Business of Speed Podcast - Magnus Walker: Why He Sold 18 Porsches, Burned It Down, and Started Over at 59

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

Magnus Walker — the Urban Outlaw — just auctioned off 18 of his most iconic Porsches through RM Sotheby's. No reserve. No hesitation. And within days of the cars leaving his warehouse, he felt something he hadn't felt in years.This conversation is about what led to that moment. The years of accumulating, the slow recognition that he'd stopped driving most of them, and the quiet watch experiment he ran before committing to anything. But more than the auction, this is a conversation about a man who has reinvented himself completely, multiple times, and what he's learned from each one.Magnus arrived in LA at 19 on a Trailways bus with two O-levels. He built Serious Clothing from a Venice Boardwalk table into a seven-figure brand, dressed Madonna and Alice Cooper, then walked away when the joy ran out. The 2012 Urban Outlaw documentary changed his life publicly. We talk about what it cost him privately.He also gets into why he's never built a car for a client, his involvement with the TWR Supercat project, why stories and miles matter more to him than showroom condition, and the one Porsche he just bought that he's never owned before.Forty years in LA. Three complete reinventions. One throughline.00:00 – The week after the auction 02:00 – Rebirth, identity, and 40 years in LA 03:30 – Arriving at 19 with almost nothing 07:30 – The psychology of collecting 11:30 – The watch test that told him he was ready 13:00 – Closing Serious Clothing and what opened because of it 15:00 – Why he never turned the hobby into a business 25:30 – Imperfection as a philosophy 26:30 – The 911 market and the Urban Outlaw effect 28:00 – How the film got made and how Nike found it before release 30:30 – Raindance, Piccadilly Circus, and the moment things shifted 34:00 – Why his story connects beyond the Porsche world 35:45 – The private cost of going viral 43:00 – Why high-mileage cars interest him more than low-mileage trophies 44:30 – The best driving roads in LA 47:30 – The TWR Supercat project 51:45 – 928 vs. 944 53:20 – One final piece of advice

And we've got a Porsche legend on the show, someone who many people may not connect with racing, I guess, even though I think automotive is just as important. But Magnus Walker joins us. He is quite an interesting story. He is known as the Porsche man or as a Porsche man. was recently in the news because he sold off a lot of his collection and we want to talk to him about it so yeah we got him on the show to talk and uh the urban outlaw here's the thing with with folks like like magnus and what they do very much artist the mentality the thinking and driving a race car owning a business i mean all of that has a level of artistry to it but magnus takes it to a whole nother level and he allows the passion to drive him which is creates for a very interesting conversation a great conversation a lot of

wisdom a lot of lessons that can be taken whether you are running a business whether you're racing whether you are trying to collect things whatever it may be i think a lot of what he says translates across the board. And it was a fun conversation. He started off, he actually called, or he had me call him because he's like, I don't want to download the link because I'm in a digital detox. And I'm like, okay, this is going to be a cool conversation. The thought process, right? He could have easily just been like, I'm going to download it because I'm like, no, he's sticking to it. I'm in a digital detox. This is what I'm doing for my sanity, mental health, whatever he's doing it for, right? For his creative reset. And he truly is what he puts out there, which

that's all you can ask for he is an absolute creative genius and he's so authentic i think that's a word that i can use to describe him he's authentic he is who he is and he lives a life that maybe a lot of us or he makes a lot of decisions and how he operates his life that maybe a lot of us are envious about in the good way and like man i wish i could be that bold that sincere and live with such sort of gusto. Enjoy. Crazy morning, but good. You probably had a very busy last week or so.

How long has it been since the auction started? The auction ended March 25th on a Wednesday, so nine days ago. Yeah, it's been busy. Oh, goodness gracious. Finally rearranging my warehouse space, both physically and mentally. It's a reset, a refresh.

You know, I'm feeling uncluttered, motivated, inspired. new beginning new chapter you know i'm seeing my space for the first time in 26 years without housing part of it i mean to clarify i didn't sell everything i sold 18 cars i kept 15 and i actually just bought a car yesterday so it's a uh it's a little bit like you know when you want to spring clean your garage or your closet and you might have been putting this off for a long time if it's your closet with clothes or your garage with whatever jumps in there and then one day you go in and you just start throwing stuff behind you and you end up with a big pile on the floor and if it's clothing maybe you sort of second guess throwing stuff away but then the

smart part of your brain goes just throw it in a black plastic trash bag yes take it to the good will that is right where i'm at right now you know you've said things like this the collection was part of shedding your skin. And you just mentioned it's a rebirth. I was just, I guess my curiosity was it's a rebirth for you. Do you see this as something where it no longer is defining you as much or, or do you want to just change how you're defined? Well, it's a great question. I mean, I've worn a lot of hats in my life. You know, this is kind of a milestone era for me on lots of levels. You know, this sure is my fifth year in LA. I literally arrived 40 years ago in 1986 when I was 19 years old, less than a mile from where I'm sat on a trailways bus at Union Station.

So that's a very pivotal part of my story. Next year, I turned 60. So that's another milestone. And over the past 40 years of being in LA, I've done three things with no education in. You know, to back up, I left school when I was 15 years old with two O levels, which is really not much education. But I often say you're one of two things. You're either book smart or you're street smart. You know, my sister went to university and got all the O levels and degrees and whatever else. And I didn't get any of that. And a lot of the people that I've met that are more entrepreneurial are the same way. They didn't have an educational background in the sense of, you know, doing a lot of schoolwork, you know, and I was a bit of a rebel in school.

