Aug. 6, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:02:12
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Boom. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| I love when I see something online where I see someone who takes the idea of fixing something or re-engineering something and just goes so far out there. | ||
| Something totally irrational. | ||
| You go, who is this fucking crazy guy? | ||
| Idiot. | ||
| I think the first thing I saw was your Bronco, the Icon Bronco, which is just, you took a car, which is the Ford Bronco, the 60s and early 70s versions, which are, you know, this kind of... | ||
| It's a cool car. | ||
| It's a cool old car. | ||
| A lot of people take the tops off of them, and they're always kind of rickety and funky looking. | ||
| And you just engineered this thing to the nth degree with these billet door openers and the way you have the step comes out. | ||
| I'm like, who the fuck is this guy? | ||
| And so then I start going into your... | ||
| Your website and the two different companies, TLC, where you take old Land Cruisers and re-engineer those and put modern engines and suspensions. | ||
| And I'm like, wow. | ||
| I just love that someone like you is out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sweet. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, it's because I had no investors that were smarter than me that said, you're a fucktard. | ||
| Don't even... | ||
| Do this. | ||
| Bad business. | ||
| Well, they were wrong, though. | ||
| They were wrong, obviously. | ||
| I mean, your shop is enormous. | ||
| There's like a beehive. | ||
| People are constantly buzzing around there working. | ||
| You've got 100 different projects going concurrently. | ||
| The Bronco build, what do you say, like a three-year wait list right now? | ||
| Yeah, we've sold 62 of them so far, and delivery dates, unfortunately, are running like late third quarter 2018, which sucks. | ||
| It drives me nuts. | ||
| Is there anything you can do to ramp that up? | ||
| You would have to just have like four or five of those giant warehouses. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| So like we're trying to move and find a bigger building. | ||
| We're just about 50,000 square now, and it's all ass and elbows. | ||
| Like I think we could hire maybe three or more guys before we're out of space. | ||
| But more importantly, it's difficult to find those people. | ||
| Because kind of the idiocy of what I do is going against modern trends and American design and manufacturers, so it's really hard to find people that have the crazy skill set that we require. | ||
| Well, that's what really impressed me about what you're doing. | ||
| What impressed me about what you're doing is not just that you're re-engineering things and improving and upgrading, but there's this ode to craftsmanship. | ||
| There's this passion in what you're doing where it might not necessarily make sense. | ||
| Oh, everything we do, if you want to bring up that term practicality, makes absolutely no sense. | ||
| But to me, that's kind of why we do it and why I'm so passionate about every project we do, because I've approached it from the obtuse angle of, okay, that's how it's been done in the past, and stock restorations are great, and they fit a niche, and they're right for that guy. | ||
| Personally, I have no patience for archaic mechanical interface, but I love vintage aesthetic. | ||
| And then resto shops, hot rod shops traditionally, they buy this piece, that piece, and kind of cobble it together, and that's cool. | ||
| But I always thought, well, you've got this convergence of CAD design, computer-aided design resources, and a convergence of reverse engineering and low-volume manufacturing, and Capabilities that kind of are creating a perfect storm where the stupid stuff we can dream up and execute and make a relatively viable business model out of wasn't even possible 10 years ago. | ||
| So I've been lucky enough to find enough people that agree with my craziness and let me not compromise and whore it out, but to really hold the line and keep pushing the boundaries and keep geeking out further and further. | ||
| Well, it seems like over the last year or so, I've been hearing about you more and more and more and more, and then Jay Leno's Garage featured, he's featured a few of your cars, right? | ||
| Yeah, we've been on Jay's show, I think, four times now. | ||
| What a fucking trip that place is, huh? | ||
| Off, just off. | ||
| I was just there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| On Tuesday, I guess. | ||
| Oh my god, it was just a geek boner I had walking around that place. | ||
| Well, and keep your chubby because what's crazy is a lot of people don't realize the depth of that subculture. | ||
| So Jay is wonderful in that he's almost become sort of a spokesman for the niches and odd proclivities and mechanical goodness. | ||
| But just in LA alone, there's... | ||
| Tons of dudes with these ridiculous man caves full of wild mechanical beasts and it is so cool. | ||
| And that's another thing I never had the intelligence to anticipate. | ||
| When I built the first Icon, which was based on the FJ40 Land Cruiser, I just built it because it was keeping me up at night and I had this idea and after doing a design job for Toyota, I told Mr. Toyota about my stupid idea. | ||
| He kind of sort of off the record bowed and said, go for it, fool, but we won't get in your way. | ||
| So I built it to realize that sort of model I had in my head. | ||
| Then I went back and added up how much it cost. | ||
| And I thought, shit, no one's going to go for this. | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
| And I talked to some people smarter than me, really big brand people, and they said, no. | ||
| Keep it pure. | ||
| Keep it what you want and what you're proud of and you'll build a market. | ||
| So I gambled and rolled with them. | ||
| And now, like 30 plus percent of our clients have two or more of our projects where I was having a hard time getting my head around people would be able to justify the expense of one of them. | ||
| Well, they're so well done. | ||
| And one of the things that I was really impressed with was just the FJ62 Land Cruiser conversions that you've done. | ||
| Because for a lot of people that aren't fans of that aesthetic or fans of that, that's just a regular four-door, suburban-type SUV vehicle. | ||
| Most people would look at that, and they would go, there it is on the big screen. | ||
| They would look at that and go, oh, that's one of those cars. | ||
| That's part of the appeal, though. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because it's pure utility. | ||
| There's no fluff. | ||
| There's nothing superfluous. | ||
| And people yearn for that. | ||
| Because if you look at modern cars, I don't care what it is. | ||
| Longevity, simplicity, durability. | ||
| No one's thinking about those things anymore. | ||
| Their priorities are totally different. | ||
| So a lot of guys go, hey, I used to have one of those Land Cruisers. | ||
| Man, I miss that thing. | ||
| I go to the dealer, I look at everything, I can buy whatever I want, and it sucks. | ||
| Everything's plastic, has no soul, doesn't have that utilitarian root to it, so there's kind of a subculture that'll gravitate to wanting to go back to that. | ||
| And some of them are cool with them stock, but more and more people have been perverted by modern vehicles and like, could we make the pedal on the right actually do something? | ||
| Yeah, really do something. | ||
| Well, your Bronco is like this beautiful, I mean, that shape with the icon bumper, it's so sexy. | ||
| To the average person looking at it, it's sexy. | ||
| But to this, it's like you kind of have to be a fan of that style of Land Cruiser, that four-door with the hatch in the back Land Cruiser. | ||
| But what you've done is completely bonkers. | ||
| What this is is an FJ-62 and you call them a 142, right? | ||
| Because you take an FJ-80 and you combine it with the FJ-62. | ||
| So what he does is he takes this fucking thing, strips it down to nothing. | ||
| I mean, you could do this way better than me. | ||
| Polyurea coats it, media blasts it. | ||
| You take this thing and make it a combination of modern underpinnings, completely redone as far as weather protection and the moisture protection. | ||
| It's at a level that nobody ever engineered before. | ||
| And then you put a modern Corvette engine in it, 450 horsepower plus. | ||
| I mean, this is bananas. | ||
| And you're taking this car that was like, how much were these new? | ||
| I think they were expensive when they were new, but that means, what, 20 grand, probably 25 grand, I think. | ||
| And he engineers them to the point where there are 160 plus thousand dollar cars. | ||
| It's total stealth wealth. | ||
| Yeah, and that's a big part of the appeal, I find. | ||
| Like, guys will take these on surf trips down through Central America and not have to stress out or freak out or worry about... | ||
| You know, the preconceived notions, like, you know, people see you rolling in a nice, modern supercar sports car, and unfortunately, in our culture, there's a lot of guys, oh, look at that rich prick in his Porsche. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it just gets beyond that. | ||
| So you're either totally invisible, or you get kind of warm, fuzzy, thumbs up, smiles, and it's just a whole different energy. | ||
| Well, then I started going into the subculture. | ||
| I wasn't aware that there was a subculture of people that were obsessed with these FJ62s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| There's so many different little Twitter follower pages that you can go to. | ||
| You can see the images they post or Instagram. | ||
| These cars have this crazy, legendary following where people just are obsessed with these old, like, what years are these? | ||
| These 1989, 1990? | ||
| Yeah, specifically the ones with the four rectangular headlights, the FJ62, are 88 to 90. And then the preceding models, the FJ60, which looks about the same, those were from 81 to 87. What gave you the motivation to take this particular type of car and engineer it to such an incredible degree? | ||
| Well, we started with the older ones. | ||
| The FJ40s, right? | ||
| Yeah, the 40s. | ||
| Which are really sexy. | ||
| Yeah, and you'll talk about subcultes. | ||
| That subculte's tremendous. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But we started with the 40 and then the 45 pickups and wagons, then the FJ55 wagons. | ||
| So... | ||
| It's just sort of the culture evolved in that those were so archaic because they were earlier standards, earlier years. | ||
| Yeah, choke and one barrel carb, three on the tree drum brakes. | ||
| No power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think as these got older and the average conditions of the ones people could find out there became lesser and lesser, The market naturally extended into these models, and people said, well, hey, what about a 60? | ||
| What about a 6.2? | ||
| We're even doing the FCJ 80s, doing major restos, the 91 to 97 versions, because, again, there's a certain attachment that people will have with them that even though the truck is gone or it had shortcomings... | ||
| It still holds a spot in their heart, which is kind of a big part of the 98% of the battle is already won with Icon because the majority of our projects, we're starting with something that already gives people warm and fuzzies. | ||
| Any of these cars have cult followings and shortcomings, which is kind of the perfect formula to let me revision them and create something like a new option for people that appreciate it. | ||
| Well, I wasn't even a fan of these, but I became a fan from just going over your website and then watching the vehicles. | ||
| I watched a couple of the videos and Jonathan has these videos that he puts on YouTube where he puts sticks a couple of GoPros in the cars and you personally take them out, which is very appealing too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, my videos suck. | |
| No, they don't! | ||
| At least they're honest. | ||
| No, they don't suck at all. | ||
| They're great. | ||
| They're really effective. | ||
| Because, yeah, throw one of those, like, the second one down, that one right there. | ||
| They're not even remotely sucky. | ||
| What they are is 100% authentic. | ||
| Like, when you're taking these cars out, you're going over all the different upgrades and different things that you've done to them, that's when you really start getting it. | ||
| You go, oh, this guy's fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This guy's crazy. | ||
| He's made a $170,000, $20,000 car. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and that's been A, because I don't have the budget, but B, because I concur with you that brands like these, if they're not driven out of the vision of a singular lunatic, then they're not worth doing. | ||
| So I wanted to keep that relationship and personal relationship. | ||
| Although I just knock the videos out and edit them real quick, but I really want people to understand the level of geekness that we do and... | ||
| Well, you even leave in when you dropped your GoPro in one of them. | ||
| I love that, too. | ||
| Up, here it goes. | ||
| Boom, boom, boom. | ||
| But the passion comes through. | ||
| And I'm a big fan of contagious passion. | ||
| And, I mean, there's things that I was never interested in before. | ||
| Like, I never gave a fuck about cooking. | ||
| I loved good food, but I never gave a fuck about cooking. | ||
| Until I watched Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. | ||
| And I'd see the passion that this guy has about chefs and about preparation and the, you know, just the amount of skill that is involved in creating a perfect meal. | ||
| And then I started to get it. | ||
| I'm like, oh, this is an art form. | ||
| It's an art form that I never understood. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| This is an art form. | ||
| What you're doing is an art form. | ||
| That's the history of the world in a nutshell. | ||
| Anyone who's ever done a great thing, be it important or not, Be he a chef, a sculptor, a seamstress, a woodcarver, a leader, a political figure, whatever. | ||
| It was that inner passion that drove it and made it distinct and really matter. | ||
| So, fortunately, I'm feeling like I'm not the only idiot in the last three or four years. | ||
| There's kind of like this, like... | ||
| It's like there's a renaissance. | ||
| I think consumers are tired of the big box luxury branded kind of bullshit marketing facade and want... | ||
| Like we all already have enough crap in the first world, right? | ||
| So if you're going to buy another something, like you with your pool cues. | ||
| If you're going to buy another pool cue, there's going to be a story to that fucker. | ||
| It's going to mean something and someone's going to put their heart and soul in that. | ||
| So I'm starting to see this sort of... | ||
| Craftsman, collective renaissance of makers, of people creating stuff out of passion, not out of a spreadsheet and a VC's formula of how well it's going to do on Wall Street, but product first. | ||
| Because I think we forgot about that as a country. | ||
| We kind of walked away from that. | ||
| Slowly seeing that come back. | ||
| Yeah, it seems recently. | ||
| Recently, that's become, like, all sorts of things. | ||
| I watched a video on this company called Brooklyn Cut. | ||
| It was another, uh, handmade knives. | ||
| And I was like, this is fascinating! | ||
| I never give a shit about a guy making knives, and I'm watching this guy make these handmade butcher knives and kitchen knives, and I was like, But you could see like the sweat and the dirt in his hands and he's going over the edges and making sure everything's nice like ah There's something about that that I'm as an adult just starting to recognize This contagious aspect and how important it is and how when you when you see people that are passionate about things No matter what it is like you said like you to make making furniture or anything There's something about it | ||
| that gets you excited like almost you're pulling some of their energy from their creation Yeah, to me that's the perfect formula because then also, even if you don't become a consumer, the price point doesn't make sense or whatever, just if you respect it and understand where they're coming from and you in turn are inspired to do whatever it is that You know, you've been staying in your cubicle and earning your good salary, but your soul is dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you start tinkering at night. | ||
| You get in the garage on the weekends or whatever it is. | ||
| I think that's key. | ||
| Because, you know, our government for decades now has been telling us just go to Target and buy something and we'll all be fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Which I think is just asinine because it was the country was built on... | ||
