August 9, 2024 • 47 mins
Cannonball run record-holder, endurance driver, author and TV host Alex Roy joins the podcast to share the secrets of how he set a world record when he drove from New York to Los Angeles in just over 31 hours. Plus, his thoughts on the EV future: Lucid, Hyundai, and whether a Porsche Taycan could ever hope to beat a Tesla on cross-country endurance run of its own.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is
hot pursuit.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
All right, we have a pretty interesting guest today who
has won a Cannonball Run.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yeah, I'm mystery Man of the Car World, if you will.
By the way, someone who's been around forever.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I gotta say, I'm I think I'm older than you.
But when I was a kid, Cannonball Run was the
first movies. I'm sorry, sorry, I'm just saying because of
the date right when Cannonball Run came out, the original
with Burt Reynolds, which was a long long time ago,
that's one of the first movies I saw that really
got me kind of obsessed with cars.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
I'm gonna google it right.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Now to see you exactly when it came His guest
is Alex Roy. I mean, why why delay? This is
Alex Roy, who kind of is like this international Man
of Mystery slash world's most interesting car guy. I was
reading his Wikipedia page and we should ask him about this.
It said that in two thousand and four he won
a British reality TV series called The Ultimate Playboy, which
(01:09):
I was not aware of. We should definitely ask him
about He has the look, so I feel like I
should give some context here because basically I called Alex
I don't know, six weeks ago because I was doing
a story about rallies and especially about Millimelia coming to
the US, and the number one person I know who
(01:29):
has done car rallies and cannonball style runs is Alex Roy.
So we when we got to talking, it was just like, Wow,
this is somebody who really has been in cars a
long time and also really knows the underground side of it.
So like after we got off the phone, Alex I
(01:50):
told Matt like we got to have him on because,
especially in light of electric vehicles and autonomous driving, I
just want to hear your thoughts on every everything about
where we are now with people who love cars and
compared to twenty years ago. This isn't really a question.
It's kind of a setup. Matt.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, I want to ask.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
You, but I think it's weird that I've never that
we've never actually met in person to my knowledge, because
I've been obsessed with cars and covering like the business
side for Bloomberg for twenty years. But I've been following
you from Afar throughout all of your antics and I mean,
and also you give a lot of legit like important reporting,
(02:35):
you know for journalists on self driving stuff and on Tesla.
But I'm more interested in like the Canniball Run in
the Morgan.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
Happy to talk about all of it. I mean, actually, Hannah,
our conversation win that direction because there's car reporting and
then there's like luxury goods reporting, like rob report. But
Hannah a complement, is the only journalist who covers automotive
who has her own fashion language and can actually justify
(03:08):
getting into some of these cars as like a not
just as a driver, but as the kind of person
who would own one. And because most people who buy
these cars have no taste at all, and like they
don't in any way reflect the brands that they are
driving around. They hope the brands reflect on them, but
they do not reflect the brands in least.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
That's a very nice that point.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Yeah, that's what set me off.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, where should we start? Then? Should we start?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
We were talking about the Cannibal Run movie. I was
saying that it was like the first thing that I
watched that got me into cars. I was born at
the end of seventy three, and it came out in
eighty one, So I was like eight years old or
I was seven turning eight when I saw it?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
And was that based on anything real?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Like?
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Had there been a true cannonball run before that? Or
is the race that the record that you set based
on the movie?
Speaker 3 (03:56):
How's that whole story play out?
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Okay? So the answer is that, yes, there was a
real cannonball run race that ran from nineteen seventy one
to nineteen seventy nine. Brock Yates was the progenitor of that.
It ran four times. Right after it ended seventy nine,
a bunch of cannonball drivers and fans who wanted to
(04:19):
keep going decided to put on what they considered a
more professional event with no media coverage, no movie at all,
called the US Express. That race ran four times and
the last one was in the nineteen eighty three and
after that that was pretty much the end of the
classic era of cannonballing. But the most interesting thing about
(04:41):
the Cannonball Run and even its name, isn't the race
from the seventies. It's where the name came from. And
for all the people who think that the cannonball is illegal, dangerous, foolish,
and silly, the name came from a guy named Irwin
Baker whose nickname was Cannonball. Hundred years ago. He was
(05:02):
a motorcycle racer. So in the early twentieth century he
was hired by the first generation of car companies, stutz
Gardner Cadillac to drive their cars from New York to
LA before the interstate Highway system existed, to prove that
cars were intermi combustion cars were reliable, affordable, efficient, and
(05:24):
polluted less than horses and trains, and were the best
way for anyone of any income level to get around.
And so it was at one point front page news
when people went and did this, and it was for
many years, and so that was the person after whom
the current illegal races was named.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
That's very cool. So how did you conceive this idea
to attack and attempt a cannon ball run?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And by the way, to state I think the obvious
the cannonball run, the US expressed they're not legal races, right, they're.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
All not regulated.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Well, there you have to break the speed limit in
order to win, like by a substantial amount for a
very long period of time.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
Totally illegal for anyone who wants to set a record.
But anyone can go. There's no organizing body, there's no
rules other than same car stays on the ground and
at least one person in the whole way, although that
might not be true in the future of autonomous records.
The you know, I got into it the way almost
everyone has ever gotten into it. They saw the movie
(06:33):
as a kid. My father talked about it. He wanted
to go, he didn't do it. And so in the
late nineties, I wanted into a nightclub in New York
called Void Now Gone, and they were playing a film
called Rendezvous, which was the famous French nine minute film
Nowhere where Claude, Yeah, Claude de Luche, the French director,
(06:55):
you know, put a camera in the front of a
car and drove across Paris in nine minutes and change.
And after that, I'm like, I'm going to do that someday.
And so I put that in the hat alongside cannonball
and anything else I can think of, and I'm like,
I'm going to do that eventually. When I had the
time and money in my thirties, I'm like, I did
do it. But the thing is cannonball a word like
(07:20):
the as entered into like kind of the English vernacular.
As a word to just do dangerous stuff in a car.
So it's been bastardized and conflated with so many other things,
sometimes by people with good intentions, but often by people
who want to bask in the glory of the real
(07:40):
thing without actually doing it. And so that is, in
my opinion, where most modern rallies come from, because when
people talk about the cannonball they call it interchangeably a
race or a rally. But in the classic definition, a
rally is on a public road, timed from point to point.
(08:02):
It's legal, it's sanctioned, there's a governing body and their
entrance who are serious people, generally in vintage cars. And
in nineteen ninety nine, all of these ideas, the conflation,
the confusion, the glory, the desire to drive the fund
was all thrown together by a guy named Maximilian Cooper
(08:22):
out of London, who decided to put on an event
inspired He says, it's inspired by the Gumball Rally movie.
For the Gumball Rally movie itself was inspired by the
Cannonball Run race and so to put the timeline together,
Cannonball Run Race Gumball Rally Movie comes out in seventy
six Canniball Run movie comes out in eighty one, and
(08:45):
then seventeen years later, this Englishman shows up and says,
let me put on an event, a rally call the
Gumball that basts in the glow of the cannonball legend.
And yeah, that event, the Gumball three thousand launching Night
ninety nine, is the modern uh you know, it's called
(09:06):
I don't want to say inhertorys it's not a race,
but it is the event that changed and utterly the
landscape of modern car rallies, because prior to that they
were vintage cars and an older demographic, and suddenly had
all these people going in their supercars, stickered up on
public roads and acting egregiously. I was one of them,
(09:28):
and so I went thinking that the Gumball three thousand
was kind of a clearinghouse or unofficial proven ground for
people who wanted to do a real cannonball to meet
each other, and that eventually they would go do that.
And I got there and there was no one who
wanted to go coast to coast NonStop illegally. Everybody wanted
(09:50):
to go to a party, however, and everybody interchangeably called
it cannonballing, and so that is really how I got
into this.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
So tell us about your your first attempt and how
you set it up because it must take a lot
of planning. I imagine you're going to want to either
have extra gas tanks or like four radar detectors or
a spotter or I don't know, but like what do
you do to because you you achieved the fastest crossing
(10:22):
right what from New York to LA.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
So, yeah, we did set the record in two thousand
and six, and we were the first team to successfully
break it in I think twenty five or twenty six years.
What car in a BMW five two thousand and thirty
nine five Our record has been broken anytime since.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
And you did it in about thirty four thirty four hours.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
Thirty one thirty one. So the record in nineteen eighty
three in the last US Express unsanctioned full on race
was thirty two hours of seven minutes. We broke it
by a little bit over an hour the way we did,
and it was really made possible by going on the
Gumball three thousand rally and other rallies is one called
the bull Run was one I did so many of
(11:10):
them I forget, and on those rallies, you're in a
stickered car and you're in a group of fifty to
one hundred other cars going city to city with the
police generally waiting for you, and so on those events
from two thousand and three to two thousand and five,
I figured out what hardware you needed and what equipment
(11:30):
was necessary, and so everyone knows you need a radar detector.
