How Magnus Walker Built an Empire From Nothing

I've quietly been letting cars go over the past five, six years.

One here, one there.

One time I had seven three-liter turbos.

I'm now down a two.

It was quietly let one go.

Did I miss it?

No, I thought I'd miss it.

I didn't miss it.

Let another one go.

Did I miss that?

No, don't even notice it.

So for anyone that ever wanted one of my cars, here's your

opportunity to have one.

My life's going to go on, right?

With or without these cars.

And something else is going to come in.

That's the next chapter.

Yeah.

But I'm actually pretty excited about.

I like that, but I got to let that stuff go.

I'm not going to be defined by what I own part of who I am, but

that's not going to define me.

Welcome back to Talk Talk Nation.

I'm your host Joe Weber and join with me this week is the one

that only the urban outlaw himself, Mr. Magnus Walker.

Magnus, thank you so much for being here with us or I should

say we're here with you.

I'm always here.

So thank you, Joe Weber and Dona Media for coming downtown to

see me.

I mean, you're with me.

I'm always here.

We are people come through all the time, but welcome.

Well, you just had, you just opened up your shop to the public.

Correct.

For the first time.

No, no, no, I do it occasionally, you know, sort of under the radar.

You know, this is not really a shop.

Yeah.

You know, it's my garage.

I call it, you know, sort of what separates me from a lot of

the other automotive people you may be talking to is this is not

actually a business.

It's an out of control hobby.

So last week was LA art week.

It was also LA Porsche week.

Yeah.

Based around the Porsche lit fest that has been going for 42

years at the LAX airport Hilton.

And I'll sum it up for people that are not Porsche people.

It's a bit like train spotting for Porsche people.

Yeah.

You know, everyone's all about the old school stuff.

And last week was all about the open houses and the lit fair and

swap meets and sort of the organic end of the Porsche world.

You know, that kind of coincided with you opening up to the public.

Yeah, it made sense because, you know, people want to come through here with

it being Porsche week.

There's a lot of people in town for all the, all of the Porsche activities.

And it tends to be more of the old school three, five, six crowd.

I mean, in the average age, he's like, you know, 65 to 90, you know, no

ones, uh, you know, flying drones is hardly any social media, uh, content

being created, no one's roaming around with cameras and gimbals.

I've never even heard of it before.

And let me tell you, it was refreshing.

Yeah.

That's how the car community used to be before it sort of had to be

documented every single step of the way.

That's interesting.

That you learn something every day.

There's no, no boomer with like an iPad filming.

I didn't see it.

I mean, my open house was a bit different because, you know, Larry

Chan was here and we're doing stuff together.

And that was a younger crowd for the most part, though, LA Porsche week,

which is centered around this lit fair and all the independent shops or

open houses is put on by the three, five, six community.

Okay.

So the three, five, six community, you know, that was Porsche's first car

back in 1948.

So, you know, those things are almost 80 years old and most of their owners

are in a similar age bracket and they don't really care about creating

content, which is refreshing because you just focused on the people in the

cars and having face to face, eye to eye communication.

You know, it's like a digital detox, you know, and a sea of disposable

content that, you know, is, is made to last 30 seconds and then you've

moved on to the next thing.

So it's sort of like stepping back in time.

You know, I've been a car guy for 50 years.

And so I'm kind of bridging the gap between the new school and the old

school.

Yeah, I was going to say, you have a great online presence and I feel like

you're well known on the internet.

So being a bridge to that community could be cool too.

And, and also detoxing and just being able to like disconnect from everything.

Yeah.

So, you know, digital detox, digital disconnect, you know, I'm all about

bridges, we're literally one block from the 60th bridge, you know, I've

traveled the world and I've done events and gatherings usually under bridges,

whether it's Sydney Harbor Bridge, London Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, LA,

Sixth Street Bridge.

And, you know, I always talk about bridges, bring people in and out of

the city and the bridge gaps and bring people together.

You know, I'm all about communicating.

I'm a car guy, but that doesn't define who I am.

You know, I'm a man with a beard this year is the 40th year that I've

been in LA.

I thought you were going to say it's the 40th year you've had a beard.

No, I probably had a beard 25 years.

You know, there's a pre-bid days, you know, which were the glam rock

days of the 80s and 90s.

Do you sue to get those pictures taken off the internet of you without a beard?

No, not at all.

You're not, not at all, you know, they're in, they're in that catalogue

right there.

We can dive into that later.

Yeah.

You know, life is all about phases.

You know, next year I'm turning 60.

This year marks my 40th anniversary in LA.

I literally arrived on a trailways bus less than two miles from where

I was sat right now at Union Station after spending the summer on a

summer camp north of Detroit with inner city kids in Detroit and the

surrounding areas in 1986.

So let me let's back up for a second because that's a lot.

That's a crazy history just to even get to LA.

You grew up in Sheffield, correct?

Correct.

So what made you cross the Atlantic and start?

Pretty simple sex, drugs, rock and roll.

You know, I grew up in, I was born July 7th, 1967.

So you can do the math figure out how old I am.

So I grew up in the 70s and 80s.

You know, I was a bit of a rebel outcast at an early age.

You know, by the time I was 13, 14, I discovered the new wave of British

heavy metal and I was going to rock shows when I was 14, 15, seeing everyone

from let's say Iron Maiden, Death Leopard, Saxon, Motorhead, Deep Purple

all the way through the American bands such as Van Halen and Motley Crew

and Poison and obviously ACDC and Sabbath and all of this stuff.

So, you know, did they all come through Sheffield or did you have to travel to?

No, they all came through Sheffield, Sheffield City Hall.

The first big gig I went to was the Monsters of Rock Festival at Donnington

Park in 1982.

And I've got that program right there.

Wow.

It's literally right there.

So you you save everything.

Yeah, I tried to, you know, yeah, you know, that's what mums are good for.

You know, you know, you end up putting stuff in a box and your mom never

throws it away.

So probably 25 years ago when I went back to England and going up in my mom's

attic and found all these rock programs from literally 82 to 86.

And, you know, that was when I left England to come to America.

So I spent 19 years of my life in Sheffield, England, which is a former

industrial steel town, famous for cutlery and stainless steel.

They invented the process of stainless steel in the 1880s and supplied

a lot of steel to the cutlery industry and obviously the automotive industry.

So ironically, going from Sheffield to Detroit was kind of a similar thing

because Detroit, obviously the motor city in the mid 80s has fallen on hard times.

It wasn't going through the gentrification and resurgence that it's going through right now.

Yeah.

This is like the start of the downfall.

The downfall had already happened in the 70s.

By the time it was 80s, Detroit was in big urban decay.

All these former grand buildings were, you know, abandoned, boarded up.

Squatters were living in a, you know, the big new Ford plant,

the Grand Central Station that just opened up.

That was a ruin in the 80s and it was just still a ruin in the 90s and early 2000s.

So, you know, people had left Detroit and it was sort of a little bit of a ghost town.

You know, grown up as a kid in Sheffield, England,

I listened to a lot of heavy metal music, a lot of American music,

and I watched a lot of American TV shows.

Shows such as Dukes of Hazard, Starsky and Hutch, Kojak Chips.

So they're all centered around mostly LA and car culture.

Lots of cars in those.

Lots of cool cars.

You know, Starsky and Hutch, you know, the Ford Torino with the stripe down the side.

And then of course, General Lee in...

Yeah, you know, so for me, I was influenced by Americana,

whether it was the music, the film, Captain America, Evil Can Evil,

Red, White and Blue, Stars and Stripes.

Everything's bigger and better in America and American TV shows, like I say.

