William Gibson supposedly said, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Self-driving cars are like that. A close friend of mine has a brand new Tesla Model X, one of the last ones, equipped with the Hardware 4 gear and the Full-Self-Driving 14 software. It opens his garage door for him, meets him in the driveway, opens the car door as he approaches, closes the car door after he’s inside, closes the garage door as it drives him out of the subdivision, navigates through the suburbs and onto the highway, and takes him right to his destination. Granted, we live in Vegas, a nearly-always-sunny location with clearly marked roads, but for all practical purposes, it feels like the future we were promised.

I have other friends with Teslas that have earlier versions of the hardware, not capable of getting FSD 14, and they have very different levels of experiences. And then of course there’s me, and none of my cars even stay in their own lanes, let alone do any kind of self-driving. It’s not like I’m poor, either: it’s just that the Venn diagram of cars I wanna own, and cars that have good self-driving, have nearly no overlap.

So if you ask six people to describe the abilities of self-driving cars today, you can get six different answers ranging from “it’s amazing” to “it will kill you”, much like the parable of the blind men describing an elephant. All of those answers are simultaneously correct, and yet also incorrect.

AI is like that today, too.

The exact conference, presentation, and presenter doesn’t really matter here, so I’m not going to name them. The point is that at this recent conference, I sat through sessions where I heard a few presenters say things from the podium like:

• “AI doesn’t have runtime access to your database, so it can’t see how its recommended query changes will perform”
• “AI’s knowledge is limited to only what it was trained on, and it can’t infer new things about new systems”
• “AI can’t evaluate query optimizer cost calculations because it doesn’t understand your data distribution”
• “AI can’t identify the root cause of performance issues”
• “AI can’t reason about CPU, memory, and I/O tradeoffs while tuning a query”

Uh… maybe your AI can’t.

But there are most definitely AIs out there today that do all of that stuff, and I should know, because I use them on a daily basis.

I’m a Microsoft SQL Server consultant and trainer, and I run Claude Code Desktop on my MacBook Pro. I use it for writing demo queries, First Responder Kit changes, and client work. Claude Code can still comprehend exactly what’s going on, despite being on a Mac, and it can test its work against Azure SQL DB, Amazon RDS SQL Server, local SQL Server VMs, and some in Amazon EC2. It’s fast, works well with Github, and accomplishes things in minutes while I’m off doing other stuff.

When something in my environment goes wrong, I can ask Claude Code to troubleshoot it. I don’t maintain production Availability Groups or failover clusters, but if I did, I’d be quite comfortable using Claude Code to troubleshoot those as well, plus make plans for upcoming deployments or environmental changes.

Claude Code can connect to your database, read your statistics, try different versions of a query, measure its overhead in terms of CPU/memory/IO, help you understand the tradeoffs, and much more. Just yesterday, while sitting in an airport, it was helping me use undocumented tricks against undocumented DMV columns – stuff that most definitely wasn’t a part of its training data, but it was experimenting and trying new stuff so we could both learn together.

The only thing that would have been cooler is if all this was happening in a self-driving car.

Careful when you listen to AI sessions at conferences.

The state of the art is advancing really quickly, and the people standing up on stages talking about the state of the art are like six blind folks describing an elephant.

• Some vendor staff will over-sell what their own products can do
• Some vendor staff will be honest about what their own products can’t do
• Many vendor staff will just be plain ignorant about what their competitors can do
• End users in the field will have the most relevant experience to share, but they need to be clear about which AI platforms they’re discussing, and make it clear that they’re only describing the part of the elephant they’ve been able to put their hands on
• Some (most?) of this stuff will be outdated within 2-4 months of the conference talk
• Some of it was already outdated when the slides were due, but the busy practitioner didn’t have time to update their slides, so listen really carefully to what they say aloud, and ask plenty of questions

I don’t think any of these people are being purposely misleading or malicious. They’re just blind folks describing an elephant. We’ll get a better picture of the elephant over time.

Some people call it a tri-fold, which isn’t right – it’s only got two folds in it. When it’s folded up like a Z, you have a reasonably sized phone:

It’s thick, but not unreasonably thick. It still fits easily in a pocket, and it’s about the same thickness as the single-fold Samsung Galaxy phones I’ve handled, or as thick as two iPhones on top of each other. Unfold it once, and you have a device with a square screen, twice as big as a regular phone:

Their custom operating system automatically resizes apps to fit the screen. They’re not stretched, either – they resize appropriately, just like windows on your computer. Turn the phone over, and you can use one of the panels as a selfie screen with the high-quality rear cameras:

But of course the big party trick is to fully unfold it, and it becomes a tablet:

Works in both portrait and landscape, apps resize automatically, etc., etc. just like a regular tablet. It just works, to the point where there isn’t really much to say about it.

It does have drawbacks, of course, and most of the drawbacks would be immediately obvious just because you can guess ’em. It’s expensive, around $3k USD. You definitely do feel the indents in the screen for the folds, and depending on what angle you’re looking from, you can see the folds quite obviously as well. Reliability will be a concern long-term, although Huawei includes a screen protector, plus replaces the screen protector free at their stores several times per year. It ships with a case, and it’s fine, but not great – and given the number of ways you can use this thing, I can’t imagine a case that would fit all situations.