And I think looking back, cause I'm looking back over my past 40 years of life, cause it went like that and i'm looking forward to the next i've probably got 20 25 years active and go wow maybe for once in my life i should think ahead because i never did you know i'm sort of like the opposite of you know people like to map out things of where they're going and you know i always say a spreadsheet can only get you so far and you know he's not saying you know you can't put a saddle on a mustang so i had no sort of preconceived vision of where i would be and this is a very long rambling answer to you i love it that was beautiful i love it i've worn a lot of hats in my time you know there was a time when i was selling secondhand clothing on the boardwalk

in venice which was how i got started in my entrepreneurial sort of business sense and ultimately it's just i like doing cool things with cool people and i like doing things that are creative and inspiring and inspire me and motivate me so one time i was hey you're the crazy hat guy in venice aren't you because i made these big whimsical crazy sort of lewis uh carol cat in the hat mad hatter rape type thing so that was me in the late 80s all the way up through this and into early 2000s early 2000s when i grew the beard i got the hey aren't you rob zombie so i used to get that all the time and then over the past 15 years i've got hey aren't you that porsche guy now I've been all of those things for the past 59 years I'm still the crazy hat guy still

joke about Rob Zombie I know Rob Zombie and I've been a Porsche guy since I was 10 years old so that love affair started in 1977 the 10 year old me I've told that story many many times but essentially I went to the Mills Court Motor Show fell in love with Porsche saw the white Martini turbo on the stand and that started the love affair with porsche so i've been into porsche for almost 50 years i bought my first porsche in 1992 that was 34 years ago so i've always been a porsche guy what sort of defined me as the hey onto that porsche guy i suppose was the urban outlaw film timmy moscovici's film that came out in 2012. this sort of put me on a bigger scale on the automotive map and as you probably know 14 years ago the automotive content scene wasn't as

crazy as it is today and that film was sort of relevant then and it's relevant today part of this letting things go i joke about spring cleaning is i'm not redefining who i am it's other people's perception of who i am sure i'm the same guy you know the cars that i let go last week at rm sotheby's a lot of those cars i'd bought almost 20 years ago you know i haven't bought an air-cooled 911 since 2013 2014 i bought other porsches water-cooled things because i i'm a goal-orientated collector so those cars represented achieving a goal at the time one of everything porsche had made in a sports car which was front engine mid-engine rear engine both air and water cool so i sort of tick that box and then you know i travel a lot and over

the years when i'm traveling i'm not necessarily missing some of these cars therefore these cars weren't getting driven and then you get to a point of why do i own this stuff if i'm not actually using this yeah so that's kind of where i'm at i have a question for you if if we could map out all your cars chronologically is this like picasso do you have your blue era your rose era your cute will it tell the story of you oh in this era he maybe was sad he was happy he was upset yeah yeah i mean you know the cars that i kept and you know i just bought one i'm not going to tell you what that is but it's the first porsche i've never owned so you can probably connect the dots if i can finally purchase one i'm gonna get it next week but the cars that i kept are the real

defining ones that i've built you know the cars that i let go some of them i had really no connection to a lot of the transaxle water-cooled cars i just wanted to experience diversity of 924 928 944 968 yeah and then i kept certain ones that were either special significant or i'd really sort of developed over time as full builds like the 964 and obviously 277 and then the art cars that i've sort of been doing over the past i guess eight years you know for me this is not a business it's been a hobby up to this point where i just build what i personally want to experience that's sort of what separates me from a lot of the other great builders where they're building cars for a business you know i just happened to have sold cars i figured it was time to let go but everything

that i built was something that i wanted to experience from an aesthetic point of view or driving point of view and you know there's an art to collecting humans like to collect whether it's cars guitars watches sneakers jewelry whatever it may be right and often the thrill is like the chase to begin with chasing something down and then the art of the deal right you know no matter what price someone's asking on anything whether it's a watch or a guitar you know first of all i'm that guy i like going to flea markets and rose bowls and stuff like that i like old things i don't like new things i've never owned a new car so if you're not the rose bowl flea market and there's a guy with a table of vintage watches i have to go look at them even though i don't need them

i'm the type of collector whether it's cars guitars or watches i don't just have one i'll have two three five of pretty much the same thing at one point i had seven of the same three liter turbo it's 567s so with watches it's the same thing i collected omega hoya and porsche design so i started with one but then you know 10 years later i've got five speed masters and of course you can't wear them so it's the art of collecting is sometimes it's like you just got to go look then you've got to negotiate the deal right if he's asking a thousand bucks i'm not paying a thousand bucks i'm going to work him down i start at five and somewhere in the middle we meet right so it's kind of the thrill of the art of the deal the novelty of oh i've got something new even

though it's slightly different no two things are ever the same so it's the same but different and then over time with watches and same with guitars you know they just watches end up in the bottom of a drawer not being worn and guitars end up gathering dust until i accidentally knock them over and break the neck of them and letting things go takes time you know people everyone's got an opinion about why i'm selling things right and i just let them go because i didn't need them anymore but it took me a long time to get to that point i'd been letting a couple of cars go one here one there over the past five years that sort of no one knew about but it was a big band-aid to pull off and go okay i'm gonna sell 18 through rm syllabus and thousands of parts through hundreds

