get it fixed. And that's their job, right? They're trying to fix problems. As an engineer where I spent years and years designing cars, if you have a problem in the field, you can't just say, hey, I have 4 million Fords on the F-150s on the road. We're just gonna change out all the parts just in case. That's not financially viable. And so you look at the real risk factors around that failure. What's the risk factor to the P&L of the company? Certainly is there a risk factor to the occupant's safety, which is rare, but you always put that first and foremost. But then you try to weigh that out and say, what's the probability? What's the best way to solve this? And you have to take all things into account. If a manufacturer is looking at a failure, that failure rate might be 0.1%, right? Or 0.5%, very low, right? But they're gonna be very pragmatic about trying to fix that, because they're looking at it over hundreds of thousands of vehicles. A mechanic can't do that, right? So there's no way for them to look at this individual part and sometimes do an accurate risk assessment. So what they often do, even the mechanics in good faith, are giving inaccurate information to the end user, because they're almost like a lawyer. If you ask a lawyer, should I go do this? What's the lawyer gonna do? They're gonna tell you, you should avoid all risk, so do this or don't do this. It's about risk aversion. Mechanics are that, to the same degree, kinda do the same thing. But as a consumer, if I told you there was a.1% chance that shocks were gonna fail in the next thousand miles, would you change them?

No.

No, you wouldn't. If it was 80%, would you?

Yeah, then it's time.

Then it's time.

But most people wait till they're actually done for.

Correct.

That's me.

But you know if your shock goes bad, you're not gonna be stranded on the side of the road.

Yep.

Right? It's not catastrophic. You just know, okay, the car is wobbling now, I need to go get the shocks repaired. But that's not the information that the average user comes back with when they do make decisions. So the question is collectively, how do you arm consumers with the right information on quite frankly fairly complicated topics in a way that they can internalize them and make better decisions and take down their cost of car repair? Because right now, the cars are frankly stacked against you when it comes to service and maintenance. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that that's where the dealerships are making the bulk of all their profits. So when you go in, they're setting you up to say, I'm trying to optimize the profit around your father when he brought his Mercedes in. It needed a spark plug, right? And what was his estimate?

Oh, we haven't got that yet. Yeah, I haven't seen anything from that yet. We just got news yesterday.

I would suspect that estimates gonna be well over $2,000.

It's gonna, yeah, for a spark plug.

It's a fancy sports car too. So it's got the Mercedes-Benz supercar tax.

That's why it's got the warranty too, which is nice.

It has the what?

The supercar tax.

Oh, does it really?

Yeah.

Yeah, because it's the GTR.

So all the parts for that are more expensive than if you.

They're not giving you the discount. No, no.

Yeah, and I even told them, like, okay, let's see what the quote is here, because otherwise I can just go take it to one of these local shops, like Eurocharged or Ratified, whatever that's specialty shops. But yeah, nonetheless, back to your point.

So anyway, we're trying to see how do we digitally create a good environment to give people the best information. Once you give people accurate information, they can make better decisions, and you start to take down the layers in between. And that's the part that I find is concerning right now around the automotive service and maintenance sector, is there's a lot of layers in there. And a lot of the technology that people are developing, it's really designed to serve the same ecosystem. How can I get more people in the door? How can I drive upsell? How can I get more productivity out of every mechanic? How can I do better advertising? And they're trying to optimize that P&L, but it's all about the needs of the dealership or the shop. We're trying to come at this orthogonally and say, well, what about the needs of the consumer? What does the consumer need? And what information can we arm them with so they're empowered to make smarter decisions and effectively reduce their cost of vehicle ownership? And it's a fundamentally different problem. And so if you look at almost all the tech that's going on in the automotive space, it's really focused on the needs of the manufacturers or the needs of the ecosystem. There's not a lot of tech out there that's designed for the needs of the individual users on a broad-based scale.

Particularly in the automotive space, or you just mean as a whole?

I'm speaking now about the automotive space in particular. But that's kind of the nature of the businesses. For a lot of businesses, if I have to go attract 300 million customers, or instead attract 10,000 businesses, sometimes it's easier to build an ecosystem to attract the 10,000 businesses. It's a lower cost to attract them. It's easier to bring them in. Ours is different. We're saying, how do we go help the 300 million Americans out there and improve their overall experience? Because as you said, there's a lot of bad information online. It's some really good stuff. It's mixed with a lot of bad stuff. So unless you're an expert, it's hard to differentiate the good from the bad. And that's the fundamental issue.

So we have the problem.

We built this AI engine. He's called Gus. Generative Uniform Syntactics. And it's patented or it's patent pending, I should say. But what we changed about this Gus and the AI engine, why we patented it, is that you guys have obviously used CHAT GPT and heard of CHAT GPT. And it's really impressive, right? But use it to go try and diagnose your vehicle. And you'll realize it gives you very broad information that's not always-

I did this two days ago, actually.

Yeah, what'd you learn?

So again, my GTI has been rattling for a month, month and a half, ever since I hit that pothole at 80. Again, I got a few ideas what it could be, but again, let's remember that I am a car enthusiast, so I have a little more knowledge than the average Joe. Imagine, oh my God, I couldn't even imagine my mom trying to figure this out.

She'd just take it to a shop.

No, but it's like, all right, well, I hit a pothole, and I had to, the other thing about AI is you have to, the prompt you put in is a direct correlation to the results you get out. So having used ChatGBT, I'm like, all right, what's the best prompt I can get here to get the answer I want? So I can't remember what it was. I got really specific with it, but it gave me like five different things. I'm like, no, that's not possible, none of those things. So I reprompted it, specified more, and I'm like, all right, it actually could be my sway bar links or tie rod or whatever. So it took a little bit of doing, but yeah, that's kind of what I did the other day. And again, that's a big maybe.

It's a big maybe. And when you get into AI, and I do not profess to be the world's greatest AI expert. My co-founder, my partner is Dr. Nunley, and Patrick Nunley has been doing AI since the mid-80s. He started building AI systems for the Department of Defense on missile guidance. He has 127 patents to his name. We just filed for a number of 128. If it's a tough question, I just look at Patrick and say, please help. But when you get into AI, is the AI model that we're all familiar with most is ChatGPT. And ChatGPT is considered a large language model. And within large language models, they aren't doing analytics. I'm going to grossly oversimplify this, but they're looking for collections of words to say, well, if I understand language really well, and I understand this whole architecture very well, all the stuff, I can actually start logically putting together the right sentences and words that make the most sense based on this amalgamation of everything on the internet. And so it doesn't say, I know how your GTI performs, Eric, I'm going to try to analyze it. It says, I can see all the information that people are talking about relative to this GTI. So therefore, I'm going to try to put an very articulate set of words around this. One of the challenges that we have in AI, specifically with large language models, is that it also can have, sometimes they call it ghosting or anomalies, where it's effectively making up information that doesn't exist.

We've seen that.

And even the AI experts aren't entirely sure why it happens all of the time. And I was at an AI conference last week in Palo Alto, two weeks ago in Palo Alto. Some of the most brilliant AI experts I know, for instance, one of the guys that I spent some time with and was presenting to us was the founder of Siri that we all know and love on the iPhone. And so you can even go into ChatGPT next time and ask Chad, not him, her, it, they, you know, how did you come up with this solution? And they'll tell you, ask them a second time, and they'll give you a different answer of how they came up with the solution. Even the scientists that built the AI engines don't entirely know how they came up with the right answer. So it's not like you can look into the side of the system and say, here's where, you know, here's why you came up with your sway bar link, you don't know.

Yeah, so you can't see the path of logic and reasoning, okay, interesting.

You can't, you can't, and so it's also like a dog that wants to please you. So in other words, if you tell your dog and you have an obedient pup, and it's a lab or a golden, they just want to please you, and you tell it to go do something, even if it gets it wrong, it will try to please you. You know, it won't understand a command, so it'll sit down thinking that that's what you're asking. Sometimes large language models can do the same thing. They're trying to please you. So even if it has to fill in the hole with inaccurate information, it will often do that. When they tune it, you can actually, and you can do this actually on chat, you can actually put in parameters to say, I want it to be really accurate or really creative. You peg it to the creative side and it'll practically come back and everything will sound like prose. It'll speak to you in poetry. And so as somebody who's trying to get their car fixed, you go, well, I don't care about the creativity, just make it 100% accurate, right? The reality is if you make it 100% accurate, it's actually less accurate than if you drive some creativity into it. So even in designing these AI systems, they're trying to find that balance between creativity and accuracy, and there's a blend in between there where you actually get the better results. So the net is, it's like anything. It's a little bit like blogs. Garbage in, garbage out, right? And so if you just suck up everything on the internet related to GTIs with clunks after you hit 80 miles an hour, right? How much content is there out there? Not a ton. How much content is out there that's in the public domain that is actually vetted to be accurate? None. Because the last time that that happened to somebody, what did they do with the data? They didn't do anything with the data. What is there to do with the data? There's no place to officially report what you did. And so most people just walk away and they go, oh, I have my GTI fixed, I'm good.

Yeah, they don't post it, they don't do a review, nothing.

Yeah, you always post the bad and not the good. It gets fixed, we don't need to talk about it anymore. If it's still broken, I'm gonna keep talking about it being broken.

Every forum.

That's exactly right. I'm gonna keep talking about it while it's broken and I'm gonna get a whole bunch of opinions. And then when I fix it, most people don't go back and say, I'm gonna pay this forward. Most people just move on with their life. They're busy.

You see that all the time on, like it doesn't matter if it's cars or whatever. Any forum where it's like, even a support expert from the company will be responding. And then you'll see three or four people be like, hey, did you ever find a solution to this?

And crickets, crickets, crickets. So when we designed Raise A Hood, one of the things that we do is, for instance, if there's a solution, I'll pick on your GTI for a second. Which is a great car, by the way. Is it Gen 6?

Seven.

Seven, is one way we've structured this is there's some wonderful things about forums and blogs and YouTubes, it's outstanding. The question is, can we structure this and curate this in a manner that's helpful for everybody? So you're not spending an entire Saturday digging around all this content, trying to find an answer. And I can tell by the way you're smiling, you've done that before.

Oh my gosh, so many times, that I just keep retyping the prompt, and maybe you'll change something.

Help me find something, and you're there four hours later, and you still haven't come up with an answer.

Yeah, my hands are all covered in brake dust.

And so the way that we've structured this, and I'm gonna oversimplify this a little bit, but first of all, if you're an expert, is we bucketize the world into two situations. We either have a symptom, or I have a known problem, a repair. Symptoms might be something like my elbow hurts. That's the symptom. The underlying problem is I have tennis elbow, or I have cancer of the elbow, or my elbow's about to fall off, but there's symptoms and problems. Most people don't know what the problems are. People know what their symptom is. In your case, your symptom is it clunks while I drive, and I know within that, I can start to ask qualifying questions for years that happened after you hit a speed bump, right? So we use the AI to diagnose. So you punch in your car and say, here's what's going on. And we ask you some questions. And then from that, we use the artificial intelligence engine to diagnose what the underlying problem is. Now, we never go in and say, there's a 100% chance that this is the problem. Maybe short of a flat tire or a broken windshield, you know, where we kind of know that's the problem, the tire is flat. But we never give it 100%, but we'll have stuff at 80, 90, 95% that this is the known problem and we parade away. So we might say, in your case, and I'm not familiar with the GTI, but there's a 72% chance you have a broken stabilizer bar link, you have an 8% chance that it's a bushing that you've broken loose. There's a 4% chance of accident, 3% something else. But that at least gives you the indication of, okay, I understand what likely is broken based on all the modeling of artificial intelligence engine. And then once you click how to change a stay bar link, which is relatively straightforward, but for some it's still, then once you click that solution, that becomes a singular page of what's broken, why it typically breaks, is it going to strand you, everything that you would want to know, whether it was your mother, your father, or you, and then we even show you how to fix it yourself. And the fix it yourself part, oh, thank you, the fix it yourself part is actually highly curated videos that virtually anybody can do. We say it's kind of the Betty Cracker Cookbook formula. So the intent is you go, here's my car, and a little bit of typing on AI and you go, okay, there's an 78 or 85% chance this is it, and it should cost me this much money. Here's how I fix it myself. Here's the best shop to go bring it to, and here's all of the other things I may want to do while it's in there since I have this part off. So in a matter of minutes, I can go from I have a situation to I actually have an answer. Today, that is not possible anywhere that I'm aware of online, right? And while this all sounds good, the only way we can make this work is if we bring together experts like you and the whole community to participate. So what we do in this to get people to participate is if your father goes online, our subscriptions fees are very low. They're about $50 a year. But when your father goes in and reports the symptom, we kind of keep peppering him and say, hey, did you fix it yet? Did you fix it yet? When he says, I fixed it, you say, did this solution work? Yes or no. And once they report the results, it's easier than doing an Amazon review. You report your results and then we give you five bucks back.

Oh yeah, you get a rebate.

You get a little small rebate, right? It's not a lot, but it's enough for most people. Getting five bucks back by clicking a link is better than not getting five bucks back.

Yeah, guacamole and Chipotle.

It's guacamole and Chipotle, that's exactly right. But it's enough that we're trying to catalyze this feedback mechanism so that you can effectively pay it forward. The AI is important because the AI allows you to take this big mess of data and start to narrow it down so I can give you the actual answer. Where people struggle is diagnosing the problems of things. Changing a state of our link is not that hard, right? Understanding what it is though, for most people, is where the real challenge is. So that's where we use the AI. But changing the dynamics of everybody is, you know, it's a big undertaking. You're trying to change the technology, the usability, but more importantly, consumer behavior. So we'll see. But then within that, once somebody uses that, the mechanics are the ones that actually start to get paid. Because the other thing that we found, is so if a mechanic posts his or her solution out there, is in the minute you use that, I'm gonna give your father his rebate, and I'm gonna give the mechanic a payout for actually posting that. So now the mechanics can profit from using the solution. Your father can save a lot of money, and gets a rebate for posting the results, and we're effectively just the platform that bring those two pieces together. It's a little bit like Spotify. You guys Spotify or iTunes? I'm guessing Spotify.

The podcast you mean?

Yeah, I know what I mean on just music.

Oh, music, Spotify.

Spotify, right?

That's me.