If you buy a Mate XTs in China like I did, it comes with Huawei’s own operating system, which Google Play and Google’s app stores don’t support. You can load Google apps onto there, but some of them will never work quite right. If you buy it in other markets, it has a different OS, from what I understand – perhaps some flavor of Android – and I hear you can get Google’s apps and app store officially supported over there.

For me, though? This is great! I absolutely love it, and I’ve found myself using it more than my iPhone when I’m traveling. It’s so nice to have the full widescreen tablet experience for watching downloaded YouTube videos on planes, or portrait mode for surfing the web.

The instant Apple brings out something like this, I’m in. In the meantime, though, this’ll do.

To learn more, check out Marques Brownlee’s video of the first version of the phone, the Mate XT, or his video of Samsung’s Galaxy Z. Ironically, the Galaxy Z does not fold like a Z: it folds like a U, which has serious drawbacks that he discusses in his review. I wouldn’t recommend the Galaxy’s approach unless you can’t get the Huawei Mate XTs.

The short story for 2024 is that broadening my technology & geographic horizons went great, but it made me even more thankful for Microsoft SQL Server and Las Vegas. The long story, well, deep breath – let’s get introspective and do some navel-gazing.

What made BrentOzar.com successful?

As a SQL Server-focused business, BrentOzar.com has a bunch of parts that evolved organically over the years:

• Consulting: lead generation, contracts, methodologies, slide decks to assist the process
• Training classes: pre-conference workshops, in-person classes, live online classes, and private corporate events
• Training videos: long (day+) training recordings, 10-60 minute recordings, 1-2 minute recordings
• Training in written form: blog posts, specialized mailers (like a 6-month DBA training newsletter), social media
• Subscriber base: about 100K email subscribers, about 40K YouTube subscribers
• Scripts, aka the First Responder Kit
• Apps: SQL ConstantCare, the Consultant Toolkit

All that stuff didn’t all materialize at once, obviously. We built the company up for over a decade. Initially, it was me, a few founding partners (shout out to Jeremiah, Kendra, and Tim), and we added employees and vendors/contractors over time. The BrentOzar.com you see today is the product of a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from a LOT of people, and there’s absolutely no way I could have built anything even remotely resembling it by myself. I’m thankful for their work, although of course they got paid for that, and I still try to credit them constantly. (I would never say I wrote sp_BlitzIndex or sp_BlitzCache – I simply wouldn’t have the talent for that.)

However, “a lot of people” also means “a lot of time and money” – and if I was gonna build a new company from scratch, I didn’t want to reuse the same plan, because it was expensive in a lot of ways. When I started up a new company aiming to achieve a similar level of success, I couldn’t reuse the same plan. I had to reconsider what to build to make SmartPostgres.com as sustainable as possible, quickly. To do that, I thought about:

1. What income-generating parts brought the most profit?
2. What could bring in the most customers in the door for #1?

I decided to focus on training revenue.

I came to the conclusion that for revenue, I should focus on building training classes. Done well, it’s purely passive income: you keep building more and more courses, and eventually you hit the point where the income is coming in even when you’re not working.

Software and consultants never hit that point unless you grow the business so large that you can afford to hire enough people to assign all the work out, and even then, you spend time managing those folks and their service delivery. I’m trying to work less, not more, so I ruled those options out. (Just to be clear, I do think there are a lot of interesting online SaaS angles in the Postgres market, and I’ll probably pursue some at some point, but to get the business profitable and sustainable quickly, I had to ignore those in 2024 for sure.)

So with that decision out of the way, how could I build a sustainable long term pipeline of customers for training material? It was time to make that decision.

And to bring in customers for that,
I decided to focus on a newsletter.

For inbound marketing, I focused on building the kind of newsletter I would wanna read myself. I like newsletters because people will trade their email address for it, and you own that list of email addresses. If you have a mailing list, it’s really easy to sell content to your captive readers.

Starting December 2023, I built the SmartPostgres.com blog & newsletter with two kinds of content:

• Short weekly recaps like this of the best 3-4 resources I found each week, plus one query tutorial. I thought the combination of the super-limited curation, PLUS the query tutorial, would be the magic recipe to differentiate me from other Postgres curations in this space like Postgres Weekly.
• Query exercises with a challenge one week, followed by answers the next week

Part of my reasoning with picking those kinds of content was that AI wasn’t a serious competitor for either one. Even if LLMs completely invaded content creation, they still wouldn’t do a great job on those two kinds of content.

I also wanted to build something very different than what I saw in traditional Postgres blogs. There’s a lot of Web 1.0 content out there, if you know what I mean: ancient web sites, mailing lists, non-interactive stuff. I wanted to attract a different kind of reader.

Aaaaaand… I gave up on the newsletter.

By summer, I decided my magic recipe for newsletter contents was wrong. It was simply too resource-intensive to come up with a useful, concise SQL tutorial each week, plus a query challenge and answer. Some of the tutorials and challenges took me an entire day to write.

