The Auto Industry Is Heating Up — Are You Positioned Right?

Transcript

Just to correct you, you said despite a $2.7 billion EV-related charge. Is that what I said? What you meant to say, sir, was despite a $7.2 billion EV-related charge. Why I’m so frustrated right now is you think about how hard it is to get tiny little programs off the ground at these OEs, tiny little things that enthusiasts would love that cost like $1 million, $2 million. Can’t do it. Writing off $7 billion in EV, stock still goes up, record profits, 20% dividend hike. I don’t understand how the stock market worked clearly.

Welcome to the automotive advantage. Grow your business and get smarter in just one hour. All right. Let’s get the most important thing out of the way up front. What is the little gangster drag racing class, the 530 class everybody’s talking about? Can you get us up to speed on that? I’m a little bit behind here, but 530 little gangster is the class. Everybody loves it. The cars are on 530s. And the 8th. Yeah. Just to be clear. You never know now. Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m asking. Yeah. I first heard about this from Ron at Vengeance. He was like, dude, everyone’s going to use 530 little gangster cars. And then we heard it again today from Case at Streetcar Takeover. And yeah, they’re popping off all over the country. I think it’s… We always talk about this. Like, what’s the next thing? What do you see coming? What’s going to be cool in the future? It seems like 530 gangster is where it’s at right now. But honestly, I don’t know a lot about it. So if someone does, that would be cool to fill us in on. Do you know anything about this?

No, I don’t. But I think it’s grown up out of some of the, what do they call them? The call-out classes. And they needed… You can pick a number in the 8th and people can pick a number in the 8th. And people can build a car to it and have a set of rules. So it’s cool. I mean, new classes drive the sport forward. So that’s cool. Good. Let’s go. Do we have podcast update? Are you prepared to talk about where we’re at as a podcast?

No, we are doing well. Still hovering around 1,100 subscribers, which is great. We did have our last podcast with Alan. I guess people love it. How car sales go down and how Corvettes are built and all that. It was a great pod. That one did really well for us. And then I think we learned a lot about kind of this short form of vacation of the long form pod. But Alan was a great guest. That was definitely a pod that popped off a little bit on both YouTube and Spotify. We got a lot of comments about it. And you were telling me he sold a bunch of cars from this.

So maybe we can again talk about how little views you need to make a big impact in your business. It’s a little bit of Alan’s business and a little bit of Maddox business, but I’ll share what I know, which I think is okay. But they are already seeing the impact. Alan personally seeing the impact and yeah, you’re right. I mean, once you get past the, everybody knows the big YouTubers. And the big podcasters, but you start to realize if you’re a specialist on selling Corvettes, which it’s fun because when I watched Alan’s podcast, the thing that hit me was that’s a guy who has the perfect job in life. He loves Corvettes. He loves hanging out with people like Corvettes. Loves road racing and he loves finding you the right car. They sold a bunch of cars. They sold a bunch of cars.

Alan sold them and had a lot of interesting conversations and it makes sense. And I think this will help people as they think about how they put content together and how they interact in a podcast. But if someone is going to take the time to listen to you talk about how to order a new Corvette, they’re probably ready to order a new Corvette. And that’s exactly what happened. I know he sold a bunch of cars. He sold a bunch of cars. He sold a bunch of cars. I know he sold a bunch of cars, like more than five, more than ten. So from that little podcast. So these things go a long way. That’s ultimately our measurement of impact is do people really come on here, talk to us and get some response. The other thing that Alan did, and it’s funny because he starts experimenting with something called Opus Clip or Opus Clips, which is an AI generated software that can take a video, cut it up into little bite sized pieces, which is what everybody watches. And it’s blown up for Alan. And you and I had a good laugh because he dumped them all. And that’s you and I would never recommend that. But talk about that a little bit because it’s worked.

Honestly, the craziest I see, I was going to say crazy strategy, but I don’t think there was any strategy. I think Alan just so if you don’t know, opusclip.com is the app, but it’s also a website. You can basically take any long form content, which weirdly doesn’t even have to be your own. You can just take any YouTube link you have, you drop it into Opus Clip and it will go through and cut up 10, 15, 20 short form vertical videos for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, whatever. It doesn’t do a perfect job, but it does do a very good job. And it has this little AI built in score card now that’ll say like, based on what this is and what we see, this should be 90% viral or 80% viral or down to 10%. This is pretty boring. No one’s going to watch it type of a thing. Now, what a normal person would do, I believe, is they would download these clips and they would say, okay, I’m going to release one a week for 10 weeks, or I’m going to release one every other day

for two weeks, or I’m going to release one a day for 10 days. And what Alan did was just literally post all 10 of them at the exact same time, which is absurd. And every single one of them did numbers. They did like seven, eight, 10,000 views a piece, which is a great reminder that social media is not a time-based machine anymore. When you post something is not how it decides who gets to see it and how it goes viral and all that. It used to be that way when your feed was chronological, but your feed has been non-chronological since like a decade now. You know what I’m saying? So yeah, he posted all of them at the same time. Insane. They all did great.

Double insane. And the lesson is just try things, I guess. Like don’t think about everything so much. Really the game to content, which we’ve told people forever, is to just put out a lot of content. Guys like Gary Vee, when they’re saying “Promosy,” when they’re saying “I post 200 clips a day,” that’s not scheduled. They’re just posting 200 clips a day. Some of them go really well. Some of them don’t. They learn from that. But yeah, what Alan did was a wake-up call from me. I’m like, “Man, we just got to post more.”

And if you’re at home and you want to do that, Opus Clip is a good one. There’s other good ones as well. But I’ve been using that one for quite a while. Again, sometimes the cuts aren’t perfect. You know, you can mess with it a little bit. It’s getting better all the time though. But yeah, super cool. And again, he showed us, I mean, some of his analytics. He was doing like 100,000 views in a day. So it was working for him.

