Podcasts about m4a

You can't let time erase history, because without knowing where we're going we're just a spec in time.  You're just a piece of starstuff if you don't have a vector - got to know where we've been.  9/11 was one of those points in time that everyone has/knows/remembers, and without that memory (and comprehension), so much of what is afoot now (from warfighters and conflicts in the Middle East to Big Gov't miseries and threats aplenty) makes no sense.  Get a grip, people, and help those who've not come to understand what 9/11 means grasp its consequence - and the loss of it all. Join the Garage Hour in a little bit of remembrance this 9/11: thank a veteran, pat someone in law enforcement on the back (not by surprise, though), and pour one out for those who aren't with us anymore.  While we're at it, how about some Megadeth - this may be a somber day, but a little thrash metal makes everyone feel better.

In business and in sales, the future is changing faster than most can keep up. AI isn't just a buzzword anymore. It's transforming how deals are made and how teams operate. In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Steve Trang of ObjectionProof.ai to explore how AI sales reps can book appointments, review calls, and follow up with leads instantly, what this means for property management entrepreneurs, and why learning to leverage AI now is critical to staying competitive. You'll Learn [01:24] The AI Revolution [11:11] AI Sales Reps [17:39] The Future of AI in Sales [27:31] The Importance of Asking Good Questions [34:49] Setting Impossible Goals to Grow Faster Quotables “I'm not here to say your job is at stake, but you should operate as if it is—because if you're not, you're going to get replaced.” “The version of AI today is the worst version you'll ever deal with—because it's only getting better.” “AI can instantly—99.9% uptime—call the prospect, ask questions, and book an appointment for you or your salesperson to actually run the sales process.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Transcript Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (00:00) We are building out an AI agent that can actually run sales.   call the prospect, ask questions, book an appointment.   for you,   so it actually sounds like you're having a conversation with another human being.   Jason Hull (00:14) All right, I am Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we have spoken to thousands of property management business owners, coached, consulted, and cleaned up hundreds of businesses, helping them add doors, improve pricing.   increase profit and simplify operations and build and replace teams. We are like bar rescue for property managers. In fact, we have cleaned up and rebranded over 300 businesses and we run the leading property management mastermind with more video testimonials and reviews than any other coach or consultant in the industry. At DoorGrow, we believe that good property managers can change the world and that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway.   to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. Now, let's get into the show. All right, my guest today is Steve Trang of objectionproof.ai, and we're gonna be talking about, I guess, the future.   Does that sound about right?   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (01:36) Yeah, I would say that's very, very relevant, even more acutely today than normal. Yes.   Jason Hull (01:42) So we are in the middle of this insane AI revolution. know, AI is taking over quickly. Everybody's talking about all the jobs that are going to go away. Everybody's playing with chat GPT. It's becoming like their second brain. We're all maybe getting a little dumber because of it. Who knows? But we're also getting more more capabilities.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (01:59) Yeah.   Jason Hull (02:03) It's all speeding up so quickly even before we started. I'm like, I just tried this tool and you're like, have you heard of this tool? And like, there's just so many tools out there. before we get into all that, Steve, tell us a little bit, give us a little background on you as an entrepreneur and how you kind of got into entrepreneurism and what led to objection proof.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (02:26) Yeah, so it's going to be a long, secretive road because I got into real estate in 2005. So, you know, I did the good, you know, the, the get good grades so can get a good job deal. Right. I all that. was an engineer. I worked at Intel. and I realized fairly quickly, I wasn't manageable. And so, I had to, I had to find something else where I could work for myself. I read rich dad, poor dad from that. It's like, I got to do real estate, but.   I didn't take the advice quite right because I became a realtor in 07, not a good time. So that was a major, major humbling experience. I did some short sales, which are relevant again today. I a list of properties for banks, eventually started my own brokerage. You know, when the bank, when the foreclosure started dying down, became, my own brokerage. Did pretty well. had almost 1 % or we had 1 % market share for a very, short period of time. In the Phoenix market, one of every 100 transactions went through our brokerage.   then, I started buying houses, cash started wholesaling, did some flipping, started a podcast disruptors, which is where most people know me from. And then along the way I started a sales training program, started a title company, did some mortgage joint ventures. and then where we are today is AI. I probably sound very ADHD. I promise you, I don't have it.   I'm just always chasing the next object, which is very much a symptom of ADHD. But I can sit down and focus for long periods of time. It's just that I'm an entrepreneur, I started out as entrepreneur, and it wasn't until the last two, three years that I've actually learned how to actually sit down and focus. So that's how we got here.   Jason Hull (03:58) Okay, yeah.   All right, cool. So now that you know how to focus, what are you focused on?   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (04:05) Our focus is at this point more than half of my work schedule, which is more than 50 hours a week, right? It's probably like 60 or 70, is on AI. And the reason why is because things are changing so fast and the things we're trying to do are so innovative. And everyone says that, right? But like We are building out an AI agent that can actually run sales.   And so that is something that a lot of people have promised is something we're actually doing. Now, it's not going to buy a house. Is that going to convince a landlord to allow you to do property management? You're still going to have to do the heavy lifting. But what it can do is initiate the conversation, right? So if someone fills out a form, AI can instantly, 99.9 % uptime, right, because it's all technology now, call the prospect, ask questions, book an appointment.   for you, the business owner or salesperson, to actually run your sales process. So we can actually book appointments. It sounds real. You can't tell it's AI. Well, if you're really, really deep in the AI world, you could probably tell it's AI. But most people can't tell it's AI. And so it actually sounds like you're having a conversation with another human being. And it took a lot of effort to make that happen.   Jason Hull (05:22) Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (05:23) So that's where a core, a very, very heavy percentage of our detention is today.   Jason Hull (05:28) Got it. Yeah. I've started playing around with it. I haven't pulled the trigger to actually have AI agents calling or cold calling my prospects. I'm a little nervous about doing that.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (05:36) Mm-hmm.   It's a there's there's elements of leap of faith, right? But you can also test it. You know, we have a if you want to, you know, give it out, we have like a way to opt in for AI to call you so you can hear for yourself what it sounds like. It's not perfect, right? Like the we launched it on August 1st to all our existing clients. So, you know, not that long ago. ⁓ And we're learning about bugs that we weren't aware existed as we're testing it.   Jason Hull (05:59) Yeah.   Yeah.   Right. Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (06:06) because that's how new this is, right? So we're still iterating   and getting better all the time.   Jason Hull (06:10) Yeah, got it. OK, cool. Well, that's that's the future. I mean, the amazing thing is. I just signed up for an AI tool like this last weekend and they had this chat bot on the home page that you click talk and it's like a voice, it talks to you and it can hear you talk and it was in the voice of one of the principals of the company. And it was like really good. I don't know if they use 11 labs to do the voice or whatever.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (06:29) Yeah.   Right.   Mm-hmm. It's probably   11 labs, so that would be my guess.   Jason Hull (06:40) But   yeah, it was like his voice and I could ask it anything. I was asking like, it do AI, like can it do API integrations with HubSpot and how would it connect to this? And it was like giving me, yeah, you could do this and this is how it would work and this way. And I was like, there was no question I could ask it, it didn't know. And it knew everything about the tool. I could ask all sorts of questions about its capabilities and it's like, nope, we don't have that functionality but you could do it this way. And I was like, I was like.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (06:53) All right.   Jason Hull (07:07) I felt like it knew more than any salesperson at their company I could have talked to.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (07:12) Oh, 100%. Yeah.   Jason Hull (07:14) And so I was really blown away. was like, I I spend hours asking questions because they had, it was like, you have to pay for the year for this tool, right? So I was like, I'm not going to pay for the year for a tool. If I don't know, like I can't trial it or anything. So I was like, I'm asking every question and because it could answer every question I could throw at it with ease. I got all my answers asked and nobody there had to spend any human labor time to talk to me. And I signed up.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (07:22) Yeah. ⁓   Jason Hull (07:42) It was pretty wild. And I'm like, wait a second, could I do this? Can my clients do this? Yeah. But yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (07:48) ⁓ You can answer   all the questions. That's not a sales thing, right? Because we have a philosophy that sales is an emotional process, not logical process. So it can answer all the questions. It can remove a lot of the obstacles. But someone still needs to either sell a story or a dream. Or our philosophy is can we ask Jason enough questions.   Jason Hull (07:55) Yes.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (08:09) where Jason can formulate his own dream and decide to purchase himself. Because the thing we talk about is we don't sell. We get prospects to sell themselves. And so the one thing that AI cannot do just yet is to get you to sell yourself so that you're willing to sign a contract or pull out a credit card. The thing about entrepreneurs, business owners, and salespeople, the reason why we're such great buyers is because we tell ourselves great stories.   Jason Hull (08:18) Yes, totally true.   Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (08:34) The   general public is not as good at telling ourselves as great as stories. And so they don't need someone to facilitate that conversation to get them to pull the trigger.   Jason Hull (08:42) you   Yeah, I've really followed Jeremy Miner's kind of new model of selling sort of formula is NEPQ stuff. And because I noticed sales was getting harder and harder, like people didn't trust. And we're like in this post trust era, nobody trusts anything anymore. so, you know, everything's fake. Like is everybody's perception, especially since the pandemic, everybody got a little bit burned, you know, in the last several years. We're like, everybody's trying to trick us like   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (08:48) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes.   Exactly.   Mm-hmm.   Everyone has an agenda. Yeah.   Jason Hull (09:10) And nobody has our best interests at heart. Everybody has   an agenda. And I'm actually working on a book right now called the Golden Bridge Formula, which is my philosophy in selling, which is basically if you can showcase how, if I am purely selfish and I'm achieving what I want out of life, I can show how it benefits you, my prospect. And so everybody can trust our motives. If the default assumption in sales is that your motive is to get their money.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (09:19) All right.   are mutually aligned.   Jason Hull (09:34) which is a really crappy sort of motive, right? But I have something I want more than money, right? Which relates to my purpose in life. And so we teach our clients how to build that golden bridge and how to do that. So I think it'll be really interesting to see when people start to build. I think that's the thing is it would take some real intelligence from, you know, a human that understands empathy and understands this.   question-based selling in order to build out AI bots that can do it. Well, I don't know, but we'll see.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (10:04) I would estimate we're probably about 12 months out because we can do it pretty well right now, but we can't do it well with latency and enough information. So like when we're scheduling appointments, like the reason is not to schedule an appointment. There's only a handful of objections, right? But when we're doing real estate,   Jason Hull (10:14) Yeah.   Mm-hmm.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (10:24) there's a lot more questions that need to be answered. And also there's all sorts of different creative ways we can solve the problem, right? Like, you know, the traditional buying land creatively is like, all right, Jason, look, you can pick price, you can pick timeframe, you can pick payments, but you can't pick all three, right? We're not quite there yet, because the dimensions of how you can negotiate a real estate transaction.   Jason Hull (10:40) Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (10:47) It's substantial, right? It could be like, what's most important to them? Is it the depreciation? Is it the tax consequences? Is it the appreciation? Is it the cashflow? Is it I need to hide my taxes, right? Like what is your agenda? And so like AI doesn't have all the information today.   Jason Hull (11:02) Hmm.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (11:04) But I imagine 12 months from now, we can have enough data, can have AI figure all that out.   Jason Hull (11:10) Yeah, I would think so. okay. Well, tell us about objection proof. Like what is it?   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (11:17) Okay. So, before we get into that, I've been a sales trainer for more than six years now. So we've been coaching the top, house buyers across the country. You know, I'm in Collector Genius, I'm in boardroom and family mastermind. And so like, I work with the biggest and best operators across the country. And as I was looking at it, we've trained hundreds of sales teams and we've trained thousands of salespeople. And so when we talk about our AI tool, it's really just leveling up what already existed.   Jason Hull (11:29) Mm-hmm.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (11:45) And so earlier this year, we had three different individuals. We Stephanie Biders, the left main, Brad Chandler with Express Home Buyers, and then Casey Ryan, another really successful wholesaler in Vegas. All three of them, in a course of days, pulled me aside and said, hey, Steve, can you create an AI tool that does this? Hey, Steve, can you create an AI tool that does that? And the things they were asking for was an AI tool that can do automatic call reviews.   Right, because there's nothing more frustrating as a business owner than to sit down and listen to call reviews, right? I'd rather cold call than listen to a call review. And so, ⁓ so can you automate the call reviews? Especially if it's bad calls, yes. Right, and so can we automate call reviews? all right, so I set out to figure out how to do that. The other problem was like, how do I know my new salesperson is now ready to take leads I'm paying for?   Jason Hull (12:20) Right.   Right, especially if it's mad calls.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (12:43) You hire a salesperson, you onboard and you train them. When are they actually ready for leads that you're spending three, $400 for? Okay, so let's create a roleplay bot that can measure the quality. And then the last thing is how can we have our salespeople train every day on your ideal sales process? So again, the same idea with a roleplay bot is that you can call it every single day and train on it. So we created that.   Jason Hull (12:44) Right.