Magnus Walker - Porsche Hunter

Full transcript: Magnus Walker on London Real

5:52 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Magnus Walker who is the creator of the fashion label Serious Clothing and one of the most prolific Porsche collectors in the world. Or you might know him as the bearded, dreadlocked, tattooed, rock and roll Urban Outlaw Porsche Hunter. That’s quite a mouthful but you’ve obviously done a little bit of homework because I didn’t provide you with any of that info but that’s a great intro. Thank you.

6:16 That was all me. You shot to fame in 2012 with a 32 minute documentary titled Urban Outlaw followed by more videos with you and Porsches and your recent TED Talk that’s had over a million views. Magnus, welcome to London Real. Great to be here. You’re in this uber-trendy part of town so I’ve been exploring the neighborhood and it’s got a good vibe so thanks for the opportunity and I’m glad to be here.

6:37 No, it’s going to be a lot of fun. You know it’s funny because I’m an American in East London who looks like he’s from LA and you’re an Englishman who lives in LA who looks like he’s from East London. Are you reading that off a script there? Yeah, I wrote that earlier. Yeah, that’s pretty good.

6:51 Is that a fair representation? After a period I was paying no attention. I was just amazed that you read it. Because I was thinking about the tour. You’re an American in LA. I’m an American who looks like he’s from LA who’s in East London. You’re an Englishman who lives in LA who looks like he should live in Shoreditch.

7:05 Yeah, it’s a pretty good assumption. I mean I often feel like I’m a visitor or a tourist in my own country because truth be told I grew up in Sheffield but I left Sheffield as a 19 year old in 1986 so I’ve been in America almost 30 years so as much as I love England I often joke that it’s a great place to visit growing up in Sheffield in the late 70s, early 80s. I seldom visited London so London is interesting. Back then people didn’t really travel.

7:34 A trip to London was something you planned. It wasn’t like you just got on a train or got in the car and went there. So it’s good to be here but yeah I agree. I feel a little bit like a tourist in my own country. What’s the big difference you notice when you come here from LA that London or England feels different than say LA?

7:54 Well the main difference I think London’s obviously a lot more cosmopolitan than LA. It’s a spectacular walking city. There’s a song, nobody walks in LA. I mean just because it’s so spread out. So for me I love you know whenever I come to London I’m always on some sort of odd jet like where you wake up at 3am in the morning. So generally I love to get up around that time 4 o’clock and go walk around.

8:20 Just the amount of people you see on the street it’s a whole cross section of life. You know one time I was down on the south side of the river Tate Modern area Borough Market I love it down there. Cab driver pulls up and there’s so many great things about London. London cab drivers are one. I guess it must have been a Friday or Saturday morning and the guy goes you’ve been on the razzle or something.

8:41 Thought I’d been you know literally out all night long ways in reality. I’d just flown in with jet like and walking around. So to me London is just a real cosmopolitan city that is inspirational. You know I was walking around yesterday. I’m not too familiar with this area. Normally I’m sort of more Covent Garden area. My wife likes to stay there at the Saint Martins Lane. So I joked earlier on that we’re not hip enough to be in shortage. You know I’ve made it to Brick Lane a few times before because being English obviously I do love curry.

9:08 But a point to my story the long answer to your question is just even yesterday I’m walking around I got out the iPhone. There’s just so much visual inspiration. You know whether it’s street art or graffiti or just buildings in various states of either sort of commercialization or buildings that are decayed but have just got great character soul and patina and just the people you know you see walking around the diversity from one neighborhood to the other in a short period of time.

9:38 You don’t see that in L.A. because nobody walks in L.A. you know because you’re known for driving cars. You know you’re very well known for that. But yet you’re walking when you’re here.

9:45 Well yeah well that’s my running joke also I just came from a garage in Watford with some buddies and we’re talking about electric cars and one of the guys was from Norway and in Norway there’s a lot of electric cars especially Teslas because there’s no tax. You know and so those cars are tax free paying no sales tax and I’m talking about well I’ve got a low carbon footprint because I got a garage full of 40 50 year old Porsches but I actually walk to work. So I’m one of the few people in L.A. that actually walks and we live in the arts district in downtown L.A. which in a sense is similar to this neighborhood in the sense that 10 years ago it was a no go zone former sort of industrial transient desolate neighborhood that now is going through mass gentrification.

10:29 You know I’m talking a couple of thousand condo lofts in former industrial buildings that were converted and now the new trend is those buildings have sort of been bought up and already converted. People are now doing ground up construction so mass residential coming in and then what follows residential obviously is commercial so trendy coffee shops gourmet restaurants yoga studios CrossFit gyms. You know literally next door to our building is a seven and a half thousand square foot restaurant that just opened up across the road is a hipster hipster coffee house next door to them it looks like someone’s opening up their own bourbon distillery.

11:10 So this is all going on in the arts district in L.A. which is newer and smaller than shortage but shares quite a lot of what I’m seeing has already happened here gentrification. Right I want to talk about that space that you converted I think in 2000 2001 it was in your documentary I know you have your garage there but I wondered if you could take us back to almost 40 years ago when I guess you would have made a trip from Sheffield down to London 1977 Earl’s Court for the Motor Show.

11:36 I think you had a big moment there I was just wondering do you remember what London was like then and do you remember what that looked like then? I don’t remember London I remember the moment the Earl’s Court Motor Show I remember my dad and myself came down on a coach you know I grew up working class Northern England dad was a salesman so we didn’t grow up with wealth so I remember we took a coach down to London and then I guess we must have took a train to Earl’s Court where the Motor Show was and as a kid I had that Porsche poster on the wall played those top trumps playing supercar cards so I don’t remember London when I was 10 years old but I do remember that London Earl’s Court Motor Show because that was what has become a very pivotal moment for me at the time as a 10 year old it was just hey that’s an awesome car at a car show type of thing I didn’t realize the impact that it would have on my life because that impact didn’t happen for almost 35 years later you mentioned earlier on about the film urban outlaw the 32 minute documentary which my Canadian Bido brother as I like to call him Timmy Muscovici took a leap of faith for those that are watching we shot urban outlaw on two cameras and I think here we have six but he asked one pretty interesting question in that film at the time I really didn’t think about it but he said what do you think Porsche would think about what you’ve done to their cars and I said something like I hope they’d be smiling and within three months of that film coming out which changed my life and we can talk about that in

13:06 A bit more detail but within three months of the film coming out I actually received a letter from Porsche because as a 10 year old after I went to London Earl’s Court Motor Show I did write a letter to Porsche apparently that’s quite a familiar story because I’ve received thousands of emails in the past two and a half years and it seemed to be a common thread of people riding to their favorite car company when they were young when they were young and back then in the 70s Porsche was a smaller company just like most automobile companies were and they obviously had a PR press department that sent letters back to kids like me and sent him a brochure and you know the seed was sown there at an early age and that’s a common story I think people fall in love with bikes and cars and automotive stuff and planes as an early age because that’s when you start dreaming what do you want to be race car driver, fireman, astronaut, fighter, pilot, you know those early moments maybe we don’t realize at the time but those turn out to be life changing moments what do you think it is but with boys and cars or men and cars is it I’m trying to think of what it is I’m not necessarily a car guy but now that I’ve read about your story I had mine 68 Mustang when I was in high school and I was all over that thing when I was 16 to 18 and so is it is it something about the body of the car and that the female figure or is it the fact that his men were not encouraged to be creative and we can be creative with our cars have you ever thought thought about what I think is everything I think you know there’s a lot of different equations as to that answer to that question one is freedom you know to me my story you know I fell in love with Porsche as a

14:36 Ten-year-old but I didn’t buy my first Porsche till I was 22 I bought my first car a few years earlier which was a 1977 Toyota Corolla 2TC that I bought for 200 bucks when I lived in Sheffield you know I was there till I was 19 but all my adult responsibility was really in the States when I was living in Sheffield I was at home on the dole living at my mom and dad’s house doing odd jobs so there was no real sense of freedom there sort of in this channel of going nowhere fast so when I bought my first car several years later once had been in LA for a few years instantly represented freedom but to backtrack to a ten-year-old one I didn’t know what freedom was it just looked cool and fast you know the shapes intoxicating so I see friends that have kids kids are three four five years old I give them toy models and they just like whizzing them around on the floor on the tabletop it just seems a natural thing for boys to play with cars when you’re young yeah and you either grow out of it or you don’t I don’t think a lot of people never grow out of that yeah the freedom issue is big because when I was 16 you know you get your license in the States of 16 and the car meant so much of freedom and you didn’t have to do what your parents said and then she could do all those things people say today that the internet is now people’s freedom because now they can associate with their friends and you don’t necessarily have to get to places yeah the internet is different though cuz you never leave your home right car you actually go out there and experience stuff in the real world

