He walks in the bar and takes the video. He calls me back like he'd seen Bigfoot, you know. He's, oh my god, calm down, piers! Tell me what you're looking at! You know, a 71 stingray with 40 miles on it. You know, okay, a 63 Cadillac with 20,000 miles on it. Okay, we start going through it. I'm like, okay, do you have a tent in your car? No. Okay, well, send whoever's with you to go get one because you are not allowed to leave the premises until we have the titles, the keys, and they have the money in the bag. You now live there. Call your wife and tell her whatever your car or cancel her.
What's up, everyone? This is Car D'Oeschabay. You're listening to the Car D'Oeschabay podcast, which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market. Let's get into today's episode. John Clay Wolf is founder and president at Give Me the VIN, one of the largest use car wholesalers in the country. In this conversation, we discussed auctioning 1500 use cars every single week, setting the world record for most cars sold in a single day, stumbling upon a secret $1 million dollar classic car collection, the impact of UAW strikes on the car industry, bankruptcy risks for car manufacturers, and much more. Fun fact, John's a man of many talents and also hosts a popular weekly radio show. I think you'll love this episode.
大家好,这里是卡尔·多伊斯哈贝。你正在收听卡尔·多伊斯哈贝播客,这是我努力提供给你最不偏不倚和透明的汽车市场见解的努力。我们开始今天的节目吧。约翰·克雷·沃尔夫是 Give Me the VIN 的创始人和总裁,这是全国最大的二手车批发商之一。在这次对话中,我们讨论了每周拍卖1500辆二手车,创下单日最高车辆销量的世界纪录,偶然发现一批价值100万美元的古董车收藏品,UAW罢工对汽车行业的影响,汽车制造商面临的破产风险等等。有趣的是,约翰是一个多才多艺的人,还主持一档受欢迎的每周广播节目。我相信你会喜欢这一集的。
All right, let's get into it. John Clay Wolf on the CDG podcast, John. Welcome. Hi. Welcome. I don't know where to begin, so we'll kind of, we'll start with some background here, but you know, media, vehicle, wholesaling. I read you hold the world record for selling 1500 cars per day, which I found fascinating, selling 50,000 cars per year. So you keep busy. Give us your background. How did you get started? I was a salesman at a Ford dealership when I was 18 between high school and college. I was going to play football at SMU. In that summer, I needed a gig. So I went to work at Hillard Ford as a salesman, and I noticed the wholesaler was buying the trade-ins, and that wholesaler was a friend of my brothers, and I went to his house with him one day, and he was 25 years old and lived in a mansion. Like, wow, these guys must make money. That's how I got in.
How have you been able to, you know, build this conglomerate in automotive, which we'll discuss, but also host a super popular radio show, which I'd love for you to tell the audience about as well. Here's the deal. Grew up a rich kid. Granddad had a big construction company. I'm supposed to run it. Dad goes broke. Now I'm broke. I want that life back. So all of these results is, did I have talent? Absolutely. I'm sure I do in some form, but there's a lot of drive there, and I just kept plugging. You know, if I get into something, I need to cross a river. I figure out how to build that bridge. Do I have talent to build that bridge? I don't know, but I just do it. And when I'm 19 at SMU, after I got there, I played football for a couple of years and a half, and I quit to open a bar in a restaurant over at TCU. And then we grew and grew and got into concert promotion. At the time, Dave Matthews banned fish better than Ezra's soul hat, tripping days. He died, we were running all these bands through a venue, and they've got record deals. And so I became the promoter outside because they outgrow our room. And so there's part of that media and entertainment. You know, during the back in the college bar days, I do stand up on the stage to keep the warm up of band or in between next. And that's where the radio personality comes from.
你是怎么办到的呢,你知道的,同时在汽车领域建立了这个公司联合体,我们将会讨论这个,还有一个超级受欢迎的广播节目,我希望你能向观众介绍一下。事情是这样的,我从小生活在富裕之家,祖父有一家大型建筑公司,我应该接手经营。父亲破产了,现在我也一贫如洗。我想重新拥有那种生活。所以所有这些成果表明了什么呢?我有天赋吗?当然有。我相信在某些方面我肯定有,但其中也有很多动力。你知道,如果我想做某件事,我就要跨过一座河。我会想办法架桥。我有建桥的才能吗?我不知道,但我就是去做了。当我19岁在SMU时,我在那里打了一年半的橄榄球,然后辍学去TCU开了一家酒吧和餐厅。然后我们不断壮大,开始从事音乐会的推广。当时有Dave Matthews乐队、fish乐队和better than Ezra乐队的soul hat等,我们在一个场地举办了这些乐队的演出,他们又签了唱片合约。所以我成为了这些乐队在外部的推广人员,因为他们的表演场地已经不适应他们的规模了。所以这涉及到了媒体和娱乐方面。你知道,在大学酒吧的时候,我在舞台上表演,给乐队热场或在一个乐队演出和下一个乐队演出之间。这就是我成为广播人的源头。
Tell me more about your radio show. How did that. How did that actually get started? Right? Like. Very simple. You're. Motocross Rec.
32 years old. I already own Wolf Ford, Wolf Dodge, Wolf. Wolf Ford, Wolf Dodge Chrysler Jeep, and Wolf Chevrolet. I was the youngest, multi-franchise, big three dealer principal in their history that was not a. Hammy Down, an inheritor. There's no daddy in the. A PhD. Right. Popeye's a deal shit. So I had all three brands. I was approved with all three brands when I was 30 years old or 29 years old.