I couldn’t justify that much time – that’s 30-50 days per year dedicated to growing the newsletter. Just for rough comparison, that represents $105K-$250K worth of Microsoft SQL Server consulting, depending on each day’s billable rate (like a single long term client vs individual emergency gigs.) And that doesn’t even include the time required to build courses! Given the choice between the two, I’d be much better off in the short term simply giving up on SmartPostgres, and focusing on SQL Server instead.

I could have skipped the code examples and just curated links, but… why bother when Postgres Weekly already exists? I do wish they’d do a little curation because some of the stuff feels like obvious corporate spam, but that’s my only complaint. I would rather just point people to Postgres Weekly, stick a fork in my own newsletter, and call it done. Time to move on to an alternative strategy.

(For SQL Server, I do even now still spend 1-2 days per week on inbound marketing – building blog posts, curating the newsletter content, recording Office Hours episodes, etc., but that pays off in >$1M/year in training sales, so it’s way easier to justify.)

Instead of building inbound marketing for Postgres, I tried something radical.

I tried pre-selling Postgres content I hadn’t built yet.

In August, I went to my social media with my early access sales pitch: pay $195 once, and for life, get access to any Postgres performance fundamentals classes I build, plus the ability to watch me stream live as I build those classes out, and watch the live stream recordings. I really had no idea if it would sell.

I sold $161K in the first 30 days.

Well, that changed everything right there! Instead of spending 30-50 days building inbound marketing for products I didn’t have yet, I could take that $161K and spend 30-50 days building out training material – which would then be easier to sell. It worked: I built Fundamentals of Select, Fundamentals of Vacuum, Fundamentals of Index Tuning, and commissioned Fundamentals of Python from Drew Furgiuele. I really hustled in that 2024 period.

Now, to be clear, I don’t want you to think SmartPostgres.com raked in a ton of cash after those first 30 days! As soon as the sales started rolling in, I went, “OMG, I priced that way too low.” I think I left a lot of money on the table. As soon as the promised early access dates finished, I shut off enrollment, then raised prices later. In the subsequent 10 months, I sold less than $25K because I was really focused on building the training material first. I wanted to be able to justify a much higher price tag after the material was built.

While I focused on SmartPostgres, I had to turn down the rest of my activities a little. After all, I can’t say “yes” to everything.

I did have to say no to some things.

I stopped doing proactive SQL Server First Responder Kit script additions just for the sake of adding stuff. Thankfully, Microsoft didn’t ship a new SQL Server version, so the scripts were more than good enough to get by through 2024.

I massively cut back on new SQL Server consulting clients, instead farming them out to a network of trusted friends that I’d worked with on previous projects. I took a small referral fee to send them the work, but I hardly took any new clients on myself – only the companies who insisted on working with me personally.

I also decided to be much more strategic about choosing conferences in 2024. I really, really love attending conferences, especially to give back to small local conferences, but I just had to make tough decisions to get Postgres content out the door. In a way, this sucked, because the in-person event circuit had just started to build back up enough that I could regroup with amazing friends (exhibit A: the above photo) – but I had to make tough choices.

That kinda sucked, because the post-COVID conference market was starting to ramp back up, and I was able to attend and speak at a few really amazing events.

My heart is really full with happiness when I look at the above photo, and that’s just one of the many amazing memories I made in 2024 as conferences started to come back to life.

Plus, a friend of mine from the Microsoft Certified Master program had branched out to start a completely new conference on how to do presentations. Boris Hristov had invited me to give a talk at the Present to Succeed conference, which was really flattering and I had to leap at the chance.

That conference was humbling! There were so many great sessions from really talented presenters, and it really inspired me to up my game with my own presentations. I’ve been proud of a lot of my sessions over the years, but this conference reminded me that my work is never done, and I gotta keep upping my game.

Even though I cut back a lot on work travel, I still managed to hit a bunch of places. The highlights of 2024 included Telluride Colorado, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Orange County CA, Nashville, Vancouver, Bulgaria, Cabo San Lucas, an Alaska cruise, San Diego, Boston Massachusetts, Anaheim California, Seattle, West Hollywood, and I finished up the year with a month in China and Japan before coming home to spend New Year’s Eve in Vegas with friends. My social media profiles say I love teaching, travel, and laughing, and the travel part is true for sure.

The more I roamed, the more I appreciated home.

I can type that now in retrospect, but I definitely didn’t recognize it in 2024. The more I played with different technologies and visited different countries, the more I appreciated the tech and places I’d built up the most familiarity with.

I continued traveling a lot in 2025, and working with different technologies, but my appreciation for the familiar grew in 2025 thanks to the ground work and experimentation I put in during 2024. Today as I type this in December 2025, I think the evidence is pretty clear: I’m churning out 3 blog posts and one long-form video per week on my SQL Server platforms through 2025, and I’m hardly publishing anything on my Postgres platforms in comparison. In 2026, my goal is to find a natural balance between those two things, because I really do love both of ’em tremendously. They’re both awesome.

I’m 52 years old, and I’m still cursed/blessed with a desire to know everything about every technology. Man, if I could wave a magic wand and suddenly know one thing, I wish I could have instant mental familiarity with the entirety of the Postgres source code. I want to know everything about how that one database works (which is easier than SQL Server, since it’s open source), and then I’m sure I would want to know everything about how every database works, and then how every caching layer works, and then how every cloud vendor’s implementation of every database and every caching layer works, and then how every ORM interfaces with those technologies, and….