of lots and it took me quite a few years to get to that point and the pivotal part to this story is i almost did this a year ago but i wasn't ready and i thought let me see if i drive these cars anymore. And I didn't. And that was when I knew I was ready. And the fact that everything was no reserve really told you these are selling. When people put a reserve price on it, it means I'm only going to sell this if it gets to the price I want to get for it. So the ready at a price. For me, it didn't matter because I bought into them so long ago that they'd already doubled and tripled and doubled again. So the no reserve element, people thought, wow, you're nuts. What if it sells low i go well if it sells low it sells low but i don't think the gun i had a gut instinct

that this is the time for me emotionally to let him go physically let him go but i did a little test about a year ago with my watches i pulled out a dozen of these omega speedmaster hoyas and porsche design and i had my buddy who runs a pretty nice boutique watch business put them up for sale and they all sold in one day at market and right there and then i realized i didn't even think about those watches. So the watches was like a baby step into the cars. The cars were obviously more significant, the more visual, they take more space and more expensive, the more the connection. But it was just the time was ready for me to let them go on auction. The cars all sold a week ago and everything left two days ago. Now it's sort of like, wow, I feel light. I feel

energized. I feel inspired. I'm in this new environment where I'm looking at this building that i've owned for 26 years with new eyes same eyes but i'm looking at a different light of wow there's a lot of possibility here it's like a new blank canvas and i don't exactly know what i'm doing next but i'm telling you i'm pretty excited that i just know that something good is going to happen and i've always sort of had that feeling yeah i've closed my clothing company down serious clothing 15 years ago in 2011 you know i'd done it for 25 years was no longer motivated with i've lost creativity. Sales had gone down. And at the time we were like, success should be the ability to do whatever you want to do when you want to do it. So why am I a hamster on a treadmill going

through the motions? Because that's all I know that I've done. And so now it's kind of the same thing with the cars. And I closed serious clothing down. That was a clothing brand that I'd started on the boardwalk in Venice in the late eighties. I'd run it for over 20 years and I didn't know what was coming next, but I knew I had a cushion of financial stability. But what came next was the Urban Outlaw film, which opened the door to the TED Talk and the book and me traveling around the world. Now, if I still had my full-time job running a clothing company with a dozen employees, I would not have had the freedom of time to just say, okay, next week, yeah, I'm going to go here, there, and everywhere, and I'm able to do it. So I'm not tied down to something that's anchoring me

that i no longer even enjoy so it's like shedding the skin right last year was the year of the snake this year's year of the horse and i'm ready to gallop and giddy up so so okay here's a question or maybe it's not a question you don't have to answer it because i know you're not going to say it do you see this photo right here do you know this photo i don't see it i'm at that age where i gotta put my glasses on it i'm on the phone and i think you'll know who who it is when you see it and what car he was driving i can't even see it all right so it's james dean driving his 550 down sunset oh yeah okay so my guess for you is either it's a 550 which i don't probably is not a 550 or a 356 because i don't think you've owned the 356 well

one one out of two ain't bad and i don't like convertibles so so there it is breaking news you've said that you said that ideas are not necessarily or cannot be taught right it comes from walking observing and bouncing things off of people if we put that into context of running a business that's tied to your personal vision or your passion how do you decide which ones of those you want to make money off of because and let me just say one one more thing before i finish that And oftentimes we love things and we love to do them, photography, any type of artist, creativity, artistry, collecting. But then we think let's turn it into a money-making opportunity and then we hate it. That's why I'm asking the question.

Is there anything that you look at or how do you make that decision? Great question. So in 2009, 10, I had this thread going online on Pelican Parts, early S-registry, like a blog. And it was literally Porsche Collection out of control hobby. And hobby is the important part here. My day job was the clothing company, and that enabled me to get into real estate. I like old things, old cars, old clothing, old jewelry, rehabbing things. The building that I'm sat in is 125 years old.

So I like old things and old things have made me money. But when it came to cars, sure, occasionally I would sell them, but it was never a business. I never wanted to make my hobby a business. And that was what separates me from the likes of the singers and the Gunther works and tunnels and RWBs and whoever else you want to throw in. have they're all making great cars but it's a business and i've been around modifying cars for over 20 25 years and i've obviously seen a lot of people come and go on a lot of shops that you know they start a project and then a year later it's not finished because the customer ran out of money or changed his mind or you know changed the color and i don't like dealing with deadlines and customer expectations you know sure i've sold cars but i've sold them when i built them and what here it is you either like it or you don't you know i always set up to this point that i don't want you to say hey i really love that car can you build it for me but i want it this

way then all of a sudden i'm catering to your personal taste on your very on your sort of variety of what it is that i sure i probably left a lot of money on the table when it comes to things like merch you know i'm the guy that is always giving shit away free hot wheels free stickers for you. But ironically, there was a guy that bought something at auction recently and he came in and he said, I've got a sticker. Can you put it on my car? And it was a bootleg sticker that this guy bought from someone on eBay for 10 bucks. And I go, well, I won't put the bootleg sticker on because it's not quite right. It's wrong size, wrong color. But obviously I'll put my sticker on. I'll give you my sticker. And, you know, I realized that I could have been

selling a ton of merch you know occasionally i sell some but then i mean really in this letting things go phase up to now where i'd scale back to where i'm sort of a one-man army lone wolf type of operation where i don't have a manager an agent obviously you can get that from this podcast that i'd forgotten about and didn't follow up on and blah blah blah so i'm an in the moment guy yeah so obviously i've made money selling things usually a lot of money selling property clothing was before that the recent sale on rm sotheby's was good but i could have been selling a lot of merch and a lot of other things it just didn't feel right to me like a lot of people approach me to do collabs with things that i'm not interested in you know jewelry i don't wear it

