Porsche For Sale, Tesla Pulls FSD Team, Etherium Merge Success

‍SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier, Paul Daly

Paul Daly  00:00

Yo yo, what is up? It is Tuesday, Kyle's back in the office. Today we're talking about a few things. Porsche is selling to people like its shares, Tesla pulls their full self driving team and a theory emerges this success. Success people really want to actively and utter success.

Kyle Mountsier  00:37

It does actually blow my mind. I don't know, enough to know how much of a success it was. But I know enough to know. Wow,

Paul Daly  00:45

it could have been, you know, in that it could have been a disaster, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, we'll talk about that in a second. We're gonna talk about it yesterday, but other more important things. Took took the Etherium story out and put it into today, but that's okay. That's okay, Kyle, you spent the day in Atlanta yesterday on the golf course. But, like, if there's a lot more going on than just golf, well, there was a lot more going on than just golf. There was a lot of fun stuff.

Kyle Mountsier  01:11

I'm going to try and get a couple of the things up on social today. But like beaver Toyota threw down in typical fashion, like I said yesterday on the podcast, you know, they brought a long drive guy that on one of the I think it was like on holds a long drive guy.

Paul Daly  01:30

So that I mean, I kind of the name is kind of self explanatory, but it's just like, like, like, kind of like you'd bring in a magician. You're like bringing along Dr. Guy just to show you like, look at that long drive.

Kyle Mountsier  01:40

Well, so there's long there's a long drive tour, right? Where were these guys? They they can their sticks are like three to four inches longer than a typical driver so they can hit longer. And so they're, you know, they they hit drives with these things. They're just they like illegal, right? Yeah, they would be illegal like that. All everything about the club is not PGA Tour certified. So it's letting drive loves physics is what loves physics. Okay, crush the ball. Like the the guys that hit the longest are up in like the for 3040 or 40 range. With a driver. It's unbelievable, right? And so yeah, so but they bring him and then he does like all types of trick shots and that type of thing. So there was that Harlem Globetrotters have golf. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Who's out on the course, you know, you've got all these, you know, it's a typical golf challenge. But it was in, it's the first time they ever did it. And they raised over $100,000 for two charities in the Atlanta area, and the Forsyth County area. So all going to charities and nonprofits that that support kids and mentor kids and give kids access to camps that wouldn't otherwise be able to go to camps because of disabilities or anything like that. So

Paul Daly  02:58

just the heart this was the first year they did the golf thing, or the first year they brought in the long drive guy, the golf

Kyle Mountsier  03:03

thing. Yeah. So they had never done it before. And it was like, man, they've got a lady named Cheryl that does all their community stuff there. She was unbelievable. Just had had her arms around the whole thing. There were it was it was great to see, you know, like a bunch of their automotive partners, and then even their other partners there. And then community members, like their AC company sent a crew, right? And then you got companies like foundation direct and autotrader and Dr. centric, that are their partners coming in and supporting right. So it was just this massive community build. And I think, I mean, I see dealers doing this all over the country with golf tournaments and deaths fundraiser, but it's really cool when you can see all of these elements of community coming together to support a local nonprofit it was it was really fun.

Paul Daly  03:52

Just like everything to like when your boots are on the ground, right? You kind of you kind of get the feels right. And you see the people that benefits and you see the camaraderie you see the you know, you just see all the things that like a new story will never cover. Yes. All right, okay, raised a bunch of money for some people, right. But when you're there, it's like, oh, actually, there's intentionality. And there's care and there's no community built around that thing. That's awesome. Fact. Well, it was really cool. You got to do that. And spend some time with some really amazing people. It's funny, watching Patrick, all of a sudden, be noticed over the last six to nine months. Yep. And kind of watch, watch the attention like kind of move on and be like, who, what, who is this? And what are they doing? Right? And you realize, like, oh, it's not like every overnight success, right? Like no, that I mean, they started I don't get 40 to 50 people to follow you from Florida to Georgia.

Kyle Mountsier  04:42

Yeah, this store started with 150 cars a month, what, two and a half, three years ago. So you know, and now is selling 600 cars a month that you know, that's not an overnight success. It's a lot of intention. It's a lot of community build a lot of care for employees and customers so I You know, this is just one example of a lot of what's going on across automotive.