And at that time, laser jammers were just coming into
use and laser was becoming more popular among police. But
what we had done is we'd studied the teams from
nineteen eighty three and one of them had a spotter
plane which flew overhead in the daytime stretch. So, using
(11:53):
everything I knew from tech startup world, we put in
the car triple redundant sell communications, one phone from every
network at the time. I forget how many GPS we had.
There were probably four GPS displays in the vehicle, one
for navigation, two for speed, two more in the back.
(12:13):
Every one of them had their own antenta on the roof.
Because of the spotter plane, we put a partially a
semi reflective white stripe pair on the roof of the
plane could see us in low light conditions, rear brake
light cutoff switches, rear running light cutoff switches, thermal cameras
who could drive it out with no headlights, a fourteen
gallon fuel tank, redundant replacement parts for anything we could
(12:35):
fix on the move, and some things quickly on the ground,
and so everything that had ever been done historically ever
had been installed in that car at that time, and
we tested all of it except the plane on the
Gumball three thousand. The most important lesson from the Gumball
was that if you have a highly stickered car in
(12:58):
a group of stickered cars, you're running a lottery because
it's basically how many police cars have been vectored to
a group of speeding vehicles. And if you are early
in the speeding pack, you will get away, take the
stickers off. With all the skills you learned, it becomes
actually pretty easy to speed and not get caught. The
hard part is there's no cars running scrimmage for you,
(13:19):
so you've got to get really tactical. I know it
sounds crazy about safety, and the hardest part is not
the car. It's not the driving, it's the research into
the road conditions, and volume of traffic on the road,
so you can pick a date for maximum safety and
risk mitigation. And that was a lot of trial, expensive
(13:41):
and time consuming trial and error because the best driver
in the world, in the best car or the best
equipment cannot be safe rolling through packs of pedestrians and traffic.
It's not possible.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
So you did your run around Christmas time.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Oh that's awesome, right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
We're kind of we're speechless. You've run us speechless. But
this was around Christmas, right if I remember right.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
So well, we broke the record on October seventh, eighth
ninth of two thousand and six, which is very specifically
chosen Columbus Day weekend because you don't you can't drag
go in the summer because road traffic is three to
four x higher than other times a year, and police
(14:24):
patrols are three x higher any other time of year,
so it won't work. You need a holiday weekend, preferably
that is a low traffic weekend, and ideally tornadoes because
most law enforcement and first responders are diverted to deal
with tornado issues. So that meant Columbus Day was the
perfect weekend, and so we had mapped it out, and
(14:48):
I looked at like twenty years of data from the
Federal Dot on traffic and weather determined that was it.
And it turned out that was the right day. However, Hannah,
you are correct, Christmas Day would be if it was
not snowing and there was minimal to no ice, maybe
the best day of the year.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Interesting.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
We considered it. We considered it.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
So physically, how did you prepare? What types of food,
food and beverages and stimulation did you plan for yourself
along with and how many people.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Were how many people were in the car?
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Three people in the car My co driver Dave Maher,
who did slightly more driving than I did, and it
is a better driver than I am. He was an
essential choice. And in the back we had Corey Wells,
who's a documentary filmmaker who was shooting at the documentary
which we made about the run, which came out a
few years later called APEX The Secret Race across America.
And she was really essential because she had been making
(15:47):
a documentary about the US Express for years and had
not yet completed it when we met, and so the
availability of the veteran drivers from that time and her
knowledge was invaluable. I was physically better shape than than
I am now. I smoked at the time, and I
was allowed to smoke a cigarette anytime we saw a
(16:08):
police car. Nice and which ended up being three times
the whole way, But that was it, because you cannot
stop to go to the bathroom. You can only go
when you stop for gas, which is and a maximum
five minute stop. One person's got to stay at the car,
(16:29):
so it means one person go in, so you really can't.
There are no luxuries or convenience, so minimal flavor. I
tested diapers in advance, very uncomfortable, and I have also
used tubes in the past on other events, but I
learned that if you have a tube running down through
(16:50):
the bottom of the car, it leaks in both directions
or there comes out oh no, yeah, and it's very awkward.
And so we settled on something that was the least
bad of all bad choices, a device called a portagon
or something. Oh it's basically it's a thing that could
(17:11):
be used by a man or a woman.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Or a woman. I've seen for a woman that.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
You don't want to use. And we each tried it
and decided we would bring them and tried not to
use them and we did not use them. It was
you have to be good friends. And even the then
it's not the best.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
How did you I can't believe you only saw three
cops going from New York to la if I have
the direction correct? And did you have any legal problems?
Like afterwards because you publicized it, So did any cops
say like, well, we know you broke the speed lim
in our state, so.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
We're going to arrest you, like retroactive.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:50):
So, because no one had done this successfully for you know,
twenty five year or twenty seven years prior, I had
no roadmap and was absolutely terrified of the consequences the
you know, Brockiates wrote a book publish in two thousand
and two called Cannonball It which he states the end
that no car would ever cross the United States in
less than thirty eight hours ever, and the canniball record
(18:13):
at that when he did the last ran, the race
was like thirty two point fifty one I think in
the last Cannibal and then thirty two to seven the
last Express and so he here he is, you know,
twenty years later, saying can't be done. Thirty eight is
the floor. And so I called my lawyer, I've got
a question, and he's like, that'll be an expensive answer.
So he started digging around, looking into I had a
(18:35):
book deal at the time for the record we not
yet set, and so he said, well, in worst case scenario,
you could maybe get hit under Rico statutes because you're
committing fel any crimes across state lines, all of them,
you could, and you're profiting from it, so maybe an
angry prosecutor could come. And of course there's the felony
(18:55):
spinning charges themselves. So I had him prepare a document.
It's a wonderful spreadsheet. I should send you, Hannah, color
coded document with the state by state the severity color
coded of the likely charges want to receive based on speed.
Some states have an arbitrary felony charge trigger based on speed.
(19:18):
My book tour I knew would go to some states
and not others, so I gave the states I knew
I would not ever want to go to to Dave
Maher to drive, so when I showed up a year
later or two years later, I wouldn't be charged because
I wouldn't be going there. So Dave he's like, great,
I'll take them. And I also learned that everyone's familiar
(19:42):
with the idea of statue limitations, but they also think
called a tolling law. So if you commit a crime
and a state and you leave that state, the statue
limitations clock is frozen until you set footnet state again.
So take Oklahoma. Yeah, so leaving the state does not
protect you necessarily because if you don't let spend say
(20:03):
the full twelve months in that state, you can go
back for a minute and they can just grab you
if they want to. So my attorney advised me that
a very cranky prosecutor could just make it his mission
to take down that Roy guy. And I need to
be very careful about this. So we went and did it,
and we were successful. However, before we succeeded, we did
(20:24):
have a failed drive at it was meant to be
the real drive in April two thousand and six, and
we broke down halfway in Oklahoma City. And this is
a story I rarely tell. My teammates left the state
and I had the being able to be picked up
and taken to the local dealership, and then I went
(20:46):
to the airport and I told the dealership hold the car,
I'll call you in like six hours. So at the airport.
I called my girlfriend, my mother, my attorney and told
them what happened. And then I flew to uh forget
tell some other city to stop over. And it was
a message from the dealership that the state police, Oklahoma
(21:08):
State Police were already there looking for me. Hours later. Yeah,
And so it turned out that behind me in line
at the Oaklahoma City airport was the Lieutenant Governor of Oklahoma,
and he had overheard my entire conversation with my lawyer
where I said, now, BMW, we escaped. They didn't catch us,
(21:28):
They can't catch us, and he they deployed the entire
state police academy to go find the guy in the
blue BMW. They thought I was a drug dealer whose
car broke it down, and a judge ordered the vehicle
held for several days as they figured out what was
going on. And on, like the second day the car
was being held at BMW, an off duty district attorney
(21:52):
who had no idea about the investigation, happened to be
shopping for cars and spotted my blue BMW, which he
recognized from Gumball three thousand videos, and got in the
car and turned on the police lights and started playing
with the systems, and as a result, I got my
attorney to contact the court to declare evidence had been
tampered with, get the car released returned to me, and
(22:15):
six months later we went back and that attorney, that
district attorney, years later became my friend and we're friends
to this day. And I'm also great friends with the
now retired Oklahoma state trooper led the investigation and to
whom I sold my second BMW five stickred as a
German police car.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Can you go back to Oklahoma now? Are you banned
from the city?
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Absolutely? No, No, I'm fully welcome because the da who
was there, who found the car is his family's very
close with I think the current governor. So I went
back more than once and had dinner with a bunch
of these officers and we had a lot of laughs.
It pays to be nice to people.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, your career is a
natural charm. Does work to your advantage?
Speaker 3 (23:10):
How do you prove the run? Like, uh, do you.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Sort of take a picture of yourself with the newspaper
in New York and then the next day's edition in
LA or what do you do?