So I did this thing called Camp America,

which was just a way for me to get out of England

and get to America on a sort of a student visa, which I ended up overstaying.

So it was a program that you could transfer over to Detroit

and be a camp counselor for the summer?

You don't really know where you end up.

And so I got to set the scenario of summer camps don't exist in England,

or at least they didn't in the 80s.

I wasn't even in the Cubs or the Scouts or whatever it may be.

So the concept of a summer camp was completely foreign to me.

And that was where I became what I call an adaptive swimmer.

And by that, I mean, I'm 19 years old,

looking like I want to be in Poison or Motley Crew.

And I'm dropped into this environment,

this urban environment north of Detroit on a summer camp on Lake Michigan.

And everyone's into Run DMC and LL Cool J.

And I'm into Motorhead and Iron Maiden, and it was a culture shock.

And that was where I really learned to adapt to the environment that you're in

if you want to survive.

And that was where I sort of coined this term,

how I became an adaptive swimmer.

Like I'd left school at 15 with two O levels,

which is not a lot of education.

But I described myself as being street smart.

And there's kind of two different types.

You're either book smart where you get a lot of education

and you go to college and you've got a career path.

I was complete opposite.

I didn't know what I was going to do.

Becoming an actual swimmer was not part of the equation,

even though you're a camp counselor.

But it's pretty funny, the term adaptive swimmer.

I was a general counselor on this summer camp,

but I was a lifeguard at that summer camp.

And it was kind of just, even that was strange,

because Europeans wear speedos.

Americans don't wear speedos.

They've got board shorts.

So everything was a culture shock to me.

And it was also a culture shock to the people

that were on the summer camp.

I would imagine.

It was to watch with this freaky guy

with spiky peroxide air wearing speedos by the pool.

It's kind of like watching Borat or something like that.

Like watching an Ali G episode of Before It Even Existed.

You got to remember this is 1986.

So the internet does not exist.

Cell phones do not exist.

So there's like, these kids are not seeing

what you grew up with in Sheffield.

They're not seeing heavy metal the same way you are.

No, but ironically, Detroit, the motor city,

Motown, music, soul, Iggy in the Stooges,

MC5, Alice Cooper, Rundown Stealtown,

Rundown Automotive City, right?

Sheffield and Detroit were kind of similar

working class neighborhoods and cities.

So that resonated with you?

It did.

And as time went on, it really resonated.

Yeah.

You know, for me, originally, it was just like,

I got to get out of Sheffield.

This is going nowhere fast.

You know, I never spent any time in London.

My goal was, hey, I sort of stumbled

into this Camp America thing.

It was like work eight weeks on a summer camp,

and then you got six to eight weeks to travel around America.

Oh, that's very cool.

But all I did was buy a trailways bus ticket.

So my goal was to get to LA.

Yeah, I kind of skimmed over it,

but you said that your visa lapsed

and you were technically here illegally for a while?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I arrived on that trailways bus,

Union Station, end of August,

probably like whatever the end of August Labor Day weekend is,

and took a trailways bus from Detroit to LA

and then got on a bus from Union Station.

When I arrived at Union Station,

it was probably four in the morning,

and I remember sleeping on a bench

and getting woken up by security

who basically said, you can't be here.

And at that point, this was the rude,

rough wake-up call of, in my mind,

LA was like the LA that I'd seen on TV and in movies.

And I'm like, we're all the beautiful people,

we're all the rock stars.

Where's life?

Because Union Station at 4, 5 a.m. in the morning.

And then you looked at a map

and realized how huge LA was?

Yeah, and then I figured out, hey,

well, I didn't figure out, I asked a lot of questions.

Where am I gonna stay?

I ended up staying at the YMCA off of Hollywood Boulevard.

So I had to take a bus from downtown LA to Hollywood Boulevard.

And Hollywood Boulevard, it hasn't really changed in 40 years.

And it's this magical place that you either love or hate.

But it's a bit like the Guns N' Roses Welcome to the Jungle song

where Axl gets off the Greyhound bus.

And there were thousands of people doing that.

And I was one of them.

Because people came to LA to fulfill their dream.

Whether you want to be a rock star, movie star,

those were probably the two big dreams.

So I ended up staying on a YMCA,

which is still there ironically.

It's on Schroeder, which is two blocks.

And Wynonna?

Wilcox and Schroeder, which is one block south of Hollywood Boulevard,

two blocks west of Cawenga.

And that place is still there.

Yeah, I used to play dodgeball there.

I was in an adult dodgeball league.

That sounds like a Ben Stiller film.

Yeah, it was fun, but definitely dorky.

So imagine that in 1986.

And for me, it just represented the ultimate freedom.

Like instantly I went down Hollywood Boulevard

and that was sort of like the closest thing to Kings Road

or Camden Market.

And it was full of teenage dreamers and hustlers.

And it was just a vibe.

And I had this taste of freedom that lasted probably six weeks

until I overstayed my visa.

And my story is short.

40 years later, I never went back.

But LA represented the land of opportunity.

And it still does.

You know, whatever you want to do here,

you can do if you put the energy in.

Whether you want to host a podcast, be a camera guy,

you know, movie star, rock star, skateboarder,

supermodel, beach bum, whatever it is.

There's an infrastructure and an industry that's already here,

which they're not going to give you this career.

But if you put the energy in,

because LA is a melting pot, right?

It doesn't matter where you come from,

what you look like, what you sound like.

Very few people are LA natives.

And everyone's coming here with this dream.

You know, I'm an LA story,

no different to your LA story.

You came here 17 years ago from Milwaukee, right?

Yeah, good memory.

To make sure it happened and you made it happen.

Yeah.

I did it 40 years ago and I'm still making it happen.

Hell yeah.

I'm still evolving.

Well, I can only aspire to what you've accomplished so far.

Well, I appreciate that.

I mean, the key is, and here's the tricky bit,

but the key is find what you love to do and do it.

Yeah.

The tricky bit is most people don't know what they love to do.

Or they might have an idea and they'll say to the friend,

hey, I'm thinking of doing this.

And the friend might say, ah, it's not a good idea.

It'll never work.

So most people are afraid of failure.

So therefore they don't start this idea because somehow

they have someone else's opinion.

The key is if it feels right to you,

it doesn't matter what other people think.

I think what a lot of people misunderstand

is there's never an age where you can't reinvent yourself

and figure out a new skill.

Bingo.

I am there right now today.

I wanted to talk to you about this because you mentioned it

a little bit on Spike's car radio,

but you're kind of in this transformation era right now.

Correct.

You're selling, what, 18 of your almost 40 Porsches.

You're getting rid of some of your most prized possessions.

And this feels like you're kind of moving into

a different chapter of life.

What spurred that on?

Well, life is all about chapters.

And life comes in cycles.

And what I've discovered with age is, for me,

my life has been 10 to 15 year cycles of creativity

in certain areas.

You know, I came here in the mid-late 80s,

bummed around, sex toys rock and roll for a little bit,

and then accidentally fell into the clothing business.

Yeah, how did that happen?

I'd been here maybe two years and sort of, you know,

living on 25 cent burritos and frozen ramen,

we're starting to wear off and, you know, couch surf in

and just sort of bumming around by the time I was early 20s.

It has sort of grown a bit tedious with,

what am I doing here in this paradise?

But I'm not feeling fulfilled.

So I got a job by accident on the boardwalk in Venice,

which led to selling second hand clothing,

i.e. old Levi's 501s.

Wait, how did you get a job by accident?

I was walking down the boardwalk one day.

And, you know, the boardwalk in the 80s

was different to the boardwalk today, but not really.

There was like the guy selling cheap sunglasses,

socks on one side.