people always like let's do an outlaw whiskey i go sounds great but i don't drink whiskey right so you know i just like doing cool shit with cool people and some of those opportunities maybe you know you make money on some you don't it's like you know my nike shoe cola for example right perhaps but there was no money in it same with hot wheels i've probably done over 30 hot wheels where i've designed them and there's probably over 20 million hot wheels out there with my name and brand on it but i've spent more on coffee than hot wheels paid me for a license oh my gosh go wow you're crazy why are you not licensing all this stuff it just wasn't a priority for me so the long answer to your question is if it feels right in the gut at that time i'm all in

it i'm not anti-making money it just has to feel right at the time like a nike deal there was no money in it but from a branding point of view it was the coolest thing i ever did so for me it's not always about money sure i gotta pay some bills and responsibilities yeah i've never come into something from making money when people come up to me and they ask me my pet peeve question of usually first-time Porsche owner, what car is going to be a good investment? And I've got the canned response. Unless you're investing in miles per mile

and memorable moments, I can't answer that question for you. And they go, yeah, but you bought cars that are worth a lot of money. I go, yeah, because I bought what I personally liked at that time, which was before they became cool. Ironically, a certain time ago, short-wheel-based cars, no one was into them.

They were really the turbos. Nobody cared about them. So you could pick them up really inexpensively. so i'm not chasing it sort of goes back to my clothing days where we were more of a trendsetter and it comes back to the idea can't be tall inspiration's all around and you're either inspired by something you see hear feel taste smell right all the senses are engaged and that sparks something whether it's making coffee brewing candles skateboards whatever it is that floats your boat that's the creative type on the idea that can't be taught obviously people can see

a trend and go air-cooled 911s are trendy right let's get into it we drink that kool-aid well right i've been into air-cooled 911s since 1977 and i bought my first one in 1992. so this is not a fashion statement or fashion trend that i jumped on the bandwagon i was into this stuff really sort of in my own time frame let's put it that way and turns everything you know when i was buying clothing on the boardwalk and going to thrift stores and buying levars for 50 cents and selling them for five ten dollars i was ahead of that trend when i got into real estate in the arts district in downtown l.a 25 30 years ago i was ahead of the trend that came next and the same with the porsches that i got into so the answer to that is i just do things that i personally feel

that i'm into visually and all of the other stuff i mentioned has to be something i'm interested like you know i've never owned convertibles i've never owned a target you know it's too much of the wind in the hair beard in the eye type of thing so i'm not interested in it doesn't matter whether i could have bought a you know a 67s soft window target was the first year of the soft window target i couldn't have cared less about them when they were five grand or ten grand and it didn't bother me when they were worth 200 because i just wasn't into them yeah so i don't come at things from oh i should have bought more of those because i bought other stuff in that same sort of price bracket that did what i just described that i actually liked so i have to like what i'm involved

in otherwise yeah i'm not committed to it 100 then you just call a fastenship yeah i want to talk a little bit because every creative has a process and i do you have mentioned a few times here you're in it in the moment kind of guy you do everything you're sort of a one-man show but there has to be at some point some sort of storyboard when you're when you're dreaming up a car do you already know what it's going to look like in the end because you have to order parts you have to get the right things not downloading an app to get on a podcast you know i'm getting i'm in a digital detox i'm trying to get less stuff off this phone but this comes back to this idea of the idea is the most important thing and can't be taught you can go to school and learn how

to do graphic i guess illustration and design and output stuff and now with ai it can be done like that but usually i don't even draw stuff occasionally i do recently i got on this whole tape sort of journey of it started with blue painters tape then it went to vinyl tape and multi-colored tape and that was how i did my art cards like the 914 got a checkerboard roof those were visually post-its like a two and a half inch square yellow post-it that i just put on the roof and went wow that looks cool so for me i'm more of a hands-on like some people design digital in with ai it's like i don't even i'm not even interested in that i'm not against it but it's not how i it's not how i create i like to create in full scale i was doing this project

with pina farina for example where i was just putting tape on that batista and it was like wow that opportunity came or you know i've been a design consultant with twr on the old supercharged supercat the xjs i've been on that project for three and a half years and so these are things that i'm already doing outside of the porsche world but they're all sort of design driven you know for me really it's an aesthetic thing you know good design never goes out of style let's put it that way things come and go in cycles right but you know it's a classic case of money doesn't necessarily buy you taste and taste is something that you can acquire it and you can sort of be around it and you can learn it or you can just naturally sort of have it whether it's good taste

or bad taste right we all have it something could sort of work better than others some people are really put together and other people have got all the money in the world they've got no taste and you go how does that work right but that's just how it is i don't know if that helps you but i'm analog most of the way and this car that i'm getting next week in my mind i can't first of all i can't wait to get it because it's something new yeah it's a new experience but But I've already visually, I already know how it's going to look. It may change slightly because things do evolve. But I've got a baseline that I'm just going to start throwing tape on it straight away.