| People trying new ideas and taking risk and Standing up for what they believe in and if we just turn into a nation of consumers Then why should anyone give a shit about our opinion and our nosiness telling them how to run their country? | ||
| There's another thing that I was really struck by when I was tooling around your shop Which is insanely impressive and sitting in your cars is the build quality Quality like you're sitting in everything like this fucking thing is going to last a hundred years like all of your stuff and then we have that conversation about planned Obsolescence that companies are actually engineering planned obsolescence into their automobiles which are business A lot of people always think it's like some sort of a conspiracy theory, | ||
| like, oh, that's, you know, nonsense. | ||
| They're just trying to do the best thing they can with modern electronics and some of that stuff breaks. | ||
| But that's not really the case. | ||
| Bullshit, yeah. | ||
| Explain to me what you explained to me today. | ||
| Basically, I think in the old days you were dealing with... | ||
| Um, products were designed and manufactured for the sake of the product. | ||
| You know, pretty, duh, simple, linear, pure concept. | ||
| Um, unfortunately, I would blame it on Wall Street more than anything in that suddenly the product in a product company Was no longer the priority. | ||
| The priority was the margin, the scalability, the numbers for the shareholders. | ||
| So the second you take your eye off of the product being what drives the company, it's going to go to shit one way or another. | ||
| So like car companies, I mean, there's stories that a certain Japanese car company whose name I will not mention actually went and studied paid Microsoft and said, oh, wait a minute. | ||
| So your consumer buys a laptop. | ||
| When the battery dies, you're retaining that client, and the vast majority of those clients aren't buying a battery. | ||
| They're buying another laptop. | ||
| Oh, this good business. | ||
| This very good. | ||
| How racist of you, by the way. | ||
| Very racist. | ||
| I love the whole world. | ||
| It's accurate, but you're not allowed to do it. | ||
| I don't mean to infer that this is an Asian... | ||
| Design or corporate priority. | ||
| It's global, and America's as guilty as anyone else. | ||
| America's been, that's been the one that people point to, because American cars, especially like in the 80s, were such shit. | ||
| They would just fall apart on a regular basis. | ||
| So, you know, we could have a long bitch fest about what unions have done to impact product and viability of American manufacture and all that. | ||
| It's another story. | ||
| But I think on the product level, suddenly automotive brands were looking at creating a A vehicle that, by nature, the durability of the components within and the complexity of the architecture to facilitate all the perversions that we've come to expect in modern cars automatically set the obsolescence cycle. | ||
| So it's much better business, although much worse for the future, To make a vehicle whiz-bang, nifty, groovy, designed to survive a life cycle of a lease or warranty cycle. | ||
| And then it's off to the landfill, and then what happens? | ||
| Repeat consumer. | ||
| You come back and you buy another one. | ||
| Japan's taken it and other nations to an even crazier level to promote the GDP. It's actually hard for you to own your car the older it gets. | ||
| Your inspections become more routine. | ||
| They go from yearly to quarterly and on and on and on. | ||
| Registration goes up every year. | ||
| Insurance goes up. | ||
| This is in Japan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It goes yearly to quarterly to what? | ||
| I think it goes... | ||
| I believe it's yearly to biannual to quarterly. | ||
| And then if it's a really old vehicle, it's like monthly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Monthly inspections? | |
| And then they're held to a much higher scrutiny. | ||
| Like you have one little leak. | ||
| Oh, and then you can't get your reg. | ||
| You've got to dial that in. | ||
| So it's been great for, you know, domestic manufacturing numbers and keeping industry... | ||
| Propped up, but it's kind of bullshit and short-sighted, I think, on a cultural level. | ||
| Well, it's fascinating because they're known for their durability, like Toyota cars, especially Hondas, known for their reliability. | ||
| But like, if you owned, let's say, an LX570, which are great trucks, a modern SUV version of the Land Cruiser. | ||
| They're brilliant. | ||
| They're strong. | ||
| Yeah, it'll run forever, probably, and it's super durable. | ||
| But let's talk about your touchscreen on the dash. | ||
| When that bugger breaks, you can't use your climate control and a whole bunch of other things. | ||
| I already have an LX570, and the touchscreen's dog shit. | ||
| It really is dog shit. | ||
| Now, let's flash forward to you love your truck. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| The warranty has expired, and that screen takes a shit. | ||
| Well, the problem is everything's engineered into it. | ||
| The climate control is in that. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| There's no knobs for it. | ||
| Now, that part is available now, and it's federally mandated that it must be available for a specific window of time. | ||
| That part today, I'm going to make an educated guess. | ||
| It's a $9,000 module for you to buy. | ||
| That stupid touchscreen? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| It's shit, though. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's not that responsive. | ||
| Okay, so five years from now, it dies. | ||
| It's out of warranty. | ||
| You love the truck. | ||
| It's nine grand. | ||
| If it is still available, what do you do? | ||
| You likely say, oh, fuck it, and you go get a new one. | ||
| Back to their business model. | ||
| Yeah, it's disturbing that that's actually an engineered idea, that they want stuff to break. | ||
| That's not what we want. | ||
| What people really appreciate is stuff that's durable. | ||
| But your mass consumer is to blame also, because, like, I don't know, I get in a modern car, like a nice fancy car, and people go, God, it's $140,000, this new Porsche, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But I drive in and go, man, how on earth do they get it to do all this neat shit for only $140,000? | ||
| That's true, right? | ||
| All the way through to people going to box stores and buying a backpack for the kids for school, and they want a $12.95 backpack. | ||
| Now, granted, they'll replace it four or five times because it's a heartless pile of poo that no one cared about. | ||
| Versus buying one from, I don't know, Filson or Tanner Goods or one of these upcoming passion-based brands where maybe it's an $80 or $120 bag, but the kid will own it for 20 years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think that's part of the re-education of the consumer that hopefully in turn will incite and motivate manufacturers, large and small, to re-prioritize what drives design. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Are they mutually exclusive when it comes to options like magnetic ride control and all this crazy shit that they have now, these sensors that adjust to the fact that one wheel's slipping and they counter and all this traction control and stability management and all this jazz? | ||
| Isn't that stuff just gonna break? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the traditional answer they'd give you if you asked a, you know, top AG engineer, he'd say, ah, but it's all computer-based, so there's no varying parts. | ||
| Yeah, but there's circuit boards that take a shit and solders that split and code that becomes corrupted and on and on and on. | ||
| That's not a tire that you can change on the side of the road either. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| When that shit's out, you're fucked. | ||
| And the biggest issue is trying to get those parts to support that vehicle. | ||
| When you are the last of the Mohicans who's trying to keep it on the road and keep it going. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, most manufacturers could give a damn, and as soon as they're federally not required to maintain those parts, they want nothing to do with them. | ||
| So it gets to that point where, like, there's cars that are classic that you're always going to get parts for. | ||
| Like, you're always going to be able to get parts for, like, a 70 Chevy Nova. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, because people love them, and there's a big market for it. | ||
| But, like, a 91 Civic... | ||
| It's like, ooh, what is that? | ||
| You're dumpster diving, and that's... | ||
| Yeah, you're fuck, kind of. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird thing that these... | ||
| There's some cars and some vehicles that attain this classic status, and then they'll always be classic. | ||
| But, like, a 2010 Mercedes, like, nobody wants that. | ||
| They just don't want it. | ||
| I mean, you might want it. | ||
| It's not a terrible car to drive around in. | ||
| Pretty soon you can resell them in Cuba for big money. | ||
| Yeah, pretty soon. | ||
| It was an emerging market. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But, you know, I think... | ||
| You just got back from there, didn't you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I saw some of your photos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You must have been geeked out at all those cars down there, huh? | ||
| Stupid. | ||
| I'm surprised I didn't get arrested, though, because we went there officially as, like, a guest of... | ||
| The governing family on an arts mission. | ||
| And because we had sort of anticipated less scrutiny at customs, my backpack had literally about 95 pounds worth of vintage car parts. | ||
| I figured out how to ingratiate myself with the motoring locals in a hurry, which was amazing because I got taken to some crazy hordes and finds of really wild early cars because of that. | ||
| But yeah, I brought soldering guns, soldering wire, bulbs, relays, all sorts of stuff because the ingenuity, the resourcefulness of that country and the spirit of the people is just phenomenal. | ||
| We've talked about it a dozen times on this podcast because I love the fact that they didn't have access to new cars. | ||
| So what they did is they just reconditioned and upgraded and fixed all their old cars to the point where those yank tanks, is what they call them, those 1950s-plus cars. | ||
| They're just driving them around all over the place. | ||
| The vast majority of the cars on the road are those or recent import Chinese vehicles because the Chinese government kind of got in bed with them and partnered on import automotive distribution companies. | ||
| I just wrote about it for... | ||
| I'm the automotive editor for Penthouse in the article that comes out in the next issue, which I don't think anyone fucking reads, but I enjoy writing them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Someone should read a penthouse. | ||
| But anyway, it was about that and the change in the culture. | ||
| But it's interesting. | ||
| They've actually recently passed a federal law there that makes it illegal to export any of these vehicles. | ||
| Because as they loosen the restrictions on inbound vehicles, they anticipated potentially there'd be a reduction in the demand. | ||
| But I don't think it's going to happen from all the people that I talk to from all walks of life there. | ||
| It's become like a cultural icon to them. | ||
| And I think it expresses a lot of the human spirit in Cuba and how they've persevered and managed to make things work with what they have. | ||
| But, I mean, most of them that I drove around in, like, you know, you'd be in a 57 Chevy Bel Air convertible and it's running a 70s Russian Volga diesel. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, it's nuts. | ||
| Actually, I was in Castro's ex... | ||
| A late 60s limousine. | ||
| We rented three of his limos in the fleet. | ||
| We didn't really rent, but it was a friendly arrangement. | ||
| To drive out a couple hours out of Havana to go look at a very rare Aston Martin that I knew about that's the only one in the country that had been abandoned there. | ||
| That's a one-of-one early Aston. | ||
| So we drove these crazy old Russian limousines to go for there, and I ended up on the side of the road twice having to fix them. | ||
| And then again, we were going out to hear music, drunk at like 2 in the morning, and our Russian Lada taxi cab broke down. | ||
| It was pretty funny. | ||
| So I have some pretty funny pictures of my cabbie looking at me just completely incredulous. | ||
| I'm underneath the car with bailing wire, cubiting it up. | ||
| Cubiting it up. | ||
| So how are they keeping these things running? | ||
| How do they get access to parts? | ||
| Are they manufacturing their own parts? | ||
| Are they reconfiguring them? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they can't get anything. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, for example, as a tourist, if you forget your toothbrush, you're going to spend three days trying to find a fucking toothbrush. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| So where do you think you're going to get a break drum for 48 olds? | ||
| So did you stay at a hotel when you were there? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Some people stay in people's homes. | ||
| Yeah, that's a big new trend, and I'd recommend it. | ||
| Same with the home restaurant industry that's growing there. | ||
| Backstory to that is there was a recent limited allowance that allowed private individuals to create small businesses. | ||
| So people are opening up their homes. | ||
| They're repurposing these beautiful, derelict old buildings and opening magnificent restaurants in them. | ||
| Well, magnificent might be a strong word because the food kind of sucks. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, well, because, again, they can't get anything. | ||
| So, like, the food that's imported comes from what the government said they could import from who they could say it imported from. | ||
| So, unless the dude has his own farm and garden and herb resource, which a lot of them do. | ||
| It greatly limits what ends up on the plate. | ||
| So they just take people in and they have like two seats at their kitchen. | ||
| Yeah, I think they're called paladores, I think is the word. | ||
| And some of the best meals and experience and discussions and human interface we had were in those environments. | ||
| It was super cool. | ||
| So do they take like a broken part and reconfigure it? | ||
| Do they make a new one? | ||
| I mean, it's everything from... | ||
| J.B. Weld chewing gum, duct tape, and corks and coat hangers through to incredibly gifted, resourceful, generally the older generation. | ||
| And I met one guy in particular in his 80s who's very well known down there. | ||
| There's a big car club called Friends of Fangio. | ||
| So Fangio was a great racer back in the 50s who in fact won the first big Havana rally. | ||
| And there's this magnificent poster that's like the holy grail of car geek posters. | ||
| I still want one. | ||
| Can't find it. | ||
| But anyway, the second year, he went there to compete again, and Castro had him kidnapped because they didn't want him winning because he was an Argentinian. | ||
| And they're like, mm-mm, he can't win. | ||
| So they held him captive and apparently treated him quite well and didn't release him until after the race. | ||
| But this Friends of Fangio Car Club is founded by one of the local guys who was on his mechanic team that first year. | ||
| Everybody with anything that has a motor and wheels. | ||
| And he took me to meet this older gentleman. | ||
| And this guy will not only make the part, he'll make the tool needed to make the damn part. | ||
| So they're forging and casting their own stuff. | ||
| And it's phenomenal. | ||
| Like, we could learn a lot of lessons in MacGyvering shit back together from them. | ||
| Well, that is one thing that we're missing and we're losing. | ||
| The people, the skilled craftsmen that have the ability to make metal pieces, which used to be a big thing. | ||
| I mean, there are people in the hot rod world, it's a big thing. | ||
| Fabricators are very high in demand because they do so much custom work. | ||
| But it's such a tiny, tiny fraction. | ||
| But again, I think if we step back... | ||
| The thing that keeps me from becoming a depressed drunk is the feeling that that's changing. | ||
| It's becoming more important to the greater general population. | ||
| People are more inspired and be it in metal, be it in leather, be it in soup, be it in cuddlery, whatever the hell it is. | ||
| There seems to be a growing trend in people giving a shit and returning back to that. | ||
| And I think also, more importantly perhaps, feeling how it changes them as an individual. | ||
| So like for me, my past life, I had a completely different career. | ||
| And I wasn't really... | ||
