Chevy’s first NFT flops, People controlling the Fed with their minds, Tesla’s pothole tech

SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier, Paul Daly

Paul Daly  00:21

Yo, I don't care what anybody says this, this will start to the second half of the year and everybody knows that. So we're talking about Chevys first NFT didn't do so well. People controlling the Federal Reserve with their brains go their minds with their thoughts.

Kyle Mountsier  00:37

Mind Tricks, baby.

Paul Daly  00:41

This is already feel like a different day, we logged into the live stream this morning. And I was like, What is going on? Because dude, I'm wearing a button up shirt.

Kyle Mountsier  00:51

If you are not watching this, it's like, if you're watching this, you're going I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if you're not yet see, that's what if you went full top button I would get there's a lot of like top button flatbed guys out there. So I think you could put Yeah,

Paul Daly  01:07

yes, yeah, no, this way that I feel like I need to start playing music and I have the top button up somehow. But it gives me the opportunity to wear the asoto pin, right, the little lapel pin, I got the shield, I got the a shield, we still have these actually, if you refer some people to the email, you can get one of these for free. By the way, we got a lot of stuff to talk about today. It was only a three day weekend. It felt like a week. You know, some people didn't even have a three day weekend. But we took Monday off, which is kind of a rare thing. When we're both not working on the same day, right? If one of us takes a day off, the other ones usually working. I don't know, man. It's just like, it feels like so much happened in three days. And not that much happened. At the same time. If you haven't listened to it, or what

Kyle Mountsier  01:47

happened in three days, I took three runs outside you and normally I run in the gym, right sounds at the gym, you've got like all the TVs playing and you're doing people watching and all this type of stuff. But outside Outside is where the ideas happen.

Paul Daly  02:04

You fill in the summer,

Kyle Mountsier  02:07

I was in Ohio. But here's the thing is when I'm running outside and like the world is just a piece around me all the ideas flow. And so a three day weekend with runs outside means like today is washed out, just shot out of a cannon.

Paul Daly  02:28

out I mean, we're super pumped anyway, because we are launching tickets to a so to con today. By within hours. Tickets will be live for a soda con. But the only people that are going to get the link are the people that signed up for the free registration and you still can that's the good news. If you go to a soda con.com and sign up for the pre read you will still get the email launch when the tickets go live. And we have limited tickets. It's gonna sell out. I know we say that and we mean it and it will so get on the pre registration.

Kyle Mountsier  03:00

I'll be fine. I'm telling you. Well, I'll be

Paul Daly  03:02

sad is what you'll be. You'll be sad is what you'll be caught here

Kyle Mountsier  03:08

real quick. Because we covered this. I found we said this I don't know if we said this Friday or yesterday when we were on Cirilo. But

Paul Daly  03:16

we are by the way, by the way, we did have a fourth of July podcast episode if you haven't listened to it, go listen to it because we do a little comparison of Canada Day and the Fourth of July from the perspective of a Canadian who now lives in the US. It's a lot of fun. Yes,

Kyle Mountsier  03:32

exactly. Well, no. So I was I was just reminiscing on the fact that it's been a year since our family's first man. And man just the crazy look at this picture. I threw the photo up look at them young guns a whole year ago our kids like I feel like every single one of our kids looks different. And so yeah, it was just this this weekend was so full of everything including reminiscing and it's just I feel like the last weekend for a lot of people is a launchpad into the second half of the year. Right Yeah, it's that it's it's almost like everybody everybody's been you know, I've even read this in the stock market. Everyone's kind of been like waiting on this start to this week, similar to how you would wait on a new year. It's like the chance Halo I said button. Right.

Paul Daly  04:22

It really does feel like that. You know, we have a few troublemakers troublemaker alum, as we call them people that have been in our ecosystem for quite a while that we kind of see out and about and want to give props to our man Glen Lundy who restarted his 5:30am Morning Show today it was called Rise and grind. Now it's I wish I could I think it's like GT 3x. I'll read I'll figure out what that means. And I'll come back and tell you but I just saw his live notification pop up this morning and I logged in and man he is just a person that takes away all their excuses because he's live streaming his show at 5:30am that he woke up at 320 On a prep so good to have you back out there good to know, Glen that you're out there this morning. And I can't wait to tune into the morning because

Kyle Mountsier  05:07

it was so it was like episode 1002 Which is, what, seven months? Eight months from Episode 1000.