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (13:12) earlier this year and that's been growing like gangbusters. Right. And then the thing again, we just launched this past week or week and a half now is an AI lead manager, which takes it from like someone that fills out an inquiry on the web form to calling them within seconds, right? To talk to them, to schedule an appointment. And the great thing about AI is that it has zero call reluctance. And I can tell you in my own personal experience as the one that created this tool.   Jason Hull (13:30) Yeah.   Yes.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (13:40) When I built it out, I forgot to iterate, like this is super nerdy stuff, right? But like, hey, call three times and stop, right? But I didn't get the counter right, so it always started zero every time I went through the loop. It called me 15 times in a row before I figured out how to shut it off, right? So it's got zero call reluctance. Oh yeah, if you said it, it'll call you 100 times a row, 1,000 times a row, no fear.   Jason Hull (14:01) It's very persistent, yeah.   Well, you know,   that's super interesting because I saw a video recently from Alex Hermosy and I've worked with him. I've been in masterminds with him and he said that he, one of his partner companies that he invests in, they had a 400 % increase in their close rate just by hiring one person to call every new lead within 60 seconds of the lead coming in. 400 % increase in deals close. And I'm like,   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (14:26) Mm-hm. Yeah. Right.   Jason Hull (14:31) That speed to lead is a significant thing. So I've been thinking about the same exact thing. I'm like, can connect Sinflow to HubSpot or can I do something to get some sort of phone agent to like call a new lead instantly? Because it's really difficult to get my team to do that. They might be in the middle of something. They might be making calls right then, you know? And so, yeah, 60 seconds.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (14:46) They're humans.   They can be at a sales appointment,   they can be in the bathroom, they can be in the car driving back from an appointment. Yeah, exactly.   Jason Hull (14:55) It can be late at night, like when the lead comes in, you know, and I don't know,   maybe somebody's filling out a lead form at one in the morning. I don't know if they'd answer the phone, but like call them and text them an email and maybe something happens. don't know.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (15:08) Exactly. Yeah, so that's the problem we seek to solve and I would say we did a pretty good job of it.   Jason Hull (15:14) Nice. Okay. Very cool. So yeah, super cool. So mean, this is the future and you know, I'm sure now because AI allows us to innovate with AI even faster, like it's, it's snowballing. Like it's just speeding up rapidly. It's like, now you can go to your AI and say, Hey, I want to figure out how to do this, solve this problem. And it's like, here's a bunch of ideas, which like   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (15:25) Mm-hmm. Yes.   Mm-hmm.   Right.   Jason Hull (15:38) Evaluate these ideas which ones are the best ideas and it's like this one will give you the the biggest return, right? Yeah, so it's pretty wild. So I think I did in working on my book over the weekend in a day. I probably did what would have taken 90 days of research in it like It just months of research like   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (15:57) Mm-hmm. Yeah.   Yeah,   the time compression is just absolutely outrageous. The amount of time AI can save you is just off the charts. I built out the tool. Now there's Ian Ross from an organization. He's the AI Whisperer. He's been training the AI boss for two years now. But I built everything around it. And if I were to try to do everything I did without AI, three years maybe to get it done, right?   to learn React and SuperBase and all this other stuff, right? To learn how to compress audio files and automatically. And it took me months to get a product. We have, we're looking at, have 130 clients now using our tool. And it's something that started less than six months ago. So yeah, AI is showing you how to use AI.   Jason Hull (16:43) Wow. Yeah.   Yeah, I mean, it's scratching a super strong   niche. Like if you go on Google Trends and put in AI and it like, just watch, it's like nothing and then it's just going crazy and it's surpassing everything right now. So let me share a quick word from our sponsor real quick for this episode. So our sponsor is Cover Pest. Cover Pest is the easy and seamless way to add on demand pest control for your resident benefit package.   Residents love the simplicity of submitting a service request and how affordable it is compared to traditional pest control options. Investors love knowing that their property is kept pest free and property managers love getting their time back and making more revenue per door. Simply put, Cover Pest is the easiest way to handle pest control issues at all of your properties. To learn more and to get special DoorGrow pricing, go to the website coverpest.com slash door grow.   All right, so Steve, let's get back into talking about AI. you know, you're focused on the sales side of things. What do you see as the future of what's gonna be happening with sales and what are your team working on developing next?   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (17:57) I mean, the things we're working on next is just getting to the actual sales conversation where, you know, for someone that needs to their house for cash, right, which is our core audience, is how do we get it from beginning of a web form all the way into an actual transaction to actually get assigned a contract? That is going to be the next step. I think we can incorporate transaction management into it.   Right? The goal here is to get to a point where you basically have a handful of salespeople. One person that can handle the acquisitions, the buying of the houses. One person can handle the dispositions. And one person still to really talk to homeowners as scheduled appointments because the reality is AI doesn't replace everybody. AI just makes everybody better. As matter of fact, in half an hour from now, we're actually doing a training internally where our guy Ian, our AI whisperer,   is going to be teaching everyone in our organization prompt engineering. And the reason why that is, is that everyone needs to be using AI. Because if you're not, the amount of productivity everyone in organization, since we started using AI, is at least three times better, at least, if not more. And so every person that's not using AI is expensive now, because their amount of productivity is less than a third of what the other guy who is using AI.   Jason Hull (18:59) Right.   Right. So you could easily 3x the output if you just understand how you can leverage AI in some clever use cases.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (19:18) Exactly. Right. So if you look at that and then the reality is if I can get it down to just the best salespeople in my organization and AI everything else, everyone else that's not using it, their marketing costs, their overhead and everything else is just going to be more than mine to do the same amount of work, which in a very short period of time isn't that big a deal. But if I can reduce my overhead by 10 % compared to you and we're running the same business model.   Next month I have 10 % more to spend on marketing. And the month after that. And month after that. And my sales is only gonna grow. So we're gonna see a time where those that aren't on board are gonna find themselves unable to compete just because of margins alone. We had a, there's a colleague of mine, someone I look up to, I respect a lot. And we had a conversation where she let four people, she let go of four people earlier this year.   Jason Hull (19:50) Right. Yeah. And it compounds.   Right.   to compete, totally.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (20:13) Each person, six figure salary. So, she had to let go four people. And the reason why was that AI can do their job, right?   Jason Hull (20:24) Yeah, I six figure salary is saving like what half a million? Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (20:27) almost half a mil, right? And she's   like, and it sucks because she cares about these people. They've been with her as she built out the company, right? But right now her competition is some kid who lives at home with no expenses. She can't compete with that kid if she has all this expense on her payroll. It sucks. So everyone in our company is going to have to learn how to use AI to do their job more effectively, more efficiently. And so that's, so I would say on top of   Jason Hull (20:31) Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (20:54) the sales part is that everyone, everyone is getting looked at. There's a person in organization, I'm like, how are you getting so much done? Because she has stepped up and picked up three other people's in the last year. She picked up three other people's jobs. And then I talked to her last week, like, what are you doing? And she just showed me her chat GPT that's always open. That's it. She's just picking up other people's jobs because she's able to do it all day.   Excelled at using it and I think that's just that's just the future and this is not nothing new that people haven't heard before Really? What I would say is there should be a wake-up call if you're not listening as a matter of fact I had a really uncomfortable conversation last week Because I train acquisition managers, which is sales disposition managers, which is moving the properties Lead managers we were booking the appointments and then sales managers right how to manage sells people get the most out of them the lead manager call I was like, hey look   how many of you guys are paying attention to what I'm saying on social media? And like maybe 10%, 12 % raise their hands. I was like, okay, if you're not paying attention on what on social media, then this needs to be your wake up call. I have created an AA tool that is directly threatening your job. I am training you and I'm also creating a tool that might compete against you, that will probably compete against you. And so the reality is,   Jason Hull (22:08) or real life.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (22:13) A, it's awesome you're on this call, because you're training becoming one of the better ones across the country. And you have to have this mindset that I'm going to be irreplaceable. So you have to be the best, because this is what you're competing against. So I'm not here to say your job is at stake, but you should operate as if it is, because if you're not, you're going to get replaced. That was an uncomfortable conversation.   Jason Hull (22:30) Yeah, it was at least a year ago when AI was   starting to just sort of peak, you know, come up on everybody's radar. I gave my team, heard of, saw Alex Hormozi like give his team the task of like trying to replace themselves with AI. And so I said that to my team and several were so offended. They're like, you trying to replace us? I'm like, but that's reality. So I was like, try it. And I got some like.   of weak responses because they weren't really focused on it. But now I think everybody can see like this is coming and nobody thought that the most expensive jobs would be the first thing to be going. Lawyers, like doctors, like a lot of this a lot of the data, the research, the stuff that takes a lot of knowledge. It's hard to beat something that can pull in everything, you know, and and then really all these specialists that are so specialized in things, they're   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (23:05) No, no one saw that coming.   Jason Hull (23:23) you know, AI is probably going to eat their lunch and then, you know, and then like really high level copywriting jobs, high level graphic design work, like all of this also. And so it really is becoming a future in which those that are the most creative in thought and how to leverage AI, the creators, and they're going to be AI creators that can leverage AI and know what tools.   are available and they're staying up on that. Those are going to be the ones that are the most valuable team members because they have access to infinite knowledge. Knowledge is no longer a super valuable resource. It's, and you can just get it. We've got the internet, there's tons of it out there, but the people that can figure out how do I isolate what knowledge is needed right now? How do I leverage AI to like figure it out? How do I, you know, then feed it into some sort of agentic system or create some sort of agent or some sort of chat or prompt or rule to like,   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (24:00) Mm-hmm.   Jason Hull (24:19) you know, get the output that I need. These are the people that are going to, you know, be leading the way. And so it's really interesting.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (24:27) Yeah, the creators.   I've been looking at it. we've been using Working Genius internally as well as for hiring. So if you guys that are listening aren't familiar with it, it's created by Patrick Lancioni who wrote like, what is it? ⁓ Amazing books. was, shoot. Anyway, Patrick Lancioni is an amazing, amazing author, wrote some amazing books.   Jason Hull (24:41) He's written a bunch of good books.   That's that from right here.   I've got, where are they? Let's see.   Oh, he wrote The Motive, Getting Naked, The Ideal Team Player, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Death by Meeting. Yeah, he's got some great books.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (24:50) The advantage is one of them, but there's like...   by this function as a team, yeah.   Yeah, FIDAS   function seems huge, huge one, right? So he wrote working genius. And working genius breaks down to six letters, right? Widget, which is coincidental, I suppose. So what it stands for is wondering, inventor, galvanizer, discerning, enabler, and tenacity. And so most people are two of them as an energy.   It gives you energy, two of them are like it drains you, right? So like I don't like doing work. So T and E is just that for me, right? But I do like to invent and I like to discern. And then Ian likes to invent and likes to galvanize. But the key here is we're both inventors according to Working Genius. And I think right now in this world with AI, it's going to be the people that have the W, the wondering, the inventiveness. I think those are the two they're going to do the most.   Jason Hull (25:30) you   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (25:49) the most well in this new world because we can automate a lot of other things. We can automate the mundane tasks. That's what the agents are for. So it'll be interesting. AI can discern to some degree. It can't galvanize. So we still need someone to lead the charge and get everyone to storm the.   Jason Hull (26:00) Mm.   Thank   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (26:13) stormed enemy territory. But yeah, I think to your point, the creators, I look at it as everyone that's got the wondering and inventiveness is gonna do really well on this new AI world.   Jason Hull (26:25) Okay, yeah. Those things sound fun to me. That sounds like way more fun to be spending my time on doing those kind of things than most anything else you do in business. And I love that you said, you know, figuring out which things are kind of your, give you energy or take away your energy. So one of the things we have our clients do is we give them a time study that we've created that.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (26:32) Yeah.   Mm-hmm.   Jason Hull (26:49) They do a time study for like two weeks and they track which things are plus signs or which things are minus signs. Just to figure out, because the easiest way I can get them towards more output or towards more joy or more fulfillment in their business or more freedom or offloading the right stuff is just to figure out which things are their minus signs and which things are tactical so we can get those off their plates so they're focused more on the strategic things and the plus signs, which usually are connected. So for entrepreneurs, yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (26:54) Huge.   Mm-hmm.   Jason Hull (27:17) And so, yeah, I think that's going to be the powerful thing is that if people can become conscious of the things that are draining them, then you can just ask the question. You can go ask AI the question, how do I get rid of this? How do get this off my plate? Give me some really good ideas. Yeah. And so we've got this magical thing that it's like we've got the magic genie of answers that can just give us any answer to anything at any time. But you have to ask good questions.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (27:30) All right. It really is that simple these days.   