I'm 32 years old. I'm racing motocrossed like a dumb s*** and I wreck, I break my back, can't walk. I'm laying there on the ground. The medics are like, you know. Move your feet. Move your feet. I'm like, if you'll just take my boots off, I'll show you I can move my feet. They said, we cut your boots off about five minutes ago. Uh-oh. Hall me in the meat wagon to the hospital. They take the x-rays, say, do you want to go to Wichita Falls, Texas, or Oklahoma City in the helicopter. They're on their way. I said, neither. They will kill me. Take me home to Fort Worth. If we got a helicopter, spinal cords cut, paralyzed waist down. Never gonna walk again. In the hospital and rehab for six months.
And I was looted. My controller, her boyfriend, she's married, he's married. Come to find out. He owns three dealerships. She's stealing from my dealerships to keep him from bankruptcy. So now I'm, you know, in my wife leaves me when I'm in the hospital. So I'm broke. I'm actually upside down. I can't walk. My mom died during that time. My wife leaves. So it's, I'm just having a bad run. That's what we call a bad run.
And I'm listening to Howard Stern's build up on Sirius and XM and, um, because he was leaving terrestrial at the time. Guy gets paid $90 million to leave. And I'm like, I could do that. Says that dumb. I can do that. Who the hell makes me think I can do that? I've never done radio. I've never been an intern. I've never run a board.
So the advertising she comes by the dealership. They want me to sign my annual agreement, QLIS, and for advertising is $250 grand or whatever for that year. And Wichita follows us out. I'll do it, but I want a radio show. No, you know, it's a long story short after that negotiation. I did sign the agreement. They did give me a radio show from nine to 10 on their country station.
I got on the air and started bidding cars online and talk comparing women's **** to wheels and hot rods. And it was, that was 18 years ago and it, everything I've got today revolved around that. It did it all.
What do you mean by that? What do you mean everything after they? Nighted the whole mechanism for all of it. I mean, yes, I was already a great a wholesaler. I've been wholesaling since I was, you know, a young age and I was one of the larger ones in the country. I'd made enough money wholesaling to buy those dealerships. You know, I was a self made millionaire. I was 26 years old.
But bidding the cars on the radio opened, just opened more doors. And then I started working on my radio personality. A guy calls me, says, you're really good on the air. You ought to be on my station. So I did a, I did a deal with him. We built a radio studio in the car dealership at the Ford store. And converted his, and I did, I did a show called the Daily Nooner. And I was going 12 to one that had nothing to do with cars. And really I was trying to get my chops down and figure out if I could beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings in that small market. And I was like, if I could beat Rush Limbaugh in the, I was like, I can beat Rush Limbaugh in these ratings in this small market. Then I need to do this for a living. I'm as good as I think I might be. Not as, not as, I'm as good as I think I am, as good as I think I might be. Because you've got to accept your expectations right. And when you get into something, you're not the best at it at all.
You know roughly like how the show has impacted your, your wholesaling business, your vehicle, your selling business in terms of. It made me, it made me, in not all over the country, but like especially in Texas, a pseudo household name. So that, you know, if people know you, then, and they trust you, and they like you, they're more likely to do business with you. So yeah, that's absolutely that helped.
Tell me about actually, you know, buying cars, sight and seat on the show. So you, you pioneered this like, they would, like I said, buying cars sight and seat on a radio show. What was that like? Do you still do this? What's it like? Tell me about that.
You know, any wholesaler watching this knows that we've been doing that forever. Guys were buying cars over pay phones with beeper hits, you know, in the 80s. So people, what I noticed is people that were riding with me in, you know, 96 is about when I started wholesaling, and I was like, you know, 90, 90, Tahoe, dah, dah, dah, dah, how many miles? Yeah, I'll give 23 grand. And they would look at you like, did you just buy that and that freaked him out? Like, yeah, that's what we do. It sounds very weird to a lame, but for us it's what we do.
So I was like, I need to put this on the, on the air. And that was my hook. Now it's everywhere. You know, it's not, it's not unique anymore. But the radio piece came from being paralyzed. I was in a wheelchair and I, radio is not video and they won't know I'm crippled in, on the air. And it was a way that I could get my rocks off and run again on radio.
Tell us, tell us about your business. Give me the van. Like, I want to dive deeper into this. You know, just for anyone that doesn't know, what do you actually do? What's the business model? We buy cars from dealers, individuals, all over the country and we resell them to dealers in the auction.
Give me some, I would just, some tactics just so we can kind of align here. How many cars do you sell per week? First of all, let's just start there. Well, we did 53,000 cars last year. So you can do the math on that. And is all, are all these cars sold in Dallas? 97% of them. 95% of them. I don't know exactly what, but a lot of them.
What about your team, right? Like, how have you built your team? Has it just been all organic over the years, you know, accumulating great people? Or what's that been like? Oh, I accumulated a bunch of terrible people. And then I've got to get rid of them. So I have to sift through bad people to find the good ones. And a lot of times the ones that I think are bad are the good ones and the ones that I think are good are the bad ones.
So how big is your buying team today? The buying team, we've got probably 80 there and 30 there. It's called 110. I'm about 110. But really, what is the buying team, right? Is it the guy that makes the decision to say yes or no? And then that trips a trigger for the title department. And then that trips a trigger for the accounting department. And then that trips a trigger for the transportation department. And then that trips a trigger for the recon department. And then the lane numbering department and then the arbitration department to keep the deal together.
