If You Aren’t A Know-it-All, You Probably Should Be.

For 35 years, Car Talk was an enormous hit for National Public Radio, providing an endless supply of warm-hearted wit, curiosity, goofiness and laughter. But the secret to its enduring success had a much simpler explanation: Know your stuff.

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It was the mid-‘90s and Clinton Everhart had moved out West, just about the middle of nowhere. Accustomed to the vibrant characters and intellectual stimulation of college campuses, he found the silence and the distance isolating. He didn’t even have radio reception, except for one station: NPR. His mom suggested a program she had begun listening to every week. It didn’t sound enticing; it was about cars.

He still jokes about it. “I thought, if my mom likes it, I probably won’t.” He tried it anyway, if only to humor her and stave off boredom. Within minutes, he changed his mind. His mom, he decided, was onto something.

Click and Clack. Ray and Tom Magliozzi. The Tappet Brothers. Those two reached him in the heart of the desert and hooked him from the very first program with well-informed wit and generous laughter. “They’re so goofy, but then they tell you good stuff.” Like so many others who happened upon the radio show, Everhart became a regular listener. The two brothers became his long-distance companions, providing a laugh when he needed one and always astounding him with how much they knew. They almost felt like friends, the kind you can always count on to help out in a pinch. For Everhart, the friendship became a habit that’s lasted more than 20 years so far.

He kept tuning in after his visit to his mom. A few years later, during his grad school years, he’d make them part of his weekend wind-down routine. Now, finishing his doctoral dissertation while he works as university registrar at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, he still makes time for them. The show went out of production in 2012, and reruns on public radio are ending, but podcasts of the show let him carry on his tradition.

While he’s never been huge into cars — he’s not a die hard for car shows or a gearhead with a garage dedicated to a muscle car collection — Everhart thinks he knows a little more than the average motorist. He’ll tinker around under the hood with smaller repairs, always changes his own oil and knows, for the most part, how to keep his 2009 Toyota Tacoma plugging away. He’s learned enough to know just how much he doesn’t know — and to recognize how much Click and Clack did. He’s always been stunned at just how much the brothers could easily recall about any make or model. “You’d hear them answer right away about an ’83 Volvo or something. Really, how the heck do you remember that?” As someone who’s spent his adult life in academic circles, Everhart appreciates that the brothers were MIT educated. But he also found them relatable and never condescending, despite their wealth of knowledge.

In some ways, it was like joining a boisterous Italian family trading good-natured jabs over dinner. He recalls listening in to the brother’s mother, Elizabeth Magliozzi, and discovering that a sense of humor ran in the family. When she died in 2003 and the brothers spoke about it during a show, Everhart was touched. When Tom died, Everhart admired Ray’s determination to go on without him, to keep the show running in his brother’s honor. Everhart felt the loss, too. He remembers it clearly, sitting in his car, listening to one half of the familiar duo, with tears in his own eyes. “These were MIT grads, very smart men, but you could always connect with them. You felt like you were part of the family.”

In a small studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts the brothers produced one of the longest-running hit radio shows of all time. Vic Wheatman was the young program director at Boston’s WBUR Radio who first pitched a concept for a new call-in show about cars and car repair. In 1977, the idea seemed timely. Because new fuel economy standards were requiring manufacturers to churn out redesigned models, car repairs suddenly were a more sophisticated and bewildering endeavor than ever before.

Wheatman and his development team picked six mechanics, assuming that the wide variety of models, systems, and potential problems required an equally broad range of expertise. Tom, who had left his family car repair business and was teaching marketing at the Boston University School of Management, accepted one of those invitations. He thought it might be a chance to drum up good publicity for the Good News Garage, the second iteration of a do-it-yourself auto-repair shop the brothers had started together in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then he arrived to find that he was the star of a one-person panel.

Apparent from that very first show when Tom Magliozzi and Vic Wheatman sat alone in that studio was that Tom knew as much about automobiles as an entire panel of mechanics would have. When he brought his brother Ray on board the following week, Wheatman had everything he needed. The two talkers were as proficient in diagnosing automobile woes as they come, and it spawned a 10-year local run that went into national syndication and became one of the most popular shows in radio history, with an audience of millions tuning in to 600 public radio stations.

Years later, when NPR announced the final season of “The Best of Car Talk” in 2016, the brother’s humorously packaged roadside wisdom remained one of iTunes’ most popular podcasts, with more than 2.3 million downloads a month. What made loyal listeners, even of those folks who would never dream of fixing their own wheels or who weren’t stuck on the side of the road? When Tom died in November 2014, longtime producer Doug Berman said he had an “infectious” laugh that drew people to him. And it did. Listening to the brothers laugh their way through a show was a feel-good experience in itself, but that alone wasn’t what made the show stick.

