The Return of Honest Instagram?, Seizing Auto Manufacturing, Teen Hackers, and Remoooooote Work

SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier,Paul Daly

Paul Daly 00:21

Welcometo fry. Day, March. I don't know, man, we're fired up this morning. kylesbouncing Across the screen No, no, I know it's Friday I know it's Friday  ready to rock. Alright, let's get in theshow. They stopped now Isaac is just trying to surprise us with graphics on thescreen. So if you're, if you're an audio listener, it probably makes sense to gocheck out the podcast because it's gonna get more visually interesting fromthis point forward. So you don't just have to look at the two of us, lads. Thatwas ridiculous. By the way. If you didn't see as Kyle's head cut earners again,Kyle's literally head is bouncing across the street screen and it says today isThursday. But Paul thinks is Friday. Nice try. I actually know what day is Ihave specifically make sure I got the date. Right. Right. He's like I'm lookingup in the top corner of my screen. We got this, it is Friday. Friday is an excitingday for me today, because I just have a lot moving. There's a lot of movingparts of got dealers that we're going to be speaking with about differentstuff, other vendor industry partners that we're gonna be talking aboutpartnering with a ASOTU. It's just a lot of energy. We're bringing new peoplein seeing how to how to engage them within the ASOTU, and contagious and all ofthe things that we're doing. It's just, it's just really cool. So I'm excitedabout today. I just had to throw it up. I love it. I love it. We have some funstories today. But first look, I think is we're saying yeah, we kind of ahiring HR theme going today. So this is the this is a people's episode onFriday. And today's email actually, I'm gonna give him a shout out. We haven'tdone this yet. But our boy, Larry Feldman is just one of my favorite people inthe auto industry. He's an insane recruiter. He's crazy. I'm like, not likesome people say like, he's an insane recruiter and mean. Like he just is sogood, which that is yes. But yeah, context is slightly different. He is so he'sfrom Philly. And like, he reminds me of all my dad's friends, which is which hejust show like, in your face likable, it's crazy. He picks up his phone, but hewas the sponsor today's email. So if you don't get the email you go to today,you go to a ASOTU.com, gotta put pushback emails and look at today's and you'llsee a little bit about his recruiting efforts and company, everyone I'vereferred him to so far. Thanks me. So that's all I can say. Everyone I referhim to thanks me. But speaking of hiring, oh, he just speaking of hiring stuff,segue. We have never, we have never had a segue in the intro before. That'snuts. That was quick. That's an early Friday just happening and moving withthree minutes. By the way, Liza Myers Borges just said Good morning, guys. Andthat just makes my heart warm, especially on HR day, especially on HR. It's theperfect, it's the perfect Good morning dialed in. So, um, we have hired severalpeople in the soda universe. So now we have kind of like team working behindthe scenes, we're able to accomplish more, we're like, how are we going towrangle this sucker? Because the thing is, when you hire competent people, theywant to run, right? Which is good, because if you don't want to run, you'regonna probably quit in like six hours, like these people are nuts. So we findwe are hiring a few more positions. One is like sponsor partner development,like someone who can really cultivate our sponsorship partners, and make surethey get the value and we give value back to our readers and subscribers. We'realso looking for like the best event planner coordinator in automotive oroutside automotive. Don't need automotive experience, but we're going to put onsome amazing events this year, both live stream and in person. And we needsomeone that's just down to ride, right? So if you know anybody or if you arethat person, hit us up at crew, CR e w at a sotu.com. And we would love tostart a conversation. Let's get into some information. Yo, you remember OGInstagram? When did you get Instagram? Do you remember when you first got it?Man, I've been like in and out in a few different times. But I think I waspretty I was pretty early as far as just early adoption and okay, I have thisthing I scroll it, I don't really engage with it. So I remember I remember thedays where it was like, Man, this is the greatest non algorithm thing in thewhole world. And and not just that, but early on. It wasn't this everybody's acreator type thing. And so there was a really, really dynamic level ofcreativity. Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. I mean, beginning it was just like,hey, this thing has the have these things called filters, and it makes mypictures look better. My very first post on Instagram was like, I guess Ishould do this and It was me sitting in front of the building I'm in now, andthe moon was up. And I was sitting outside getting some work done in themorning. And that was my very first picture after go all the way back. And, butso used to just see, write everything in chronological order of who youfollowed and when they posted. So it was starting to be like two minutes ago,one hour ago, seven hours ago, one day ago. And that's real timelines, becausethat's the only the number of people that were posting, right, exactly right.And but then then the algorithm took over, right, they start developing thealgorithm, so you start seeing what it thinks you want to see. And in a way,that's good, it makes it engaging, and they want people to stay stick, theywant to make the platform sticky, and addictive, actually. And so what happensthough, is you just end up only seeing, like a very small group of the peoplethat you follow. And so Instagram just announced and just released. So you can ifyour app is updated this morning, you can actually click on the Instagram logoin the upper left hand corner. And it'll give you two options. One isfollowing, and one is favorites. So when you open the app, it pops you in thealgorithm feed, right where you just see like, what you know, the hype, you seeall the hype and the thing that you've liked, and all that. But if you hitfollowing, all of a sudden, you're gonna realize where all those friends went.Wow. So I did. I did try it. I did. It's awesome. Oh, it's also like, I haven'tseen this person forever. But I've been following them. But I just haven't seenany other posts. So you can also go favorites, right? So you can favorite nowpeople and it'll show you just what your favorites are posting. So you canalmost curate your own feed. But you know, this was an attempt an Instagram torespond to the allegations that the algorithm now is telling and reallyinfluencing what people think which it is, which it absolutely is what theythink about political issues, what they think about social issues, what theythink about what they should buy, right, the algorithm without a doubtinfluences that. So if you want to get out of that world and just go straighton following, you can just go on, click the Instagram logo, click following,and now get a very holistic, organic view of the people that you forgot thatyou knew. This is this is crazy, this is the same kind of thing. I'm wonderingwhether or not it'll make it more sticky or less sticky, because I think aboutacross app tracking with with advertisers, and how a lot of people are turningthat off and probably getting less curated, or at what might feel like lesscurated ads out there. Yeah. And I wonder if we're so conditioned as a societyto see curated content by algorithms, that it actually makes us feel weird,right. And this isn't as great as when I opened it.  But my guess is that it'll probably be, it'llprobably be a little less sticky. But maybe not. It depends on who you follow,I guess, you know, for the people that follow like 20,000 people, it's going tobe probably not sticky. But for the people that only really do follow peoplethat they're genuinely interested in, it'll probably be better. I like,Favorites thing, I like to favorites thing that I like the fact that you cantoggle. Right? I like the fact that you tell us. So the thought and applicationthere is like this is applicable to everyone that works in your store, right.And if anything, like I think it's probably an opportunity with to connect withsome of those people, and encourage social media posting within your store orwithin your group. I've long thought that there's a big opportunities beingmissed in just basic Instagram accounts for businesses just as an internalcommunication platform, right? Because if people all of a sudden, you know, sayyou're a dealership, right? And you have somebody just or let other people,multiple people post your Instagram, your internal one, right, you can actuallyuse it like, What's everybody up to today? Right. And now the interesting backwhen I was with the store, what we started to move toward was if we'd spokemore to more to and about our employees. What do you mean,