You listen to Spotify, you're really listening to your artist, whomever that may be. Spotify is just the platform that brings together listeners and artists. And we're trying to do the same thing. We're just the platform that brings together experts and people with problems. But we have to make an incentive for everybody to go use this thing. And that's the challenging part because in the last 10 years, there are 550 different makes and models in the US in the last 10 years. And those are not the esoteric ones. These are just sort of the mainstream ones. That is not broken out by model year. And so if there's a fresh generation every three to four years, now you're talking about 2000 different, maybe 3000 different makes and models. Every vehicle has roughly 3000 to 4000 parts on it. And every vehicle has multiple powertrains and configurations. So you say, well, I have 3000 different vehicles times 3000 different parts, times three different or five different powertrains. And you start doing the math and you go, there's just no way that I can go build 100 million solutions for individuals. That's where this gets complicated. Because the permutations and the combinations are overwhelming. But what we find is, for the average vehicle, is I don't have to know everything about your GTI to help you fix your clunk. I only have to worry about the stuff that breaks. And so where we focus on is the priority of the stuff that actually breaks. If it's a part that never breaks, who cares, we don't worry about it, I don't know anything about it, I don't wanna know anything about it. I just wanna focus on the stuff that breaks. And so that's where we prioritize our model based on the high failure modes as well as the most popular vehicles. So when you come in, I have the highest statistical probability of being able to help you out.

And there's some things that are universal too. From the GTI to the Audi or whatever, there's so many shared parts in that thing. So yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and I come from a supply chain and operations background.

So you know this stuff in spades.

Well, I wouldn't say spades, I was a BC student, but nonetheless, when you start talking about huge numbers like this, especially when you start talking about, what is it, sigma and green belt and all that fun stuff, when you have 4,000 parts and every single one of those parts has a one in 100,000 chance of failing, something's bound to fail. I saw there was a meme a few years ago, and it's like mechanics don't say one car is better than the other. They say all cars suck, because there's something that's always going to be broken. There's no way to avoid it.

You know the lemon law, I always kind of laugh about the lemon law a little bit, because I think sometimes people get into this mode and they go, well, it's a lemon. Like the whole car is bad. There has never been one car manufactured where the whole car is bad, right? There's cars where they do have a statistically higher level of, you know, they have a higher failure rate than the other cars in that make and model. But it doesn't mean the whole car is bad. They just kind of had, you know, it's like flipping a coin and they happen to throw heads three times in a row or five times in a row. But it doesn't mean the whole car is bad. And so I appreciate that people are trying to protect the consumer, but we all know from a technical perspective, just because it's had a few failures does not signify that it's going to have a lot more. So.

And just some cars like that, you could probably speak to BMW better than anyone in this room right now, but like I have an M1 you said?

One M.

Oh, one M, I mean.

Yep, yep, 2011. It's the one series M Coupe, N54 motor, but what I'm thinking of is in the SRT's Dodge, a lot of them have these camshafts that wear out ridiculously fast. And there hasn't been a warranty recall, you know, it seems like so many people, it's almost like every week, somebody's saying, yep, cams out, cams out, gotta get a new engine, gotta get new rollers. Like, it's crazy.

Yeah, and every manufacturer and brand has something, like the new BRZ or whatever, Alex Martini made a post about this, I was watching his TikTok or whatever. It's like, oh, before you beat on this car really hard, this thing you have to change needs to be done, or it's gonna be a catastrophic failure. And it's just like, this is a 2022 model, like why is there issues, you know?

Well, and I'm gonna pick on your Dodge for a second. Not in a bad way, I mean, from the complexity of the problem. First of all, you have a car that's high performance and people like to talk about it, right? So they get online and they talk about it, and if there's a problem, man, they're lighting up the forums on this. And before you know it, everybody thinks, oh my God, I'm panicked, I'm nervous, I can hear a tick in my engine, or whatever the leading indicator is.

Yeah, right, it's the tick.

It's the tick. The heavy tick. So therefore, I need to go replace my engine, whatever it may be. One of the cars I own, in fact, I have it out front here, it's an older Porsche, one of my track cars that's prepped for the track, and it's a 986, same as the 996. And I've pulled the engine a few times and rebuilt it a few times, and it's a fun, quick little car. That car can be bought cheap, though, because Porsche had one bearing in there that was s***. And it was called the IMS, Intermediate Shaft Bearing, and they really did a dumb design on this one bearing, and so this bearing can fail. And when it fails, it takes out the whole engine, because it is connects the chains and the Boxster engine. And so then the camming is out of alignment, and just everything goes south after that. So you can imagine that people have figured out that this car can be like a ticking time bomb. Now there's aftermarket parts to go fix that now, so you can prevent this from ever happening. It's not an easy fix to get to it, but nevertheless, it can be repaired. People were so frustrated with Porsche when this happened 20 years ago that they sued the company, and there was a class action lawsuit. And within that class action lawsuit, you effectively have to say how many cars are impacted. Now if you just spent 50 or 100 grand on a new Porsche, and you know it's a ticking time bomb, do you want the new engine now, or do you just want to take your chances?

I want it now.

You want it now, exactly, of course you do. And so they sued Porsche, but for all the great information on the internet, you know how close they can get? You know what the failure rate was on that part?

I bet it was something really low, like less than 5%.

Nobody knows, that's the problem. It was somewhere between 2% and 10%. That's a big difference, that's a 5X difference. So you have a team of lawyers trying to sue Porsche for poor engineering, and you can't even tell me what the failure rate is. The only person that really knows the failure rate is Porsche. Is Porsche going to tell the lawyers what the failure rate is? Of course they're not, right? For the same reason that Dodge isn't going to tell you what the failure rate is on their engine, for a couple of reasons. One is it's not great for confidence in the product, but secondly, it opens you up to significant lawsuits. So, if you came back and you found out that the failure rate on that engine was 3%, do you think the lawyers are going to take that and go after Chrysler? Of course they are, right? So, there's no way that any of the manufacturers, I'm not picking on Chrysler or Porsche, they're all legally exposed. They start publishing actual failure rates, and the lawyers would be lined up a mile deep.

We wouldn't have new cars anymore.

We wouldn't have new cars anymore, right? So, the question is, how can you, wouldn't you like to get within your engine and say, all right, based on what I know on this vehicle, what's the actual risk that my engine is going to fail? Is it a 1%, a 5%, a 30%? Those are very meaningful numbers. Today, there's no way to get to that, right? Coupled with, what are all the other characteristics of when the engine actually is about to fail? Is it because it's been tracked, or is it because you live in hotter climates or colder climates, or you run this motor viscosity, or this production bait, or this build date? Because even in manufacturing, is you may build the part under this heat treatment cycle, and then you realize you've had a few field failures, so then you'll cut over to the next generation of the camshaft at this date, and at that point forward, it's a better part. They've improved the quenching process, or whatever it may be. The hardening process to prevent that from failing again. Christ was not going to tell you, hey, any vehicle built before this date is going to blow up, and anything after this date is fine.

Supras are a great example of this. I mean, not blowing up wise, but from 2020 to 21, they went from the two port to the six port or whatever, and just mild upgrades that people just don't talk about. So, or like, damn, I had another example, but nonetheless.

But this is where I love AI, because we live in a four-dimensional world. X, Y, Z, and time, right? That's how you think. You think in four dimensions. If I'm trying to draw a graph for you, we do this all the time as engineers. Hey, check out this graph, and I can see as time goes on, the failure rate goes up, whatever it is. That's a two-dimensional world. I have X and Y, and we've looked at that for all our life. And so we tend to think in two dimensions at the engineering level. Sometimes we're more abstract, and we can think of three dimensions, like what's the shape of your house. When we're really good, we think in four dimensions. How does this three-dimensional environment change over time? So we can do that. We can conceptualize this. If I said, I want you to think in seven different dimensions, try to imagine seven dimensions in your brain. You can't, I mean, I can't think of it in seven dimensions. Einstein, I think, could when he started talking about the bending of magnetic fields and bending of light. And he was on a different plane than the rest of us in the general and the special theory of relativity. But we can't think in more than four dimensions. So if I said, what's the risk of your Dodge Durango that it's gonna fail based on its location, its mileage, the oil that you've used, the production date, how the car is driven, what engine is it, what tires you're driving, you know, I can start listing them off. And now all of a sudden I have 10 or 15 dimensions.

Yeah, there's too many variables.

You can't think about that. There's no way, right? It's beyond our capability. And you can use formulas and mathematics to kind of get there. The challenge is with a lot of these formulas, there's a lot of holes in the data, right? Because I don't know everything about every vehicle that's failed. I know limited data sets. But AI is actually pretty good about filling in some of these holes. And so now I can take all of these dimensions and start to compress them to a narrow set to say, well, the reality is for your particular vehicle, the failure rate or the failure probability is X.

Oh, okay.

Right, taking into account all that information.

Yeah.

Today, that just doesn't exist. And to be clear, Raise A Hood can't do that yet. We're headed that direction. It takes time to build up the database and the learnings. But that's the part that's exciting to me, is we can actually use these big data sets to actually do some really cool predictive modeling for enthusiasts and consumers alike. Because to use your father on his GTR, not GTR.

GTR, yeah.

Yeah, the GTR, the Mercedes. You know, you'd love to tell your father, hey, over the next 10,000 miles, well, he's not going to drive the car 10,000 miles a year, right?

Yeah, I think we're at about five or six since we got it.

Okay, so how, per year? Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to drive it 5,000 miles a year. Statistically, what's the probability of the failure for going forward?

Tires, and we actually had this conversation yesterday, tires, it's like, I don't want to get tires every 5,000 miles, I'd rather get something every two years. I mean, track days excluded, but yeah.

Correct, correct. So anyway, that's what's exciting about some of this data that we're super enthused about, because it will change how people can take care of their vehicle. They'll prevent failures, it'll lower your cost of ownership.

Yeah, no, I love that, being able to see it instead of theorizing it. And like, I'm no expert, but if an AI can show me, hey, here's the data set that's gonna tell you you drive this in the next 10,000 miles and with these variables, expect this.

Correct.

One of my favorite things, and we're not really shifting gears too much here, but one of my favorite things about what you're doing is you're kind of taking these retired mechanics or people who just don't wear and tear over the years and they're actually kind of helping you sort through this data. But I was reading one of the articles that you shot over to me and the best way to describe Raise A Hood was kind of like that, like, help me out with the doctor meetings online. What's the word? Telehealth. Telehealth, yeah, it took me a second there, but that's my favorite thing. It's like you could just call someone on the spot or whatever and they could kind of talk you through it or kind of tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, and so if I, what's unique about this business model that we're doing is if I was trying to try to build this business three or five years ago, I couldn't have done it. I mean, I really couldn't because the AI wasn't far enough along and most people didn't get comfortable with video calls until the pandemic.

True.

Yeah.

Right, before that, most people, it was just completely foreign to them. And so since the pandemic, all of this stuff has come together to make this business viable. You were talking about diagnosing your stuff online, right? Was it you that were talking about that, Harris?

One of us.

One of you were. Is you were talking about diagnosing this stuff online. And the average person tries that quite often. So they go to the shop and they go, hey, my car is broken and I was Googling it and I'm pretty sure that, you know, it's such and such. What do you think the percentage is that they get it right?

I've been sure like probably single digits, just like how if I go to the doctor and I go, hey, WebMD told me I have elbow cancer.

And WebMD will almost do that because they have litigious risks. If you have cancer of the elbow and WebMD says, hey, it's a 98%, you really just have tennis elbow and you kind of blow it off and you find out you do have cancer of the elbow, they're just exposing them to a lawsuit. If I tell you you need an alternator when you really only need a battery, you're still not gonna sue me. You're not gonna sue me because I give you the wrong diagnosis. And that's why we never say 100%. But when you're talking about somebody's life that's very different than, do I need a new battery or not? So I can be very accurate in the data without the lawyers getting in the way. But the average person comes in and says, this is what's wrong with my car. They normally get it right about 10 to 15% of the time, which isn't very good. If you talk to a mechanic, and the mechanic has the ability to have a conversation around that vehicle, and they know that vehicle like that make and model, without looking at the car, they get it right about 80 to 85% of the time, right? So that's pretty interesting, right? If they could get it right 85% of the time, and they don't even have to see the vehicle, this is a compelling value proposition. The question is with AI, can we get that right 90, 95, 99% of the time? So to do this though, what we did unique, and to your question is to train the AI, we first trained the AI with mechanics. So we took actual mechanics, average year, 20, 25 to 35 year veterans, and we used them to train Gus, the artificial intelligence engine. And so they are actually pretty good. We say, here's the make, here's the model, here's the problem they're complaining about, and then they start to think through what they would look at and why, and based on all these variables, they'll say, here's how we would analyze this problem. And then once we assemble that language, then the AI team sucks that in and programs Gus. So when we first started to do this, this was my favorite part of this entire business. We had a team of about a dozen mechanics, and a team of about 30 people in this AI team. And most of this team was actually overseas. The average mechanic couldn't spell artificial intelligence and had never heard of what a large language model is or any other, you know, substructure inside of AI. The average AI programmer couldn't change their tire if they were stranded on the side of the road in a desert. And so there was like, if there were two Venn diagrams, I sound like Kamala Harris here, if there were two Venn diagrams, there's no overlap between these Venn diagrams at all. And so we were like this thin line between these two disparate groups where the AI programmers were learning about cars and the mechanics were learning about AI. And we almost had to create a third language in between them so that they could converse. Because how do you extract with you as a mechanic, what you know, how do I go get that inside of an engine like Chatchie PT or Gus? And so what we do is we structure it first from the mechanics, and then we allow AI to take over, and it uses the big numbers to go kind of fill in for accuracy based on the data. It's a little bit like this. If you walked into the dealership and you said, hey, my Durango, the engine is sticking. I'm concerned about that. And if they said, well, let's take a look at it. The first thing that we're going to check are the windshield wipers just to make sure that they're functional. You're going to get in your car and drive away. You're like, you guys, it's not the windshield wipers. I'm pretty sure it's not the windshield wipers. We kind of do the same thing in GUS and we tell it where to look for other information and other symptoms and correlations because that's the information that can tell us what the likely problem actually is. So that's why we use the mechanic. So GUS in its early form will be at least as smart as a mechanic. And as it gets smarter, it'll fill it in with all of these data points so we can get super, super accurate.

But before it gets as smart or smarter, is it kind of, in its infancy, is it just kind of like a helping tool for mechanics maybe?

It could be. And quite frankly, mechanics are still smarter than GUS right now. Because it's like any AI model.

They just know.

When the AI model starts, as Dr. Nunley, my co-founder, would tell you, the average AI engine is about as smart in the beginning as a bag of hammers. It just doesn't know anything yet.

Right.

And so when you build AI, you effectively learn it how to read, teach it how to read, and then you send it to the library to start consuming books. So that's what we've done first, is you build the engine, and then it starts consuming books, and then it gets smart.

That's a good way of putting it.