So you're saying it's all the buying team? Oh, God. You know, these guys, they get their egos so big they don't realize we have an absolute huge assembly line behind them. So we've got doctors, but the nurses, the doctors can't do it without the nurses.
Who's the process whiz behind your organization? Is it you? Absolutely. I'm not trying whiz is a strong word, but yeah, I'm an architect all the way. Got it. So you're very process driven. You're the engineer. Sure. I'm more that than I am a car dealer now. See, I was, you know, Joe Bob the car dealer. I was, you know, 100 cars a week, 200 cars a week. And now I know I'm none. I know I'm people and processes.
你们组织中的流程精英是谁?是你吗?确实是我。我并不试图以“精英”来形容自己,但是没错,我是一位彻底的架构师。明白了。所以你非常注重流程。你是那位工程师。没错。相比于以前的汽车销售员,现在我更偏向于工程师的身份。你知道,我曾经是 Joe Bob 这个汽车销售员,每周卖100辆车或者200辆车。现在我知道我不再是那个人了。我知道我是关于人员和流程的。
All right. So I've got a couple more questions on the tactics. Where do you source your cars? Where do you find, you know, 1000 to 1500 cars a week? Where do you find that? Sunbelt. Be more specific. I mean, give us your secrets. You know, no, of course. But the consumer cars is what is a very, very, very slow burn. And that is what makes our business very, very special. And so they come from all over. Mainly it's Sunbelt areas. We've tried the Northeast. We've tried Detroit. We've tried Chicago and we've not been very successful.
Yeah. I mean, everyone wants the consumer cars, right? Those are the unique skews that you just can't get and mass at auction, right? Typically. It's so funny to hear us talk about this now because 20 years ago, I was, I would say these things and people look at me sideways.
I mean, but look, there's like the inventory situation that is also a bit different, you know, like, you know, 10 years ago, you were going to Manheim and you were just standing in some random, some random off lease lane and buying these things way below book value in certain cases. It was a lot, it feels like it was a lot less efficient. And given the supply constraints, the rise of, you know, Carvana, you know, obviously car max and all these other companies, just, it feels like things got like hyper-efficient almost to certain, in the use cover space. How do you feel about that?
So when I got in this deal in, I don't know, say 95, all the old car dogs told me, I missed the good days. I missed the big time. This is terrible now. There's too much competition. This is, I'm going back 95. So, so do the mass 30 years ago, roughly. And I'm doing, we keep doing better than we've ever done. When in 96, I used to take my laptop and download MMR. It downloaded once a week at Manheim.com. The UI, the user interface for MMR is the same then in 96 as it is now. They haven't changed it much. But I would go to auctions and I would have a laptop with me and I was using MMR, which was a week's worth of data pulls, but M, and people would ridicule me. I used to go to car max and I'd take those VIN numbers in the night before and I'd work on my list out. So I was, I was doing that before most people did. So I was young enough to be tech savvy. And I was old enough to learn from the old dogs. So I had a little bit of both of me. All right.
So something very interesting happened to you recently. I read about this, right? You discovered and we're going to, I want to know how you discovered it, but you discovered a barn or we call it the barn find. You acquired a barn full of classic vehicles. Who, what, where, when, why, like give us the background story or what happened.
Did you watch that video we put out the other day? I did not. I want you to throw the link up here. I'm pointing to the screen when you, when you edit this, because I want people to see this. That took a lot of time to make it, but it tells the story. John Pierce found the barn find. John Wolf did not.
Who's John Pierce? John Pierce is one of my buyers in East from Atlanta. John Pierce was one of Holland's head buyers for a long time. He and Holland's head got little sideways over, guess what, a classic car. About five years ago.
The first Lamborghini I ever sold was Bob Holland's head that I sold in Dallas for Bob, but in John, because John was one of Bob's buyers. John rides dirt bikes. I ride dirt bikes. John came here a while back and we really hit it off well. When he left Bob about four years ago, it's three years ago, he called me, I don't know, a couple of years ago, about a year and a half ago, and now he's buying for us.
But Chad, who you know, Chad Cunningham buys a short mile Porsche from a dealer in Alabama as a wholesale trade. That dealer bought it from John Pierce. John Pierce bought it from a widow. So we, I didn't even know we bought the car. I didn't know Pierce was on the front end of this deal. It was just another Chad car. It was great. Short miles. Everything was great. We sell it at the auction and we sell it to a guy I'm not going to say his name because we get along now. We didn't at the time.
But he's a heavy arbitrator. A heavy arbitrator is a guy that loves to buy cars and then starts whining about our items to back them up just because they know they can get them a little bit cheaper. And so when I saw that this fellow bought this 600 mile 96 C4S with a stick, 600 miles, remember that. I was like, this is bad. This is bad that this guy bought this car because he's an arbor. This is gang.
And I called the auction immediately and I said, hey, call this guy. I've got a backup bidder on this car. Knock the fellow out that bought it. Tell him he's got to buy it. Red light if he wants it because I don't want to send it all the way to Florida and then get it back. Play the game. And just for anyone that's anyone that's listening, red light just means it's as is your bind that car. There's no guarantee, meaning you bought it, you own it. You can't come back and cry for a couple more dollars or pennies.