Paul Daly  05:05

And so you had a little toy that you brought with you and you sent a text message like dude, deal. Like, dealer marketing departments have zero excuses. I

Kyle Mountsier  05:12

did have the new iPhone. And we, I mean, you and I keep saying this over and over and over that shot. If you're not watch, you can see the shot right now. But it's like, it's absolutely incredible what just an iPhone is able to with its image stabilization with the cinematic mode, and it doesn't even do it justice, if you're on the stream and what the actual shot looks.

Paul Daly  05:37

So the sharpest you sent it to me after you took it. And I couldn't believe it.

Kyle Mountsier  05:41

Yeah. So here's the thing, if you have someone iPhone, or even some of the new, you know, the Samsung phones, like the level of quality that you get out of a phone these days, if you just have someone with the right eye with a little bit of creativity, and then some editing skills, like you can get a ton done for your brand, and just constantly pump out content. There's no literally no excuses.

Paul Daly  06:07

Oh, man. Well, there'll be excuses. There, but there should be none. There should be none. We have an auto collabs episode, I believe dropped this morning. Is it Matt Jones? We check that Isaac check that pretty sure I saw that check that check, check,

Kyle Mountsier  06:22

check fact check. Today morning.

Paul Daly  06:25

It's a pretty sure it's Matt Jones, Matt Jones, Director of Communications at TrueCar. I think that's his title. Fact check me if it's not just gonna factor. Oh, great. We got the comment up. And awesome, dude, awesome interview, you have to check it out. Are we streaming it at noon, I should know more about what's going on around here. If we're not streaming, okay, we're streaming it live at noon, on LinkedIn, and Facebook. But if you just search auto collabs on your favorite podcast platform, it will be there waiting for you at whatever speed you want to listen to. We did that just for you. You can change the speed. It's a feature that

Kyle Mountsier  07:04

you want to hear my sonar LOA 2x. You can

Paul Daly  07:07

I want to hear granted, on the way his voice held up at a soda con, you're gonna need to listen to it to actually just to have it sound a little bit more normal. Okay, let's get into some news today. I don't know if you've heard this, but Porsche is having an IPO meaning you can own a little piece of that brand, the demand for the Porsche IPO is outpacing supply, it's a really good problem for them to have, as the cornerstone investors move quickly to scoop up large portions of available shares, who then will probably resell to some retail to retail investors now, I spent like 20 minutes this morning, trying to understand what the structure was, I was like, Who's this who's that I try to break it down as simply as I can. So you don't have to spend time. So basically, it's this. Volkswagen is the selling entity, they own the brand. They're selling the brand, the public entity which retail traders can trade is called Porsche AG, that's the new company that is going to come from Volkswagen selling it. And its shares are going to be split in two ways, ordinary shares and preferred shares. Now, the ordinary shares are actually the better ones. If that makes sense, right? I thought the preferred shares were going but it's that took me like 10 minutes to figure out like, oh, the ordinary ones are the great ones. And the preferred ones, it's like it's opposite day on Tuesday. So so the ordinary, so the ordinary shares carry voting rights, the preferred shares don't ordinary shares, basically, the family, the family own trust, the peach and the Porsche family own are going to own 25% plus one person, plus one share, so that they can actually block and really control the company because of Volkswagen. Controlling rights. Right, exactly. Yep. And so that's going through, but a bunch of other large investment firms are scooping up all of the preferred shares, which are the less desirable ones, but still, they're great. And they're gonna you know, so companies like T Rowe Price, some sovereign wealth funds of Norway and Abu Dhabi. I was like, this is getting legit. Alright, Abu Dhabi, people gotta watch out for those investors always get you. So basically, the company is valued at $80 billion. With a B, they between like how much Volkswagens going to hold on to how much they're going to sell. They're planning on raising 20 billion in cash from the sale. That's a little bit of money to invest in electrification.