Speaker 4 (23:24):
So there was no playbook for this and the people
who had the record previously were accused of cheating, And
so I contacted Ernst and Young and Deloyde and every
company I could think of, asking if they would send
witnesses and if I could pay. I contacted Guinness. Everybody
all declined because it's illegal. So I got Jelopnik to
(23:45):
send Mike Spinelli, who was the editor chief at the time,
to the New York Start and Davy Johnson, who was
one of the famous writers there rest Bless your Heart,
Davy recipes. He went to the finish line, and then
we had a guy. We had a turnalist from the
New York Times review all the evidence. We recorded all
(24:06):
of the GPS devices, and then we had Charles Graeber
from Wired magazine go through the evidence. And we also
had uninterrupted video off of two cameras on front and
rear bumpers, as well as video recorded from the spot
er plant. And then we had receipts from the tolls,
receipts from the gas. So by our standard, we had
(24:27):
multiple corroborating, overlapping, redundant witnesses and evidence, and more evidence
that had ever been compiled to any prior team. But
I do want to have a shout out right now
to the guy who broke my record, Ed Bullion, who
broke it seven years later, because I was so convinced
that we had raised the bar and evidence on evidence
that anyone who came after us would have to meet
(24:48):
or surpass it. And years later, when I heard that
this record had been broken, I didn't give it the
credence that it deserved. Now, of course everybody right now,
everyone recognizes that the record was broken. But I didn't
jump all over it to recognize it. And I feel
bad about that because they had something we didn't have,
which is they had high quality real time vehicle tracking,
(25:10):
and every vehicle's gone after us just puts in what
you see in every truck now, which is a real
time transponder that you can watch progress on a password
protected site, which is what goes on today. Anytime someone
wants to set a record.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Well, seven years is a really long time in terms
of technology advances. I mean seven years is a long time.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Well also it is he beat your record in a
gas powered car, but you have set another record in
an electric car, right.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Yes, So the current gas record actually even Ed's record,
which is incredible. Twenty at fifty was has been beaten
multiple times now. But you know, people always ask me
why don't go out and set gas canniball records anymore?
And the answer is, I'm not remotely interested in them
because the canniball originally in teen fifteen Irwin Baker was
(26:02):
always intended to be a proof of onset for new technology.
So in twenty fourteen, and I've been watching the Tesla
story kind of evolve, and I wasn't totally convinced that
the cars were great. In twenty fourteen, when Tesla released
autopilot as a software update to all their cars, I
(26:22):
immediately was like, I need to do this because whoever
is going to inherit the mantle of Erwin Baker has
got to go and test new technologies. It's going to electric, hydrogen, hybrid, autonomy,
whatever it is. Someone's got to do that. No one
was doing it, and so that is what God means
the EV records. So in late twenty fourteen went across
(26:47):
and broke the EV record and also set the first
driving assistance record using Tesla Autopilot, which I think we
did it like ninety eight percent engaged across country and
then broke it two more time in Tesla's and subsequent years,
and that was far more intellectually challenging than the gas
records because what is known, like what one has to
(27:12):
know and learn to set a gas record, is known.
There is nothing more to be learned except weather forecasting
and potentially incremental improvements entire technology, because weather and and
your tires ability to survive road surfaces at high speed
are the only limiting factors. Is setting a record in
(27:33):
a gas car whereas an electric vehicle, It's like nineteen fifteen. Again.
In nineteen fifteen, there were no gas stations. You have
to buy gas at a hardware store pharmacy, and over
the years of the teens and twenties, gas station networks
began to get built out, but they still weren't consistent.
Pump speeds were different, pumps didn't always work. It's exactly
(27:55):
like electric vehicles today. So to anyone who thinks that
EV's not inevitable, ask yourself what is the rate of
improvement of EV's today in their ability to get cross
country quickly versus one hundred years ago? And the answer
is it's the same, if not slightly better than it
was at the dawn of internal combustion, so EV's are inevitible.
(28:16):
And in fact, I would encourage anyone, any car company
that wants to save billions go drive cross country or
hire me to go a cross country for you, because
every problem that's occurred in the EV sector, software, hardware, reliability,
we saw this five six years ago.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
By the way, I want to I want to keep.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
I want to keep on the EVAH train right now.
But before we get too far away from your cannonball
run in Gas, I just am curious, how much of
the time were you breaking the speed limit and how fast.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Were you going, like average and top speed? And was
it fun?
Speaker 4 (29:00):
It's it's work. It's not fun at all. Every moment
talking about it after is fun, but doing it is work.
And the reason so a few people do it is
because it is work. Everybody in the cannibal community is
bonded by something that people outside just don't understand. You
have to do some math, a lot of math, and
be a good driver and be really committed. And most
(29:21):
people who call themselves car enthusiasts are not actually car
enthusiasts at all. They're not They are as much enthusiasts
of ours as someone who buys a really beautiful dress
and wears it once and gives it back. Just you
have to eat. This is a task. You can't go
mountaineering in couture. You have to bring the gear the day. Yeah. So,
(29:43):
but everything has its place. And so we I mean
we were speeding. I'm guessing ninety nine point nine percent
of the time. The speed limit was inwhere from fifty
five to seventy five, and we're our Our driving average
was ninety two point seven and our average including stop
time was ninety point four. So we're stopped for approximately
(30:04):
thirty thirty one minutes just to refuel, and then you're
just as fast as you can. Our toss speed was
one sixty, but most of the time we're in the
one twenty range, and we would have been an hour faster,
except that I am a more cautious driver than my
co driver Dave, who really was flat out most of
the way, and I slowed down.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
What happened to the car that you set the record in?
Do you still have it?
Speaker 4 (30:27):
I still have it. It's in semi storage in New York.
It's being restored to two thousand and six Cannibal record
setting and condition. As I consider selling it, so it's
period correct everything period correct six. I any time I
took it out in the years subsequent to going public,
it would be recognized, generally by a police officer, and
(30:49):
I'd get pulled over and they'd want to talk about it.
Never got in trouble subsequently, but came close when I
was pulled over for speeding in it in Upstate New
York by an officer who recognized me in the car
and stated that he gave a copy of my book.
(31:11):
I tell all of this to every student in radar
class at the New York State Police Academy, and he
couldn't wait to see me in court to defense where
I would try to defend myself. So that story is.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
To show, okay, well you're here with us.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Now. That story is too long for this show, but
I tell the extended version of it on ed Bullian's
Vinwiki car channel. It's called the evidence story, and it's
it's hard to believe. So today I drive like a baby,
an absolute baby.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
So going back to Tesla, though, did Tesla help you
at all when you were setting records in their cars?
Did they assist you do support in any way in
the spirit of r and.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
D did Elon call you and say yes, dude, okay?
Speaker 4 (31:56):
Elon never called me. However, I I had a good
relationship with Tesla's Tom's team which existed at the time,
and there were some terrific people there. And you remember
that there was a woman that kill Silprizio. Keiley was
very supportive and helped me learn a lot about Tesla
(32:20):
to autopilot and charging and put me in touch with
senior people still. Stirling Anderson was the head of Autopilot
at the time. She connected me with him, and so
I learned a lot and they let's just say that
they lent me the first let's see, the second record
I set was set in a Tesla press car. They
did not have advanced notice of what we were doing.
(32:41):
They did know that we would pick it up in
New York and drop it in La. They didn't ask
and I didn't tell them, uh, And I did receive
many likes and retweets from very important people in Tesla
at the time. That's no longer the case as in
the years since. I've lobbed some criticism at Tesla for
(33:04):
some safety issues around autopilot. But there was a time
when they gave let's just say tacit indirect approve.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
That is wild because I freak out about dog hair
and press cars. So this is putting a whole new
perspective on what we do what we do with press cars.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
If you consider the irony of it all is that
one hundred years ago, car companies would literally pay for
people to set records in their cars. And today, I mean,
what is the dream headline for any EV maker today?
The dream headline and every car company making a TV
today is five days from having this headline is company
(33:42):
X beats Tesla. Because there's almost it's almost a possible
to get that headline in any category of performance or metric.