Paul Daly  05:16

Right? I miss 1001. I was there live when he did episode 1000 and closed it out. I missed one episode. But dang,

Kyle Mountsier  05:23

I don't know, I don't know if it was Monday or last Friday. I'm not sure.

Paul Daly  05:27

Maybe it was one day. And we can. Also our good friend Erica Tiffany Wells was on the front homepage of automotive news website today with Ashley church. They're doing a 40 under 40 q&a on there. So it was just cool to see their faces when I logged on this morning. And troublemakers got to make trouble. You know what I mean? And they're making trouble on the front page automotive news today. So give them a little shout out. We have some news to talk about, because that's what we do. On the show. We've tried to bring you letters to what we see out there. This story really

Kyle Mountsier  06:00

quick, quick, quick, because it's a start to the year. Okay. This is like a minute, Hang Hang with me. All right,

Paul Daly  06:06

and start

Kyle Mountsier  06:09

with why why don't we talk about the news every day? Right? Calibration question. I like this. Yeah, because there's news everywhere, you've got news resources, I mean, you can log in here and be like this close to news really quickly. One, there's too much. So we try and whittle it down to things that you can pay attention to. To is there's perspective and connection that's required when you when you take in the news, if you only passively take in what's happening around you and do not allow it to impact what you're doing on the ground level or in your business or in your personal life. Then what is the news there? It's it's just noise, right? And so what we're trying to do is reduced the noise and bring intentionality to way that you approach the world's news or problems or market forces or anything like that, and push it into an intentionality that drives business profitability and results instead of drives fear or anxiety or anything like that, because that's what the majority of the news does. Yeah, so our our goal is to turn your attention correctly on the news each morning, and we only take two or three topics, and you might read 10 or 12 or 15 today, but maybe reclassifying the way you approach the news every day is something that we want to offer you in these few minutes. So I just wanted to like throw that out there. Because we just we do this on a day in and day out basis. And sometimes connecting the dots as to why is really important. That's a

Paul Daly  07:31

great calibration. And if you're a dealer, right, we hope that you can share this with your team and have a senator point of conversation, right? You can't talk about everything. But you can talk about a few things in a deep manner. And if you're an industry partner, these are stories that we think are relevant to retail auto, even if they're not specifically about retail auto. So hopefully, these are some thoughts starters within your organization, or to share with the dealers that you are trying to serve as we all try to serve this industry together. I love that calibration. So that being said, let's talk about the Federal Reserve because that's an exciting topic these days. So thrilling. Read an amazing Wall Street Journal article this morning, that says the consumers inflation psychology. So the way consumers are thinking about inflation actually impacts the Federal Reserve's decision making about interest rates. Here's the premise people's expectations of future inflation. So what you and I and all the other people out there think about what's likely to happen with inflation, in all of our different levels of education and understanding about inflation, right? This is just a great leveler, it takes someone who knows nothing about economics, with someone who knows everything and knows everything about economics, it pulls everybody and it says, Where do people think inflation will be? In six months, one year, five years. And based on that data, right, our behaviors change. So it's like this, if I think inflation is going to be really high next year, guess what I'm going to do, I'm going to ask for raise, I'm going to raise the prices of my products, I'm going to try to hedge if I'm a landlord, I'm going to ask for higher rents now. And what that actually does, is makes inflation go up. Right? So now that you fall

Kyle Mountsier  09:13

into this, there's this old there's this old saying, it's it's perception is reality, right? And none truer than when we perceive the world one way that like reality happens in that way. And it sounds like what the Fed is trying to do is curbed the perception by adjusting the reality based on the interest rates.

Paul Daly  09:35

Well, it's it's pretty tricky, apparently. So and it makes sense why it's tricky. So. So, if the Fed raises rates, right, too quickly, what happens is people think inflation is going out of control, they react to it more, and then inflation actually will be likely to increase even more. So in order to increase rates more slowly, they actually risk inflation going up. So if you're fear me, right, they're in a really tight spot. So it's like we raised them too fast, inflation go up, we raised them too slow, inflation can go up. So there's not much of a win here. But they really benchmark back into the 70s and 80s. And they say, look, there are some things that happened there, that we went too fast too far. And that actually made it worse. So they're trying to thread the needle here. And so I think for us, the important part is that we are just aware of what is going on, because little calibration moment. Do you remember, I don't remember I was born in 79. But interest rates actually hit 18.45% for a 30 year mortgage, Kyle? That's so we're like, oh, it's at six 5% 6% Oh, my gosh, what's gonna happen? We just never saw it. But on the flip side, you could actually make somewhere around the same amount in a certificate of deposit or a savings account. Imagine a savings account pumping you up. 18% interest,

Kyle Mountsier  11:05

right? Yeah, not, not a half percent or whatever.