Consider how many components it takes to make a whole, functioning vehicle. Toyota says a single car has around 30,000 parts, counting down to the last screw. A screw doesn’t change, but the major systems are unique from manufacturer to manufacturer, typically with alterations among each of those manufacturer’s makes and models. So how much would Tom and Ray really have to know to give an accurate diagnosis with just a few snippets of information, often in under a minute or two? A lot.

To illustrate the expanse of expertise these two brothers would have needed, let’s perform a rough calculation of how many pieces of information they had to have at the ready. Assuming callers might have a decade-old vehicle, use just one 10-year period, 1968 to 1978.

Then take major U.S. manufacturers who were making vehicles at the time: Chrysler, Jeep, Plymouth, Dodge, Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, GM, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Pontiac and Oldsmobile. That’s 14 major U.S. manufacturers operating in that particular decade.

Taking a cue from Click and Clack’s book Car Talk, we’ll go with their “big picture” diagram of a vehicle, which includes nine major systems. That’s not considering how many smaller pieces comprise each of those systems (radiator, engine, transmission, muffler, differential, U-joint, drive shaft, catalytic converter, and clutch) and it’s not counting smaller systems. Let’s say each of the aforementioned manufacturers made, conservatively, six unique body lines during that span, and those changed mechanically every few years. So, just among those ten manufacturers selling six body lines that change three times over the course of a decade, we come up with 180 distinct body lines.

Multiply that by the nine major systems Click and Clack provided, and that means the brothers would have had instant knowledge of the unique problems — sounds and symptoms — of at least 1,620 mechanical systems to be able to answer those phone calls so confidently, so nonchalantly that they had time and imagination to throw jokes in along the way. That’s not even counting international manufacturers like Toyota or Volkswagen in an era when the Beetle was still a favorite. It’s also not taking into account the extraordinary length of time these two were giving speedy suggestions on the radio.

By the end of their career, they would have to have knowledge of some 40 to 50 years of car parts and their problems. And using our previous calculation of 1,620 per decade, we’re now talking about a span of 6,480 to 8,100 possible major systems that Ray and Tom would have had to understand. Mechanics today sometimes choose just one manufacturer to study. The National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence, an industry organization that issues certification exams by sub-specialties, such as vehicle types, repairs, and parts, offers more than 40 exams to help consumers sort the pros from the amateurs. The Tappet Brothers were ready for anything.

In the span of an hour, callers might ring in with questions about a 1982 Windstar minivan, a 1968 Alpha Romeo, a 2002 Honda Civic, and a 1975 AMC Gremlin. The brothers always proposed an answer — right away. They knew the vehicle, knew the way it was built, where things were, what problems were common, and whether they could be fixed. They also knew about how much the part or repair should cost. Take this example, where a caller has a question about his 1989 Volkswagen Golf:

Ray: Hello, you’re on CarTalk.

Caller: Hi. This is Dave. I’m up here in Hanover, Massachusetts.

Ray: Hanover?

Tom: Where’s that?

Caller: About 20 minutes south of Boston.

Tom: Oh, that’s like down the Cape, sort of.

Caller: Uh, about half way.

Tom: I’ve never been. Is it exciting?

Caller: No, it’s kind of a quiet, little sleepy town. A little suburb.

Tom: So, what’s on your mind, Dave?

Caller: Well, I have an ’89 Volkswagen Golf that I’ve had for about three years now. It’s got about 130,000 miles on it. Every once in awhile, it starts to click as you’re driving it. And then when you’re driving along, all of a sudden the whole front end will start to shake. Like the car’s about to shake apart.

The brothers go through a minute or so of questions on a problem that’s already stumped a few mechanics. They make a few jokes, and then Ray offers his conclusion.

Ray: I think what you have, Dave, is a bad constant velocity joint.

Tom: (whistle)

Ray: Which would account for the clicking and also account for the shaking. What’s happening is one of balls in there must be broken. The constant velocity joint has, on this car, six ball bearings that are embedded in a cage…and there’s a male part of the joint and a female…

After just a few questions, Ray knows, off-hand, how many ball bearings are embedded in a cage on the caller’s specific type of vehicle, a 1989 Volkswagen Golf. In the midst of all those rounds of laughter where the brothers are poking fun at each other, these two really know their stuff, down to the number of ball bearings in this particular make and model’s constant velocity joint.

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Sharing what they knew seemed to come naturally to Ray and Tom, but they had to know a lot to begin with, thousands of major car systems and their potential pitfalls, and they had to stay up on the intricacies of new vehicles being released every year. The same way a talented tree carver or sailor would have made our ancestors’ journeys safer, Click and Clack offered the assurance that they knew what they were doing when they offered advice for keeping us safer in our vehicles. They were competent to an extraordinary degree, and it showed.

Click and Clack put in the effort — they knew their stuff. Research. Learn. Repeat for decades.

You need to show that you’ve got what it takes — the knowledge, the resources, the talent — to keep your relationships safe into the future. But, it’s not enough to do it occasionally. They have to know they can depend on you to provide it for them today, tomorrow, and the next day for years to come. They need you to demonstrate the third component of trust, consistency.