Lucid could do it for efficiency, but no one can
do it with front page headlines setting time unless it's
done literally a canniball record is set, and they are
of course, are all concerned about legal legal issues. So
(34:04):
what is really interesting about Tesla and EV's and charging
is that if a car company wanted to beat the
EV record in it that was set by in a Tesla,
the window when it could be done opens every year
for a few months and then closes. The first generation
portion tychon technically well the range is shorter than the
(34:26):
best the longest range Tesla. However, the battery technology and
some of the EA chargers that it could connect to
are better. So there was a window when a portchit
Tychon could have broken the record. That window closed with
multiple software updates from Tesla and the improvement of the
Tesla chargers. Lucid currently is probably the only ev that
(34:48):
could be used to break the Tesla record. The Lucid
longest range air battery pack five hundred and sixteen miles
is twenty percent longer than a Tesla, but it would
require that the chargers have an uptime i'm equivalent to
the Tesla charging network, which they do not, and so
there is an arms race among evy manufacturers to enable
(35:10):
a third party like myself to go do this. But
currently the record is basically sitting. I think it's forty
two hours in the Tesla and it will sit there
until the charging networks available to non Tesla companies achieve
a level of liability that Tesla has always had.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
What about an electric hypercar like a Nevara and yeah,
the Rimac Navara, And also is that a liability just
because it's so much flashier than something like a Lucid Sedan,
which blends in yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
The own, yeah it is. Any any sports car looking
car is a liability. You have to have an innocuous
vehicle and it must be with the largest battery pack
and the best efficiency combined with a network with uptime
as equivalent to a gas station, or you're just not going.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
So it's not about to all.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
Really, it's pure math. So right now, the battery, the
power density of electric batteries of any technology is less
than that of petroleum. So until those lines cross, and
they will cross, uh, you are at the mercy. You
are hostage to the inexorable, terrible devil's math of power
(36:23):
and efficiency. There's no way around it. I have tables,
like calculation tables that just about this. Every time an
EV manufacturer releases anything, I enter the car and the
table and to determine if it can be done. But
the choke point today is not the cars. It's the chargers. Uh,
it's the chargers, Alex.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
I wonder about the.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
You obviously are a super enthusiast and you like interesting
and uh sort of niche cars, the Morgan three wheel
are being one of them. But also you like, you know,
everybody likes.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
An M five.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Can you be passionate about an EV like like the
driving experience?
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Do you enjoy it?
Speaker 1 (37:14):
So?
Speaker 4 (37:14):
Ideally drive a Tesla. It's my fourth I love it.
So evi's have gotten a bad rap in terms of
driving enthusiasts because we have not yet really seen an
EV with soul that is productized in the way that
a cor enthusiasts want it to be. So let me
just unpack that. So there are Tesli Model three performances
(37:34):
like on paper like the perfect car. Why do car
enthusiasts not like it? Well, no sound, so I would argue, yes,
lack of sound is a thing because we equate. Analog
cars are not great just because they're analog. They matter
(37:55):
to us that we connect with them. Because we are analog.
Our heart beats, we can hear it. We run faster,
our heart beats faster, we get scared, heart beats faster,
We can feel the blood pulsing in our veins. So
we are connected as our own bodies with exert Hannah
used to be a runner. You know this, Yeah, I
mean athletes understand that people who understand exertion and physicality
(38:17):
understand cars. In a way different from others, And so
a vehicle that when we change gears, it is analogous
to the psychological decision to I will now know that
the final sprint in a marathon, like I'm changing gears
now you do in a car. It's the same decision,
and the noise changes in the same way. The noise
(38:37):
changes in our heads and when our heart rates that
much faster. So an EV that lacks that doesn't have
a parallel set of sounds and feelings to what we
feel inside ourselves, because that's what we do in a
car too. When we get scared and excited, we react,
and EV lacks that bridge connecting the driver, the organic
(38:58):
human analog driver, to what the vehicle does. Now, the
corrollary to that is that an EV, because the power
it comes at is linear and the noise floor is
lower in a way, connects us much more deeply than
any analog vehicle to the actual act of driving, because
(39:21):
the outputs of driving fast are quicker, less time, and
an EV will do those things that analog cars can't do.
And so for someone to drive an EV faster better
than they do an analog vehicle, they have to be
willing to give up that bridge but intellectually connect with
a vehicle that will do more of what they want
(39:41):
better than any ice vehicle. And the community does not
really recognize that that what few professional drivers have raised
in formulae. They get it, but everyone else doesn't get it.
And I think that the enthusiast community will have to
age into it, and then the next generation of kids
after that will just take it for granted. But the
other half of this is something that I'm very disappointed
(40:05):
to see, which is that virtually every car company in
the planet working on EV's and there's a few exceptions.
Rimok Wull be an exception. Everyone else is shoehorning electric
power trains into internal combustion thinking, and they've made it
with this concept of the software defined vehicle. And their
(40:27):
notion is, oh, well, we'll offer subscription services with these evs.
People will love it just like a phone. That's just
not true. The only thing we want an EV to
do is be cheaper and more reliable than an ice car.
Than that, we most people just don't care. The missing piece,
the piece that will connect with enthusiasts, is there's only
(40:53):
one company thinking about this really well, it's Hyundai. So
Hyundai's new Ionic five n the racing of the I
five has fake engine sounds. Many companies have done this,
but most of them are terrible. But Hyundai's did it
with a purpose. They offer not just fake engine sounds,
but a fake synthetic gearbox paddle gearbox with synthetic gears
(41:18):
that mimic actual driving gears. You can redline the car.
So now the car sounds and feels closer to an
ice vehicle, and you have all the benefits of learning
how an ice vehicle drives, and other downside is potentially
damaging it. So you actually have a vehicle which you
could learn to drive an ice vehicle better. And this
(41:39):
and this is tip of the iceberg because ultimately, and
I wrote about this ten years ago, every legacy car
maker that has a brand or a model whose brand
is more powerful than the parent brand. As an example,
the Corvette is worth more than GM, are worth more
than four now nine to eleven is probably worth more
than Portia. Every company but he has one model like
(42:01):
this Jeep is worth more than Stilantis. So each of
these companies has a fifteen hundred year library of sound
and feel and enthusiasts who want that sound and feel.
And in the future, because no one those cars aren't
made anymore, people will want that sound and feel. What
is the future of software defined vehicles? The only future
(42:21):
is one where you can buy a future nine to eleven.
It's a skateboard that looks like a future nine to eleven,
but on board you can subscribe to the sound, feel,
and physics of every nine to eleven ever made. Pick your year,
portable download physics, model, sound, the field into the car,
and the car's chassis itself. They'll need some kind of
(42:45):
actual dynamic chassis that's very far more evolved than anything
we've seen yet to actually mimic oversteer, understeer and while
doing all these things inside a software defined boundary that
prevents a crash. The dream of everyone is to have
a sports car that does whatever you want that will
(43:05):
never hit anything. We're very far from this, but that
is the dream and we'll only get there Biosolvin vehicles
from oatims that have legacy. So because the new ones
have no.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Legacy, I'm so curious. You know, all day to day
and this week we've been looking at earnings and you know,
so many automakers have walked back their predictions and their
estimates for EV's and their production goals. How does that
strike you are EV's It sounds like you're saying EV's
are still the future, even though it seems like there's
(43:40):
quite a stall in demand.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
So when I say evs are inevitable, you know, like
like fight Club. On a long enough timeline, every technology
success rates one hundred percent. However, it is very likely
that there will be in an interim phase where hybrids
supersede internal question and that that will play out over decades,
(44:05):
after which ev will supersede hybrid. However, the other issue,
which is a political one. China has most of the
rare earth's required to build evs, so they can churn
out EV's all day long that are better than anything
made in the West except maybe a Teslam and sell
them throughout the world. And they have already started. And
(44:25):
so if the United States wants to compete in these
markets expert vehicles anywhere in the world, they need start
trading out EV's, And so, in the absence of a
supply chain that could support you know, EV's sold at scale,
something else must be done. Hopefully some of the sources
of these rare earths, some buish in the United States
and some elsewhere. Well, many of them are locked up
(44:48):
for environmental reasons, some of them for political reasons. Will
be unlocked so American car makers can compete with Chinese
ev makers. And the second thing, which I'm very optimistic about,
is that you know, formerly of Tesla as a company
called Redwood Materials and they recycle batteries and they are
just starting to scale. So between the pressure to compete
(45:10):
with the Chinese ev companies and the potential of Redwood Materials,
I think they'll be both a stick and a carrot
to get American car companies on board with evds. But
hybrids are going to become a bigger thing first. And
you know, really, all this is it's tiresome because these
things should not be politicized. The market should have to decide,
(45:30):
and the market has already decided that if we don't
compete with China, our car companies are going to be
not going to go away, but they're not going to
be what they were. Alex.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
We have to wrap it up because of time. But
I have to say, dude, you have blown my mind. Yeah,
I mean, I mean the the amount of insights that
you have. I just haven't heard anything like this from
any of the top car executives that we talk to,
(46:00):
and it all makes sense.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
So where can people find your work now? I mean,
where to get more of you? Where should we send
our listeners?
Speaker 4 (46:10):
Well, I have published very little in recent years, but
I have a podcast called the autono Cast with Kirsen
Corsek and Niemeyer, and I suggest following me on Twitter
or LinkedIn on Twitter. I'm Alex Wroy one forty four.
If I mean to say one last thing to everyone
who ever said that driving would go away and that
people are kids aren't getting driver's licenses, I worked at
(46:32):
a self driving car company for four years. All of
them are wrong, and human driving will never die, even
when autonomous vehicles are available at scale cheaply love it.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
I hope you're right about that.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
I'm on board with that for sure.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
I know I am. I take way Mos every day,
but I'm always going to own my old Morgan, my
old Porsche. So thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Thank you, Alex than thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
I hope we can have you back because that was
really incredible. So I truly appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
And uh anytime, Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
That's all we have time for unfortunately, Hannah, but we'll
see you back here, same time, same place, next week.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is
Bloomberg
I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is
hot pursuit.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
All right, we have a pretty interesting guest today who
has won a Cannonball Run.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yeah, I'm mystery Man of the Car World, if you will.