And it's real too. That's kind of how you set the whole system up. But what we have in the meantime is we have a bunch of mechanics. Right? And mechanics are really bright. And one thing that I've learned, and you guys know this from working on your own cars, working on a car is hard. When you're underneath the dashboard, or under the hood, or under the chassis, or crawling around underneath, is this is not as easy as sitting at a desk. So mechanics, after about 30 years, they're just worn out. They're 55 years old, they're standing in a shop, they've been contorted and bent and burning their fingers for 30 years, and they want out. Right? Their body is breaking down and they want out. So now you have a 30 year season mechanic that knows a great deal about very specific makes and models and they start to retire out. So what do you do with all the information that mechanic has? It's kind of lost. And so the question we have is, how can you take these aging mechanics and extract more information out of them in the senior stages of their career? But it's good for them because what you'll find is when you hit 55 and I don't know how old you guys are, I won't ask.

I turned 24 yesterday.

You turned 24 and-

Congrats, 27.

27. You're in your mid 20s. And when you're in your mid 20s, 55 seems like it's never ever going to come, right? You don't think about it because you're totally looking forward and looking forward to the rest of your career. You hit 55 and you don't have as much money in your bank account as you would like and you're not quite ready to retire. And it's generally not healthy just to go sit on the couch and watch TV for the next 30 years. This is not good for you. People need a purpose. And so you have these really talented mechanics. How can you give them a purpose where they can monetize that purpose and work directly with individuals? And so our telemechanics are really good with people. They still like to work on vehicles. They have a lot of expertise. So we're just allowing people to work directly with them. So if you have a problem, reach out to them before you go to the shop. After you get your first estimate from the shop, they'll work it through. And we found that for the people that set up these telemechanic calls, the average person has a larger repair, larger problem, saves over $1,000 from one phone call. That's a real number. So is it worth spending $20 or call start at $20, $19? Is it worth spending $20 to try to save $1,000? Yeah, for most people it is.

For the bigger problems in particular in this instance. So like if I, whatever, got to quote something. Or actually, so take me through the process. So let's say somebody, like I'm on the side of the road, I'm stranded in winter. That's one of my problems with modded cars, by the way. It's like I don't want to be stranded in the middle of winter. Everybody's telling me, Harris, do this mod. No. Let's say, like I'd love an extra 100 horsepower, but if I get stranded on 35W, I'm going to be pissed off. So take me through the process. I'm stuck on 35W. It's negative 20 degrees. At what point do I have to, you know, buy something from Raise A Hood, or I guess what are the resources going through you?

And we need, we're sensitive to the fact that we're still a digital solution. Yeah, yeah. So it's not like I can physically show up and put fuel in your tank for you because you ran out of fuel. We recognize that. So we're not going to fix every automotive problem that's out there. Correct. If you're stranded on the side of the road, chances are you're not going to fix that with wisdom.

Okay. So that's one of those instances, you know, call AAA, get to the dealership.

It could be. But I'll give you a great example. And a gentleman called us a couple of days ago. He came out of work and he had an Audi A3. He was about your age, came out. His Audi A3 was dead. And he lives in Florida. And so he called a tow truck and towed the car in. Well, actually called a tow truck and they were able to jump start it. And he was able to drive the car home. And the tow truck, the tow driver said, hey, listen, because this happened, more than likely it's your alternator. You're going to have to get a new alternator in the vehicle. So here's some shops in the area I might recommend. You know, good luck. And so he went home and started to do his research and booked an appointment and was expected to spend $1,200. And he said, well, before I do that, I'm just going to call Raise A Hood. And he called us and he talked to one of the mechanics who specializes in Audi. And he said, well, this is a systemic problem with Audis, but more importantly, your battery is old enough and you live in Florida. I think you have a bad battery in this. I don't think you need an alternator. They said, I would just recommend, let's start with a battery. Let's install the battery. We can help you do that. That's easy to do. That's easy to do. And then we can see if you actually need an alternator. And if so, we'll either help you do it yourself or we'll get you to the right shop. And he was worried about reprogramming the battery and whatnot. Well, he was able to, you know, turned out, he went down, he spent his $130 on a battery and installed the battery and it's perfect. Right? It fixed the problem. It was just a worn out battery. So here's a situation where he was expecting to spend $1,100, $1,200 for a new alternator in his Audi and he fixed it for $129. Right? And he was delighted. You know, it's nice to save $1,000. But when you have professionals that are telling you that you need a new alternator, of course, what are you going to go do? Well, go bring it down and get an alternator. And I bet you, I would large sum of money that once you bring that to the shop, the shop's not going to say, oh, it was just a battery, it's fine. Many shops are going to look at that and say, well, we do think that alternator might need replacing. And it's an opportunity for them to replace parts that aren't always necessary.

So in this instance, so was he... remind me again, is this a subscription model or is he a subscriber already of Raise A Hood?

A great question. If... actually two things. Right now, our telemechanics, you can sign up to be a telemechanic call without being a subscriber. We do ask you that you sign up for free. And we ask you that you put your car in the garage. And to put your car in the garage, just give us your license plate or your VIN and we'll put that car in the garage. And that way we know everything about your vehicle. Your online garage. Not our physical garage. You don't need to put it in my home. But put it in our digital garage. And once you're in the digital garage, we'll give you a whole bunch of information about your vehicle for free. Maintenance schedules, how it was built, all the options on the car, effectively everything the average person would need to know about their vehicle. But then when you need help, you just say, I need help on Sean's GTI, right? What's that?

Well, I would have the BMW. He has the GTI. I don't think I would get one.

See, I'm a typical car guy. I can remember cars better than names. So Harris' GTI. So you go in there and you say, I'm having problems with my GTI. And then we'll narrow it down to say, hey, these are the three or four people that can help you on your GTI. And so now we're connecting you and your GTI to the right expert. When you call in and you book the appointment and what we do differently, you can call our 1-800 number, but we encourage you to actually just book an appointment and it's a Zoom call. And so you say, I'm going to go talk to Mr. Lawrence at 3 o'clock, and you know who you're talking to, at what time, and there's no waiting in line, it's just a booked meeting. And when you call in, is he looks at, Harris, he looks in and he says, okay, I know his VIN, he pulls all that information up, he has all the information about your car from the minute you're on the call. He says, okay, I can see you're on a Gen 6 GTI, and you've said here's what the problem is, and you instantly start into the actual problem, and they have all the technical information in front of you, in front of them, and they'll walk you through wherever it may be. Now, some people use it before they go to the shop. Should I go to the shop at all? Is this something that's necessary? Some of it use it because they want to fix it themselves, right, they need a hand. Some of it, they've gone to the shop, and they've done the 101 point inspection and the $2,300 bill and go, is this necessary? And so we can help out on every aspect of this.

Okay, so before they pull the trigger on any repair or even finding out a quote, I could just sign up real quick, get a free call or whatever, and start working my way through, I guess. Correct.

Well, I thought the call cost money.

The call is for a charge, and they start at $19.

So your first call ever would be, in this instance, $19.

$19. And it depends a little bit on how seasoned the mechanic is, and every mechanic has the ability to adjust their rates a little bit. But a more seasoned mechanic, if you're looking at a 35-year-old mechanic, a 35-year veteran, I think those calls start at $25 or $27. Listen, it's very reasonable compared to the fact, if you bring it to a shop, it's going to cost you $150 just for diagnostics.

So that's the selling point then. Before you get that $150 diagnostic, let's... $20 conversation, we could probably figure out a lot of this and see if you can do it yourself. Okay, I'm caught up now.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so it allows you to actually have a first line of defense before you bring it to the shop. Because quite frankly, bringing a car to the shop, it's a pain in the butt. You don't have enough time. You got to drop the car off. You often have to get a ride back or get a loaner. It's going to cost you at least $150 in most locations. That's a fairly major burden for most people, whether it's the money or the time or both. For $19, give us a shot. We might be able to give you some good guidance, keep you out of the shop, or at least allow you to save some money.

That's kind of what I was thinking. And the reason I bring this up, because I might be your target market here, is overcoming these hurdles. Before I buy a $15 subscription or whatever, like Netflix or whatever, I want to make sure that's worth my $15. I'm more choosy about $15 than $400 for some reason.

Everybody is, though. It's like the price of gas. You're more sensitive to saving 10 cents on a gallon of gas.

That's how we think that way.

We are that way.

But that's kind of what I was looking for. I completely forgot that when I took my car to Ratt or whatever, it was $70, $80 inspection fee, because I told them to run through it, to be fair. But nonetheless, that's part of it.

And we're not trying to replace mechanics. If I can see a vehicle, can I do a better job than if I do it remotely? Of course I can. But for the average person, sometimes just getting good counsel goes a long ways.

Yeah, it's like having that one friend that's got the lift. You go to them for your problems.

Yeah, I go to him first every single time. It's like, Sean, do you think I'm an idiot? I think this is what's broken, whatever. Should I go see a shop?

Correct. And if Sean had worked on Gen 6 GTIs for 30 years, well, you couldn't work on that 30 years, I guess not old enough, but worked on Volkswagens for 30 years and was a deep expert, there's value there. Because you don't know a heck of a lot about it.

No, not at all.

No, I mean, you know as much as the next guy.

I know general information about vehicles and their parts, but if I talk to somebody who's been working on Volkswagens for 30 years, they're going to know the ins and outs of that vehicle. They're going to know exactly what parts break when, and how to replace them a lot more efficiently than I will.

That's exactly right. So we're trying to find those 30-year-old GTI experts, veterans, and connect them with people like you, so that we can, and that's what we call disintermediation, is how do you take out all the fat in the middle? I'm trying to connect this real expert mechanic to the exact person in need and make that as efficient as we possibly can do it.

I think that's awesome, because I see that a lot of times in forums. You know, people ask, you know, hey, this is what's wrong with my vehicle. And then you have all these people who think they know what the answer is. And I go in there and I start reading and it's like, I just read five different answers to your issue. And it's like, so you're doing what, like, you know, people on these forums want. They're looking for an answer online.

For the consumer.

You know, and so that'd be, you know, perfect. They can ask that question to an actual mechanic for their vehicle and get a straight answer.

That's exactly what we're trying to do. You summarize it so well. And but in within that, we're trying to allow the mechanics to be successful and the consumer to be successful and making sure that process is really efficient. Because today, how do you go talk to, if you don't have a mechanic buddy, you can't even go to a dealership and talk to mechanic. You get to talk to the service advisor. And what most people don't realize is when you bring your car in for service, is dealerships make more money on servicing vehicles than the new cars and used car sales combined.

Yep. Oh, I notice as well just because dealerships have been in my family forever.

And it's not that it's bad, it's that 30 years ago when the internet came into fruition, is the primary profit model for a dealership, and you know this because there's dealerships in your family, they made most of their money on car sales.

Yep.

And service was sort of a customer courtesy, it was necessary, but that wasn't their primary profit pool. And then the internet came along, and now you knew what the used car and the new car was worth. It was easier to sell it on your own if you wanted to, and the profitability of cars went down, right? And so all dealerships said, okay, I'm not making as much money on the car sales, so I'm going to turn to my service bay to go make up that profit hole. And to do that, now they've driven greater what you would call upsell. That 101 point inspection really isn't for your benefit, it's really for their benefit. It's a sales list. And so they're trying to drive more people in the door, higher average pricing, more repairs per vehicle, and they're trying to optimize that you as a customer from a profitability perspective. What most people don't realize is the game starts the minute you walk in the dealership. The service manager has a quota. That service manager is trying to sell as many services as realistically possible. The parts manager has a quota. They're trying to sell more parts. The mechanic is not paid by the hour. They're paid by the job. If you're a mechanic and you're getting paid by the job, you're going to go after the jobs that are the easiest to do that pay the most amount of money for the per repair. Right? You're running your own individual P&L. It's your family budget. And so the mechanic's going for the lowest hanging fruit. The parts guy is trying to sell you more parts. The service manager is trying to upsell you. And you're on the other end, you're just trying to get your car fixed. You don't know that this is like Vegas and it feels like the cards are stacked against you. And so that's where people get nervous. They go in and it just feels expensive. We wrote an article and it hasn't been published yet. I'll have to publish it online here. But I have a good one of my sons. My son is kind of your age. And one of his buddies is fresh out of college and he has a BMW 3 Series. And it had a couple of shocks that were going bad. And he brought it to the dealership for an oil change. And they said, all right, you need, you know, your shocks are bad. We're going to have to replace, we should change the rear shocks. And they gave him a quote of $2,200 to replace two shocks. And so for him, he's making, fresh out of college, he's probably making 20, 25 bucks an hour, right? And his bill was $2,200. Now, from his perspective, there's a thing in economics called the work ratio. And work ratio means that how much work do I have to do to earn an hour of your work? If you had a broken arm and you were with a surgeon, that work ratio is in favor of the surgeon, right? You might have to work 50 hours to afford an hour of that surgeon's time.

50 to one.

50 to one, right? What do you think the work ratio was between this 24-year-old college graduate that needed shocks on his car to the amount of work that the mechanic was going to put into the vehicle?

I was thinking maybe like 10 to one?

Higher.

Your turn.

Oh, 25 to one?

Keep going.

100 to one.

You're right on.

Oh my gosh.

It's 100 to one.

That's so much.

It's so much. You're telling me this kid had to work almost a month to pay for this mechanic to take her on his car for two and a half hours.

That's insane.

That's insane. And so in this case, he came over to our garage, which, by the way, is not as nice as your garage. I will just say that first and foremost.

Thank you.

But he came over. My son and him, they rolled up their sleeves and they figured out how to go change a set of struts. And it cost him a couple hundred dollars for parts, and he saved $2,200 and he put it in his pocket. But he also saved, the reality, what he was saving is he didn't have to go work 200 hours to go pay for this repair. He did it. And that's where, if you look at the macroeconomic situation, of almost everything you buy, the question is, what do I get for how many hours I have to put into it? Right? When you take into account inflation and taxes, et cetera, et cetera. And so ultimately, that's what we're trying to normalize, is if you wanted to hire the expertise of the mechanic versus your needs, we're trying to compress that number to be as close as possible.

Yeah. And something about that work ratio number, kind of made me think about, you know, why maybe somebody might get upset. If you're stealing time from me, essentially, if you're up charging me, you're essentially stealing a hundred hours from me, because I had to work a hundred hours to pay for your job, when it could have been 20 hours, 10 hours of my time to just buy one hour of your time.

That's exactly right.

So it can be very frustrating. And I can see now why people go to the shop and they come out anxious, because they just spent a hundred, not a thousand or two thousand dollars. They're spending hundreds of hours of their hard earned time.

That's exactly right.

And I think there's something to be said for that, too, though. It's like the simple fix is that that's where you're trying to save people their time and their money. Now, there is circumstances like, you're not going to rebuild an engine block on your own, by no means. That's where the experts come in and they are going to get paid accordingly.

That's the thing. The mechanics are hanging or looking for the low hanging fruit. They don't get paid as much for doing a whole engine rebuild. So in that case, you're paying for their expertise and time, which is probably all tools and everything.

Because everything you would need to...