How long will that take you, do you think, to get to the completion of the vision? I don't think long. The 924 Ferraro GT started out with four pieces of tape one day. And, you know, we spanned that over several days. But I don't think I spent more than 10 hours on it. Oh, wow. And I never actually took tape off it. I just kept adding more tape.

but i'd be surprised if i put 10 hours into it oh i mean it's not painted yet but visually that thing's done end of the day not pleasing anyone else i'm i'm a big believer in nothing needs to be perfect nothing ever is perfect right right i'm comfortable in that imperfection do you do you how much i i don't even know why i'm thinking of this right now but how how much responsibility and I use that loosely but how much responsibility do you take for the 9-11 market kind of blowing up I don't take any that's that's other people's things you know do you think that do you think people look at you and your passion and and obviously it the market just exploded right you can't even touch I love the 9 the 930 turbo that's always been my favorite but I don't have

one and they became untouchable i don't want to say untouchable that's such a weird word but they're they're very they're they're difficult to come across for some of us do you like what do you think really led to that then i think everything's timing you know it was 7500 bucks i bought a lot of 911s that were under 10 grand 4500 bucks five grand like the car you're describing used to be a 20 grand car yeah and i bought them when they were 20 grand cars yeah so it's a timing thing i mean for me there is a definition of time stamp with urban outlaw tamir moscovici's award-winning short documentary 32 minute film that came out october 15 2012 that is timestamp so you can go okay what was the porsche scene like before that it was a little bit of this generic i'm talking in broad

generic strokes here but most porsche owners might be considered douchebaggy doctor lawyer dentist older wealthier type of guy usually right or they were a pca club member now i'm not putting them down i'm just saying what it was just facts pca club member with his shorts and his polo shirt and he's got his little name tag on it zone region pca member yeah i've never been a member of any but i've owned porsches now you're kidding yeah exactly so breaking news to me it was great because i've been around filming you know my day job separate of the clothing is film location business i own property in our intact production studios for commercial filming tv show music video reality show i've been approached by people to make uh car related films but just never click

with them tamir moscovici sent me an email in 2011 said hey i've been following your thread you're out of control i'll be thread on the blogs and i think there's more to your story than meets the eye you know so he took a leap of faith flew down from toronto and we filmed what became a urban outlaw in february of 2012 over four days with a ramsackle crew of people like four or five people and two cannon 5ds and we didn't know what was going to happen with that film we released a little trailer in June of 2012. And within a few days, I got a contact. Someone reached out from Nike, Sandy Bodecker, who was in charge of Nike Action Sports, and said he loved the film. He was a Porsche owner. Loved the trailer. And was there any way he could see the film? I go, well, it's

not finished yet, but let me see what I can do. Why? And he said, well, Nike hosts a two-day Design Summit conference for all of their Nike think tank designers and marketing people. and long story short nike ended up renting my building in downtown la we ended up screening an uncut version of urban outlaw at the soho house and we hosted 30 of their designers and marketing people and i even did a sort of what would become a version of my ted talk which happened later and that was in 2012 and the film hadn't even come out and i just got onto facebook at the time i guess and i don't know maybe i had a couple of hundred followers and then overnight this trailer got picked up by top gear top gear top gear and that sort of went viral and

went like this and we didn't know if 500 people were going to see that trailer 5 000 50 000 or millions right so when the film got accepted into the london rain dance film festival which is a rainy version of sundance will got on plane and went to london because hey our film's premiering at a film festival in london it was sold out crowd on a saturday night in piccadilly circus so we knew we were onto something and then when the film came out in 2012 october 15th that was like the floodgates to porsche contacted me and things just started happening pretty quick you know so the pivotal point with 2012 the film 2014 the ted talk 2017 i had a book come out which is now in three different languages english german japanese three different editions and then in between all

of these things started happening collaborating with hot wheels mobile one you know momo steering wheel and ultimately leading up to nike and lots of other things in between so that pivotal moment started in 2012 and if you backtrack to 2012 a lot of automotive things were it was just a different environment different platforms social media hadn't exploded yet influencers weren't quite where they were today so the long answer to this question is i wouldn't personally say define the moment but other people tell me it did all the time the amount of people that came up to me that told me just like the guy with the bootleg sticker he bought his first porsche because of me and i hear that all the time if it wasn't for you i would not have owned a porsche because at the

time i thought porsche owners were blah blah blah so a lot of people related to my story because urban outlaw is not really it's a porsche story but it's my story of my life and the porsche is the car that takes you on the journey of my life so the relatability and then from that getting into games like need for speed the video games csr racing it went beyond the porsche world and just reached the automotive car culture world whether you're a ken block fan a need for speed fan a formula drift fan a formula one fan an off-road fan i think people connected to my story first of all i'm not trying to sell you anything i'm not here with a can of soft drink trying to sell you something secondly true i'm just saying that's true it's very off-putting

when somebody's trying to sell you something part of your charm is that you've never tried to sell us anything you're just right i mean so it becomes disrelated but i'm no different to the other guy i may just be into portions and that guy's into sport import tunas or mazdas or drift or whatever it may be right so when i did these outlaw gatherings all over the world it was always all cars welcome. They were never Porsche century. So the reach went beyond the Porsche world. But in the Porsche world, of course, you know, things started becoming a little cooler and a little hipper. And, you know, you sort of look at how Porsche changed their marketing and brought in a younger demographic with a broader appeal and a broader sort of reach of, you know,

now we're doing things with surfers and DJs and tennis players and singers and everything else. it wasn't actually like that before so things evolved was i part of that scene am i part of that scene yeah sure hence hey aren't you the porsche gun you know and having a beard helped and being rock and roll helped and the timing helped to you know i was on the cover of road and track in 2013 which was the 50th anniversary of the 911 now road and track could have put anything on the cover like the ladies greatest gt3 rs but i think people related to this everyone's got an inner outlaw a little bit of rebelliousness to them which maybe they let it out maybe they don't so i feel like what i've noticed is people tend to live vicariously