Right. This car had not been started in years. It's 600 mile 96 Porsche. We believed it to be dry. I mean, it's a museum car. It's never going to go anywhere. Right. Last of the mojicans, last of the air cools. And he sent a mechanic over there. He turned the engine over and realized it wasn't seized. Everything was good. They said, great. They kept it. It gets down there and he starts to shit. Like, dude, we're not going to do this. And then we had some other cars that were in play.
This is a whole not a topic, but in case anybody is done aware, there's a serious problem with Lamborghinis and mileage rollbacks. But we had a couple Lamborghinis that had been tampered with. And we bought some cars from him.
Anyway, there was a problem there and we fixed the problem. But in the middle of the problem, I bought the Porsche back. So remember, we bought this Porsche and this is something that the video doesn't say. I didn't say it intentionally because I wanted people to say, well, how did you get this Porsche back? Because here's the chain of events. We sell the car to dealer. We buy the car back from dealer. And then I've got it in my barn. It must have been one of those carmen deals because two days later, phone rings, and then the car comes in and says, Hey, she's got another one. I'm like, what? 97 C 500 miles.
And now you're noticing a trend. Right. There was like at least 18 months that had passed. I'm like, OK, so she didn't just pop this. She didn't buy this car this week. So I'm like, Pierce, what else does homegirl have? What else does Melba toast back? You smell the blood and water. I'm good with these buyers is I'm on the guy in the corner coaching the fighters. No.
Let's get her on the phone. Real nice. We got a soft server and she won't come off of it and tell us what she's got. But she says I've got a lot more, but I can't tell you, but you handled that Porsche transaction so well. You handled that. Oh, so she so she tested you with one. Yeah. You handled this current Corvette transaction so well. I will call y'all when it's time.
Pierce calls me. I don't know two weeks ago and said, Hey, it's time. I'm going over there to look. I said, get the video camera and send it to me. He walks in the bar and takes the video. He calls me back like he'd seen Bigfoot, you know, he's, Oh my God. Calm down, Pierce. Tell me what you're looking at.
You know, a 71 stingray with 40 miles on it. You know, OK, a 63 Cadillac with 20,000 miles on it. OK, and we start going through it. I'm like, OK, do you have a tent in your car? No. OK, well, send whoever's with you to go get one because you are not allowed to leave the premises until we have the titles, the keys, and they have the money in the back. You now live there. Call your wife and tell her whatever your plan or cancel. I understand, man. I understand wolf. You're crazy. No, I'm serious. So we worked together and the brother in law came over and we got all this done and we made a big offer and he bumped us 37,000 miles on it. We did that. I didn't tell anybody and, you know, remember all this chain of people I was explaining earlier?
So this is going on for a week, no, three days, four days. I didn't tell anybody until late Sunday night in the company that we were fixing to wire this big wire over. And they're like, what about a process? You got a validates title? You got to do this. You got to do that. I said, I understand, but we're going to break a lot of rules on this one. I didn't tell anybody in the company because if I'd have told anybody, they would have told somebody and that somebody would have told somebody in the company. And all of a sudden I look up at this bar in Alabama and I've got people to talk about. Loo slips, sink ships. Right. So we got the titles. I saw it called the girl Sunday night. I said, we've got to work, but we're watching the football game. I said, do this way. Watch the football game. This is serious. This is a once in a lifetime deal. I've got Bigfoot in the scopes. So we validated the titles. We were in the reports. Got it all done. We got the wire sent off and it was sitting there in their account by 903 on the East Coast time. Wait, or 1003. And we had the transport already lined up. It was a machine.
So a lot of questions. Number one is, what was the wire? How much did you pay for all these? More or less, roughly. Million bucks is over million bucks. How do you price these things? Right? There's no market for it. I mean, meaning there's probably one. I understand. Oh, you understand. And I say, I want. And I say this for the audience as well. But like, how do you price these things? How do you know what they're worth? Here's what we did. I looked at the list. I took all of the new cars. I estimated them off of my gut real quick. And in my experience, I wrote down one big number. I said it to Pierce. He was working on the used ones and he called me back, had you number them cars so fast? I said, I don't know. I must be good. He said, you're real good because you're right on. And I've been working on this for hours or for days. I said, well, go with that then because we both said the same thing. And then he was number in the used ones. And then we talked and I said, tell him this number. And he said, that's funny that you're on the big number. And he said, it's funny. You said that because I already told him that number. And they came back and said, they need 37,500 more. I said, you know, obviously we're going to do that. I don't know what they're worth. He didn't know what they're worth. We just think we're close. Let me ask you this question, Delvar. You mentioned earlier that, you know, you're an architect. You're a business first type of guy. Is this deal actually financially worth it for you? Or is this more of a like a marketing play or you just scratching a niche? You just like love this shit. You're like, I love it. Let me just buy these. All of the above. All of the above.
So I built this studio in my ranch because I wanted to move the radio show and get a higher grade of TV production out here. And the vision was to start a new YouTube channel, TV show called GMTV Garage, and start playing with the classics. So I over decorated it and I built a set. And I was buying some classic cars from other auctions just to get some fill in here. So all of a sudden, it was crazy. It's like building the ark and all the animals showed up. I mean, now we're full. So Pierce wants to sell them and I don't want to sell them yet. He's cool. Oh, I was just assuming you're going to sell them, but you just completely surprised me. So you're going to, you might keep these. Absolutely. Well, hopefully I get an invite to come see these things because of the pictures. I don't think they do it in justice, but it looks great. So really, really impressive. Yeah, the really, really, really lays all this stuff.