Tools, required, specialty tools, parts, the knowledge. And that's just something like where that comes into play. But for something as simple as Shox, where you could teach yourself that, and your app or your Raise A Hood can show you, here's your DIY options, and save over $1,000, that's incredible.

And one of the things that we've done, there's some great videos on YouTube. There's some terrible videos on YouTube as well, that people that don't know what they're doing. But what we've done on our videos is, we actually have partnered with a couple of shops. And so we have a videographer working at the shop. And so we actually record real repairs on real vehicles. And then we curate this down for every hour worth of work. We generally curate that down to about three minutes. So in other words, do you want the answer? Step one, do this. Step two, do this. Step three, do this. In a very simplified format that just virtually anybody can go do. It's not sexy. It's not, you know, there's no big bright words on it. It's just here's the actual process that you should follow to fix this. Now, what we've realized, most people still don't want to work on their car, right? We're all oddities in this world. We recognize that. The reason we publish it, though, is some people look at that and go, you know what, that one is easy enough that I can do that repair. You know, that one is within my skill set. And in fact, I was working with one of our marketing women a couple of months ago, and we were looking at a solution and we were kind of optimizing the website. And she said, Mike, she goes, is that really real data that you're using? And it was to change spark plugs or something in a Honda or coils on a Honda. And I said, well, what do you mean, is it real data? She's like, is that a real repair? I'm like, of course it's a real repair. She said, well, I don't really believe you that this $800 repair, I could do it myself in two hours. And I said, well, no, this is all pretty accurate. And you could see her, she was engaged. She was your age, she was 27 years old. And she thought, I could see her. She's like, you know what? I don't think I could change that, but I know my fiance could. Right? And so she's adding this up, going, you know, I could save $700 or $800 here. And for her, that's seven more guests at her wedding. And so it was meaningful. So for here as a person, and we found that there's a big chunk of middle, this is exactly where you were saying here, there's a big chunk of the middle in the population, we call them knowledge seekers. Some of them are going to do the self-repair, it may be very small, but they're open to it. They're just trying to get the right answer up front before they jump into something. So they know they're making the right decision. If it's a half-hour job and they want to do it themselves, great. If they have to bring it to the shop because it requires specialized tools, wonderful. But if they bring it to the shop, they just want to make sure that they're fixing the right thing and they're not being overcharged.

Heads up, Sean, by the way. Your hand's in the camera. Just a little heads up. That's why I adjust it that way. It's happened so many times, especially shooting from that angle. It's so hilarious. Where was I? Oh, a question. When you said Honda, for whatever reason, it sparked something in my head. Are you guys trying to develop the database in any particular fashion? For example, cars under $30,000 first, you're not focusing on the crazy supercars, you're focusing on the lower market, people who actually would want to work on their own cars, right?

Yeah, and in fact, if you want, I can actually send you some of our analysis. What we did early on is we looked at vehicles that were sold over the last 15 years for all model years. We just said, what's the volume of each and every vehicle? And Ford F-150 is number one, and the GMC truck is number, or the Chevy truck is number two, and I think Ram is below that. And you kind of go down this list. We focused on the top of the Pareto. And going after, so when you show up, statistically, I'm trying to make sure that I have answers for you based on just where the net volume is. We can't cover all the makes and models and volume and everything else. In fact, we'll never be able to do that individually. Where we focus on is creating the platform and seeding just enough information out there that people like you and other enthusiasts can then use the platform to profit from it. So just like you're an artist, you may do this repair and say, you know what, this is pretty, I'm going to take the time to record it, just like on YouTube, but I'm going to follow this format. We show you the format, so it's easy to follow. You have to take the time to write up, it's almost like a very small Wikipedia page. Why does this happen? What are the key issues, et cetera, et cetera. Anything that we post, and you would submit it for proposal, and then everything that we post is first vetted by mechanics and engineers. So everything on the site is actually vetted by professionals, and there's no garbage out there. Everything is in the same format, everything is an accurate answer, everything is vetted by professionals. Because there's stuff on YouTube and blogs, you just go, this is not fundamentally correct, this is a bad idea. And our job is to cut all of that stuff out. But then once you post it, every time somebody uses it, you get paid, right? And it's not a lot of money, but if you're making a couple of bucks of you and a couple of thousand people use that, you said, well, I could make a couple of thousand dollars on posting this solution, would you do it?

Oh, yeah, 100%.

I would.

So people could be contributors in that way too.

And they can contribute, but they can profit from it.

One thing, this actually, I found something to make my life easier yesterday regarding the podcast. Well, what you could do, potentially, I'm not sure how you guys are sourcing your data and all that, if it's just forums or whatever, but what you could do, for example, someone like, let's say, Chris Fix, huge person on YouTube. What you could do, either working with him or without him, you could get his videos and transcribe the text and then feed that to the engine, somehow clean it up or whatever. Just, I don't know.

No, no. That's how my brain is working right now. No, your brain works very well. What we do look at is when you take in data, you're trying to prioritize the data. Is it good data?

Yeah.

Maybe data or bad data?

And then is it clean?

Is it clean? Exactly. And so we take data in from multiple sources. We have gotten to the point where we're starting to scrape some of YouTube. But one of the sources we also take is every time you have a call with a telemechanic, is we say, okay, this one is pure. We trust our mechanics. So you have that call. And by the way, that's all recorded. You get a copy of the recording after you're done, so you don't have to take any notes. We also scrub that transcript and then use that transcript as an additional feeder inside the AI engine. So every time this engine is used in any way, shape, or form, it gets a little smarter and a little smarter. So we do exactly, exactly that. The first time we built this engine is we said, okay, we're going to go build this. And we were maybe a little bit naive. We just said, okay, we're going to go scrub, take all this information on the Internet and just suck it all in and build an AI engine around it and just do the math around this big terabytes of data. So we went out and just started scrubbing data left and right and pulling all this in and terabytes and sucking up servers. And then we wrapped the AI engine around it and tried to calculate. It was garbage. I mean, it was really bad. It wasn't actually coming up with any accurate answers because there was so much bad information coming in that it couldn't actually calculate a realistic minimization or maximization, optimization point to come up with an answer. It just kind of spun and spun and spun and spun because there was too much garbage in. And so that's one of the big issues about AI is, how do you give it the cleanest, most accurate data that you can so that the answers you give are actually real answers? So, and that's one of the issues that we're trying to overcome in this whole thing is, how do you structure this so we have good data coming in and we actually have accurate answers coming out because if it's difficult for an AI engine, imagine the average person that's going through these blogs trying to find the right answer. You can't because somebody says this is the problem and you get eight different answers out of it, right? And the AI fundamentally doesn't know what the right answer is. It just knows, well, somebody said here's eight answers and it's not aware of what's right or what's wrong. So the question is, how can we feed the most accurate information back into it?

So there's a couple of different ways we could take this. We could, it all depends on your time, we can keep cooking. I have millions of questions. Otherwise, I do have a question regarding Raise A Hood as well.

And I feel bad because I'm over here, I feel like I'm plugging my business. That's not it. I want to make sure you guys have a really good conversation that you can...

This is a fantastic conversation because we have a lot of listeners that, some of them, they're just here for the ride, the fun times. Others are really trying to learn something or hear... You fall into that category. We love this.

It's educational. It's all about showing off what makes our community so great.

Yeah, we absolutely love it. That's the other thing. We like to showcase various types of people in the community. You're very similar to our last guest, Kyle, who, again, he dominated a lot of the episode in the conversation, but that's because we're absorbing so much information. We love that. That's the whole purpose of this, so don't worry about that. But what I was going to ask is, so we're currently in the current phase of Raise A Hood. What's next? And then after that, how do people get involved, like our listeners or whatever, in that regard?

A couple of good questions. I mean, longer term, what we want to do is we have this longer term objective back to what we want to do with Raise A Hood is we're passionate about the sector as a whole. We all love vehicles, right? Our objective, anytime you have a startup, clearly you want to, one of the objective for any startup is you have to make a profit, right? That's why you have investors and the whole startup community is actually very good about extracting good ideas and then how do you go invest in them and build them out. But more importantly, our objective is how do we disrupt this overall ecosystem to make it work better? Disruption is fun. Disruption is really fun when you could go, okay, this is how it's worked for a long time. How can we fundamentally fix this to make it work better? I love, I mean, just like an engineer, you love breaking things and making them better. The question is how can we break this entire ecosystem that is ripe for improvement and make it work better? Ultimately, that's what we want to, is what we're doing. Now there's multiple ways to do that and there's a lot of steps in the process and there's different aspects to the overall ecosystem. So I don't want to oversimplify this whole thing, but our objective is to help the end users and allow them to reduce their overall cost of ownership, right? That's the end goal. In the short term for the listeners right now, I think the easiest way to get involved with this, if you're interested, just go in and sign up and register. It's free. And so you can sign up and log on. And it still says beta across the top. One of the things that we're doing, just so you're aware, this is a Minnesota company. We are doing all of our, what I would call micro promotions and early stuff just in the state of Minnesota, just to optimize it. So even if you go on our website, it says we're in beta mode, report errors here, you know, we're still kind of in the building phase, but it's great for consumers and customers to get involved. Put your car in the garage, and in fact, even on the back end, it will tell you all the relevant information you need to know about your vehicle from the actual service and maintenance schedule to how it was built in the factory, all of the recalls, all in a single dashboard. You can record the repairs that you've done, modifications that you've done, and all of that is fed into AI engine. The other thing though is quite frankly, if you ever have a problem with your vehicle or questions, just reach out to one of our telemechanics, because they're accessible and all you have to do is just say, I want to talk to David and I want to talk to him Tuesday at 2 o'clock and you'll end up on a direct video call one on one with him or her.

This is all accessible right now as well, correct?

Right now. And in fact, what we did is before we came, I hope you don't mind, I took the liberty, we actually put together a discount code for Minnoxide. Okay, so if you want to book a call at Raise A Hood, we put together the discount code MO15.

Okay.

Minnoxide 15. And if you punch that in, we'll give you 15% off for a for a for a call. I mean, the calls are inexpensive to begin with, but that way you guys can at least the listeners can save a little bit of money. And almost all of that capital goes directly to the mechanic.

Okay. Yeah, that's actually a good thing to discuss. Because I remember we talked about this on the phone call that the mechanics are compensated pretty well, actually.

Thank you. Thank you so much. That's very generous for you to come up with a discount code for us. And it's really special.

A lot of our listeners' cars are f*****.

It sounds like yours is.

Yeah. Well, they tried and true over here. But yeah.

But you're kind of going like, what's the business model, right? The average mechanic in a shop makes on the order magnitude about 40 bucks an hour, right? Plus or minus based on years of service and make model brand, etc. But that's sort of the order of magnitude of a mechanic. And when you go to the shop for your father's Mercedes, did you look on the wall what the hourly rate was?

I did not know. Well, again, everything is warrantied.

It's warranty. But nevertheless, I mean, the the the manufacturer is still paying that bill.

Yeah. Yep.

Which means that your father paid for it up front when he bought the car.

Yep.

Right. And so but once the car goes auto warranty, and it will, because nobody wants to throw away a GTR after four years.

Oh, we keep buying extended ones.

And so but I'll touch on extended warranties here in a second. But the point is, most shops like that are charging $150 to $190 an hour. So think about that. Somebody is charging $190 an hour for your time and you get $40. That's a pretty good deal for the dealership, right? Our model is totally different, where the bulk of the dollars all go to the mechanic. And so our mechanics can actually make a little bit more working at Raise A Hood than what they could as an actual mechanic. And we take a fairly small cut of that just to go run operations, et cetera, et cetera.

Your overhead, I'd imagine, is very low compared to a dealership.

And that's where I'm empathetic to dealerships. You have a $30 million piece of property sitting on the side of an interstate with the full staff and taxes, property taxes, income taxes, maintenance support, SGN. That's expensive to just keep that thing up and running. So it's not easy to go do it.

Somebody has to do it, too.

And somebody has to do it. And so that model will get changed. Look at Costco. You shop at Costco. Your parents may shop at Costco. Costco is great value. They have great scale. They're not sitting on expensive real estate. They have very crowded stores, I mean, in a good way. So the cost per customer is quite low. That's not what a dealership looks like. Dealerships are still a high SGNA, I'm sorry, I say SGNA, sales general and administration of P&L term. But it's an expensive operation to go run, which means that you got to charge your customers a lot of money to go make up for all your inherent costs in the business. How can we take those costs out of the business and reduce the prices to consumers? So, but you were talking about extended warranties. Extended warranties, I think, are fascinating. Americans spend $20 billion a year on extended warranties. It's a lot of money. And why do they do that? Because they're deathly terrified of how expensive this thing is going to be to fix it because of that work ratio of 100 to one that we just talked about. So like, listen, I'd rather pay up front and control what this looks like. But when they sell an extended warranty policy is, if they sell an extended warranty policy, and I bet the extended warranty policy on your dad's GTR was eight grand, I'm guessing. I don't know for sure.

I think it's a little more.

What's that?

He had some wholesale.

But nevertheless, for the average person, there's a lot of gross profit in that sale that goes back to the dealership. The dealerships are selling you those extended warranties because they make a boatload of money on these things. So only a portion of that actually goes to the insurance provider. Once you do that insurance and you actually have a problem, the first thing the carrier's generally gonna go do is to say, well, can you prove that all the oil changes have been done on time, have the belts been serviced on time? They're looking for a reason to push back on that claim. And so, quite frankly, for the average person out there, they don't come in on the plus side of the insurance policy. It benefits them that they've eliminated the risk of a high warranty repair, but most people would be better off just taking that money and putting it in the bank as a reserve for when that day comes up.

It's a calculation, just like Mystic Lake over here, right? It may seem like you're winning sometimes, but when you start talking law of large numbers, you lose.

The odds are stacked against you. And statistically, it's gonna come out with whatever the probability is over the long run.

Yeah, but then they also kind of put a price on, you know, peace of mind, assuming everything's done correctly.

And all insurance works that way, right? If all insurance was a money loser, there wouldn't be a lot of money insurance companies out there, right? So by definition, insurance companies have to make a profit. I get that. What's unique about automotive insurance, so in my opinion, is there's a high gross profit at point of sale. For the average person is... So we ran some numbers, and I'll share this because most... Not everybody will believe this, but I'll let them... I will encourage them to run the numbers for themselves. I think we have this article published on the website so they can even double check the math. Let's say you're a new car buyer, right? And you buy a new car every three years because you like peace of mind. You're a used car buyer. And you say, you know what? I'm trying to save money, and so I'm going to drive cars a little bit longer, and I'm going to buy them after Harris takes the depreciation out. So you're buying his three-year-old car, and then you drive it ten years. And you know why I picked ten years? Because the average car in the US right now is 13 years old. The average car in the US., think about that, the average car in the US is 13 years old. By the time you sold your car at 13 years old, it's just an average car. So we did the calculations, and you buy a new car every three years, you don't have to pay for oil changes, you probably don't have to buy tires, there's some luxuries that come with that. And every three years, you trade it in, and then you go off and you buy a new car again. You never have a warranty claim, effectively.