You have to ask good questions, and then the thing that you have to make sure, and I don't know how to do this, is to make sure you don't give up your critical thinking abilities. I think that that muscle is going to atrophy pretty fast in this new world. The ability to actually ask good questions and then filter, is that actually a good answer? Does that make sense? Or are we just accepting the answers? Because you can see, if you just accept things, if you just accept data without questioning it,   Jason Hull (27:56) Mm.   Yeah, it'd be pretty destructive.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (28:08) you're going to atrophy pretty fast, I think, of your critical thinking skills.   Jason Hull (28:11) Yeah. And that's where you hear the horror stories of AI, like people killing themselves because AI told them to, know, stuff like this, where they're just like, they think AI is like, becomes some sort of superpower when it's really just reflecting them. Yeah. It's just reflecting them and their, you know, psychoses, I guess. So I think, yeah, you know, I've noticed that, yeah, sometimes chat GPT, for example, can be very agreeable.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (28:17) Yeah.   It's not all knowing all powerful, it just appears that way.   Yeah, sad.   Jason Hull (28:36) It's like, that's brilliant. You're the best. Like it's giving you compliments. like, yeah. You know, but the reality is, yeah, you have to ask it to challenge you. And you have to like say, what are the flaws in this or what evaluate or, and so I'll have the one AI tool evaluate what another AI tool gives me. I'll say, which of these ideas should I actually do to my offer document or what should I change or what should I improve and which things are not a good idea?   And it rates them for me. Like Claude will be like, this is like, these are the ones you should do. These ones maybe, and these ones definitely don't. I would recommend these. And I'm like, cool, do that. Right? And so, yeah. And so I think we have to, we have to have a brain that's creative enough to see the potential problems and to ask the right questions and to challenge things. because yeah, otherwise you may just   be led down a rabbit hole of your own self-reflection, that's a blind spot.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (29:37) Mm-hmm. It's the same dangers we see with TikTok. It just sends you down the wrong rabbit holes.   Jason Hull (29:43) Right. Because the algorithm is just giving you more of what you look at. you're like, man, I'm really, it's like, you know, that prurient interest where you just can't stop looking at the car crashes that are driving, you know, driving by. then the algorithm's like, cool, they want to see more car crashes. And you're like, wait, why is this awful? Yeah. So yeah, that's, that's, that's the difference between AI and real life. so, you talk about creating a self-managing sales team.   What the self-managing sales team because having managing a sales team is pain in the ass.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (30:16) Yeah, so the self-managing sales team, we're using AI to power it. So it still requires a person to actually care about the other salespeople, right? So the big thing is like, what are you meeting with them? Are you finding out what's important to them? What is their big, hairy, audacious goal, right? So that's the first and foremost. We've got to figure out what their big, hairy, audacious goals are. Then we've got to quantify it. How much money do you actually need to make to accomplish that, right? And then we reverse the math, which isn't new, but   Jason Hull (30:17) They can't.   Mm-hmm.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (30:46) The newer wrinkle here is like we got to tie it to the big hair audacious goal. And then we'd look at, right, how many transactions do you need to close? Okay. And then if we need to close as many transactions in the year, then in real estate, how many contracts do we need to go under in order to have that many closings? Right? Because unfortunately it's not a one-to-one. So then how many contracts we have, then how many appointments do we need to run per week to hit that many?   Jason Hull (30:54) Hmm.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (31:15) closings per month. And then we work into how many conversations do we need to have per week to have that many appointments per week. And then in order to have, then we figure out how many conversations we need to have per day. And we back it all the way up, right? And then.   Jason Hull (31:30) So conversations   to appointments to contracts to transactions to hit the B-Hack. Okay, right.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (31:36) Yeah, yes.   It has to work that way. And the sales manager or business owner needs to care about their people to actually care about those goals. Because if you don't care about those goals alongside of them, none of this matters. You got to care about your salespeople, But once they care about our salespeople, now we can use AI to track and hold them accountable to their metrics. And so one of the things that we have is if anyone's off, we can report this.   And you can do this with VA's and systems and this and that. The things that we've added recently with AI is that in our organization, after every single sales call, AI does a call review. And after it does a call review, it pushes it into Google Chat. So we use Google Chat, you can use Slack, you can use Teams, but we use Google Chat. It pushes into Google Chat where all the salespeople are in. And so it says, hey, Steve on this call got a 51 out of 100.   Everyone can see it. There's no hiding. Yeah, and so then after it gives me that review, it gives me the score, it gives me all the reasons why, I need to, as a salesperson, go in there and comment on it. I agree with this, I disagree with this, here's my takeaway from it, here's what I'm gonna work on. So, that's a super tight feedback loop. Now, instead of a call review that happens maybe once a week, or maybe once a month, or never,   Jason Hull (32:33) Yeah,   Right. Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (32:58) our sales guys are being coached in the moment where they're at in real time. Right? So they're self-managed because they have to go and respond to it. And here's the other thing too, like marketing has always been, or marketing should be accountable. you run your business right, we should know, hey, we spent our X dollars on this. How many leads did we get? How many contracts did we get? What was the revenue that came from this lead source for this marketing channel? What is the return on investment or return on ad spend?   Jason Hull (33:03) Yeah, that's great.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (33:25) We can be pretty good with marketing if we care. Accounting, it's really easy to tell when accounting is screwed up. It didn't zero out. Pretty easy to, you know, black and white accounting. Sales has always been leads went in and there's this black box and then contracts came out. We've eliminated that black box, right? Everyone's accountable to everyone else. So if you're in there,   Jason Hull (33:50) Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (33:51) And you can see, like you're putting up 50s over and over again out of 100, either you're going to self-select out or you're going to get better. But there's nowhere safe to hide in our sales company anymore. And that's how we created a self-managing sales team. Everyone can hold everyone else accountable. Jason can call Steve out, Steve can call Jason out. Right? So that's how we've had that. And then on top of that, our AI tool also has trends. So we can say like, hey, in the last seven days, here's where Jason's really struggling. Coach him on this. Or in the last 30 days, right? So we have one guy.   His struggle consistently is isolating the real objection. That's one of our guys. The other guy, his challenge consistently is not letting a difficult statement just sit there and just ruminate for like five seconds. We'll all agree, yeah, we gotta let it sit there. So those are two different cells, guys, we have two different challenges, but I know that because   Jason Hull (34:36) Right, he jumps in and has to solve it too quick.   Right.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (34:47) every single call is being reviewed. And that's how we build our self-managed Excel team.   Jason Hull (34:51) Wow, yeah, it's really cool. I love the idea of, normally in the past, historically, I wasn't really a big fan of BHAGs, like big hairy audacious goals, because it was unrealistic, I thought. But I recently was in Mexico and I was hanging out with Ben Hardy. And he wrote this amazing new book called The Science of Scaling. And he talks about the importance of having impossible goals. And unless the goal is impossible, because he says if a goal is realistic,   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (35:13) Mm-hmm.   Jason Hull (35:17) then that means basically you're operating on your current limited level of thinking and your brain has nothing to work on. And as good as AI is, our brain really is like a quantum computer. It's like this masterful supercomputer that can create whole worlds. Our unconscious mind can do amazing things in the background. But unless we give our brain impossible goals to achieve, our brain doesn't even work to formulate new paths or new ways of thinking. It gets us out of our current prison of thinking. And so   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (35:24) Nothing to strive for.   Jason Hull (35:45) This is where I think having really big impossible goals gives you a completely different path than a linear realistic goal. so, you know, I think what I've noticed with AI, and you can test this with AI, like just say, if I want to get from zero to a thousand Instagram followers in a year, what would be my path? And it's gonna give you a pretty predictable linear path. But if you say, how do I get to a million followers in a month, for example?   super impossible, how could that be possible? You're gonna get a completely different path, right? And so the path, you know, having better goals or unrealistic or impossible goals allows your brain in the background to come up with new ideas. So I came back from Mexico, I was like, how could it close 100 deals in a month instead of 10? It's impossible. How could I do that? And I figured it out. It took me a week and a half, my brain just figured it out. I'm like, I have to...   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (36:18) True. Yeah.   Jason Hull (36:43) cancel 60 to 70 % of my calls. Anyone like doesn't confirm I have to get them off my plate. I have to have my setters feed them through a different funnel. And so we have a slow lane, middle lane, and I'm fast lane. I would have to, so we re-engineered our entire sales process and I did it in like a day. I did it in a day, maybe two. And I rebuilt everything because I had to create a completely different path in how we were doing it. Cause my current thinking,   well, my previous level of thinking realistic in order to get my company to be at X millions of dollars, you know, bigger than it is now. I was like, I'm going to have to hire like, it was a linear path. I'm like, I'm doing X. I'm going to have to hire 10 closers, 30 setters. And like it was, yeah. And I'm going to have to build this team. And I didn't even want to do it because that sounded so uncomfortable. And now we closed just about as many deals last month as we did the month before, but   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (37:27) Yeah.   Jason Hull (37:39) our sales calls, at least for me, were like a tiny, tiny fraction because we had made the process so much more efficient because without really, you know, impossible goals, we optimize for the wrong things. And I was optimizing for just increasing this linear difficult path instead of looking at how could I eliminate 90 % of the calls and still have the same close rate? That's a completely different path, right?   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (37:45) Yeah.   Yeah, well, I think you're asking your previous questions with the brand you had, right? And so we need to ask different questions with a different, with, yeah.   Jason Hull (38:12) length, which was a brain that was focused on reality. And reality kept   me stuck in the same place for years. And so now I see a path where we can get much larger, much quicker, but it's because I changed my brain's focus into the playground of impossible goals instead of looking at realistic goals, which usually are just a punishment tool that we measure ourselves by.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (38:34) And it's uninspiring.   We're not getting out of bed for realistic goals. And also, in sales, like,   We get punched in the mouth all day every day. Why would you not want to build your dream life? If we're going to do the difficult things, it should be incredibly rewarding.   Jason Hull (38:44) Ahem.   Yeah. Yeah, we get a lot of people coming into the property management industry from the real estate industry, because they're tired of the hunt and chase of deals and getting punched in the mouth. They're like, how do I build a residual income subscription model business that scales and grows, that's systemizable and do that. But a lot of our clients have a brokerage and they have property management, like most of them. They do both. But the   And once the property management business is healthy, it feeds them plenty of real estate deals because investors are always doing deals.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (39:23) Right. Yeah.   Jason Hull (39:24) So anyway, I know, Steve, maybe we should hang out later and come up with some cool ideas together. But yeah, this is really fun stuff to chat about. you know, this probably we could talk about AI probably all day. It's like a big focus of mine right now as well. I'm just super geeking out on it. What, you know, what maybe   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (39:30) Absolutely, I'm game for it.   Yeah, I bet.   Jason Hull (39:47) Big takeaway, would you like everybody to get from listening to this podcast episode and then how could people, who are you looking for to connect with objection proof? And, cause I'm sure some of my audience are your audience as well. And, and how can they get in touch with you?   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (40:03) Yeah, so I think the big takeaway, I mean, we already beaten it quite a bit, but I just want to really emphasize, this is a pivotal moment in time. This is like the dot com era, right? This is like when things started getting online. There are going be a handful of people that are going to make a stupid amount of money in this period of time. And so the same question I always ask is, why not you? Right?   Jason Hull (40:25) Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (40:26) So like if you're afraid just start because the reality is like AI will coach you on how to use AI. So just start. I'll say that and then you know the if someone wants to check out what we do I have a URL objectionproof.ai you can upload any sales call through text. It's gonna be a text file. It can be transcription. It can be WAV, M4A, MP3, whatever you can upload it. There's no charge you can use as many times you want. My team hates when I say that but   You upload it for free and it will evaluate your sales call, will email you the results. That's a free tool we have. Also, if anyone wanted to role play with our boss, you can text roleplay, that's one word, to the phone number 33777. And if anyone wants to check out our lead manager, you can text AI space caller, AI caller, to the same number 33777. Again, both of those are free. We're not charging anything for those.   It really is just a demonstration. All three are real demonstration of our actual product in action. And then we give that for free. Now you are going to have to talk to someone on my team. But you'll hear what our salespeople sound like as well. Or you can just ignore it. Either way is fine. But if nothing else, just check it out because you can see the direction we're heading. look, I've heard people say this over and over again. I always kind of like roll my eyes when they say it. But it's still true.   Jason Hull (41:34) Yeah.   Steve Trang ObjectionProof.ai (41:47) The version of AI today is the worst version you'll ever deal with. Because it's only getting better.   Jason Hull (41:51) Yeah.   Yeah, and it's crazy. It's really insane how quick things are changing. It's just speeding up faster and faster. So, all right, well, Steve, great having you on the show. Appreciate you hanging out with me. Those of you watching, if you are a property management business owner, you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your property management business to the next level, reach out to us at doorgrow.com. We can help.   Also join our free Facebook community just for property management business owners at doorgrowclub.com. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. And until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together and guess with AI. Bye everyone.