Paul Daly  11:08

So I know that's a bit bit of a bit of a complicated thing for the morning. But thinking about consumer mindset, thinking about what's going to happen, no one knows what inflation is going to do. No one knows what recessions John Floyd just commented he remembers. Thanks, John. Here's the deal. Being a great and efficient operator is probably the only inflation proof thing you can do with your business in your

Kyle Mountsier  11:30

dealership. Absolutely. And stressed on efficiency, right? Yes. Because Because efficiency is is your margin, actually. And we'll talk we're going to talk about this a lot tomorrow. But Steve Greenfield, in his newsletter was talking everything about efficiency in his opening and how efficiency plays a role in whether or not you survive and the agency model if that ever comes to pass. And efficiency plays a role as margins are squeezed all of those types of things, being an efficient business operator, is extremely crucial to long term success. Whether it be in a recession or a boom, or, or a bear market, whatever it may be. That's that's the that's the measure of success. Yeah, we're

Paul Daly  12:13

a little uh, who was saying it? What was the drunk on what drunk on profit? Like jump on the stock? I bet stocks hitting right. And yeah, if you haven't listened to last Friday's all things use cars. It's, it's an insane room, probably one of the best we've ever had. But here's the deal. Good times, create bad habits, right. And while there's a lot of money flowing around, valuations are high, we're likely to let the little things slide right, which efficiency goes down when all the profits are there. But we're getting back to a time when we think marketing efficiency, operational efficiency, hiring, efficiency, employee retention, right? All these things are going to matter more and more and more and more. So the sun is still shining. Right? The sun is still shining, work on your efficiency. That's that's what we're saying today. That's our takeaway. All right. Enough Federal Reserve and psychology I know that was like a big heavy one from our Tuesday, shoot first half of the year. You gotta calibrate. Let's talk about something a little more fun. Well, maybe not so fun for Chevy.

Kyle Mountsier  13:09

Not for Chevy. Oh, man. So Chevy Washington. NFT.

Paul Daly  13:15

They did. And I heard about this this morning. I didn't know this was coming until this morning, which is probably part of the problem.

Kyle Mountsier  13:23

You got you got you got

Paul Daly  13:25

oh yeah, that's probably part of the problem. Sorry, I got things popping up on my screen and nonsense nonsense going on. So Chevy was like, hey, the NF T's are hot. We're getting in this NFT game, we're going to show everyone how in touch VR with this. And so they launched an NF T who was created by an artist named Nick sullo, famous famous or like NFT artists famous and produce this, you know, really cool kind of what you would expect like a like an electric green Corvette, like busting through this cyber punk scene is pretty awesome. And the trick is like when you buy this NF t, you don't just get the piece of art, you actually get the car. So they created a custom colored 06. That if you get this NFT the car goes with it. It's got some cool features. The VIN number isn't binary. So zeros and ones, right? Because blockchains in binary, that's cool. The color of the car is called minted green. It's the only color car or 06. They did in that color from the factory. So it's a one of one. You know, they gave the car special code. So it's always known, this is a one on one. And they released bidding. And they opened it up and nobody bid on the car or on the NFT. And then they were like, oh, you know what that was from June 20 through 24th. And then they're like, You know what? We think some people missed the bidding. Right? Like all the people missed the bidding. So they released the bidding again for 20. They open it up for another 24 hours. And you know how many bids they got? Chevron zero bids for the z 06. We'll call it and I couldn't find what the starting price was was for the NFV. I'm assuming there was a starting price because if not somebody would have been like one penny, you know. And so we got to get a quote from Trevor Tompkins, a spokesperson for Chevy. He shrugged off the disappointment. He said, our first step into web three has been educational, and will continue its educational. That's the way to put it. And we'll continue to explore to leverage this technology to benefit our customers. So how what do you here's what's wrong here? Right? What do you think went wrong?