| I got into it loving it and over the years I really didn't have the control and creative input that I thought I did despite putting my heart and soul in it or past a point despite getting dispassionate about it and it starts to kill your soul. | ||
| When I was young and dumb and we didn't have kids yet, my wife and I spontaneously basically quit our jobs and started our automotive, the first one, TLC. I mean, it could have totally screwed up and not worked. | ||
| I'm lucky that it did, but I think most epically important, it reinvigorated me as an individual. | ||
| So I'm more proud and passionate and content, which in turn hopefully makes me less of an asshole than the rest of the people that I interface with on this planet. | ||
| So I think big cultural sense. | ||
| That's a wonderful thing that I'm seeing, and it's not unique to America. | ||
| The ripple effect is real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think around the world people are wanting to return to those values. | ||
| Well, and it's also, there's something about, like, if someone drives, like, say, one of your FJ40s that you re-engineered, they're driving around in a piece of art. | ||
| It's not just a car. | ||
| Those volcanic... | ||
| Black ones that you... | ||
| I mean, that's so... | ||
| I mean, icon, but it's so iconic. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's your thing. | ||
| I'm glad you see it that way. | ||
| No, it's art, man. | ||
| Because that's my whole approach. | ||
| It's a functioning sculpture. | ||
| There's art even in the way your door's closed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I shut your door, I don't know if you noticed, in your showroom like four or five times, because it's just so well done. | ||
| There's nothing wonky. | ||
| It's just clink, clink, clink. | ||
| You could feel that. | ||
| I think when people drive something like that, or use that guy's knives, or this clock that we have here, you feel craftsmanship. | ||
| And it impacts you on a more important level. | ||
| Yeah, whereas if you have a cool piece of electronic, it's cool. | ||
| I love a cool iPhone or a cool laptop, but I love this laptop. | ||
| I write all my jokes on it. | ||
| I write all emails and jazz, but I don't feel anything out of it. | ||
| This isn't like some guy's creation. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a tool. | |
| It's not a relationship. | ||
| Yeah, some woman didn't carve these keys with her skilled hands and I feel it when I'm typing. | ||
| No, it's kind of manufactured. | ||
| And it's cool that that can be done too, but there's another level of stuff, there's another level of feeling that you get from functional art. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| And probably the most obtuse expression of that brand theology is our derelicts, which some people just don't. | ||
| Get it. | ||
| You know, I had ran into a guy who came running up at a stoplight this morning. | ||
| I was test driving a 54 DeSoto. | ||
| Explain what a derelict is, because people think you're talking about bums. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| So, basically, a derelict is where we'll take a car with epic patina, like just time-worn natural decay, but not a rust bucket. | ||
| It's like a barn find. | ||
| We'll take that car, we'll laser scan it, get it into CAD, chuck the original chassis and mechanical and everything, and evolve that into a modern, highly capable daily driver. | ||
| But the art is trying to make it look like we did nothing. | ||
| So this guy at Alight, he's like, you think you're going to make it? | ||
| I'm like, yeah, I'm good. | ||
| He goes, are you going to fix it up? | ||
| I'm like, nope, I'm done. | ||
| Well, what color are you going to paint it? | ||
| Red? | ||
| Nope, I'm done. | ||
| What? | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| But to me, that's kind of part of the fun. | ||
| Not everyone does get it. | ||
| They look like an old car, but you put this DeSoto up on a lift... | ||
| And showed it to me. | ||
| And it's got this insane, fully independent suspension. | ||
| That's the icons, but if you find a reformer... | ||
| Just a little icon derelict, it'll come right up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or the derelict, not a reformer. | ||
| But these cars look on the outside as if it's just an old car. | ||
| But then you look down at the wheels, like, hey, wait a minute, what's going on here? | ||
| And then you're kind of like, oh, hold up a second. | ||
| You have modern Corvette engines in them. | ||
| Yeah, they're just bad ships. | ||
| Oh, it's insane. | ||
| Like, what is this one right here? | ||
| This is a Powermaster wagon. | ||
| That's what I was driving this morning, yeah. | ||
| Powermaster, what a great name. | ||
| So that car was inspired by the first Derelict, which is mine, which is a 52 DeSoto wagon. | ||
| So like in this, it has a one-off chassis. | ||
| We partner with Art Morrison on most of our chassis engineering. | ||
| We gave it a gold tooth, like a Kronk, because it had a cavity, which is kind of fun. | ||
| But yeah, like 550 horse SRT8 Hemi Fuel E, 5-speed automatic independent suspension, 6-piston hydro-boosted brakes, modern climate control, Bluetooth audio, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But all like packaged and hidden, so it's totally under the radar. | ||
| Totally under the radar to the point where the knob that controls the old-school radio... | ||
| Actually controls the volume on this Bluetooth-enabled system that syncs up with your phone. | ||
| It's fucking incredible! | ||
| Digital bit one Audison, not digital to analog, but pure digital audio. | ||
| Gotta love the gold teeth. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| What you're doing is so cool because, like, someone, if they didn't know and they looked at it on the outside, they literally have no idea. | ||
| But then you would look inside and go, wow, that is a really well-preserved interior. | ||
| Wait a minute, what's that? | ||
| It just looks It looks off. | ||
| They're like onions. | ||
| If you start peeling back, there's a lot of layers to the absurdities in building these. | ||
| On that video, everyone gave me a hard time for my hat. | ||
| It's a derelict hat. | ||
| It's all fucked up. | ||
| I thought it was perfect. | ||
| The hat's perfect. | ||
| They're assholes. | ||
| People give you a hard time about everything. | ||
| You could save babies. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I've been lucky, though. | ||
| We have too many babies. | ||
| The trollers used to just rip me a new one. | ||
| And over the years, it's gotten better. | ||
| I think people have gotten a more thorough understanding of what we're doing. | ||
| Well, also, trolls are like snake venom. | ||
| You get a little bit, and it fucks you up. | ||
| But over time, you become immune to it. | ||
| And they actually help you. | ||
| People who are overly critical and assholes, they actually help you in the long run. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| Because they make you understand that there's too many people. | ||
| You can't just pay attention to everyone's opinion. | ||
| There's just too many fucking people. | ||
| Just remind you that we could use a little Darwinian trimming of the herd. | ||
| There's that! | ||
| But it's also, it's really on them. | ||
| What is this fucking thing you've got here? | ||
| This convertible? | ||
| Oh my god, the seats! | ||
| The interior was just nuts. | ||
| Oh my god, that's beautiful! | ||
| So that's a 50 Buick Roadmaster convertible. | ||
| Last on the road in 1958, one of our hunters, who's actually a UPS driver, saw that in some dude's backyard and hat-tipped us and we grabbed it. | ||
| Back up. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| UPS drivers are the best hunters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, we pay finder's fees to them all the time because they're delivering packages and they see something covered by leaves. | ||
| Look at that fucking car. | ||
| God, those seats are incredible. | ||
| That one's now running... | ||
| About a 600 horse LS7 dry sump. | ||
| That car is a blast. | ||
| Now, who's got that thing? | ||
| That's an L.A. client? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Remember the Superbird, the 70 Superbird reformer we're building? | ||
| This is the same owner. | ||
| He's taking a Superbird, which is one of the iconic American muscle cars, and putting completely modern underpinnings. | ||
| You were going to do a Hellcat setup, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is, for folks who don't know what we're talking about because we're geeking out here, Hellcat is the Chrysler SRT version, the newest of their badass Challengers. | ||
| It's a beast. | ||
| Yeah, it's what I drove on my comedy special, the 707 horsepower red Challenger. | ||
| It's fucking incredible. | ||
| So after talking to the creative team in the SRT division at Mopar, We actually learned that we're not going to go that route. | ||
| We'd like to. | ||
| But you talk about complexity in modern vehicles, without being too much of a geek, that runs what's called a CAN bus network. | ||
| So the electrical network in that car is no longer yeses and nos, exes and nos. | ||
| It's constant data stream. | ||
| So even the damn dome light could be talking to the brake pedal that's talking to the tranny. | ||
| So it makes it very difficult to... | ||
| Really engineer those right in a non-native platform. | ||
| So with SRT's support, we're actually going to the company that builds their race engines, and we're going to do our own scratch-built SCAT 6.4-blown. | ||
| So that's our performance target, but we originally were just going to buy one and disassemble it and repurpose it, and we got talked out of that. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| All that stuff has also enabled them to have two keys. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Which is hilarious, because one of them that you give to the valet only gives it 500 horsepower. | ||
| It's like, do you know how fucking fast that is? | ||
| It's like, here, take this toned-down version, and then the other one, the red key, gives you 707 horsepower, which is incredibly manageable. | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| Yeah, it's so well engineered. | ||
| With all the electronics and all the jazz. | ||
| Even 10 years ago, when they would do a performance model, they'd just shoehorn in the biggest motor they could find. | ||
| That car, to me, is a great example of good change in Detroit. | ||
| It is so engineered to be what it is. | ||
| It's not just throw a motor in it and sell it. | ||
| No, it's really drivable. | ||
| It's almost like a GT car more than it is a sports car, even a muscle car. | ||
| It feels like a big Cadillac when you're riding there. | ||
| But it'll suck it down when you need it to. | ||
| Oh, when you stomp the gas on it. | ||
| Speaking of that duality of the two different keys, there's an engine builder out near our shop. | ||
| This guy builds motors like his trainer motor. | ||
| His entry-level motor is like a thousand horse. | ||
| That's the alien intake manifold guy? | ||
| Yeah, the one that looks like a woman with her legs open. | ||
| Is it Nelson? | ||
| Nelson, yeah. | ||
| Tom is an evil genius, but he'll build his cars where they have dual gas tanks. | ||
| You've got a toggle switch under the dash. | ||
| There's dual computer networks. | ||
| Dual tanks, dual injectors. | ||
| So you got your low output at a thousand horse, and then a flick of a switch, it goes to the jet fuel tank and to the other computer network, and now it's like 2,000 horsepower. | ||
| Yeah, that guy built an 1,800 horsepower 69 Chevelle. | ||
| For my friend, the white one? | ||
| No, it's like a light blue. | ||
| Oh, he did a white one called unfuckwithable. | ||
| They machined the badges. | ||
| It says, unfuckwithable. | ||
| And it's quite true. | ||
| Other than it's probably going to rip itself in half within five years. | ||
| Well, it's also, you know, the first corner. | ||
| On the first corner, a 200 horsepower Porsche is going to beat you. | ||
| We try and not do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, although over the years, I've been pushing the envelope with more and more and more horsepower, and it's hard to return once you've gone there. | ||
| We try and never build what we call cul-de-sac rides, where it's so into a corner of, yeah, well, it's 2,000 horsepower, but it overheats if you stand still. | ||
| It won't idle. | ||
| The AC won't work. | ||
| Or it's so much power, it's not trackable. | ||
| I'm trying to keep everything we do... | ||
| It's relatively practical, so whatever performance we have, it's in measure with the refinement, the trackability. | ||
| Like the Thriftmaster pickups we're building, people keep asking for more power. | ||
| Well, 447 horsepower is what we have found to be the maximum amount of power you can put in it without it just being asinine and never hooking up and just spinning tires. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like they might have painted themselves into a corner with this American horsepower war. | ||
| Because when you get things like the 777 horsepower Challenger, and then you've got the Mustang Shelby that has 662, and what are you going to have five years from now? | ||
| Are you going to have a million horsepower? | ||
| Where are you going to take it to? | ||
| It's going to... | ||
| Well, kind of like empires, I think if you look at the history of automotive design and trends, there's always a kind of a specific graph of a rise and fall. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think, you know, just as emissions laws came in and impacted the first era of the muscle cars, starting in 66 with DOT and EPA, I think you're going to see the same thing with these, where The corporate numbers will never allow that kind of output vehicle to be predominant because it impacts the ratio. | ||
| So I don't know the exact numbers, but I would fathom to say that for every three Hellcats they sell, they would have arguably had better business selling 20 six-banger versions, and the final corporate fleet The emissions of it is such that that thing eats up so much of their allotted emissions they're able to produce that it limits them. | ||
| So I think that should be a great opportunity. | ||
| I think Cadillac is showing early signs of embracing it correctly, which is, okay, well, let's get back to craftsmanship. | ||
| So, yeah, we can do this motor and it's super sexy and all that, but what about that plastic, ridiculous dash that we've turned into? | ||
| What about all this faux wood and, like, whoa, whoa. | ||
| Gee, why don't we start making more quality materials? | ||
| Which I think could be a really interesting opportunity because on the other side of the coin, you look at what the Chrysler Fiat ownership of Ferrari has done to Ferrari product. | ||
| You hop in a new Ferrari, the nav system's the same thing that's in your kid's Jeep Rubicon. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| And the plastic stuff that, oh, well, it has a sexy... | ||
| Well, the Porsche as well. | ||
| Coating that looks like aluminum, but it's plastic. | ||
| It's just the same thing that's in a Hyundai or a Kia or anything else. | ||
| And I think they better be careful to hold the line of that quality and that tactile, that human interface. | ||
| Or what's the point? | ||
| It's just a badge car. | ||
| Well, they've made some real errors in navigation systems and not keeping them update and current. | ||
| Because if you're going to have all that electronic jazz, it better be the good shit. | ||
| You're going to go there, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, like, I have a friend who has a Maserati, and this fucking piece of shit, oh my god, the navigation thing is just dog shit. | ||
| But it's just Chrysler stuff that some pencil pusher said, hey, you already paid for this, let's use it over there. | ||
| No traffic, doesn't know where the traffic is, can't update, can't reroute you. | ||
| Like, come on, my fucking phone does all this. | ||
| That's why I like Ferrari and Porsche to a certain extent as well. | ||
| I actually had more respect for them when they were making less money. | ||
| You know, when, like, the last of the air colds, like a 997. Yeah, there's no nav. | ||
| 993, right? | ||
| Yeah, I'm sorry, 993. Well, I can picture some German guy going, Via Natzat. | ||
| We are a driver's car. | ||
| There's no cup holder either. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck you. | |
| But they had the balls to say, hey, this is what we are. | ||
| We're not for everyone. | ||
| We don't have a backup camera. | ||
| It's a sports car. | ||
| It is minimalist. | ||
| Deal with it. | ||
| Dig it. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Don't go buy a Miata. | ||
| We don't care. | ||
| We are who we are. | ||
| Well, Lotus is kind of doing that. | ||
| They have a few of their cars. | ||