The guy with the roller blades playing the guitar.

Harry, Harry, he was there a lot younger.

So that was like on the east side of the beach,

and then the west side is where all the crystals

and tarot readers and deadheads were.

And I was walking down the beach,

probably looking, you know, sort of rock and rolly,

and I walked past this one stall

where there was an English guy working,

and he heard me talking,

and he literally came up to me and said,

hey, do you want a job?

And ironically, I sort of did,

and it paid me $10 a day to work at this booth,

which was selling seconds from the gap clothing store.

And it wasn't even shit that I was into,

but I noticed a couple of booths down,

there was a guy selling old vintage clothing,

and I was into that.

And so I'm like, oh, vintage clothing.

Yeah, I'd always, I could sew as a kid,

and by that I meant sewing patches on my denim jacket

that said AC DC or mode ahead, right?

My mom had taught me how to sew,

which generally meant making my Levi's as tight as possible.

So I learned this one skill.

And I started going to yard sales and thrift stores,

and literally buying old Levi 501s for 50 cents or a dollar,

and buying old vintage shirts,

which were paisley print or leopard print,

or dresses that were floral.

And I just started cutting them up

and sewing patches on jeans.

And I was coming at it from this sort of rock and roll vibe,

grateful dead ass, but more like Led Zeppelin's

70s rock and roll slash 80s heavy metal.

And timing is everything,

and timing cannot be predicted or scripted.

But at this same time, it was adjunct to position of

the European rave culture scene was taking over LA.

This was late 80s, early 90s,

and everyone was into sort of whimsical, theatrical,

baggy overalls and patchwork jeans.

And I also started making these crazy hats

that resembled the cat in the hat,

the mad hat, a court jester hats.

And I was literally coming at it from this rock and roll thing,

but it was this merging of these styles,

the fusion of rave culture,

which was dance all night on drugs,

rave on, and sort of rock and roll.

That kind of like jester style, right?

Like the Euro house, Jamir Kwai hat.

Completely that scene.

Which is circa 89, 1991.

And Venice was kind of the epicenter of it,

because Venice is a mecca for Europeans, always has been.

And Venice was the epicenter of all things

that were really cool in LA.

It was Hollywood, but that was rock and roll.

But daytime stuff, Venice was super cool,

because it was edgy.

You know, there was the element of danger to it.

The boardwalk on the weekend really had an element

of danger in the late 80s, early 90s.

It was kind of sketchy.

I do have a question, because it's kind of a trope

for Europeans to come to America

and misunderstand how big it is,

and be like, oh, I'm flying into Florida.

I could bop over to Nashville for one day.

Don't look that far on the map.

Yeah, when you first arrived in the US

and you were looking at taking this bus from Detroit to LA,

were you blown away by how big it was?

Yeah, great question, because you look at the map

and you go, okay, Detroit's up here and LA's down here.

So automatically you're just to a straight line, right?

The shortest point between two places.

But the trailways bus doesn't go on that straight.

It goes down through Memphis and Tennessee and Jags around

and took four days on this bus, which was like, wow.

This was an eye-opener,

just pulling into some of these places.

And you got to remember, I'm literally 19.

I've got a big duffel bag that's as big as that table with,

you know, like three months with the stuff that I've acquired.

And you're kind of on your own because no one's got a cell phone.

Yeah.

The internet's not existing at this point.

Your parents just kind of have to trust that you're doing fine.

Yeah, you know, you call them once a week or once a month

or send them a postcard, which is how it was.

So that was my first taste of this great American road trip adventure.

But ultimately the goal is just got to get to LA,

got to get to LA.

Nothing else mattered.

I'd flown into New York, took a bus from New York to Detroit

and then did the summer camp in the middle of nowhere.

And then LA was always the goal.

And that was it.

You know, I'm an Angelino.

I've spent 40 years here.

I spent 19 years in England.

So two thirds of my life is in LA, California.

And no one's telling me, cut your hair and get a real job.

I mean, I've never had a real job where I've worked for someone

other than being a construction laborer.

I've never had a corporate gig.

And I haven't had a gig in working for anyone in 40 years

since I've been in LA.

It's this entrepreneurial spirit of one thing leads to another.

And what I will say is, for certain types of people

who have inner self confidence, you don't need a plan.

A spreadsheet will only get you so far.

Some people like structure and they want to know

where am I going to be in five, 10, 20 years?

Some people like the ultimate freedom of, hey,

life's just going to come at me and it's going to be what it is.

Yeah.

And I was that type of guy that didn't really worry

about overstaying my visa.

And you know, I went through a whole process of,

you know, I had a social security number for banking purposes

and I was paying taxes.

I was employing American citizens because within a year or two

the business became pretty successful.

Wow.

So it really spooled up quick.

It spooled up quick because I was doing something at the time

that no one else was doing.

And the boardwalk in Venice might have had 100,000 people walking by.

But it was this other type of thing that the first day,

I think I made 25 bucks.

Second day, 30.

So third day, 50.

Then it's 100, then it's 200, then it's 500.

Kind of snowballed.

Yeah, just exponentially got better.

So you're getting like the first day that you start selling

your own clothing, you made two and a half times what you were

being paid at the other shop.

Yeah, you know, it was just, you know, at the time I had a girlfriend

so I was paying no rent.

She had a sewing machine.

I was sewing stuff on here and, you know, little by little,

it was $25, $50, $100, $200.

And then quickly it got to like a more significant daily amount,

let's say 500 bucks.

And then the milestone of, wow, we did $1,000 today.

And it's all cash.

And so, you know, then someone said,

hey, you should start wholesale.

And I go, what do you mean?

They go, you know, all those stores on Melrose, you know,

they'll buy your stuff as well.

Then that led to doing a trade show at the Javits Center in New York.

So got on a plane in New York and at this very first trade show

I ever did, we sold Disneyland and they bought 144 of every style.

That's literally late 80s.

That company's called Venetian Paradise because I was living in Venice

and that was Paradise.

And ironically, you know, I was doing stickers that went on things.

That sticker is from probably 1991.

This is like that.

You see what's going on here.

It's his whimsical Mad Hatter, Lewis Carroll fantasy world thing.

Yeah.

So that evolved from Venetian Paradise into by 1994,

what became known as serious clothing, mall rock and roll.

Because literally at that point,

Venetian Paradise had become old hat.

Like we had a great run for a couple of years where we're selling

all these theme parks, boutiques, and then people realized,

oh, we can knock this off and go overseas to China

and make it for pennies on the dollar.

We were hand making these things originally in Venice.

And then when we couldn't make enough,

we found a production facility that made baseball caps

and taught them how to make whimsical hats.

So it was all trial and error.

And this was the early days of hip hop and a lot of hip hop artists

started wearing big floppy hats that we were supplying.

But then probably five years into it,

someone had realized, oh, we can go make these overseas

in China for next to nothing.

And overnight, overnight, we became old hat, literally old hat.

And we were outfitting one of these hip hop bands.

And this rapper was really into, it's called No Faces,

really into these big floppy hats.

And one day I was showing them something that I'd sewed up.

And this is how inspiration strikes.

He literally went, yo, that's dope.

That's some serious shit.

That was his line.

That's how serious clothing got in.

Boom, that's how serious clothing was formed.

Because this guy went, yo, that's some serious shit.

That's so cool.

I'm like rebrand.

So Venetian Paradise became serious clothing.

And then I had that great run of serious clothing

where we started selling Hot Topic when they had five stores.

And then Hot Topic grew to 700 stores.

And for those that don't know,

Hot Topic was in every single mall

and outfitting every rebellious teenage pissed off wannabe kid

whether they're into goth, punk, rock and roll.