By the way, someone who's been around forever.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I gotta say, I'm I think I'm older than you.
But when I was a kid, Cannonball Run was the
first movies. I'm sorry, sorry, I'm just saying because of
the date right when Cannonball Run came out, the original
with Burt Reynolds, which was a long long time ago,
that's one of the first movies I saw that really
got me kind of obsessed with cars.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
I'm gonna google it right.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Now to see you exactly when it came His guest
is Alex Roy. I mean, why why delay? This is
Alex Roy, who kind of is like this international Man
of Mystery slash world's most interesting car guy. I was
reading his Wikipedia page and we should ask him about this.
It said that in two thousand and four he won
a British reality TV series called The Ultimate Playboy, which
(01:09):
I was not aware of. We should definitely ask him
about He has the look, so I feel like I
should give some context here because basically I called Alex
I don't know, six weeks ago because I was doing
a story about rallies and especially about Millimelia coming to
the US, and the number one person I know who
(01:29):
has done car rallies and cannonball style runs is Alex Roy.
So we when we got to talking, it was just like, Wow,
this is somebody who really has been in cars a
long time and also really knows the underground side of it.
So like after we got off the phone, Alex I
(01:50):
told Matt like we got to have him on because,
especially in light of electric vehicles and autonomous driving, I
just want to hear your thoughts on every everything about
where we are now with people who love cars and
compared to twenty years ago. This isn't really a question.
It's kind of a setup. Matt.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, I want to ask.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
You, but I think it's weird that I've never that
we've never actually met in person to my knowledge, because
I've been obsessed with cars and covering like the business
side for Bloomberg for twenty years. But I've been following
you from Afar throughout all of your antics and I mean,
and also you give a lot of legit like important reporting,
(02:35):
you know for journalists on self driving stuff and on Tesla.
But I'm more interested in like the Canniball Run in
the Morgan.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
Happy to talk about all of it. I mean, actually, Hannah,
our conversation win that direction because there's car reporting and
then there's like luxury goods reporting, like rob report. But
Hannah a complement, is the only journalist who covers automotive
who has her own fashion language and can actually justify
(03:08):
getting into some of these cars as like a not
just as a driver, but as the kind of person
who would own one. And because most people who buy
these cars have no taste at all, and like they
don't in any way reflect the brands that they are
driving around. They hope the brands reflect on them, but
they do not reflect the brands in least.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
That's a very nice that point.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Yeah, that's what set me off.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, where should we start? Then? Should we start?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
We were talking about the Cannibal Run movie. I was
saying that it was like the first thing that I
watched that got me into cars. I was born at
the end of seventy three, and it came out in
eighty one, So I was like eight years old or
I was seven turning eight when I saw it?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
And was that based on anything real?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Like?
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Had there been a true cannonball run before that? Or
is the race that the record that you set based
on the movie?
Speaker 3 (03:56):
How's that whole story play out?
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Okay? So the answer is that, yes, there was a
real cannonball run race that ran from nineteen seventy one
to nineteen seventy nine. Brock Yates was the progenitor of that.
It ran four times. Right after it ended seventy nine,
a bunch of cannonball drivers and fans who wanted to
(04:19):
keep going decided to put on what they considered a
more professional event with no media coverage, no movie at all,
called the US Express. That race ran four times and
the last one was in the nineteen eighty three and
after that that was pretty much the end of the
classic era of cannonballing. But the most interesting thing about
(04:41):
the Cannonball Run and even its name, isn't the race
from the seventies. It's where the name came from. And
for all the people who think that the cannonball is illegal, dangerous, foolish,
and silly, the name came from a guy named Irwin
Baker whose nickname was Cannonball. Hundred years ago. He was
(05:02):
a motorcycle racer. So in the early twentieth century he
was hired by the first generation of car companies, stutz
Gardner Cadillac to drive their cars from New York to
LA before the interstate Highway system existed, to prove that
cars were intermi combustion cars were reliable, affordable, efficient, and
(05:24):
polluted less than horses and trains, and were the best
way for anyone of any income level to get around.
And so it was at one point front page news
when people went and did this, and it was for
many years, and so that was the person after whom
the current illegal races was named.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
That's very cool. So how did you conceive this idea
to attack and attempt a cannon ball run?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And by the way, to state I think the obvious
the cannonball run, the US expressed they're not legal races, right, they're.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
All not regulated.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Well, there you have to break the speed limit in
order to win, like by a substantial amount for a
very long period of time.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
Totally illegal for anyone who wants to set a record.
But anyone can go. There's no organizing body, there's no
rules other than same car stays on the ground and
at least one person in the whole way, although that
might not be true in the future of autonomous records.
The you know, I got into it the way almost
everyone has ever gotten into it. They saw the movie
(06:33):
as a kid. My father talked about it. He wanted
to go, he didn't do it. And so in the
late nineties, I wanted into a nightclub in New York
called Void Now Gone, and they were playing a film
called Rendezvous, which was the famous French nine minute film
Nowhere where Claude, Yeah, Claude de Luche, the French director,
(06:55):
you know, put a camera in the front of a
car and drove across Paris in nine minutes and change.
And after that, I'm like, I'm going to do that someday.
And so I put that in the hat alongside cannonball
and anything else I can think of, and I'm like,
I'm going to do that eventually. When I had the
time and money in my thirties, I'm like, I did
do it. But the thing is cannonball a word like
(07:20):
the as entered into like kind of the English vernacular.
As a word to just do dangerous stuff in a car.
So it's been bastardized and conflated with so many other things,
sometimes by people with good intentions, but often by people
who want to bask in the glory of the real
(07:40):
thing without actually doing it. And so that is, in
my opinion, where most modern rallies come from, because when
people talk about the cannonball they call it interchangeably a
race or a rally. But in the classic definition, a
rally is on a public road, timed from point to point.
(08:02):
It's legal, it's sanctioned, there's a governing body and their
entrance who are serious people, generally in vintage cars. And
in nineteen ninety nine, all of these ideas, the conflation,
the confusion, the glory, the desire to drive the fund
was all thrown together by a guy named Maximilian Cooper
(08:22):
out of London, who decided to put on an event
inspired He says, it's inspired by the Gumball Rally movie.
For the Gumball Rally movie itself was inspired by the
Cannonball Run race and so to put the timeline together,
Cannonball Run Race Gumball Rally Movie comes out in seventy
six Canniball Run movie comes out in eighty one, and
(08:45):
then seventeen years later, this Englishman shows up and says,
let me put on an event, a rally call the
Gumball that basts in the glow of the cannonball legend.
And yeah, that event, the Gumball three thousand launching Night
ninety nine, is the modern uh you know, it's called
(09:06):
I don't want to say inhertorys it's not a race,
but it is the event that changed and utterly the
landscape of modern car rallies, because prior to that they
were vintage cars and an older demographic, and suddenly had
all these people going in their supercars, stickered up on
public roads and acting egregiously. I was one of them,
(09:28):
and so I went thinking that the Gumball three thousand
was kind of a clearinghouse or unofficial proven ground for
people who wanted to do a real cannonball to meet
each other, and that eventually they would go do that.
And I got there and there was no one who
wanted to go coast to coast NonStop illegally. Everybody wanted
(09:50):
to go to a party, however, and everybody interchangeably called
it cannonballing, and so that is really how I got
into this.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
So tell us about your your first attempt and how
you set it up because it must take a lot
of planning. I imagine you're going to want to either
have extra gas tanks or like four radar detectors or
a spotter or I don't know, but like what do
you do to because you you achieved the fastest crossing
(10:22):
right what from New York to LA.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
So, yeah, we did set the record in two thousand
and six, and we were the first team to successfully
break it in I think twenty five or twenty six years.
What car in a BMW five two thousand and thirty
nine five Our record has been broken anytime since.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
And you did it in about thirty four thirty four hours.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
Thirty one thirty one. So the record in nineteen eighty
three in the last US Express unsanctioned full on race
was thirty two hours of seven minutes. We broke it
by a little bit over an hour the way we did,
and it was really made possible by going on the
Gumball three thousand rally and other rallies is one called
the bull Run was one I did so many of
(11:10):
them I forget, and on those rallies, you're in a
stickered car and you're in a group of fifty to
one hundred other cars going city to city with the
police generally waiting for you, and so on those events
from two thousand and three to two thousand and five,
I figured out what hardware you needed and what equipment
(11:30):
was necessary, and so everyone knows you need a radar detector.
And at that time, laser jammers were just coming into
use and laser was becoming more popular among police. But
what we had done is we'd studied the teams from
nineteen eighty three and one of them had a spotter
plane which flew overhead in the daytime stretch. So, using
(11:53):
everything I knew from tech startup world, we put in
the car triple redundant sell communications, one phone from every
network at the time. I forget how many GPS we had.