through what it is i'm doing because maybe it's something they want to be doing but i haven't taken that leap of faith to achieve that goal or i haven't set a goal or there are many reasons why it might not have happened but you know it's kind of strange like you know recently i'm reading all these comments wow it makes me so sad that you're selling all your cars i go i'm actually happy so why should that make you sad if i'm happy right yeah so i don't really answer your question but it was a pivotal moment in time that's still going i'm just sort of not even diversifying i'm just looking for new things that excite whether it's a different porsche or a pina farina or a twr because at the end of the day i'm a car guy i have you know i'm in my vintage rolls royce era

because these things just represent great value like 911s did 25 years ago great build quality and you know they sort of you drive at a different pace and it's a conversation starter everyone wants to know what year it is and you know the little tidbit like 20 years ago there was a thing called the porsche wave where you'd wait to other porsche owners and they related to it that does not happen anymore yeah happen if someone's got a new panamera taikan cayenne macon and it really doesn't happen if someone's in a new 992.2 whatever so it's a different sort of community and i got into porsche because it was a dream i had as a 10 year old and i fulfilled that dream and that was a sense of personal achievement and success a lot of people the same way but some

people get into porsches as an investment right and it's like a status symbol of like owning a certain watch or eating at a certain restaurant or i was never into it for that so it's kind of like an evolving crowd an evolving scene inside the porsche room uh you brought something up that was interesting you said that uh you know some people they feel sad and i think with social media it's created a lot of these parasocial relationships and we talk about that a lot with with race car drivers on this show specifically so i want to tie that into something here after the film pretty much changed your life i would say it sounds like you know when things went viral a lot of things changed publicly what did that cost you privately what version of your

life ended when that went viral well i'm still the same person difference is when i go to car shows i gotta look at cars but a lot of times i end up looking at nothing because people come up and i get it hey aren't you that porsche guy can i get a photo let me show you my car can you do this can you do that and it's about their validation of hey i showed magnus my car and he really liked it so it makes them feel good right yeah but when i go to events it falls into what i call this conversations where we all like porsche and i joke about my own they all look the same but then people sometimes get a little sensitive when i say ah they all look you go do you want to see my blah blah blah and let's say something i'm not interested in like a convertible something

and then i'm in this awkward position where i'm not really interested because i don't like convertibles but i can't say no to this person because he's going to be disappointed and he's going to go that guy's a real wanker you didn't want to see my car so it's not even about me it's about me validating that they made the right choice so of course they go sure let me walk you know 200 yards away to go look at something i'm not interested in sure i'll take a photo with you So the answer to your question is I'd had success before the Porsche thing, but I'm going back through my archives to serious clothing. And this is pre-digital age of his and his. And I've got a whole scrapbook, which I had to put together when I got a green card 25 years ago. I had to prove that I had some artistic merit and I wasn't taking jobs away from an American citizen to apply for a green card as a designer.

So here's the point to the story. I've got this press kit going back to the early 90s and letters from MTV and Vogue magazine and you name it, Sassy and Interview and Seventeen and Cosmopolitan and these pictures of bands wearing serious clothing on the cover of Rolling Stone. And we literally outfitted Alice Cooper to Madonna and a lot of people in between. So I had some notoriety and success before. The difference was before the internet didn't exist. And in a way, it was easier to get stuff done. Like stylists would come down and pull wardrobe for bands that were going on tour, music videos, whether it's Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or Madonna or whoever. and people said okay we're going to be there at 10 o'clock and it wasn't like five different text messages to set up a time to come and then bail in the end it just happened because there was no

other way for it to happen it was like the last generation of pre-digital creativity so the answer to your question is i i was already sort of known in the clothing world but the clothing world is not the car world so when urban outlaw came out in the past 15 years of overnight internet whatever notoriety or accessibility yeah i just experienced that before in a different different setting of pre-internet you know back to hey onto that crazy hat guy on the boardwalk in venice yeah this will used to come up to me but it wasn't like this just happened overnight and it was like wow i wasn't aware of how this was going to be you know i'd always sort of been a little outgoing a little outrageous, a little flamboyant, a little different, right? Dare to be different. And it goes back to

my name. I hated my name as a kid, Magnus, because I talk about this all the time. And instead of like David, John, Paul, and Stevens, I got picked on. It's a bit like the Johnny Cash song, a boy named Sue. So I was used to standing out, whether it was because I was a crazy hat guy or I had a name that people picked, made fun of, right? But now I realize, hey, this was all part of my journey of building character i was into heavy metal at an early age the outlaw thing wasn't actually anything new in the 80s heavy metal was kind of an outlaw thing and you know the lone wolf sort of viking warrior rock and roll whatever was it wasn't sort of the norm norm norm it might have been a few steps down from the norm so life goes on and you know people come up

and say hi and that's just that's that's kind of how it is let me tell you something magnus walker is a pretty epic literary name so you're very lucky i want to talk to you a little bit you always talk about the 2014 your daily driver the 991.1 turbo yeah last i heard you had 200 000 miles on it and you said it'll make it to 500 000 miles yeah i'm curious what's the most miles you've ever actually put into a car where before it just like collapsed well i haven't got there yet i mean the 2014 991 turbo s i drove it today i'm only the second owner the prior owner actually put most of those miles out I bought it with 159,000 miles on it it's currently at 206 now that's the car that has never been parked in the garage you know with my favorite cars it's parked

outside never in a garage it's usually covered in leaves and bird shit and stuff like that and it's the only Porsche I'll let a valley park guy park and it's the only Porsche I've driven in one day 1,050 miles through five states from LA to Denver. I wouldn't want to do it at my age in a GT3 or an air-cooled car. You know, Hannah and I took a road trip to Denver over the Rockies

at 14,000 feet. One day, Willow was with us. We had our luggage in it. So that car's a car that will just like the Swiss Army knife of 911. Yeah. Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, it doesn't matter.