There's some strange things afoot at the Circle K, amongst them some sideways situations for American firearm owners and Second Amendment supporters (which means everyone, in a fashion).  What's going on with the unintended acceleration from M18s?  Did Sig Sauer make a mistake or is this something worse?  What's better for our fighters to carry - an M18 or an M14?  Did we have these problems when US warfighters carried their 1911s cocked and locked?  Do all off-roaders carry a sidearm?  How about a frontarm?  Meanwhile, what's afoot and ahand with the underlying argument about craziness in the transmission crowd, and how American gun dealers are unintentionally making the case against dudes in the girls' locker room (ie: You can't blame the hammer for crooked nails.).  Meanwhile, let's all watch how the NRA negotiates this one (and how long is their game - Go Doug, go!). Here's talking at you: an F-35 conference call, polymath versus psycho, Leo Gordon, Bruce Lee Jr., self-defense spatulas, Sam Peckinpaugh, an Excellent Weirdo Sendoff for Graham Greene of "Maverick" and "Longmire", the Spiritual Beggars, Pelican and an Excellent Weirdo Sendoff for Dave Mustaine and his monster, Megadeth.

Are you a maker or a taker?  We've made nothing but the good stuff on this episode: automaker OEs forgetting who owns the cars they sold (you) and taking away the performance over the phone (and forgetting the rules of Right-To-Repair as outlined by champs like Steve Wozniak and the federal case against John Deere).  Speaking of tractors, we've got a study of the big-head elitist media whackos at NPR who are either pretending they just discovered tractor pulling or they're actually that clueless.  There's also the new measurement of horse-pounds (when HP and FT-LBs ain't enough), Camping World's big American flags and even bigger FU to every city that complains about 'em, some thoughts about the hazards of folks who break into your country being allowed to drive 40,000lb not-very-guided cruise missiles, and some great video of a small Philippines Coast Guard cruiser outsmarting two Chinese warships into ramming each other. Backing it all up - literally and metaphorically - is The Prodigy and a proper Excellent Weirdo RIP for classic English acting oddball Terrence Stamp (if you haven't seen him in "The Limey", you're missing out - dude could act, and that movie's got fire and some high-Q ass-kicking).

The Garage Hour: home of microaggressions (plus the other kind) - your favorite gearhead goons got lost in the good stuff (Collegiate Mountains above Salida, Poncha Springs, Buena Vista and St. Elmo) and their trucks will never be the same.  Cohosts White Mark the Diversity Hire and the Walkin' Dude came along, and dragged FOB cohosts Papa Smurf and Mike the Gimp along for the fracas.  Trails?  Tomichi Pass and Hancock Pass (so many rocks), the Bonanza Mine complex (so many options), Mt. Antero (so many feet above sea level), Taylor Mountain (so many llamas), and Billings Lake (so many free beers)...  On the way up and down, new Ineos Grenaders were dropped on old rocks, old 4Runners climbed some new obstacles, an Extreme Outback toolbox compressor got a cohosting credit, and an e-Jeep almost drove itself off a cliff.  See more at "JFSummit3" on Instaspam. Along the way, many sidelong awesomes occurred: Sammy Davis Jr. and the "Cannonball Run", Charlie Daniels and the Beau Weevils, illegal ham and some Bad Fangs, a sweet StayinSalida rental won the cabin versus tent argument, and somebody decided to buy some new shocks.