Kyle Mountsier  09:23

I think they're gonna be alright. I'm just having a guess. And and here's the thing. I'm excited to see what they do with it, because I think that they can get they can, you know, I love that these luxury brands are starting to really, really dive in because, like we've said, especially early early on, which we're still in early adopter phase, it doesn't seem like it because electrification has really been going on for 3040 years, but like we're still in an early adoption phase. It's a luxury brand, like evey is luxury right now. And so the port, players like Porsche, have a unique opportunity to lean into that luxury brand and do some Hopefully really unique stuff with what they come out with. But I'm guessing this 20 billion is gonna go a long way to making sure that they have to make sure that they have some really cool tech.

Paul Daly  10:11

You know, you and I are big fans of brand place and get this this is my favorite part of this whole thing. Of all the stuff going on. My favorite part is this. They issued 455 point 5 million preferred shares and 455 point 5 million ordinary shares that total of 900 911 million shares. I love that little brand play little easter egg in there. You gotta always love the little brand. He was like, I know what we can do. Let's go talk to the finance team. Like does anybody know anybody over there? They're like, No, they always tell us to stop doing things. It's pretty good idea. They might like this.

Kyle Mountsier  10:47

If you're a marketing director, you know the as you know, this happens, right? You walk up to the owner, you're like, I got this crazy cool idea. The owners like That's awesome. Let's go talk to the controller. The controller is like dumb. Right? Somebody was like, You're seriously gonna make a split up 911 million you're gonna like we couldn't do 100 900

Paul Daly  11:10

Right? I don't know what happens to the half share because it's farther 55 and one half shares I just there's a great scene in there somewhere like where the brand guy who's like, Hey, bro, I got like this idea. Guy comes around, turns around, looks down. And like probably I don't know. There's a thing there. There's a thing there. So if you want to buy some Porsche shares, they trade on European exchanges. Berlin, Dusseldorf Frankfurt, Hamburg. Hannover. Munich Stuttgart you have to go get an account at a European brokerage. Sorry. To all of our I don't know, maybe I'm under selling them. Can you do this on like TD Ameritrade or Robin Hood or anything like that? No clue. day trader were the wrong people

Kyle Mountsier  11:53

to ask about that. Not investment advice for people who are brand people 911 Go

Paul Daly  12:01

speak your brand people segue. Tesla has recently pulled its autopilot team that's been working on full self driving to help out the Optimus humanoid robot team meet an end of month deadline. That's a sentence that if I heard myself read it, uh, 10 years ago, three years ago. You can advance the 2019 like humanoid robot to only in 2019. Right? That is a 2022 headline if we've ever read one last night on Twitter, again, another thing to actually write Twitter, a Tesla owner asked eat CEO Elon Musk. So this is again, craziness. If you think about it, just a Tesla owner is asking the world's richest man about about how about, you know what they're going to do to fix a feature in autopilot? And Elon responds to this. And he's like, hey, just by the way, I want to let you know the autopilot team is currently working with the AI humanoid team to hit a deadline. He goes Oh, and by the way, we also have an update on summon an autopark coming by the end of the month. Like that, that conversation just happened.

Kyle Mountsier  13:18

Just a couple of things. Right? I just say, you know, this is what we're working on. We got some end of month deadlines. That's why we're pausing on autopilot, it's not so big of a deal. Back to your Twitter rant.

Paul Daly  13:29

Right? And you hear the toilet flush and Elon goes back to whatever he was doing. Basically a deadline at the end of the month for optimistic they're they're say they're gonna have a fully like working prototype of this humanoid robot at Tesla AI day, I think is the first week in October maybe. And also, they appear to have plans to release an updated version of smart summon or auto Park. So if you're not familiar with it, that's where like, you get your groceries at the grocery store and you click the little button and your car comes out of the parking space and comes and meet you at the front. A whole bunch of problematic things with that. But if they can figure that out, I'm going to be super happy because that is that is in upstate New York. In upstate New York do that walk is disgusting. Like three months out of the year.

Kyle Mountsier  14:15

Yeah, just slightly to do it when it's snowing. Yeah, right.