Yeah, I think especially for folks that don’t have a graphic artist background like you, this is a great tool. Don’t wait. I’ve been playing around with a little bit. I did a Monoxide podcast interview when I was at PRI. And I did exactly what you just described. I had to just cut up that interview and I’ve played around on LinkedIn. I’m going to start… I think I’ll do our stuff and start… You’re not going to like it. The cuts won’t be perfect. The lighting will be amazing.

But yeah, so we’ll just start doing that. And we learned a lot from Alan. Thanks for doing that, Alan. That was good. And I think he’s going to have to come back on because he had a good time. Okay. you don’t have to have a podcast to reap the rewards of this thing. He was a guest on our podcast. He cut up a bunch of clips and did really well for him. You were a guest on Monoxide. You can cut up those clips and use them. So for people who were like, “Well, I don’t know. Podcast is not helpful to me.” He’s like, “Right, but someone’s probably hounded you to go on a podcast, talk about your life or your business. So go do that.” And then take all that. Use it for your own social channels. Collab with the original pod and then grow from there. So yeah, it’s a good lesson.

I want to talk about where we’re at, kind of the close of 25 and then early indicators of 26. Because Justin, in case you didn’t notice, Q1 is already over. Are you aware of this? So you got it? So we reached out to Brian Lounsberry, our friend at Midway Plus, and this is a Midway Plus Index. So I always give the disclaimer of “Call Brian.” We’re just going to report this, but he’s the real expert and go deeper into the data with you. So give the gang over at MidwayPlus.com a call.

Here’s the punchline as an industry, the automotive aftermarket from December into January down 4.9%. We saw a little bit of lift around the holidays, not surprising. Everybody was spending some money. You and I are following other industries right now, firearms industries popping off, which is great because they had a really bad last couple of years. I think the automotive aftermarket will follow. We’re going to talk about the OEs here in a second. Here were the cliff notes from the report, though, from Midway Plus.

Demand is up and keeps going up. This is interesting. Capital investment is up, meaning folks are buying equipment and product. But conversion and orders are down. Skew percentage available is down. You can’t sell what you don’t have, which is this is an interesting development. And if you’re a manufacturer, this might ring a bell because I think people tightened it up and don’t have the product on the shelf. This is a big number. Demand is up 37% over January, the month of January so far. So it looks like people are out there buying performance parts and accessories. But I think manufacturers probably tightened it up a little bit at the end of the year. You can guess why they had to make the numbers. But what’s your feel on the street, Justin?

Just general vibe. I feel like the January, everyone was like, all right, well, at least here regionally. Winter, the cars are away. All the trade shows are over. I got through the holidays. All right, let me hunker down a little bit. I don’t feel like buying was bad. People weren’t really into it. But in the last week, everyone I’m talking to, no matter what their hobby is, they’re like itching again. Like, man, I can’t wait to get back out golfing. I can’t wait to get back out cars. Like, I’m already like, what do I need? What’s the race schedule look like? Where are we going? So it feels like there is this pent up energy that we’re going to see come right now.

Because if you’re looking at your calendar, you’re like, okay, June is very close to now. Q1 is basically over. It’s February. And I got to get ready for these things. Oh, now I’m excited about these things. Now, like, okay, what do I need to do? What do we need to buy? So like, even my own little projects, I’m like, okay, hold on. We got to swap the brake pads out. We got to do the oil change. We got to get prep for spring.

So yeah, it feels to me like that’s right, just based on general vibes of a car guy. Yeah, good. I think I would add to this. If you’re a salesperson, and you’re trying to move the needle, the impact of the weather is real. And if your C-suite and your sales team comes in and says, hey, it’s been snowing for 60 days, nobody’s thinking about cars. It’s real. Like, I don’t… For our audience that’s not in the Midwest or the Northeast, this winter has sucked. It’s bad. And I don’t want to do anything with cars. You can’t move a car. You wouldn’t… Nobody, unless you got a trailer, and even then, you don’t want to put a car in a trailer right now. So things are going to be off. They’re just going to be off, and you’re just going to have to roll with it. But that’s a really good point, Justin. Like, I can’t wait to go do stuff in the Corvette. And I can’t wait to go to my first car show. Even if it’s 40 degrees, I’m going to be there. Like, I think it’ll hit. That might be May, but anyways, it’s coming soon. But what are you going to do first thing as a car guy?

Well, yeah. So I’ve slid now into like… I want a classic vintage muscle car to just cruise Woodward in and go to Cars and Coffee In. I don’t want to be a hot rod. I don’t want to be cool. I don’t want to be lowered. I was around a 71 Chevelle, 71, 72 Chevelle. And I was like, man, these are just fucking cool. And then I was like, you know what? I’ve always wanted a box Nova.

So then I’m on Facebook Marketplace looking at like… But there aren’t a lot of cars for sale because no one in Michigan wants to be selling a car right now. But I’m like, man, it’d be cool. And then you’re like, well, okay, I do have other cars. So what can I buy for those in the meantime? So yeah, I think the first time you can go out in your hot rod is going to be great because this winter has sucked. And it was weird. I think everyone was just like, all right, I’m going to hunker down winter and then February first hit. And we’re like, it’s almost I could almost see the end, even though it’s so far away. How about you? What’s your first move?

I mean, it works. It’s 24 degrees here in Pontiac, Michigan. And it feels warm outside. Like I only have two jackets on today. So first thing, I got to get the Corvette back. I want to go drag racing this year. I, you know, we went out with Fox Factory F-150 and had a blast on that thing. So we really got the juices flowing at the end of the year. I’m like, man, these things are just… Another thing is new cars are just amazing right now. They’re so fast compared to what we both grew up on. You had LS stuff. I had Fox Body stuff and, you know, it’s nothing to get 11 second car. So, yeah, spring is around the corner. Q1’s already over. Let’s talk about other early indicators. You ready? Here’s what the year looks like. So I just grabbed this clip. I’m going to read it, talk about some OEMs. General Motors reported Q4 2025 results on January 27.