We sent a, and Pierce found him. I said, get your wife if you don't know anybody. Find a videographer in Birmingham. Meet you over at the barn and video this whole thing. It's like, you know, uncovering a tomb. And they did a great job. So we have all the video from the load in. We have all the video from the, I mean, the load out in the video from the load in. We have the widow interview. We have the brother in law interview. You know, it's a mess, but it's hard to move a bunch of cars that don't run. You have to put them all in rollers and use winches and stuff like that.
Now, and to answer this question to me, did they not shop your price? Did they just accept it, you know, other than the $37,000 bump? They were just, okay. I mean, what was that like? The neat thing that, you know, we'd already been through two negotiations with them on the Porsche and the vet. So we kind of had a feel for their price point. And their price point was top of the market. It was not free, right? Because that vet, we had to, um, the 97 vet, we had to bump four times to get it done. And we weren't winning against anyone. So I was like, okay, they're not stupid. They're not going to let us steal them. And we need to hit them hard enough to get something wrapped up quick. So we hit them with a, with a buckshot. We didn't hit them with pepper. Get control of the assets. Ask questions later. If you know what you're doing, if you don't know what you're doing, you'll quickly learn what you're doing by getting your ass kicked. The best way to make money in the car business is lose. That's the only way to do it. People want to come and how do you do it? How do you do it? How do you do it? There's no easy way. You go in there and you get, you get the **** kicked out of you. Yeah.
I mean, there's a reason that you don't ever buy Ford Taurus or Ford Winstar. I'm going way back. But I mean, you get into another bit. If you're buying commodities that are so easily, Camry's, Rental's, right? They're everywhere. Everybody knows what they're worth. There's no money in the wholesale side to be made at all or retail because there's everybody knows what they're worth. Well, I think what's neat is, you know, accumulating that experience and, you know, storing the back of your head, like, I have the same feeling. You take me, you know, I'm at an auction or I see a car. You know, if it's a car that I've experienced with, which, you know, most of the under $30,000 cars, that was the market, you know, that we've always served, you're right away. Like, oh, yeah, that's, you know, the Ford Expedition, the Honda Odyssey transmission, the disc, the that, you just learn, you know, you get used to it and you make a ton of mistakes along the way. So sure. Yeah. But, you know, one key denominator, core common denominator in a good wholesale buyer is photographic memory. And everybody I know in this space that is an A player as a photographic memory. And I can still tell you oddly transactions and miles and money of cars from 30 years ago. I don't mean to. I don't want to, but that's all in my mental rolodex. So when you're going through MMR and you're looking at the NAD and you're looking at all this in this, all those old transactions in that bucket and that silo of that car, when I say that silo, you know, Camaro's, right? Which Camaro's? There's two kinds of Camaro's. And six Silo-Ner Camaro's. They're not the same Camaro's. They're not even in the same category. So you have, Mustang GT's eight Silo-Ner's six Silo-Ner's, right? You have, you know, the same with sticks and manuals. So you categorize these things and you have all this data in your head from gazillions of transactions to look at the auction results in the book house and in the desirability factors to make these judgments off of them.
Well, speaking of acquisitions and just general supply, I want to talk about the strikes and, you know, there's a ton going on here. I get asked about this every single day. What is, before we get into the nitty gritty, what's your general take on what's happening? Like, what's your general perspective on the strikes, how it's going to impact the economy, the car market go?
The UA, the dealers got four years worth of earnings. The factory got four years worth of earnings. In the business got four years worth of earnings in one year during COVID. The workers did not get that. They're pissed. They saw the results. Everybody starts bragging about their big years. I mean, look at the auto nations, look at Hendricks, look at everybody making too much money. We made too much money. Everybody made too much money. The workers didn't get it. So they want revenge. And that's what started this. And that's why they're asking for so much. And I was like, man, just pay these guys a big lump and settle this up because what they're asking for is unreasonable. They will wind up putting if they conceded, if the factories conceded right now at these demands, they'd be out of business in five years. They can't afford it. I was told that 401k and insurance, all the things on the average UAW workers, $140,000 a year is what it costs the manufacturers and what they're asking for will cost them $400,000. Or you said $100,000 to $400,000. That's the difference because the 32 hour work, understand this, the 32 hour work week is not a 32 hour work. They want, they want to be capped at 32 hours. So when they can go to overtime at 33. So now we get time and a half is they're going to do in the math on this. And I was told this by a pretty good Ford insider that it's just economically un feasible.
So they have, what I was told is they have five weeks, I'm talking about UAW worth of money in their till to pay their workers $500 a week during the strike time and they're going out. The manufacturers have more than that. So they can wait them out. They're going to win. So they're, if we go, okay, okay, draw, shoot, here we go. She's going to shut down and the manufacturer's going to wait them out. So what's the endgame? You think that's what happens? You think the manufacturer's going to wait them out? I think that's what's happening right now.
Okay, we're going to shut your parts off and that was a smart move and that's what they're doing. Why was that a smart move? It puts pressure on them from the public. It puts pressure on them from the dealer body. It puts pressure on them from every aspect because if the public can't get their car fixed, their new car fixed, the wartees can't get the parts. The parts are are now you can't service the car. You sold. We keep talking about the cars that aren't going to get built. What it's going to do to the ecosystem. What about all the customers that can't get parts and can't keep their cars running their new cars? There's a problem. Shutting down the PDCs, the parts distribution centers, the parts are in the warehouse but there's nobody to reload the trucks. That is genius on the UAW as part. That is nuclear. That's mean. That's chemical warfare.