That was me with my first three cars were all leases.

Same thing. Whether it's a lease or buy, you effectively come up with the same model. And you, on the other hand, you say, hey, I'm fiscally conservative. I'm going to take that used lease car off your hands, I'm going to drive it a decade, take care of it, and then I'm going to sell it for a very modest amount. And I'm going to have to pay a little bit more for tires, I'm going to have to spend a little bit of extra money on maintenance because it's going to break more, it's a used car. The only difference is the money that you're saving, you're going to put that in the bank. And you're just going to put it in a brokerage account and just leave it alone and never touch it. And you know you'll have a little reserve there that if something ever breaks, you can pull it out. And you just do that over the course of a career. From the age of about 25 to I think we checked 62, when most people retire, is over that time period, using just statistical modeling, how much money will you have in that account? You're driving used cars, you're driving new cars, how much money do you have in that account?

Oh God, it's got to be six figures.

More than Harris.

Seven figures.

$1.3 million.

Holy.

$1.3 million. And so, now the hard part is people spend what they have. So the diligent part is you go, okay, I'm getting the s***** used car, you get the new car, but I still got to put the $300 or $500 in the bank per month or whatever the number is, right? Because I still am spending the same amount. But you're just saying, I'm going to spend just as much as him, but I'm going to keep the extra for myself. You'll have $1.3 million by the time you retire. For some people, and listen, if you're 40 years old, and all of a sudden there's $300,000 in the bank and your transmission goes out, you're going to go, hey, this is going to be okay. I got a $300,000 reserve to go change that transmission.

Can you walk us through as well, by the way, how you get to that $1.3?

Yeah, in fact, you can go on the website. I think we have that article posted. It's called Buckle Up Buttercup. That new car is going to cost you a million bucks. So we outline actually what the net costs are in that calculation. I can actually, if you want, I'll send you the actual, you know, the raw calculations. We do that also under the assumption that there's no inflation. So we adjust all of this for inflation both to the pro and the con. In other words, it's today's dollars. And you do that often in economics because if I told you, hey, you're going to have a million dollars in 30 years, a million dollars in 30 years might not be worth nearly as much as what you think it is today. So you try to normalize it to today's dollars. So those calculations are actually done against the normalization of today's dollars. They're also working under the assumption that you actually take the money and you invest it in just an S&P account. You actually do something with the money and it won't work for you as opposed to just hiding it under your pillow.

Gotcha. That makes sense.

But that's the time value of money, but it also points out that driving a new vehicle is a luxury that not a lot of people can afford. Now, if it makes you happy to drive a new vehicle, great, wonderful, hallelujah, pass the beans, that's great. But if you're trying to be cost-conscious and save some money, that's a great way to save money as well is to buy slightly used vehicles and properly take care of them and maintain them.

Yeah, I feel like that is true with people who buy used cars is that they are looking for a better deal. They are trying to save money, and it's just finding that action of putting away that extra money and actually investing it and then seeing it grow in the next 40, 50 years versus just saying like, oh, I just pay $150 a month for my s***** used car. It just gives me A to B instead of me driving a brand new car for $500 a month, and I should be putting away $350 a month into an investment account.

Yep, couldn't be me.

But I would argue though, because if you're a car person, is there's other fun ways, you don't have to own a $100,000 car to have fun with vehicles.

We've seen that so much in car reviews, and people taking, is the $10,000 car just as good as the $50,000 car? Usually they're slightly slower, but with a little bit of mods and modifications.

It's like the Indiana versus M2, kinda.

Yeah, or taking the, I wanna say like a fourth gen Honda Civic and pitting it against the most up-to-date generation. You spend $10,000 versus a $50,000 car, you put $10,000 worth of modifications, you save $30,000, and you're just right up there with them.

The other thing I noticed, one of the things I, throughout my entire career, I've spent time on the racetrack in a variety of different models. I still teach racing school and track school up at Brainerd, B-I-R. And I do it just because it's a pure, it's fun, it's a pastime. I like training younger drivers. I like being on the track. I think it's really engaging on a whole bunch of levels. But what I find is, getting a vehicle on the track is the greatest way to actually test the actual performance of a vehicle. The average person out there, I bet there's, for all you listeners that are dialing into this, I bet less than 1% of them have ever even had their tires warm. And if I'm on a racetrack, you're going to take at least a full lap, a couple of miles of pushing the car to get the tires warm enough where you actually start to explore the limits of the vehicle.

I learned that actually about a month ago, my first time ever autocrossing, first time on a track.

And it's hard to get your tires hot even on an autocross because it's so short.

They were cooking though, because I could tell by the third lap, the car drastically changed.

Drastically, it's amazing, isn't it?

New car all together. I was like, I love this.

Yeah, it's amazing. Most people don't do that. Most people don't do that.

Never ever. Right.

And so if you have a chance to get on an autocross or get on a track and really explore the limits of the vehicle, that's when all of a sudden I think most people go, oh my God, I had no idea this car was actually capable of this. Right? Because cars can do things that most people don't even realize what they're designed to do. I chuckle sometimes. At some point in my life, we're going to do a taxonomy of the different driver types. Because there's people I call them the waxers. They love to wax their vehicles and show them off, and that's great. There's people that are customizers, and they like to customize their vehicle. There's people that just love to have the cleanest, newest car that they possibly can. There's also people out there that just love to drive. And there's hundreds of different types of individuals out there. But I would encourage anybody that's a car person, get some time on the track. Book a day at Brainerd or any of your local track and go up there and just become a better driver. And it's a skill that will take a lifetime of getting better. But it's like golf. Listen, nobody goes out there, and they're a great golfer from day one. But it's a fun game. Driving is an absolute talent. And you'll also find the limits of the vehicle in ways that most people will never actually comprehend. You'll get the tires up to temperature. You'll get the oil up to temperature. You'll learn what vehicle dynamics are all about. It's hard to learn about the vehicle dynamics on a street. It's just not safe. And so I just think vehicle dynamics is one of the most fascinating aspects of vehicles. The downside is most people never appreciate vehicle dynamics until they're in an accident or close to an accident because they never really get a chance to let their car move around underneath of them and realize what the vehicle can do. They only do that in a panic situation. That's why all these electronic nannies are important because you need those electronic nannies to help you in a panic situation, whether it's braking or steering or turning or over steer or under steer. But getting a vehicle on a track, I think, is a reward that most drivers should take advantage of at least a couple of times in their life because it's an entirely new universe. And the part that I love about vehicle dynamics is everything that you do on a vehicle. You've lowered your vehicle. I bet you've lowered your...

Yeah, three wheels into Sean's driveway.

Why did you lower your car? In addition, that it looks cool.

Yeah, well, I... So when we actually lowered it, because the coilovers are adjustable, and when we adjusted it, I was like, all right, I want to get a lobe because it looks cool, of course. But I also wanted it to just lower the center of gravity.

And why do you lower the center of gravity?

So better traction.

Why does it give you better traction?

Handling.

Why does it give you better handling?

Oh, I got to use the bird brain today. Because the weight isn't higher up or whatever.

And so the reason is, and I'm not trying to pick on you, I guess what I am, though, but most people don't realize this, is what's interesting about tires is they have a non-linear relationship on the slip curve. So I'll tell you a couple things, and you won't believe this at first, but you can go Google it, and you'll realize that I'm mostly correct, is the only way for a tire to build traction is if it's slipping. If a tire is not slipping, there's zero traction because it's rubber. Now those slip percentages are very low. So if I want to build a little traction and I turn the tire, there has to be a little deformation of that rubber to actually create a force to propel it forward or sideways or braking. And up to about 2% or 3% slip, it's a very linear relationship, right? Which means that if I'm coming around a corner at.7 Gs or.8 Gs, the more it slides, the higher the traction force. And I say it's sliding, you will never notice it's sliding because it's sliding a couple of percent, right? And so the harder you turn, the tighter you turn, the G-forces build up, the tire slips a little bit more, you don't recognize it, until it hits about 2% or 3% slip, and then it starts to roll off. And what happens is now you actually get to a point where it's sliding more, where you're actually getting more noticeable movement and you're starting to build up a lot of heat in the tires. And it will generally, most tires peak in its traction at around 5%. So if you're optimized on the street, you'll have about 5% slip. Whether it's turning, braking, accelerating, you're trying to hold it at sort of this 3% to 7% slip. What happens when you go over that slip point is your traction goes down. And it's less traction, and you're not going as fast. That's why when you look at drifting, drifting is fun to watch, man, it's a fun sport. It's great, I think it's a riot, but you don't see anybody in Formula One drifting around the course.

Well, Max will, but...

Not during the race, though.

Well, you remember that 360 he did.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, during the race, they're just trying... It looks like they're on rails, because they're holding that car at 3% to 4% slip.

Right at the line, yep.

And sometimes we refer to that as you're on rails.

Yeah, yeah.

It feels like you're on rails. And that's what you're trying to do. But remember, if you go too fast, you start to slide down that slip curve, and you have lower traction. Sometimes we refer to that as you're over driving the vehicle.

Yep.

But that slip curve will change based on how much weight is on the vehicle. Right? How much force is on that tire. And the less force that's on the tire, the higher that typical peak friction is. And so the reason that we have a lower center of gravity is gives you effectively get less weight transfer. And if I have less trait transfer, I have the lowest net weight on each tire, and it will increase my net traction for the vehicle. Like if I had 100% weight transfer, and all the weight was on the outside tire, and there was hardly any on the inside tire, I'm actually going to have a lower peak coefficient of friction. But if I have effectively zero weight transfer and the same weight on the inside and the outside wheel, that curve goes up a little bit, and I have higher net traction. So that's why I want to keep that center of gravity very low. It's also why, when you guys play with sway bars, right, front and rear sway bars, is you can have either the back wheels or the front wheels take more of that weight transfer. And the end that takes more of that weight transfer is the first one that's going to start to break away. So if you put a stiffer front roll bar on or a thinner or lesser rear wheel roll bar, is you're transferring more of that weight resistance to the front end, which means that it's going to understeer, right? If you put a thicker roll bar on the back or a thinner roll bar on the front, you're going to have the rear wheels doing more of that resistance to roll, and more weight transfer is going to go on the back, and you're going to actually start to oversteer. That's why when you start playing with the roll bars, you're trying to tune in, whether you have understeer or oversteer, but all of it goes down back to that slip curve. And that's the part that most people don't actually think about. They just know, well, if I change the sway bar, I can change the understeer and the oversteer, but they don't actually know why. And everything within vehicle dynamics, it almost all comes back down to that interface between the tire and the track, and it's why driving on a track is so rewarding, because you're in this really nonlinear relationship, and you're trying to optimize within that, and that's hard to go do. It's really hard to go do, and it's harder to do on a motorcycle. Because you guys have a bunch of motorcycles here, I saw them, they're awesome bikes. You're perfectly comfortable sliding your car on a track, right? You overcook the corner, the car slides a little bit, you scrub off some speed, you know, and you're back out and you're fine. When you're on a motorcycle, and you start going over the edge, 98% of the time people are going to go down. And when you go down on a motorcycle, it just hurts more than if you slide your car around too much and you lose a second in the corner. That's why I think motorcycle racing, I raced motorbikes when I was young. I just have so much respect for those drivers because they're really, really good.

Yeah, those guys are daredevils. They're teetering on that line. It is adrenaline to the max. I get adrenaline just driving my car around the track. I can't imagine how they feel on a bike. Just open cockpit with nothing but a helmet and a thick track suit.

I cannot wait to re-listen to this episode, by the way. Again, this is why I love talking technical stuff because I know I won't get it right the first time, but I go listen back two or three times and be like, yeah, I like that.

Well, this is a harder one. I'm over here drawing charts on your board here. You can visualize this stuff. I would encourage you to go online and look at tire slip curves, and you're going to realize that it's a fairly... It's not a very super sophisticated curve. It's just up and to the right, and then it kind of levels off. But it makes calculating vehicle dynamics fairly complicated.

Does this background come from you being a Ford engineer or from being a teacher at Brainerd? Or just your history or background with racing?

You know, it's a great question. Both are the right answer. Most of my expertise when it comes to vehicle dynamics, I did my master's work at Purdue specifically in vehicle dynamics. So 30 years ago, I was programming computers in vehicle dynamics to improve their acceleration or deacceleration and calculating all of this. And we were doing these calculations on, you know, Fortran 77 systems, which is an old programming model. But it was really interesting calculations because of these nonlinearities, you can't actually just calculate the answer. You have to model it, and then you'll let these mathematical models sort of step forward in time, a hundredth of a second, a hundredth of a second, a hundredth of a second. So simulating traction control and simulating ABS and simulating the dynamics of the vehicle. And we take everything into account, from the weight of the fly shaft, the crankshaft to the polar moment of inertia of the tires and the brakes and everything. And you completely simulate this entire vehicle. So then we could say, well, how much faster would this car accelerate if I change the front brakes? And you think, well, that's probably not much, but you would be surprised that reducing the mass and the polar moment of inertia, which is effectively the rotational mass of these things, can make a large impact. So those are some of the things. And so all of that, though, then ties back to the slip curve. So then you can start optimizing the slip curve and figure out what it actually does to the dynamics of the vehicle. And that's why when we look at the math around this stuff, I chuckle sometimes that there's a lot of information out there, but there's a lot of information out there that most people don't actually understand why. You mentioned your coilovers. Why do you have coilovers?

Because the previous owner had them.

Why did he buy them?

Again, just set the car. Have a little more adjustments with the car.

What is he trying to adjust? I'm picking on you.

Rebound, compression.

What's better?

More rebound or less rebound?

Well, it depends on what the temperature and the conditions of the track are.

And so let's say it's warmer. What do you do with the rebound and the compression?

I think you're supposed to turn it down.

And Francis, I don't know. You might be right. You might be right. So I don't mean to put you on the spot. My point is when you start to get into these secondary and tertiary calculations about the net impact of adjusting the compression and rebound on the track with all these other macro dynamics going on, people feel good that they have the adjustability. The reality is I think there's very few people that actually have the capabilities of dialing these things in that actually makes a meaningful impact.

Derek talked about that because he has like three-way adjustable coilovers or something for his Corvette. And he's like, I just pay somebody else to do that because I don't know anything.

I bet that person that he's paying doesn't know what they're doing. No, and I don't mean that as a criticism.

I just mean that it's so complex.

It's so complex.