| They don't do that anymore? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, the stories that I've been hearing is Lotus was making so much money off of licensing T-shirts and product and crap that the cars are kind of a pain in their ass. | ||
| So the engineering arm is still alive and somewhat well. | ||
| But the cars, I mean, they had, what, seven concepts in the last two years? | ||
| And then production viability of any and all of them is all but gone. | ||
| It just takes such deep pockets to get one of those coach-built versions of those cars, like what Singer's doing. | ||
| But see, guys like Rob and I, I think it's viable that if we... | ||
| Are the creative sorts who are smart enough to acknowledge that we're dumb enough to not be the numbers sorts, but to build our team and add those people to the team? | ||
| I think we can make viable businesses out of it. | ||
| Now, the second you want to make 50,000, 100,000, 300, half million of them a year, I think that is the bigger struggle, because I think there's conflicts at core with the efficiencies that those business models demand In the modern world to be considered competitive, etc. | ||
| It's like, you know, with Ferrari talking about coming out with an SUV because, you know, some pencil pusher, stockholder of power somewhere is like, we need more market share. | ||
| You need to come up with something else. | ||
| Even with Porsche, with the Cayenne and stuff, like, yeah, it's off-core, but I can understand the business numbers. | ||
| It made perfect sense to grab a Touregg and package it up and party on. | ||
| Have you driven one of those Cayenne turbos? | ||
| They're a fucking spaceship. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a spaceship. | ||
| It goes zero to 60 in four seconds, and it's a fucking truck, and it handles like it's on rails. | ||
| It doesn't even make sense. | ||
| It defies the laws of physics. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Same with the new... | ||
| Turbo Panamera. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh my God, that thing's insane. | ||
| I love that tranny, that PDA. See, I want to take a car like that, package that fucker into an old pre-A split window 356A, and have an all-wheel drive, like, 660 horse, PDK, paddle shift. | ||
| But what does that thing weigh? | ||
| Those things didn't weigh 2,500 pounds. | ||
| So... | ||
| That would be insane. | ||
| The amount of power for 2,500 pounds. | ||
| That would be so crazy. | ||
| By the time you stuff all that crap in there, you're going to be back up to 4,000, but it'd still be a hell of an E-ticket ride. | ||
| It would be insane. | ||
| Is there a market? | ||
| Everyone loves those old cars. | ||
| People love 69 Camaros and those old school cars. | ||
| Do you think there's a market for someone to come along and do what Singer's doing? | ||
| Because what Singer is doing is taking... | ||
| When you buy a Singer car, it's technically a 964, which is like a 1989 Porsche, but it's not really. | ||
| It's a carbon fiber body. | ||
| The drivetrain is totally re-engineered. | ||
| Is he Cosworth still? | ||
| I think he had a Cosworth engine. | ||
| So he's got a 400-plus horsepower air-cooled... | ||
| I mean, air-cooled is kind of a stupid way to do it, but... | ||
| The people love that sound that the air-cooled produces, and it has such a mechanical, sort of an engaging feel to it. | ||
| You know that there's that feel that those engines have that people fall in love with so he's got this kind of like very niche market or niche market if you don't like me butchering that word but Is there a market for someone doing that with an American car like building a 1969 Camaro today like a re-engineered Camaro certainly so I think traditionally There's two ways it's been done and there's a pending third way it might be able to soon be done Traditionally, | ||
| you got a guy who doesn't give a damn, respects quality, finds a pro builder, and there's plenty of geeks like us out there who do exactly what you're talking about, and they build six-digit super freak, super trick for that dude, one car. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Build one car. | ||
| And all the engineering is applied to that one car. | ||
| Then you have the professional, quote-unquote, shops that see a market. | ||
| So they see that car on Barrett-Jackson, and it sells for $250, and they go, well, shit, my friend's got some 69s in the backyard. | ||
| I can put those together, make them shine, and we get some money. | ||
| You're talking about that guy fast and loud, aren't you? | ||
| No, I have no personal issues with him. | ||
| No, but it's just like... | ||
| That's the show. | ||
| People see an... | ||
| It's more the wolves, you know, people that see an opportunity. | ||
| So then, that's like Broncos. | ||
| Traditionally, and it's not to say anything negative about that community, but the shop owners go, okay... | ||
| What is the perceived tolerance of the guy who might call me and wants a restored Bronco? | ||
| And right or wrong, that may have been $40,000, $50,000. | ||
| So then what do they do? | ||
| They go and they try and make a feasible business model of delivering whatever the hell they can at that perceived market tolerance. | ||
| So you either have the guy who one-off builds for the occasional funded guy, you have the slightly more commercial versions of shops, which in mass tend to... | ||
| Cut corners or make sacrifices to meet a perceived market. | ||
| Three, you've got the new breed of fools like me and Robert Singer and more and more guys who throw caution to the wind, ignore the established price tolerance, focus on the quality and then try and build a market from scratch. | ||
| In the future, there's a House bill that just got presented that has been promoted by our big trade group called SEMA, which is going to really work to create a new federal classification for ultra-low-volume vehicular manufacturers. | ||
| We'll take responsibility for tailpipe submissions, but get exemptions from larger impact mass-market vehicle crash test certification, which makes it impossible. | ||
| But, you know, we can only bill 200 a year, 300 a year. | ||
| If that law passes, I think people are going to be shocked how many geeks in the fringes like us and like us that are not branded yet, that have the engineering prowess and resources to do exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| Like that body for a 69 Camaro, you can buy that entire body brand new. | ||
| You can almost buy that whole car via mail order in Lego together in Boston over the winter. | ||
| Like companies like Year One? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think there's issues there with quality control, licensing deals, making the OEMs enforce quality with the license so that this emerging market doesn't step on its own dick because nothing fits anything, and there's plenty of concerns there. | ||
| But bigger picture, The capabilities of the shops and the resources and the tooling and all this stuff coming together, if this law comes into play, you're going to see an immediate new subculture in custom vehicles built to a very high level. | ||
| At a more and more feasible price point because we'll all get that scale. | ||
| And like as of today for me when I'm these Broncos, I'm paying triple a day for the old Bronco I need to restore and modify into my final equation. | ||
| I'm paying triple what I paid before I opened my mouth and we came out with them. | ||
| And it's a shrinking group. | ||
| So you have kind of fucked yourself in your own market. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, totally fucked myself. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Ruined it. | ||
| So if I had had the intelligence and finance, I would have chipmunked away a hundred of them. | ||
| Well, you were talking about this before when we were in your lot, when you were talking to me about how you got into business. | ||
| It's kind of on a bet. | ||
| And you chipmunked away a bunch of FJ40s and tried to create a market. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Explain that. | ||
| Okay, basically, I've always been a big fan of getting out of my little box and traveling the world and respecting different cultures and viewpoints, etc. | ||
| So I've done a lot of traveling. | ||
| I found... | ||
| It was incredible how often you'd be in a really remote locale where a vehicle is literally life or death. | ||
| How much the people loved the Land Cruisers. | ||
| On a whole different level than what North Americans dig about, aren't that cute? | ||
| It's kind of like a safari vehicle. | ||
| Like, no. | ||
| Like, life or fucking death. | ||
| This is what gets you out of the bush alive. | ||
| And people have such a deep affinity for them. | ||
| So... | ||
| Back here in the States, all my cars are over-restored. | ||
| I want something for fun, dogs, surfing, beach, whatever. | ||
| Bought an old FJ40 like I had grown to love on a prior trip. | ||
| Geeked out and restored it, etc. | ||
| So I was at a business class, extension class. | ||
| I didn't go to college at USC. And we got into a debate over supply and demand. | ||
| Me, another student, and the professor. | ||
| My theory was supply and demand's bullshit, because nowadays, if you control the supply, you can create the demand. | ||
| They said I was an idiot back and forth, turned into a bet, and I was given, I think it was six months, to drive a trackable market up 30 points, and I think it was like a thousand-buck bet or whatever, so... | ||
| Although I was still active in my prior career, in my spare time and with spare money, I had already invested in a couple automotive shops just because I was already wrenching and restoring stuff in my garage and helping these guys with their business model but using their resources because I didn't have a lift in my shop, in my house. | ||
| So yeah, I went out and bought every FJ40 worth of rat's ass that I could find. | ||
| I do find trips through... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think about... | |
| Probably about 30 of them. | ||
| 30 of them in six months? | ||
| Yeah, but this is like thrifty nickel. | ||
| No, that was like in two months. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I wasn't working. | ||
| I was going on road trips. | ||
| Rampaging. | ||
| I'd buy a 12 or so, and then I'd call the transporter and coordinate and send the 18-wheeler to go pick up those 12. And then keep going, call the other transporter, pick up the next 12. And then chipmunk them away. | ||
| I didn't geek out at first. | ||
| All I did was fix the problems they had. | ||
| Clean them up really well and then bring them back to market. | ||
| And this is in the day of the recycler and the thrifty nickel and all that. | ||
| And it was like shooting ducks in a barrel because culturally people dug them but there wasn't like a cult around them. | ||
| And nobody was restoring them worth a damn. | ||
| They would like throw leftover V8 and a $20 paint job and chrome rims from their brothers El Camino or whatever. | ||
| No one was treating them like conventional classics. | ||
| So that was just a very simple premise of give them more respect, represent them better, bring them back to the market. | ||
| I bet you there's a bunch of men and women that dig them who aren't engaging because of the quality level of what they see. | ||
| And then luckily I was right and went back for them to pay me on the bet and no one would pay me. | ||
| They wouldn't pay you. | ||
| No, the bastards. | ||
| So what did they say? | ||
| It was just a joke, dude. | ||
| Just a joke? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whatever. | |
| You bought 30 fucking cars. | ||
| It was fun as all hell. | ||
| I made out like a bandit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I made out quite well. | |
| Well, you win. | ||
| In fact, those cars, the profit from those cars, let my wife and I piss off and go to South Africa for like three months and have a killer vacation when we were young and single. | ||
| And that's the vacation where we're lamenting these dudes never paid up. | ||
| But I'm like, but I think there's something there. | ||
| And honey, you hate your job. | ||
| I don't really like mine anymore. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| Goddamn, I love these stories. | ||
| Our overhead's low. | ||
| When we get home, let's just quit. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| We're in our 20s. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| So we quit. | ||
| I took like three credit cards, 20 grand, my quiver of trucks, a wing and a prayer. | ||
| Took over my friend's lease because he wanted to move his classic car shop to Santa Monica. | ||
| And literally, we put a post-it note. | ||
| It was like 1,200 square feet. | ||
| I put like, I don't know, five or six trucks, glass, window, and van. | ||
| I put the trucks in the window, put a piece of cardboard on the door, my cell number, and I'd carry around my old Motorola, you know, tan brick cell phone. | ||
| Just go about my life. | ||
| And people started calling. | ||
| It just, like, third truck we sold, we sold to a dude who's like, hey, have you ever heard of the internet? | ||
| We're like, yeah, we heard about that. | ||
| Sounds cool. | ||
| What year is this? | ||
| What year? | ||
|
unidentified
|
96. Oh, that was barely, right? | |
| Yeah, it sounds pretty wild, man. | ||
| He's like, yeah, well, I design websites. | ||
| We're like, cool, what are those? | ||
| So we actually traded the FJ40 we sold this guy for a website. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| It was just, again, serendipity has been so good to me. | ||
| That just shows you how insane technology has changed in just a short amount of time. | ||
| We have one of our sponsors, this company called Squarespace, and you can make a website, no bullshit, in about 10 minutes. | ||
| And it's a badass website. | ||
| Drag and drop. | ||
| If you have a series of images, it's so easy to do. | ||
| You can build an online store. | ||
| You had to trade a fucking car for a website. | ||
| Oh, and nowadays, we're redesigning the Icon site. | ||
| It's going to go live in a couple weeks. | ||
| And being the geek that I am, I'm like, didn't want to redo it. | ||
| Our current site's okay. | ||
| No one's bitching. | ||
| It gets the job done. | ||
| But apparently, it's written in some language of some company that got bought by someone who got bought, who got shelved by the last guy who bought them. | ||
| And we got a notice that, like, yeah, well, you know, browsers could be tomorrow, could be in a year. | ||
| But literally, like a light switch, my site won't be decipherable. | ||
| So I'm like, fuck. | ||
| So if I'm going to do it, I want to do it right. | ||
| So my art director and I spent like eight months geeking out and researching all the automotive sites, which, you know, got a lot of ideas of what to and what not to do. | ||
| And my programmer, I'm like Mr. America for manufacturing, but my programmer is in Afghanistan. | ||
| So other than my server freaking out and then wanting to block, you're getting hacked from Afghanistan. | ||
| Once we got that cleared up, this dude is a rock star. | ||
| From Afghanistan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's got like 20 young employees. | ||
| He's fresh out of college. | ||
| All of his employees are college kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're paying them way more than they're used to making locally. | |
| But 10% what I was paying the Fancy Pants agency in New York to the old site. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And overnight, I'll give them all the notes and we'll do the layout at like 5 p.m. | ||
| I come in at work. | ||
| Like there'll be an email that comes in at 5 a.m. | ||
| Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| Dude, get me this guy's number. | ||
| He rocks the house. | ||
| Jesus fucking Christ. | ||
| I'm down with hanging out with Afghanis. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I love that kind of story. | ||
| I just love the fact that you just went for it. | ||
| I love people go for it. | ||
| Don't sit around and fucking hate your life for the next two decades. | ||
| And that Afghani is just yet again another example of a guy who's like, there's no opportunity here. | ||
| Life sucks. | ||
| I don't like my job, but wait a minute. | ||
| Maybe I could do programming for, you know, the guy followed his passion. | ||
| And again, he's doing a great job and succeeding commercially and personally because he put his heart in what he does. | ||
| And he does a good job. | ||
| Yeah, there's anywhere it's it's possible and I love I one of the things that's come out of this podcast that's been Surprising and amazing is how many people have done the same thing how many people that have listened to these podcasts and go and listen to people like you talk and Spread their passion go fuck it. | ||
| I'm doing it and then just figured out a way to do it on the weekends and That's nights after work and then put it together and then get a viable business model and I'll tell you what when you and I are We're 80. And we're not producing. | ||
| Maybe we can't do anything anymore. | ||