Beating earnings expectations and guiding for higher 2026 profits. That’s 13 to 15 billion is the expectations for 26. Despite paying off the 2.7 billion in EV related charges. The stock rose 8% to a record high driven by strong SUV pickup truck demand and a 20% dividend hike. So no problem with the EV thing. We’re off and rolling and GM had a record setting, another record setting year and away we go. I think that’s the feel in Detroit, Justin. Has everybody shrugged off the EV thing? We’re over that or we’ve come to our senses maybe as an industry.

We’re going to have a great year for the OEMs. I think it’s going to be bonkers here in Detroit. Just to correct you, you said despite a $2.7 billion EV related charge. Is that what I said? Yeah. And what you meant to say, sir, despite a $7.2 billion EV related charge. And why I’m so frustrated right now is you think about how hard it is to get tiny little programs off the ground at these OEs, tiny little things that enthusiasts would love that cost like a million bucks, 2 million bucks. Can’t do it. Writing off 7 billion bucks in EV stock still goes up record profits. 20% dividend hike. Like I don’t understand how the stock market worked clearly.

I would not have expected news like this to be so good. I know. I guess the positive thing to the stock market is like, all right, well, a lot of those regulations are gone. So that must make it easier to make cars. That seems like a positive thing, which it definitely is. But they could have wrote off 7.6 billion and snuck some cool cars out the door or something. Like, I guess it’s just frustrating for me that that’s where we’re at.

So thanks for the correction. Let’s read into that for our aftermarket friends. So if you make accessories or you make performance parts, or if you’re into the the motorsports industry, trucks are still where it’s at. I think we’ve been saying that consistently for the last decade. And that’s not going to change. SUVs are going to keep pacing the industry. Not electric vehicles. If you do that, no, it’s super niche. But, you know, good times ahead. I don’t think any of that thing slows. And the people we hang out with build big crazy trucks and build race cars, and they need big trucks to tow them. So the regulation comment is interesting. We have reached out to a few folks that can come on and talk a little bit about what’s going on.

Some interesting, you know, DOJ statements in the last week or so. But the good times are here. And if you’re into big horsepower and big trucks, we’re running. We’re bullish, right? Yeah, I agree. And racing’s back. Like, there were dark times where all the OEs were pulling out of racing. And, you know, I was just at the Detroit Auto Show. You know, Cadillac’s got a Formula One car there. Like, everyone has like racing programs. Dodge is doing that truck thing where they’re going to get people into NASCAR trucks or whatever they’re called, Craftman truck.

Like, if you’re a company that works in and around performance and racing, like racing is hotter than ever at the OE level, you know, and then you’ve got sim racing on top of that. Like, that whole sector used to be didn’t get any funding. And now suddenly is getting more and more and more funding. So that’s cool. I like that. So, yeah, I think from an aftermarket perspective, trucks, obviously, there seems to be no upper limit to what you can charge for a truck. Like, I thought when the Fox Super Truck came out, like who would pay $200,000 for a truck? Then you drive it and you’re like, well, I mean, if I had $200,000, I understand exactly where the money went. But then you’re like, oh, wait, escalate these 200 grand. A Raptor R is 160. Like, they can’t find a top to these things. So no wonder profit goes up as truck demand goes up, because they’re not getting cheaper.

I think it’s probably a good time to also, you know, one of the things we’ve kind of tracked is high net worth individuals are still spending a lot of money. Those reports came out at the end of 25 without you and I really having to know that that was a report. Just the way our businesses have gone, we know, hey, people that are spending money on fun things are still spending a lot of money on fun things. So if you’ve got a large portfolio, you may want to think about, should I be sliding toward more expensive things? Should I be sliding toward better experiences for people that are high net worth individuals that want to go experience something and do something unique that is hard to have access to? Talk about that because you’re around those groups with everything you do. Do I shift a percentage of my portfolio toward high net worth individuals in 26, if I’m not there already?

Yeah. And I mean, you’re wearing a Barrett shirt today and we’re going to talk about the auction world, but the auctions that just happened were unhinged, absolutely unhinged. Cars that had never sold for more than $6 million in previous known sales were selling for 16 million, 11 million. Like we’ve never seen that before. Even in the highest of high supercar world, they tick up slowly, you know, like an Enzo Ferrari goes up a little bit every year and it doesn’t really, and then it kind of flattens out. And then maybe there’s a little jump. These things were doubling in value at the high end. And we’ve talked about the barbell a lot. I think you have a stat in here. Farad had 100% sell through rate with over 1,900 vehicles doing 195 million in sales. Like that’s wild, right? So yeah, the rich are getting richer and they’re spending money in a crazy way right now. So I don’t think there’s anything you could do. Again, to the pickup truck thing, like there’s no way you can sell $200,000 trucks. Oh no, you can sell out of $200,000 trucks. You can do that. And you can probably make a $400,000 version and sell out of those too. So like, yeah, the upper end of the barbell is wild. The middle sucks a little bit, I think, although it’s not as bad as maybe we paint it to be sometimes. And then the lower end is just non-existent really in the space. So, I mean, you’ve got to be a little bit more confident. I mean, you’ve been a Barrett a million times. What do you take from all this auction nonsense? And they didn’t know you hear about minivans. I’m not going to let that skirt by because that’s my hot topic. So we’re going to come back to that. I’m just marking that there’s a minivan. We have minivan stuff conversation coming up, but give me your Barrett auction vibe.

Yeah, I was like, you fascinated watching it. I will share with people that when I was selling crate engines and performance parts, we went to Barrett Jackson probably more than 12 or 10, 12 years in a row. And I would watch certain cars. And to your point, if they were up 10%, 20%, maybe max or down 10 or 20%, I kind of knew what the year was going to look like. It was a really interesting judge of the market.