Paul Daly  14:20

All your sensors are covered in six inches of snow. I don't know. I don't know. But in another tweet, so in another tweet because and then once you get tweeting right, you're gonna keep tweeting might just go through a thread and that's Musk says the full self driving beta that they just released. He said the beta looks good. They're going to be extending it to 160,000 owners in the US and Canada. Earlier in the year. He said like, Hey, we're gonna turn this Tesla fleet into, you know, have 1 million, quote unquote Robo taxis by the end of the year they've appeared to abandon that one. And they're just like looking forward to like a really healthy beta by the end of the year on full self driving. So I mean, whether or not you love it or hate it, Tesla musk, whatever that is, all of these things as anecdotal as we kind of make them really are moving the bar forward, for the industry for adoption for just even like public comfort around talking about them. Like that's, like 90% of it is just I think that's the biggest thing. It's like, oh, that's

Kyle Mountsier  15:16

a reality. Okay, let's, let's talk about what that looks like for us in daily life. And then for other manufacturers and other technology companies to go, Okay, there's the bar moved, let's either get to that or go past it and continue to iterate on what we have. Because we all know, this is, again, back to the early adoption, this is early adoption phase, and we're gonna grow based on like, what more massive mass the masses adopt, and it's coming quickly, I will say that it's coming a lot quicker than I than I maybe even anticipated. I have

Paul Daly  15:50

one, it's going to be interesting to see what happens we never would have anticipated today, right? Three years ago, right? Where we are today how things advanced and the adoption of electrification just just like anything, the more you talk about, the more it's normalized, the more it's likely to happen. Right? Because the less the less, you know, mental roadblocks in the way the less physical roadblocks people are willing to put in the past. So yeah, I think that statement you just made is probably pretty accurate. It's probably going to come faster than we think. Yep. But who knows? Who knows?

Kyle Mountsier  16:24

A lot about the metaverse and, you know, basically, that's,

Paul Daly  16:26

that's so true, dude. I mean, like, look, I remember when Pokemon GO came out. And everyone's like, this, is it, right? They just cracked they just cracked the egg. Right? So now, it's like, a lot of people are gonna be all these AR experiences everywhere, the iPhones able to do it and deploy it well. And guess what? Not?

Kyle Mountsier  16:42

Well, but you see, I mean, just see where that leans. Because, like, what Home Depot and Lowe's had been able to do practical deployments, right to practically deployed it into a space saying, okay, yep, that was a grand vision. Now, let's take that and make it more practical for users on a daily basis. And I think okay, so maybe Robo taxis is the vision, but let's make it practical for day to day, you know,

Paul Daly  17:06

yeah, for a car to drive you somewhere without hitting something. Exactly. So I wasn't, I was eating my breakfast and like reading the story, and I did kind of for a second like my mind, like went to like, maybe like if there was like a humanoid robot in my kitchen right now. Like, Lon.

Kyle Mountsier  17:22

iRobot. Right,

Paul Daly  17:23

bringing me some orange juice or something right now. I was like, that'd be really weird about but but my next thought was like, somebody will do it and people get used to it. Yeah. Without a doubt. I don't know if I'd

Kyle Mountsier  17:34

have what would it be like? If you're what would it be like in 2001? If your phone was much more a camera than it was a phone? Yeah,

Paul Daly  17:44

that's a good point. Right? What do you mean it can hear everything? What do you mean? It's always listening? What do you mean, it can do this? And this and this? And this? I don't know. We'll see where that goes. But I bet when you and I are old dudes. We're going to really appreciate having humanoid robots around to do stuff for us and cars that drive us where we need to go. I'm looking forward to that. I feel like we got I feel like we're gonna get the best deal out of this because we've gotten to experience all the like, all the now stuff. But then like, by the time that conveniences are there like I want those like Honda Super leg, exoskeleton legs, right? I can see like sideways, a future of transacting? Just pull up, pull up, this is some kind of Tuesday. I think part of the reason is that you and I have been in this vacuum for the last four months of a solo con. So our

Kyle Mountsier  18:36

days, well, my wife, I said, I feel like Today's my first workday again, right? It's like, oh, there's a meeting and then there's some intention. And then there's another meeting and then here's some intention. And like, it's all kind of broken up. And I feel like I'm walking into a day. No, you know, it's like some eerie