16:06 As opposed to the virtual world right you know and for me I never had a car in England never had a car in Sheffield never even have a driver’s license so as a kid my father watched motorsports I vividly remember watching f1 in the 70s mid 70s in England was a glory era 76 77 you know it’s documented in the film rush we had James Hunt 1976 world champion on four wheels Formula One we also had Barry Sheen two-wheel world champion so you remember that in your childhood remember England is an automotive country yeah Detroit’s an automotive legendary city and the Ford Motor Company and Henry Ford and the Model T the birth of it was in the states but you got to remember England had a thriving car industry in the 50s and 60s I mean all these just iconic cards that are not Porsche 911s a lot of them were English cars the Austin Mini Cooper e-type Jag you know so as a kid you grow up you watch James Bond James Bond driving an Aston Martin there’s a lot of visual exposure and simulation to the automobile you know I remember watching James Bond driving the Aston Martin I remember watching a show called the persuaders where it was Roger Moore and Tony Curtis Tony Curtis was driving a Ferrari Dino I remember watching Dukes a hazard where they’re driving a Dodge Charger the American muscle car Steve McQueen driving the 68 Mustang in bullet bullet yeah so as a kid growing up anywhere in the world I mean my story was Porsche but the influencers are out there if you just turn on the TV you know I used to watch a lot of motor sport occasionally we’d go to racetracks such as Donington and Mallory Park and Cadwell Park and watch amateur club racing you know even though we didn’t have much money my dad was pretty mechanical and would work on his buddies cars and stuff like that so I was exposed to the car at an early age and it never really went away right talk to me about America you always say that it was the land of opportunity and when you

18:06 Say it in the documentary it sounds almost like a cliched expression but you really you really mean that and I was just wondering why why it it meant that for you well the backup you know I left school at 15 fell in love with Porsche at 10 from like probably 11 12 13 14 15 I was doing a lot of cross-country middle-distance running and I was pretty motivated and relatively successful at it and I’ll touch on this story a little bit later on because I think that gave me a lot of drive as a young kid which I still have that drive later in life so that early teen period of achieving some level of success in a sport which is an individual sport cross-country running I was not necessarily a team player so I left school at 15 on the dollars I said but to answer your question of America and freedom I realized that at an early age I suppose 16 17 I’d bummed around for a year I went back to college and did this thing called leisure and recreation sports management course it was sort of an easy thing to do for a year but the pivotal part there was I heard of this thing called camp America and camp America basically recruited people in Europe to go work on a summer camp in the States and to me it was like wow this is great you’re actually going to get paid a little bit of money to go spend the summer in America you know so compared to Sheffield with sort of no opportunity I jumped at that and got excepted onto a summer camp in Michigan I didn’t really know where Michigan was but America and freedom

19:36 So took the train from Sheffield down to London he throw to New York one night in New York and then all gathered in a hotel this is 1986 and the next day you’re on a Trailways Buster the middle of nowhere which turned out to be Detroit or actually a summer camp on Lake Michigan 40 minutes north of Detroit and so that summer just represented complete freedom so the first time I’d actually ever really been away from home for any great length of period and that was just like being dropped into a different world you know the summer camp was I was a camp counselor so I’m looking after inner city kids from Detroit you know so it was sort of a rough environment now Sheffield’s a northern environment sort of a little bit of a rough environment too but I was like a fish out of water you know I’m a rock and roll heavy metal kid surrounded by at the time everything’s run DMC LL Cool J and it’s hip hop so I was like diving in the deep end to this American culture and to me it was just no one has ever really wanted to tell you can’t do this can’t do that so my first sense of freedom was a road trip which I call my first American great road trip stage one was New York to Detroit two three months on the summer camp in Detroit and then Trailways Bus from Detroit to LA now I often joke about you look at the map and Detroit to LA in a straight line doesn’t go through Memphis Tennessee but the first experience back in 86 was three days on a Trailways Bus going cross country you meet a lot of interesting people

21:06 When I arrived at Union Station in LA at 5 30 in the morning big duffel bag and it was it was a bit of a shock because I’d watched tons of American TV everything I just described chips Rockford files and you just expect in Hollywood to be as you see it on TV but Union Station at 5 a.m. in the morning 30 years ago is nothing like you see on TV or some sort of down and out version of that I didn’t really know where I was going I fell asleep on a bench and got really awoken at 6 a.m. by a cop who said I couldn’t sleep here and ended up going to a YMCA in Hollywood Boulevard so that was my first sort of journey of wow what am I gonna do you know I was only really planning on visiting LA for a couple of weeks and I didn’t know nobody and were you cool about this back then were you kind of I’m gonna take life as it goes or were you stressing it all is at this age when you show up there and you don’t know where to sleep what was your do you remember what your mindset was like in 19 years old you think you can do anything I mean the sunshine and everyone speaks English or American English you know so how about could it be really I mean it’s an adventure on this big adventure and it’s a challenge to see how you’re gonna survive you know I really didn’t have much money in my pocket I might have had a couple hundred bucks staying at the YMCA for a couple of nights and Hollywood Boulevard was there and that sort of down and out transient homeless scuzzy punky but to me it was a perfect environment because

22:36 It was a glory days of heavy metal sex drugs rock and roll motley crew guns and roses whiskey a go-go sunset strip so I think within the first day or two I’d visited one or two of the local heavy metal nightclubs socialized with a few people back then being English was sort of a bit of a novelty people were super friendly super welcoming you know and that was where I sort of fell into my first taste of American entrepreneurial spirit I don’t know if you’re familiar with the story I talk about buying those PVC pants on Hollywood Boulevard so that was my glam rock days pre-beard motley crew spiked here so I remember I guess we must have got there like on a Friday or Saturday and I literally bought a pair of pants black snakeskin vinyl pants on this retail store on Hollywood Boulevard for $9.99 and I asked around where’s the cool shopping street and eventually found Melrose which was sort of like the King’s Road of LA back then you know a lot of those boutique independent stores were very King’s Road esque and you know I went into this one store retail slot this is a familiar story that I’ve told but I’ll repeat it again and there was a band called faster pussycat who was sort of a guns and roses motley crew type of band who hadn’t quite made it to their level and one of the guys Tammy Downs was working behind the counter and struck up a conversation rock and roll type stuff and comment it on my pants and I hadn’t thought about selling them but it literally was I can almost remember it word for word like it was so

24:06 Clear hey man cool pants where do you get them and I didn’t say Hollywood Boulevard I said I got him in London and just jokingly said why do you want to buy some and he said yeah how much ollie and I’m like well I’m not gonna tell I paid $9.99 from so first figure that cropped into my head was 25 bucks he said all right I’ll take eight pairs I want one thirty two thirty two two thirty fours now thirty six I went right back to Hollywood Boulevard I guess I bought a dozen pants for 120 bucks and went and sold him eight for 200 and I was 80 bucks ahead and still had four more pairs of pants that I later sold to someone else and I was like wow maybe this LA thing’s not so bad after all I mean you know it’s pretty comical it was almost like fuck how could these people not know but that’s the division Hollywood Boulevard wasn’t trendy Melrose was trendy so it wouldn’t have occurred to someone to go to a crappy type of clothing store on Melrose because that wasn’t cool did you have any fashion interest when you’re in England well yeah I did in a sense of if you count you know making your jeans tight and sewing patches on your denim jacket that say Saxon and motorhead and rainbow and deep purple as fashion you know I didn’t see it as fashion but my mom had an old tabletop singer sewing machine and she used to make her own dresses and stuff like that so I obviously learnt to sew from watching my mom and you know I’d buy old Levi’s and of course you were never tight enough so you had to turn him inside out put a seam down the leg and all of a sudden the tight so it was pretty interesting because the part I don’t generally tell about the $9.99 pants story is

25:36 When I actually bought them they weren’t tight I actually went to a CVS and bought a hand sewing kit and tuck them in by hand and made them tight but of course when I sold the retail slot they were just buying the they weren’t wide leg version but they weren’t spray on spin tight version that I was wearing so I’d actually made those pants I’d adapted them pretty quickly right so serious clothing was born then pretty much serious clothing didn’t come to like 1991 this is 86 okay you know I actually went back to England probably four months later for a short period 86 I overstayed my visa that first time went from the YMCA to Venice Beach for a week and then back to Hollywood met some friends I was couch hopping for a couple of months went back to England probably November of 86 completely hated it applied for camp America again and got turned down I’m like oh fuck you know had a taste of freedom but all of a sudden I’m back up north in Grim Sheffield and depressed and just feel like I’m going nowhere fast so reapplied to camp America got turned down and thought oh what am I gonna do and then another story I remember just like yesterday on a Tuesday I got a phone call from the camp America administration staff saying we found you a spot can you leave on Friday so literally with like two three days notice I was back in America with hardly any money on my pocket but this time worked on a summer camp in New York so this was great the camp was actually in New Jersey but same type of camp