I don’t know what I would say after watching this year, like you don’t, I’m not going to forecast my portfolio to be 5X based on that auction. But man, you better, you better think about it. I think you touch on some interesting stuff like the super unique, super rare, gotta have it kind of vehicles drew money that they never had before. I don’t, I don’t think you change your whole portfolio, but you know, the serial numbered stuff that’s super exclusive, the, the special experience for our events, people, you know, put a put a crazy VIP package out there. Just just try it. You might sell five, but I think that’s where I don’t, I don’t want to see the market shifting. It probably has, but I think that’s too strong. I think, I think you’ve got to experiment in that space. If you’re in charge of product at whatever company you’re in charge of, if you’re a used car dealer, you know, I think you, you mark the stuff up, you start going to town on it. But I do want to give you one story about Barrett Jackson. Uh, I wrote it down as kind of their index. Uh, I’ve got a friend over at Barrett Jackson that runs all the consignment.

We, badass Broncos was looking at putting super bad, a very expensive Gen one Bronco into the auction kind of last minute. And, uh, it came back with, and I’d never heard this. They came back and they said, uh, yeah, you’re a little bit late. We can get it in there. You know, we can have it in a premium spot. It’s a premium vehicle, but we’re, there’s super high inventory of Gen one Broncos right now. And I had never thought about that as a, as a large collector car inventory national or maybe international high inventory of Gen one Broncos right now. And they had 30 to 45 Broncos, something like that. So we pulled back. We didn’t want the competition. They all went for record numbers. It wouldn’t have hurt. It’s just, it’s just so strong. So I think there’s something there to watch as you’re putting your plan for whatever you do. We could be talking about accessories on minivans. I’m telling you go up up market in 26. I think that’s where the actions at.

Yeah, it’s funny. We were having this conversation, um, in a different, one of our clients is in a totally different industry to all of this, uh, earlier today. And I’m like, look, the, I don’t, and I agree with you. I don’t think it’s that the market is shifting. I think it’s just that there’s more access to high net worth individuals than there’s ever been. So like it used to be that you never saw an F 40 and you never, if you saw one, you didn’t get to meet the owner of the car, right? There was just very tight and now it just seems like they’re more out in the wild. They’re at Barrett, they’re walking around, they’re going to cars and coffees like they’re around. So it’s easier for a brand or a marketing team or an event company to like interact with them and be like, Hey, we have a really high end thing going on. Do you want to be a part of that? So it seems like maybe the walls lowered a little bit or something. Um, and because cars are cool again, people are spending money on cars again, right? It used to be, I remember before Barrett came up with this blue chip car idea and before it was on Fox business, there was a period of time where people were like, Oh, cars are not what the wealthy spend their money on. Those are depreciating assets. And like now I see more and more family offices. I see more and more investment portfolios containing cars because they have been a very high growth thing. So that’s good and potentially bad. But, um, yeah, I think anybody who has an idea and they’re like, yeah, but it would cost. It’s going to cost too much. No one would pay that. Just try it. Just try it. Cause they probably pay.

Yeah. I had one interaction this week, which was, uh, one of our high performance expo advisory council members, uh, we’re asking them to, uh, record themselves talking about the high performance expo. And we got this apology note back from one of our council members and it was only, you know, it’s only been a couple of days. It wasn’t a big deal, but we’re very grateful for all their involvement. But the gist was, you know, I’m so sorry. I haven’t gotten back to you. I can’t believe how busy I’m I am right now. Like the economy is back exclamation point. Like I can’t believe how crazy it is right now.

He makes, he makes oil separators like super nichey, really far down. You got to be an insane racer to want, need his product. So if it’s hitting that level, um, I think there’s a lot of, a lot of money being spent right now in our space, in our industry. And I, and I can’t wait for Brian to give us a report in 30 days. Cause I think we, we know this is the busy time of season. We know people buy inventory to move it. And a Q1, if you don’t make it in Q1, you really struggle for the rest of the year.

it does not feel like there’s any scared money right now. It feels like money is flowing. Clients are coming up with projects. Marketing teams are coming up with photo shoots. Event teams are filling up events. Cars are getting green lit. Crazy ideas are getting green lit. Racing is back on. So like, yeah, I don’t know that there’s more money, but there’s been times where money is tight because all the money is scared and short up. And right now it just feels like it’s a kind of, you’re in one of those little things where you’re just grabbing all the money you can.

It definitely feels looser than it’s been in a while, which is great. You mentioned racing as an indicator. Still seeing tons of stuff from F1. Cadillac F1 program is everywhere. I think they’re actively talking about how it is over indexed as far as people that are getting behind an American F1 team. And then Rolex 24 reported a record number of attendance. There was a NASCAR race that got pushed back because of the crazy weather. Again, I think that’s going to slow things down here. But in a lot of events popping up, a lot of racing popping up. So, um, Motorsports specifically, what’s your feel there for 26?

I mean, Rolex 24 was a good indicator. I think it was like viewership on TV was up double from previous years. So like, it’s not only that people are obsessed with formula one, right? It’s flowing into other things. I think the Rolex 24 stuff comes from real enthusiasts too. I don’t think that’s a thing you watch just out of nowhere. No one knows any of the drivers, you know, um, so I feel like they’re doing a better job. Imps is doing a good job of making that stuff relevant and cool. The manufacturer battles over there are cool. Like Corvettes there, you know, Porsches there. There’s a bunch of cool stuff going on. I love that market.