Yeah, it just never ends.

But at the same time, I wanna do a decent job of work/community/family/personal life balance, and there’s a lot I wanna achieve across all of those. I’m not the kind of person who wants to leave a legacy or have buildings with my name on them, but I wanna enjoy all of the time that I can. That goal keeps me from even going close to source code.

So yeah, in 2024, I feel like I did pretty well trying to balance roaming away from home, plus keeping the lights on at home. If anything, I erred on the side of roaming. I look forward to the next blog post in this series when I look back at 2025, because for now, I feel like I erred to much in goofing off, and 2026 will involve me getting back to work. Let’s see how things look in the rear view mirror a year from now!

It’s a genuinely big deal for me, almost half of our annual revenue. We brought in $885K last year (up from $847K in 2023, although down from well over $1M during the pandemic.) In addition, this is a release year for Microsoft, which means customers will be looking for training on the new version, SQL Server 2025.

To prep for that, I have to think about:

• What my deals will be for this year – because I need to walk the line between cheap (which brings all the boys to the yard), and profitable (which fuels the business for the rest of the year.)
• Who the target buyers will be for those deals
• How I’ll get those buyers into my mailing list to market to them
• What marketing message I’ll use once they’re in the mailing list

Every year, I take a planning retreat to think about this stuff, plus other stuff, and I just got back, so let’s brain dump out what we’re going to do.

Setting up the marketing calendar

I run my Black Friday sale all November long because a lot of my customers are businesses who need some time to make the accounting magic happen, get approvals, etc. That means the sale will start November 1, which means I need to work backwards from that date. One way to think about it is:

• November 1: sale goes live
• October: the prospect email content starts to shift into marketing the Black Friday sale, getting them ready to purchase.
• September: do marketing activities that will get customers to sign up for the email list. September’s emails should only provide free value, not ask for anything in return.
• August: write the material for the above emails, set up the marketing activities.

These activities don’t necessarily take me the whole month – I’m trying to balance my time between the work I put into Black Friday prep, plus servicing my regular consulting customers, plus have a personal life. (That’s particularly tricky this year because I have week-long trips to Cancun, LA, Boston, Miami, and Houston during this time.)

So that’s what the calendar looks like – but then I have to decide what I’m actually going to sell, and for how much.

Setting up the sale items & prices

I try to keep the menu extremely simple and just offer 3-4 things for people to choose from: a small, medium, or large bundle of training & apps.

Historically, my largest sellers are:

• Fundamentals training class bundle, 1 year, $395 regular price
• Fundamentals & Mastering training class bundle, 1 year, $1,295 regular price
• Level 2 Bundle (training classes + apps), 1 year, $1,595 regular price
• Fundamentals & Mastering lifetime pass, lifetime, $2,495 regular price

In 2024, I focused Black Friday on discounts for the latter 3 options. Generally speaking, I’ll do better on sales if customers buy higher-priced bundles. As long as they’re swiping the credit card, you wanna tempt ’em with the next level up to encourage higher average ticket price sales.

For 2025, I really wanna focus on the last 3. I want to market to people who are ready for mastering-level classes, and I want to make sure they’re prepped by finishing the Fundamentals classes first so they know they’ll succeed. So how do I get them ready?

Setting up the marketing efforts

One of the most effective methods I’ve had for marketing training is to give people a free webcast that covers the material they need to know before they start a class. For example, if I want to teach someone a 200-level topic, then I give away a 100-level class for free first.

I teach the class live online for free on Twitch, upload the recordings to YouTube, and in the class, I make a sales pitch at the end for the next class. “If you loved this class, you’re gonna love Class B. Here’s a two-slide introduction to what you’re gonna learn in Class B, and here’s where to go buy it.”

This year, I decided that if I wanna sell the Mastering-level classes, I need to do the Fundamentals (and the classes before that) for free. This is an approach I’ve used before, but I’m amping it up this year, doing more free classes. Here’s how it’ll work:

• September 16-17 and 23-24: free public 2-hour webcasts of my introductory-level classes How to Think Like the Engine and How I Use the First Responder Kit. These are free intro classes that are already available on my site and on YouTube, but for some reason, teaching them live – even with the same material – seems to really draw in new audiences. Folks say, “Wow, Brent’s teaching this live – I should send this to my coworkers to get them to attend.” These will be live streamed, no registration required, but at the end of each class, I’ll talk about the upcoming…
• October 13-17: free Fundamentals Week, public webcasts of my next-level classes like Fundamentals of Index Tuning and Fundamentals of Query Tuning. I’ll do 4-hour versions of these classes live, but registration via email will be required for these. Registrants will be able to watch live, or watch the recordings for a very limited time afterwards. By registering, they’ll also join the marketing email list, which will prep them for…
• November 11-14: free Mastering Week, a totally new thing I’m trying this year. My Mastering classes are 20-30 hours long, the most advanced stuff I’ve got. I’ve never taught them for free publicly before, but this year, I’ll be teaching the first 4 hours of each class for free, only for people who registered via email. During those classes, I’ll be plugging the Black Friday sales, reminding folks that if they wanna see the full class, it’s at the cheapest price of the year.