Well, yeah, because I mean, with the variables of track conditions and with the vehicle, you literally would have to keep a notebook and write down everything that happened and the exact setting that you use and then figure out this got me the best time, or this was the best in corners. And then you'd have to reference to that little book every time you went racing. It's like, not a lot of people are going to be doing that, unless they're getting paid six figures on an F1 or a serious racing team.

The data they have every single race.

Exactly right. That's exactly right. As an amateur, you're not going to be able to figure it out. In fact, I would even argue from your 10 o'clock run to your 11 o'clock run and the track has warmed up 2.5 degrees, that now you've changed all these other variables that you don't have control over anyway. And even as a driver, I can be running at 9 tenths on the track and I'll go do a dozen laps. And I've done, I don't know, well over a thousand laps, I suppose, at Brainerd, just playing, racing, screwing around. So I'm above average, right? Not perfect, I can't make a living at it, but I'm above average. And on a good day, my laps will be within a half a second of one another, right? Two minute lap, 150 lap is within a half second of one another. The average person, when you're out there dialing in shocks and by making these changes in the shock, you might be saving a tenth of a second per lap, but the noise of just how fast I can drive is a half of a second a lap? How are you going to get data out of that? And then I have ten laps? You're not, right? The reality is it's almost impossible to do. So like Formula One, what they'll do is first of all, they have data loads in a thousand different ways, but they'll also simulate all of this stuff on the computer in a very sophisticated means, and then they'll say, okay, what happens if I do change this valve reaction on the shock? And they'll run that simulation against a hundred different settings or a thousand different settings and try to dial it in based on the computations. The things that are just beyond the capabilities of the average individual, not just because they're not smart enough, there's just not enough consistency in all the other variables to actually dial it in.

I mean, we're talking terabytes of data every single race. I did have a question. So when you were, you know, your decade at Ford, in what capacity were you designing? Were you like, again, for the sake of argument, were you like Aero or something or, you know, what were you designing?

I was primarily doing powertrain. And I was working on the Mustang and the Mustang Cobra and then...

The SN95.

The SN95 generation. And then after B school, I mean, after graduate school, engineering school, I came back and I was working primarily on the Taurus platform on emissions and some other things. So, you know, I worked on a variety of different programs out there, and I have some very fond memories at Ford. And we were working on the SN95 program, which was the Mustang, circa 1994 and beyond. And to be quite honest, you look back on it, and it wasn't the most loved Mustang out there in retrospect. It's fine, you know, it's a good car. But the story that most people don't realize is that there was the old Fox Body Mustang that was around for a long time. And they got that car about two months from production. And the new Mustang was the Ford Probe. And do you remember the Ford Probe?

Before me.

Before you, but you remember it, you've seen it. And they were just about to launch this thing, and they were putting this thing in front of focus groups, Mustang owners, and the Mustang owners went, hey, that's a nice little car you got there, man, but that ain't no Mustang, I'm just telling you. And so at the last minute, they went, oh s***, we can't launch this as a Mustang. I mean, it's just not performing well. So they branded it the Probe, and it went off, and then the Mustang lived on. And so the Mustang was getting really long in the tooth because the replacement effectively had been rebranded, something else. So my mentor, when you start at Ford, and I was fresh out of school, and I was just some punk overgrown farm kid from the Midwest, and I was working at Ford, I loved it. And my mentor was a gentleman by the name of John Coletti, who ran the Skunk Works program. He was also the head of the SVT program. Are you familiar with Ford SVT? So he ran SVT for a long time. And they tapped John on the shoulder, and they said, we want you to design the new Mustang. And the automotive sector was kind of bloated at the time. Like the teams were too big, and the headcount was too big, and the engine engineers were fighting with the power train or the chassis engineers, and the whole thing just became a little bit too insetuous. And they said, we want to bypass all of this coefficient of bureaucratic drag, and we want you to do a Skunk Works project. And Skunk Works really just means you're going to break all the rules and just lock yourself in a warehouse somewhere. So we contracted with Jack Rausch, and they took the entire team out of headquarters, and we were in this little, not that little, but a smaller private garage in Bromulus, Michigan, which said Rausch Racing on it. And it didn't say Ford anywhere on it, and we were like, you know, our whole engineering team was there, but it didn't say Ford. It was, you know, offsite, as they would say. And we had the designers there and the clay modelers there and the mechanics there and the engineers there and the finances team there and the marketing team there and the leadership there. I mean, we had everybody, and we locked ourselves all in the same building, which seems pretty logical, but that's not how it used to work in the past, like the chassis engineers in the chassis building and the engine engineers were in the engine building. So we locked everybody in the same room, so everybody's working together effectively. And the team that started that was John Coletti. And I'm like a year into the program, and John tapped me on the shoulder, and he said, hey, Mike, I want you to go join this. He was my mentor. Mike, I want you to join this Mustang program. I said, John, I don't want to. I'm doing this, you know, two years called an FCG program. For two years, you're in this, you're kind of bouncing around the company, and I was in the middle of this. And I said, I'd like to finish my FCG program. He's like, okay. He goes, think about this carefully, but, you know, it's your life. And then about two months later, he said, hey, Petersen, I want you to join this Mustang program. And after he asked twice, I'm like, okay, maybe I should smarten up and accept it. And so he pulled me out of this FCG program, and he put me on this, the Mustang program. And so that was a really good chapter. And so I worked on the Mustang program for a few years. And then we did the Cobra program, is where we put the quad cam engine in it. And then after that, I said, John, I really want to go back to school academically. And he said, I sat down with him. I said, hey, John, here's the proposal. I want to go to school. I want to take a break and go back full time and finish my master's work. And I'll never forget this. And I'm talking to John and he looks at me and he goes, he goes, Petersen? He goes, God damn it. And I'm like, oh s***, I pissed him off now. And he's kind of a scary dude, right? He goes, God damn it. He goes, I wish everybody was looking forward like you are. I would love it. And I'm going to set you up on this on a scholarship. And so he scared the s*** out of me. And then it turned out that he said, you know, we're going to send you back on scholarship. And so I took some time off and they sent me back on scholarship, which was nice. And so I got to go down to Purdue for a couple of years, not a couple of years, for a year, and finished my graduate work down there. And my professor down there was a gentleman called Professor Starkey. And he was the vehicle dynamics guru. And he was great. So he really knew the vehicle dynamics. And so I spent a lot of time studying underneath of him to understand vehicle dynamics. But what he liked about it is I was taking all this information from the Ford Mustang and we were modeling the Ford Mustang on these programs we were writing. But then we could correlate what the math models said, the computer said, to what was going on in the real world. So anytime they were testing a Mustang on the track, we were correlating it to what the computer was telling us to figure out where it was accurate and where we needed to adjust it. So we were looking at wheel slip and wheel spin and power output and all the dynamics that we could get a track on to get this thing really accurate. And then we published a bunch of those results with the Society of Automotive Engineers. So it was kind of a win-win. By today's standard, our model was pretty simple. But back then, it was better than what a lot of people had. And so it was a fun time. I really enjoyed that stage of my life.

Yeah, that sounds incredible. You made essentially the SN95, which then turned into the generation after that. And it brought the Mustang back, essentially.

How big was the team that worked on the SN95?

The co-located team was with the people that were, I think on the white, I don't say white color, blue color, but the people that were kind of designing it, there was about 70 of us. And then we also had a group of mechanics that were actually Roush mechanics, the reason I separate them. So you have real cars that you're changing parts and testing and testing. So there were probably another 30 mechanics that were working on it. So we were probably about 100, 150 people large.

And then so on the powertrain aspect, since you were one of the people working on that, how many people did you have there, just for scale?

Just for scale. And you got to have to be, it's always hard to answer some of these questions because we were taking a, called the modular 4.6 engine that was already built. And then we were doing modifications to that. And the powertrain included the transmission. And I was actually leading the transmission efforts in conjunction with Borg Warner down in Muncie, Indiana. And so when you say, well, how big was the team? Well, we had a team in Muncie, Indiana that built the transmission. And us on the SN95 program integrated in the car and the piston engineers and crank rod engineers. It gets complicated.

You still had like a full set of engineers.

Absolutely.

It wasn't like you and a few buddies just out back, just throwing together a car.

Exactly. But you do have kind of this team of people saying, okay, we got to throw this car together. So you're taking an engine that largely exists and you're putting it in the vehicle and you're customizing the stuff that needs to be customized. But then you also have a fairly large, what we would call the engine dev team. And they're doing a lot of the programming of the engine. And so you guys are familiar with programming. You get it up on the dyno and you're adjusting the variables. Well, the guys who are adjusting the variables on the program for the master code, if you think it's hard to adjust to tune a car on a dyno, imagine tuning a car where it has to meet emissions, performance and fuel economy everywhere from Arizona to Bemidji, Minnesota and everything else in between. And so they're really trying to fine tune this thing. So that development process takes a long time to optimize this. And then you're trying to get it up on the emission rollers and the fuel economy rollers to actually dial this thing in so you can meet the certifications. It's a complicated process.

And then you got guys like us who just tear it all down and replace the parts.

How do you feel about car mods?

I do the same thing. So I'm right there with you. But that's the part that you guys are building some pretty cool cars, right? But you really have a fairly low level of constraints. Like you can spend more money than a new car. You can buy overpriced crankshafts and overpriced pistons and aftermarket X, Y and Z. You really don't worry about emissions. You're not putting this on an emission roller. You're concerned about longevity, but not that much, right? You want it to last 100,000 miles, but it doesn't have to last a million.

Yeah, let the next person blow it up.

Correct. And so you kind of narrow this in. You say, my objective is I want to make this go fast. If your objective is, I want to make this go fast, I have to meet emissions, I have to meet all these internal requirements for durability, I have to make sure it does fuel economy, it has to do all these other things, it becomes a much more... And by the way, I can't spend much money because every piece price really impacts the profitability of the company. That's where it starts to get really, really complicated. And so you can even talk to engineers at a Formula 1 team and they'll say the same thing. It's hard to build a Formula 1 car. It's harder to build a production car. Just because there's more constraints around it. And so there's more trade-offs of your trade-off weight and cost and durability and reliability and emissions and da-da-da-da-da. And so it's a complicated process to build vehicles without question.

No doubt.

And then you want it to last for 25 or 30 years and make it reliably inexpensive to fix and maintain and repair.

There's so much that goes into it when you think about it.

There is a lot of variables.

It's dizzying.

And I even remember when we were building cars, because you could come up with this perfect design, and then the guys from the factory would come in and then go, well, I can't build that. You know, go back to the drawing board. I can't build that. I mean, I can't build that. Well, it's going to take me too long to put this screw in or that screw in. And so you have to design it for what we would call assemblability, and you have to design it as well for serviceability. And when you start to lay out all of those, you end up with some tough decisions and tough design trade-offs to get it to work. And now in today's environment, that doesn't include the crash standards and safety. And all of those things add up to a point where one of the reasons, and I'm disappointed in this, but a lot of new cars on the road today kind of look the same.

Oh, yeah. 100%. I think that's very fair to say. You look at a lot of economy cars, and they're all either getting bigger into this crossover shape or they're getting these similar lines, body lines.

Focus group stuff, yeah.

Yeah, they're just building a car for everybody. It's like, you know, I don't want to say it's communist, but, you know, it's like there's only one car that everybody can buy, and it's going to look the same and it's going to have the same function. It's just going to drive you.

Bring back the Golf Mark II. I think everybody should have one of those.

It's a great car.

So if I ever start making any sort of money off of this, that's going to be the project car. A Mark II Golf, I'm going to put a VR6 in there. We'll see if it works.

Maybe we can find an old busted up one and then we can use Raise A Hood to fix it up.

Yeah, there we go. Oh my, that'd be pretty cool. A Raise A Hood project car.

I love it.

Yeah, lots of billable hours.

But the point is, and you were spot on, everything starts to look the same, especially for the vehicles that are sort of mainstream vehicles. Because when you try to optimize all of these variables together, guess what? The best answer often wins. So you end up with vehicles that start to look...

Within constraints.

Within constraints. And that's kind of the best model for doing such and such.

Like Indy cars, they all look the same for a reason.

Well, and like BMW, BMW, every BMW has the same front bumper now. It has the same little air ducts, the same headlights, it has the same kidney grills because it saves money. They don't have to keep producing new parts for each model. So you literally get the cookie cutter shapes.

And I love BMWs. I have a few of them. My favorite car still is I have an old BMW E38, the old 7 Series. And I have had this laid up in a barn now for five or seven years. So my family gives me s*** that I haven't pulled it out of the barn for five or seven years. It has low mileage, it's covered up kind of out in the middle of nowhere. But to me, that was one of the best designs. And this is like a 2000 BMW 740i Sport, right? The short wheelbase. And one of the epitomes of kind of the classic BMW design. And around 2003, there was a designer from BMW called Chris Bangle. And Chris came in and he said, I'm going to reimagine kind of the definition of what a BMW looks like. And that's when there were more curves and scoops and, you know, dynamics to the design. Now, you can love it or hate it. Most of the traditionalists said that doesn't look like a BMW anymore. But the fact of the matter is the sales almost doubled. And they kind of mainstream the car a little bit. And BMW fiscally, financially did much better under their leader, his leadership for a while. Now, ultimately, he left, I think, for a variety of reasons. But as the Chris Bangle design came in, there were new government regulations specifically in Europe. And now, if you look at a BMW, the hoods are higher. And the hoods have to be higher because there has to be so much crash protection for when you run into a pedestrian. And so between fuel economy standards and safety standards and impact protection for pedestrians and pedestrians, I mean, I've seen a thousand other things, even like the new 7 Series. I look at the new 7 Series and I go, that thing just looks kind of like a pig. It's not a beautiful car, in my humble opinion. But the old vehicle, some of the older BMWs that had the lighter A pillars, the lower cowl, the crisper lines, you couldn't even legally produce those anymore because they don't meet all of these other different standards that are out there. And so, while standards are inherently good to make cars safer, better, more economical, the cost is, I think, for enthusiasts, the vehicles are not as light anymore, they're not as small anymore, they're just different. And you're over there going, I want a Mark II Golf. You can't even explain why, other than the fact that it's different, it's more organic, it's more analog.

Yeah, it's just, I love how light it is. The looks have always been amazing. And that was also my dad's dream car 30 years ago. Maybe there's some genetic reason that it's encoded in me. But I love older cars for some reason, just, I don't know. For some reason, it draws me to it. So that's always been like a dream of mine. But by the way, congratulations on being the longest episode.

Oh, well, that's my fault. Sorry about that.

First of all, we could keep going. It's all on your time here. We don't got jobs to get to today, but.

Let me look at my schedule. Cause if we're here and we're talking and we could even.

Cause otherwise we have a great question that we post to all our guests to wrap up as well.

Cause what we can do here, let me respond to this quick.

Yeah, absolutely. But.

Yeah, we can just cut this part out.

Yeah, that, yeah. Well, we, I'm the editor.