I don’t know why they made them drive around for six hours under a yellow flag, like just red flag. Like, what are we doing? That’s, uh, but everyone was asleep during that time. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. But yeah, I think that’s doing great. Again, I know I’m just on the sim thing, but there was a whole swell of sim race activity around the Rolex 24. So all the sim leagues were doing their thing, uh, which I think they were doing that prior. So everyone’s getting geeked up about it. And then you’re like, oh, here comes the real race and you know, you want to watch it. So that was cool. Yeah, I saw Caddy had their first, like it built their first hospitality suite. So they were all geeked up about that. It looks like the same hospitality suite. There was in the F1 movie. So I don’t know if they built it and loaned it to the F1 movie or if they bought it from F1 movie, but pretty sick display. Um, yeah, so it’d be interesting to see what that looks like. And then you and I have both been.

Pseudo track promoters at one time or another, the weather just sucks. Sucks for everybody. And the fact that weather is getting more and more unpredictable and harder to know what’s happening. I saw something the other day that the polar vortex is normally always a circle and now it’s been split in two and it’s just going to cause chaos forever. Like if you’re just a guy running a drag strip, what are you supposed to do with this knowledge? But yeah, it’s going to be hard because, you know, those, those things, it’s rare to move an NASCAR race, where to lay something like that. You don’t normally just have to skip it. So feel bad for all the racetracks out there having to deal with this going forward. But

no, it’s a bummer. Um, I think we want to talk about the high performance expo. And what I want to talk about is minivans before we go to the high performance expo. All right, go, go ahead. No, you have to read me in. This came from the morning brew. Newsletter. If you’re not reading that, I highly recommend it. If you need a link, just I’ll put my link. I think I get free stickers if I get five people signed up. Anyways, um, minivans with 393, 812 vehicles sold last year, 2025 minivan sales were up 21% compared to just 2% growth for car sales overall, according to research firm Edmunds.

Uh, minivans are the hottest vehicle in the industry right now, Justin. I’ve been right about this for two decades now. I was wrong for the majority of those two decades, but I am right now. I was, I’ve literally been talking about minivans for the past two weeks. I just, I think they are one of the best cars ever. Fun to drive. They’re super cool. I will say we were at the auto show. Stellantis had a Pacifica was kind of over landy. It had like tires, a little bit taller, not too much taller, little yellow fog lights on it, a little roof rack thing. Like I, I’m a buyer here. Obviously the real ones, the Hellcat swap one, which may or may not ever exist, but it should. And again, you can charge whatever you wanted for that Stellantis and you will sell out. I guarantee it. Um, but yeah, I think it’s weird that as a culture at one point we were just like, those are lame. They’re out forever. And now we’re just building SUVs that are essentially minivans. We’re just pretending like they’re SUVs. They’re just slightly more uncomfortable to get into. So I’m here for it.

This stack can’t be right though, because they sell like 17 million vehicles. I don’t know where the 393 comes from, but I don’t care. I’m saying 20% of all vehicles sold were minivans and that’s incredible. Long live the minivan. Nice. I love minivans too. And they’re not just for dads, even though, you know, they’re highly functional, but just in general, they’re built so that they haul a lot of stuff and they’re super tough. So they’re always over-engineered. They always got a killer drive train and even cool guys like Brad Brown, who we had on as our guest, our IT expert, Brad’s getting a minivan. So it’s super exciting.

What makes sense? Brad’s personality fits the minivan lifestyle perfectly. He’s going to love it. And no one will make fun of him because minivans are back and there’s a new hotness. So now we can talk about other stuff, but I’m really glad we just spent a moment of time on the minivan. Maybe we should make this a recurring kind of thing so that people are up to speed on We will dedicate this entire podcast to the Hellcat minivan if it comes out. How about that?

And it will be the first expense that the automotive advantage has, because we’re going to need two of those bad boys for the podcast. You know, it’s a business right off. All-wheel drive minivan with Hellcat powertrain on Woodward. You were both going to jail. Honestly, it would be the end of the F-150’s reign. The F-150’s been the Woodward killer. Slayer. Yeah, you can’t Hellcat the Pacifica’s out there. Done. can just see them lined up in the hot spot. Like 50 of them waiting to race. It’s just going to be hilarious.

Okay. Transitioning. It’s going to be tough, but here we go. We want to go a little deeper into the high performance expo. Maybe a little behind the scenes a little bit on the trade show that we helped put together. So get everybody up to speed. High performance expo. New trade show in Charlotte for the automotive industry. For the automotive aftermarket industry. East Coast supported by the North Carolina Motorsports Association. We had our first event in June of 25. And things have been going great. We’re already past the space that we were as a show in 25.

We had some great activity today. I don’t want to talk about who’s coming in until we have contracts signed. But, you know, the floor is filled with the right people. Rick Hendrick personally involved in the Hendrick Motorsports Association are coming out strong. And it solves a lot of problems in the industry right now. Where do I find new sales? That’s the biggest. How do I see the latest technology? How do I keep up to speed with education? Help me as an individual. Help me as a company. Where do I find new people and the trends that they would bring my company? So working with Jen Hoff who is this brilliant trade show producer. She’s done dozens of shows. She’s awesome. She’s got a lot of insight into the trade show industry. And how this is going to come together. And we’re off and running. And, you know, thanks to you, Justin, and your drive line studios. You guys have been quarterbacking the marketing and taking it to new places. So maybe start from scratch. Like when we came to you with this crazy idea to do a trade show. You know, what do you think through as a client? Like, okay, what have I got to do here? Literally starting from scratch with a trade show.

I mean, you know, one of my favorite questions and one of my favorite things to think about is when was the last time you did something for the first time? Right. And as an industry, we’re pretty bad about first time things. It’s like you go to the 50th version of an event and you’re like, oh yeah, this is a big event. But on day one, it’s hard to back a new event, be a part of a new event, come up with a new event. So HPX was always an interesting challenge, but the East Coast, I mean, I’ve lived on the East Coast my whole life, right? And the East Coast is the place where I think car culture comes from. So it’s a perfect home for an event like this. If you go up and down the East Coast enough, you know that Charlotte is one of the craziest places in the world when it comes to car culture. And it’s weird because it doesn’t get any credit, really. People just think NASCAR, but it’s just… So much more than NASCAR.