Kyle Mountsier 08:48

whatwould so so on our on our social feeds, it was more about how do we communicatewhat we're doing, why we're doing it to and with our employees. And originally,I thought, Oh, I don't just want our employees engaging with our content,right? It was like 70, all of a sudden, we started getting 75% of ourengagements were from our employees. Yep. Well, but our our engagements werebumping up. And our employees were starting to get more willing to be in frontof the camera. And the culture starts to take a bump because everyone kind ofsees and knows was everybody. Right? Right. Absolutely. Because now I'mwatching my I'm watching the stores Instagram to know what's going back in theservice,

Paul Daly 09:27

which isso cool, because you're just not you could walk back there. But you're not walkingback there. But you are opening your phone. I think there's a huge opportunityhere for the people who are paying attention and guess what, it's free. Justtakes a little effort. So you don't need some fancy platform. Someone built areally fancy platform called Instagram and you can use it for free so rightlet's let's just transition right to this last article. Speaking of someone whobuilt a really expensive Instagram app segway Alright, so there we don't havetime to let that whole thing roll meta executives are taking remote work to awhole new level. So there's an article I can't remember the article was rightnow, hold on. It's a Wall Street Journal. Fancy that. They're so the so way No,some meta executives have been like taking remote work to the extreme so thecompany's head of product and one of its longest longest tenured employees,Naomi glit. is relocated to New York City that's not that far, but their chiefmarketing officers moving to the UK. Their chief growth officer has been spendinghis time between California and Europe, but is planning on spending more timeabroad. Adam mosseri The head of Instagram, there you go. Adam has beentraveling and working remotely from locations including Hawaii, Los Angeles andCape Cod. So Mark Zuckerberg is planning on splitting his time betweenCalifornia and his Hawaii compound. So they're taking remote work to thefurthest region. What's crazy track track track was doing I was actually gonnabring this up and I didn't put in the show notes. But the Census Bureau cameout with kind of the move in, move out. It's all there today. I saw that today.I was like, oh, everybody's moving to Nashville. There's a few men. Well, Izoom in. And actually Davidson County Nashville proper. Is is reducing losing thefirst time ever, but greater Nashville Metro, literally the darkest areas onthe whole map of the US your house is literally all of the five counties thattouched Davidson County. Yep. Which means all of those people that said I haveto be as close to the office as close to whatever possible I have to bedowntown are still major metros, but moving to the suburbs. Well, that makessense. They want to be close to the sports teams and the bars and the food andthe eatery and all that stuff in the city limit working sitting in the city inthe city limit. Yeah, crazy. Now that's an interesting graph. We should link itup somewhere. Um, you know, Tennessee when big, right? The map is I think, whatis it? Is it purple? The darker shades of purple, if you're losing in thedarker shades of green, if you're gaining? You know, who else surprised me?Idaho was like all dark green. I know. It was like everybody's like, yep, we'lltake Idaho. Well, granted, they have like two counties, and it's a percentageincrease. So if like 10 people move to Idaho, it's disproportionately differentthan Tennessee. So like, you know, as a percentage, we got three people lastyear. So we're up 1.8%. Yeah, as you can expect, I'm around the major citieslike New York and New York State in general, California, California State andgeneral largely purple states. People are running for different different lifeexperiences. I guess we'll call it that way. But either way, meta thinkingabout remote work saying it's different. I think it's so much different on theexecutive level. Sure, then it is. But I still actually, I guess it's differenton the executive level. But you talk about being able to rally troops and makereal connection. I mean, I guess it makes sense that met is like, hey, we canlive in another world and eat Metaverse food and all that stuff. But you know,in the auto in the auto industry, in the auto industry, not the same, right inyour stores, dealers heat. But here's the difference like in the vendor world,in all the partners you're working with, they are dealing with a remoteworkforce, like we're living it right now building asotu, it's like, oh, wehave people in Atlanta, and Nashville, and New York, and Colorado, right. It'sdifferent now. And so we're getting experienced that I would encourage people,especially if you're an industry partner, to remember that the dealer lifeisn't a remote life, your life might be a remote life, and your you may be ableto execute remotely, but the dealer life is not that way. Which is why Kyle andI are so grateful that we get to still like be in dealerships on a regularbasis because of our work with contagious auto. But don't forget that if you'rean industry partner, don't lose that empathy because your life is way differentthan the dealer life is. Yes, exactly. It's like how I used to have to remindyou that Friday isn't the start of the weekend. Right? Yes, but for sure. Butthat's the that's the constant. Like I remember being as a dealer and gettingon a call on Friday. And they're like, you know, the vendor would be like, it'sFriday. Oh, can't you wait for the weekend? And I will be like, Ah, this