| And we sit back and we think about our lives outside of family and the people in our immediate circle. | ||
| I think the thing that we're going to carry the longest term true pride about... | ||
| Is having, in little ways or big, inspired other people and made a positive impact. | ||
| And just like that. | ||
| Like, the fact that this podcast, you probably, when you started, you're like, yeah, whatever, okay, it'll be a side thing and get rolling with it. | ||
| But it's turned in, it's created an entire community. | ||
| And it's inspired other people. | ||
| Like, we call them my kudos emails. | ||
| So just being a goober, if I'm on a blog or I'm listening to a podcast and I hear of another craftsman, I don't care what he's doing. | ||
| Like the dude with the petrified wood I was telling you about earlier. | ||
| If I find there's somebody out there following their dream and they're doing something that I think is killer, I'll figure out, big or small, who they are, where they are, get their email. | ||
| And I always send out an email and my subject line's always kudos. | ||
| And it's just, dude... | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| Well done, bitchin', go for it, proud of you, that's great. | ||
| And they're honest, and they have to be, or this wouldn't happen, but it has turned into so many friendships, opportunities, relationships, collaborative projects. | ||
| Like, it's just, it's good, warm, fuzzy, karmic. | ||
| And for both of you, when the guy receives that email, that is fuel. | ||
| Yeah, and the reason I started sending them is because I started getting them, and I noticed how it impacted and empowered me to stick to what was important, and it's everything. | ||
| That thing you were telling me about, does that guy have a website, the stools that he makes and the tables that he makes? | ||
| You know, I've only seen him on Instagram, and there's another one I'll send you. | ||
| Tell me what it is again. | ||
| What is the name on Instagram? | ||
| I've got to find it. | ||
| He's using petrified wood, right? | ||
| This dude takes petrified wood, and then through the cracks in the petrified wood, generally like a trunk, he'll embed diodes in the thing, so at night it bleeds light and is organic. | ||
| There's this other dude who's in... | ||
| Where is he? | ||
| Is he in Pedigree, I think? | ||
| The guy takes gourds. | ||
| And he carves them in the most incredible, filigree, intricate way. | ||
| Turns them into ceiling lights. | ||
| So they broadcast this most incredible spectrum of shadow and color. | ||
| It's a fucking gourd! | ||
|
unidentified
|
The guy turns it into just like They're out there. | |
| There's the Sanchez brothers. | ||
| They're a family. | ||
| Three generations, okay? | ||
| These Mexican dudes in New Mexico or Arizona, and I think New Mexico. | ||
| Now, they have state Licenses to pick up firewood. | ||
| So they're out in the old growth areas in the desert, competing with dudes who are looking for firewood, but they're looking for fallen old growth timber or standing dead. | ||
| These guys take these pieces of wood and they'll pick up turquoise and metals in that same area. | ||
| They literally take him back to their studio. | ||
| And I don't know about the older generation, but I've met the youngest. | ||
| He'll sit back and stare at that wood and roll a fatty and burn it. | ||
| And get intimate with the shape of the wood. | ||
| And it can sit there for an hour or five years. | ||
| Until one day he's like... | ||
| Oh yeah, a chair. | ||
| And he sees the vision of the shape in it, so they do bowls and trays and staircases and tables and shit out of this wood. | ||
| Tate Fletcher's Instagram page, he put up this insane table that someone did along those lines. | ||
| It looks like it was carved out of a single block of wood, and some guy had this really... | ||
| Unique idea for the side of a table, like the front... | ||
| I see it wouldn't do it. | ||
| What was the guy's name that made those... | ||
| The table? | ||
| I don't remember the gourd or the table. | ||
| I suck with names, but I'll email it to you. | ||
| I wish we could pimp him on the... | ||
| And another guy like that, there's a guy on disability in Detroit who is the most gifted welder. | ||
| I'm a damn good welder and this guy's a rock star. | ||
| So his name's Josh Welton, Brown Dog Welding. | ||
| He no longer can work because he has massive surgeries in both arms. | ||
| But just to keep himself alive, like his spirit alive, He started doing artistic efforts with his welds. | ||
| So this dude literally takes scrap metal or old shovels, hammers them, messes with them, repurposes them, and does these incredible sculptures out of scrap metal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Out of nothing. | ||
| Dogs and cars and... | ||
| Whoa, that table's kick-ass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is the table. | |
| Yeah, I don't think he put a source... | ||
| No. | ||
| Look at that, though. | ||
| It's all one giant block of wood, and I think it probably is sectioned off on the left side that we can't see. | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| But on the right side, the side that's facing us, it's sort of like steps. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It looks like he took end cuts of post beams, like four-by's, And section them in to like a butcher block pattern. | ||
| Guys are doing that with walls too, where from like paper makers, they can take the center hub of the wood that they don't use for the paper pulp, and you leave them at dissimilar lengths, and you put them at 90 degrees on a wall, and you do a whole wall of in-cut tree limbs. | ||
| It looks super cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We've been doing more and more hardwood. | ||
| There's a company called Urban Hardwoods that sells tables like that. | ||
| And they essentially, they take really cool old hardwood chunks and make them these really unique tables. | ||
| They're not perfectly smooth. | ||
| A lot of them have... | ||
| See if you go to the gallery, if they have... | ||
| You can see some of the stuff that they do. | ||
| But they kind of do this on a fairly large scale, and they go all over the world or all over the country, rather, to find cool chunks of wood. | ||
| There's also, like, auto aero art, I think it's called, or aero art. | ||
| The dudes that take airplane scrap and repurpose it into... | ||
| Furniture and stuff is so cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, here you see these guys actually taking the wood itself. | ||
| They'll have giant cranes, carry these logs. | ||
| Oh, that's brilliant. | ||
| My buddy Eric is a pool cue manufacturer. | ||
| He's like one of the most sought after in the world. | ||
| He runs a company called Sugar Tree Cues. | ||
| It's all completely handmade. | ||
| All his own and he's one of those guys that will drive around in his truck and if he sees a log like off the site, like he lives in New Mexico, he'll drive like a mile into the desert and figure out a way to chop this fucking ironwood and get it into the back of his truck and then he'll make these insane pool cues with it with the most detailed figure, total artwork from Mother Nature. | ||
| He doesn't inlay them. | ||
| Just let the natural character He'll do points, like he'll cut pieces together, but he doesn't like inlay. | ||
| Like some people, there's different styles of cues. | ||
| Some of them they'll inlay like abalone or little pieces of bone or mastodon. | ||
| Ivory is one that he uses occasionally for the joint, like 10,000 year old mastodon. | ||
| Because apparently that's super prevalent. | ||
| Like you can find a lot of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's actually been growing because of the crackdown on elephant ivory that has actually created a strong market spike. | ||
| I just learned that in Africa last month. | ||
| But I used to do fine furniture as a hobby. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I used to sculpt... | ||
| Paint pre-Raphaelite style, do woodworking. | ||
| I did leatherworking. | ||
| But these are all hobbies, just different things I'd explore. | ||
| And I actually gave a couple minutes thought of making a commercial go of my furniture. | ||
| But it was just like, add up the hours. | ||
| Like, no, not going to happen. | ||
| Like, all quarter sawn, white oak. | ||
| I'd fume it instead of staining it, which is like... | ||
| Way old school way of doing it that makes no sense. | ||
| Fume, what does that mean? | ||
| Fume means you basically create like a desiccant chamber, like a sealed chamber, and you put a desiccant in there that sucks all the oxygen out of the air. | ||
| So that in turn surface cures the wood, and the longer you leave it in there, depending on the type of wood and the coarseness of the grain, it'll impact and stain the wood. | ||
| So like early Stickley, Gustav Stickley furniture arts and crafts era stuff, most of that, a big part of its durability is not just that it's quarter sawn, But that it's fumed. | ||
| Ammonia fuming. | ||
| Yeah, any desiccant, ammonia is what's traditionally used. | ||
| What is desiccant? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I believe it's the process of extracting oxygen and moisture. | ||
| And that's what ammonia does? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, look at that. | |
| Yeah, you try and take a breath in your desk and chamber when you're doing something. | ||
| So unfumed it looks like maybe like a white oak and it gets down to black at 32 hours. | ||
| Yeah, and they're dreaming. | ||
| It's not that calculable. | ||
| Depends on the size and the grain. | ||
| Literally, you put it in there and you make it clear so you can just check on the bugger and let it sit in there and darken up until you find that sweet spot. | ||
| Then you just take it out and surface wax it or oil it and you're done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And if you get a gnarly... | ||
| Scratching it, that's not just on the top of the grain. | ||
| It permeates in really nice and deep. | ||
| So like that Thriftmaster you saw, that's old Puget Sound. | ||
| Sunken logs, brought back up, kilned, quartered, sawn, and processed, and fumed. | ||
| But then we do a marine mat seal for durability because of that being a truck bed. | ||
| So I still get a little bit of time to have fun with hardwoods. | ||
| We integrate them sometimes. | ||
| Well, if you decided to do that and put the same passion that you put into Icon, I'm sure it would be just as big a success. | ||
| It's just one of those things. | ||
| People, I mean, the market's not as big, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it? | |
| More people probably buy cars. | ||
| Does that make, no, it doesn't even make sense. | ||
| People buy tables, chairs, couches and shit. | ||
| It's just hard finding something cool. | ||
| If you want to put like a cool piece of furniture in your house, Good luck. | ||
| You know, there's some stuff that you can get at retail stores, like Restoration Hardware has some pretty nice stuff, but it doesn't, yeah, you raise your, like someone just farted. | ||
| Well, that guy has screwed more heritage brands and designers. | ||
| He'll steal your design lock, stock, and barrel and take it to market. | ||
| Wait till you come after him and go, yeah, sue me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm big. | ||
| Oh, they did a horrible thing with the guys that originally designed the famous American Navy aluminum tall chairs. | ||
| They just stole it, went to market, had it made in India or whatever. | ||
| But that's actually a very cool story for people that care about these things that is worth looking into. | ||
| And they no longer will publicly comment on it, but there was a settlement and the owner of... | ||
| What is that Navy Chair Company? | ||
| They're Southern Cal Company. | ||
| Been around forever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Since like the 40s. | ||
| But anyway, he said, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| You're not going to screw me just because you're big and I'm little. | ||
| And he leveraged everything he had to do and did a big campaign to be made right and protected. | ||
| So they... | ||
| Courts upheld his complaint, shut down Restoration Hardware's effort, made them pay damages, and they protected this guy's design and trademark and brand. | ||
| It shouldn't just be damages. | ||
| When someone plagiarizes like that or steals, it shouldn't be... | ||
| Don't even get me started. | ||
| Trademark infringement, copyright violation. | ||
| We go to trade shows and see designs that I penned and developed and did the CAD, did everything myself in-house. | ||
| I've seen the exact product lock, stock, and barrel online. | ||
| On a supplier's booth at SEMA for sale, retail. | ||
| Yeah, there's no way. | ||
| I even know the guy. | ||
| I said, dude, what are you doing? | ||
| When you call me, you got my cell? | ||
| Like, you can make that so much cheaper than I can. | ||
| I would have given you my files. | ||
| We could have worked something out. | ||
| Yeah, that's business. | ||
| So do you sue them? | ||
| How do you deal with that? | ||
| No, I lick my wounds and walk away. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| I just learn a lesson and go, fucking humans. | ||
| But not all. | ||
| Just a few cunts. | ||
| There's a rickshaw driver in Havana that I realized after I'd given away all my car parts, I had a tire patch kit still in my backpack. | ||
| And I remember this kid, we had had a conversation. | ||
| I speak Spanish. | ||
| We'd had a conversation early in the trip, and I'm like, oh, he'd appreciate that, because he had been telling me, like the mafioso that runs the rickshaw rentals, just like in the Greek New York cab deal, if he gets a flat, he's got to bring it back there, and they charge him some ridiculous rate to fix the flat, and it's on him. | ||
| So I'm like, oh, this kid will appreciate my kit. | ||
| So late at night, I find him, I give him the kit, he's stoked, takes me out, we just go for a drive and a talk, and he nailed it. | ||
| In broken English, she was saying the difference between communism, socialism, and Western, capitalistic-driven things, it's like, you know, there's values in them all, and none of them work independent, and perhaps the perfect cultures of the future would be a fusion of socialism in certain respects, such as, you know, education and medicine, what have you, but also the free market capitalism. | ||
| He goes, but the—and he was explaining the failures of each, and he nailed it. | ||
| Capitalism has no conscience. | ||
| And to me, that's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| If we can figure out a way to still have brands and products and consumerism that has a conscience both to its consumers, its shareholders, the environment, like just a wake-up awareness, not this me, me, mine, mine, mine, then that would be cool. | ||
| Well, isn't it that the idea of capitalism is sort of independent of the human being? | ||
| It's like the idea of capitalism, this idea of eternal growth, that's sort of independent of the human being. | ||
| But the human being practices capitalism, so it's up to the human being to have conscience. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think it's maybe... | ||
| I'd prefer to hope that what you just described would be corporatism, if that was a word. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well... | |
| Right? | ||
| Like, a corporation I can understand having no conscience, and then it's up to the individuals to hold them to some level of accountability. | ||
| But just money for the sake of money and capitalism as a priority, I think if we could put that in check and reset those priorities, I think it would serve everyone well on many different levels. | ||
| But what do I know? | ||
| I'm just some fucking mechanic. | ||
| No, you know. | ||
| Don't you dare do that. | ||
| You're dead on. | ||
| And I also think that it could be taught, whether it's in just primary education or whether it's being taught in business school, that when you steal, you're not going to be happy. | ||
| You're going to know that what you did is illegitimate. | ||
| You're a fraud. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And there's no getting around that. | ||
| Make that culturally relevant and important. | ||
| Which goes back to accountability. | ||
| People do something stupid now. | ||
| They turn around and sue somebody. | ||
| It's like, well, you did something stupid. | ||
| Whatever happened is saying, oh, I fucked up. | ||
| Just being accountable for it. | ||
| Look what happens to authors. | ||
| When you hear about an author or writer plagiarizing, and they get caught, and then someone takes their work and shows the original, and like, look, there's 50 different examples of this guy taking full passages from these books and repackaging it as his own. | ||
| That guy's done! | ||
| They're fucking done! | ||
| And that's essentially what these people are doing. | ||
| They're doing the same thing. | ||