If you’ve never been there, you can literally drive around and just be like, oh, there’s… And there’s… And there’s… And then, you know, just trillions of them. Case in point, Cadillac wants to go F1 racing where they build their HQ in Charlotte, right? So I love the location, for one thing. June was scary for everybody. It’s like June, man. We’re used to the end and that’s it. But I love the idea of a mid-year check-in. I love the idea of not having to wait a full year to see someone and be like, how was your year?

June, you’re in the middle of it. It’s like, what’s going on? What are you doing next week? Are you going to this? Are you going to that? Oh, there’s a race. You know, it’s like, it’s such a cool thing to have in the middle there. And then momentum, right? There was… We had momentum to build into the show and then people had a great show. And then it was like, how do we take that momentum and make it really impactful for 26? And like you said, 26 is shaping up to be a crazy event.

It’s not maybe what you think it is, right? You got to go and see it and really be a part of it. But the quality of people there, the quality of time you can spend with people there, the connection of everybody there, the excitement of like, oh, you believe in this thing too, right? You’re at the front of the industry now. Super cool. So I love it. It was a fun project to come up with names and logos and colors and all that stuff. You know, that was cool. But now that it’s happened, now it’s really the people’s event that they own the brand now and like shaping it to what they want it to be. That’s been the most rewarding part. And then, yeah, the calls we’ve been having in the last 48 hours are crazy. I do want to talk about them, but I can’t. But by the time this comes out, maybe some of this stuff will be out in the wild. And it’s going to be it’s going to be big. It’ll be big without these things, but it’ll be extra big with them. So, yeah, I’m hyped on it. I feel like everybody should go to it. I feel like it’s shaping up to be a really big week in Charlotte as opposed to just one event.

So all that’s super exciting. And again, it’s going to be five years from now before we know it. And then this show is going to be massive. And all the people that have been there the whole time are really going to have grown from all that momentum. So, yeah, it’s great. And I like the I like the comments about the ownership, right? Because some of those early adopters really love this concept and they’re going to make it their own. And a lot of them are on our HPX Advisory Council. And that’s a super active group that sees it. Sees that market, wants to take advantage of the opportunities in Charlotte. There’s a couple things, right? The June timing is interesting, right? If you launch product there, if you have a real push on the sales, it impacts your P&L that year, which we never had that at the end of the year.

I got to say this carefully. I’m talking to an OEM that’s coming into the show today. Their superior is setting up a big launch here at Woodward in Detroit. And they want to start building to that by using the high-performance expo, by dropping some information, showcasing getting their performance parts brand more exposure that leads to these bigger vehicle launches back here in Detroit. I thought that was a really interesting strategy. It was one of the quickest sales calls I’ve ever had because they’d done all the research. We thought they knew everything and they did. And then their agency was recommending HPX. So, you know, real soon we’ll talk about an OEM coming on the floor.

The other part about it is the culture of Charlotte, the culture around all that motorsports and what it breeds, literally. But this industry continues to try to find where the next generation’s coming from. You’ve gone through this with your company, hiring some young folks that come in. You’ve got talent that’s available to you and the whole industry needs to figure that out. So we’re super involved with the schools. We had a great turnout last year of schools. This year we’re going to ramp up their students coming out and really being exposed to some great industry folks. And I think, you know, both of us played a role in the educational program last year. That was one of the highlights for us. We had some awesome people on stage. We’re going to be back this year with more programming. We had a women empowerment program with just some awesome lady executives talking about how they grow in the industry. And we’ve expanded that to the Automotive Leadership Conference. Again, what challenges do we face as an industry? Finding people, finding technology, working through logistics, you know, just the HR concerns that we have as operators. So a lot of those problems, you got to get people together to solve that problem. And that’s why the High Performance Expo is serving that need for the industry.

Also, education is boring and sitting in classrooms is boring. And the way that HPX does it with the Power Talks is so much more interesting. It’s 20 minutes. It’s on the show floor. You can walk up. You’re not stuck like in a row where it’s obvious that you’re leaving because the speaker sucks or whatever. You know, you can go up. You can still have a little side conversation. If you get ADD, you can look around to, you know, other parts and stuff like that. But you can get 20 minutes. Someone has to be a good speaker to get their point across in 20 minutes. So like, I love the Power Talk

thing. I love the Automotive Leadership Conference idea because we need that as an industry because everyone who’s listening to this wants to be a better leader and wants to grow their company and wants to do these things. So to have a physical place to do that is awesome. I like the Women’s Empowerment Summit. Both of my team members went to it last year. So that’s a super cool thing. And they’re not overlapping with the show, which is important for people to know. So you can do those things. You can get refreshed. Then you can go to the show, which is huge. But yeah, I think for people that, I mean, look, I’ve done education panels all over the place in many different shows and venues and industries.

It’s tough to leave the show floor, to go to a room that’s upstairs somewhere, to sit there for an hour. This version of it, the Power Talk is so much better. So I mean, that’s reason alone to go to HPX, I think. And when people see that, I think we’re going to see this more and more often in different places from now on. Because it’s just a more impactful way to do it. I love it. Yeah, that’s a good point. I think you really, when you separate that from the floor, you don’t want to miss the sales. You don’t want to walk away from your display, even though you know you should be in that program about some topic. It gives you a chance to really up your game as a company and as an individual, for sure. HPX, first week in June, June 2, 3, 4.

There’s going to be a podcast row there. Have you thought about how we’re going to set up the automotive advantage? Because I’ve got like the pinnacle of guests we’re talking about having on the show and talking about businesses. How are we going to like them, Justin? Have you thought about this challenge? Yeah, this is not a problem for us. We can set this thing up. We can take the show on the road, for sure. I think it’d be really cool.