This is our show.

Let's do this. I got it. Let me respond to this.

No, no, no worries at all. But really Sean, it is freaking crazy how much goes into these things. Like cars as a whole. When you really think about like just everything that led to the, like the Hellcat was also Skunk Works project.

The Hellcat, yeah. And so was the 1M.

Yeah.

It was just a group of M engineers got together. They're like, let's make the one series, the sickest car that BMW's ever seen. And they pulled it off wonderfully.

Yeah.

So why don't we do this? I'll make a suggestion. I had another meeting, but I was able to cancel it. I just did that. Why don't we do this? Let's continue the conversation for whatever you want. Let's see where it goes. If you want to cut out half of this stuff, that's perfectly fine. Most marketing, it stays on the cutting room floor, that's fine. If for some reason you think there's enough there, you could break it into two, or you got one in the bag, I'll leave it to your discretion. But once we're here, and if there's other fun stuff to talk about, let's finish the conversation, see where it goes, and then I'll leave it to your discretion what you want to go do with it. Yeah. Does that sound okay?

I think let's do one more topic, and then we can wrap up with the usual three. The one topic that I had in mind, this could be a full topic or you could branch off.

Okay. You gotta be careful with me, because I'll branch off in a wary. Yeah, exactly.

This is a loaded one. The S197. Why is that the Mustang that crashes?

The S197.

Or just Mustang's engine. Okay, because you're being a Ford guy and an engineer. Maybe you could explain why is it that Fords are the, I guess, the meme in car culture? Why are they known for being the crowd killers? Would you have any explanation on that?

And when you say the crowd killers, what do you mean?

So, for example, like the Mustang is the cheapest horsepower that anybody could buy. So obviously, there's no talent when people get cars for cheap like that. And they're just known for crashing into crowds because you give all this power to somebody who's a rookie driver. And for some reason, it seems to happen with Mustangs the most. Somebody mentioned like the, what, leaf spring or whatever, suspension or something like that being the main reason. But I was just curious if you had any input on that one.

I don't know about that one.

Well, I think it's just because of the, you know, when you say Mustangs crash the most, when in all actuality, it's probably more like a Honda Civic or like a F-150, cause there's way more of them on the roads, but people just especially pay attention to Mustangs and they go, oh, yep, of course it was a Mustang driver. But, and somebody did a study and you know, BMWs, they don't use their blinkers for whatever reason. We just-

We got proof of you on camera.

We don't have that, you know, blinker. Yeah, so, but when people were asked to like actually take notice of what cars don't use their blinkers, it wasn't BMW that was the highest. It was Honda Civics. It was the more populated cars on the road. And I think like wherever BMW was, it was still like maybe like number six or five or seven, somewhere up there. But it was just because it's that stigma where you see a BMW not use their blinker, just lights up your head.

It reinforces.

Yeah, and you go, of course, the BMW driver didn't use his blinker. But you never do that when you see a Honda and you don't go, oh, of course, he didn't use his blinker. It's just this stigmatism that has been reinforced with everybody. And now we're seeing it with...

Scat backs.

Dodge Chargers, it shifted.

Yeah, that's the new one that crashes all the time. Because again, I think it might just be a cheap horsepower thing.

You know what's interesting though is that, I mean, what you're suggesting, there's two sides of this. So there's sort of the cultural side of it. And then there's the actual reality of what's actually happening. And you were kind of outlining both. That the perception of what is it was BMW, the reality is it was Civics, right? Whatever the answer was. Is the same thing happens when you're talking about vehicle problems. Somebody starts to light up a discussion around failure of the XYZ. And everybody goes, oh, I had that problem, or I saw that, or I heard about somebody. And it's almost like a bubble. You know, a problematic bubble online. Whether it's real or perceived, things tend to get overblown. A number of years ago, I've always kind of followed these esoteric stories in automotive, a number of years ago, this is probably 20 years ago, Ford, no, I take that back, it was GM. GM was being sued by the federal government because their trucks were too dangerous because they had the fuel tank on the outside of the fuel rail. I mean, the outside of the frame. So a typical truck has this frame in the middle and Ford would put the fuel cell here.

Where it's protected.

Where it's protected and GM and Chevy would put it on the outside. And so when you impacted the side of a Chevy, you had a higher likelihood of that truck catching on fire than you wouldn't afford. And so the federal government, even though it was perfectly legal, the federal government said, well, we're going to save the world and we're going to sue GM for having a dumb design out there. Now there was nothing illegal about their design, but they sued them or penalized them in some way. The part that was amazing though, is you can go online in NHTSA, the National Highway Transportation Safety Institute, and you can see what truck is actually safer. Statistically, the GMs have a lower fatality rate than the Fords do, right? And their failure rate was 1.3 million deaths per 100 million miles, and the Ford was 1.4, 1.5. And so you have the federal government suing GM because its fuel tanks are more likely to explode, even though it was the safer vehicle. And guess what? Once you put that in the public domain, that guess what? Your fuel trucks' tanks can explode. Anytime there was an explosion of a fuel tank, the media picked it up and it practically hit the six o'clock news.

Like Tesla's and their autonomous driving, for example, recently.

Yes, exactly. The same thing happens. And so part of it is, how can you cut through all of the noise to get to the actual facts? And we live in a sensationalized world where you're not only looking, always looking at the data, you're looking at just what's drawing headlines. And if the headline is, this truck crashed, it blew up, GM is building bad cars, it's a safety risk to American, that makes headlines. And so that's what was kind of driving the discussion. But I think the second side of it is, for every vehicle, you have different, different drivers have different, you know, personalities. And somebody that's buying a Civic versus somebody driving a Mustang, there's a higher risk profile there.

Absolutely. Or somebody in a BMW that doesn't use their blinkers. I caught him in 4K. I mean, it was close.

We were doing a shoot. I'm not, I don't have to use my blinkers if we're purposely switching lanes like in and out.

Like he used to give me s***.

It doesn't, it wouldn't even look good if I did use them, like in the shoe.

Back in the, he used to give me.

Does Chris Harris use his blinkers when they're doing the drive-bys and like, they're like, okay, I'm going to signal now to let you know I'm going around the camera car.

Like, no, I'm with him. I don't think this is a BMW issue. I think he was just in the heat of the moment.

Yeah, no, I was specifically thinking like, okay, don't use your blinker because, you know, we're shooting a video.

Yeah.

I know, I'm just busting him, but he used to mess with me. He used to mess with me. Like he'd be riding with me and I'd be doing a buck, buck 10 or whatever. And then I would, you know, signal to change lanes. He's like, you're already doing something illegal. Like why are you signaling at 110?

Yeah, if you're signaling at 110 miles an hour, you're wasting effort focusing on the road instead of, and you're using your blinker for somebody who's in front of us or behind us, who's behind us that's, you know, needs that, who's in front of us is gonna see that within the three seconds that you're about to pass on. Like it doesn't make sense. It's a waste of effort.

I touched the nerve on that one.

There you go.

But there's so many different topics we could talk about. You obviously have a lot of experience within the industry. I would definitely love to have you on in the future if you'd ever be interested. This is gonna be a project that we're following very closely with Raise A Hood.

Well, and I think what you guys are doing, quite frankly, and we talked about this a little bit in our conversation, is that it's fun to build things. And you guys are building an audience here in Minnesota where you're trying to tie together experts and stories in a long form format. And when you first start, it's hard, right? These things just don't come naturally. You said you were doing the one rally program and you lost a lot of money on it. Building a business is real and it comes with real risks. But I applaud you guys for at least doing it because there's a lot of people that are talking and there's always not a lot of people that are doing. And so it takes guts to go put real capital and real money and real time into this stuff. And so I think the whole idea of building out our broader Minnesota community, even though this is beyond just Minnesota, I recognize that, but creating an epicenter here is pretty cool what you guys are up to.

Yeah, Harris is one of the few people that I really believe in. He's got so much drive, so much more than I see in half the people I know. He's incredible. And that's why I'm so happy to be able to do this with him, just because if anybody was gonna succeed, it's gonna be him. And whatever he does is gonna be great.

Yeah.

Well, I appreciate that.

Keep punching, man, it's awesome.

I've met a lot of people. You are by far one of the most talented and skilled people that I know.

I was hoping you'd say skilled, because man, I was not born with talent. Like, I just figured it out over time.

Have you ever read the book Grit by Angela, I think it's Duckworth is her name.

I saw it at Barnes and Noble yesterday, but I didn't read it, no.

You know, it's interesting. If you ever get a chance, the premise is not that hard, but they back it up with a bunch of academic research. But the premise is that if you have a lot of grit, you'll do well in this world. And it's backed up on a bunch of levels. Now, clearly, it's better to be smarter than less intelligent, and it's better to be born in certain areas than not. But the reality is that one of the best predictors of your success is grit. And I say that word, and we all kind of go, well, I know what that means. It's a little harder to measure. But the reality is, it's a huge predictor. My daughter is, when she was younger, she had some minor learning disabilities. They weren't bad, but we sat down, and she was probably eight years old, nine years old. And we started to read this book, Grit. And it was probably over her skill set to read this adult book at the age of 10. But we would sit down every night and read for, you know, 10 or 15 minutes together about Grit. And if you ask her, and she does have great grit, but she realized that that was one of her strongest attributes. And so she's 20 years old now, and she's doing very well. But if you ask her, if you ever meet my daughter, and you go, hey, what's your greatest attribute? She'll go, it's my grit. And I'm so glad that that kind of sunk in and that she actually does have that because she just doesn't give up. And she'll ultimately be very successful in this world just because she has that persistence that when something goes sideways, she doesn't give up. It doesn't matter if it's a boyfriend, or friends, or whatever it may be, she's like, okay, that happened, I'm gonna move on and just focus on the go forward of what I have control over. And that skill is a really important skill, especially if you're starting a business. Because you always go, oh, this is gonna be fun, it's gonna be great. It's hard, it feels like everything is stacked up against you when you're doing this stuff. And I don't care if you're trying to build Raise A Hood or Minnoxide, they're all, it's a path riddled with a thousand reasons why not to go do it.

Yeah, and I think, and I learned this maybe three or four years ago from, it's a book called The Way of the Seal.

I haven't heard about this.

Yeah, I've heard, I forgot who the author was at the top of my head. But basically, it's something called front sight focus. It's kind of like standard amongst armed forces or whatever, it's like, you got all this, you know, you have your peripheral vision, but you have that red dot in front of you. That's the only thing that's clear. Focus on what's in front of you. Everything else is just noise, because, you know, to be able to jump from one target to the next, you need to be focused on what's in front of you.

Front sight focus.

Be aware of what's around you, but focus on, yeah, I love it. And it's just stuck with me forever, but.

No, it's a great, it's kind of the same thing, which is if you can envision where you're gonna land and what you're trying to get to, it's easy to stay focused on that and do that. It's easy to get distracted. One of the key things that we teach in driver school, there's a book out there called Twist of the Wrist, and I'm trying to remember the author. He was a motorcycle racer, and he wrote a book called Twist of the Wrist. You can look it up on Amazon and kind of remind me of the author. But he has a saying in there, I mean an article in there, a section, that I use in business, I use it in life, I use it when I teach students on the track as well, which is you have a $10 bill worth of attention, right? That's all you have, right? If you have a $10 bill of attention right now, is how much are you focused on me? Maybe five bucks, six bucks, I don't know. You're thinking about the time, is this turned up at the right level? There's a whole bunch of stuff you're focused on. But we always will go where our eyes go. So think about what you're thinking about. When you're on the track, one of the parts that I love about being on the track is you can spend almost your entire $10 on X. The downside with that is when you're on the track is you'll focus in on, you'll get tunnel vision. You'll be focused on just like the track right in front of you. People will be waving flags on the side of the track. Your session is done, the race is done, and you won't even see them, right? Because you're so incredibly focused. You have all your $10 focused on this, right? And so when you're on the track, you're saying, how much of my focus on my braking? How much of my focus on the acceleration? How much do I focus on feeling the car and where it's moving? How much of my focus on the car in front of me? You know, there's a lot of little things there, but you're using all of your $10. And so in racing, sometimes you're trying to tell people to open up your aperture, right? Think about all these dynamics that are going on so you're more of a holistic driver. I think the opposite is true sometimes in life. Like you have all of these externalities going on and you're focused about the stock market and your girlfriend and whose turn is it to take out the garbage and your car is broken, whatever it is, you're focused on so many things. But when you say front side focus, you're trying to say, okay, cut out all the noise, oops, where should I spend 80% of my effort? And if you're not spending enough effort on that 80% of whatever that front side focus is, you'll get lost in all the noise and you won't move forward.

Yeah, Joe Rogan and lots of other philosophers and all this, they call it many different things, but Joe Rogan calls it like bandwidth or units in your head. So it's like, you have 100 units, what are you dedicating them to? And even in conversations like, and this is why the last few podcasts have gotten a lot better, I'm just purely engaged, just getting better at listening skills because that's where I'm using 80% of my units or whatever.

And you have to focus, it's hard to be an interviewer, I think. Cause if you come in as a guest, you get some stories to tell and it's kind of easy and you can react. But if you're the host of something, and this happens whether you're interviewing somebody, if you're hosting a podcast, whether you're trying to lead an organization, is you're trying to listen to them, but then you have to figure out what am I going to talk about next, right? How am I going to stitch this conversation together? And then ultimately I have to dovetail all of this into something that is actually interesting to people on the other end, and you're doing it all in real time.

Yep, and the interesting factor, I call it the bell, I learned that from Mr. Beast or whatever, but that's 10%, but I've also learned in the last few episodes that it's okay to have a lull. Like give it two, three seconds, let it sit, and then come up with a question. Like digest everything that you threw at me or whatever. It's like, all right, and then instead of having this question, it is me and 100% related. You know, so. But yeah, I absolutely love it, but.

So the twist of the wrist author is Keith Code.

Yes, Keith Code.

The Way of the Seal, Mark Devine.

That's what it was. And the one by Mark Devine was an excellent book, but there's a few others I'd recommend before that one, just because I've, you know, expanded my library over the years. So, but let's do the three questions, Sean.

Yeah, all right. So we'll hit you with this. You're gonna have to choose three cars. One's your daily, track car and show car. Oh my God. So you have unlimited budget.

Unlimited budget.

Yep, your imagination is the only thing that's holding you back.

Oh my God. Yep, one example I always use is Dave Rasmussen put a Judd engine into a car.

Yeah.

Just modified it.

Into a little kit car.

Was that his daily drive car?

That was gonna be his kit or track car. And then he was gonna have a tow rig as well for it.

You can get wild with it.

Yeah.

Oh man, that's limiting. Three is not enough.

No, not a false problem.

I know, when we first stated this question, it was five cars, but then we thought that was a little bit too many.