27:06 Underprivileged kids from Newark New Jersey so almost the same environment as the Detroit camp but the great thing about camp America around two was was 30 minutes outside Manhattan so as great as Detroit was in Detroit in 86 it was a thriving sort of punk rock music scene there with a lot of cool underground clubs and that was sort of the beginning of the great decay of Detroit I suppose and at the time I didn’t realize upon reflection what I impact Detroit had on the states you know automotive industry but round two was New York even cooler cool clubs more sex drugs rock and roll type stuff CBG bees CBG bees all that stuff you know okay went to a lot of clubs clubs that are scrap bar bars that are no longer even there the Mars in Brooklyn stuff like that so that eat that East Coast flavor probably later fed into some of your fashion you think probably just well the fashion came back and I’ll lead into the fashion I went back out to LA and 86 and literally never went back bummed around in LA for a couple of years going out to clubs and stuff like that and back then a little bit of money went a long way the fashion thing happened by accident really in around 1990 I got a job on the boardwalk in Venice selling originally seconds from the gap t-shirts and crap like that two days a week on a little stall and I noticed there’s a guy a couple of booths down and Venice Beach back then was sort of a little bit like what Camden Market was like ten years ago

28:36 You know it wasn’t really commercialized lots of artisans doing lots of Grateful Dead hippie type stuff craft arts type things I noticed this guy was selling old second-hand clothing you know vintage stuff so I started getting into second-hand clothing gonna yard sales flea markets salvation army and buying Levi jeans you’d pick them up for 50 cents a dollar 250 and I started putting patches on them because I sort of like that whole I’ve always liked Americana I often talk about evil can evil Captain America red white and blue so I’d put like old red white and blue flags I’d buy flags and cut them up and put patches on the jeans and then I’d do this sort of buy old Western shirts Paisley florals and patch them up so it was sort of like a on the rock and roll end of things black crows esque rock and rolly and then on the opposite end it was right when the racing was starting to happen and they were all into sort of patchwork jeans and overalls I remember someone came up to me and there was a booth next door selling Guatemalan hats and Tams and one guy said to me could you make one of those like in velvet I said well I never have but I’ll try so I bought one took it apart copied the pattern and instead of sewing it back up in Guatemalan type cloth I sewed it up in red white and blue oh no actually red gold and green raster colors made a raster hat but it’s something just a little bit different instead of lining it like those guys always did with some black nylon cheap lining I lined it in a solid velvet color and decided oh this thing’s reversible

30:06 Two sides two hats for one so I started selling hats in the patchwork jeans sort of went together back then it was this sort of whole black crows is a pretty good reference to what that scene was like early 90s early 90s 70s inspired rock and roll music the rave scenes coming in a little bit with all these English bands from Manchester happy Mondays in spiral carpets trippy hippie dippy looking stuff and it was just a creative time and I think someone asked me you ever made a cat in the hat hat I didn’t know what the cat in the hat was but dr. Zeus bucco it’s got a bunch of stripes around it so figured out how to make that and before you know it we had a little hat line of jester hat dr. Zeus can the hat matter had a top hat and no one was doing that stuff so we started wholesale and we’d make up a bunch of 20 jeans put them in a backpack go down Melrose and see you wanted to buy them well around late 1990 91 was doing this sort of Americana type things on jeans and I’d actually bought what turned out to be a Peter Mac’s bag spread and cut it up not realizing that it was actually something quite collectible so I had the hippie line the American flag stuff and then the Gulf War broke out and everyone had patriotic American fever couldn’t make these jeans quick enough with American flags on it then did like an uncle Sam style top hat just having fun creative stuff but what happened was I’d gone from sort of sewing the stuff myself with my then girlfriend to you know making five pairs of jeans ten pairs

31:36 Of jeans and renting a booth for ten pound ten dollars a day during the week to all of a sudden couldn’t make them quick enough so then we started hiring people to put patches on the jeans we’d pay five bucks to patch them five bucks to sew them probably bought the jeans for a couple of bucks and then you know you saw them for 30 40 50 bucks so cash started rolling in pretty quick so that was like the entrepreneurial ship lesson 101 so sort of right place right time with a good idea that hadn’t been done and tweaked and worked at it and finalized it and then started wholesaling so Gulf War Americana people are buying stars and stripes stuff we did a trade show in London for a trade show in New York first trade show would ever done at the Javits Center probably 1991 we got an order from Disneyland first show couldn’t believe it they bought like ten styles of each hat and they’re buying 144 pieces so all of a sudden we had to find a hat manufacturer then of course one’s Disneyland bought them then all of a sudden Six Flags Magic Mountains buying them then Universal Studios theme parks buying them so all of a sudden we’ve gone from sort of making really no money living on someone else’s apartment floor to rented a former garage for 200 bucks and set up our own little sewing factory and you have no formal business education but this you know I left school at 15 I left school at Silverdale High School at the end of the fifth year so but it seems like this stuff comes natural to you yeah I think it sort of does you know I often talk about this is a

33:06 Type of stuff you can’t teach street smarts it’s survival tactic but it’s also knowing an opportunity but more importantly doing what you love to do it’s not so much an opportunity because fast forward 30 odd years later I’ve really done three things in America started a clothing company that became relatively successful and had a good run for at least a dozen years which enabled us to buy a building in a once former desolate neighborhood that we converted my wife and I Karen I’ve been with for 21 years people thought were crazy when we bought that building 26,000 square feet two-story break built in 1902 so for LA that’s an old building but back then the neighborhood was transient and desolate you know to back up my story when I was doing the clothing thing I was living in Venice as the clothing became more successful needed a bigger building it was hard to get anything done in Venice because all the garment manufacturing was done in downtown LA and LA is a mate New York’s major fashion city but LA is also a major fashion city on the West Coast so it necessitated a move to downtown rented a warehouse and ended up living in another loft in downtown so for the next six years the clothing business grew and we started selling we sort of changed our style a little bit because of course that trend got swamped and all of a sudden people were knocking us off and making similar type of stuff in China for a third of the price so we had a great run for probably two three years and then what we used to

34:36 Sell Disneyland let’s say for 20 bucks wholesale there were now retail in that for 20 bucks and buying it from some vendor that had got it made in China and sold it to him for seven bucks or something so we formed serious clothing in 1994 before that it was called Venetian Paradise little startup business out of my flat in Venice hence Venetian at the time I’m 20 early 20s it was just like paradise living on the beach making some cash doing whatever you want so we needed to separate you know in essence Venetian Paradise had become old hat we were making these hats that were sort of out of style now you know it just exploded beyond this cool little hippie thing into a whole big floppy rave thing and then all the rappers wearing the big hats and so we needed to change new identity right actually business must be tough to stay on top of yeah you know 15 years later I’ll tell you why we got out of it but yeah it’s always same but different people you know they don’t want to be the first to try something new but they want something different so it’s constantly reinventing the wheel you know after 15 years I jokingly refer to as we got sick of designing a three-legged pant type of thing so in 94 we changed the name someone said wow that’s some serious shit you got there and we go oh serious that’s a great name for a label so had this label called series which was full-on cut-and-sew rock-and-roll stuff

35:55 And we started selling this chain called hot topic when they had five stores and hot topics like a junior retailer that grew to 700 stores and was in every single mall and they catered to the misfit teenager which is always around been around since day one and that kid just keeps reinventing but they’re always into the same type of genre of goth music punk rock music heavy metal music rebellious teenagers they’re going to be around forever so that was a core customer and hot topic we used to do hundreds of thousands of units with those guys so the business grew to where it became pretty successful which enabled us to buy the building I described the 26,000 square foot building in 2000 at the time people thought we were crazy for doing that why would you want to because nobody was moving in residential nobody was really I mean there was a hardcore artist loft that had been there that people rented that were one step above a squat but people weren’t really or people like us weren’t really buying buildings right and this is a crucial part of your story is this real pivotal parts of this physical structure because you know it went into kind of the location in the movie business but also it was a place that you later would be your garage and yeah it happened by accident I used the word organic quite a lot you know it got to the point where from 94 to 2000 we were renting a 5600 square foot warehouse in the garment district in downtown and we’re also renting a 3500 square foot loft in the artist district and after six years we’re like wow why are we paying two people’s mortgages you know it made no sense so the business was making money and we were able to get a bank loan and we bought this building

37:27 And at the time we never owned anything so buying a building is a real mature purchase and we’re like wow how are we going to be able to afford this and we bought it in 2000 and moved in we probably spent 12 months building it out and our goal was to build our dream live workspace live upstairs work downstairs so myself and my wife and two cats lived in a 12,000 square foot loft that we built out as our dream live workspace and I often jokingly refer to it as like a mini Hertz castle it was a combination of sort of English Gothic meets Moroccan and we’d always sort of been into the loft we had before was pretty big so we’d always got a flea market such as a rose bowl in Pasadena when we’d go there with a pocket full of cash and an empty van and come back with this mishmash of Middle Eastern Moroccan batiki type of furniture so the loft was a combination of that side mixed with 60s pop art mid-century modern which sort of sounds like the two don’t go together but rather we created our dream live workspace and we moved in I guess early 2001 but the pivotal point to the story now happens in right after 9-11 I think it was like September 20th two three weeks after 9-11 there was an article in the LA Times Sunday color supplement magazine and they were doing a feature on the sort of first wave of adaptive reuse of former industrial buildings gentrification of the downtown area because downtown LA it sort of sat dormant from the 70s all the way through believe it or not