But that said, you still think that the manufacturers are going to wait them out. They have no choice because if they can see they're going to go broke. They can't afford it. They're going to have to rent the cars. What do you do if you're the CEO of all three of those OEMs? How do you handle this right now? What I do? And this might be unfeasible because I can't get my brain around that role because I've never been there. But the redneck enemy says, put a word hiring ad out and tell her by the fire. Start over because this is going to cost them that much anyway. They have decided to go to war. Jim Jung-ung is going to fire nuclear weapons. What are we going to do? This is real. So if we concede, we give up all of our land. Do you all want to buy the manufacturers? What do you want to do? I'm going to talk to UAW. They're attacking.
You don't think it's feasible to, like we said, propose like a lump sum payment? I was talking to this insider guy and I gave him my theory. He said, we already tried that. We're ahead of us. We already tried that. We didn't go for it.
Given that there's a reversion to the mean here with respect to earnings and well not slowly but surely, it sort of makes more sense to throw a bonus. There should still be an increase but maybe a bigger bonus to account for the earnings about the past couple of years. You also have got to remember they're on a profit share. So they did get to feel the rise of the lift. The economics of it do not make sense. So it's kind of terroristic, man. I'm not trying to call the UAW terrorists but this is pretty wild. We've got them by the head. We're going to send you a finger. We're going to send you an ear. That's what they're doing. We're going to shut this line down. We're going to shut that line down. Now they cut a knee off with this part saying. So what happens? I do not know. Either everybody comes to their senses and they make a negotiation that makes economic sense or they literally go into meltdown mode and it's a nuclear war and it turns into a wait out and the manufacturers will lose a gazillion dollars but they will win this negotiation because really what they're fighting for is their companies at this point.
Do you think bankruptcy is a real riskier? If they sign up for what is being offered, bankruptcy is an absolute risk because they can't afford to do it because they would have to charge so much for the cars that we can't afford to buy it. Especially you're all 8% into it and it just whacks it all out. They're already too high. You know, look at these Corvette. I've had a 77, an 88 anniversary Corvette out there with 19 miles in a Windows sticker and the sticker on its $32,000. That car today would be $97,000. That's from 88. So if they had to raise the prices on cars, another 20%, it just won't.
I'm sure there's a lot of things I'm saying here that I don't know. You don't know. I don't know. We're not inside inside. I don't know the mass. But I know the realistic feasibility of what's being proposed here and it will not work. How do you think it's going to impact to use business, your business, or better question? Are you seeing an impact already? We saw the impact a month ago on the speculation of this occurring. So the core heart of a car dealer is a gambler and they started gambling immediately. And so that price started coming back up. But you know, it went down May 15th, just as I forecasted the slip started and then it began back and we had a good August on speculation. So we actually slept a little bit and pressed too hard by and on chasing the speculation in the past two weeks have not been good in the market. Now that the strike is actually live and active, the lift has stopped. So, so when we go into real strike mode, the supply really stops, the cars will start increasing. The 8% interest is going 8% is for the good credit. 14 is for the regular. That's going to really limit this. So the COVID high that we saw will not. It just can't afford it, right? Are we going to see a lift in prices? Absolutely.
Well, why do you think the lift has stopped though? Do you think that's driven by like interest rates right now? Why do you think that stopped last two weeks? The stop after interest rates, for sure. And I think the overall disposable income is lower today than it was, you know, 20 months ago when all this went on this price. Undoubtedly, yeah, I actually just posted about this. I think Bloomberg put out pretty good chart about, you know, only the richest 20% top 20% of the country still have excess savings from the pandemic. This was still overselling in the auction lines. Big cars. It was buying those guys. You know, I mean, we sell $800,000 cars, SVJs. We sell $200,000. Our average cost of car is $33,000, right? $34,000. And there's a lot of cheap cars in that mix. So but you would think that these real heavy cars had slipped off harder. They did about a year ago. No, they're still trading pretty pretty good. I'm very surprised that the heavies have held their value. Yeah, I just I just had I just had Jason put on from Tactical Fleet on the podcast last week. And he said the same thing. He said, you know, business is down relatively to the last two years, but it's pretty steady.
So he seemed pretty optimistic overall. It's it's sad. I don't like it. Here's what I've learned over the years. The harder you party and the drunker you get, the worse the hanger. And I keep waiting for the hanger. We've had some hanging over days, you know, months during this this rise and fall, but the ride about the time where it's really starting to hurt and you get some hair of the dog, the bitch, you and you get rolling it. And that there's definitely an adjustment that the market's trying to adjust right now.
The strike is what's keeping it from coming down. Definitely an inflationary force on the consumer side. As you as being, you know, such a close and insider and seeing this, you know, daily basis, what would you say if you were like giving advice right now to your best friend? Like, what would you tell them right now to buy? Like, what are you seeing as like the sweetest deals on the market? Relatively speaking.
