Josh Dubon ’64 Impala | LOWRIDER Roll Models - Season 5 Episode 5 | MotorTrend

(upbeat music) - When I get into the car, my face constantly hurts because I'm smiling from ear to ear. If you appear on three wheels, it's like being on a

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er coaster, even better. Hard work. Being able to get into my car is a great joy. I'll put my three-year-old niece in there and hit the switch once, and she grabs the wheel and screams. This is highlighted in adult men. So my '63 Impala SS, aka T1000, I always wanted to build a low-rider based on the T1000 from Terminator. Since I was a kid, the '63 taillights always reminded me of the T1000 with the red eyes and the fish scale, holographic look.

I am very excited. It's finally finished. Got the trunk done, got some cool sounds, just did a basic setup on it. Two pumps, Marzocchi 11 gearbox in the front, eight batteries and something good enough to be able to

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around, hit some switches and have fun. That's all it is. In the end, I had a lot of fun doing that build, but it all turned into my holy grail, which is my '64 Impala SS, Black Sabbath. I always wanted to theme a Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osborn car. It just seems like that color, everything about it was just evil and just bad.

It's a really bad, four-speed, 327 turbo fire truck. I've never driven a four-speed, but I always wanted one in an Impala, so it all worked out. So the only thing I've changed on this car is the wheels. So it's a 72 spoke, 13. They're cast iron Daytons from the '90s with skinny spokes and baby nipples. You have the imitated dog ears and the 24-karat gold plating. When you were a kid, you just see them and say, "Yeah, that's what happens." The facts, the Daytons, you put them out there, you hear them in the music, and they're just classics, the wire wheels.

The fact that this is original and it's so bad that I've been contemplating, "Should I cut it or not?" I have the 63 that has power, but I have to do it, every time I drive it it goes very smooth, but I put my hand down there ready to hit some switches, and it's like, "Ah, I have to do it." But I'm enjoying it for now. Every time I look at it I find something new. If you know what you are looking for, you can identify it. It's a unicorn. This is rare. You see the protection panels there.

You see the mileage. There are so many different things that are really interesting that you will never see. It came with his dealer book. Let's say you go to the dealer and are going through the entire sales process. They open it. You can see the car. You choose the Impala. You go to the fabric and they tell you: "What do you want? Aqua blue?" It kind of takes you back in time, because it takes you through the process of what someone went through when they bought the car in '64. I grew up in Reno, Nevada. It is a beautiful place.

You're close to the rivers and Lake Tahoe and all that stuff, but it's also a very small place. Very quickly, you are exposed to all kinds of things. I mean, you walk into a 7-11. I'm used to seeing slot machines and people chain smoking as soon as you walk in trying to get a Slurpee. a family that had very limited resources, we didn't have a lot of money, and getting school supplies and even school clothes was a completely different experience for me. I remember going to the Salvation Army or wherever with a bag and being. like, "Okay, go get your school clothes." My family is from Guatemala.

My dad is from Mexico. My grandparents are French Guatemalan, so we have a great mix. But growing up here, my mom didn't know English. I taught my mom to speak English when she was little. While I was still learning in elementary school, I was in the welfare line and my mother translated for her. Like, "Oh, what are they saying?" I was like, "Oh, we can only get this many bags of food per household, because of this." And she was like, "How do you say this?" That's something I've thought about since I was young. Being there For my mother, there was always a sense of responsibility from day one and I always knew that I had to be there to help my mother.

That is one of the things I am most proud of: having taught my mother to speak English. . when I was a kid (laughs), so I'm proud of that, having limited resources and not having some of those things available to us as a minority and Latino family, it naturally creates that drive in you to want something better. My mom has been a. A big part of my success, my motivation, just being able to support our dreams and be there to kick our butts was also something she played both roles in our entire lives, basically. What's really important to me is having her support. there for everything, for the good, the bad, the ugly, I owe everything to my family and the people around me.

For me, when I was 12, I was skating and jumping fences, drinking 40, smoking joints, going to the swap meet, going to gangs, where we were like, "Hey, where can we get pocket knives?" And stuff like that. . We were just, kids are like that. Maybe that's what it's like to grow up in Reno. We were surrounded by things like drugs, drinking and partying at a very young age. And I think a lot of what made me react and some of my friends said, "How do we escape this?" I think being surrounded by so much negativity really created a natural recipe for destruction.

And for me, just being able to get out of it was all I wanted, and I didn't even know it. I didn't realize that when I was young I was self-destructing. I don't think any 12 year old should have to deal with that. In Reno, Nevada, where I grew up, one of the most important things for anyone who grows up there is to go to Hot August Nights. I mean, I remember seeing the ads on the highway. It's like, "Win this '57 Chevy Bel Air!" Or “Win ​​this Impala!” And that's when I really fell in love with cars, because it's a city where everyone has a classic car in their garage, whether it works or not, you see them and you get excited.

Children, the greatest thing we had was our imagination. When we saw cars at the car show, it was free. That was something we could enjoy as a family and not have to spend money. We can just look at it visually and be inspired by it and it was really bad. Something that was cool was when I started digging into the car and inspecting it, I mean, I looked at the license plates, "1998 Reno Gazette Journal, Hot August Nights," and I was like, "Dude, this car was for me." Like I swear, It was waiting for me in this garage." And I knew I had to have it.