38:57 Until mid 90s late 90s early 2000s nothing was really I talked about in one of my videos at downtown LA at night times a ghost town no one’s there or no one was there because no one lived downtown everyone commuted sort of commuted in and then left so you know the loft was featured in this Sunday times color supplement big double center page spread and literally within two weeks phone rang it was a production it was a location company asking would we be interested in renting the loft for a music video now bear in mind we’d lived in downtown since 94 but we’d never owned anything so we’d seen them shoot everything Batman Terminator gone in 60 seconds and in the 90s we’d be going out a lot we were sort of the Hollywood rock and roll couple gonna punk rock shows and heavy metal shows all the time and we’d be coming back from clubs at two in the morning on a Tuesday night and the street would be closed because they’re filming a scene out of Batman but never occurred to us we could make money just never even occurred to us because we didn’t own anything at the time so when someone said would you be interested in renting your loft for a music video sure how about could that be well the very first thing we ever did was a Missy Elliott video with a artist called tweet and we’re naive we figure what goes around comes around we gave an inch and they took five miles and I’ll never forget this day because it was the best crash course into the film location business so we got a fee and the fee was pretty fat because back then locations paid a lot of money and it was for 14 hour day and the

40:27 Day started at 6 a.m. so 14 hours they were done by 10 p.m. at night but halfway through the day they said hey can we just shoot a scene in your office downstairs like sure why not you’re already here well three hours later I’m like who are these 30 extra people and one of the location guys goes oh nobody told you we’re shooting a Verizon cell phone time with the artist on the back end of the video didn’t realize we could actually have got more money for that no one told us that then they said can we shoot a little nightclub scene in the garage because you’re trying to cram everything into one day so they don’t have to go to into another location so I ended up having to move a few cars out of the garage and shot a nightclub scene there and I think by by midnight I was sort of over it because that was two hours into overtime by 2 a.m. I’m just furious I’m hating it I’m like want to go to bed I’m tired finally I think we kicked him out around three or four ish and so this was I didn’t know what a site rep was so I’m the guy doing the site rep position which in essence is making sure these guys are not fucking anything up and burning the building down so I’d been up literally 22 hours started at 6 a.m. on a Friday ended about 4 a.m. on a Saturday and we were like fuck we’ll never do that again like my eyes were tired my wife was pissed off anyway dust settled two three days later when we realized how much money we’d made in overtime because they went into double time we’re like wow I guess we’ll do that again so over the next couple of years we lived in the building and were selective about what film

41:57 We did because the novelty of having to wait for the production company to end or having them rent as a hotel for the night that novelty wore off but the big organic turning point happened in 2004 a little over 10 years ago when we shot this Bruce Willis movie called The Whole Ten Yards and they were there in the building for a month relocated us to a house in the Hollywood Hills and paid us quite a lot of money and finally the light bulb flashed us to literally it was this simple wow I bet if we didn’t live here we could film all the time so we got into the film business by accident through that article in the LA Times almost 15 years ago and we now average probably 80 to 100 days a year of filming so it’s everything from at one time we do two reality shows a year for a period of about five years because reality shows and laughs were like a match made in heaven so we did America’s next top model and all their spin-off pussycat dolls type of shows and the contender because we had a lot of different looks we became the one-stop shop look where if it was reality show the contestants would live upstairs and then have all the video village control room production office downstairs so once you got in that loop we got listed with five or six agents and we’d do everything from little still shoots to big-budget crime drama TV shows all the sort of CSI NCIS 24 monk all that type of stuff and then we also did tons of commercials everything from fast food cell phone McDonald’s alcohol party scene Bud Light commercials

43:27 Music videos so that sort of enabled us to really over the next couple of years back out of the clothing industry you know by this time we’ve moved out of the building we ended up buying another loft around the corner right in 2006 and then probably from 2004 to probably 2010 we just started losing momentum with the clothing industry spoke earlier on about how we’d go out and see all these rock and roll bands we always said we only designed what we personally like to wear we didn’t follow a trend we sort of made the trend so less we started going out you know we didn’t read we sort of lost connection with our core audience we were no longer teenagers by now we’re in our late 30s but we’re still into music but weren’t going out you know priorities had changed so stale started dwindling and it was affecting the business and finally you know it got to the point where we literally said why are we doing this you know the film industry had been pretty good to us the film revenue is really pretty lucrative because unlike clothing you don’t have to keep redesigning a product just maintain the building maybe change a few things around buy some furniture paint some walls and we were this one-stop shop with a lot of different looks under one route so the filming sort of gave us this ability to scale back on the clothing we said when you stop the clothing business it was like pulling a band-aid off and it was it was hard at first but then you could kind of let your mind open up yeah I mean in reality we’d sort of spoke about it for a couple of years and we were afraid of

44:57 Doing it because we had this pretty tight-knit family of employees and we were just sort of keeping them employed in a sense and finally got to the point where we were sick of workman’s comp and payroll and all the things that bug you when a business is not successful and you’re probably losing money and we’re like wow you know what we’re just done so we let gay people notice let them go we never sold the business we kept all the patterns and all the samples because you never know if we wanted to go back so it was a little leap of faith that had been building up probably for a good two years of we should just get out of this okay and so the cars have been going on this whole time as a yeah I bought my first Porsche in 1992 okay so the Porsche part of the story in the 90s I’m getting speeding tickets racing around at one time I wasn’t just purely Porsche I had we had quite a lot of variety of European sports cars so I’ll go through the list we had a 65 Mustang GT 350 our replica 6070 type Jag 269 Dodge Super B’s 73 loaded per 79 308 GTB and a couple of Porsches all at one go and where’d you keep them all in the garage pretty big you know 26,000 square foot building with a 2,000 square foot former machine shop which became the garage so we had plenty of room to keep and that’s sort of how I’ve been able to have the filming basically supports what I call the out-of-control hobby which is my automotive obsession or the Porsche obsession so

46:27 Little by little everything that was a non Porsche we just gradually got rid of over a four five year period in the early 2000s because 90s I’m getting speeding tickets and collecting non Porsche cars 2001 I joined the Porsche owner’s club and took what I call my sort of spirited reckless street driving to the track and for the next five years I need for speed and did a boatload of track days and got club race license and probably did 4050 track days a year and got to the point where I became a way better driver how was that the track experience is that something you were just really drawn on that because that’s a long story that I’ll get to but I want to finish this thread and then we’ll get to the the track addiction the Porsche slippery slope addiction so little by little I got rid of every car that wasn’t a Porsche because the Porsche just simply excelled at everything you know the other cars for example the Mustang was good but didn’t handle Super B was good in the straight line but didn’t handle you know nothing really handled performance like wise like the Porsche but to finish the point on clothing closing down serious clothing the clothing company it was tough for us because that was serious was our baby that we’d basically grown out of nothing and it got us to the point where we’re able to buy the building the building then we accidentally fell into the film location business so we didn’t know what was coming next but we always knew there was going to be something else down the road you know you

47:57 She said well you want to be in five years and truth be told I hate that question because we don’t know where we’re going to be in five years but you never have you never have go with the gut feeling how bad can it be and I always say we’re on on this open road you know along for the ride we don’t know what’s coming but we always know that whatever it is we’re going to be able to manage it right and everything you take seriously don’t you well yeah the common bond thread to sidestep slightly between the three things that I’ve done and Karen and I’ve done in the past 20 30 years is the clothing the filming the buildings that we’ve owned the property that we’ve managed and the Porsches have all got their own unique style serious clothing wasn’t the only rock and roll clothing company but what we did that separators from other people is we use non-traditional clothing materials for example we used car seat fabric swirl velvet for a line of clothing so we think outside the box because we didn’t go to fashion school no one ever sort of taught us the right and wrong and when serious clothing was pretty big we’d often have people come up to us and familiar story my daughter or sons looking to get into fashion I’m thinking of sending them to fashion school and this is pre-project runway and all these reality show and they’d say what do you think and we’d say well maybe you can learn the business end of things but you cannot go to school to learn ideas and taste you either have that or you don’t you can’t you can’t be taught style someone can show you what styles have come before his punk his blah blah blah but you can’t be taught a style I think you either have it or you don’t so the common bond thread is