| When they get called out, they pay the lawsuits, but they're allowed to keep practicing. | ||
| And if we treated those companies the same way we treat those writers, then things would really change. | ||
| And people looked at Restoration Hardware and went, oh, you did what? | ||
| I'm not supporting that. | ||
| I'm out of here. | ||
| I'm going to go to Design Within Reach. | ||
| Yeah, it's more expensive, but they work with these companies. | ||
| They respect that history. | ||
| It's a location. | ||
| There's a big building. | ||
| You go there, you know, I need a fucking couch. | ||
| It's a cool catalog, and those aircraft chairs they make, I'm damn tempted. | ||
| I am too. | ||
| But I'm like, once I heard that story, I'm like, I can't do it. | ||
| What you need to do is hire someone to rip off their design of their aircraft chairs. | ||
| There you go! | ||
| Just beat them at their own game. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, is that real? | ||
| I mean, can you do that? | ||
| I think you can. | ||
| When you tap, though, on education, I think that's another thing that... | ||
| It's so important and misguided. | ||
| You know, suddenly blue collar is a bad thing. | ||
| Well, I mean, I've got a neighbor who's a plumber. | ||
| He's doing fine. | ||
| Don't worry about him. | ||
| Yeah, you can make a lot of money, blue collar. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And I think that... | ||
| Our school system, not only not supporting that, but not educating kids on the plethora of opportunities in the world for careers and the importance of loving what you do versus expecting people to fit in these silos of doctor or lawyer or, worse yet, the I'm going to take a two-second half-cooked idea and I'm going to sell it and become an internet billionaire. | ||
| Good luck with that. | ||
| But it's like the Pele dreams of the Brazilian kids. | ||
| Like, okay, but I hope you got another plan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're not even teaching kids how to write a check and balance personal finances in school, not to mention showing them the opportunities the world has and help them identify what they care about. | ||
| We just kick them off to college where they party for two years and hopefully on their own find something that matters to them or they continue doing whatever they thought they were supposed to be doing and don't discover what they love until it's too late. | ||
| And if they get any inspiration from their teachers or professors, you're going to get these little nuggets that they have to nurture, like little embers. | ||
| It's not like a constant aspect of their education. | ||
| I think it's Norway does a kick-ass thing, where I think it's 10th grade, you do an internship. | ||
| Well, like, first they sort of give you the big picture, and then you can pick where you want to do an internship, and then you do it. | ||
| And then your final year in... | ||
| High school is preparing you for the career future that speaks to you that you've already identified. | ||
| So when kids go into business right away or off for further continuing education, they care about it and they're already engaged. | ||
| They're not just getting kind of churned through this system where they don't even know what the hell they want to do. | ||
| So someone's just making money charging them for a debt they'll carry through their professional career. | ||
| Well, it's also hard because the teachers are so unmotivated here. | ||
| It's so difficult to get people and pay them like a poverty wage and expect them to be enthusiastic about presenting limitless possibilities to these kids. | ||
| Well, they don't even have limitless possibilities in their own life. | ||
| They're fucked in some shitbag $40,000 a year job that has a complete ceiling on it as far as growth potential and as far as the appreciation that people have for what they're doing. | ||
| And that's something I struggle with. | ||
| I mean, I pay over market in my world and none of my people make what I honestly think they should. | ||
| But if you look at the business model of it and all the ridiculous costs of doing business in scale in America, not to mention California, it's like the business that I see guys go to China or wherever they go to make something feasible. | ||
| We can bitch about that all we want, but if we look at The entitlements and taxes and all the crap that's developed around, it's like, I think these guys should make double what they're making. | ||
| Show me the business model. | ||
| Like, literally, I've been searching for it. | ||
| I just finished reading a great book called Spark, which is about Lincoln, which is one of the early, still one of the predominant welding manufacturers in America. | ||
| This guy was doing revolutionary stuff with employee retentions. | ||
| He was paying out such big bonuses that the bonuses generally were 110% of the salary to all employees at all level. | ||
| He would basically, at the end of the year, look at whatever the taxable profit of the company was. | ||
| And disperse it as bonuses, so you have to pay the tax. | ||
| And the IRS got pissed and investigated them several times, but it held up. | ||
| But now they have a proud, educated, healthy workforce, some of which had been there for three generations. | ||
| They're a multinational company. | ||
| They've managed to stay progressive, competitive, and dominant. | ||
| Having this model of this pay structure and this community that goes against what every economist... | ||
| I mean, this book is still one of the... | ||
| It started as a Harvard case study and has become the most common business case study ever in North American universities, from what I understand. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Is it duplicated? | ||
| Has anybody tried to replicate what they're doing? | ||
| There's been different efforts, but not to the extent that they have. | ||
| And in fact, they've failed with it in other nations because there become cultural conflicts with the viability. | ||
| But, like, I'm studying that. | ||
| Like, well, could I do that? | ||
| Can we make that work? | ||
| But, you know, when you're... | ||
| You know, California, shit, we're busy. | ||
| We got a one to five year back order on all the different icons. | ||
| If I wanted to, dudes, let's work harder. | ||
| Let's come in Saturday. | ||
| Let's all work Saturday. | ||
| Everyone came. | ||
| It's not mandatory. | ||
| It's up to you dudes. | ||
| Okay, overtime is one thing and that's fair and reasonable. | ||
| But all your workman's comp and all your insurances and everything rise exponentially based on You're doing that. | ||
| So wait a minute, you're de-incentivizing me to give my guys bonus income, increase our productivity, and therefore the productivity of the nation on a bigger impact company. | ||
| Not my little stuff, but it disincentivizes you to create more. | ||
| It just adds more costs on top. | ||
| It's hilarious that they were investigated by the IRS for generosity. | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| And it took them years and years, but they won. | ||
| That's so gross, you have to fight the fucking government. | ||
| Like, who are you? | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Aren't you guys supposed to be just protecting us from fucking war? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| You're investigating generosity? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| Nothing but fun. | ||
| It's so bizarre. | ||
| I hope we didn't bore the car geek contentions of your audience. | ||
| I think you have a wider reach, though. | ||
| These people, they're loving this. | ||
| This is great stuff. | ||
| This is fuel. | ||
| Do you get a hard time, to bring it back to the car stuff, like the DeSoto that you showed me today, which is just fabulous. | ||
| Do you get a hard time from people that want to keep everything numbers matching? | ||
| Those fuckos. | ||
| Those people drive me goddamn crazy. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| That's their world, and I'm okay with it. | ||
| I just, if they call me, I'm the first one to go, dude, you're talking to the wrong guy. | ||
| There's a DeSoto specialist in Kansas that will do it down to the factory imperfections and chalk marks that you love so much. | ||
| Enjoy. | ||
| I mean, the way I see it, Henry Ford was kind of a prick, but he was a genius and he said a couple clever things. | ||
| My favorite being, there's an ass for every seat. | ||
| So I don't expect what I do to make sense to everyone, nor do... | ||
| That should be a two-way street. | ||
| So there's a place in that. | ||
| I think that's a dying market. | ||
| I think that guy's somewhat of a dinosaur in our market. | ||
| People expect it to evolve. | ||
| But there's a finite number of those DeSoto's. | ||
| That's the argument against it. | ||
| Oh, but they can eat me. | ||
| I mean, it's a station wagon, which traditionally no one's given a shit about. | ||
| They were worked the hardest, thrown away wet. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They have the least amount of parts support. | ||
| They're the most expensive to restore, with the least return if you look at it as an investment. | ||
| Well, here's a perfect example. | ||
| I have a 1965 Corvette, and my neighbor has a 1965 Corvette. | ||
| And my neighbor was driving up the hill in his car while my car was being returned to me from Steve Stroop at Pure Vision. | ||
|
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I know Steve. | |
| Yeah, he's the one who builds my car. | ||
| He's nuts. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| Steve, my car is not stock at all. | ||
| And this guy is bone stock. | ||
| This guy just really looks at you like you're just a moron. | ||
| He looked at me like I tried to feed Ted Nugent a tofu turkey. | ||
| It was really the look in his face. | ||
| He goes, is that stock? | ||
| And it comes out with this fucking 35 series rear tires. | ||
| You ruined it. | ||
| He looked at me like I was a total, it's not even, nothing stock. | ||
| The only thing that's stock is the panels. | ||
| The entire frame, subframe. | ||
| Knowing Steve, those are hardly stock anymore either. | ||
| No, he actually got it from, I got it from RK Motors in Charlotte, and then shipped it to him, and he did all the extra work to it, but the underpinnings and everything was already done. | ||
| He's quite the craftsman. | ||
| Oh, he's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| He's a madman when it comes to that stuff. | ||
| But the point is, this guy was... | ||
| There's room for everyone. | ||
| But those cars are sort of precious. | ||
| Those 65 Corvettes are precious. | ||
| There's a finite number of them. | ||
| And he looked at me like, what the fuck did you do? | ||
| I've gotten hate mail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've got a couple cars in the line that we're going to do soon that are really going to piss off the purists. | ||
| But I got to tell you, it's part of the fun to me. | ||
| Like that 63 Ferrari we're going to build. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| The Ferrariistas are just going to lose their shit over it. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Yeah, Ferrariistas. | ||
| Dana White, my friend who owns the UFC, the president of the UFC. I met Dana. | ||
| He wanted an FJ for a while, but he didn't like the wait time. | ||
| He disappeared on me. | ||
| Yeah, that's Dana. | ||
| He wants things yesterday. | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| You got anything right now? | ||
| Let's go! | ||
| He has a Testarossa, and he always wanted a Testarossa when he was a kid, so he got some money, got a Testarossa, but he had the interior completely stripped out, and he had everything completely redone, like modern stereo system, totally new upholstery, and people who have found out about it were just appalled. | ||
| I think he even changed the wheels. | ||
| How dare he? | ||
| But you can't do that. | ||
| Where you can do it with other cars, it's sort of like... | ||
| Even with Porsches, you know, the R-Group Porsches, they would take those older... | ||
| Well, yeah, look how the outlaws have become acceptable. | ||
| Like Magnus Walker's creations. | ||
| Yeah, I love that guy, too. | ||
| He's a character, too. | ||
| He's been on here. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| There's... | ||
| For each his own. | ||
| Ferraris, they don't do that. | ||
| They don't do that also with Rolls Royces. | ||
| Even Land Rovers that I've done, I've pissed off the Rover guys. | ||
| It's the best vehicle ever. | ||
| How have you ruined it? | ||
| What you did, unfortunately, was get people's dick hard for something that you don't want to do again. | ||
| One of the things I asked you about right away, I was like, that Defender! | ||
| You're like, nope, nope, nope. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| I'll still do it if I cannot speak reason. | ||
| Pull up the Icon Defender video. | ||
| The Icon Defender 110 video. | ||
| Yeah, the 110's cooler than the 90's. | ||
| Oh my god, it's a fucking work of art. | ||
| It's a beautiful, beautiful car. | ||
| They suck. | ||
| They're beautiful, but whoever sketched it was a rock star. | ||
| Whoever executed it was an accountant. | ||
| Everything that could be compromised. | ||
| It was compromised. | ||
| In my opinion. | ||
| Essentially, they were just utilitary vehicles, or utility vehicles, agriculture vehicles. | ||
| They did great for what they were. | ||
| But they don't line up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it wasn't a priority. | ||
| What do you think about West Coast Defender? | ||
| You know what he's doing? | ||
| He's taking these things and kind of rebuilding them from the bottom up? | ||
| Just a different kind of thing? | ||
| Totally different thing. | ||
| He's more respectful of the original. | ||
| The most established company with that approach is called East Coast Rover, E-C-R. They're held at the highest regard with a tradition. | ||
| The West Coast dude, I haven't met him. | ||
| I've seen him. | ||
| Very nice guy. | ||
| Some media, good guy. | ||
| But I don't know the depth of their expertise. | ||
| I do know that that car is a disaster because so many people have been importing them and calling it older than it really was. | ||
| There's crazy stories out there. | ||
| I mean, the federal government has seized, I think, 68 of them. | ||
| And they destroy them. | ||
| They destroy them. | ||
| Which is fucking crazy. | ||
| If it's past, like, 95, I think? | ||
| Well, they've been in the right, but then it turned into a clusterfuck because the story I heard was that when they were confirming by VIN number with Land Rover Corporate, they were only for privacy concerns, giving Land Rover the last six digits of the VIN. So Rover's like, oh yeah, that's not an AT full, that's a 2002. Well, the last six digits got repeated through the decades. | ||
| So a lot of these cars were seized and in some cases erroneously scrapped when they were legal. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| The ones that I built, I'll only use a US model because I don't want anything to do with that shit show. | ||
| I haven't done much import. | ||
| We're actually importing a 1946 Simca from France this week. | ||
| What is a Simca? | ||
| Well, Simca, I believe, was owned by Ford, and they built all sorts of stuff under license. | ||
| The car that we're going to do is like a funky two-door woody version of the Fiat Topolino that was licensed to the French market to be made by Simca. | ||
| But that thing's so old, it'll be easy to import. | ||
| This video just totally gives me a boner. | ||
| What you've done is create the perfect Defender, but you don't want to do it again. | ||
| I mean, this thing is amazing. | ||
| I mean, I'll do it, but it still wasn't perfect, which is what bugged me as a designer. | ||
| But it's fucking beautiful. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
|
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It is pretty. | |
| But it's got this manly, utility look to it. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It just makes you want to own it. | ||
| It makes you want to drive around in it and deal with all of its quirks. | ||
| I mean, there's shapes that just become so satisfying. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| For whatever reason. | ||
| They nailed it. | ||
| The shape on them is just magic. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| The bulge that the hood has, the fender flares. | ||
| I like how you have it in a different color. | ||
| I like how you repurpose the vents and redesign the side mirrors. | ||
| The vents actually work. | ||
| Because they didn't do anything before. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A hole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're plastic. | ||
| And you use twisted parts too, right? | ||
| From the UK. They do some good work too. | ||
|
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Good quality. | |