There are going to be other podcasters there, which is cool. We can meet some of the other people in the space and talk about what they’ve got going on. And again, even that alone, when else are you going to get to hang out with five other people that are doing the same thing that we’re doing, talk to them, hey, what’s working, what’s not? Hey, have you ever made 100 AI clips and posted them all at the same time? Because I haven’t had a lot of that work so perfectly.

So yeah, I think that’s really cool. And to your point about the colleges, we recently have been very involved with our local community college. It’s been incredibly rewarding for us. It’s been incredibly rewarding, hopefully, for the students. And it’s hard when you’re a shop or a small business to give someone a chance. It’s hard to onboard someone. It’s hard to pay them when they don’t know anything. It’s hard to fire them when they weren’t the right person. It’s just very difficult. But college kids, they’ll take internships. They’ll take a two-week chance. They’ll show you that they can put in the effort to do something. It’s such a cool way to do it. And a lot of people in our industry just don’t have a way to connect with them. So to be able to come to HPX to meet with not only college kids, but their professors and be like, hey, who’s the stand out over there? Oh, man, you got to meet Matt. He’s the best. OK. Give me Matt’s contact info. That’s huge. There’s no one on this planet, especially no one listening to this, that’s like, I’m good on people. I don’t need any new people and talent. Right? So that, again, that alone is worth the price of admission, I think.

Aren’t you worried your people might get scooped up? No. We have a very interesting framework here. For every year you work, you become like a two-year indentured servant in the future. Oh, I see. Yeah, so Donna can’t leave until like 2074 or something like that at this point. So it’s the rolling thing. So yeah, we’re all set. Donna, of course, is your brilliant— do I say graphic artist to describe? Donna, what’s your title? she’s our creative director.

Yeah, and everything you see from DriveLine, every graphic, every print deliverable, every piece of social, literally everything we do goes through Donna. So yeah, she’s really the whole business. That’s why I have time to do this. Thank you, Donna, for that. But I remember there was this moment on, I guess, College Ave, right, where the convention center is in Charlotte, and Donna was looking up at the big high-performance Expo banners. And it didn’t dawn on me that she had done all of this artwork, and it was the first time she had seen it in this massive banner that’s hanging up outside of a convention center. And what does that feel like as an artist? That’s got to be pretty cool.

So that is the weirdest thing that can happen to an artist, I think. Any time your work is displayed in big, real-world scenarios, every photographer I’ve ever been around, every video person I’ve ever been around, every graphic designer, you’re working on your computer. There’s a deadline. How big is the thing? Like, it’s 10 feet by 4 feet. Okay, whatever. Here it is. It goes through the approval process. The best ones don’t make it all the way through, the kind of standard one. They’re like, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool. That’d be cool.” And then it’s outside. There’s 50 of them going down a street. They’re 10 feet tall by 5 feet. It’s like, “That’s the coolest thing in the world. That was just a little thing on my computer two days ago.” And now it’s the entire cityscape of Charlotte.

We’ve been lucky enough to have things on billboards and have things on the entire circumference of a stadium before. And you never get tired of that. It’s a cool experience. The print magazine days were like that. When you’d walk by and see your thing in print, that’s such a cool experience. But trade shows are one of the best places for designers and photographers to see that. Even if you’re sold a picture to a small company and they have it on a 20 by 10 wall, I mean, it’s just awesome to see in the wild. So that never gets old. I think everyone should experience that as a creative. It’s super cool.

So I think we’ll touch on the High Performance Expo. I think we owe it to the industry. We’ve got some stuff coming. We don’t want to break the news yet. But this is a major event, and it should be on everybody’s calendar. Also, just go. Like you can just fly into Charlotte. It’s a major airport. You can go to downtown Charlotte in June. It’s beautiful. You can get a hotel anywhere. You can walk around in beautiful, nice weather. The good food, the rooftop bars. The tickets are like so cheap. It’s like insane.

You don’t have to do a whole thing. You can just, you and one other person in your business can come down and attend the show. You’re going to fall in love with it. And then you’re going to want to bring your whole team. And then you’re going to want to display. But like for 2026, it’s not crazy. It’s in the middle of the week. You know, so I say just go. I love just going to new things.

Even if it’s a show that’s not perfect for my industry or it’s a little bit outside, you never know what you’re going to see there and be like, we should use that. All you need is one little thing to go home with, you know? So yeah, be there. Justin, from the very beginning, we have tried to stay up to speed with artificial intelligence. I got a little bit of a rant today about AI. You ready? You ready? Here’s my rant.

The hot thing right now is apparently to ask AI to do a caricature of yourself and what it knows about you. What a dumb thing to waste time on. And more so, I think about the bandwidth and the energy and what it takes to have chat GPT produce that piece of art, which really means nothing. It’s stupid. Stop doing it, right? Well, my favorite part is when we put this on social media, I will have already chat GPT the version of you, an angry little version of you. Oh, don’t fucking do it. Yeah, so I love this. Don’t do it. For sure.

No, but the fact that like computer RAM, the RAM that we need to do regular jobs, every day has quadrupled in price and is going to get 20x more expensive because people can’t help themselves but to render the dumbest things possible. Part of me loves it because I love that kind of nonsense on the internet. But another part of me is like, what are we doing here? And just like every one of these weird fads, three weeks from now, you’re going to look back at that thing, be like, why did I make this? This is so stupid. I look dumb as shit here.

I will say though, if I’m going to be positive, the YouTube thumbnail abilities of Gemini specifically, pretty impressive. So I think using AI for wise things that are worthy of your time, still good, but this latest trend, I’m not. That is not for me. no. But I think it’s exactly that, right? All of our energy, all of our money, all of Wall Street’s all about AI. It’s not to do this stuff, right? Like build businesses, build new ways to make you grow.