49:27 Serious had its own style the building that we’ve been able to film in consistently for 15 years we’re not the only old film location in LA there’s lots of them but ours was just a little bit different because we didn’t set out to build a sound stage so it’s not a bunch of flats and props we built our dream live work facility so we put our soul and passion into it which is what we did with the clothing we didn’t follow the trend we designed what we personally like to wear and apparently we were the trend setters so the part of the story is the Porsches that I’ve designed and sort of tweaked with my own individual style are instantly recognizable as a 911 but what separates them from a lot of people building similar cars so little details that the factory never put on those cars a lot of people tend to emulate okay if this 73 RS left the factory a certain way everyone duplicates the way it left the factory so the common thread the purest the purest so the common thread between the three things that we’ve been able to do with no educational background in that area is always followed our gut always sort of knew if it felt right to us we were on the right track right if you got a second guess something and ask people’s opinions we never did that and you do everything to the max though too yeah we’re extremists we’re also control freaks we like to control our own thing you know a lot of stuff’s done in house or under our control or supervision so close serious clothing down didn’t know what was coming next my Porsche builds have been building some momentum

50:57 I joined the Porsche on a club in 2002 did 4050 track days for the next probably five six years until 2008 and then sort of got a little bit burnt out on that because a lot of travel a lot of time away and racing is quite expensive even a amateur club level so I started collecting cars and sort of was ahead of the trend of what’s now become quite collectible these early mid 60s short wheelbase 911 and so I was building these sort of purpose outlaw style Porsches that were gaining a little bit of momentum and a little bit of notoriety in Southern California and you weren’t building them to sell you’re building them for your own yeah and and people would see them they would be a feature to magazines you’d write blog well before it got to that I formed a blog on Pelican parts that was just literally Porsche collection out of control hobby sort of like here’s a random look into my life of obsessive Porsche collector you know I haven’t been in the film business on the location and a lot of people in the world do I had Porsches and I’d offered to make little short documentary films and nothing ever felt quite right we always go on feel so I’d had one or two magazine articles because I was still a little bit under the radar and still a little bit reluctant to put myself out there but I got an email I guess three years ago probably January of 2012 from Canadian to me a mosque of each you’ve seen the article and it was commercial film director also a Porsche owner and was getting a little bit frustrated with doing

52:27 Commercials and wanted something just a little bit edgy for his real that he could put into a film festival so we had a couple of phone conversations and he basically flew down from Toronto on frequent fly miles and for us it was like well what’s the worst that can happen here we’re going to get some great footage that we can maybe use for something like a blog that we were going to set up and for us like how bad can it be that was literally yeah and this your first time really putting yourself out on camera yeah never been in front of was that comfortable was it a little bit of a risk for you to take me I mean I clicked with Tamir you know he made me feel comfortable because basically none of it was scripted you can obviously tell I don’t like writing shit down so I met him for the first time when he came to set on the first day and we filmed like Friday Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday I guess and he said you want to go over the questions I said no I said just when you’re ready to shoot just ask me and he asked me what does Portia mean to you and as you can tell I sort of ramble on so I’d ramble on for 40 minutes what Portia meant to me and he was able to find the best bits and the whole project just sort of was synergized organically in the sense that was shot on a shoestring budget but he was able to get a great crew that was willing to work for like a quarter of the regular scale because the timing was right or they liked the project so it ended up looking like a million dollar production but it wasn’t that so we shot over four days a lot of driving footage a lot of me talking about what drives me and what motivates me and initially

53:57 The idea was six seven minute YouTube short documentary but we obviously shot like probably 20 hours of footage and realized he realized there was a lot more to it than a six minute documentary so we released a three minute trailer came out in June of 2012 and this was pretty pretty pivotal because Tamir came down in February we shot for four days bonded had a great time and then he disappeared back to Toronto and we were in no rush you know we just let him do his thing didn’t really see any of the rushes or any of that stuff a little bit of playback when you’re on location of did it look fast did it look cool that type of thing but didn’t really put too much thought into it was his baby so released a three minute trailer was just killer and it got picked up by Top Gear on the first day and we didn’t know there was no release date for the film coming out we never done anything before Tamir had done a little edgy piece on a tattoo artist and that got I guess couple of thousand views over I don’t know how long but within the first few hours of this three minute Urban Outlaw trailer got picked up by Top Gear so it became this unbelievable thing of by nine o’clock it had five thousand views by ten o’clock it had ten thousand views by the end of the day I’d like twenty five thousand views it was like went viral you know I remember what you were thinking that day we yeah I do because we knew it was coming out and we had a website before for serious clothing and we sort of had a feeling

55:27 That the film might be something cool so we decided you should get a Facebook page because people are going to want to know what’s going on so I don’t have an iPhone at this time I’m old school flip phone Motorola guy I’m not an iPhone guy I used to take the piss out of guys doing this on the iPhone anyway I’ll tell you my iPhone bit later on but so film comes out got on Facebook twenty five thousand views first day next day I come in these like five hundred friend requests from Spain I’m like what’s going on in Spain turned out the trailer just got blocked and blocked everywhere all the way to Russia and Israel just weird places non Porsche centric places and people connected with the trailer why did they connect do you think so my story and to follow up trailer came out in June and the film came out it got accepted into the London Raindance Film Festival so there was a release date but the London Raindance Film Festival September twenty ninth on a Friday night and this story is great because never thought we’d be in a documentary that got in a film festival so myself and my wife and Tamir and a few other people flew from the states premiered the film at the London Raindance Film Festival on a Friday or Saturday night at Piccadilly Circus Leicester Square to a sold out audience didn’t matter there are only 200 people in the audience a lot of Porsche enthusiasts had sort of been waiting they’d seen the trailer there was quite a lot of buzz about it and often talk about to relate

56:55 To Porsche for me ultimately it’s all about the drive but a close second is the people and I had people that had been following my thread coming from Europe to meet me for the first time and see the film and we had no idea what the film was going to do but we released it after the London Raindance Film Festival it came out October 15th so it’s not even been out two and a half years within I should backtrack slightly couple of pivotal things happened before the film came out probably two weeks after it got on top gear I got an email from Sandy Bodecker who’s the vice president of Nike action sports Porsche fan seen the trailer asked if he could bring Nike does these sort of motivational workshop design project seminars wanted to know if we could host one at the loft now we’ve done sort of corporate Microsoft events before but he said no we want you to actually be part of the event I want you to talk about your passion and what drives you and I’m thinking how does this relate to Nike I mean Nike is a multi-billion dollar a year company but I guess the relation was was formed out of a guy’s garage with a crazy idea so we hosted this workshop with Nike and they asked could we see the film a film wasn’t done hadn’t even been rough edited but they hired the Soho House in LA and we actually screened a rough edit of the unfinished urban outlaw probably in July so probably 40 50 Nike marketing design people right there we knew well we’re probably onto something

58:25 Because they told you they said it was you go wow I mean I’m making little leather door straps thinking how does this relate to Nike but think outside the box so there was a lot of anticipation for the film to come out in the past two and a half years I can sum it up pretty quick of just being a whirlwind of opportunities that came from the film turn October late October 2012 I went to SEMA seamers this big automotive show in Las Vegas aftermarket supplier tuna type thing whilst I was there I had to sneak into the SEMA show on someone else’s pass but I got a call from Jay Leno’s producer who said Jay seen urban outlaw and he’d love to have you come down on the garage show this on a Tuesday at SEMA he goes can you come down on Saturday sure be there Saturday so all of a sudden within two weeks of it being out on the Jay Leno garage show and that just didn’t stop so Jay Leno garage show he’s just phenomenal collector down a worth all-round gearhead guy that’s been super supportive to us so the exposure from the Jay Leno garage show opened us up to a non Porsche centric audience because he’s got a just muscle car enthusiast exotic car enthusiast I just kept snowballing you know and then we just it grew beyond purely Porsche century to the point where I’ve probably done realistically at least 50 TV appearances everything from Jay Leno garage show to fifth gear to the classic car show that just aired last week here in

59:54 London and every country’s got their own version of top gear so we’re in LA familiar story and I think timing was a couple of key points to the film film came out the following year it was the 50th anniversary of the 9-11 so everyone’s talking about the iconic 9-11 I’m obviously not your typical looking Porsche guy so from a journalistic story point of view I’m building these old 50s 60s cafe racer style sport purpose outlaw Porsches it’s the 50th anniversary of the 9-11 and my story I guess from a journalistic point of view was pretty interesting because that’s a big part of the story is that you’re not whatever that it means the typical 9-11 owner which yeah I often say it doesn’t matter all car guys are the same doesn’t matter whether you’re driving a Corvette a muscle car or a drift car or old VW back to the freedom car represents freedom to go wherever you want to go however you want to go whether you’re drifting or whether you’re speeding or street racing people like tinkering with cars it’s an expression of individuality and what they’re into so this barrage of opportunity and emails and TV shows and magazines are still not ended two and a half years later but one of the coolest things really was emails that I got from people that were relating to the story because the film Urban Outlaw is not a story about Porsche it’s sort of a story of my life and it’s a story of my dream and following that dream and in a sense it’s a great American story it is I played it for my girlfriend last night and I said you’re gonna love this and in a minute she’s loving it and she doesn’t