And so we grew with them.

We had our own store on Melrose retail store.

And we were wholesale in hundreds of stores

and doing a lot of volume with Hot Topic.

I remember going to Hot Topic in the 90s.

Pick that up right there.

See that?

Lean over and grab that skull.

With thanks and appreciation for your outstanding

vendor partnership, Serious Clothing from Hot Topic.

You can't buy this in Hot Topic.

What's the year?

1999.

So by my math, 27 years ago.

I love that.

Fine.

So it comes back to this evolution of a long answer

to the question about I'm going through a life change.

Right?

Yeah.

So change is constant.

So we go from Venetian Paradise on the boardwalk

in Venice to Serious.

And that has a great run until 2012

when I get a phone call from this crazy Canadian guy,

Tamir Moskovich, who wants to make a short documentary film.

And I won't bore you with all the details,

but that became an outlaw.

I remember that.

That was a big moment.

Big moment, 2012, 14 years ago.

That 32-minute award-winning documentary film

that was debuted at the Rain Dance,

which is a rainy version of Sundance in London

and we flew, was shot on two Canon 5Ds.

Two.

You guys are doing this podcast with three.

Yeah.

So back then, you know, a lot of,

let's call it the car culture environment

was different to what it is today.

Absolutely.

And that put me on the map.

So that sort of ran, and he's still running,

but the new evolution is from urban outlaw

to be branding myself as Magnus.

Nice.

And that evolution is coming all the way through to here.

Oh, like, inspired by Marlboro?

Correct.

So you look here, what's this inspired by?

I know it as Indie Trucks, because I'm a skateboarder.

Is that what, what's it originally from?

Harley-Davidson logo.

Oh, yeah.

The one percenters.

Yeah.

Hoyer logo.

Mobile one logo.

Marlboro logo.

Hell yeah.

But you look at the continuity.

These are all red, white and blue coming back to my love affair

with all things Americana, all things rock and roll.

Yeah.

Whether it's the Rolling Stones, the Who,

Evil Can Evil, Captain America continuity.

Are you a big Evil Can Evil fan?

Yeah, I mean, I like the mentality of being a dreamer

and achieving a goal and being kind of reckless.

It's like the evolution of the revolution.

Yeah.

So for me, what I've talked about in the past 10 minutes,

there is this evolution from a one-time people knew me as,

oh, you're that crazy hat guy on the boardwalk in Venice, right?

Then sort of in the 90s, the serious clothing era was,

hey, aren't you that serious clothing guy?

Or, hey, aren't you Rob Zombie?

I used to get that all the time.

Hey, aren't you Rob Zombie?

And ironically, I knew Rob Zombie.

And then, you know, the past kind of 12, 15 years,

hey, aren't you that Porsche guy?

And yeah, I'm all of those things.

But I'm never defined by one.

You know, I built a clothing brand that was pretty successful

that allowed me to get into real estate.

I bought this building 26 years ago.

At one point, I owned six pieces of property in the arts district.

Timings, everything.

Like, I was buying Porsches when they were really, really affordable,

when nobody cared about them, when they were literally like five grand.

Same with property.

It's all about following your own passion, your own dream,

and doing things that make sense within.

Like, from 94 to 2000, I'd rented two people's buildings,

a warehouse where I ran serious clothing on a loft where I lived.

And finally, I'm like, why am I paying two people's mortgages?

I got to invest in myself.

So I bought my own building, or we bought our own building.

You bought this at a time when downtown LA was pretty rough.

Correct.

It's not like it's super clean right now,

but we are in an area that's kind of being cleaned up,

and there's new shops going in and stuff like that.

I've been in the neighborhood, which is the arts district, since 1992.

Oh, wow.

So, you know, I'm 40 years in LA, but I've been down here for 34 years.

Yeah.

And remember, Union Station is two miles up the road.

I was going to say, it's kind of poetic that you live so close to where you got dropped off.

Correct.

And I'll come full circle on that.

I no longer live in the arts district.

Five years ago, my wife and I bought a house in Hollywood, near the Hollywood Bowl.

An old fixer upper.

Yeah.

This is a 125-year-old warehouse.

We bought a bit of a rundown, gray gardens,

airstill-appedated Spanish home that you can walk to the Hollywood Boulevard in,

that's had 25 years of deferred MacGyvered maintenance.

But we love it, because I like old things.

So the connection here is my story started selling old Levi's.

Then I bought an old building along the way I've restored old cars.

Then I bought another old building, which happens to be a house that we're

living through a restoration.

But here's the interesting point to it.

It's basically one mile north of Hollywood Boulevard.

So every day I go get coffee on Hollywood Boulevard.

And occasionally, I'll take these walks on Hollywood Boulevard.

Like, you know, the song Nobody Walks in LA?

Well, my last name's Walker.

So I got to live up to my last name.

I average over six miles a day.

Now, here's the full circle 40 years later.

At least once or twice a month, I walk past that YMCA where I first came.

Oh, yeah.

It's still there.

Yeah.

That keeps me really grounded, keeps me pretty humble, I think.

I don't really feel like I'm drastically different.

I got less hair and it's gray.

You know, I'm 60 years old instead of 19 years old or whatever I'm 59 years old.

But my spirit's kind of the same.

You know, I'm still don't know where I'm going tomorrow.

I'm in this phase right now where I'm closing one door,

which I did with serious clothing.

That had a great run up until maybe 2008, 2009.

And then the past three years of that, you know, I'd lost passion for design.

And I'd always say we personally design what we like to wear.

We weren't following the trends.

We were making the trends by designing what we personally wanted to wear.

When did you shutter that?

Well, closed in 2011.

Okay.

The last two, three years because we'd lost passion.

We're in our 40s.

We're not going out to clubs anymore.

We're not seeing bands.

We don't really care.

So of course what happens is sales dwindle,

but all our buddies are working for us.

So you can't let those guys go.

Right.

And so finally after like two years of losing money,

we're like, okay, guys, we're going to give you six months notice

and we're closing this thing down.

We never sold the brand.

We just did our last clothing line and that was it.

Shipped the orders and said, okay, we're done

because at that point success to us meant the freedom to do

whatever you wanted to do when you wanted to do it.

So why are we doing something that was a pattern

that we'd done for 15 years, but he's now not working?

Yeah.

So you get stuck in this rut.

So literally we closed that door and we didn't know

what was coming next,

but what came next in 2012 was Tamir's film.

Now, if I was still running serious clothing

with a dozen employees when this came out,

I wouldn't have the time to go travel the world

doing car related stuff.

Now we didn't know what was going to come,

but we had the inner self-belief of it's going to be okay

and something good is going to happen.

We'll be right back after these messages.

Big thanks to our sponsor this week, Five Hour Energy.

Confetti craze five hour energy shots taste just like birthday cake.

Vanilla and buttery flavors to let you be unapologetically

extra and unstoppably energized.

All cake, no sugar.

You can have your cake and sip it too minus any sugar guilt.

Take a fire day with a quick easy and portable tasty caffeine boost.

The fun Fetty flavor is back on fivehourenergy.com or Amazon.

Crack open confetti craze five hour energy shot today.

Now back to the show.

Where does the term urban outlaw come from?

Did that come from you or did that come from?

So throw away term in 2011.

So like 2009, 10, I've got a backup.

I fell in love with Porsche when I'm 10 years old.

Wrote a letter to Porsche.

Dad told me to learn a lot of motor show when I'm 10 years old.

White martini turbo.

I won't bore you with that story because I've told it a lot of times

but that was when my love affair started.

Bought my first Porsche in 1992.

That represented dream come true, ultimate freedom,

personal sense of accomplishment because I'd set a goal and I achieved the goal.