Nissan's they're good. They're pretty. You can buy them with a discount. You can get incentivized rates with them. Go get a new Nissan. What do I get my kid? Nissan. Go get it right now. Why why why you say you can buy them at a discount right now and to use and to use market? What's happening? I'm a new and this one you said my friends when they asked me what to do, hey, I'm looking for a good use car for my daughter. Go buy a new Nissan. That's that's my suggestion. Why though? Why do you love Nissan? Because the price on this Nissan new versus the price on that Toyota or GM use is so close that you get a new car with new car warranty and you're when the adjustment sets in, you're going to be better off back. He's going to be better in the new car at a sticker or a little back and back. A sticker rate. These cars are still too high. So back to the whole selling and just general supply and demand. I mean, how are you preparing internally? Are you preparing? Are you just whatever happens happens? I mean, what are you thinking for the next coming like three to six months? How do you think about that?
It all depends on, you know, we have to watch the strike very closely. If it goes into full lockdown, then we're going to have a good run, but the quality is suffering. I mean, there's no question that the cars are getting worse that are available in the resale market. I am we keep our, we have a meeting every Thursday morning after the auction. We go through the recaps because we have seven lanes, six in Dallas and one in LA. They all run. And since we sell nearly 100% every week, winlows are draw, we feel those tides changing more than other people. When you look at a wholesale group lane with a lot of no sales in it, then it's not a good group to look at. You're counting winners, right? The losers are more important than the winners to me. So we, we, it's our squawk box and we have everybody call in and we, we talk about what's hot, what's not, what's happening. And we change that guidance weekly.
So right now, what was our, what was our opinion this last Thursday? The market was flat compared to the previous week and it was down compared to two weeks ago or three weeks ago, for sure. And we need to be careful because if, if there's an announcement that the strike is settled and all is good in law, law land in Detroit, then you're going to see this car market adjust quickly. Really? That's my opinion. It's trying to do it right now. It's trying to do it right now, but the speculators will let it happen. What do you think happens? If the strike is settled, what do you think happens in the news market? Like we have a really bad day. So what will happen when the market just, our volume will go down. You can tell what's happening with the market. If we have 1,700 cars at the auction, it's game on. If we have 800 cars at the auction, it's game off. We pull back. We press one to send a press. We pull back when it's time to pull back. And we pulled away the hell back in July because the market was falling pretty hard.
Yeah. I think there was one of the biggest weekly falls in July or maybe it was like the first week of August. It was right around there, but then it flipped. Yep. On the news, the news, the news, the news. And right now is the fall and seasonally we should be hitting the adjustment right now. And we are in some categories, but it's just a supply driven thing. And you can look at the different silos. So heavy duty trucks are the next to strike if they didn't on Friday. I've not checked yet. This was the Ford guy told me. So you're going to see the next two new diesel trucks pop back up. It's just all commodities. The whole thing is just commodities is all mass. And the math is run by desirability.
You know, just zooming out before we wrap up. I want to hear your take on just a macro. You know, I had a great conversation with Hollenshead recently about his take on the future of wholesaling. What's your take? What do you think wholesaling looks like vehicle wholesaling? Five years. The industry has changed a lot. There's a lot more tech at play right now. What do you think happens here?
What I notice happening is that all the guys that watch this, they're inspired and they want to do what I do. And I meet a lot of them. They're going to have trouble because the trade that you learn, those fundamentals of going to the dealership and buying the trade-ins and taking a guy out and romancing him and building these accounts and actually getting flow from the dealership trade-ins. That's kind of gone. And without the consumer piece, give me the win would not be around. So that farming that I did on the consumer piece starting, you know, almost 20 years ago is really my special sauce. And if I had to start it today, I don't think I would be able to do it because Carvanna took my process and my pitch to the public and they broad-banded it. CarMax was already doing it, but not like Carvanna did. The reason Carvanna can't make any money is because they spend so much money selling my pitch to the public. But what did they do when they did that? They validated my pitch. So what we used to tell customers all the time, we'd make all these deals and they would be like, okay, so let me get this straight. I go to your website, I put in a VIN number and then poof magically a guy's going to show up in my doorstep with a 28,000 dollar check. They didn't believe it's true. It can't be true. So it's not. And Carvanna just pounded that message in and then it became true. So then COVID happened, CarMax number one, we were number two, Carvanna's number three. They spend a billion dollars in marketing. They pass us big. All right. I didn't spend that money like they did because I know you can't outrun the amount of money that they're spending and I wasn't wanting to take on venture capital. I just didn't, I don't want to go into debt. I've been broke. It sucks. You know, so, but then all this competition waived in, but they didn't have the core competencies that we have in the wholesale world. They don't know, they don't understand that little stuff. And like a lot of stuff that you heard from Bob Holland's head that's shake and bake kind of stuff. We're savvier traders than any of them really. But you know, I say that CarMax is pretty damn good. They're the best. We could, I'm the biggest. Bob's used to be the biggest. Everybody's the biggest. Biggest is CarMax. They have a huge wholesale book that people don't realize. I bought, I don't know, I probably about 50,000 cars from CarMax.
What makes them the best? I mean, why do you say that? Because there's still a massive, massive corporation at the end of the day. Right. They, they hire non-car people. They robot them. They don't pay much. And they, they have such a massive brand. They have the Amazon effect that in the trust. And they number their cars well. And they have their own book. They don't need MMR. They don't need anybody. They have so much transaction under their own belt and they have their own auctions. That they can set their own market based off of their results. And they're really good. You can, you can still pinch some money out of CarMax cars on the wholesale level. But really, if you go to CarMax and you want to go buy at their lower auction, I've been Maryland and you buy 12 cars. At the end of the whole shake out, there's going to be a bunch of, it's going to be zero. When I have buyers that call me like, Hey, I want to, I've got, you know, I've got this great whole CarMax and I've been buying there for years and I can do this. And I said, no, because that is a casino bet that you're going to walk out with zero. You'll make two thousand on one. You'll make 500, 500, 2000, lose 2000, lose 500, lose 500, and then you're going to lose 7,000. So CarMax is like, great, you'll come make all the money you want. We love wholesaler. Please come play at our casino. And if you go in and buy one and leave with one, you might be okay. But when you start buying numbers out of CarMax, you think you made money, but you did. You ever consider going into retail? I've done it. I did it too much. I've never, I've never had it down year in the wholesale business where I lost money. And I damn sure didn't the retail business.