1:01:24 Even seen a Porsche yeah you don’t have to like Porsches to like that I mean I get a lot of emails and obvious ones are dig the cars but they’re not obvious ones are from wives and girlfriends who find they’re like wow I’m so happy because now I realize my boyfriend or husband he’s not the only psycho out there that is in the garage obsessed with his cars so people related to that story of what I’ve told you over the past hour of I wasn’t born rich but followed my dream never gave up so you can relate that story to anything whether you want a brew coffee or make guitars or collect watches or whatever it may be I think that was why the film became relatively successful where it got into several film festivals won a couple of awards and really changed my life I mean we took that leap of faith when we closed series down we didn’t know what was coming next but if we’re still running that clothing company with a dozen employees I wouldn’t have had the free time over the past two years last year I did 12 events four of them were events with Porsche I came to Europe five times so I would not have been able to travel right what’s your relationship like with Porsche now because they they said they sent you a letter after all this happened that letter after Urban Outlaw came out this realized I’d wrote that first letter as a 10 year old and never gave up on the dream so it surprised you to be contacted by them yeah it did I wasn’t expecting I was guessing they’re a very conservative German company but maybe I’m wrong on the surface they are but underneath it’s a little bit different but they related to that story and we ended up hosting an event in conjunction with the LA

1:02:54 Show in 2013 because the warehouse is pretty close to the convention center so our first corporate event with Porsche was they displayed the new Panamera in 2013 at the loft and then we formed this relationship where they did this thing called the PM event which is basically a global event for all their dealers where the showcase a new product coming out so they obviously realized I’m a true enthusiast had this facility that was you know old cool building close to the convention center where we hosted a couple events with Porsche and they even included me on the Porsche classic end of things in one of these little seminars where it was over two days and it was like a two hour workshop where they basically did a presentation and then I drove into the garage and talked about what I thought was great about Porsche and a lot of people relate to that story well last year like I said I did four events with Porsche I did the techno classic show in Essen which is a automotive trade show I did the old time of GP at the Nürburgring in Germany I did the Goodwood revival here and then I did a Porsche event in December also so I think they realized I have something that you cannot manufacture bottle and sell yeah passion and enthusiasm yeah and authenticity I feel like these days somebody someone in the tech guys in this in this area over here because we’re in the middle of tech in London said it like authenticity is something it’s like its own commodity these days because with the social media and YouTube and everything people can see everything so they can tell make 20 years

1:04:24 Ago an ad might get you by if you were a corporate but now people see and smell everything and so I guess that’s why people relate to you well the Porsche thing people can’t understand it because you know I’m not a typical looking Porsche guy but the relationship you know it could end tomorrow because he’s no contracts but I got the freedom to do whatever I want to do and they have realized obviously I think because he’s continuing to this day that I’m bringing a new face into Porsche and apparently I’m bringing a younger face into Porsche because there is a little bit of a stigma of your typical Porsche guy is a either the 80 style yuppie Wall Street guy driving his Porsche but never takes it to the racetrack or it’s the older more stuffy guy polo shirt wearing golf club playing type of guy you know so I’m bringing in a new element of through all the emails I get guys that will send me emails how I was never into Porsche but I started following your bills and I’m really inspired to go out and do my own so Porsche is not just about selling new cars are about Porsche classic is supplying parts and resources all the way back to the 356 over 60 years later so what’s happened in the past couple years the 50th anniversary the 911 Porsche prices started rising a lot of collectors were getting into the Porsche mark that were non Porsche collectors they might have been Ferrari Lamborghini guys that realize well these Porsches compared to Lamborghinis and Ferraris are actually a relative bargain performance is equal you can drive them there’s a lot of high mileage Porsches out there you don’t see a lot of high mileage Ferraris

1:05:54 So there’s a wealthy end coming into the Porsche hobby and then there’s a non Porsche guys coming on on the lower mid-level end and I think Porsche realized I’m bringing a new new customer in indirectly that may be buying parts for the classic car or they may be buying the first time Porsche so you know it’s this great relationship where the lonely cars I just had a video come out two days ago where I’m comparing my 1975 turbo against a 2015 turbo during a comparison of 40 years a turbo so for me I mean it’s like a dream come true that didn’t plan it didn’t solicit it didn’t approach it I haven’t approached anybody wasn’t like I’ll rank Jay Leno up and said hey can anybody be on your garage show so you know now we’re getting these opportunities to travel we just got invited to go to Tokyo for a Porsche related event you know I just made a video London outlaw here in December so I’m sort of really happy and fortunate that I’m able to do what I want is there any downside to that wave is I mean do you yeah I mean do you have a water yeah yeah yeah hold on I’ll go yeah you stay right there alright here we are back in cool cool cool now I mean for me I said it earlier on I’m this open road this journey not knowing where it’s going but sort of now now we get into some pretty interesting opportunities that are going to be coming my way you know obviously over the past two years is people have approached us to do things from our own TV show to various other things so now it’s often say the past couple of years have been laying this foundation sewing the seed for the next sort of 10 years you know I spoke earlier on about serious clothing had a good run for a dozen years I think there’s like a 10 12 year cycle the film business was phenomenal for 10 12 years I’m now starting to see that

1:08:05 As our neighborhoods becoming more gentrified filming sort of becoming a little bit more difficult because you’ve got issues with retailers and stores and parking so I’ve really seen this cycle sort of be a 10 12 year cycle I’m about to turn 48 you know I don’t feel like I’m almost 50 but things are aching that never ate before but I still feel like I’m just firing on all six cylinders you know I’m just on this role that hasn’t seemed to have stopped over the past 30 years you know I don’t feel like I’m working I’m just enjoying life doing what I really love to do what I noticed most about that documentary is how all the details you took so seriously when you’re building your cars and especially it felt like I could see your fashion in there like when you’re making those vinyl door tabs or when you’re talking about the way the interior feels or you talk about the way that you customize a door handle and you said you might not notice it but you do notice it subconsciously and that’s always been the case with things you design yeah and I think to step back to what I told you an hour ago about when I was a cross-country runner at an early age I’ve always been motivated I’ve never been afraid of hard work because that is hard work when I heard you were a cross-country runner I was like okay that’s an individual sport where you put yourself through pain yeah I used to train twice a day five six days a week so I didn’t think anything of it at the time was just natural to me but I think 30 odd years later that’s so the seed of motivation early on and going after things that you’re passionate about

1:09:35 Setting goals I’m a goal orientated collector had to have one of each year from a certain year now I’m expanding into variety but um I said all the time I’ll repeat it again the cut the three things that link everything we’ve done together are the common thread is style and design and that’s like I said earlier on you can’t go to school to learn that we didn’t go to school to learn we bought a couple of buildings and fell into the film business some people say you got lucky well how did we get lucky three times didn’t have no fashion education background we’re not Donald Trump but we ended up you know owning six pieces of property in LA and we got into neighborhoods before they became trendy it’s like our buildings worth ten times what we paid for it now in 15 years you know I didn’t go to a school or design school to learn car design and I don’t call myself a car designer necessarily but I’m adding my own personality and soul to it so I don’t think we got lucky three times being sort of successful at what we love to do and for me everything that’s happened since Urban Outlaw came out all this media exposure in a sense we had that 15 years ago with serious clothing serious clothing used to be in all the magazines we outfitted everyone from Alice Cooper to Madonna we’re on the cover of Rolling Stone you know a lot of pop stars rock and roll stars wore our clothing so that came natural when we bought the building was in the LA Times magazine then it got in LA loft book then it got in a couple of other books so that common thread just keeps going

1:11:05 So it’s not rocket science it’s like maybe people find it hard to find something they like to do which led up to the Ted talk right Ted talk was something pretty pivotal to me I did it I guess I did it almost a year ago did you prepare for that cuz I couldn’t tell if you either no let me tell the Ted talk story okay I think I did the Ted talk first week of June as when I think it was titled go with your gut yeah so literally three weeks early I get a phone call from a friend of a friend who said I’d like to come down to talk to you something about a Ted talk and I’m like what’s a Ted talk and no idea what it was never heard of it he goes we think we’ll be great for I showed the guy your Urban Outlaw film and a couple of your other videos and he he said we think you have a message I’m like what’s my message he goes well we’ll come down and go over a few things with you so they gave me the general outline on what a Ted talk was and they said well we think you should actually rehearse the talk we want you to come I did at UCLA and we want you to come down and rehearse and I’m like told this story a hundred times how hard can it be to tell my story well let me tell you the Ted talk was perhaps the most nerve-wracking thing I’ve ever done because I did the rehearsal on a Friday and the Ted talk was on a Saturday and I rambled on and it took me half an hour to get half of my story out I mean we’ve been talking an hour and 15 minutes here so I’m like oh fuck the girl you got to do it in 18 minutes and I’ve got slides as well so the Ted talk was difficult in the sense of I knew I had to bid a certain