And growing up working class, I never thought I'd own a Porsche.

You know, that was for rich people, doctors and lawyers and stuff like that and that wasn't me.

So when you were 10 and you first saw the Porsche,

it was in a showroom or a motor show, right?

London Old School Motor Show.

We like going to the LA Auto Show and going to the Porsche stand and see,

you know, G2, 3 RS.

And immediately this is your goal when you're 10.

Yeah, there's a bit more to it than that because that era of the 70s,

England ruled the motorsports world.

James Hunt was Formula One World Champion.

Barrichin was two-wheel superbike champion.

And Formula One, all those F1 teams, they pretty much still are today based in England.

So I grew up watching a lot of motorsports on TV.

And I'd go to local tracks like Mallory Park, Caldwell Park,

Donington, be like on a Willow Springs and watch on a track day, right?

I'm at a club racing.

So even though we were working class, my uncle David, he had a Ferrari.

So there was an aspirational dream.

My dad was mechanical, but didn't have any money to buy a car.

He liked cars.

So, I mean, the car culture seed starts at an early age, 3, 4, 5 years old

with a little matchbox, Corgi, Hot Wheels car, whatever.

Going through it right now with my son.

That was his first word was car.

Yeah.

I did not impose it on him at all.

I was like, if he wants to like cars, I'm going to let him like cars

and I'm going to support him.

But first word was car.

He loves everything cars.

So that's the beginning of it.

You know, he was probably in the culture, right?

Or round it, saw it.

Was attracted to it for whatever reason.

So that was me and Porsche.

I mean, it could have been Ferrari, it could have been Lamborghini,

because those were the three posters any kid on the, in the 70s and 80s

would have on the wall.

Yeah.

Lamborghini, Kuntas, Ferrari 512 box or Porsche 930 Turbo.

For some reason, I just picked Porsche.

So this is a long-winded answer, but I haven't forgot it

as to where did urban outlook come out.

So I buy my first Porsche in 92, early 2000s.

I joined the Porsche owner's club and started doing track days

between 2002, 2008.

I'm doing a lot of track days.

Willow Springs, Laguna Seca and various other tracks.

Did it ever occur to you that you could at that stage become,

you know, a race car driver or did you ever have those aspirations?

No, I took my aggressive street driving to the track,

went through the Porsche owner club program of a short track license,

time trial license, cup race license.

And I became an instructor.

I became a better driver by doing that from that period of 2002 to 2006.

I'd probably do 40 track days a year.

Everything from Thunder Hill, Laguna Seca, all the Rovals,

like Phoenix, California Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway,

a lot of Willow Springs.

Like Willow Springs is 95 miles from where we sat.

We could be there in an hour and 20 minutes, hour and 30 minutes.

So I would drive there, do a track day drive back home.

And that would be the weekend.

Not trailer it.

No, do the math.

I'd do 95 miles each way.

So that's 190 on a Saturday, 190 on a Sunday.

I'd do 380 miles backwards and forwards,

plus do like the four to eight run sessions a day.

Wow.

So I never trail it.

I liked the idea of having a streetable track car, which is 277.

That's a 71911T that I bought at the Pomona Swamp Meet in 1999.

That's probably your most famous 91911.

That's what the Nike shoe is based on, on all the Hot Wheels.

So that car is 55 years old, and I've owned it for 27 years.

I've owned it half its life.

So I never wanted a car that I had to trailer to the track.

It's a streetable track car.

You're going to have fun in the canyons.

You're going to have fun on the track.

And you've got to remember the environment.

20, 25 years ago, these were 510 grand cars.

Dudes weren't rolling up in 992 GT3 RSs that spent all the money in the world.

It was just air cooled cars.

That was right when the 996 water cooled era was coming in,

and they were starting to creep into the track.

But no, I mean, for me, it was like I had to be able to drive to the track and drive by.

So you mentioned good timing before, like being in the 80s at a time where you could kind of

guide the fashion towards your own liking, and your clothing business popped off.

This is another time where timing really paid off.

And you really hit like the bull's eye on timing.

Yeah, you can't script timing because now I want to answer the question about urban outlaw.

Yeah.

I haven't forgot about it.

So by 2008, the pressure and the time spent doing a lot of track days,

the more competitive it became, the less fun it became, the more time it took,

the more energy, the more money.

You know, you're doing a three day track event.

Let's say Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Vegas.

You're leaving on a Wednesday, Thursday, and you're prepping your car before.

That's a lot of time.

It's a lot of money.

A lot of time, a lot of money.

So I stopped doing track days, and that was when I started acquiring a lot of Porsches.

2008, 2009, 2010, big acquisition period for me.

I mean, that was at a time where a lot of people were kind of doing damage control with

stock market crash and stuff like that.

Bingo, back to timing.

So it's funny, you mentioned that.

Some of these cars that I'm letting go at this upcoming no reserve arm,

Sotheby's auction, I'm looking back.

I bought a lot of them in 2008, 2009, and 2010, and I bought them inexpensively.

But back then, the internet wasn't really like it is today.

I'm still buying stuff off a Craigslist, auto trader, sports car trader.

I'm getting on flights to Phoenix and Seattle and picking stuff up inexpensively.

And then I start modifying them into these, what I call sport purpose,

streetable, Canyon Carver, cafe racer, early nimble, Canyon Carver track cars.

That's a long name for 9-11.

Yeah, just called sport purpose 9-11.

Yeah, it's a long name.

But I started a long-winded thread on Pelican parts in the early S-reggis

that was literally called Porsche Collection Out of Control hobby.

Now here's the answer to the question urban outlook.

Around that time, I started getting quite a lot of magazine coverage from European magazines,

not American.

Car magazines.

Car magazines, Total 9-11, Porsche this,

Porsche that, and one of the articles was in Total 9-11,

and they literally called the article urban outlook.

Because I lived in an urban environment, and I was making something that you could

describe as an outlaw Porsche.

So I never even came up with a name.

So when Tamir Moskovich's film came out in 2012, what are we going to call it?

Let's call it urban outlook.

And then that spun off a little clothing brand.

I mean, truth be told, upon reflection, I never really loved the term urban outlook.

It always reminded me too much of urban outfitters.

It was like, you know, I was like, okay, I ran with it.

You know, I came up with this concept of the logo that was kind of inspired by the

Hoyle logo.

But you know, it's always been my name on it.

And it's like, you introduce me as the urban outlaw.

I never do that.

It's like, people know me as certain things.

Oh, the urban outlaws.

See, I go, what's an urban outlaw?

Right?

You look up outlaw in the dictionary,

someone who lives beyond the boundaries of the law.

The outlaw, Josie Wales.

I always think of like the Wild West.

Yeah, Josie Wales, Bill Halier, whatever, right?

So it was a term that stuck because back then,

people have been modifying Porsches since day one.

James Dean's little bastard 550 is modified.

So I'm not doing anything new that hadn't been done 50, 60 years before I started doing it.

But the difference is I was bringing in my own personalized touches,

meaning I'm so sick of Gulf livery, martini livery, this livery, that livery.

I never duplicated what the factory had done.

Like, here's a martini livery, 73 RS, right?

I might take those colors, silver, blue, and red and tweak them around

and put them in a car where you don't even know.

Oh, that's martini colors, right?

Because I'm not mimicking this livery.

I'm adding my own personality, you know,

influences from Americana, from hot rotting, louvers on the fenders,

louvers on the deck lids, you know, some Starsky and Hutch, some Dukes of Hazard,

throwing it in the blender and what came out was my own interpretation of

my era of motorsports that I'm most drawn to really back then was 60s, 70s, and early 80s.