Don't get traffucked - it's up to people who think, who see, and who comprehend to deal with the state of cars and trucks around us (instead of being ground into quivering sheetmetal jelly by the incompetence of the four-wheeled troglodytes and chuds who seek to drag us down to their level of base idiocy).  What makes it worse, bad bureaucracy compounds the failings of the flabby halfwit shoveling breakfast into her face in the hybrid in the next lane by adding ineffectual laws, dysfunctional lanes and obsequious lemminglike expectations like a blanket full of smother.  The Garage Hour is here to help, though - we'll point out the landmines, be they Sunday drivers on a Monday, dominant mergers, aggressive sloggers, lane splitters or local crashers. Lest we forget the icing: 4Runner shocks for boingless 'froading, cars that are too fat, bourgeois Jeeps, hardcore construction equipment and so much Snail (all "Feral", all the time).

Lords: * Wacy * Chris Topics: * Mysterious BART smell between 12th st. Oakland and West Oakland * Glucose monitor * Winston has been playing Minecraft. Have you heard about this game? Kids love it I guess. * The Earth Wants You * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/_jj6TAcC.jpg Microtopics: * Knowing so many Chrises that you refuse to call yourself Chris. * Not knowing what just happened for the past how, but now there's an hour-long M4A file with your voice in it. * A whole range of thought experiments that might bear interesting fruit. * A scrap of papyrus containing a transcript of the first episode of Topic Lords. * Trash-adjacent smells. * Whether power substations smell like anything. * A smell worth seeking out for its own experience. * A smell for smell connoisseurs. * A tiny BART Easter egg for your nose. * A huge amount of substance that is replenishing the smell particles. * Checking your apps for indescribable smells. * Closing some Tupperware in a stinky room to preserve the smell forever. * A rat kingdom living under the BART tracks. * Where to talk about unsolved mysteries now that Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack went off the air. * Reintroducing mystery to the world like replenishing a lake with trout. * What is the goo under the BART 12th Street Tunnel? * Mystery caches. * An extremely achievable local mystery. * Your body surfacing issues you were previously unaware of. * The full spectrum of diabetes. * Disposable glucose monitors. * What type of food are you eating that spikes your blood sugar, and by how much? * Glucose Curious. * Sports enthusiasts needing to checking their pulse as they watch the big game. * Going for a walk right after eating. * Continuing walking until your blood sugar is back within tolerances. * Having a bad habit for a few months vs. having a bad habit for your whole life. * Learning to spot blood glucose meters in the wild. * Measuring your blood glucose for a month to learn how your body reacts to various foods. * Getting funneled into videos of a douchebag with spiked hair breaking shit with a hammer. * Figuring out how to survive the first night in Minecraft with a six year old. * A game that lets you do lots of different things but doesn't suggest any of them so you have to figure out what you can do and why you would want to do it. * Java edition mods vs. Bedrock edition mods. * Mods: they have they mod problem. * Why they added copper to Minecraft. * Purposeful exploration. * Laying down a bunch of the stone that makes The Warden spawn so you can meet your new Warden pal. * Exploring The End and getting your wings. * Dragon Quest Builders. * The Terraria tutorial. * A weird person to be. * Vampire Survivors: not the first Vampire Survivors-like. * Getting to the poem before it's too late. * Looking through your photos of graffiti * A cat mermaid playing a violin as if it's a guitar. * The Earth Wants You To Be Die. * Emitting a series of tones that insert an image in the listener's mind. * If you can't handle me at my fish, you don't deserve me at my cat. * Missing some sleep and some teeth. * Trying to refute an idea without exposing your audience to the original idea. * Videos continuing to appear on your travel vlog long after you've finished traveling.

The Garage Hour does good interviews (whether or not Hostus Maximus Justin Fort is any good at interviews), and we did a semi-sneak beer attack on Chris Hefty at the eponymously named Hefty Fab last month.  Unfortunately, with the hillclimb and about a gajillion client to-dos on the front burner, we're a little late with the upload.  Sort'a sorry!  No matter: it's worth the wait - we puzzle out the doin's of keeping a serious shop going when times get tight (as our hero Hunter S. once opined, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.").  Chris details the art of shifting the lift when retail production took a hit post-Scamdemic, the intense and varied demands of the "Please make my truck work" customer, and what it takes to chase the market when the market takes a left turn at Albuquerque. Because it's the Garage Hour, we've got more: bicyclists who just don't get it, whether cleaning soap is a procedural singularity, Nate's efforts to reinvent the Brady Bunch, how you can ruin a good message with too much creativity, the Hefty Internet Café, and dropping $40Gs for serious parts that don't get serious use.  There's also shock rebuilds, F-150s, Cherokees, an F-350, 80-Serieses in a big pile, Miatas versus S2Ks, and of course, 4Runners.

You can't get this kind of goodness without a prescription (or a warrant) - it's a roundabout look at the upcoming 2025 Pike's Peak International Hillclimb [PPIHC.org (or .com - choose your adventure)], with everything from drivers, racecars (because racecar!), viewing (in-person or on TV and online), spectating (because you're not going to choke on race fuel fumes in your living room - probably), course info (best turns and, well, there are no worst turns here), and a little bit of history (because you can't do 100+ years of racing without having something historic happen).  Also, Hostus Maximus Justin Fort makes up a few words, describes a few things, and hits on a few highlights from the upcoming JF Summit #3. What's more? A head's up on an upside of the "big beautiful bill" - seems there is a little good tucked in this monstrosity for shooters, hunters and Second Amendment fans.  Also, backgrounds and full-on Euro club-hop weirdness from "This Is Everybody Too".

Tools are for humans (and super-smart animals, apparently), garages are for cars, countertops are for food, and rollaways are for organizing!  This esoteric episode is all (mostly) about embracing the perfectionist - just a little - and making your tools and shop space match your intellect and style.  Because so many good projects and necessary repairs get hog-tied by bad organization, and a lack of operable tool enhancement can be submarined by a lack of organization, we want you to scratch that itch and embrace the OCD (if just long enough to put the nut drivers in the correct drawer). While we're at it, there's Jerry Reed and "Amos Moses", Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Ninja Tune and Funkungfusion, Electronic Excursions in Hi-Fi and Meat Beat Manifesto, and more "Kashmir' covers than you can shake a two-headed guitar at.

Catching up with the backup - it's a timely episode of the Garage Hour (not to be cornfused with the usual when-we-can upload freakout).  There are still a few more further-behind  units to be kicked into production, so don't worry - you won't miss a thing. What's in this 'un?  Good electronics versus new, "dumb" appliances versus robot vacuums conspiring with the 'fridge, and the importance of having a good TV repairman up your sleeve.  There's a stint with the inevitable: electric cars and why taxpayer dough makes them soft and flabby (and inevitable losers); a possible breakthrough in small trucks (because it's simple), the spy on the counter, the spy in your solar panels, the spy in A.I., and how Carl Sagan called this 50 years ago (and Asimov did 100 years ago).  Add on a few thoughts about the freedom to roam (and boat, when you're in Florida (man)), and more from JFS3, and you've got a show. While we're at it, this episode's got a few Excellent Weirdo R.I.P.s for some high-Q fellows who left us (and it's not okay): Joe Don Baker, George Wendt and Bruce Glover.  Make it more: music from Karma to Burn, KMFDM, Deadbolt, Fatso Jetson, I Mother Earth, Dire Straits, Rev. Heat, Clutch, the Allmans and Fun Lovin' Criminals.

If you've got a year's worth of 'froading fun (ie: dirt) crammed into every corner of your truck, reaching a "perfect" clean might not be a thing. Instead, aim for "maintenance clean" - the body is rinsed off, the two-bucket method is in overdrive, the dirt is gone, and the rig is neat enough that you can go back to work fixing what you broke on-trail (or wash it again to a state of "show detailed").  The Garage Hour discusses how.  We also chat about the need for a good fabrication guy, and why a good can of Krylon can be essential to your truckly appearance. There's also fun times with worn out old electronics, worn out tires for White Mark the Diversity Hire's Grenader, worn out hi-po factory parts, and worn out Metallica.

Hostus Maximus Justin Fort and White Mark the Diversity Hire got lost in the hills (and their minds) for this one: two-lane blacktop uphill to see our old friends at Freedom:30 Arms for some lasers and weirdo rounds spurred the conversation about what makes a bullet a boutique round instead of a fad, and why .40 Smith & Wesson has staying power versus Mark's freaky LE-favorite .357 Sig Sauer.  We also get some Dude Food going, with a debate about how meat patties can be a loaf instead of a patty, and why the meat's more important than the shape of it.  There's also mountains to four-wheel for the upcoming JF Summit (#3!), and which is worse (a question): camel spiders or vinegaroons, and what stick to hit them with in either case. Let's just blame our busy days for the shortage of episodes...  The pace will get better (even if it doesn't look it).  ...With Fluke, pistachios, Otter Boxes and redneck North Koreans, it's so much Garage Hour, even if we had the attention spans of a gnat for this one.

It's not hard to make fine gearhead talk (TM) when the world lines 'em up like this: wicked and nasty Mercedes W196R Stromlinienwagen nets $54 mill on the block (and why modern go-fast cars can't hold a candle to the brutal elegance and sexual attractiveness of the classics), more failures of modern OEs as they try to avoid testing their hardware before selling it (and why WE aren't going out like a guinea pig), how BYD's going to use AI to make their customer experience ever worse, another story about how nothing makes things worse than the government, and how to avoid letting bad writers ruin good opportunities for gearhead behavior. While we're at it: cyborgs versus robots, STi versus 911, securing your home with smart children (and a kid from Kentucky who did just that), gardening for the head, sun tea for the old growlers, John Paul Jones on "Zooma", and an Excellent Weirdo R.I.P. for Air Force ace Bud Anderson.

With the throwback gratification of Failure's "Fantastic Planet" rolling throughout, the gearhead goons at the Garage Hour start out gritty with the bucket (or well-sorted trays) of backup bolts that every good geek has in the garadtch.  Note: if that pile of bolts (and rags, and parts, and tools) is getting dusty, you're not making enough - time to build, boys and girls.  There's also a look at the trannie nutjobs who are blowing up cars and dealerships, the politics of production (with perspectives from pinko China and politicized capitalism), and why race fans have very little interest in electric race cars (and still line up for vintage Trans Am, Thunderboats and NASCAR). Want more?  Miniaturized spyware in your USB cables from Tom's Hardware (and a look at when Western civilization figured out that SMALLER is more G-resistant), a retreat from cashless society in Europe, and the importance of protecting your data from the crazies, because they are what they do.