It's as fast as a GT3 on your favorite road. There are things that are irritating about it, like center-lock wheels, you know, because I'm always getting nails and punctures and stuff like that uh and i didn't even i wasn't even looking for it it just came to me i was actually looking for a 997 turbo and i just sort of fell into it for pennies on the dollar because you add high miles on it uh i don't necessarily drive a lot of miles because

i don't really have a job where i commute to work where for a long time i lived and worked in the same place so i always said for me my driving was 90 pleasure in meaning there's driving and there's commuting two different things right you're in bumper to bumper traffic going to work now it's not driving doing like 15 20 miles an hour as opposed to you know going up your favorite road angeles crest highway for a blast you might only do round trip 100 miles but they're more spirited memorable miles rather than like the guy that i bought the car from i think his commute was 80 miles a day that was how that car got miles on it but they were freeway miles and he was a mature owner so he wasn't thrashing the shit out of it it's not modified like a lot of people might

have tried to make 800 or 1000 horsepower out of that car and that's when you have issues that's cars plenty fast enough with the 560 horsepower it has in stock form so i'm more interested in cars that have stories and high miles compared to people flexing their you know thousand mile pink to sample whatever i'm more interested in the guy that's got a million miles on something like one of the most exciting or most sort of memorable drives i ever had i did this series for haggardy called the next big thing and it was about the underdog cars you know like sob turbos and volvo station wagons and i drove this 1967 volvo p1800 that's in the guinness book of world records as the highest mileage non-commercial individually owned uh and at the time it had

over three million miles and it was owned by one guy this school teacher called herb gordon and he had that 80 mile commute today lived somewhere in new york and just drove and drove and drove and by the mid 70s when the car was 10 years old volvo was documenting high mileage cars through dealer maintenance and he had a million miles on it and he became a brand ambassador for volvo because what is better was original engine rebuilt twice repainted a couple of times but all their numbers matching car so from a brand point of view this p1700 is now owned by volvo and it's sort of this iconic car that has got over three million miles on it so that's that's the story there that i'm still telling what uh so you mentioned the angeles crest highway and i know that's your

favorite road to really uh exercise the porsches on the porsches on outside of that highway is there another road that you really enjoy maybe or maybe it's your favorite in the entire world sure i mean one of the greatest things about la is accessibility to world-class driving roads where you can do the trifecta and i've done it ocean doesn't mountain in a day yeah so there's plenty of roads around the ocean if you want an ocean view i mean pch is an iconic road but it's not a great driving road because it's slow and road works and whatever like the crest is 18 miles from where i'm sat right now the ocean's 18 miles from where i'm sat right now and let's say lake arrowhead big bear the mountains they're probably 60 miles from where i'm sat so it there's so many

iconic not even iconic there's just so many great driving roads if you want to cruise pch that's great you want to rip up the crest that's a challenging road that's got on camber off camber good road surface bad road surface you get in a flow you can go as fast as you want to go the road is up to lake arrowhead and big bear is spectacular or if you want to drive out to joshua tree or the high desert or even just doing freeway loops at nighttime i love nighttime freeway loops you know and you can connect them all i'm within a mile of every major freeway the 510 the 101 the 60 so if you want to drive down the 110 the long beach and go over the bridges at nighttime with the refineries glowing it's like you're in blade runner and so for me it's cinematic

what i love about la is like you see films like heat right or gone in 60 seconds yeah terminator and they're on the six street bridge or in the la river or the down in san pedro driving in la at nighttime feels like you're in your own movie no matter what car you're in you could be in a rental minivan and go wow this is like this is the scene where al pacino's running chasing deniro this is are seen in you know terminator whether going into the la river or gone in 60 seconds or whatever it is rockford files so la with it being a movie town and everyone's sort of into film right that's inspirations all around so it's kind of like currently we don't have speed cameras that's changing but currently we don't have them so you know whenever i go back to england england's just

so frustrating because these roadworks everywhere and these mandatory 30 mile an hour averages and everyone's like overly aggressive and don't want to let you in and i'm not saying la drivers are great but yeah you know you go to miami and see people just cross four lanes to get off oh yeah well that's that's florida yeah i grew up in miami it's crazy so you're in miami no i'm in toronto actually and just you know tamir is a local legend of course here we love him but i grew up in miami i have a question if i called you up and now i have your number so i may mark he's like oh no changing it tomorrow if i called you up and i said hey i have laguna seca for us for a day you can pick any car it cannot be a porsche what car are we taking to laguna seca

pwr supercat that i i'm still involved with i don't know if you saw that thing go up the hill at goodwood but yeah yeah car made his debut finished in 11th position with a sub 56 second run two tents outside of the top 10 which surprised a lot of people so ironically that's that's a project that i'm a jack guy i've owned e-types i've owned xjs's i actually wanted to do great story in 2018 i did a press drive with jag i became sort of acquaintance buddies with ian callum the jack designer and he'd just done his xj6 coupe and they'd done a similar hot rod jack but nico mcbain the drummer of iron maiden and you know the xjs is the unloved jag it's a follow-up to the e-type yeah played with problems but they were great touring car and i said hey i want to do