On a closing note, uh, can you tell us where for anyone I want to learn more about you, give me the van working to go? How can I get in contact with you? JohnClayWolf.com or JCW, JCW show.com and hit email, John. And those go directly to me. Symbols pie. Simple as pie. And you can tune in the radio all over the country or the stream of the YouTube channel every Saturday morning, depending on what time zone you're on. We're on for six hours. And it's, it's a rock and roll T and A funny slap. But there's car in there too. And the, I've got a new venture called GMTV Garage where we're doing our video version this more car centric. Because this car culture, you know, the car culture, happy days, right? That was a big moment. And you hear these baby boomers. Car, car, car, car, car. Our deal was car too. But, but this, this new youth, you know, the 18 to 35, this car culture has gotten weird again. I mean, they're deep. Look at these YouTube channels. Look at their subscribers that are car centric is over the top. So I am, I've been hiding my car business from my entertainment business for the past 18 years. Besides bidding the cars on the radio brought to you by give me the event because I didn't want to slow it down with too much car talk. So I'm, I'm opening a, I'm creating a new channel that is the car side. I mean, the people really haven't seen.
在结束时,你能告诉我们想要了解更多关于你的人去哪里吗?给我一个可以联系到你的方式吗?可以通过JohnClayWolf.com或JCWshow.com并点击邮箱的方式联系到我。这些直接发到我的手中。简单得像派一样。你可以打开广播听我在全国各地的电台节目,或者在YouTube频道上每个星期六早上进行直播,具体取决于你所在的时区。我们播放六个小时。这是一个摇滚、搞笑、有趣的节目,还有汽车元素参与其中。而且,我还有一个新的项目叫做GMTV车库,在这个项目中,我们会以视频的形式更加聚焦汽车方面。因为汽车文化,你知道,汽车文化,好像似乎重返了我们所熟悉的那个时代,是吗?那是一个重要的时刻。你听到这些婴儿潮一代,汽车,汽车,汽车,汽车,汽车。对我们来说,汽车也很重要。但是,这个新一代年轻人,即18岁到35岁之间的人,他们对汽车文化的热情又变得异常奇特起来。我是说,看看这些汽车相关的YouTube频道,看看他们的订阅者数量,非常惊人。所以我过去18年来一直在将我的汽车业务与娱乐业务分开,只是通过广播拍卖汽车,并由give me the event赞助,因为我不想让太多的汽车话题拖慢娱乐节目的进度。所以我正在开设一个全新的频道,以汽车为主题,这是人们真正没有看到过的东西。
Yeah, you're leaning into it at a time where it's, you know, it's, there's ton of demand of people are super interested in it. Sure. I mean, we're doing it all day. You're just now just documenting it. Sure. All these characters are already in our world. All the transportation mistakes, the ice road truckers, the crazy, all kinds of stuff. It's all there every day. we just have to start putting it together. You know, there's one thing in it and this is real car dealers. But I always try to do this and, and I don't feel like I've ever gotten it across in a platformer. People really understand what Bob Hollins had did for me. And he, he did a nice piece with him the other day, but Bob, I called Bob years ago, told to pitch him my radio show for trade and marketplace. And he was just in the process of selling it to auto trader. And he said, Johnny, love your show. Talented guy. I know exactly who you are. Cox will never go for it. You're too edgy on the radio. You know, they're too corporate, but we became friends that day. And that guy, you know, we just clicked. We just, we just, you know, we think at the same pace and the same level. And he, he, he started, if he was my golf coach, he started teaching me where to put my feet, where to lean, where to put my hands, try this a little different. I used to get off the auction block and me first thing Bob, phone ring, I'm talking back when I was running 150 cars a week. You need to do this. You need to do that. You did this good. You did that wrong. Da da da da da da da da da da da da. And I was just right down notes, right down notes. And he's done this with a lot of people. He did this with Chad Cunningham back when they were working together, wholesaling. But for some reason, it is really resonated with me. You know, you just meet these different mentors at different ports of your life, but that guy, he took time. He raised me. He finished me off. I was really good in the wholesale. I was one, I was great at it from the beginning, but, but he finished me off and he taught me some methods that I was unaware of that made a lot of sense to me, but I didn't have the guts to try them in the, in the auction selling, you know, side of things. And I just like to thank him for that. The hello way to end. I love it.
John, thank you so much for coming on. This was a blast. And you know, I wish you all the best. It seems like we're going into some rocky times, but it's definitely going to be interesting to see how these strikes and everything works its way out. So, and one other note, I definitely want to make a visit next time in Texas to see the collection. So it's fun. You come sitting on the radio show. We have comedians, we have entertainers. There's an experience out here that we've developed as it's fun as hell. So you guys come on up. All right. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Please give the podcast a rating. Consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about. Thanks for tuning in. See you guys next time.