That’s more than two weeks of unpaid labor right there, in the sense that I don’t get paid for the work while I’m doing it. It’s just a down payment in order to make sure the Black Friday sale is successful. That’s only the delivery part of the work, too!

Setting up the content

For each event, I have to:

• Write announcement blog posts & social media messages about each event
• Set up email automations for the list for each event, reminding folks about what’s coming up
• Update the class material to reflect SQL Server 2025, writing new slides & demos, reorganizing things
• Rehearse & record updated versions of the classes with the 2025 material

Then for the sale itself, I also have to write the blog posts, emails, and social media posts that will :

• Count down to the sale
• Announce that the sale is open
• Remind folks about the sale during November (they can’t just be “yo the sale is still on” – they have to be posts my regular readers will enjoy, that happen to tie into something that’s new in the 2025 classes)
• Count down to the sale ending

Whew. I’m over 1,000 words and I haven’t even made progress towards my goal! Well, I mean, I kinda have, because now you know that the Black Friday sale is coming, dear reader – it’s all part of my evil plan, muhahaha.

This is also why I tend to take very little new client work on during September & October – because I have so much Black Friday prep to do.

Finally, I have to prep my travel for December, because as soon as the sale finishes, I head out to join Yves in China & Japan. (Yves flies over there in early November to let me focus on the Black Friday stuff and to spend time with the family.) We relax and unwind in December over there, and then fly back to the States to get back to work in January. Wish me luck!

People are overly friendly to me. They wave, take pictures, and constantly compliment both the car and me in a way that doesn’t happen with any other car I’ve driven. The compliments have a common theme: “You look happy, and I’m happy for you.” It’s happened so often that I can’t deny the commonality – especially contrasted with my other cars, where the comments are appreciative of cars, the styling, or their cost, but I never hear people actually say, “I’m happy for you.” It happens all the time in the Rolls, which surprises me!

It’s a relaxing cocoon. It’s quiet, rides well, and turns driving into a much more chill experience. While I can drive it aggressively (and sometimes I do), that’s not a rewarding experience because I find myself distracted by the car’s mass, especially during braking and cornering. The Dawn makes the driving part of the trip a non-event. It’s not tiring at all. I actually find myself wishing it had less gauges, like no instrument cluster at all. All I use is the heads-up display with the speed limit and the car’s current speed.

It’s not perfect by any means. I find myself filling up the 22-gallon gas tank a lot because it only has about 250 miles of city driving range. The oddly-shaped trunk can fit lots of carryons and soft bags, but not a single large checked bag. Parts are wildly expensive. The infotainment system predates Apple CarPlay. When Rolls-Royce eventually offers a convertible version of the electric Spectre coupe, only the CarPlay part will be addressed – the rest of the limitations will remain. So even if Spectre convertibles were reasonably priced – which they won’t be – I still wouldn’t replace the Dawn with one.

It changes the way I view other cars. Before buying the Rolls:

• I saw my 911 Targa as a comfy grand tourer, and my old 1964 356 SC as a sports car
• Now, I see the Dawn as a comfy grand tourer, and my 911 Targa as a sports car

When I get out of the Dawn and into the 911, the 911 rides so low, the manual shifts feel brutal, the exhaust noise seems loud, etc. One can argue that various flavors of the 911 are more sports car or more grand tourer – like the GT3 is more sports car, and the Turbo is more grand tourer – but getting out of the Dawn, all of the 911 range feels like a sports car. Before the Dawn, I’d wanted to try sportier flavors of the 911, but now, I don’t. When I get out of the Dawn, the 911 Targa 4S totally scratches the sports car itch.

However, I can already see a change coming. In a year or two, I’ll probably sell the 911 and replace it with something more hard-core. I’ve had my eye on used McLaren 600LT Spiders for a while, with their top-mounted exhaust and crazy Senna seats. It depends on how our house sale goes, and what kind of garage we end up with in the new place. It’s surprisingly hard to find nice houses with big garages in Vegas.

• I sold my Porsche Speedster replica because I’d had some great adventures with it for 3 years and I wasn’t driving it as much anymore. Yves’ hair is really long now, and she doesn’t like going out in a convertible that doesn’t have side windows or a wind deflector. We tended to use the 911 Targa instead. For short solo errands in a convertible, I have my Honda Beat, which I adore.
• I sold my Cadillac Brougham because I just didn’t have the space for it, and I can always get another one of those relatively easily. We’ve been looking for a house with more garage space, and it’s just been damn near impossible to find anything in our price range in Vegas with 5+ garage spots without going way, way out into the sticks.
• I sold the Land Rover Defender. It had been our favorite road trip car because it was big, comfortable, modern, and reliable. We’d put about 11k miles on it in a year and a half – despite owning a handful of other cars! I loved the Defender very much, and if we weren’t getting this next car, I absolutely would have kept the Defender, but Yves had always wanted one of these…

Yves had always wanted a Rolls-Royce convertible, so we’ve kept an eye on used Dawn prices over time. They’ve been annoyingly stable. Rolls hasn’t made a convertible model for a few years, and their next one is supposed to be a convertible version of the electric Spectre coupe. It’ll probably come out in a couple/few years, but in the meantime, if you want a modern convertible Roller, your only choice is a used Dawn.