There were probably four GPS displays in the vehicle, one
for navigation, two for speed, two more in the back.
(12:13):
Every one of them had their own antenta on the roof.
Because of the spotter plane, we put a partially a
semi reflective white stripe pair on the roof of the
plane could see us in low light conditions, rear brake
light cutoff switches, rear running light cutoff switches, thermal cameras
who could drive it out with no headlights, a fourteen
gallon fuel tank, redundant replacement parts for anything we could
(12:35):
fix on the move, and some things quickly on the ground,
and so everything that had ever been done historically ever
had been installed in that car at that time, and
we tested all of it except the plane on the
Gumball three thousand. The most important lesson from the Gumball
was that if you have a highly stickered car in
(12:58):
a group of stickered cars, you're running a lottery because
it's basically how many police cars have been vectored to
a group of speeding vehicles. And if you are early
in the speeding pack, you will get away, take the
stickers off. With all the skills you learned, it becomes
actually pretty easy to speed and not get caught. The
hard part is there's no cars running scrimmage for you,
(13:19):
so you've got to get really tactical. I know it
sounds crazy about safety, and the hardest part is not
the car. It's not the driving, it's the research into
the road conditions, and volume of traffic on the road,
so you can pick a date for maximum safety and
risk mitigation. And that was a lot of trial, expensive
(13:41):
and time consuming trial and error because the best driver
in the world, in the best car or the best
equipment cannot be safe rolling through packs of pedestrians and traffic.
It's not possible.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
So you did your run around Christmas time.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Oh that's awesome, right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
We're kind of we're speechless. You've run us speechless. But
this was around Christmas, right if I remember right.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
So well, we broke the record on October seventh, eighth
ninth of two thousand and six, which is very specifically
chosen Columbus Day weekend because you don't you can't drag
go in the summer because road traffic is three to
four x higher than other times a year, and police
(14:24):
patrols are three x higher any other time of year,
so it won't work. You need a holiday weekend, preferably
that is a low traffic weekend, and ideally tornadoes because
most law enforcement and first responders are diverted to deal
with tornado issues. So that meant Columbus Day was the
perfect weekend, and so we had mapped it out, and
(14:48):
I looked at like twenty years of data from the
Federal Dot on traffic and weather determined that was it.
And it turned out that was the right day. However, Hannah,
you are correct, Christmas Day would be if it was
not snowing and there was minimal to no ice, maybe
the best day of the year.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Interesting.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
We considered it. We considered it.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
So physically, how did you prepare? What types of food,
food and beverages and stimulation did you plan for yourself
along with and how many people.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Were how many people were in the car?
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Three people in the car My co driver Dave Maher,
who did slightly more driving than I did, and it
is a better driver than I am. He was an
essential choice. And in the back we had Corey Wells,
who's a documentary filmmaker who was shooting at the documentary
which we made about the run, which came out a
few years later called APEX The Secret Race across America.
And she was really essential because she had been making
(15:47):
a documentary about the US Express for years and had
not yet completed it when we met, and so the
availability of the veteran drivers from that time and her
knowledge was invaluable. I was physically better shape than than
I am now. I smoked at the time, and I
was allowed to smoke a cigarette anytime we saw a
(16:08):
police car. Nice and which ended up being three times
the whole way, But that was it, because you cannot
stop to go to the bathroom. You can only go
when you stop for gas, which is and a maximum
five minute stop. One person's got to stay at the car,
(16:29):
so it means one person go in, so you really can't.
There are no luxuries or convenience, so minimal flavor. I
tested diapers in advance, very uncomfortable, and I have also
used tubes in the past on other events, but I
learned that if you have a tube running down through
(16:50):
the bottom of the car, it leaks in both directions
or there comes out oh no, yeah, and it's very awkward.
And so we settled on something that was the least
bad of all bad choices, a device called a portagon
or something. Oh it's basically it's a thing that could
(17:11):
be used by a man or a woman.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Or a woman. I've seen for a woman that.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
You don't want to use. And we each tried it
and decided we would bring them and tried not to
use them and we did not use them. It was
you have to be good friends. And even the then
it's not the best.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
How did you I can't believe you only saw three
cops going from New York to la if I have
the direction correct? And did you have any legal problems?
Like afterwards because you publicized it, So did any cops
say like, well, we know you broke the speed lim
in our state, so.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
We're going to arrest you, like retroactive.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:50):
So, because no one had done this successfully for you know,
twenty five year or twenty seven years prior, I had
no roadmap and was absolutely terrified of the consequences the
you know, Brockiates wrote a book publish in two thousand
and two called Cannonball It which he states the end
that no car would ever cross the United States in
less than thirty eight hours ever, and the canniball record
(18:13):
at that when he did the last ran, the race
was like thirty two point fifty one I think in
the last Cannibal and then thirty two to seven the
last Express and so he here he is, you know,
twenty years later, saying can't be done. Thirty eight is
the floor. And so I called my lawyer, I've got
a question, and he's like, that'll be an expensive answer.
So he started digging around, looking into I had a
(18:35):
book deal at the time for the record we not
yet set, and so he said, well, in worst case scenario,
you could maybe get hit under Rico statutes because you're
committing fel any crimes across state lines, all of them,
you could, and you're profiting from it, so maybe an
angry prosecutor could come. And of course there's the felony
(18:55):
spinning charges themselves. So I had him prepare a document.
It's a wonderful spreadsheet. I should send you, Hannah, color
coded document with the state by state the severity color
coded of the likely charges want to receive based on speed.
Some states have an arbitrary felony charge trigger based on speed.
(19:18):
My book tour I knew would go to some states
and not others, so I gave the states I knew
I would not ever want to go to to Dave
Maher to drive, so when I showed up a year
later or two years later, I wouldn't be charged because
I wouldn't be going there. So Dave he's like, great,
I'll take them. And I also learned that everyone's familiar
(19:42):
with the idea of statue limitations, but they also think
called a tolling law. So if you commit a crime
and a state and you leave that state, the statue
limitations clock is frozen until you set footnet state again.
So take Oklahoma. Yeah, so leaving the state does not
protect you necessarily because if you don't let spend say
(20:03):
the full twelve months in that state, you can go
back for a minute and they can just grab you
if they want to. So my attorney advised me that
a very cranky prosecutor could just make it his mission
to take down that Roy guy. And I need to
be very careful about this. So we went and did it,
and we were successful. However, before we succeeded, we did
(20:24):
have a failed drive at it was meant to be
the real drive in April two thousand and six, and
we broke down halfway in Oklahoma City. And this is
a story I rarely tell. My teammates left the state
and I had the being able to be picked up
and taken to the local dealership, and then I went
(20:46):
to the airport and I told the dealership hold the car,
I'll call you in like six hours. So at the airport.
I called my girlfriend, my mother, my attorney and told
them what happened. And then I flew to uh forget
tell some other city to stop over. And it was
a message from the dealership that the state police, Oklahoma
(21:08):
State Police were already there looking for me. Hours later. Yeah,
And so it turned out that behind me in line
at the Oaklahoma City airport was the Lieutenant Governor of Oklahoma,
and he had overheard my entire conversation with my lawyer
where I said, now, BMW, we escaped. They didn't catch us,
(21:28):
They can't catch us, and he they deployed the entire
state police academy to go find the guy in the
blue BMW. They thought I was a drug dealer whose
car broke it down, and a judge ordered the vehicle
held for several days as they figured out what was
going on. And on, like the second day the car
was being held at BMW, an off duty district attorney
(21:52):
who had no idea about the investigation, happened to be
shopping for cars and spotted my blue BMW, which he
recognized from Gumball three thousand videos, and got in the
car and turned on the police lights and started playing
with the systems, and as a result, I got my
attorney to contact the court to declare evidence had been
tampered with, get the car released returned to me, and
(22:15):
six months later we went back and that attorney, that
district attorney, years later became my friend and we're friends
to this day. And I'm also great friends with the
now retired Oklahoma state trooper led the investigation and to
whom I sold my second BMW five stickred as a
German police car.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Can you go back to Oklahoma now? Are you banned
from the city?
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Absolutely? No, No, I'm fully welcome because the da who
was there, who found the car is his family's very
close with I think the current governor. So I went
back more than once and had dinner with a bunch
of these officers and we had a lot of laughs.
It pays to be nice to people.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, your career is a
natural charm. Does work to your advantage?
Speaker 3 (23:10):
How do you prove the run? Like, uh, do you.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Sort of take a picture of yourself with the newspaper
in New York and then the next day's edition in
LA or what do you do?