1:12:35 Point in my story by 10 minutes otherwise I was gonna be out of time and I actually went one minute over right it’s like 18 or 19 minutes so they’re too difficult there were a couple of difficult parts of the Ted talk one it’s in front of a live audience of intellectual students at UCLA well I left school at 15 so UCLA on a stage on the campus slightly daunting you know the second thing was the big clock in front ticking down you know everything I’ve done up to this point film wise I ramble on I spoke about it with Tamir they find the good bits and edit it down or if I fuck something up ago let me say that again Ted talks live there is no safety net there’s no second chance so they said we suggest you go home and write down some bulletin points and this is like four o’clock on a Friday afternoon by the time we got back from UCLA LA traffic and all that so I start riding it down it just was going nowhere it seemed this is so artificial it’s so structured which is why when you sent me your list I don’t know if I offend you but I’m just like I got no interest in doing this a lot about you you know it’s I’m like it just seems I’m like reading from the script of my life I’m like I’m just gonna wing it so the first two minutes I was actually pretty nervous I get up there crack a joker I don’t think many people knew who I was but two minutes in I relaxed and it was just natural from there and the great thing about the Ted talk is it was a valuable lesson for me you know I’m telling my story and also pacing myself and sort of being able to get up in front of a live audience and

1:14:05 The Ted talk is the most viewed thing I’ve done yeah 1.2 million times that’s more than more than urban outlaw right yeah it’s interesting cuz I looked at the metric and I was like hmm yeah it’s because it’s hard to put a number on it was originally hosted on Real House yeah and it got like 600,000 views there and then everyone reblogged it on right yeah but as a single piece yeah no question the Ted talk is the number one why do you think that is I think people relate to the story it’s always back to the stories simple stories you know the people that were doing the like Ted talk lectures before it was I swear to God it was like watching paint dry for me oh for the rest of that UCLA one I was the last one before lunch so I was probably I don’t know they do three an hour I was probably the 12th one up you know they bang a lot of those out and it was like watching paint dry guys talking about genetic bonding and molecular strokes and I’m like just shoot me I mean to me I couldn’t relate to it relatability I think is the key right you know I get up almost one email a day maybe more now from people that watch the Ted talk and I would say 95% of those people that watch me on the Ted talk had no idea who I was wasn’t like there were Porsche followers but it’s funny even today I’m hanging out with a guy and he’s goes what’s his podcast you’re doing I said I don’t really know but the guy saw my Ted talk he goes you did a Ted talk like it was a big deal that I’d done a Ted talk to me honest I didn’t know what it was so there was no fear element there there was no big deal you know I didn’t really I guess realize the significance of doing a Ted talk is quite an honor

1:15:35 Right I didn’t move in that circle so to me it was like just another thing I’m gonna talk about really or do I mean like when you contacted me opportunity I’m like sure I’ll go I’ve never met I don’t really know what he thinks about I didn’t really ask anyone what it’s about but back to how bad can it be I actually once I realized I was half a mile from me I’m like oh listen no brainy I’ll go do that I’ll go to the podcast right another thing that just kind of happens to you going with your gut and then these kind of things happen which is I say yes more than I say no and I think that’s a simple lesson but back to the Ted talk is one of the real for me the great things to come out of Ted talk was people finding my story inspiring that they’re now changing their life and I have received a few emails from guys that quit the job and some of them were pretty lucrative jobs but they weren’t happy in them you know and that story is you don’t necessarily need a university degree and that type of education to do what you love you know there’s this whole this area is a great example of creative artistic handmade you know corporate gigs are one thing but people can be happy making candles and pots in the backyard garage and I think that was the connection that people responded to through the Ted talk was I’m going down this path to a job that I know I’m not going to be happy in or I already went down that path and I’m ready for a career change and a lot of times people are afraid to take that challenge I guess for me

1:17:05 To sort of summarize 30 years coming to America was best thing I ever did because that how bad can it be mentality I don’t think would have happened in Sheffield which is why I’m always sort of open to try something new and slightly different even if I know nothing about it because you can always ask questions to get help I think a lot of people are afraid to take that plunge you know I see a lot of people wanting to buy a Porsche and they just are afraid of everything so they ask way too many questions or they want to build a car and get everyone’s opinion and get way too confused and never complete the project you know we’ve done a lot of things but the sort of simple things right is that we’ve succeeded because we’re passionate about when people ask you about that going with your gut feeling I mean I guess there’s not much more to say than go with your gut but do you do you ever try to tell people about how to do that because I feel like we’re conditioned these days not to go with our gut well I think that was the Nike story why did Nike come to me well slightly thinking outside the box well how does that relate to Nike well it might be just a different color lace on the shoe or something like that but how do you teach go with your gut feeling I think people know things are either if it fits if it feels slightly fearful and wow I don’t know if I can do this you should probably do it yeah I’m hearing that message a lot these days you know from the people I speak the nervousness of wow this is a really good idea but can I do it well we really love this building but everyone’s telling us why you buying that well we’re buying it because we like it I’m doing these integrated grafted turn signals on a Porsche that no one’s ever done before and yeah I know

1:18:35 It’s gonna upset people but I don’t care it’s my car so I guess it’s you know going with your own sort of I guess you have to feel comfortable in the fact that you’re gonna make it happen it’s like when we bought that building we knew we were gonna make it happen we didn’t know how long it was gonna take but we never gave up I just shipped a car from Australia I talked about it in this new video if you’d said to me a year ago I’d be shipping a car for around the world I’d say you were crazy but I never gave up on chasing something didn’t really matter that was halfway around the world right I’m not gonna ask you what the next five years holds but I’m I know this is a couple things that you always want to make clear to people you don’t build cars for other people you really build cars for yourself and I guess you just look at projects that you like is that is that kind of what you’re about yeah I’m always building for myself right now I’m in this period of variety so I’ve ticked off the early 64 through 73 911 box and you got them all got the dose of turbo fever 75 6 and 7 got them all so now I’m about variety experiencing everything Porsche has to offer which ultimately means for me newer cars now in the Porsche world there’s a big sort of divide air-cooled early stuff newer water-cooled stuff the purest you know they don’t drink the water my running joke is I might have a water leak in my building because there’s some air-cooled stuff coming in but to answer your question I don’t build customer cars I turn that down every day people want I think there’s a misconception that people may think I’m an independent

1:20:05 Performance tuning shop purely because I’ve got so much exposure but I think I’ve got exposure because one I’ve made time to I’ve said yes most of the time and I think what I’m doing is pretty cool and slightly different so a lot of people assume I build customer cars I don’t I just build cars for myself I like variety and diversity I’ve owned over 59 11s of course occasionally you sell one or two and buy two or three different ones or you know some of these cars have become pretty well known through magazine coverage and media exposure that sometimes sometimes quite a lot of times I get emails from people if you ever want to sell that car let me know so I’ve never really had a problem selling a car and the reason I don’t build customer cars is to me it’s still a fun hobby like if you come to me and you say yeah I really love you 65 911 but I’d like it to be brown with a pink interior all of a sudden that’s no longer my car it’s your interpretation of my style but done through you so all of a sudden I don’t have full control over it I have to manage your expectations on time money quality blah blah blah so all of a sudden that is becoming pressure pressure is not fun becoming a job I’ve gone down that road before you know sure I could hire two three people and probably build four five cars a year and actually make you know pretty good living out of doing them but I’m just not interested in that a lot of people can’t necessarily relate to that some people can some people come up but it’s funny sometimes when you tell people no I won’t build you want to just make some want one even more yeah I think people have a hard time understanding

1:21:35 That you’re just pursuing your passion and that you don’t have a price tag I think that’s something that’s hard for people to understand yeah but it makes sense when you explain it yeah you know if I could sell every car I own tomorrow I think wouldn’t take long to do it but what do I replace it with right there’s a like my there are part of my soul you know it’s part of my identity is part of what I’m really passionate about and when you stop feeling passionate about it you’ll do something else yeah I don’t think I’m ever gonna stop feeling passionate about Porsche’s cuz I’m 48 turning 48 I fell in love with them 38 years ago I don’t think that’s gonna change my tastes are evolving and diversifying but I’m always gonna have that core of early cars you know I like to experience life that’s why I’m here I mean why else would I be here you know I’m not promoting anything you said to me what are the things you want to talk about I’m just here telling my story and sharing a story that I’m I’m passionate about and I think people relate to is that sort of dream of just try to enjoy the most out of life and do what you like to do and hopefully you know do something you enjoy and it becomes successfully sort of I guess if I’ve got a motto that’s it I always ask everyone here at the end a few questions I’m gonna ask you I mean we’re at the end yeah we’re close to the end here if you can make a phone call to the 20 year old Magnus and give that young man a bit of advice is there anything specific that you would tell him I think I’d say you know what pal is gonna work out right just keep doing what you’re doing and really keep plodding along and stay focused motivated work hard and keep at it