Picking a Used Dawn

Shopping for used Dawns is about finding one with the design choices you want. Rolls-Royces are usually custom ordered bespoke, with a dizzying array of exterior & interior color & material choices – and there are a lot of choices. We wanted to find one with:

• Two-tone exterior paint – I really, really love this, especially with a metal look on the center of the car. We didn’t really care what color was on the sides because that’s easy to wrap.
• A light or bright interior leather color – most of them are black, which is a shame in a convertible since black leather heats up quickly in the sun. Plus, black leather makes a car feel claustrophobic. We wanted anything other than black.
• Canadel wood paneling – by default, Rolls covers everything in leather, but they offer a beautiful book-matched wood panels in a matte, open pore finish. It’s like a $20k option when the car is new, but it’s so gorgeous and really makes a difference in the interior feel. We wanted that.
• Wood paneling on the convertible top cover – an option, and we wanted that too.

We searched for quite a while and almost pulled the trigger on a light dusty yellow one with yellow & white leather interior, but it didn’t pass a pre-purchase inspection and the seller acted shady about it. We were heartbroken when that one didn’t work out, but shortly thereafter, this one popped up at Carrio Motorcars in Fort Lauderdale, which usually has a nice selection of Rolls convertibles:

Like a lot of Rolls-Royce colors, this one is really tricky: it looks black in most photos, but in daylight, it’s a very dark, rich combination of brown and red. It’s a beautiful color, but we wrapped the dark part in pink with a metallic overlay.

The Rolls Driving Experience

Car reviewers all say the same cliche phrases: Rolls cars waft and glide over the road. They’re silent, peaceful, and you arrive at your destination feeling more relaxed.

The reviews are correct.

If you wanna find out if that kind of waft-y car experience is your bag, go buy a used Cadillac Brougham. Seriously. You get maybe 60% of the experience (or more) at 10% of the price (or less). Granted, a 30 year old Caddy is going to accelerate slower, ride worse, be noisier, and break down more often, but… not that much worse. Yves’ first reaction upon riding in a Dawn for the first time was, “Oh, this is like a modern Caddy.” In some other universe timeline, one where Cadillac actually brought the Sollei concept car to market, I can see how we’d have bought that rather than a Dawn.

The Dawn replaced our road-trip Defender, the cushy Caddy, and the convertible Speedster replica by kinda being all 3 of those cars in one. Interestingly, the Dawn does so many things well that it makes me more likely to buy crazy, oddball, uncomfortable sports cars! If I’m walking into the garage and I want an easy, comfy experience, the Dawn is a no-brainer – much more so than the 2024 911 Targa. I find myself driving the Targa less, and the Dawn more. It’s just easy and cushy. Then, when I want to drive something challenging or stimulating, I’m more likely to take the Honda Beat or 356 SC.

The 909 Bergspyder was one of the lightest Porsche race cars ever produced, weighing in at just 847 pounds (384kg). For comparison, a tiny Smart Fortwo weighs about twice as much! The Bergspyder could do 0-60mph in 2.4 seconds – a feat most cars still can’t pull off today, even electric ones.

Here’s a modern Porsche Boxster alongside the 909 Bergspyder for size comparison – and the small Boxster looks giant in comparison!

Porsche sometimes mines its history to produce special editions, and I’ve always thought a Bergspyder would have been a great lightweight edition for the Boxster. In 2015, Porsche built a one-off Boxster Bergspyder (pictured above, the car at left), but they never mass produced it. At the time, they didn’t think they could sell it because they’d have problems getting governments to approve a car with such a low windshield:

So it sits in the Porsche museum’s collection:

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Today in 2025, though, there are several road-legal cars with low-or-no windshield: the Ariel Atom, Mercedes PureSpeed, McLaren Elva, and more. My personal favorite is the Ferrari Monza SP1 for its stunning one-person cockpit design that seems to tightly stretch around the driver:

I think it’s only a matter of time before Porsche attaches the Bergspyder name to a very, very expensive special edition car, but in the meantime… I wanna build one of my own.

My Starting Point: a 1999 Boxster

I’d had my eye on the Boxster market for quite a while, and I was going to pick up a salvage one from an auction like Copart. I figured as long as I was making changes to the body and painting it, why bother with a pristine car?

However, good-condition used Boxster prices collapsed so much that it made more sense to buy a perfectly functioning Boxster as a starting point. This one came up on CarsAndBids near me in Vegas, and I was able to get it for $8,050 – not much more than a salvage Boxster would have cost!

I love this first Boxster generation, the 986, for this project because the body shape is so clean and simple. Later generations have more exaggerated hips which absolutely look great, but for a Bergspyder, I wanted cleaner lines.

This 986 had 134K miles and a clean CarFax, which made it a great starting point. It did have an automatic transmission (Tiptronic), but before you groan about that, hold that thought.