like a dtm outlaw sort of hot rod xjs and i even spoke to jag classic about it and they loved the idea and then in callum left jag and just kind of went nowhere and then fast forward to 2022 during kobe i get a email from a former porsche marketing guy pr guy called lee newton we said hey he's freelancing on this rebirth of TWR Tom Wilkinson Shore racing these were these guys won up Tom Wilkinson Shore was British touring car champion raced at Bathurst and then they were the motorsports engineering division of JAG that won Le Mans in 1988 to develop the XJ220 the XJ15 and rebirthing the brand through the San Fergus so when my friend Lee said hey are you interested in this project i go you must be a mind reader he goes why i got i wanted to do a hot rod

jack it's a british thing right i wanted to do one for a long time so that's something that i'm very proud of being part of that team you know we debuted that car at my warehouse in 2024 and we took it to vegas for f1 and la auto show and you know it was just a very creative exciting thing forming that wasn't a porsche so yeah we want supercats well supercharged g12 and the supercat straight uh flat sixes flat fours porsche what what do you which do you prefer it's horses for courses it's all about what you want to experience in the journey and the drive and i'm about variety it's like you know out there's my 55 year old rolls royce 72 um shadow right nothing doesn't go fast but you feel good driving it we've got a 77 c3 corvette doesn't do anything

great but it looks great it's not fast doesn't stop doesn't sound good but you feel good when you're in it so it doesn't matter whether it's a four-cylinder or v12 it's more about do you feel good in it and you don't have to be driving fast to feel good i've driven a lot of sort of i've been fortunate enough to have some seat time in some hypercars and supercars most of them i wouldn't want to own because they're not practical or you know just ultimately the road determines the speed yeah i drove the um cleaner batista before i got involved in that project up the crest and that thing has 2 000 horsepower which sounds like unbelievably scary and all that stuff and my turbo's got 560 horsepower so the batista had four times the horsepower but it wasn't going

four times quicker maybe it was going 10 maybe 15 percent quicker because the road determines the speed so it don't matter whether you're in a four-cylinder car or v12 it's like v12 might go quicker but yet might not be having more fun yeah true or just sounds better or whatever the decision is yeah i um yeah i'll tell you something that if if there's anything in chatting with you that this has got me thinking i was just telling lolly that i i had sold my 944 turbo after maybe three four years after i bought it um just didn't have room but now i want to buy i want to buy it again just because you've got me thinking like why not i should just because i want to i just sold not all of my transaxle water cooled cars a few of them 924 928 944 968 yeah and this is what i'm

gonna say 928 is the best of the bunch because the v8's got just enough bottom end torque where you don't have to rev the nuts 924 na or turbo or the 944 they're kind of similar you really you really have to drive them in a very spirited manner to be on boost and they're a little frantic and rattly and you know they're not as quick as you feel but they're a great experience but here's my butt in 968 three liter is the sweet spot of both of them because it's got enough bottom end torque and the build quality is better it's more 993 sure well you don't have to thrash the nuts off and like you do with a 944 because off boost 944s they're a little lazy let's put it that way when they're on boost different story part spin vw wow well do you want a 944 turbo i like them

I just want to, I just, I need to get, I need to have it back, right. Just to even have it, but I'm, I'm going to take you up on that. Final, I guess, thought or question. It's not even a question. It's more of a final thought from you. If you had to leave the audience with one nugget of wisdom that you've learned over your, the last, you know, 40 years or so, what would you say? Do what you love.

Don't overthink it. Don't care what other people say. Magnus Walker, ladies and gentlemen. An outlaw. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Really appreciate it, Magnus. Accommodating my last minute schedule. And thanks for the opportunity and great, great spending time with you two.

Likewise. Are you with Hannah right now by any chance or no? No. Hannah's, you know, I was going to say Hannah's got a real job, which she does, but she's not working today because it's Good Friday. No, I'm not with Hannah today. She'll be here in a little bit. I just texted her.

That's why I sent her a picture of us talking. Hannah's had me in Bloomberg numerous times. we've talked about formula one in vegas and whatnot so anyway just tell her i said hello vincenzo from business of speed says hello she'll know i want to say something magnus that really resonated with me from your story um the letting go the shedding last year i had to let go of something like very significant to me that i had been fighting for a long time to hold on to it was my house because i got a divorce and i had to get rid of the house and i really fought hard for the house once i abandoned that like the dream of holding on to that house and i let go and i

moved to my tiny little flat from 2000 square feet oh man did I feel lighter did I feel better did light start coming into my into my life like everything improved so I'm really excited to see what this new lightness and lightness brings to your life and what you're going to create really excited to watch what's next with you yeah well thank you very much you know it's not the first time I've done this closing series closing down in 2011 was significant because I ran that business from the boardwalk up to it being you know like a seven-figure business and that was an emotional band-aid because it was what at the time it was what it was all I thought I knew because that's what I'd done for so long right and for the past three four years of

that life of that business it wasn't fun but it took a long time to let it go but once that was let go what came next is what we talked about and so I just know something good is going to come creatively and mentally and i appreciate you sharing those words words of wisdom it really resonates and i'm sure it'll resonate with people and i really hope that our paths cross vincenzo and i are often out and about and doing racing things so i hope our our paths cross and we can give you a hug and and i appreciate that if you guys were ever in la uh stop on by