What since then, including the FAQs, has that letter changed for platforms like yours, third-party lead sites, Scott?

Well, I think first of all, you're right.

There's been a lot of activity in terms of truth and disclosure around advertising.

So in California, we have SB 766, which is the California CARS Act, which is just pejoratively named combating auto retail scans, hugely offensive to our business.

The FTC in 2025 had a CARS rule where they were going out and issuing these fines.

That order was vacated in January of 2025.

The FTC abandoned that effort in February of 2026.

Yourself included, right? Notwithstanding all the transparency.

When you think about that and his latest promises and pledges, you know, what do you think? What are you expecting in terms of execution?

Well, I don't think it really matters.

And Elon has even said himself that it really doesn't matter how many Roadsters they sell.

It's not a core part of the business.

This is really about demonstrating that amazing engineering still matters.

Elon understands that the power of really doing astonishing things is to inspire not just investors and partners, but it's also to inspire a whole league of engineers that he wants to recruit to join him.

This certainly demonstrates the value of combining companies like SpaceX and Tesla.

From here, with the questions about affordability, what's your overall assessment about what consumers want and what their patterns are? Are they trading down? What happens from here?

A lot going on, uh, in your neck of the woods, and, uh, a lot to talk about probably.

You know, I think it's a really, uh, transformational time in auto retail.

Um, we've obviously got so many external things going on, both with the economy, interest rates, which hugely affect, uh, auto sales.

And, you know, the cyclicality of the car business is really about the mix shift between new and used cars.

Um, you've got, um, you know, external factors like interest rates, of course, and affordability that really force people to seek value.

And so, uh, we're, we're, we're looking at right now a real rotation towards used cars.

Um, new cars are struggling.

Sure.

Were there parts of your military experience that helped shape your thinking as an entrepreneur?

Sure.

You know, first of all, I think great entrepreneurs solve a real problem, something that they're passionate about and they understand.

I've always had a love affair with cars.

I could tell you everywhere I've been in my life and what I was doing at the time based on what I was driving.

So for me, the car wasn't just an avatar.

And certainly if you're in the military, you understand a car like to somebody who turns 16 is their ticket to freedom.

I'm curious since we're here talking about it, what is physical AI going to do to the automotive industry?

Where are we now?

Well, tariffs ultimately add costs to the overall equation, and they don't disappear.

They get reallocated somewhere.

And ultimately, what you're really looking for is how is it going to affect overall affordability? Because most consumers that we see in a true car, we've got millions of new car in-market shoppers.

We are a new car auto buying platform.

So we are, in many respects, really the canary in the mine.

And we see a lot of changes in consumer behavior.

Are we expecting more? Are we expecting things to change or tariffs to rise? Or what is the outlook now?

How did you break this cycle of the deal almost dying and then getting buy-in from the market to back you multiple times?

Entrepreneurs aren't just specialThey are the glue that keeps these types of things kept together.

When I would get the bad news, I never would share it until I had at least sat on the bad news for twenty-four hours.

And I mean, I would get devastating news, and I knew people were waiting for the next meeting to hear.

I would compartmentalize that news, and I would go into my next set of pitch meetings, and it was almost always the case that it was in that compartmentalization moment that you could begin to ideate and think about how you're gonna solve this, use it as not just information, but also as power for how you're gonna solve the, the problem because you clearly haven't gotten there yet.

Keeping my team motivated was a very, very cagey thing to keep all of them coming through.

I got to the point where in addition to this, I got married last year, so I entered my third marriage.

Do you regret th- Are you thankful for that twenty-one months, or is it just something that you had to get through and it was a huge pain in the ass and did it make you more antifragile?

And then in that race to the top of the list, dealers popping up to the top where consumers ultimately end up going to the digital lead providers make it worse because they're not monitoring whether a doc fee as an example shows up in that total price.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

When I got back to Trucar, what I realized is the company had drifted very much into the business of VIN-based classified listings and leads.

And that's really not the way the company was founded.

I think that lead generation is about making sure the customer has a clear price.

And that's just putting an advertised price on a car and making sure that, you know, at the core of this, there are three sort of fundamental rules that dealer must follow.

put a VIN number on a car when they advertise a car to avoid bait and switch.

Who's your closest competition? First up, what triggered the standard?

What are you doing differently this time to make sure that there's trust, transparency, and a connection with the dealers you serve? I

think trust in Truecar 1.0 is about the fear of the unknown.

Today, I think dealers are much more comfortable with the idea that auto pricing is transparent and upfront and consumers have much more access to information.

A lot of the unknowns and the unanswered questions have already happened.

I'm not coming back to reset or come in and be provocative just to be provocative or disruptive.

I think we want to understand why Trucar works and how it can best serve its dealers as partners.

There's absolutely a flywheel here between helping consumers to save time and money when buying a car, and selling more cars for dealers at less money.

How are you thinking about that? Is it a race to the bottom? How would you respond to a dealer that says that's what Trucar and some of the other