That windshield is coming off, and the roll bar is going to change.

I want to build a cross between a Bergspyder and a Ferrari Monza SP1, and that means we’re gonna saw the windshield off. That right there means:

• It’s going to have to be titled & registered in a state that allows cars without windshields (for example, Montana allows it as long as the driver wears goggles)
• This isn’t going to be as safe as a regular Boxster (but no one’s ever riding in this with me – it’ll be a single-seat car, period)
• It’s never going to be allowed on race tracks

Folks have built track-only Bosters with no windshield and a giant roll bar to compensate, but they end up looking pretty awful. When Porsche did their one-off Boxster Bergspyder, they kept the original Boxster’s 2-hoop roll bar, which looks kinda dumb:

Not my style – why are there two roll bar hoops and two flying buttresses when there’s only one person in the car? I’m guessing Porsche had to cut corners to get the one-off design study out the door, and they probably didn’t wanna spend the engineering money necessary to do a new roll bar.

Ideally, I want a single roll bar behind the driver’s head, like the original Bergspyders:

That’s the even-earlier 910 Bergspyder. The naming’s a little confusing – the 910 Bergspyder above came out in 1967, and then the 909 came out later in 1968 and was never raced. (It was even more unsafe, hahaha, using 1″ aluminum frame tubes.) Speaking of unsafe, I’m also considering going without a roll bar altogether, like this Boxster-turned-550 went without a roll bar. That one looks particularly nice with low-cut driver’s seats. The decision’s still out on the roll bar.

So back to the automatic transmission. If my Bergspyder won’t be driven on the track, and it won’t be as safe as a regular Boxster, do I really need a manual transmission? Nope: I’m just not going to be driving this thing fast, and it’ll be plenty engaging even with an automatic transmission.

Here are the changes I’m thinking of.

• The windshield needs to come off.
• Remove the convertible top mechanism – because the top won’t have anything to mount to, hahaha.
• Remove the roll bar – and get quotes to build a roll bar with a single hoop behind the driver. If the single-hoop roll bar is affordable, I’ll leave the driver’s seat as-is for now (and probably switch to a racing seat later.) If I end up with no roll bar, I’ll switch to a low-back driver’s seat to keep the car’s lines nice and smooth.
• Build fiberglass tonneau cover – to cover the passenger seat side of the car, a la Ferrari Monza SP1. This is going to be tricky for all kinds of reasons, like there are no attachment points built in for this kind of thing.
• Switch the wheels out – I really love these wheels in silver, but they’re ugly when painted black, and I don’t think silver wheels make sense for a Bergspyder build.
• Wrap it – with a simple white and black livery to match the original Bergspyder. (It also crossed my mind to do something skateboard-ish because this car is going to end up looking pretty flat.)
• Maybe lower the suspension – depending on how the stance looks after the changes.

I considered putting a wide body kit on it, but the ones I found seemed to make the car look visually heavier instead of lighter, and I think a light-looking car is part of the Bergspyder appeal.

Race car folks would gut the interior in order to save weight – especially if we’re going to use the name Bergspyder. I have mixed feelings about that – remember, we’re not taking this on a race track or driving it in anger. I don’t think it needs to be purposefully uncomfortable or ugly, so I’m thinking of leaving the interior as-is for now, except for removing the passenger seat and replacing the bulky steering wheel with something more classic like a Momo Prototipo.

Oh, and I gotta find the right pair of goggles.

My budget for the whole project is $15K, including the $8K for the car purchase. Wish me luck!

Kei cars were never sold in the US, but now that they’re over 25 years old, they’re eligible for import. Even better, they’re dirt cheap in Japan because the government has tapered off the kei car tax benefits. You can buy imported kei cars stateside for around $5k-$15k – even less if you’re willing to buy a used one in Japan and import it yourself using guides like these.

When this 1991 Honda Beat showed up on Cars & Bids, it was right up my alley because the previous owners had already invested a lot in tasteful upgrades like leather seats, a custom exhaust, and Watanabe wheels. When buying a kei car, you wanna look for one that’s already personalized the way you want because it’s quite hard to source things in the US for 30 year old cars that were only sold in small quantities in Japan.

Here’s how it looked when I bought it – the pictures don’t do justice to how tiny these things are though:

Sharp, but I wanted to take things up a notch. I was inspired by the Morgan Super 3, a tiny 3-wheeled British car that’s often decorated in the style of a World War II airplane. I wanted my Beat to look like a tiny Japanese fighter plane with Japanese warning labels on the various components. I described what I wanted to Miguel and the folks at Purple Flare, and they delivered:

It’s got really good proportions so it’s hard to understand just how small it is until you put people or other cars next to it:

Kei cars are fun weekend toys, but I wouldn’t recommend one as a daily driver. Parts can be very hard to find – not necessarily expensive, but just hard to source – and they’re not designed for US highway speeds. For example, the Beat can do 70mph, but its tiny, buzzy engine is doing 5,500 RPM to pull it off. (Redline is 8500 RPM.) To learn more about the engine, its addictive sound, and the car’s joyful handling, check out the Regular Car Reviews video on it:

And the other side:

It’s split down the middle so that both sides transition to different colors front to back:

So, how does something like this happen? We’ve had great results with Purple Flare Wraps doing our Speedster replica in metallic pink, Defender in black camo, and the base Gulf blue wrap for our Graffiti Gulf 356. I sent them my goal for the 911: I wanted to give the car a split personality. I wanted one side red, the other side black, with geometric shapes breaking it up like shattering glass. On the red side of the car, I wanted Hello Kitty, and on the black side, Kuromi. Purple Flare sent over this custom design for approval:

I loved it and pulled the trigger. I dropped it off, and they printed the wrap and applied it to the car. I love the way it turned out, and got the finishing touch:

I posted it in /r/sanrio and /r/porsche, and the comments were pretty amusing. The Hello Kitty crowd was all over it, and for the most part the Porsche crew were tolerant of it – but a few of ’em were real grumps. Perfect! That means I’ve struck the right balance – it’s just loud enough to offend the purists, hahaha.

Chinese platforms leverage their comments in interesting ways. For example, on Chinese equivalents of YouTube, comments are overlaid atop the video player itself, encouraging even more interactivity.

At first this sounds horribly distracting, but in a matter of minutes of seeing it in action, I loved it!

• The comments can stream by in the black areas of the video player, making them less intrusive.
• The video players seem to use some kind of content recognition to place the comments in less intrusive areas of the screen to avoid blocking relevant action.
• The commenters can add context to specific timestamps, adding useful information or reactions about specific things.

When people know that their words will be shown right atop the video (rather than buried below), they’re more likely to leave comments because they’re looking for that dopamine feedback too, the pleasure of knowing their voice is heard.

More comments, more interactivity, more dopamine for the content producer. It’s very addictive, and I can see why Yves was so disappointed in American social media sites like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, etc. They just don’t provide the same dopamine hit.

I also have a hunch, but I haven’t bothered to investigate it or prove it. I think that someone – could be the platforms, could be the government, or both – is using AI bots to generate comments from people that don’t exist. The bots analyze your video & photo content, and generate relevant positive comments to make the creator feel good, plus relevant discussion-generating comments to trigger humans to interact with the creator, and with each other. (This may also be one of the reasons Chinese LLMs are doing so well.)

Platforms are motivated to do it because it’s addictive for the users.

The Chinese government is motivated to do it because it gives government censors a way to shape discussion without censoring it outright. They can make it appear that a large number of viewers feel a certain way about the content, or add “relevant context” that’s really just government propaganda disguised as user content.

Now, Meta’s getting into the business too, building AI tools that masquerade as users that create content and leave comments. The killer quote in there is the Meta exec who said, “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.”

Set aside your feelings about the dystopian nature of this for a second. I couldn’t care less if AI bots leave comments on somebody’s food pictures, their outfit-of-the-day, or their makeup tutorial. Sure, that’s bad, and it leads to discussion on how governments shape lives, but that’s just not an interest of mine, and that’s not what we’re here for today.

I dread the idea of AI bots leaving comments on tech tutorials and documentation.

Right now, many old-school tech content creators are focused on the damage LLMs are causing to online documentation. Humans are using LLMs like ChatGPT to write blog posts and presentations. The results are cluttering up social media and search results with bad advice, outdated techniques, and code that simply don’t work. That’s bad, and Eugene Meidinger wrote a good post about that problem (or at least he says he wrote it, ha ha ho ho.)

I totally agree that it’s bad, but I also think we’ve already lost that battle. The kinds of people who do this kind of thing won’t be convinced by lectures on ethics, and there’s going to be a never-ending sea of people new to tech who want to climb the career mountain with shortcuts.

The next battle is going to take place in the comment section, which will likely move onscreen. Even good human-produced content will start to be overrun with comments – some real, some AI-generated.

This is going to represent a significant new workload for content creators. We’re going to have to be good stewards of the comment section, trying to prune out the weeds. For decades, I’ve taken the approach that everyone should be allowed to leave their opinions on my content because it leads to fun discussions, user engagement, and long-term relationships. With the advent of bot-generated onscreen content, I’m rethinking that. My concern is that if the comment volume grows dramatically on my tech content, I’m just gonna delete comments with bad advice, rather than trying to engage with the commenter.

I don’t know whether this means online tech communities will get better or worse in 2025. More engagement from real human beings is a wonderful thing. I just can’t guess whether it’s going to be worth the price that we’ll have to pay.

Update Jan 2: just to be clear, I’m not sad about this. Technology changes all the time, and we have to keep adapting. In the early days of the internet, we had no search engines, and we had to rely on manual content classification and human-updated directories. When we got Google and good search algorithms, we were excited – but then search engines were gradually manipulated by SEO fodder. When algorithms got better, we were excited – but then the paid ads business turned search engines into garbage. When LLMs came out and bypassed search engines altogether, we were excited, and society is gradually figuring out the problems with that as well. I’m genuinely excited right now because something will come out to solve the problem of humans finding their way on the internet – there’s a ton of money at stake – and I’m excited to see what’ll be next. I watch these kinds of things with enthusiasm and popcorn because there are a lot of bright people – way smarter than me – trying to solve these problems.