The Smoking Tire's Matt Farah gets a painful lesson

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

I’m not sure what to title this thread, and I don’t want to give away too much, and I don’t want to post a 15 minute video, but I think some people here might get a kick out of the slow realization of one man stepping into a hornets nest. Matt Farah is a TV producer and car guy who’s been involved in a number of different cross-country road rallies, including the Bullrun rally and it’s associated short-lived TV show. He sees that someone is organizing a revival of the Cannonball Run (upon which the movie was based), a highly illegal race on public roads with a $50,000 purse. He calls to get more info.

Spoilers down there.

Ends up the guy is a sovereign citizen type, and goes off on a very typical tangent about how he’s not bound by US law. Matt Farah, never having experienced one of these loons, gets progressively speechless.

#2

His eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger and his jaw kept dropping lower and lower as “Colonel” Wilson kept talking. That was awesome!

#3

Farah is based in California, where it is a crime to record calls without consent of all parties. It also makes him subject to a civil suit, if the nutjob decides he likes the court system after all.

#4

Maybe I just saw this totally differently, but I watched this the day it came out and didn’t really think Matt learned a “painful lesson.”

Matt knew the guy was insane from the get-go, because he’s eschewing all the normal “it’s a rally” cover-your-ass legal stuff and just saying “this is a cross-country race for cash,” because he’s stealing trademarked event names from Brock Yates’ family, etc. He called the guy to find out just how crazy he was, and ask him about the insane choices he was making. There’s a reason he recorded the call – because it was bound to be entertaining based on batshit craziness level of the guy. He didn’t expect to phone up a level-headed gentleman and just double-check the entry fee and then hang up…this is what he knew would happen.

Of course the guy really was probably even crazier than expected in a weird anti-government legalese sort of way, but that’s just a plus. Play up the reaction, makes for a great video. Matt knew what he was doing.