onetime? Yeah. Very different. Yeah, actually, it's a totally different and so Ithink being cognizant of that, but also recognizing its dealers that there aresome of your employees that are talking to those across the across the way andthat the culture shift in order to continue to engage that those employees hasto be really, really high and really, really quality. So a couple things wedon't have a ton of time for because we're about to jump into the all thingsuse cars club house room, which you should if you're on this live show rightnow. Next go to clubhouse all things used cars. It's always an amazing room ledby David Long. It's his little it's his little baby, that's become actually abig baby. And it's talking about valuable tactical real world epical applicableinformation. That's a lot of bubbles. Alright, two stories left. Number one,we're not going to hang out here too long, but it was Automotive News, our leadarticle today that Putin and Russia are looking to potentially seize to takecontrol of automotive manufacturing facilities of the companies who said, hey,you know, we're not going to do business here right now. They said who haveceased operations unreasonably? So this includes Volkswagens, the Lance'sFord's Mercedes Benz and Renault. And so basically, they're going to saythere's billion dollars. Now he's coming in with coming in automotive. That'sone thing. And he's also coming at gas. You can only buy gas in Russia with theruble for the roof. Yeah, that's right. So you got, like, he knows where themoney is. Here. It's one way to get into the automotive business. Yeah. Right.I mean, it's, it's not like you can just power the plant back up. It's, youknow what I mean, right? It's not, it's not a, you know, paper cutting. And solike, there's all kinds of issues with supply line like which China back him?Why would China even want to like try to build supply lines for like a factorythat needs to be totally retrofitted when they got it kind of dialed in, inChina? Right. So all kinds of things. It's just happening in the world,relative to automotive last story. This is one that that hopefully helps youlook at your younger staff, with a little bit more opportunity in mind, andwe'll get there. So the lapsus hacker group, so I don't know if you've seen thestory of him following it. But basically, they've been hijacking companies likeMicrosoft and Nvidia just stealing a bunch of information, holding it ransomand saying, we're going to leak this unless you pay us. You know, theypurportedly extorted about $14 million, you know, they downloaded like thesource code for like, the Galaxy phones, like all kinds of crazy stuff, theywould show up in that company zoom meetings and taught them like they're prettybold. You know, the investigators were saying, they're, they're so fast and sotalented. That you would they thought it was automated. Right? Easy. I think ofthe way you pass information around Kyle, you're like, here's the link. Here'sthat, like, that's automated right now. Right? Kyle's that fast, but turns out16 year old kid in Oxford, England, living in living in his mom's house, right?Just living in his bedroom. It's just like, Yeah, it's like, I have a 16 yearold kid about living in my house. Wow. Doesn't seem like he's got 14 million.So much, so much opportunity, right? That, like just redirected, redirect thesepeople in and give them give them a space to use that in a positive light. Howmany people in your in your store are wanting to bring their hot? We talkedabout this last week having their hobby or their side gig into their real gig?Yep. And then all of a sudden, they're not using it for harm, potentially, or,you know, trying to get around something, or it's just right there in front ofthem? Well, that's what happens when you don't have vision, right? You don'thave vision you want something to work for. You don't have any real, likeinternal reward for what you're doing. But I guarantee you, there's somebody inyour parts department, there's a service advisor, there's a salesperson thatknows a whole lot about technology. Right? And we happen to have integratingtechnology making things work together. And you know, Kyle, you really startedme thinking on this, like every store needs a technologist. Yeah. Not nottalking about it. Right. No, no, like, no, it's similar skill set in, but we'retalking about hardware, and we're talking about software. Right? And, and solike this highlighted that the technologist Connect software to people rightthere. That's the that's the differentiator. I think a lot, sir. Sure. And whenyou look at at what the younger generation is doing in real time with cryptowith discord, and with streaming and gaming, right, that's all they're doing isconnecting technology to people. For them. It's so organic and so natural. Andso second nature, that I guarantee that there's someone in your store rightnow, that's probably shuttling cars around. Right? Yes. And you're like thiskid. But give them a little vision, start to ask questions, even you knowingabout this right here is going to help you be a little more empathetic. Kyle,how should we end this out today? Let's, let's let's roll into fine Friday.Real strong, be a little bit more empathetic with your people understand thatthey're dealing with real life things and real life problems. And they havemassive opportunity right at their fingertips that they just don't even knowexists until you draw it out. Well, that was good. I know you couldn't hit thetiming if the thing was stream. But that's all there is for today. Hit allthings use cars. If not sign up for the email show.com. Let's crush it thisweekend.

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