It's sort of the glory era, whether it's Kanan, whether it's Formula One, whether it's NASCAR,

you know, it's good old boy this, you got Richard Petty, and you got Dale Earnhardt,

and you got Jackie Stewart, and you know, all these influences blended in.

So that kind of made a mark because I was doing something a little bit different.

I was coming at it from more of a rock and roll arts, you know, given

angle, which ruffled the purists.

It was the, you know, the evolution of the revolution is what I call it.

You know, it was like, I was a disruptor, and I'm still a disruptor.

I like that answer because it's such a tired conversation now, like, oh, you're upsetting

the purists, but- Pissing off the purists.

Yeah, but at the beginning of it, it was, you did ruffle a lot of feathers, you did

make waves in the community, and a lot of people followed in your footsteps too,

and kind of gained notoriety through that, but you were the first one to kind of like

blow the whole scene up.

I was just doing my thing, and back to timing, if it wasn't for Tamir's film,

I was getting some coverage before that, Total 9.11, right, that came before Tamir's film,

but Tamir's film was done so well, so cinematic, documentary film style,

and it's not a story about Porsche.

Porsche is the vehicle that takes you on the journey of my life, talking about what we've

been talking about, and people related to that beyond the Porsche world,

to the bigger car culture world, because ultimately, it doesn't matter whether you drive a drift car,

or sport import, tuner, or European sports car, or an American muscle car.

If you're a true motorhead, gearhead, whatever you want to call it, right,

it all starts with a vision or dream, you've seen something you want to chase,

then you chase it down, you acquire it, you build it, modify it, restore it,

maybe it's with your dad, your granddad, or brings back memories of, oh,

this was the first car I ever had, I met my wife on our first date in this car, right,

so it's everything thrown in, and ultimately, it comes down to the drive at the end, but

beyond that, it's the community of people who share like-minded stories and visions,

regardless of what car you drive, and I think Urban Outlaw got that message across

to a sea of people beyond the Porsche world.

The amount of people that have come up to me that like,

I used to hate Porsches until I saw Urban Outlaw, I thought it was such a

douchebaggy type of thing, right, you know, but now, it's sort of opened it up to a bigger arena,

not now, like 14 years ago, I did, and that's just evolved and evolved, and Urban Outlaw opened

the door for me to, like say, travel the world, it opened the door to doing a TED talk in 2014,

collaborating with Hot Wheels in 2015, and Mobile One, and Who Knows What Else,

Momo Steering Wheel, and the ultimate-

You have a custom Magnus Walker Momo Steering Wheel, right?

Yeah, we debuted that in 2015 for Momo's 50th anniversary, and I became the first

non-professional racecar driver in a sea of Jackie Stewart's and Nicky Lauders and Mario Andretti's

to have my own signature Momo Steering Wheel, and that happened purely organically, like,

a lot of people come and visit me, usually around the LA Auto Show or Long Beach Grand Prix,

and I can tell this story in repeat mode multiple times, but a few significant ones,

Enrique the owned Momo in 2014 came to visit me after the Long Beach Grand Prix, and he noticed,

wow, you've got a lot of Momos, vintage Momo Steering Wheels on it, I go, yeah, I love them,

the feel, the leather, it's all cracked up and patina, and he literally said, why don't we do

a steering wheel together? That's so cool. So what I did was I took my favorite Jackie Stewart

thick grip and combined it with the Momo Protipo, but I told him, you know, I don't like new steering

wheels because they've got this waxy, shiny finish on the leather, and I go, we could distress the

leather down because I did it in my clothing days, you know, you just stonewash it, get a little bit

of sandpaper on it, rough it up and make it look vintage back to old things. So we debuted my

signature steering wheel at Rensport Reunion in 2015, we had a rally that left this warehouse and

drove to Laguna Seca, and that was my Momo collaboration. I have a similar story when

Paul Henry came to visit me from Pirelli, and he goes, wow, you're running a lot of Hoosiers.

I go, yeah, because Pirelli doesn't make a Traffay O'R in anything under 18 inch. I go,

what about all these 15, 16, 17 inch guys? Within a year, Pirelli issued the Traffay O'R

but they didn't put your name on it. They didn't put my name on it. Momo did, but then perhaps the

coolest collab was Nike, which arrived in 2022, but I was in the 2015 Need for Speed video game,

the 2017 CSR racing game. Very prolific. So yeah, all of this expanded my visibility, let's say,

outside of the Porsche world, which was great. Yeah. Because you know, I don't just own Porsches.

No, you became bigger than just a car guy. You became like...

I just became relatable into a cultural thing of, I've probably done 30 different Hot Wheels,

right? They're not all Porsches. There's probably 20, 30 million Hot Wheels with my name on it.

I was going to ask, all I see here is Porsches. There's a C3 Corvette out there.

C3 Corvette out there? And don't forget the two vintage Rolls Royce.

Oh, I did see the Rolls Royce. Do you have affinity towards any other

mark that is not Porsche? Yeah, for sure. I mean, we're in our vintage Rolls Royce era right now.

Yes. And by that, I mean 60s and 70s, maybe into the 80s, because they represent style.

You know, the three things that I've done in my 40 years in LA, the fabric of my,

the fiber of my fabric, really, are things that I'm related to from a design point of view.

So there's nothing more stylish and iconic than a vintage Rolls Royce and they're so affordable.

Like no hipsters are into them. You can pick them up for next to nothing.

They forced me to slow down. You can't go more than 70 miles an hour.

They're a conversation starter at every traffic line.

How are they to fix though? Is it a pain in the ass?

They're pretty simple because, you know, it's a three speed GM transmission.

It's a VA and the carburetor. There's no computers on them.

It's like anything. They just need to be kept running.

Anything that sits, doesn't matter whether it's a Rolls Royce or a Toyota,

seals are going to drive, fuel lines are going to crack, brake lines are going to crack.

So the key is you've got to keep those fluids rolling.

It's like your body got to keep moving, right?

Yeah.

So the key is they can be expensive to fix if they're not maintained,

but the entry level of buying in is really inexpensive.

So the key is just get one that's a running driving car and you pick them up in the teams.

What would be the best year for an affordable Rolls Royce right now?

Well, pre-75 Shadow because you don't have to smog it.

Like that one outside, the two tone one, that's a 72 long wheelbase with a chrome bumper.

We bought on bring a trailer for eight grand.

No way.

$8,000.

Wow. And it drove down here?

It didn't drive, but it drove off the trailer.

You know, it needs a little bit of work because it had sat.

So the brakes need to rebuild in, the carburetors need going through,

and there's a fuel line that's cracked, basic stuff like that.

Sure.

But minimal, minimal expense and that thing will be back on the road.

Once you get it back on the road, do you think you're going to modify it all?

Well, that's a great question.

I mean, we've got four Rolls Royces and there is a golden modify one of them.

The other car you mentioned out there is a C3 Corvette.

To me, you got to respect the vet, right?

The Corvette is being in constant production longer than any other sports car.

Like the 911 and the Mustang, they came out in 1964.

They've been in production 64 years.

The Corvette came out in the 50s, right?

So you got to respect the vet.

For me, the C3 is the era.

They made a lot of them.

They're affordable yet again.

They come in all different shapes, flavors, colors, right?

Whether it's a small block 350 or a big block four speed or whatever it may be.

It's Americana.

It's an icon.

So that one is beautiful out there, by the way.

Yeah.

That's a 77.

We used to have a 69 C3 chrome bumper manual burnt orange.

Oh, nice.

I'm about variety and affordability.

Nothing needs to be expensive.

Nothing needs to be perfect.

You're a fan of the deal.

