Go with your gut feeling | Magnus Walker | TEDxUCLA

Having been in the film industry, we got a lot of people interested in doing little TV shows and things like that, but we weren't ready for the exposure, or the fit wasn't right, or it just didn't click. Then I got a call from a Canadian named Tamir Moscovici. Well, he had seen a couple of articles and he was a film director, also a Porsche fan, and he was looking for something daring for his film. He was getting a little fed up with doing Bud Light commercials and he thought, hey, maybe there's more to Magnus' story than meets the eye.

So we had a couple of conversations and Tamir ended up flying to Los Angeles, a little over two years ago, with his frequent flyer miles, a complete leap of faith. His original idea was to make a short documentary on YouTube. Well, our thought was, "What's the worst that could happen here? We'll drive around, race in my favorite Porsches for 4 days and maybe get some good pictures." Well, what turned out to be a 32-minute documentary was shot in 4 days. So we filmed, I think, in February 2012, and released a trailer in June 2012. We didn't know what would happen with the trailer, but somehow Top Gear picked it up and on the first day it got over 50,000 views and suddenly, I found this. something called Facebook.

I thought I should get on with it. I didn't really know much about it. So I got on Facebook and right now I don't even have an iPhone. So I'm not very Internet savvy, but suddenly I keep getting all these friend requests from all these strange places, you know, Spain and Indonesia, and I'm thinking about what's going on. Well, this trailer for that 3-minute movie, Urban Outlaw, that Top Gear picked up, was blogged, reblogged, and reblogged. Well, this was pretty exciting. So this was a leap of faith project, everyone was working on a shoestring budget, the brothers' favorite kind of thing, and they were doing this kind of thing on the side.

So, little by little I began to publish the film that was going to come out. Well, for me, being a producer of sorts, we bought it at some film festivals. Somehow it got into this thing called the Raindance Film Festival, which I described as the rainy version of Sundance, which takes place in England. I'm from England, what are the chances of you releasing

your

film in front of an audience similar to this? So Karen and I flew to London and premiered the film at Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night around 10 o'clock and it sold out. There were rumors about this movie.

Well, we decided, "Okay, we'll post it online." So on October 15, the movie was online and probably 2 weeks after it came out, I got a phone call from Jay Leno. Jay Leno had seen the movie and wanted it to appear on his garage show. Well, that started the avalanche of what has happened over the last 18 months. Suddenly, this is my life before Urban Outlaw came out, and this is my life after. Now, at this point, we've been doing Serious Clothing for 20 years and we weren't as motivated as before. You know, we always said we design what we personally like to wear, but in recent years we've stayed afloat.

So we took this leap of faith and decided that success really is the freedom to do whatever you want. So we decided we were going to close Serious. This was the baby that allowed us to get to this point. Now, it's not like we gave up on Serious, we still had all the patents and samples. But what she did was once we decided to take off the Band-Aid, she allowed us a little bit of breathing room. We didn't know what was coming next, but we knew it would be something good. So once we close that door, probably in the last 18 months I've probably done hundreds of interviews in magazine videos and TV shows.

I think closing the door on Serious opened up all this freedom to travel. Remember I told you about Porsche and that letter I wrote when I was 10 years old. About a month after the film's release, I received a letter from Porsche. Basically, they had seen the movie and were impressed with my passion for Porsche, and realized they had written me a letter 35 years later. Ironically, in the movie, Tamir asked me, "What do you think Porsche would think if you did it?" I said, "I don't know. I hope they're smiling and happy." Then Porsche wrote me a second letter.

I wish I had the first one, but I have the second one. They invited me to visit them in Stuttgart and tour the museum, which I went to do. By pure coincidence, I was there on September 11, 2013. Much later, at the Los Angeles Auto Show. We did a couple of events with Porsche. I hosted these events in my garage in downtown Los Angeles. It was a worldwide dealer event, it brought together all of its dealers and brought me into this workshop where Porsche talked about what Porsche does in restoration and classic Porsche. I think they felt I had this: the passion for Porsche is what I said it was, and it's something that you can't really build, you can't market, and you can sell it.

It's more or less there. So from then on, Porsche brought me into this shop, invited me to an event in Essen, Germany, and basically started inviting me places and incorporating me into their upcoming commercials. The connection with Porsche was pretty straightforward, but what we didn't expect, but also came out of the film, was that Nike approached us. Oakley approached us and then we had a visit from Bentley's chief designer, and we also had a visit from BMW and Volvo. It's almost like these people thought I was some kind of focus group and were asking me for my opinion on what I thought about certain things.

I'm scratching my head a little bit thinking, "I'm just a guy doing my thing," but you know people seem to have responded. Well, I get a lot of emails from people who often talk about the video, and I guess the best thing, other than people liking cars, is the fact that people found the movie and my story inspiring. So if there's one message I can leave for myself - what I've done over the past 28 years involved many leaps of faith, always relying on my gut when things seemed uncomfortable - that was often the case: " Hey, we're on the right track," and just keep you motivated and dedicated.

We never ask anyone's opinion. We just did what we like to do and it seems to have gone pretty well for us. We don't know where we are going. I often say that I am on this open road, along the way. We'll see what comes next, but I really appreciate all

your

time and allowing me to share my story. Greetings and all the best. (Applause) (Applause)