Too much for an episode. It's like an hour discussion.

But I feel like three is a good amount because it just kind of helps narrow down your priorities, your priorities, who you are as a person and what you find the most value in.

And do I have to drive the track car to the track or can I trailer?

No, exactly. You can get a truck and trailer to get your track car.

And so is that my truck? Does that count as a daily driver?

No, that's part of your track package.

Gotcha.

Yeah, this is a lot of people have tow rigs just to, you know, tow their multitude of cars to.

Yeah, you don't have to include that in there. Just know you'll have a tow rig.

Okay. So let's start with the daily driver. And, you know, I have a full size Range Rover now and I really like the vehicle and they just launched a new Range Rover.

Yeah.

Not that long ago, which, but what I would do is I would get that Range Rover, but they don't put the diesel engine in it anymore. They built a new diesel engine in it, but they only released that in Europe. So I would buy a new long wheelbase Range Rover, but I would grab the diesel engine that's only available in Europe and incorporate that engine. So that would be my daily driver.

Love it. Really unique answer.

Yeah, a European spec Range Rover. That you can't get in the States yet. For the show car, oh, I think if I was gonna pick a show car, is it would have to be an old Trans Am with the screaming chicken on the hook.

Oh yeah. I just watched Smokey and the Bandit.

Yes. I mean, that's just-

Such a cool car.

It's a s*** car, but it looks so cool.

Oh yeah.

They weren't very fast. They didn't handle it great. But in terms of just a cool car, I mean, that's just pure Americana.

Would you resto mod it at all or anything like that? Or keep it original?

I don't know. I think I would probably keep it original or at least original looking. I mean, more horsepower is always better.

Don't get me wrong.

Because there's a lot of like special versions of that car, you know. Would you get Smokey and the Bandit or would you go for like a certain color?

Yeah, that's a good question. You know, the black and gold is always great, but it looks a little bit like you're trying too hard as well, right? I feel like you can't do that without a cowboy hat and a mustache. I would have to give some thought to the color on that one.

I'm trying to remember. My friend, he had a blue one and I can't remember if it was a red screaming chicken or if they used a yellow on it. But the wheels also had like were whatever the alloy with gold on the inside of the spokes. Oh, I love it. It was gorgeous. It was pretty low miles too. It wasn't even like that beat up. And I was like, this is a clean Trans Am.

Yeah, I think there's just a fun car to have. Every time I bring it up, my wife just kind of shakes her head and goes, you are not getting that vehicle.

I always tell people, that's one of my dream cars, by the way. If I ever get a Minnoxide compound with 20 cars, that's in there. I'm gonna get the biggest mustache like this guy over here.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Perfect.

I just think that's a great looking car. When I was, I told you, my dad was a mechanic. And before the Smoky and Bandit version, they had one, and he was in a GM dealership. And before that, they started making the Trans Ams of that body style. I think that, was that the F body style? I think it was. But they started making them in the early 70s, mid 70s. And mid 70s, I think it was. And I was young, I was small enough that I was able to stand up in the back seat. And somehow, I was in a Trans Am with my father, and the neighbor was in the passenger seat, and I was in the back seat, kind of standing up. And my dad said, son, sit down. And apparently, I didn't sit down fast enough, so he just punched it. And this was the version before fuel economy standards kicked in. And it was the 455, either the Super Duty or the HO. I think it was called the Super Duty. 455 HO, or SD. So you can still buy a 455 SD, which is just a big block that's all hopped up, that's just torque everywhere, and they become somewhat pretty valuable. But it was just a torque monster. And so I was standing up, and my dad kinda yelled at me to sit down, and then he just punched it, and I just went, boop. I sat down instantly, non-voluntarily. And for some reason, I wasn't very young, but that still sticks with me. So maybe if I bought the Trans Am, it might be a little bit older than the Smokin Bandit generation, but still that body style.

Love it. That's a core memory, too.

Yeah, that was a core memory. That was a core memory.

And then the Trek car is a tough one.

That's a tougher one.

What do you Trek right now? You Trek the Porsche?

I Trek the Porsche, and I bought this older Boxster S, and I never said I'm gonna buy this old Boxster S and turn it into a Trek car, but I bought an older Boxster S and you just slowly turn it into a Trek car. It just sort of happens. And so I've had the engine on a few times, and now we have it up to some reasonable horsepower, some really good breathing. We've lowered it. We run tack tires on it. I've improved the cooling system, the oiling system, and all the other stuff, so it's really Trek compliant. And I love the car now because I can hang with GT3s, and I look like I'm coming up in this modest little Boxster. And it sticks like glue, but it always kind of surprises people when they think they're just going to walk away and it doesn't happen. And it does handle really well because it's the older generation that's quite light. So I enjoy that as a Trek car now because I can just use it as a daily driver as well. The other Trek cars I would consider, I think the new GT3 is...

The new RS, DRS and everything?

And actually, if I bought that, I would probably get the non-RS, which is still in the six-speed because it's more engaging. So I think the GT3 with the six-speed in it is a fun car. I've spent enough time in the new Corvette, the C8, and I'm not totally impressed. I think it's a little too big, a little too overdone, a little too heavy.

The Stingray, you mean?

The Stingray, well, and the Z06 that's come out. I haven't driven the Z06 yet. But the new Stingray, it's good, it's almost too good. And you lose some of the analog.

I see what you mean.

The C6 version in the Z06 package was one of the lightest Corvettes that was ever built. And that's still a small block, large displacement, high revving, naturally aspirated V8. And I think that's just kind of the quintessential Americana track car in many respects. And so I think those are both great track cars. I've spent enough time in Ferraris. The 458 sounds wonderful. The 488 drives wonderful. The F8 is just unbelievable. But you get to the point where it's not quite as, it's almost too good, right? It just does everything so well, is you're not fighting the car as much. And I do like vehicles where you feel like it's really you. It's fully organic.

Engaging.

But I would probably just buy a proper track car, whether it was an Ariel or, there's a couple other manufacturers that do just pure track vehicles, that's just, you know, it's not street legal, but it's an actual track car. And they just, once you get in a pure track car, they're so fast and they're so fun and they handle so well. And you don't have to worry about crash protection and bumpers and all this extra weight. And you can get the CG right down on the ground the way it should be. And so once you start to get into a pure track car, then it opens up a whole host of opportunities, including retired race cars. Because once you start looking at retired race cars, they're not good for much other than just track days. So for 50 grand, you can get an unbelievably great track car, including old Formula One and old Indy cars, make for fun track cars.

Oh my gosh, that would be a sight to see.

So that, all of a sudden, you just say a dedicated track car. I'm like, oh my God.

Yeah, that's so many options. We are gonna make you choose one. At least for this episode.

You're gonna have to bring me back. I'm gonna have to give more considerations. I can't do that.

That's a tough one.

I'll think about it. I will think about it, and I'll get back to you.

Do you like the new GT 500?

I do like the new GT 500.

It's one of my favorite cars I've driven.

Yeah, I think Mustang has done, here's what I think Mustang has done very well. I think they've done a good job trying to balance out nostalgia with enough modern technology, and they've really wrapped some good performance around it.

It's insane.

It's insane. When I drive the vehicles on the track, and I don't have one, but I've just spent enough time with customers and their vehicles that it's... The thing I like about Mustangs, they're still a little bit uncooked. They're still... You can still feel the motion. You can still... It doesn't feel like it's on rails 100% of the time. It still feels like you're driving the vehicle. And I like that. I think the Camaros have gotten too heavy over the years. They have too much weight in them, and I'm disappointed in that, although they have some great power trains in them. The Chrysler's are wonderful in a straight line. They handle like s*** on a track, unfortunately. And so you'll get on a track, and BIR is an interesting one. Like a lot of tracks, they have a drag strip, and then you drive around for two miles, and then on the drag strip, and you drive around. And so like these Hellcats, they have 750 horsepower, and they'll pull up next to you on the straightaway, and they just blow you like you're tied to a tree. You know, you can't keep up with them. But then by turn three, you've caught up with them, and you can't get around them because they're sucking up the whole track. And so I think-

You usually don't know track etiquette.

And they're not that great. And typically, most of the drivers are straight line drivers. They're just not typically. But people like to bring them to the track because they want to see how fast they can get their car to go on the straightaway. And then the rest of the course is sort of a reason to get around the track so they can go down the straightaway and wide open throttle until they can hit 170 miles an hour, 180 miles an hour. So they're not a great track car, but I applaud for what Chrysler did with those vehicles for the run they had. I think the bigger question with them is it this year or next year is the last year of the internal combustion engine event?

This year, 2023, they stopped taking orders for Challenger chargers.

Breaks your heart.

To each their own, man. I don't know if they're gonna get the same demand out of them on an electric vehicle.

I can't imagine this has been their bread and butter since 2015, since they released the Hellcat.

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

They must have made so much money, they were like, well, we can just retire off of this.

It's supposed to be a limited production run, my a**. Where can people find you?

raiseahood.com. The website is live. Sign up for free. If you wanna sign up for one of our telemechanics, just punch in your make model, put it in your garage, your digital garage, and just reach out to us, and we'll set you up with one of our experts. They're always standing by. And these are real mechanics. You get to hire the mechanic that you want with some expertise in your vehicle and use the discount called MO15, and it will give you a 15% discount to kick it off. And it's not very expensive. Our calls start less than 20 bucks. But it'll give you a means of saving some money. It'll also give you kind of a nice safety net if you like working on this stuff yourself. Or if you're having somebody in the family with a vehicle problem, get some extra advice without having to spend a lot of money at the shop. Our AI engine is still building, so you can go in there and do early diagnostics on your vehicle and start to exercise the early AI engine, which is kind of fun. And it gets better every time.

So you know, like, that's exciting.

It's exciting and we love playing with it right now. But quite frankly, every time somebody goes in and says, here's the problem I'm having, we look to see how well the AI engine performed. Of course. We look at their make, their model, what their problems are. And the thing that's been surprising to me, we look at all of the problems that are, what people are trying to understand, a lot of the problems aren't that difficult. And so it's not like they go, oh, I have these four OBD2 codes that are lighting up, and I, you know, this is happening. Sometimes it's pretty basic stuff. And that's the part that I find encouraging about this, which is how can you use the AI to answer real problems for real people in, you know, on just basic blocking and tackling things and sort of demystify vehicles to a certain degree. That's the part that we find exciting, and that's gonna get better every time somebody uses it.

And then anything else for you, like your track days, people can find you or anything like that?

Yeah, this season I have, I'll be honest, I have, if you wanna look at the track days up at BIR, it's posted. We typically run every other Monday at the track, and I'm there about half the time. I'll be the first to admit, I haven't spent as much time there this summer. I've been a little busy with this other business, but they have a great group of instructors up there.

Yep, me and my dad are gonna do one of those soon here.

Oh, are you? When you do, let me know. I'll make sure we take care of you. But the guy who is running the program now is Andre. Andre is a great gentleman. He's Brazilian. He raced for a number of years, and he's been running track schools for like 20 years now. And he was one of the stunt drivers in Ford versus Ferrari.

I love that movie.

It's a great movie. And he was one of the stunt drivers in that. And so he's always, he's a great personality, and he's fun to listen to, and he's a very good driver as well. And the part that I like about the BIR program is, we'll teach you to be a good driver. We'll keep you safe. But it's also meant to be entertaining. Like cars are fun. And I think one of the things that people are concerned about before they go to a track is, A, am I going to get hurt? The answer is no, you're not gonna get hurt. We're not gonna let you put it into a guardrail, right? It's a very safe environment to go do this. You will come home with less fuel in your tank and a little less rubber on your tires. But that's part of the fun. But it's a very safe environment. There's very few accidents up there. And it's a safe place to go play. But you will come out as a better driver than when you started. This is like golf. You're not gonna go out there and be a Formula One driver from the very beginning. But you'll get much better at what you're doing. And you'll realize there's a lot of things going on in terms of trying to drive a vehicle fast. One of the challenges that we bump into is, we had a gentleman up there, a younger gentleman, and he was, you know, this was kind of a father-son day. And the kid was up there. And you guys are young enough, you're starting to get the fear of God in your life. When you're 18, you don't have the fear of God.

That's my brother.

That's your brother.

I'm starting to get that fear of God right now.

You're starting to get the fear of God. And you actually become a better driver when you have that. And you'll realize that driving is very analytical in nature. You're trying to read the car. You're trying to be smart. And you can become a very good driver when you're a little bit more seasoned. But we do get kids up there once in a while. You know, I say kids, 18 years old, they don't have the fear of God yet. And oftentimes, if there's accidents, those are the ones that have that accidents because they're trying to come in too fast. And then they make dumb mistakes on the track. One of the most common mistakes, and I've seen it twice now, is people that are coming around, typically turn 13, and they're coming in and the car starts to drift, and then they panic and then they let off, and when they let off, the back end comes around, and they come all the way around, cross over the track, and put it into the side of the wall, kind of sideways. Never any injuries, but it's one of those that the only person that's gonna do it, is where they just think they're invincible out there, and they're not reading the car whatsoever. And it's happened, the only time I've seen it happen has been on very young individuals. So, but at least they were trying. And I say, go out there, drive within your skill set, you're gonna be fine. And you're gonna have a whole new level of appreciation for what your vehicle is capable of, and how well it was actually engineered. Whether you're driving a Honda Civic, or a GTI, or a Trans Am, or your Durango, give it a shot, it's fun.

Sweet.

Durango would be fun, if I could load up like six people into that thing, and just swing around the corners.

We actually have a track truck out there, which is actually a Ford Explorer. It's an old police car that we've semi-modded for the track. And we'll give people rides around the track just to get them accustomed to it. So we'll have five people in there doing tail drifting around the corner. And people are even amazed how fast you can get an Explorer around the track. So I can't even imagine a Dodge Durango. That would just be awesome. That would just be awesome. Guys, I appreciate you letting me join you today here on the podcast.

This is an absolute blast. I appreciate you reaching out. Really cool to, I guess, your son and then his friend, our listeners. So that's pretty sweet to hear. So just love growing this little community of ours. You know, me and Sean have been a great team and it's pretty awesome to see the community we've been growing lately. So Sean, people can find you where?

Yeah, you can find me on Instagram at 1mnmopar. I'm going to Power Cruise. Well, I've already been to Power Cruise by the time this gets posted, but I'll make sure to share any content that I get from there. So check it out.

Perfect. And then you guys all should hopefully know where to find me since you're on the Minnoxide podcast. But if you do not Instagram Minnoxide, everything is Minnoxide, make sure to sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter is getting really, really cool. Every single week I'm trying to improve it, wallpaper Wednesdays with the fun photos I take, the latest videos, latest podcasts. So just so you don't miss anything, sign up for that. But other than that, thank you everyone for tuning in. Thank you Michael for being our guest. See you next time.