I'm a fan of the deal that chased the hustle.

I love that.

You know, the barter trading things into other things.

It seems like, I mean, you did a great job on not only your cars,

but like your fixer upper house and stuff like outside of your garage.

Yeah.

I mean, the last Rolls Royce we acquired came from Beverly Hills Cart Club.

It's a great story.

I go over there one day bored.

They've got like 20 Rolls Royces.

I'm looking at one.

It's an 85 spur.

I won't bore you with all the details, but long story short.

I ended up trading a 996 and $3,500 into a Rolls Royce.

Wow.

And the 996 I'd bought for five grand.

So do that math.

That was how I got into an 80s Rolls Royce.

I could have afforded to buy it.

It was like 17.5, but I'm like,

let me see if I can work a deal and trade into it.

Yeah.

It comes back to this hustle and enjoying life.

And it comes back to this entrepreneurial street smart spirit

of me on the boardwalk in Venice in the 80s.

You know, cash in the pocket, wheeling and dealing.

Yeah.

I still like that.

It's the thrill of the barter of going into,

I'm all about flea markets, whether it's Rose Bowl,

Long Beach Swamp Me.

And if someone's selling something for,

it doesn't matter what it is.

If it's a hundred bucks, I'm going to negotiate.

So you're not afraid of buying something old,

even if you have to fix it up and kind of take care of it.

That's the whole part of it.

So you love to curate and kind of maintain and fix older things

and make them good again.

Yeah.

Restore.

You know, all things have character and soul.

Yeah.

I talk about it like your favorite pair of old shoes

or your favorite pair of old jeans.

New things are just not as interesting.

You know, they're an appliance, right?

You know, they don't have this sentimental analog value

of an experience in this digital age.

Like my newest car I own is a 2014 991 Turbo S parked outside.

That thing's got almost 206,000 miles on it.

That's a daily driver.

I'm not precious about it.

Lives on the street, doesn't get parked in a garage,

being hit a couple of times in the Hollywood Hills,

doesn't matter.

But you got one of those really tight streets up in there.

Oh God.

Do you have a lot of cars up there or no?

I got a few, most of them are down here.

But the point being is once you realize nothing needs to be

perfect and you let things go,

you're not carrying that burden of stress and perfection.

Like I just discovered while she were here

that why SG over there, last week I had an open house

and probably a thousand people came through

and people thought I was nuts because I didn't put anything away.

And that white SG, I took the baseball cap off it.

I thought, let me just throw a few chords.

And I noticed the headstock's broken on it.

Oh no.

And someone had knocked it over.

And I've done that myself quite a few times.

Yeah.

But that was a guitar bought in New York for 500 bucks,

it's an 80s SG.

And I'm like, maybe I should have put it away, but I didn't.

But that was how I left it.

So I'm responsible for that.

And it's kind of like one of those things of, well,

I guess it don't really matter.

Yeah, I noticed that.

Some people would be really upset, but I've broken a lot of guitars

and it's just kind of like, well, shit happens.

I walked around this space and I saw a lot of Gibson guitars.

Are you kind of beholden to Gibson?

You're very observant.

You know, it's one of those, the short answer is yes,

but let me expand.

It's like, if you're a car guy, and this is broad brush strokes,

but in my sort of field, you're either a Ferrari guy or a Porsche guy.

If you're a watch guy, broad strokes here,

you're either Rolex or Omega.

I was always Omega.

Guitars, generic, Fender or Gibson, right?

You don't see a Fender here.

There's a Fender replica that I bought at a swap meet for 50 bucks,

but it's not a Fender.

I don't own a Fender.

I'm a Gibson guy.

We'll leave it at that.

It's funny that you wouldn't own the guitar company

that's named after a car part.

I mean, I actually want a Fender.

I want a hollow body telecaster.

That's what I want too.

You know, who's selling one is Nolan from Donut.

Oh, no way.

What's it's called?

Sunburst?

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

The black pickguard.

But I'm even one of those guys that, you know,

one day I was at the house near the ball and I'm thinking,

I want a white Gretch, white Falcon, and they're kind of expensive.

So of course I go to Guitar Center, right?

I'm online at Guitar Center and they've got the non-expensive versions

of a Gretch white Falcon.

Well, that's why I have the Streamliner.

For like $349.

Yeah, it's great.

So literally I'm at the house, within an hour,

I've gone to the Guitar Center, spent 349 bucks,

and I've got my white Gretch made overseas.

Yeah.

And I'm happy with it.

Yeah.

I don't need the high dollar Gretch white Falcon made in USA.

No.

Uh, to me, I would sooner have a dozen guitars as opposed to one.

Same with cars.

I'm all about variety.

Well, that's kind of-

And it comes back to nothing needs to be perfect, right?

Yeah, nothing needs to be perfect.

If nothing needs to be, you don't ever have to own the top of the top.

Like, I feel like whenever I get into a new hobby,

I have to fight myself on like buying the best kind of golf clubs

or buying the best kind of blah, blah, blah.

It's better to just go to Goodwill and find a set

that's someone-

Bingo.

Guys come out to me all the time, they're looking for the perfect Porsche.

I go, it don't exist.

Yeah, what do you-

And then I have buddies like this, I'll see him three years down the road.

So have you got a Porsche yet?

No, I can't find one I like.

I go, you know, you could have been driving one for the past three years.

Yeah.

Whether it was a 10-gram box or a 20-gram 996,

but you're looking for something you'll never find,

and you've lost years and memorable miles per mile

of not just getting something and enjoying it.

I mean, I've never wanted to own the Holy Grail cars

in the Porsche world of 959 Carrera GT 918.

I was going to ask you about the 959,

what is it about it that you don't want to own one?

Have you seen how much they are?

I mean, they're insanely expensive, but-

That's why.

I mean, I put them in the category of OPP, other people's Porsche.

I've driven them, and I don't need to own them to experience them.

Yeah.

It's as simple as that.

You mentioned the Boxster.

Yeah.

I'm thinking about getting a Boxster.

Is that a good idea?

Yeah, I see it all the time.

Or should I just spring for a newer generation Cayman?

Well, the big price difference.

Yeah.

I mean, if you've got 10 grand, go buy a Boxster.

That's it.

Simple.

Yeah.

There's a Porsche price point for everyone at entry level.

What do I have to worry about if I'm buying an old Boxster?

If you're buying a 10-gram box, you don't worry about anything.

When it breaks, you just get another one.

I mean, I'm not going to bore you with IMS burying this

and headlights that.

It's like, it doesn't mean anything to me.

It's like, just drive it until it doesn't work anymore.

And then get something else.

Don't overthink it.

I mean, people ask me all that all the time about 996s.

You know, the two things you can't talk about, you know,

IMS bearings and headlights.

And you don't see the headlights when you're driving.

And so on a small percentage that had that issue

with the IMS bearings.

It's kind of like, people read a little bit

and then the obsess on the failure part of it.

It's like, you're a half glass empty person at that point.

I'm looking at it as like half glass fall.

You got 10 grand, you're in a Boxster,

you're in a Porsche, right?

This is great.

Yeah.

Like, why think about things that may never happen?

That's a good philosophy.

That's a philosophy for life.

Sure.

What's the best generation of 911 to buy right now?

Do you think 996?

Just for the deal.

Still, still.

Like five years ago, you could say 996 Turbo

when there were sub 40 grand cars was the deal.

And it's like, why are people sleeping on this?

It's the first water cooled 911, right?

This is it.

This is an icon right here in the making.

And Porsche made a lot of them,

but people get hooked on those two negative things.

Yeah.

But you can't buy a 996 Turbo now for that price point.