Paul Daly  18:51

awkward feeling. Yeah, honestly. Yeah. It because our days were scheduled to the minute back to back to back to back to back to back for like four months. So now it's like, oh, man, like we can do a 20 minute pocket like, I don't know, when you want to roll the pod. Right? Let's let's just talk about 2x. Yeah, these guys do it. Hey, by the way, if you're still listening, shut down at this point. But if you're still listening, check out the LinkedIn page. There's a lot of activity going on a lot of conversation that following has grown quite a bit since the really in the last 30 days. So we have a lot of new people in the community. If you're watching videos, right, interact with the lives, the auto collabs lives at noon, we're really just seeing good community flourish on LinkedIn. And that just happens to have become like our center point, which is pretty cool. Yeah, pretty cool. LinkedIn, LinkedIn is a good place to be a good place to be. I was about to try to do another segue. So yesterday we're going to talk about the theory emerge. It's been a while since we talked about cryptocurrency you know, it's it's had a bumpy ride.

Kyle Mountsier  19:51

It has had I don't know if you've noticed, you know, I think yesterday, even Bitcoin fell below 90 And you know, it was holding it like 2122 for a long time and it's falling below 19k? I don't I haven't looked today whether it's back up or not, but But the really cool thing that happened over the weekend was that the Aetherium merge. So going to the next version of Aetherium did happen. So I think it's it's called 2.0. Right? Aetherium or no? Aetherium? What's it? What is it called? Aetherium? Maybe, I don't

Paul Daly  20:26

know. I don't know, I think it's still just a theory.

Kyle Mountsier  20:29

But essentially what happens is when the so all everything that happens on in in cryptocurrency requires a ton of energy because the processing power to create the chains that that secure all of the systems just in like server space and power are vast, we actually ran the story of another web three platform and other crypto platform that was reducing transaction debt on energy this summer, but Aetherium has worked to go to their 2.0 system, which now uses 95.5% less power to lie meaning less meaning they are now saving the amount of power equal to the annual consumption of the whole country of New Zealand.

Paul Daly  21:15

Unbelievable. That's ridiculous. That is unbelievable. Just the complex computations that had to happen. In order for that, for that, I can't believe like that much power is happening. Hey, now we can charge to get how many EVs we can charge with all that?

Kyle Mountsier  21:29

Yep. Well put you think like you think about what what happens over time. And since it's such an early adopted technology, just think about this, right? When when a computer was first installed, it was the size of like, a whole conference hall. Yep, and tubes and all that. And now and now you've got like, a billion times the computing power in your phone. And so that's just happening with, you know, with web three with cryptocurrencies and we're just starting to see, like early moves to reduce the power consumption and the debt on on energy, which is it's a great move for cryptocurrency overall, a lot of people perceive that it might actually help Aetherium jump, but it's now hit a seven week low on Sunday at about $1,200. So didn't help him out initially. But I think that hang on.

Paul Daly  22:17

Absolutely. You know, I think web three applications, right is an easy way to think about it like oh, well, this NFT is just an image Well, it's like well different. Like if you have an image on your computer that is stored on the internet, or if it's on a website that's on the internet. The other image is actually on the blockchain, which is a totally different is a totally different storage boxes, a totally different system and Aetherium actually processes contracts. So it's a lot of events. When this happens, it triggers this or triggers this. So if you think of buying a car to think of buying a home, right, once the title search is done, this happens once this is signed off on this happens, and it's verifiable, it's not going to get lost in the file cabinet. It's on the blockchain forever for everyone else to verify. So there's a lot of utility to cryptocurrency. I know it can be a little confusing, we know that it's sometimes it's just like, Oh, I'm not thinking about that right now. And then some people just we're looking to invest money and and make a make a quick buck on it. But the bottom line is, web three is here to stay. Blockchain is here to stay, how it pans out what it's worth. We don't know the answers to any of those questions, but we want to keep you at least paying a little bit of attention to it. Because especially in service departments, car titles like this is going to affect the automotive industry in a really positive way. And so as we're going it's our job to just like put our arms out and try to like just heard this whole industry in the direction of like, what culture is doing what technology is doing broadly, not just outside automotive. So we hope that today you took all of that you'll have some takeaways and you'll actually just maybe think of things from a little different perspective as you walk into your stores walk into your companies and yeah, and the bottom line, how can we use it to serve people

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