| But what you did, man, this is amazing. | ||
| You fucking, you need to do this more. | ||
| You do, I'm sorry. | ||
| You need to make, this would be as big of a seller as those goddamn Broncos. | ||
| Yeah, but I can't get the bodies, and the other issue is the way the bodies are built. | ||
| They're angle iron with aluminum riveted to it. | ||
| So, like, boat builders have known not to do that since World War I. So they rest themselves from the inside out. | ||
| There's nothing I can do about it. | ||
| But can't that be done again? | ||
| Like, the way you do your FJ40s. | ||
| So let me explain this to folks. | ||
| When I got there, you have this FJ40, which is this Toyota Jeep-like vehicle from the 1960s and 70s. | ||
| And what you've done is... | ||
| Oh, actually, they went deep into the 80s, right? | ||
| With that shape. | ||
| Early 80s. | ||
| Early 80s. | ||
| That you've made a completely new version of it. | ||
| So it is sort of an FJ40, but there's nothing that's really from an FJ40. You've just got the shape that you've completely had remanufacture in a beautiful new aluminum. | ||
| So we keep... | ||
| Some core components so that we can still justify in a legal front that it is a resto mod. | ||
| Would you have to keep a couple of washers? | ||
| No, like pedal bucket, structural portion of the firewall, bib hinge, headlight bezel, pedal bucket, a couple things. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| That's why we're hoping to get this law passed, because we don't need the old car. | ||
| We could purpose-build it. | ||
| This is so fucking pretty, man. | ||
| But the way that the FJs traditionally had rust issues, so we crafted it out of 6061 aluminum. | ||
| But the way that body's shaped, we can get away with pretty crude construction techniques. | ||
| With the rover, there's things about it that you couldn't. | ||
| So you could reinterpret it, and then you're probably up a legal creek with Land Rover that you'd have to negotiate and come to terms with. | ||
| The other issue is even the tooling, as primitive as it might be for the FJ, if I was the only geek using those bodies, I could have never made a business model for the amortization of the development costs. | ||
| Of the tools needed to make it. | ||
| So other companies that re... | ||
| The company that makes it, it's called Aqualoo. | ||
| They're in Canada. | ||
| I see. | ||
| They have a fairly significant market, of which I'm probably a minority, to which guys buy them and build their own thing or restore them. | ||
| This thing is so incredible. | ||
| We're looking at the video, this Defender 110 with the internal sub, all the frame. | ||
| You're into the FJ video now. | ||
| Oh, this is the FJ? Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Is this the FJ44? Yep. | ||
| Okay, so this is a four-door version. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which didn't really exist, right? | ||
| This is also something that you've created. | ||
| Yeah, it just never made sense that it didn't. | ||
| Back in those days when Toyota did do a four-door wagon version Land Cruiser, the body style had nothing to do with the 40. I always thought the 40 would be cool as a four-door, and actually, there's a 40. Oh, that's a two-door. | ||
| A client on the phone is ready to rock and his wife's over her shoulder saying, you can't have it. | ||
| If you can't take the kids with you on the weekend, you ain't getting it. | ||
| So this is when we were a little bit hungrier earlier on with the brand. | ||
| I did a quick and dirty like South Park quality Photoshop render and turned one into a four door and punted it to him. | ||
| And she's like, you can get one of those. | ||
| So I'm like, all right. | ||
| So I winged it on what the costs were going to be. | ||
| Lost some money on it, but took that design and made it our next new model. | ||
| And then now it's our most popular. | ||
| Six passengers. | ||
| If this law passes and you can sort of just build your own vehicles, do you anticipate ever just building something completely from scratch? | ||
| Hell yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, part of me is challenging myself because, like I mentioned earlier, a big part of... | ||
| Why what I do now is appealing to people is that people already have history and story and emotions tied to these vehicles. | ||
| But I have other stupid ideas that are, like, based on theoreticals of, like, if the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened when it happened and streamlined art modern continued to prosper and develop as a design style... | ||
| What would that final, ultimate vision be? | ||
| I want to build that car, but much harder to market it because no one has an affinity. | ||
| It's called the Helios, based on the Greek god of the wind, and I designed it to fit on the new Tesla platform, and it's like... | ||
| If Howard Hughes drank too many—he didn't drink, apparently—but if he got drunk with Buckminster Fuller and Gordon Burek, who are two great designers, what would that napkin sketch have looked like? | ||
| It's like, what would he have taken Cruella de Vil to the country club in? | ||
| Big, gnarly, aircraft-inspired, burnished aluminum, leather straps, a little bit of steampunk, a little bit of aerospace, hot rod, Tesla, audacious thing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Dying to build it. | ||
| That sounds awesome. | ||
| Yeah, I'm in. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| These designs, you know, I think a big part of what you're saying is definitely true, that people have this connection to these particular shapes that they fell in love with, like the FJ40, like the Bronco. | ||
| But I think that your company also is developing that on its own. | ||
| You're developing your own sort of following. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And you can spread out. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| I think long-term... | ||
| That's better. | ||
| Like right now, if I did a vehicle wholly of our own design, the titling process follows that of like a kit car, which is not scalable. | ||
| So if that law evolves, I'm all in. | ||
| I got tons of stupid ideas. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird thing, right? | ||
| Like the kit car thing. | ||
| They would sell a lot of those, like the Noble, which I sell, what is that? | ||
| It's an English car, right? | ||
| And then you just get the body. | ||
| Or you can buy a roller and then you have to hire another dude to put the drivetrain in. | ||
| Or what's crazier still is the way the laws are currently. | ||
| And this bill we're trying to get passed is literally just a combination of existing laws saying, look, this is all out there, but right now companies can't do it. | ||
| So if some dude in his backyard has some spare 2x4s and some corrugated sheathing and a VA, he can hack together a death trap, take it down. | ||
| If it has turn signals, taillights, and basic stuff, he's good to go. | ||
| If a company were to build that same assemblage, it's not legal. | ||
| So it's just asinine, because the companies are going to have the technical resources, the financial wherewithal, the accountability, etc., to create a safer, better, more conscious product. | ||
| So it makes no sense to me. | ||
| That's why we're hoping it will make sense to Congress, because we know how good they are at efficiently reviewing and passing things that will further our nation's Well, at least on paper, the companies have enough money to do that. | ||
| There's the leap, right, from the initial investment to putting together an actual car. | ||
| But it's gotten so much cheaper now. | ||
| What do you got there? | ||
| That's the Helios. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, my God. | |
| It's gotten so much more cost-effective and viable to bring out highly engineered cars. | ||
| No-compromise, high-quality, low-volume product. | ||
| Is this anywhere online where Jamie can pull this up? | ||
| This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. | ||
| Send this to Jamie. | ||
| Just Google Icon Helios, H-E-L-I-O-S, and it'll pop right up. | ||
| This is sick. | ||
| You'd sell a million of these fucking things. | ||
| I'm trying to build that thing, and we're trying to get Elon's attention. | ||
| His engineering team drafted a letter and sent it to me. | ||
| It was so sweet. | ||
| The title was, like, peanut butter for chocolate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Begging Elon to support this, not on a branded level, but give us a Mule Tesla and the technological, the engineering support to repurpose the Tesla in this unique platform. | ||
| We never got his attention. | ||
| Somebody needs to get a hold of them, please. | ||
| I'm not saying Twitter bomb them, but Twitter bomb them. | ||
| I'm just ready for whoever wants to support it. | ||
| At this point, I'll do it electric, gas, or diesel. | ||
| I just need to see it fucking built, because it just keeps me awake. | ||
| That's so beautiful. | ||
| And again, the suicide doors. | ||
| That's Howard's original experimental... | ||
| A little stunt plane that he built. | ||
| Holy shit, I like the bottom one too. | ||
| I like the original version. | ||
| So that's a series of panels showing inspiration. | ||
| So we start with a fuselage of the plane. | ||
| Then we roll it into road-going form. | ||
| Then we start to do the packaging factors and it kept evolving. | ||
|
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|
Wow! | |
| God, this looks so fucking cool. | ||
| I'm going to do dual panel sunroofs that are on cranks with exposed gear and leather ratchets. | ||
| So there's like that somewhat steampunk interface of the mechanical and power windows seam deal. | ||
| I want like brass gears so you see the gears rotate as it goes down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa, I love it. | |
| I love the leather covered dash too, the hand-stitched dash and the rivets. | ||
| If I had the cache, this thing would already be under construction. | ||
|
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|
Fuck, man. | |
| I'd just build it for myself. | ||
| But you know all these rich dudes. | ||
| It seems like someone would have already dove into this. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| This is a no-lose. | ||
| This is gorgeous. | ||
| But it's expensive. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, no profit. | ||
| This thing would still cost me probably 1.3, 1.4 million. | ||
| Just to design the first one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Not like, yeah, I can make it look good and everything, but like engineered, finite analyzed, like balls outdone, would be at least 1.1. | ||
| Call your Texas friend that wanted a fucking chainsaw that Ferrari in half. | ||
| But see, he only likes Ferraris because everybody knows what a Ferrari is. | ||
| So that's the other problem. | ||
|
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|
Some dudes look at this and go, yeah, but it's not the Bentley. | |
| Those people need to eat dick. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| Hey, bro, why are you being like that, bro? | ||
| Listen to me, my friend. | ||
| Money is no option. | ||
| I just need exclusivity. | ||
| I had recently in Encino, I was driving one of our things, and this stereotypical Armenian guy with the big gold and the loafers and the whole nine, he leans over, he peeks in the window and goes, props, bro. | ||
| I thought that was killer. | ||
| I love Armenians, man. | ||
| I love how they just wear it on their sleeve. | ||
| They're some of my favorite people. | ||
| They're like, don't fuck with me. | ||
| I am what I am and I'm gonna protect my own, baby. | ||
| They're not trying to change at all. | ||
| Gold chains fucking flying high. | ||
| Go, baby. | ||
| Yeah, this is a beautiful thing, man. | ||
| Creating things like this is beautiful. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's a dream. | ||
| I'm stoked. | ||
| I'm glad you're doing it. | ||
| I think it's so important. | ||
| It's so important that someone out there is creating these bizarre creations. | ||
| It's even more important someone's buying them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'd still be doing it, but I'd be doing it in my garage at my house and just kind of One at a time. | ||
| Well, and the fact that you put out, like we said earlier, you put out all these videos, and you put all these images, even if people aren't, they don't have the cash to buy them, people get inspired by what you're doing. | ||
| That's what I hope. | ||
| Oh, fucking for sure, 100%. | ||
| Tell me how much is, like, a Defender to re-engineer, because your video is very extensive, like, you had to re-engineer. | ||
|
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Everything but price. | |
| How much does something like that cost? | ||
| The defenders, the D90 and the 110, we've done two so far. | ||
| Anywhere from 250 to low 400,000. | ||
| That's so crazy! | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I cringe when I have to tell somebody that. | ||
| But these people that you are building these for, they're nuts. | ||
| They're just crazy fucks. | ||
| Yeah, they go, well, yeah, I've tried it this way. | ||
| I had one built by so-and-so, but they suck. | ||
| I get what you do. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| So most people who would do it... | ||
| Matthew Perlman's a great guy. | ||
| He's a guy who does West Coast Defenders. | ||
| Met him, hung out with him, and seen his shop. | ||
| What he's doing is just rebuilding them exactly where they are, but brand new. | ||
| Smarter than me. | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| But what you're doing, you're re-engineering everything. | ||
| Is anybody out there re-engineering everything? | ||
| The suspension, the subframe, the way the floor is sealed and polyurea coated. | ||
| You're just taking it to a stupid level. | ||
| Yeah, I guess Singer. | ||
| Singer. | ||
| And then Arch Motorcycles. | ||
| Those guys, I'd say, are on par with rethinking every little nuance and going balls out on it. | ||
| Have you met those guys down in Long Beach? | ||
| No. | ||
| Keanu Reeves and... | ||
| Oh, man, I can't remember his name. | ||
| He's a sweetheart. | ||
| Guard. | ||
| Guard. | ||
| Guard and Keanu's company. | ||
| And they're doing a lovely, lovely, lovely job. | ||
| Now, to a guy like you, Google auto drive cars have to be the devil. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's the devil. | ||
| It is. | ||
| What's going to happen? | ||
| Are we going to not be able to drive our own cars in the future? | ||
| Is that a possibility? | ||
| You know, I've been thinking long and hard about that. | ||
| And it's been something that different people in... | ||
| My subculture have openly been concerned and discussing, and there's many different takes on it. | ||
| But I think I'm pretty centered on it. | ||
| I think actually it's a positive thing in that cars like the Prius and stuff, you know, started the generation where people don't have an emotional relationship with their vehicle. | ||
| It's a tool. | ||
| It's literally like an app on your phone that gets you from A to B. Or even more dispassionately, screw it, you Uber around and you don't care. | ||
| You don't have that relationship. | ||
| So I think culturally, as autonomous vehicles and all that continue to grow and evolve, you are going to see them eventually become predominant. | ||
| And I think we're going to start to see lobbying and federal support of that direction, because there's a lot of rational reasons behind it. | ||
| That being said, I think it will further strengthen the demand for the freaks and the geeks, the outliers, such as my brand, because people... | ||
| Are going to yearn for that relationship, that attachment. | ||
| And I think there's always going to be people, even the guy who's got the autonomous Mercedes, that's his commuter, but on the weekends, like, oh, no, I mean, this thing's got a, it's called a manual transmission, and there's pedals, by the way, and there's three of those pedals, and you have to push that one down to get it to, you know, I think there's that visceral relationship that is always going to be part of mankind, And I'm not worried about it. | ||
| If I was trying to start a big car company, then I would be worried about it. | ||
| American Muscle Cars are one of the only companies that are sticking to that manual transmission model. | ||
| I mean, some cars like the Z28 and, like, up until this version of the Corvette, you couldn't get the high-end Corvette and anything but a manual, like the ZR1s. | ||
| But emissions laws are screwing that pooch. | ||
| Because it's so much harder for them to certify a manual car than an automatic, because the automatic, the shift cycles and efficiencies are much easier to track and to regulate and pretense for in the programming and engineering dynamics of the car. | ||
| So it's an emissions issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| More than anything. | ||
| Also, nowadays, today's automatics are quicker than the manual. | ||