Well, I think people, you know,

the IMS Barrens and the headlights,

but also the fact that it's water cooled,

people tend to butt against that.

What is your thought on that?

I mean, the headlight bit is comical

because one of the Holy Grail Porsches is a GT1.

Yeah.

And no one bitches about those Friday head lights

running on a GT1, right?

They don't talk about it.

I'm all about variety.

You know, I haven't owned a lot of water cooled 911s.

The first water cooled 911 I owned,

I bought it in 2016, 10 years ago.

Was that the GT2?

GT3.

Oh, GT3.

So that 996.2 2004 Silver GT3

was the first water cooled 911 I acquired 10 years ago.

I've only had four and they're all 996s.

I had the one that I trade,

the five grand one that I traded into the Rolls Royce.

I had an Arrow Kit 99.1.

And then of course the Holy Grail of GT2s of that era 996 GT2.

Yeah.

From almost 25 years ago.

That's the black one.

The black one.

Lifelong LA car on the third owner.

When you look at that car today,

and that car's called it 25 years old.

25 years ago, that was king of the hill.

You couldn't get anything more badass from Porsche.

But that spec today, it's like 454 horsepower,

two wheel drive, six speed manual.

You can go buy a 992.2 Carrera 2 C2,

which is one step above base.

And it's got the same stats.

Same thing.

You can get a two wheel drive, six speed.

You know, different car,

but you go, wow, that's how far Porsche has evolved in 25 years.

From the king of the hill to pretty much entry level.

Yeah.

Like the new 992.2 Turbo S, 701 horsepower.

Insane.

You know, that GT2 has got 456.

By my math, it's almost 50% less

than the current evolution 25 years later.

Yeah.

But the new ones are hybrid and it can't get a manual

and four wheel drive and blah, blah, blah.

A lot of people would crash

if it was just rear wheel drive, 701 horsepower.

I'm not so much a purist though that

when you think of Porsche, it has to be air cooled.

And let's look at the numbers.

64, 911 was the first year of the 911.

First year of the water cool was 1999, 98, 99.

So that's 27 years old by now.

They're almost equal in the sense of

air cooled was in production for, you know, 34 years.

Air cooled, 34 water cooled, 28-ish.

So almost, I mean.

They're almost equal.

Yeah.

So this whole thing of air cooled cool, I get it.

I really get it because I love air cooled cars.

But I'm all about variety.

It's front engine, mid engine, rear engine.

We got all the transactional cars.

Or I've got them all 924, 928, 944, 968, 914.

But that's not a 914.6.

That's a 1.7 liter base model four banger, you know.

So it just comes down a variety.

We'll be right back after these messages.

You don't do wraps.

You have a hand painter come in and do.

I own one car that's wrapped.

And it's a funny story.

It's a 993, which is ironically my least favorite 911 model.

Wow, really?

Yeah.

It's kind of like the, it's kind of like the Cadillac of 911,

you know, in stock form.

Not that anything needs to be stocked.

I think it's a generational thing.

You're younger than I am.

So if you were growing up in the, you know,

let's say you're a teenager, early 20s in the 90s,

you're going to be all about the 964 and 993.

That's going to be your holy grail car, right?

You pegged me.

But for me, it was like, I'm 20 years before that.

So it's like 930 turbo from the 70s, right?

So it's a generational thing.

But I ended up acquiring from a buddy,

he's thinking of selling his 993.

He's going to drop it off.

You know, he says to me, it's the perfect scenario.

I'm thinking of selling it.

I'll just give it to you for a week.

Let me know what you think.

And I'd seen photos of it.

It's in this Riviera blue color and he drops it off

and he didn't tell me it was a wrap.

And so it comes through the door

and it's not quite running right.

And it's a wrap.

And I'm like, oh, it's a wrap.

But I spent a week with that.

I ended up buying it.

I sort of started to like it.

You got a good deal on it.

I got a great deal on it.

A really great deal on it.

This is probably, I don't know, seven, eight years ago.

It's originally midnight blue,

which is almost black in this wrap.

RS sort of going down the road of an RS spec car.

And that's the one that became my art car

with all the crazy color block.

It became a Hot Wheels.

And so I'm like, what am I going to do?

I don't want to paint on a wrap.

So I ended up putting all the paper tape on

like the Carrera GT right there,

which is how I mock things up.

I say the idea is the most important thing.

Some people would do that on some sort of CAD or AI thing,

but me, I'm putting paper tape on it.

That's awesome.

And I did the same thing with the 993 on top of the wrap.

And I'm like, well, I don't want to paint it.

So I'm going to do a vinyl application.

So I ended up meeting Gino from Vaderworks,

who sort of translated my paper tape job

onto a vinyl application that went on top of the wrap.

So I own one car that's wrapped.

Everything else that you see that's got color blocking is painted.

And what you're referring to is the 67S

that I had Clayton's sign painting.

Hand paint those meatball numbers on the car.

If you look at that number behind you, that's 67.

I bought that 67S in 2008, 2009, and it had meatballs on it.

67's the year of the car.

It's my birth year.

So it's kind of my lucky number.

Very special to you.

Kind of is.

And I'm like, well, I'd done a little bit of paint correction

on that car.

And I thought, you know, the bumper had sort of got dinged.

Ironically, we were filming a show

where someone had a light on a tripod that got knocked over

and dinged that front little bumper.

And it just kind of got feathered in probably six, seven years ago.

And at that point, I'm like, oh, the numbers will be fine.

But recently, I had Clayton's sign painting.

Hand paint those meatballs on it.

It's very period correct.

I love it.

Yeah.

I love the attention to detail that you put into,

like not only the cars, all your cars here,

but like this whole space is very well curated.

And I feel like that is one of the things drawing people to you

is like how well you can curate stuff.

It's interesting that you would curate because to me, I don't curate.

I am mass and I just put shit kind of where it goes.

But it doesn't feel cluttered.

It feels like intentional.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the attentional art wall.

Yeah.

But I just kind of put them in a random order.

And the interesting thing about that wall

is other than the artwork I did with Felix,

nothing there had been solicited.

It's kind of artwork that people had sent me in

based around their inspiration for 277.

And if you look at it, you know, there's a VW bus.

There's an Audi.

Like every major automotive design house

has some sort of design centre here in LA.

Whether it's Audi, Bentley, Bugatti,

and they've all come through.

And you know, there's an Audi that's being reinterpreted there.

And if you look under the serious thing,

you see that Cybertruck, right?

Yeah, I was going to ask about that.

Because I had the design guys from Tesla come and visit me

within the past six months.

I guess these people like doing field trips or wasting time

or getting out of the office

and somehow they come down here

for an ounce or a gram of inspiration.

That's awesome.

Whatever that may be.

Thinking outside the box, I think is what it is.

And not being restricted by rules.

Like rules are for fools.

And the freedom is outside the lines, right?

Yeah.

So people come here for some...

That was how I meant Nike.

Like literally in 2012,

I got an email from Sandy Bodecker

before the film had even came out.

We put a trailer out which went viral.

Oh, nice.

How Magnus Walker Built an Empire From Nothing

About this episode

Porsche

swap meets

Porsche 356

Detroit

urban decay

car culture

Pontiac Torino

Ford Torino

deferred maintenance

track day

Willow Springs

Laguna Seca

track instructor

Thunderhill Raceway

Las Vegas Motor Speedway

Phoenix Raceway

California Speedway

Sotheby's

Pelican Parts

American muscle car

drift car

sport import

tuner

European sports car

restoration

Chevrolet C3 Corvette

Porsche 911 Turbo S (991)

Request an Explanation

Want to learn more?

Help improve this episode

More from Talk Talk Nation