Somewhere we always looked up to was Los Angeles. The culture just spoke to us, the low-riding scene or the skate boarding scene. You'd watch the videos of skate and you were like, "I want to go to that place in LA and hit that railing" or do this trick there and it just amused you, it impressed you and you just wanted to live that life. to see the underground shows, that was the dream. And since then, I've always strived to get out of there and I think so many things happened to me when I was young that I'm glad they happened then because I went through my trials and tribulations when I was young. child, whether through violence or just getting in trouble with the law at a young age, in and out of doing these things that were just self-destructive.

And I realized: "I have to get out of here." And I ended up moving. I felt like it was a breath of fresh air. I thought, "No one knows me here." And from there, I just wanted to focus on positivity, try to focus on making an honest living, whatever that may be, finding a place to make money to continue to help my family and help myself do something that I wanted to do. . in a business. When I was looking at that journal today, it was a little crazy because it was the year 2008, I was looking at it and reading it and I could see the frustration even in my handwriting.

It just seems like, the pen grazes the paper like, "You've got to change, Josh," and the only way to do this," I said to myself. I wrote it down. I said, "The only way to be happy" is if I start a business and work for myself", in that sense, I knew it. I had to do it, I was driven to such pain that I had to write it. And I started looking at the pages and I thought, "Wow." Seeing all these different parts of my life that I knew I had to get away from. I didn't even have a car, but I was always looking at the small classifieds.

It's like, "What classic cars are there?" I didn't even want a real car. I wanted a Low Rider or a Karmann Ghia, or I wanted a Bel Air. And that was something I always wanted to strive for. And how was I going to do that? And the only way to do that is to just work hard and, in my mind, create a business, something that I can control. I could control my own destiny and manifest it. All my friends were much better at skating than I was, and I just wanted to document it. And I had always had cameras in my hand.

I wanted to film them and just watch those hammers fall. When they got a trick, I felt like I had it. But I wanted to make feature films. And the good thing about that is that it really pushed me to make that last move to Los Angeles. I was filming all these local kids, but they were so talented and inspired me. And fortunately I had met a great friend of mine to date. Now we are family. His name is Tosh Townend. He's an old school skater from back in the day and I met him on Do Tour.

And he and I were just chatting. He says, “You gotta come to Orange County, come skate.” He says, "You can stay with me." I had sold my Jeep to my little brother just to cover my plane ticket to get to California. Fast forward, I'm living with Tosh Townend on his couch. She just had a baby. His wife says, "Who is this guy living with us now?" All of these things happened very quickly. I met a great friend of mine, Mike Sinclair. He ran the Toy Machine Team in Tum Yeto and had met Euan Bowen in Thrasher.

And long story short, we all had a long experience and I was given the opportunity to do King of the Road in 2012 and that's the holy grail as a skater, whether you're filming it or skating it. he. It's like the Superbowl. Continue on King of the Road, you've achieved it all. And I was very happy to continue. It changed my life, because after that, I realized that I wanted to get more into different types of technology and media. That inspired me so much that I started filming commercials and stuff like that. Then naturally we will get into new technologies, like virtual reality.

So when we were doing a lot of really innovative VR work, we did something with CBS graffiti artist turned fine artist Greg Craola Simkins. And six months after we did this really interesting piece together, he approached us. He says, "Hey, I have a five-year-old niece." She was doing a backbend in her living room. She "had a stroke and was paralyzed" from the navel down. "Is there anything you can do for her?" And Jess and I jumped in, we had been exploring this vertical for a while and we don't know, but we would love to learn about it and see what we can do.

So we flew to Kentucky and stayed there for about 30 days, learning about her paralysis. How can we help her? And the difference was that we were doing an assisted crawling exercise where she has to pull it, and it's painful for her. She cries. She doesn't like to do it. What five-year-old wants to do two hours of PT every day before school? And we had put our headphones on him and it was nothing medical. It was actually a virtual reality experience that we filmed Christian I'm skating in a pool, and she instantly tried to take the board away from him and she was smiling.

And we thought, "Great, he's not throwing up." "She's not dizzy, that's amazing." They took us aside and said, "Here's the actual analytical result of what just happened." Her pain perception was almost completely diminished. She was willing to push herself for a longer period of time with more intensity, and her overall mental state and commitment were through the roof, so we were like, "Oh my God!" her through her rehabilitation and I quickly realized that she was much bigger than her and us. And that's how we started Mieron VR and created technology that helps spinal cord injury patients in their recovery.

My business is something I do every day now and you are helping people all over the world. I mean, I couldn't ask for anything more. It has changed my life and we will continue to commit to creating better technology. Keep it up. Once you hit rock bottom, everything is up. My whole life, whether the things I went through were just negative, at the end of the day, they're all positive, because the silver lining is. , you will learn something from that. And I think something I would tell my younger self or anyone growing up is, "Believe in your dreams." And if something really bad happens to you, "just try to find the positive in it." "I know it's hard, but what can you learn?

From that mistake or from that incident?" Against all odds, I have been able to rise to a place in my life where I can help other people, where I can help my family, from my skateboarding family, to my

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family, to my music family, to people in the tech world. My name is Josh Dubón. I'm a tech entrepreneur and I'm a Low Rider Roll model.