1:23:05 And that’s how I was back then to me it was an adventure going to America and that adventure never stopped you know I overstayed my visa for a certain period of time I couldn’t travel cuz I didn’t have a green card it really didn’t bother me you know maybe because it’s so there’s so much opportunity out there so I guess what I’d say is never say no to anything never really turn anything down or always be open to things that are slightly different because you don’t know where they’re gonna take you said yes to the TED talk that brought me here I don’t know where this is gonna take this will take you somewhere so these roads so you know you’re at a cross point at a road you don’t know where you’re going you either go left or right I mean yeah that for some reason you’re gonna go one direction so go with that gut feeling so that’s what I’d say to me 35 years ago just keep out it’s all gonna work out second part of that question is what’s the best advice you’ve ever received could be business could be personal I don’t know if you had any mentors with business or if you figured it out but is there anything that you remember no because I never really once had landed in America wasn’t like I had my parents tell me what I shouldn’t shouldn’t do and couldn’t couldn’t do so self-taught really I really never had a mentor saying do this do that right and fashion business all that was just you I’m gonna decide was Karen I we were self-taught it literally was take the jeans inside out take them apart copy a pattern I mean I’m trying really hard to think of someone that gave me some inspirational thing that I is my motto that I keep with me and not really finding it to

1:24:38 You seem very independent it just watching that documentary it seems like all that stuff is coming out of you I guess you always got to listen to the voice in your head yeah last part of that is you know to the 20 year old is listening to us around the world that that that wants to do something big someone listening outside of this groovy studio somebody will be listening to this hopefully I like to but like what would you say to that 20 year old I know you said before that some people talk about Porsches but they never buy one because maybe that’s too much of a risk or too much of a commitment and then they don’t do something is there anything you tell people when they ask you they’re like I want to do this I want to do that if it’s Porsche centric I say there’s a Porsche for every budget you got five grand by a box the 10 grand you know five grand by a 944 10 grand by a box the 1520 grand by an SC or three to career and above 30 grand there’s a lot of variety but the key thing is just get one a lot of people overthink it and the searching for this perfect car and two years later they’ve never found it I’m like dude you could have been driving a average car for the past two years while you really focused on getting what you really wanted because there is no perfect car I’ve owned over 50 of them and no two are ever the same and you always have to do something and my models always the same when I buy a car expect the worst and hope for the best so just don’t overthink it you know if you’re looking to get a Porsche whatever your budget is just go get one whether it’s a fifteen hundred dollar 924 that barely runs you’re still behind the wheel of a Porsche and then just let that sort of seed of passion and desire grow because

1:26:08 Once you get one one probably won’t be enough but just dive in a lot of people sort of walk around the pool and think about everything that could go wrong why don’t you just dive in and take a swim and see how bad it is right I know my first car was a 1968 Ford Mustang see that’s a cool first car it is a cool first car and I I worked my whole summer for it and I went to the auto trader when I was in San Diego and I finally found I got a picture of it I’ll show you later and I paid twelve hundred dollars for it and it was just like I just dove into it I remember I took an auto body course and for like a year I can high school I would drive to this community college and I just it was different colors and primer and I finally painted it and I was battling the purists they were like you know make a candy apple red and I was like I hate candy apple red and you know I wanted to paint the Shelby stripes on it even though it wasn’t a Shelby and like I did it all myself and you know this is what motivated you I just maybe it was that freedom or that creativity or all the fuck you know I’m gonna do it my way maybe the fuck you is a little bit of I think you need a little bit of fuck you drive yeah maybe it’s some of that and some of it is independent it makes you independent because it’s like you in the car right these guys got that cool Mustang there’s not candy apple red yeah I know that guy yeah yeah and it’s something that it works with the male personality maybe because I don’t know maybe we don’t have that that many chances to be to express ourselves and it’s a way you can do it through your car I cause a great one it’s like a you know 277 is my four-wheel calling car you know the some of the parts of that 1971 911 T is nothing special but it’s a memorable moments the mile

1:27:38 The adventures that I’ve had in that car and it’s also the car that people relate to me through because it’s the one that’s got the most exposure yeah so that’s become something that’s pretty priceless right but the some of the parts is not really that from a monetary point of view the value of the similar policy is not great but what the car means to me is priceless because it’s all my racing’s been done in that and that car has been on this journey with me it’s the second Porsche I ever owned so what I’ve owned the longest so you know certain things you just become really connected to you know when I heard you were the Porsche guy I was like well he’s not gonna want to hear my my Mustang story and then I was hearing when you when you were on Rogan I was listening to you last night and you said the Mustang owner and the Porsche owner Porsche owner to me are very similar they’re both like to customize their cars both in production for 50 years both icons and Ford is embodied by the Mustang so true I mean I tell that story all the time and a lot of people don’t tell that story I don’t know why because as you just said those cars have been in production for 50 years they’re both iconic cars when you think of Ford you really think of Mustang when you think of Porsche you think 911 or you think turbo both those cars have fanatical followings and it’s just the similarities a different type of car but back to the person the cars secondary in a sense to the fact that Mustang guys are very similar to Porsche guys and the fact that they like to put their own individuality on that car now how crazy is Joe Rogan you’re talking about Joe Rogan earlier on yeah yeah you were there you were there a few months yeah this is only the third podcast I’ve done the

1:29:08 First one was Adam Carolla he’s got car cast and then the Joe Rogan podcast he’s just such a cool dude yeah Porsche guy as well and real real animal he’s just cool guy all around and you guys went deep on the Porsches you guys really talk yeah a lot of Porsche talk I asked him a little bit about his martial arts background and you know he’s just very cool guy you know likes barbecue in his bore me and just all types of wacky stuff and very focused motivated guy yeah yeah you guys get along very well there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye I think cool or do you have a martial arts background or people are asking me question meditation background anything people were asking yoga for a little bit in the serious clothing days we used to have a yoga teacher come in two days a week when we were trying to get Zen so we do it in the office it was me and the five or six girls I enjoyed it but maybe I should get back into I’m just constantly it seems running from one place to the next right but it’s an enjoyable way if you are oh yeah but for me my meditation is getting the car and drive right you know I talk about the freedom on the open road maybe it’s a cliche but for me it’s really true I spoke earlier on about how I walked to work so for me I don’t commute in a car so 80% of my driving is pure pleasure unless I’m going grocery shopping so I picked the perfect time to go on my perfect road and you’re in this zone nothing else matters and generally it’s in a mountain canyon road so the phone never rings so you’re not distracted and it’s my yoga I say people like to go to the gym and work out

1:30:38 Like to get in the car and drive and it really gets me in that zone of you set up little challenges go faster break later to get on the gas earlier and nothing else matters when you’re out there right the one I got from documentary is you’re not just about the building and you’re about the driving one and each car means something different yeah no to do the same right and it’s a whole process from the first chase like finding the car in Australia that video that just came out people are really relating to that story because it’s the passion to chase something halfway around the world and included in the video of the guys in Australia that found the car and they shot some video footage and then I sort of wrap it up when Porsche along with a new version of the car the 40 years later and not a comparison test but it’s about how the two do a similar thing slightly differently right in your first right hand drive as well yeah first right hand drive car but ultimately it’s just I say get out and drive that’s my motto for various reasons but I think the freedom to go wherever you want whatever patient want to do it out and it clears your mind or it clears my mind when I’m out there trying yeah you were saying that but you know when you’re on the when you’re on the road and everything loses your mind I mean you just you go somewhere else when you’re driving ultimate freedom is behind the wheel yeah and for me you know the new kick is I shot a video here in London I want to go shoot a video in Tokyo and I’d love to sort of sort of parlay this into like a travel type thing where I’m shooting videos in interesting places around the world so far I must have put that out there in the world because now we’re getting invited to places like Tokyo and I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a Tokyo

1:32:08 Video coming out pretty soon because how great would that be driving around Tokyo at night that would be intense so these opportunities just you know I think you well I’m a big believer in what goes around comes around you know I always try and be generous with my time I always try to be nice to people you know and doesn’t you know people don’t always turn up at the right time people come to visit me all the time and they show up without appointments and at first it’s slightly irritating because it’s like wow if you could find me you could have called me and made an appointment because they never come at the right time you’re either pissed off leaving just getting in or something’s not working out but you gotta put on you gotta be nice to people so I always I think I think that’s how calmer is you put good out there you try to be nice to people I’m never negative to people I always try to be positive that coupled with follow your passion and put the energy in I mean you know luck only goes so far that’s a small part of the game I think you know the game is really focused motivate dedicate hard work you know for me I talk about Porsche being a sensory thing I think you got to be in touch with sight sound smell feel touch as well so those are my I guess parting words very good Magnus thanks so much for your time it’d be my pleasure it’s been a lot of fun please come see us again if you’re coming through London if you haven’t seen his documentary you know go check it out on YouTube now it’s yeah with 32 minutes it’s a great way to get to know you I think it’s probably true I would say so but this hour and a half was a great way to know you too so I appreciate the opportunity now thank you as we say in London Real it’s about the