Speaker 4 (23:24):
So there was no playbook for this and the people
who had the record previously were accused of cheating, And
so I contacted Ernst and Young and Deloyde and every
company I could think of, asking if they would send
witnesses and if I could pay. I contacted Guinness. Everybody
all declined because it's illegal. So I got Jelopnik to
(23:45):
send Mike Spinelli, who was the editor chief at the time,
to the New York Start and Davy Johnson, who was
one of the famous writers there rest Bless your Heart,
Davy recipes. He went to the finish line, and then
we had a guy. We had a turnalist from the
New York Times review all the evidence. We recorded all
(24:06):
of the GPS devices, and then we had Charles Graeber
from Wired magazine go through the evidence. And we also
had uninterrupted video off of two cameras on front and
rear bumpers, as well as video recorded from the spot
er plant. And then we had receipts from the tolls,
receipts from the gas. So by our standard, we had
(24:27):
multiple corroborating, overlapping, redundant witnesses and evidence, and more evidence
that had ever been compiled to any prior team. But
I do want to have a shout out right now
to the guy who broke my record, Ed Bullion, who
broke it seven years later, because I was so convinced
that we had raised the bar and evidence on evidence
that anyone who came after us would have to meet
(24:48):
or surpass it. And years later, when I heard that
this record had been broken, I didn't give it the
credence that it deserved. Now, of course everybody right now,
everyone recognizes that the record was broken. But I didn't
jump all over it to recognize it. And I feel
bad about that because they had something we didn't have,
which is they had high quality real time vehicle tracking,
(25:10):
and every vehicle's gone after us just puts in what
you see in every truck now, which is a real
time transponder that you can watch progress on a password
protected site, which is what goes on today. Anytime someone
wants to set a record.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Well, seven years is a really long time in terms
of technology advances. I mean seven years is a long time.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Well also it is he beat your record in a
gas powered car, but you have set another record in
an electric car, right.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Yes, So the current gas record actually even Ed's record,
which is incredible. Twenty at fifty was has been beaten
multiple times now. But you know, people always ask me
why don't go out and set gas canniball records anymore?
And the answer is, I'm not remotely interested in them
because the canniball originally in teen fifteen Irwin Baker was
(26:02):
always intended to be a proof of onset for new technology.
So in twenty fourteen, and I've been watching the Tesla
story kind of evolve, and I wasn't totally convinced that
the cars were great. In twenty fourteen, when Tesla released
autopilot as a software update to all their cars, I
(26:22):
immediately was like, I need to do this because whoever
is going to inherit the mantle of Erwin Baker has
got to go and test new technologies. It's going to electric, hydrogen, hybrid, autonomy,
whatever it is. Someone's got to do that. No one
was doing it, and so that is what God means
the EV records. So in late twenty fourteen went across
(26:47):
and broke the EV record and also set the first
driving assistance record using Tesla Autopilot, which I think we
did it like ninety eight percent engaged across country and
then broke it two more time in Tesla's and subsequent years,
and that was far more intellectually challenging than the gas
records because what is known, like what one has to
(27:12):
know and learn to set a gas record, is known.
There is nothing more to be learned except weather forecasting
and potentially incremental improvements entire technology, because weather and and
your tires ability to survive road surfaces at high speed
are the only limiting factors. Is setting a record in
(27:33):
a gas car whereas an electric vehicle, It's like nineteen fifteen. Again.
In nineteen fifteen, there were no gas stations. You have
to buy gas at a hardware store pharmacy, and over
the years of the teens and twenties, gas station networks
began to get built out, but they still weren't consistent.
Pump speeds were different, pumps didn't always work. It's exactly
(27:55):
like electric vehicles today. So to anyone who thinks that
EV's not inevitable, ask yourself what is the rate of
improvement of EV's today in their ability to get cross
country quickly versus one hundred years ago? And the answer
is it's the same, if not slightly better than it
was at the dawn of internal combustion, so EV's are inevitible.
(28:16):
And in fact, I would encourage anyone, any car company
that wants to save billions go drive cross country or
hire me to go a cross country for you, because
every problem that's occurred in the EV sector, software, hardware, reliability,
we saw this five six years ago.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
By the way, I want to I want to keep.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
I want to keep on the EVAH train right now.
But before we get too far away from your cannonball
run in Gas, I just am curious, how much of
the time were you breaking the speed limit and how fast.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Were you going, like average and top speed? And was
it fun?
Speaker 4 (29:00):
It's it's work. It's not fun at all. Every moment
talking about it after is fun, but doing it is work.
And the reason so a few people do it is
because it is work. Everybody in the cannibal community is
bonded by something that people outside just don't understand. You
have to do some math, a lot of math, and
be a good driver and be really committed. And most
(29:21):
people who call themselves car enthusiasts are not actually car
enthusiasts at all. They're not They are as much enthusiasts
of ours as someone who buys a really beautiful dress
and wears it once and gives it back. Just you
have to eat. This is a task. You can't go
mountaineering in couture. You have to bring the gear the day. Yeah. So,
(29:43):
but everything has its place. And so we I mean
we were speeding. I'm guessing ninety nine point nine percent
of the time. The speed limit was inwhere from fifty
five to seventy five, and we're our Our driving average
was ninety two point seven and our average including stop
time was ninety point four. So we're stopped for approximately
(30:04):
thirty thirty one minutes just to refuel, and then you're
just as fast as you can. Our toss speed was
one sixty, but most of the time we're in the
one twenty range, and we would have been an hour faster,
except that I am a more cautious driver than my
co driver Dave, who really was flat out most of
the way, and I slowed down.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
What happened to the car that you set the record in?
Do you still have it?
Speaker 4 (30:27):
I still have it. It's in semi storage in New York.
It's being restored to two thousand and six Cannibal record
setting and condition. As I consider selling it, so it's
period correct everything period correct six. I any time I
took it out in the years subsequent to going public,
it would be recognized, generally by a police officer, and
(30:49):
I'd get pulled over and they'd want to talk about it.
Never got in trouble subsequently, but came close when I
was pulled over for speeding in it in Upstate New
York by an officer who recognized me in the car
and stated that he gave a copy of my book.
(31:11):
I tell all of this to every student in radar
class at the New York State Police Academy, and he
couldn't wait to see me in court to defense where
I would try to defend myself. So that story is.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
To show, okay, well you're here with us.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Now. That story is too long for this show, but
I tell the extended version of it on ed Bullian's
Vinwiki car channel. It's called the evidence story, and it's
it's hard to believe. So today I drive like a baby,
an absolute baby.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
So going back to Tesla, though, did Tesla help you
at all when you were setting records in their cars?
Did they assist you do support in any way in
the spirit of r and.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
D did Elon call you and say yes, dude, okay?
Speaker 4 (31:56):
Elon never called me. However, I I had a good
relationship with Tesla's Tom's team which existed at the time,
and there were some terrific people there. And you remember
that there was a woman that kill Silprizio. Keiley was
very supportive and helped me learn a lot about Tesla
(32:20):
to autopilot and charging and put me in touch with
senior people still. Stirling Anderson was the head of Autopilot
at the time. She connected me with him, and so
I learned a lot and they let's just say that
they lent me the first let's see, the second record
I set was set in a Tesla press car. They
did not have advanced notice of what we were doing.
(32:41):
They did know that we would pick it up in
New York and drop it in La. They didn't ask
and I didn't tell them, uh, And I did receive
many likes and retweets from very important people in Tesla
at the time. That's no longer the case as in
the years since. I've lobbed some criticism at Tesla for
(33:04):
some safety issues around autopilot. But there was a time
when they gave let's just say tacit indirect approve.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
That is wild because I freak out about dog hair
and press cars. So this is putting a whole new
perspective on what we do what we do with press cars.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
If you consider the irony of it all is that
one hundred years ago, car companies would literally pay for
people to set records in their cars. And today, I mean,
what is the dream headline for any EV maker today?
The dream headline and every car company making a TV
today is five days from having this headline is company
(33:42):
X beats Tesla. Because there's almost it's almost a possible
to get that headline in any category of performance or metric.
Lucid could do it for efficiency, but no one can
do it with front page headlines setting time unless it's
done literally a canniball record is set, and they are
of course, are all concerned about legal legal issues. So
(34:04):
what is really interesting about Tesla and EV's and charging
is that if a car company wanted to beat the
EV record in it that was set by in a Tesla,
the window when it could be done opens every year
for a few months and then closes. The first generation
portion tychon technically well the range is shorter than the
(34:26):
best the longest range Tesla. However, the battery technology and
some of the EA chargers that it could connect to
are better. So there was a window when a portchit
Tychon could have broken the record. That window closed with
multiple software updates from Tesla and the improvement of the
Tesla chargers. Lucid currently is probably the only ev that
(34:48):
could be used to break the Tesla record. The Lucid
longest range air battery pack five hundred and sixteen miles
is twenty percent longer than a Tesla, but it would
require that the chargers have an uptime i'm equivalent to
the Tesla charging network, which they do not, and so
there is an arms race among evy manufacturers to enable
(35:10):
a third party like myself to go do this. But
currently the record is basically sitting. I think it's forty
two hours in the Tesla and it will sit there
until the charging networks available to non Tesla companies achieve
a level of liability that Tesla has always had.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
What about an electric hypercar like a Nevara and yeah,
the Rimac Navara, And also is that a liability just
because it's so much flashier than something like a Lucid Sedan,
which blends in yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
The own, yeah it is. Any any sports car looking
car is a liability. You have to have an innocuous
vehicle and it must be with the largest battery pack
and the best efficiency combined with a network with uptime
as equivalent to a gas station, or you're just not going.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
So it's not about to all.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
Really, it's pure math. So right now, the battery, the
power density of electric batteries of any technology is less
than that of petroleum. So until those lines cross, and
they will cross, uh, you are at the mercy. You
are hostage to the inexorable, terrible devil's math of power
(36:23):
and efficiency. There's no way around it. I have tables,
like calculation tables that just about this. Every time an
EV manufacturer releases anything, I enter the car and the
table and to determine if it can be done. But
the choke point today is not the cars. It's the chargers. Uh,
it's the chargers, Alex.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
I wonder about the.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
You obviously are a super enthusiast and you like interesting
and uh sort of niche cars, the Morgan three wheel
are being one of them. But also you like, you know,
everybody likes.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
An M five.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Can you be passionate about an EV like like the
driving experience?