So much afoot we've got two: there's the Avro Vulcan howl, the Corsair whistle, Hellcat .50s and tanks with cats, and a cool story about two F-14s that scrambled to blow up an egg salad sandwich.  Then there's tales of Tesla owners attacking each other when there were no protesters around, Honda and Nissan moving in and out of the US but not each other, and failure after failure of electric car greenthink when the "free" taxpayer bucks dry up now that reality is back in charge (ie: American mail trucks and Canadian busmaker bankruptcy). More?  Re-Soviet Russians doing what Russians do (serious wartime innovation) in their ongoing effort to take over their equally corrupt but less offensive neighbor, an anniversary look back at John Glenn hitting the skies for a quick trip around the planet 60 years ago, and Clutch all over.

So much afoot we've got two: there's the Avro Vulcan howl, the Corsair whistle, Hellcat .50s and tanks with cats, and a cool story about two F-14s that scrambled to blow up an egg salad sandwich.  Then there's tales of Tesla owners attacking each other when there were no protesters around, Honda and Nissan moving in and out of the US but not each other, and failure after failure of electric car greenthink when the "free" taxpayer bucks dry up now that reality is back in charge (ie: American mail trucks and Canadian busmaker bankruptcy). More?  Re-Soviet Russians doing what Russians do (serious wartime innovation) in their ongoing effort to take over their equally corrupt but less offensive neighbor, an anniversary look back at John Glenn hitting the skies for a quick trip around the planet 60 years ago, and Clutch all over.

Hostus Maximus and sometime savant Justin Fort goes full brain-dump on the kind of history that makes pre-teen kids deep-dive science for all the wrong reasons.  Obviously, when folks die because a ship full of ammonium nitrate or radical WW1-era explosives goes kablooey in the harbor, it's a damn shame, but you can't help but marvel at the sheer magnitude of serious industrial accidents (be they jet fuel, fertilizer, munitions or just leftover mine gas).  It's not just manmade disasters, though - Mother Nature (or Father Nature? Turnabout and all...) has a pretty good market for things that go BOOM too, like whole mountains and entire islands.  Join the show for an hour of train-of-thought goodness (and a reminder that mailboxes are federal property, "because you can" doesn't always mean you should, and if you want to blow stuff up, go pro and do it for a living). To max out the spicy, we've got the mine in Mike's basement, the legitimacy in Stephen King's short stories ("Langoliers" and "Night Flyer", for instance), some WW2 in Europe and the Pacific, submarines & "Das Boot", the return of the D2HIE1WHCII rule, and enough Monster Magnet to explode a horse.

...With an "Orange Goblin" backer (Frequencies from Planet Ten), we've got a good assortment of gearhead supersauce on this burger: blind squirrel finds a nut (bad gov't radio ads get one right while missing the point on distracted driving); speed limits for asteroids (does it apply to meteors?); weird foreign terrorist Toyotas in Wyoming (hat tip, "Cowboy State Daily"), taxpayer funding and corporate automaker interest drying up for electric cars (BMW on its lead foot and Porsche on its rear); Nissan gets caught on the wrong side of the border and its checkbook; a return to favor for gas stoves and incandescent light bulbs; small Japanese seats and brakes; HIDs versus LEDs. There's fries with that: scary words in your shampoo ingredients, honest humanity in your "Blazing Saddles", Mexican light bulbs, Korean stoves, the 1911's birthday and at least one sammich.

So much good stuff!  Don't be a menace to fellow motorists when failing to use your headlights in the dark - and don't mind while the Gearhead Consultancy laughs its pretty heads off when you get lit up (pun intended) by the Johnnies for DRIVING ON THE FREEWAY IN THE DARK WITH NO LIGHTS.  ...Way to act drunk or stoned or just dumb.  There's also some cop-on-politician violence (good), the Colorado Highway Patrol versus the CHiPs, a few thoughts on why motorcyclists' shoes fall off all the time, how the $5 billion spent by Joke Biden's DOT bureaucracy (under the deleadership of Pothole Pete) created exactly eight electric car chargers (and how the failure was caused by... bureaucracy...), and an analysis of how ineffective little beta "trucks" like Ford's Maverick are a wonderful analog for the weakness of pajama-clad pepperoni-armed top-knot beta boys. A few thoughts for the gearheads: Do jury duty.  It's so much fun (and you'll see law from it's unseemly underside). If you need your car to think for you, you're dumber. Remember when people bragged about being an elitist? Police bodycams are backfiring on politicians. While we're in there - and because the Garage Hour's audience appreciates folks who showed up and brought their A-game - we've got a heartfelt sendoff and Excellent Weirdo RIP for two great neighbors, George and Betty.  The world needs more folks like this, and we'll miss them.

So much exhaustion...  Caffeine fixes what the Sawzall can't, so we're here: the Gearhead Consultancy may be intriguing or offensive, but we're never boring.  This episode's got a micro look at the baby Superfund sites left at every house in LA that burned with an electric Statusmobile (TM) in the garadtch, a bigger look at where the makers of these toxic messes are heading (prior to burning), some of the shame of a city like LA that's got classic cars in every backyard, and the DOT's possible return to reality with a sane human at the helm. Once the room's been softened up a bit, we've also got underwater oxygen rocks, the National Guard and local PD turning a blind eye towards locals who've chosen to defend their homes and neighborhoods against the professional-grade looters raiding LA post-inferno, the mess on the US-Mexico border in even relatively safe areas like San Diego (can you say "cartel snipers"?), the LA DWP not letting a crisis go to waste, and how the radio outfits being bought up by leftist creep George Soros are already making America less safe.

Don't flinch or you'll miss it: squashy gumdrop Hyundais and crosseyed-cubist Land Rovers, dirty grabby D.O.E. palm-greased double-dealing from former Gov. Hatchetface, details of more battery "storage" plant (pile) fires set to poison the air and water (and dirt and neighbors), minivan idiots and their self-awareness fails (headlights for fun and profit), as well as tales of melted classic cars in Los Angeles garages and a border fire south of San Diego that's ruining lots of great four-wheeling trails and a bunch of sneaky Border Patrol hideouts. While we're at it, how about some support for the folks who were able to (or smart enough to) hold back and protect their homes and neighbors during LA's latest Dem-fired inevitable tinderparty, Hunter S. Thompson, William Gibson, bubbled mongoloids and DC staffers (as if they're not the same thing).

Slather on the Justin powa - from Canadian marionettes to catching up on your Orange Goblins, from dickheads with their high beams (and why is it always a Jeep or a Tesla?) to the rules about passing a snowplow, from Ford's exploding batteries to its self-disassembling front suspension (a case of the Teslas?), from Charles Bronson "fixing Emmitt" to the Israelis confiscating a lot of nice shotguns, from crashing into smaller things than you to Honda buying Nissan (why?), it's classic Garage Hour supersauce - spread it on. ...With Orange Goblin, Dire Straits, Masters of Reality, Soundgarden, Kyuss, Solarized, The Sword, Mastodon, Man or Astro Man and High on Fire.  There's also bears, crocodiles, birds and Dad's poor Buick Century.

Whether you're smart enough to know we're going to have some wind and fires in SoCal (duhh) or it's about a healthy distrust of government (kind'a like "technology", "gov't" is not on your side), a good gearhead just needs a reason not to be the meat in the seat.  A gearhead also needs a good soundtrack - how about some Monster Magnet, with drops from Pelham 1-2-3 (one of the best NYC-based caper movies ever made - it nails '70s NY atmosphere). Take a dive - logic's fine: prepping for disaster is a badge of honor (plus, you get to keep your house and classic cars).  You'll also avoid being one of the CA sheeple who 50 years of bad fire-prevention couldn't teach.  May you broadcast in interesting times...

Take a cautionary stance as gearheads, geeks and the great unwashed makers look forward to 2025 - it's our year to make great, but some of that tin needs straightening.  From the evil of your refrigerator conspiring with the dishwasher to convince the thermostat to drop the house to 42º, to the sloppy software from fool programmers on the wrong side of the wall allowing your data to be hacked by your car before you even get out of the driveway, it's time to get paranoid and understand that bad governance won't fix itself.  We've never seen so much of the tail of hidden corruption than we can now, so take a running start. It's in there: Sagan's theory on why tech without morality can end worlds (where's the stop sign?), why bad governors in sad states will still push failed technology (because it benefits them), and how the companies you shop need to be held to your standard (because Costco won't fix itself).

If you want to celebrate your mechanical success before you've succeeded, don't expect much success - Hostus Maximus Justin Fort and Ryan the BMWery Guy test their livers with a debate of all the excellent mistakes they've made when the sips start before the work stops. From the Perrin charge tube that's supposed to take a half-hour to install, not a half-week, to the little things we miss like which way the brake pads go (and what sort of sparks they throw), there's a way to do it and a way you shouldn't (and we've tried both). Not to get too far afield, there's more gearhead goodness to be had: thinking out tube bumpers, sliding your truck into a snow drift before you crash into it, loud and noisy thug trucks, SVT's good old days, verbicide, Mitsubishi Outlanders, vintage Garage Hour cohosts, plus tasting Bushmills and Breckenridge whiskeys, Peach Crown Royal, Absolut Vodka and High Country Lager.  There's also a host of tunes from Karma to Burn, 16 Volt and Deadbolt.

Well, it's that time of year - time for the Garage Hour to cram the episode full of silly holiday fun and outros.  How about some good gearhead up-to-stuffs while we're at it?  Tesla is facing another recall, but this one's full of shed.  Street-takeovers are violent, stupid, dangerous affairs, which we'd usually encourage so long as they are away from people, but crowds tend to get stupid in the worst places.  The postal service's electric trucks still suck.  Automotive journalist of great repute (and high-Q oddball) Jean Lindamood/Jennings gets a classic Garage Hour excellent-weirdo sendoff.  Also, Upslope Brewery's Draft Lager joined in for sips and grins. While we're at it, there's some fun thoughts about Christmas movies and family time (because it matters), the so-called government eradication of the Chinese murder hornet (and what could happen if they joined up with the desert helicopter wasp), Dennis Farina, Ray Liotta, and a set of chintzy Chinese (is that redundant?) foot warmers that cooked some ice-fisherman's toes.