| Well, that's the Porsche deal. | ||
| I mean, the version of my car, the new version. | ||
| Well, that's their public answer as to why. | ||
| But the real answer is based on emissions. | ||
| And efficiency as far as gas and fuel consumption? | ||
| Control over... | ||
| Efficiency more than honest efficiency, because the manual-driven right, you can make it work. | ||
| I mean, the CVT train is constant velocity. | ||
| Everyone said how amazing they were going to be for efficiency, and you know how they work? | ||
| What is CVT train? | ||
| Yeah, it's an automatic, but it's like, if you picture a cone form, it spins out, so the ratio is constantly changing as you go through your speed cycles. | ||
| But it seemed like a great idea, but at the end of the day, in true world use, they realize, oh... | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| It, like, was incredibly inefficient. | ||
| Just to spool the fucker, you were deficit of 10% in your fuel economy. | ||
| So I think it'll hopefully shift back. | ||
| And, like, how many more gears can they shove in our automatic to try and meet emissions as well? | ||
| Yeah, they're going to eight now. | ||
| And they're doing seven with manuals now, too, which is weird. | ||
| Pain in the ass. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's just an awkward pattern. | ||
| But again, it's a business case. | ||
| It's a hell of a lot easier to shove a couple more gears to keep that motor in a tighter, more controlled, more predictable RPM band than it is to evolve and keep engineering internal combustion, make it better, evolve your motor. | ||
| Everyone's so hesitant to do that until it's regulated or competition forces that transition. | ||
| It's just, to me, it's a bummer that a lot of these sports cars, at the very least, are going by Nürburgring times and they want zero to sixty times and not how they make you feel. | ||
| That's what a sports car has always been. | ||
| Most of the time you're driving. | ||
| You're not counting laps when you're on Little Tujunga. | ||
| You're not looking for lap times. | ||
| You're looking for pure enjoyment. | ||
| And if you're shifting the gears, you're going to get more enjoyment because you're going to be more connected to the experience. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And more than that, too, like... | ||
| Drove a 97 993 twin turbo to a friend's house to drive his new 50th anniversary 911. Sexy car. | ||
| Bitchin' colors, beautiful tactile surfaces, cool tweed. | ||
| You drive it. | ||
| It doesn't feel like a Porsche to me. | ||
| There's so many distractions and knobs and widgets and gizmos and switches and alarms and babysitters and lawyers on board. | ||
| Versus that 993, yeah, it's rattly, yeah, it can shake your teeth, yes, it can blow your eardrums out when you're drunk Indian, nail it, whatever. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| It had purity of purpose. | ||
| And I think many brands, but most notably automotive brands, have fallen prey to focus groups where they try and create a product That appeals to this mythical large demographic of everyone's going to love it. | ||
| Which in turn, I think they step on their wee-wee because it doesn't speak to anyone. | ||
| It doesn't have clarity, purpose in its engineering and design. | ||
| It doesn't have the balls to say, I'm not for everyone. | ||
| This is what I do and I do it damn well. | ||
| Not only that, it doesn't appeal to automotive enthusiasts. | ||
| It appeals to people that might not be. | ||
| You could say the same thing about sitcoms. | ||
| You could say the same thing about movies. | ||
| When someone creates something odd and unique, it's very difficult for other people to agree to it if they give it to a focus group. | ||
| Or hard for the poor bastard producer or writer to actually sell it, because everyone wants to dumb it down to the largest common denominator, the formula they were able to sell to the ads, you know, the advertisers last season, or what that company's doing, whatever catwalk show, well, let's do dog walk, you know, whatever it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, isn't that the case? | ||
| Or one of the best examples for why a business like yours works is it's you and your wife. | ||
| I mean, it's you. | ||
| It's your singular vision. | ||
| And I think those consumers are ganging up to demand that. | ||
| Thank goodness. | ||
| But I mean, you take, I've always said, you take like every modern four-door sedan car, paint all of them black, take all the fucking emblems off, Put them on a big empty airplane hangar. | ||
| Bring in a thousand of the general public, car geeks and not. | ||
| Ask them to name all these cars. | ||
| Who makes them? | ||
| Which brand they are. | ||
| Bet you no one would get better than a D+. Because they're all copying each other and all trying to not be too outlandish or too unique or too different. | ||
| All they're doing is making their bling bigger, the grills bigger, the emblem larger. | ||
| And it's like there's a loss of individualism. | ||
| Well, there's only a few that you could recognize based on sort of the iconic grills, like BMWs. | ||
| They have those two, like Jeeps. | ||
| You can kind of recognize those. | ||
| But, boy, there's a Hyundai that looks just like a fucking Mercedes now. | ||
| I mean, I've seen it many times. | ||
| I thought it was a Mercedes and it's a Hyundai. | ||
| Fords that look like Aston Martins and on and on. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of that going on right now. | ||
| There's a lot of like, boy, if this was the music business, you might get fucking sued. | ||
| You're stealing notes, right? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Is there anything that excites you about modern automobiles that they're creating now? | ||
| Is there anything that you find that is a positive? | ||
| Yeah, a lot of the mechanical engineering is mind-blowing. | ||
| Electromagnetic suspension system, I'm finding quite interesting and hoping to start dabbling in. | ||
| Yeah, constantly. | ||
| I just think a lot of it's superfluous and promoting self-obsolescence, so I'm always cautious. | ||
| But I mean, I'm not immune to it, so I'll lease... | ||
| A crazy new car once in a while, but I'll do a one-year, two-year leash, and I'll put it in its place. | ||
| Like, it's so complex, it's asinine, it's going to fall apart, but right now it's really fun, you know? | ||
| But usually, like, within six months, I'm bored because it has no soul. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then I lose my ass and move on. | ||
| Hop back in my DeSoto. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's a total difference in that you're aware you're doing it. | ||
| Whereas the Lexus, I love the big Lexus truck because it's quiet. | ||
|
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Oh, yeah. | |
| It floats over everything, and it's just bone quiet. | ||
| It's just, ooh, smooth. | ||
| But you're not experiencing it the way you experience, say, one of your FJs or something like that. | ||
| And they both have their place, though. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| I mean, I've got a lot of clients who maybe daily they're going to hop in that LX for the boring commute, but then when they really want to engage with themselves, the vehicle, the family, the hobby, the locale, then they're going to hop in the Icon and they're going to be, it's more of an experience. | ||
| One of the things that I like about you and what you're doing with your company is you as a person. | ||
| You have this broad variety of interests and respects for cultures and various things. | ||
| And I noticed from following your Instagram that you do a lot of trips. | ||
| You take a lot of trips to these different cultures. | ||
| Are you doing this because this is something you personally enjoy? | ||
| Are you like consciously trying to enrich yourself? | ||
| Yeah, it's always been priority number one. | ||
| I think as Americans we have a bad habit of having blinders on and not understanding. | ||
| There's The shit that we get all our panties in a knot about mean absolutely nothing. | ||
| On the opposite side of the coin, I think progress is a misrepresented benefit to mankind. | ||
| I've been to some remote cultures where I think those people are a hell of a lot more balanced and centered and family-focused and healthy than we are in our progress. | ||
| So I love traveling. | ||
| It's super important to me. | ||
| And as a designer, understanding Different cultures, approaches to solutions, complex or simple, or use of color and texture and materials. | ||
| It just enriches what I do to no end. | ||
| But I think it's really a much bigger picture life thing. | ||
| It's gotten more expensive now. | ||
| I have two teenage sons. | ||
| We'll travel less, but we'll still make sure to do those trips and bring the kids at least half the time. | ||
| So they have that perspective. | ||
| Yeah, the enrichment is sort of, it's not like calculable. | ||
| You can't like put it on a scale. | ||
| Like, hey, we should go to Africa because it's worth this. | ||
| Right, no. | ||
| It just changes the way you see the world and how you... | ||
| When you make eye contact with someone, what you're expecting out of that person or what you're open to experiencing from that person. | ||
| I think travelers open themselves up to such a crazy greater level to be able to embrace and experience and you just never know what's going to happen and what one trip or handshake or eye contact will turn into. | ||
| I'm on the board of this kick-ass charity called Go Campaign. | ||
| You should come one year. | ||
| We do a really fun cars and casino night at the shop. | ||
| When do you do it? | ||
| Joel McHale was our host this year. | ||
| We do it the first week in May. | ||
| I love him, too. | ||
| One of my favorite humans. | ||
| So, you know, we were in Africa a couple weeks ago, and yeah, we were doing the safari camping glamping thing, but we were in Tanzania because we're starting a big fundraise this year with GO to create a new center, a children's center, because if you have physical or mental disabilities in many African cultures, it's frightening what happens. | ||
| So there's... | ||
| There's ways to impact the world outside of building silly cars for rich guys. | ||
| But both experiences, you know, doing something for a children's center in Tanzania, those relationships, those experiences all help me gain a different and better, hopefully more valuable perspective on everything down to how I'm going to build a car or what material we're going to use. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think what we were talking about earlier about teaching inspiration in school and, you know, teaching people how to think and how to follow passion, that it's a lacking component. | ||
| I think you could also say sort of the same thing about traveling and experiencing different cultures. | ||
| Exchange programs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not as appreciated or as... | ||
| What's the word? | ||
| It's not as encouraged, you know, it's what it is. | ||
| Well, and sadly enough, too, unfortunately, nowadays, a lot of your global travels, you might as well be at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, or Paris, or Barcelona, or wherever, because this big box, commoditized tourist experience has become this kind of Homologated experience that's one size fit on you. | ||
| It's the gap or whatever. | ||
| It's the same box stores and I think more and more it's like Disneyland travel unless you really work hard at it to find the culture in the people. | ||
| So that's kind of scary. | ||
| Yeah, you got to really go looking for it. | ||
| I found Olive Garden, the Sao Paulo Airport. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| Sao Paulo, Brazil, Olive Garden. | ||
| But you see like what Detroit's doing in the airport? | ||
| No, what are they doing? | ||
| It's a great example of this hopeful, this renaissance I speak of and hope of. | ||
| They kicked out all the generic bullshit, typical airport concessionaire food chilies brands. | ||
| All that crap. | ||
| Then they invited in local restaurateurs, local chefs, local craft beer makers. | ||
| Gave them all killer deals. | ||
| Said, come enrich our airport. | ||
| Communicate Detroit. | ||
| Why people should be in Detroit. | ||
| The passion, the craft of Detroit. | ||
| Be a part of that. | ||
| Which is just killer. | ||
| My friend's restaurant just got put in there, and he's super stoked. | ||
| It's a win-win. | ||
| Detroit was depressing when I was there, but one of the things that was kind of cool was that I was seeing a resurgence of all these very small craft businesses. | ||
| Yes, and that'll be the only thing that'll ever save Detroit, in my humble opinion. | ||
| And you get past the topical depression, it's a very inspiring place. | ||
| Yeah, there's opportunity, because the real estate is insanely cheap, and there's young people. | ||
| And young people are young people everywhere. | ||
| They have hopes and passions, and they have the internet, and they look around, they go, what's the fucking building right here, man? | ||
| Let's just do this. | ||
| And boom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look what Shinola has done. | ||
| I don't know what Shinola has done. | ||
| Oh, Shinola is this cool brand that does watches and bags and bicycles. | ||
| I thought it was like shit or Shinola. | ||
| Well, that's the term. | ||
| That's where they got the name from. | ||
| I thought it was shoe polish. | ||
| It was back pre-World War II, and that's where they got the name from it. | ||
| You don't know shit from Shinola. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Their parallel being more product with purpose and story. | ||
| So like, oh, you bought that? | ||
| You don't know shit from Shinola. | ||
| This is Shinola. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| So it's a watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What started is a watch, then they own Filson, then they've got a bicycle brand, wonderful American, Northwest cultural icon, leather goods, outdoors company. | ||
| So yeah, they do bags and watches. | ||
| They're getting bicycles and leather goods, and they're getting into notebooks and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| But their whole thing is the cultural renaissance of Detroit, supporting Detroit. | ||
| They're opening up facilities in old, worn-out industrial buildings, repurposing them, training local kids to build it. | ||
| Like, their watches, they're assembling their own movements in Detroit and training people because there was no skill set for it. | ||
| So it's those efforts times a billion at companies large and small that are the future of our country and I think most poignantly with Detroit near term. | ||
| Well, it's one of those things, I think, that when you see, like, a lack of opportunity, you see people sort of try to create their own opportunity. | ||
| You see ingenuity come into play. | ||
| By either stealing the copper out of your building. | ||
| Sao Paulo style, steal your car, redistribute wealth, problem solved. | ||
| Or, yeah, like stopping and thinking and engaging. | ||
| Can't find a job? | ||
| Make a job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Detroit has a real problem with them stealing pipes and stuff. | ||
| They're doing that from a lot of buildings. | ||
| But I just do love the fact that when you find a dip, like we were talking about with Cuba, where they don't have any cars, so let's just figure out a way to make these fucking cars work forever. | ||
| And what you're seeing in a lot of these other places where there's not a lot of great jobs. | ||
| So they're creating their own possibilities. | ||
| And now, it's happened for so long, That it's become a source of pride for their culture, which then makes it that much more important. | ||
| Exactly, exactly, exactly. | ||
| Listen, man, you've got a busy company to run, and I really, really appreciate your time, and I'm sure you have a lot of stuff you have to get done. | ||
| No, this is important to do, and I really appreciate you taking the time to really come to the shop. | ||
| Kind of really understand our lunacy. | ||
| It's awesomely impressive. | ||
| Awesomely impressive and inspirational. | ||
| Anybody who's interested, Icon4x4, 4x4.com. | ||
| Icon4x4 on Twitter, right? | ||
| And then TLC, which is your Toyota Land Cruiser Restoration Company. | ||
| What is that, TLC? Yeah, just TLC4x4.com. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then the inside scoop on our Facebook is just my name because it's totally not corporate and unprofessional, but a hell of a lot more fun. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| And Icon Customs is your Twitter handle. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| It's not Icon4x4. | ||
| It's Icon Customs. | ||
| Icon4x4.com is the website. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cheers. |
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