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Do you enjoy it?
Speaker 1 (37:14):
So?
Speaker 4 (37:14):
Ideally drive a Tesla. It's my fourth I love it.
So evi's have gotten a bad rap in terms of
driving enthusiasts because we have not yet really seen an
EV with soul that is productized in the way that
a cor enthusiasts want it to be. So let me
just unpack that. So there are Tesli Model three performances
(37:34):
like on paper like the perfect car. Why do car
enthusiasts not like it? Well, no sound, so I would argue, yes,
lack of sound is a thing because we equate. Analog
cars are not great just because they're analog. They matter
(37:55):
to us that we connect with them. Because we are analog.
Our heart beats, we can hear it. We run faster,
our heart beats faster, we get scared, heart beats faster,
We can feel the blood pulsing in our veins. So
we are connected as our own bodies with exert Hannah
used to be a runner. You know this, Yeah, I
mean athletes understand that people who understand exertion and physicality
(38:17):
understand cars. In a way different from others, And so
a vehicle that when we change gears, it is analogous
to the psychological decision to I will now know that
the final sprint in a marathon, like I'm changing gears
now you do in a car. It's the same decision,
and the noise changes in the same way. The noise
(38:37):
changes in our heads and when our heart rates that
much faster. So an EV that lacks that doesn't have
a parallel set of sounds and feelings to what we
feel inside ourselves, because that's what we do in a
car too. When we get scared and excited, we react,
and EV lacks that bridge connecting the driver, the organic
(38:58):
human analog driver, to what the vehicle does. Now, the
corrollary to that is that an EV, because the power
it comes at is linear and the noise floor is
lower in a way, connects us much more deeply than
any analog vehicle to the actual act of driving, because
(39:21):
the outputs of driving fast are quicker, less time, and
an EV will do those things that analog cars can't do.
And so for someone to drive an EV faster better
than they do an analog vehicle, they have to be
willing to give up that bridge but intellectually connect with
a vehicle that will do more of what they want
(39:41):
better than any ice vehicle. And the community does not
really recognize that that what few professional drivers have raised
in formulae. They get it, but everyone else doesn't get it.
And I think that the enthusiast community will have to
age into it, and then the next generation of kids
after that will just take it for granted. But the
other half of this is something that I'm very disappointed
(40:05):
to see, which is that virtually every car company in
the planet working on EV's and there's a few exceptions.
Rimok Wull be an exception. Everyone else is shoehorning electric
power trains into internal combustion thinking, and they've made it
with this concept of the software defined vehicle. And their
(40:27):
notion is, oh, well, we'll offer subscription services with these evs.
People will love it just like a phone. That's just
not true. The only thing we want an EV to
do is be cheaper and more reliable than an ice car.
Than that, we most people just don't care. The missing piece,
the piece that will connect with enthusiasts, is there's only
(40:53):
one company thinking about this really well, it's Hyundai. So
Hyundai's new Ionic five n the racing of the I
five has fake engine sounds. Many companies have done this,
but most of them are terrible. But Hyundai's did it
with a purpose. They offer not just fake engine sounds,
but a fake synthetic gearbox paddle gearbox with synthetic gears
(41:18):
that mimic actual driving gears. You can redline the car.
So now the car sounds and feels closer to an
ice vehicle, and you have all the benefits of learning
how an ice vehicle drives, and other downside is potentially
damaging it. So you actually have a vehicle which you
could learn to drive an ice vehicle better. And this
(41:39):
and this is tip of the iceberg because ultimately, and
I wrote about this ten years ago, every legacy car
maker that has a brand or a model whose brand
is more powerful than the parent brand. As an example,
the Corvette is worth more than GM, are worth more
than four now nine to eleven is probably worth more
than Portia. Every company but he has one model like
(42:01):
this Jeep is worth more than Stilantis. So each of
these companies has a fifteen hundred year library of sound
and feel and enthusiasts who want that sound and feel.
And in the future, because no one those cars aren't
made anymore, people will want that sound and feel. What
is the future of software defined vehicles? The only future
(42:21):
is one where you can buy a future nine to eleven.
It's a skateboard that looks like a future nine to eleven,
but on board you can subscribe to the sound, feel,
and physics of every nine to eleven ever made. Pick your year,
portable download physics, model, sound, the field into the car,
and the car's chassis itself. They'll need some kind of
(42:45):
actual dynamic chassis that's very far more evolved than anything
we've seen yet to actually mimic oversteer, understeer and while
doing all these things inside a software defined boundary that
prevents a crash. The dream of everyone is to have
a sports car that does whatever you want that will
(43:05):
never hit anything. We're very far from this, but that
is the dream and we'll only get there Biosolvin vehicles
from oatims that have legacy. So because the new ones
have no.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Legacy, I'm so curious. You know, all day to day
and this week we've been looking at earnings and you know,
so many automakers have walked back their predictions and their
estimates for EV's and their production goals. How does that
strike you are EV's It sounds like you're saying EV's
are still the future, even though it seems like there's
(43:40):
quite a stall in demand.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
So when I say evs are inevitable, you know, like
like fight Club. On a long enough timeline, every technology
success rates one hundred percent. However, it is very likely
that there will be in an interim phase where hybrids
supersede internal question and that that will play out over decades,
(44:05):
after which ev will supersede hybrid. However, the other issue,
which is a political one. China has most of the
rare earth's required to build evs, so they can churn
out EV's all day long that are better than anything
made in the West except maybe a Teslam and sell
them throughout the world. And they have already started. And
(44:25):
so if the United States wants to compete in these
markets expert vehicles anywhere in the world, they need start
trading out EV's, And so, in the absence of a
supply chain that could support you know, EV's sold at scale,
something else must be done. Hopefully some of the sources
of these rare earths, some buish in the United States
and some elsewhere. Well, many of them are locked up
(44:48):
for environmental reasons, some of them for political reasons. Will
be unlocked so American car makers can compete with Chinese
ev makers. And the second thing, which I'm very optimistic about,
is that you know, formerly of Tesla as a company
called Redwood Materials and they recycle batteries and they are
just starting to scale. So between the pressure to compete
(45:10):
with the Chinese ev companies and the potential of Redwood Materials,
I think they'll be both a stick and a carrot
to get American car companies on board with evds. But
hybrids are going to become a bigger thing first. And
you know, really, all this is it's tiresome because these
things should not be politicized. The market should have to decide,
(45:30):
and the market has already decided that if we don't
compete with China, our car companies are going to be
not going to go away, but they're not going to
be what they were. Alex.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
We have to wrap it up because of time. But
I have to say, dude, you have blown my mind. Yeah,
I mean, I mean the the amount of insights that
you have. I just haven't heard anything like this from
any of the top car executives that we talk to,
(46:00):
and it all makes sense.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
So where can people find your work now? I mean,
where to get more of you? Where should we send
our listeners?
Speaker 4 (46:10):
Well, I have published very little in recent years, but
I have a podcast called the autono Cast with Kirsen
Corsek and Niemeyer, and I suggest following me on Twitter
or LinkedIn on Twitter. I'm Alex Wroy one forty four.
If I mean to say one last thing to everyone
who ever said that driving would go away and that
people are kids aren't getting driver's licenses, I worked at
(46:32):
a self driving car company for four years. All of
them are wrong, and human driving will never die, even
when autonomous vehicles are available at scale cheaply love it.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
I hope you're right about that.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
I'm on board with that for sure.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
I know I am. I take way Mos every day,
but I'm always going to own my old Morgan, my
old Porsche. So thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Thank you, Alex than thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
I hope we can have you back because that was
really incredible. So I truly appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
And uh anytime, Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
That's all we have time for unfortunately, Hannah, but we'll
see you back here, same time, same place, next week.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is
Bloomberg
Hosts And Creators
Hannah Elliott
Matt Miller
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