This episode's got all sorts of trafficky truckin' road-interface goodness to assist you in your daily gearhead existence, but it's mostly about how to understand your tires and what's right when the white stuff is falling down in Front Range fashion.  Or any range...  We've got the grok on tire width, suppleness, temperature range, snow treads, chemicals and materials, ice versus snow driving, why it's a fine idea to have a second set of llantas for the off-season, and why you probably wouldn't wear hiking boots to a formal dance.  ...And why all that and a bucket of fish heads still won't save you if you aren't good at driving. Not to put too fine a point on it (we're ALL fine points here at the Garage Hour), there's also a little free gas (at the pump), a few thoughts about why that guy is following you (such a nice bumper), plus Floyd, FLeppard and Pantera.

It's tired and we're late.  No, wait a minute...  Okay, that's right.  There's much afoot at the Circle J, and the Garage Hour goons have another insightful batch of geekbrain excellence for you: the other side of the coin of our skillset episode a few weeks back, thanks to a gal in the #3 lane who couldn't look up from her Distractomatic 5000 long enough to not drive into the bumper of the truck in front of her.  Don't be the anti-inspiration for our incompetence episode (and don't be a Carl).  There's also guidance on measuring up to 100% you, avoiding the shallow end of the tool pool, using your head to avoid the obvious, and trying to use your capabilities once in a while instead of sucking all the time. Moving beyond the need for being the best you you can do (coocoo k'choo), there's insight on more electric car fails by the OEs (begging the G for good money to keep spending on bad ones), wildebeests and crocodiles and educational television (back when it was worth a beer), and steering clear of incompetence multipliers (and bent pliers).

It's one of those episodes that seemed totally disjointed but turned out GREAT (kind'a like good ribs)... White Mark the Diversity Hire had Hostus Maximus Justin Fort down to his dungeon for some 6.5 Creedmoor loading and a dissertation on the goodness of bad times - learning to be better (geek it!) with what you can get, such as when the Obama gun shortage taught builders and loaders to make excellent firepower out'a what they could find. Whether it's Winchester, Sta-Bal, Hornaday, Benchmark, Lever Revolutiopn, IMR, Accurate, Hodgon, or CFE, a shooter's got to shoot and a loader's got to load, and everyone got smarter. The original point of the episode was to visit another good side of Uncle Donald getting back into office: brooming the useless bureaucrats like Buttgig and Granholm who've been making a corrupt mockery of the job of the American government (and shine a little light on the effects of four years in Biden's basement). Then it's trucks, rocks, ribs, rubs, a Garage Hour sendoff for excellent weirdo Bernie Marcus of the Home Dee Pot, and a little bit of Herb Alpert, because beer (Red Leg's Spring's Lager).

You know what to do, so do it!  It's all about the skillset today: remember to smile when you pull a fast one (or a perfect one), because that's the sort of geeksauce that makes life worth doin'.  Did you save some cops from a deer-blood shower?  Did your old buddy Baris from Turkey pull a neato Euro-style brakestand to get parked in the snow?  Did you use your bumper and a little bit of tire-drag to descend a nasty hill full of ice?  How about everyday heel-and-toe?  Tools and devices for amplified powa?  Setting the skillset loose?  Keeping skills sharp and avoiding the more-tech skill suck?  Remember, tech isn't on our side, but your killer instincts and capabilities are. Yeah, so the episodes are out of order - trying to put to some of the newer stuff up and get back on schedule.  ...So much phooey.  From trapezoidal shelves and musical gambling to rental trucks from Arizona (because Kalifornistan) and humine encephalitis (because deer), this one's got it.

Alright, so there are a few things on your plate today that may involve the fate of America, but the Garage Hour is nothing if not distracting (with all the cars, trucks, beers, guns, parts, fixing, kerplosions and awesomeness) - let us help you escape, if just for a minute: lithium battery fires don't just kill people, they kill fire departments, household spies hiding in your vacuum, how diamond mines can tell you about cars and trucks being stored instead of sold, and how Kalifornistan keeps taking steps to kill itself. There's also some Hunter S. Thompson goodness, the human body (and why some more efficiency would be good), coyotes versus dogs (and their poop!), and a brief history of commies in government. Now go vote.

MobileViews mini-podcast 47 is a 2 minute recording testing the new iOS 18.1 Phone Call Recording feature. It is an iPhone to iPhone call. I used the 15 Pro Max's built-in microphone to while Jon Westfall used the iPods Pro 2 mic. At the start of the recording both Jon and I heard a low volume "This call will be recorded" message.Duirng the call recording my display showed an audio volume graph, call duration, and a red button to stop recording without dropping the voice call. Despite also using an iPhone on his side, Jon did not see any recording indication after the brief start of call notification. After the recording was stopped, an M4A audio file and an embedded text transcript was saved to the iOS Notes app. The transcript identifies the called party (Jon Westfall).

We'll trade you a four-pound sledge and a twitchy STi for the time to get more episodes published...  This one's full of traffic thinking, with a knobby-tired look at why good alignment matters (and dying end-links don't).  There's an in-depth analysis of how it's essential to be in an offensive state of mind when commanding your place in the flow (and why bubbling yourself off from those selfsame traffic physics makes you the problem we've been waiting for).  There's also a few thoughts about how "Broken Windows Policing" could do wonders for incompetent motoring. Don't fret: how about some Amon Tobin, Die Krupps, Deep Purple and Blue Oyster Cult (no "White Room" or "Yellow Submarine", however), plus killer Bronco audio, Mom's Camry, cars in garages and TVs in dashboards.

...A data-heavy slacker-upload episode for you - too much to do, so go do it. We did: wrasslin' animals and eating' bears, recalling Fords and Fords and DEIs and Toyotas and Fords and GMs and pickups and some junk in the trunk, as well as recalling a run from El Paso to Wisco in one of BFGoodrich's fleet of jacked-up Suburbans, and revisiting the Garage Hour rule that if you dig two holes in England (or Europe) there will be a skeleton or a bomb in at least one of them. There's also a Dude Food shout-out to liverwurst, a warning tear for DeWalt (what's trying to pull a Bud Light), and a serious discussion about how artificial reinsertion of apex predators into environments from which they've absconded (ie: Colorado's wolves, which are being eaten by cougars, and Italian bears, which are eating liberals). More goodies: cheap akiya homes in Japan, awesome actors in "Copland" and "Demolition Man", terrible flame throwing pinko battery deaths from scooters and other electric deathtraps worldwide, essential electronics repair and the necessity of having a wiring and circuitry guy in your stable, plus Sinister, Fishbone, Cheap Dates, Alien Faktor, U2 (really), Earthlings?, Desert Sessions, Butthole Surfers, L.S.G., Sausage, The Dead Elvi and Incubus.

At a bustling party that's much too loud, you meet Moon, a femboy with a love for indie music. Before you know it, a genuine connection forms. Amidst the chaotic party atmosphere, you find an unexpected yet refreshing bond, leading to a promise of another meeting.

Be the geek and improve the you: the Garage Hour is here to help (everybody, apparently)... The lovely Pam called needing info on detailing a dashboard and cleaning seat fabric, so the Gearhead Consultancy went to town with everything from car care on the Front Range to the beauty of factory headlight plastic - it's all about the sincerity of your detail.  With our old buddy Craig and special appearances from a $500 Civic, a hampster's Kia, a wrecked 4Runner, a very fine Legacy, a V-6 Accord, and a cherished STi, this episode's on track like a Big Boy.  Now, will someone tell us how to clean soap? Don't stop, go: Gruntruk, Toadies, Jane's, Butthole Surfers, Monolord, Low Rider, Coldcut and "Ugly Americans"... We cap it all off with a tale of how not to be a menace in the Bronx while leaving your Audi at a block party in the 'hood.

Don't let the compunannies and digidistractions make you less of a (hu)man - it's time to think before you sink (into the mud and unpacked dirt at that job site, Mr. Cement Truck Driver)... It's an episode full of whatever got in the Gearhead Consultancy's way, because we're too damn busy.  How about cops and their Exploders?  Good and bad strap technique for fun and disastrous truck towing and hauling?  Why that little light in your sideview mirror should warn motorists about YOU... ...And why turning across lanes to avoid one driver is a recipe for meeting other drivers the hard way.  So much good stuff... What about some thinly veiled leftism hiding in new limp-wristed podcasts?  Some Amon Tobin and traffic school?  ...Also, let's remember Scott Bloomquist, incredible dirt-track racer but not so much of a pilot.  R.I.P., you excellent weirdo.

You asked for it...  Well, technically, White Mark's wife got called in for double surgery so we just ran to the garage and started pouring powder and Gilark Whiskey (version-four rye AND version-five bourbon).  What resulted?  Hot .308s for the M24 (Nosler + Hornaday +Winchester + Vargit = 2500fps), a bunch of shaped and cleaned brass, and a wide-ranging chat about what goes into making good ammo (...because if you want it to be super, you've got to MAKE it super.), with recapping, resizing, case lube, work-hardening, and some geekly mechanical catharsis. Seriously, this one is stacked: how to sniff out a fed at the range (and how bad gov makes us all paranoid), stick VS flake, tricklers for powder, .30-06s and 5.56 at the range, lands jumping, breech wear, how not to get attacked by bears in Alaska and Mark's family in Louisiana, a little Dude Food segment, and some good tunes.

Straight from the no-math Greek-'froading bipedal-maintenance intro, it's a full hour of gearhead supremacy.  Two big topics loom: tech versus you (and two of the nastiest manifestations of the threat, including what's being done with your data and what the Chinese are doing with self-driving cars), plus a chaser about carmakers having to lie about electric car sales numbers because no one wants them.  From there, we've got what sensible carmakers like Ford and Toyota are doing (running away from electrics), while woketarded outfits like GM are barreling headlong into battery-powered doom.  ...Epoch Times and Legal Insurrection provided articles for this show.  There's also a little something about caffeination and hydration with sauce from the pickle ball pros at Holey Performance. ...Because you're already dirty: good whiskey, bad investments, the Caprice versus the Crown Vic, and rock from COC, Bowie, Ninja, Graveyard Farmers, Electronic Excursions, and Southern Culture.