Kyle Mountsier  15:27

This is a simple answer to me. Oh, right. Okay. Very simple answer. And it's, like most of my learning in the NFT space comes from Gary Vee. Right? And what what I've realized is that NF T's, like whether it be board apes, or an any any level of NFT is predicated on either newly established community, or already established community transitioning into further community. Right. So they did one of two things wrong, either. They didn't recognize the community community that they were after, and what that community needed to be a part of this, or they don't actually have community at all. Now, I don't think that's true, because the core event community is very, very strong. Right. And so my question is, is did they is did they under or overestimate the community's attention on NF? TS? Yes. Because if I know something, I know that the average demographic of a 06 owner, right,

Paul Daly  16:39

isn't 23 finger? You know, I think that yeah, I think they were a little bit out of touch. I think this is where the popularity of NF TS kind of took the wheel. And it was, it shows all of us that just releasing an NF t is not a predetermined recipe for success, no matter how big you are. I mean, Corvette is a legendary brand. It's very, very old, right? It's very established, there are millions of people that are Corvette enthusiast in the world, and they couldn't get one person to bid on this. I think that the overlap, they I think they didn't realize they needed to, like you said, go deeper into a new into a an avenue of their community and they didn't promote it. They didn't cultivate community around NF T's in the way NF T community is cultivated, which is in discord, and then you know, live rooms, and then the ways that people will get excited. So I think there was just a missing the overlap was the actual value.

Kyle Mountsier  17:38

Yeah, here's the other piece of this is like, the ability to transfer it much harder, right? Yeah. Like, a lot harder. Easiest. And well, California enthusiast meets German German enthusiast, and now I gotta get that car there. Because now since I own the NFC, I own the car, right future state, or, and then also is like, actually creating like one on one type stuff where there's no community around it. It's not like the 20 06 Is that all had a unique thing that now these 20 people now get access to the Corvette vacation in Abu Dhabi, you know, or whatever, right? You actually take a community and go exclusionary with it because you you force them to go one on one.

Paul Daly  18:21

I think if they released it not as I think if they release it not as an NFT, it probably would have sold if they were like hard releasing a one of one. Couple A couple personal comments, personal comments. I'm not speaking on behalf of a soda. I think it's ugly. I think if they, I think if they made it some kind of hollow color with a glitch and it's something that was like, technology driven like the electric greens like you gotta like it. You love it or hate it. Like there's no middle ground.

Kyle Mountsier  18:50

That's it. That's straight up out of a video game. Right. Yeah, I

Paul Daly  18:53

just think I think I think they'll retool, I think they'll ask some people that know what they're doing about NF T's and like, do a little better next time. Wink. And I also think that a dealer really missed an opportunity here, because I think a dealer should have bought it, they would have had it in inventory, and then they wouldn't be able to get the majority of the value out off of the first NFT if a dealer that understood NF T's was paying attention, they would have bought it they would have bought it so that's that's what we think. Well speaking of finding your way through a new technological world segue

Kyle Mountsier  19:32

we saw this article this was yeah, we needed to say we needed that little energy that little pop I saw this article and found it really interesting and it's not like that crazy or that much of of just an article but Tesla in a new update is coming out with this this Tesla adaptive suspension system. And one of the primary portion pieces of the feature of that system that it's going to allow is recognizing road damage and potholes and and recreating maps around that. And they're calling the micro map. So it's down to like the lane, it looks like of what you're traveling in so that a car could potentially like you're on a highway, it sees a pothole, it would know to change lanes prior to come into a hole, or adjust the suspension so so like, in its type of comfort or rugged ride, it would adjust the suspension or adjust the the height of the vehicle so that you don't have any grounding out, right if there was a larger, larger issue in the road damage. So really interesting that that's just a really cool feature, I think that is going to be available with all of the camera and vehicle technology that's built into some of these new EVs. But this is my and I'm just going to move right to the takeaway, because I think it's really important. And this is more global than just this particular feature is that, you know, when I was selling cars, it was like, does that car have Bluetooth? Or does the one over there have Bluetooth? Right? That that was kind of, you know, whatever those technology features, were just kind of the competitive matrix of does, like comparing this Toyota to this monster this Nissan to this Honda, right? How do I know whether or not we have the leg up, and just educating your people and your customers on a whole nother level of technology and recognizing the speed at which that technology can change because of over the air updates is going to be really important to understanding like how you communicate competitive analysis to customers and employees in this new sales environment. So I just wanted to like, like, boom, there's the new story, but really relating it down is it's going to be a whole new matrix that we have to approach in a sales environment.

Paul Daly  21:41

Gosh, can you imagine if they connect that with the D O T? That'll never happen. That'll never happen. Hey, Phil.

Kyle Mountsier  21:49

Never happen. Tech someone they can take some

Paul Daly  21:53

they could, but they won't. Thank you for spending a little time with us and what we claim to be the unofficial start to the new year, halfway through the year. Let's get ready to make some trouble because it's time to go

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