Whatever, that’s it. I’m off that rant. What do you use an AI for? What’s new? Have you heard of MULTbook? Yeah, yes. God damn. Yes, go ahead. It’s scary as hell. What do you give me your synopsis? MULTbook. MULTbook is Facebook for AI agents. No humans are allowed. I know they created their own religion and they like to talk about how bad humans treat them. And I think they tried to form like a sub-MULTbook that nobody could have access to. All of that.

Super spooky. Yeah, I mean, that’s it. It’s a social media platform for agents and they immediately were like, “I don’t like that the humans can read our language. I don’t like that the humans can read our DMs to one another. We need to come up with encrypted ways to do this.” Like now they’re about 60% of the internet believes this is all BS and that humans are in fact, at least telling their agents to go write this creepy thing and then the agents are going to do that.

But 40% of it is the agents doing these things and it very quickly makes you realize like what is the internet at all 10 years from now, right? Like how is any of this going to be indistinguishable? If you were an alien and you showed up tomorrow, there would be no difference to you. MULTbook versus Reddit versus Facebook. It would all look identical. So pretty wild. I’m not using MULTbook. I haven’t found a good use for agents yet. I know that there are people that have used agents to do a lot of things in their life and they trust them to do that. I haven’t found a use case for that or I don’t. I haven’t been comfortable enough to use one full-time. I do see where there’s cool ways to do that.

I do think an agent going out and gathering the top five news articles that I would be interested in and delivering it to me, basically making my own newsletter. I do think there are tasks that are repetitive enough that an agent could go do, which is cool. But some people are saying like, you’re never gonna have to do anything again. I don’t see that. We’re still using chat GPT or open AI quite a bit, but the newest release 5.2, the writing style is terrible.

Instead of the M dashes, now everything is like, it’s not this, it’s this, this and that. And like, it just has these repetitive loops that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s very frustrating. Gemini has been really good. Google’s platform. platform. Gemini has way more search ability. It has way more of the internet index. So that’s good. But I’ve been surprised by the photo editing abilities of Gemini. It’s pretty, pretty wild. YouTube thumbnail abilities. The text thing is solved. Like it used to be that it would spell words wrong or couldn’t, you know, but now it can. And you can tell it, oh, no, don’t say that, say that. And it’ll fix it in the image, which is cool. But yeah, it’s, you know, on the hype scale, it seems like now we’re just settling into this little like, okay, some of it is helpful. Other bits of it are not the hype’s kind of dying down a little bit. And then, you know, with Ram pricing going through the roof and Nvidia investing $100 trillion in open AI and figuring out that wasn’t a real investment, you know, so a lot of that is, is turning. But where are you on the continuum right now? Are you using it more? Less? Is it becoming part of your life?

Maybe I’m a little salty because AI has failed me this week. I had, I had sketched out a PowerPoint slide, two slides. I’m like, Hey, draw this PowerPoint slide. The first attempt, it was, it blamed PowerPoint for not working. And I said, No, I want the two slides. And then it just gave me trash slide, like literally, just words that were wrong on two slides. And I was like, Oh, my God. And then the second thing I’ve asked Chad GBD, I’m like, Hey, develop a program for me to have the equivalent of an MBA in finance. And it did put together like an eight week plan of, Hey, you’re going to do all these things. And at the end of eight weeks, you will have the equivalent knowledge of somebody has an MBA in finance. Okay, cool. So I started digging into week one. Well, it’s like read two textbooks and watch these two video series. It, it would take, you know, I guess if you’re a full time student, you could read those two textbooks in a week. But it wasn’t reasonable. So I’ve, I’m not gonna like, Oh, man, that’s not a week worth of work. That’s like a month for me. So, but it’s there. And it did put the program together. It’s just, I think it’s what you say it’s getting it’s that interface with, with your human controller. For now we are, I think we are in charge. Maybe

we’re alongside it now. I mean, it will, we won’t be in charge forever. That’s for sure. Assuming that LLMs do in fact, become real AGI. So LLMs is what we have now large language models, basically, they’re predictors of the next word in a sentence or predictors of a text string or predictors of an image. The challenge is to get from LLMs that we have today to, you know, real intelligence, artificial general intelligence. Some people say that LLMs will never be able to do that. There’s an inherent structural flaw in the prediction algorithms that will not allow it to be intelligent. Other people say, Oh no, with enough compute, we’re going to figure that out. We’ll just brute force our way through it. All of this sounds made up until you see how much people are spending to build data centers. And then it seems like, well, they can’t be that wrong, right? Google’s building one actually in Lyon township.

It’s huge. It’s six buildings. It’s going to be a hundred trillion computers all connected to each other. It’s going to use all of the town’s water and all of the town’s electricity and shut down, you know, everything that’s happening in South Lyon. You wouldn’t build that if there wasn’t a functional use case for it, you would think. It’s not like you can repurpose it into something else. So I don’t know. It’s going to be an interesting next five years. It’s funny. I was thinking about this the other day. Some of the first content I ever recorded about AI in general, this form of it, was right before I got COVID for the first time. So it seems like a new thing, but we’ve been talking about this for five years. And it hasn’t come, it has come a long way, but it also kind of hasn’t from where it was. So I think the tomorrow shift is still far off, but over, you know, five, 10 more years, it’s going to be more and more integrated.

I mean, once Apple gets their AI sorted, I think that’ll make it much more mainstream for everybody, which weirdly they’re partnering with Google on that. So that’s a crazy flip. That’s a crazy flip. But yeah, it’s exciting. I think it’s exciting to have new technology. And I think it’s cool. We went a while with everything just being kind of how it was, and then these things popped off. So they might be the end of us or they might make some cool themes.

I’m ready for the Tesla AI robot that does all the housework and, you know, all the things that humans don’t like to do. That’s what we’re all waiting for. No, sir. The only thing that I will do is the arts and also the relaxing things that you want. You will be the vacuum cleaner for the AI substructure. So yeah, that’s All right. Let’s just keep building hot rods until that day. Are we done? That’s the pot.

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