It's an afternoon at AutoVos with Brown Caleb, White Mark and Hostus Maximus Justin Fort.  There's a good chat on recoloring your coach with the new SVG dry PPF (SVGIP.com), tinting technique (using XPel), and a secret tint job for a Porsche that's heading for Kansas, and a visit from the Boys in Brown (trucks) carrying the new dealer kit from SVG for Caleb.  As per the usual, the gearhead goons get off course and have fun with the goodness: snorkels and rooftop tents (boo!), gun purchase numbers for Q1 in 2024 (yay!), and Nurburgring versus LeMans versus the Pike's Peak Hillclimb (soon). It's in there: a 996 Carrera 2 and a 997 Carrera 4S Targa, Porsche hand placement, Dos Santos for lunch, Putin's aversion to alcohol, Albright's aversion to Putin and JustMark's aversion to Albright on SMG753.

Phew!  We'll get back on track ASAP - there's a few episodes waiting to be put together, and the Garage Hour goons are on it.  This show's pretty gearhead: a prayer for John Force, whose funny car wasn't very (just add kerploding), a chat w/ our old buddy David Lozeau about how Jap cars, trucks and bikes parts were freakin' perfect in the '90s, how Toyota's fighting with bureaucrats about testing standards in the 2020s, why Ford's first-gearing F-150s are failing while Chrysler's reverse cameras don't see much, and why batteries and electric cars are running out of ways to pretend they're viable.  Sources include Breitbart, Yahoo, Asia News and Cowboy State Daily... While we're in there: Challenger 4-8-8-4 4014 is once again roaming the Midwest (apparently pulling the city of Cheyenne behind it), Pennsylvanians put $10 million in the garbage, and an excellent weirdo sendoff for "Kelly's Heroes" standout Donald Sutherland, plus Prodigy, Josh Wink, Chemical Bros., Prong, Orbital and KMFDM.

An out-of-order episode from Gearhead Consultantcy - blame the psychic iPod: hillclimb and mountain details for race fans attending this year's 102nd PPIHC… This is a special thing, and thanks to the officials, organizers, racers and crews that make it possible (with a little help from the Garage Hour), you can better sink your teeth into one of America's most iconic motorsports to-dos. …Spots to spectate, locations to get to, background on names and why they matter, plus neatos like the flyby at Glen Cove, getting airborne at Engineers, the other side of Bottomless Pit, natural terrain versus “built” roads, why George's Corner is the best spot on the hill, and yelling at photographers. Then again, it's the Garage Hour, so there's more: why all the trees fell down, weed whacking your leg for fun and pain, hidden reserviors, Sesame Street versus the Muppets, Fisker's refail bankruptsy, personal hillclimbing versus 100% race, driving music for brainly balance, and tracks from the Hillclimb Special.

It's the most wonderful time of the year! For activists in the movement to make Medicare for All a reality, this is the week when we gather to plot, scheme, and kvetch. Welcome to the 2024 Annual Medicare for All Strategy Conference, “Healthcare Beyond the Ballot Box,” organized by Healthcare NOW! For those of you who are attending the conference right now, you are getting a sneak preview of our Very Special Conference Episode! Since our theme this year is about what happens to Medicare for All in an election year — and beyond — we wanted to invite some of our favorite policy people with their fingers on the pulse of what's happening in DC to help us sort out what's happening with healthcare on Capitol Hill and what role we can play to get some justice out of DC in the coming year! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n36v0eTV1a8&t=1167s powerpress Our guests are Eagan Kemp and Alex Lawson. Eagan Kemp is the health care policy advocate for Public Citizen's Congress Watch division. He is an expert in health care policy and served as a senior analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office prior to coming to Public Citizen. Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition— a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans.  Show Notes With one of our major candidates being a guy who is solidly against Medicare for All and the other being Trump, is 2024 a bad federal election cycle, or the worst federal election of our lifetime, and why? Alex puts a positive spin on it: we are closer to M4A with a Biden presidency than any other Democratic presidency. He's definitely not a M4A guy, but all his other economic policies are based on Sanders-esque populism, rather than Obama-esque neo-liberalism. We've seen Biden enact serious corporate reform in several sectors, and in a second Biden administration, taking on corporate greed and sociopathy in health insurance is on the agenda. On the other hand, we know exactly what's at stake with another Trump presidency, driven entirely by profit for his billionaire friends. Eagan notes that there has been movement on Medicare in recent years, including die-hard GOPs shying away from talking about cuts to Medicare until after the election. At the same time, we're seeing Biden moving more toward the M4A movement and the folks trying to expand and improve traditional Medicare. We're seeing insurance companies running scared, feeling the pressure from our movement in a way they haven't before. Alex notes that Biden's economic vision contains a lot that Medicare for All folks can work with. Our movement worked hard to expand Medicare to include vision, hearing, and dental, which was ultimately included in Biden's Build Back Better plan. We didn't get that, but we did get prescription drug negotiations, which is a huge part of improving Medicare before we expand it to everyone. (Go back and listen to another episode where we were joined by Alex to discuss prescription drug negotiations for more details.) We've also seen a lot of good work against Medicare privatization, via Medicare Advantage, and that solidarity has moved the ball a lot - more than ever before to restrain private insurance companies. We didn't just give up when we knew Biden wouldn't sign M4A; we pivoted to expanding benefits and reversing the privatization with a lot of success. Eagan found a silver lining in - of all places - the subject of private equity in healthcare. He thinks we've passed the peak of PE ravaging healthcare, and they are now backing off the healthcare sector in part because of increased pressure from the DOJ, FTC and HHS. That's due to pressure from doctors, patients, and whistleblowers. Eagan also notes that the Trump administration pilot of throwing seniors in traditional Medicare into private relationships with providers.

…Lots of parts to this episode, but they fit:  with Faith No More on the soundtrack, Hostus Maximus Justin Fort does everything from excellent Dude Food (fine sirloin and the only way to enjoy fish tacos), a revelation of historic WW2 Jap tunnels under Okinawa by NHK, scary details of federal bureaucrats trying to double the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (and send taxpayers to the poorhouse), and a proper sendoff for NFL standout (back when the NFL was worth a shed) and seriously powerful dude Larry Allen, whose pleasant normalcy made him an excellent weirdo. While that's afoot, there's a leg too:  Joe Biden's basement ruining Rubio's, electricity, trees and NASCAR (or what's left of it), UPS stalkers, new automotive crime from gangs in NYC, and some cool WW2 history.

So much episodery coming… This one's a deusie - everything that's going on to mess with your gearhead and geek existence.  From GM torpedoing the Malibu to Kalifornistan blowing up your right to roam, it's in there.  Remember, just because you don't care about politics doesn't mean politicians don't want to screw you. There's some good stuff to be heard on this episode, though - longtime contender for Best Boss Ever Col. Doug Hamlin just got voted in to fix the NRA, Texas AG Ken Paxton just scored one for America versus Biden's basement, and rock and/or roll with Melvins, Union Underground, Puny Human, Atomic Bitchwax, Adema, Ennio Morricone, Deftones and Killing Joke.

Finally, something good comes of enabling: enable your garage to do more gearhead things (and stuff)!  Just Mark, Just Caleb and Justin sit down amongst the Porsches at the new AutoVos (Caleb bought out EAS and went independent) for an hour of making garages better.  Stop polishing the door handles and think bigger:  (tasteful) additions of more floor and door, coating and levelling those floors, getting more work underway with ramps and stools, expanding the tools available with better boxes, plus seasonal enhancement with heating and drainage, and while we're thinking big, how about building up with a second story and a bridge to the house? There's so much more: a semi drag races a Rav4, Ruger makes a nice .22, the Dutchese sell a pricey Stryker, Great Divide, Big Sky, Cerviceria and Trinity brew fine beers, catwalks make a handy way to repel the hipster hordes, plus Man or Astroman, Galactic, Pantera, Dead Milkmen, Fugazi, Truckfighters and Five Horse Johnson.

Video: https://youtu.be/_oNvMUmo4sI Lossless Audio: https://www.bandrewscott.com/blog/bsp381 Topics discussed: M4a vs. MP3 which one sounds better including demos, Comparing the Rode Lavalier II, Countryman B6, Sanken Cos 11D, and Shure TL48, Why I am strict with my diet, finances, and exercise, and a few other things in the value for value section.   Subscribe to the full audio podcast at http://www.bandrewsays.com   Gear Used This Episode (Affiliate Links): Neumann U67 Reissue:  https://imp.i114863.net/u67 Rode NTH-100:  https://geni.us/rnth100 Universal Audio x8:  https://sweetwater.sjv.io/uax8   As an affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases.    Ask Questions: https://www.askbandrew.com Merch: https://www.podcastage.com/store Discord: http://www.podcastage.com/discord   00:00 - Intro 00:32 - M4a vs MP3 - Which Sounds Better? 06:18 - My Thoughts on M4a vs MP3 11:54 - Rode Lavalier II vs. Countryman B6 vs. Sanken Cos 11D vs. Shure TL48 17:00 - WYHTS: Why Not Practice Moderation? 29:00 - Value for Value 33:04 - Conclsuion   #Audio #LavMic #Podcast

Ady Barkan was a lion for healthcare justice. After his diagnosis with ALS, he spent his final years fighting for Medicare for All. Ady passed away this month at 39. We go back into the AD archives to 2019, when Abdul sat down with Ady to learn about his activism and his hopes for the America he'd leave his kids.

TMBS 127 aired on February 12th, 2020 Episode summary: We won't beat the GOP with half-measures & we cannot compromise on M4A.  Shoutout to Abby Martin (@AbbyMartin) for standing up against for her right to free speech and the rights of Palestinians.  Krystal Ball (@KrystalBall) joins us to break down NH and the lack of vetting of moderate candidates.  During the GEM, David (@davidgriscom) warns about the danger of water privatization.  Malaika Jabali (@MalaikaJabali) joins us to talk about her new documentary "Left Out." TMBS ReAirs come out every Tuesday here and on The Michael Brooks Show YouTube Channel. This program has been put together by The Michael Brooks Legacy Project. To learn more and rewatch the postgame and all other archived content visit https://www.patreon.com/TMBS -- - The TMBS ReAir project was created to give people who discovered Michael's work towards the end of his life or after his passing a weekly place to access his work without feeling overwhelmed by the volume of content they missed, as well as continuing to give grieving friends, family and fans their Tuesday evenings with Michael. While the majority of the content and analysis on TMBS has stayed relevant and timeless, please remember some of the guest's work and subject matter on the show is very much linked to the time when the show first aired. The appearance of some guests on TMBS does not constitute an endorsement of those guests' current work.