ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-07-03
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDQrMoksJ4Q
hello my name's Mangus Walker and I was born in nineteen sixty seven in Sheffield England I left school at fifteen and I I came to America at the age of nineteen well eight weeks ago I don't know what a Ted talk once and to be honest I'm not quite sure why I'm here today but I do appreciate the opportunity to be with you guys and share
my story my journey on my hopes and my dreams you know I having left school at fifteen you know for me I don't really have any future well I came to America twenty eight years ago I'm not represent the land of opportunity for me and in those past twenty eight years of being able to build three things accessible clothing company a film location business and also
%HESITATION restored raced driven and collected quite a lot of classic Porsches a portrait of passion for me and I'll talk about that in detail in a little bit but all three of those things share one common bond I had no education than them I didn't really think I was going to end up in that particular field I don't really know where I was going but all
three of those things have a common thread a common bond I'm not common bond for me really freedom freedom to do whatever I wanted to do on a dream sort of to be able to suppose well live my life to the fullest and do whatever I wanted to do so coming to America really was a journey I'll start my journey in nineteen seventy seven thirteen seventy
seven inning was sort of a special year we had this %HESITATION punk rock thing going on and we'll sort this rule jubilee thing going on but for me it was the start of a very memorable moment my father took me to a little school motorshow in nineteen seventy seven but then I fell in love with this car was a white martini Porsche now any kid growing
up anywhere in the world in the late seventies early eighties chances are you probably had a choice of three calls on your wall Porsche turbo Frari boxer all Lamborghini can trash for some reason I chose Porsche I even wrote a letter to portion when I was ten years old and essentially said to me I one of these I'm for Porsche and they wrote back to me
and said well cool is running a little bit older which I thought was pretty funny and they sent me a sales brochure and a thirty five years later there and write me a letter back but I'll get to that story little bit late around so I'm this young kid growing up in Sheffield Sheffield the grim northern steel town as shown by this picture right here you
know on the walls unnecessarily many Porsches on the road so I filed that dream away I had the poster on the wall house watching motor sports as a kid also in nineteen seventy seven England had %HESITATION James son he was a Formula One world champion I will Sudbury sheen he was a two wheel moto GP champion but that so even though I didn't grow up with
any sort of fancy because my father was a salesman I grew up in a working class background I did have this dream early on somehow the stream involve Porsche I also back then was a pretty competitive middle distance cross country runner sort of a solo sports guy and I used to love getting out there and running like became quite competitive if I join this club called
the Hallan shower is in the that this guy called Sebastian coe said quite a few world records in right at the eighty and eighty four Olympic Games and he was sort of inspirational to me around not signed same time also fell in love with something called heavy metal music a growing up in Sheffield there a lot of rock bands it may've been sort of a slightly
depressed or grim northern city but there was a lot of music and a lot of fun so fell in love with Portia doing some middle distance cross country running fell in love with heavy metal music I decided what the end of the fifth year of I would leave school I left school in nineteen eighty two basically with to %HESITATION levels and no real future by that
time I also figured out I could go drink in a pub so suffer some reason that was great for going to clubs and having fun but wasn't so good for being a middle distance cross country runner and athlete so that sort of faded away but those little thing that stuck with me was the passion sort of the drive and I think to this day those memorable
moments earlier on a still with me I'm still running around I'm still chasing around I'm still running after my goal so I bummed around on the dole for a little bit doing odd jobs and stuff like that another I started to hear this coming quite a lot cut your hair and get a real job well I was on the dole working construction living a home no
caught taking the bus places and for your two that was okay by the time I turned seventeen that I decided okay I'm not going to cut my hair but maybe I should think about getting the job so I actually took a year longer a leisure and recreation study cool sports management of a college and I heard about this thing called camp America well what was camp
America I didn't know but apparently camp America sync kids to work on a summer camp in the United States of America the growing up as a kid of course I watched a lot of American TV most of the shows I love centered around action because Starsky and Hutch dukes of Hazzard chips so at this American dream involved Evel Knievel and a and a long story short
I took this leap of faith and I applied to camp America was a little bit of a strange feeling and I've had the strange feelings in the past and somehow when my gut tells me to do something generally it's a good thing hands go on you got feeling so by pure luck I suppose I was accepted into camp America gonna %HESITATION flight to New York took
a Trailways bus from New York that's the bus I took to Detroit retry it was great it was sort of Simba to Sheffield former industrial city also happened to be the sort of automotive hub of the United States but I wasn't in Detroit I was thirty minutes north on a summer camp working with in a city underprivileged kids that happen to be from Detroit that was
a big culture shock for me because you know I'm a cert heavy metal guy from Sheffield north of England I'm sort of in the middle of no where I had to adapt pretty quickly so I adapted pretty quickly on this summer camp when when that camp was over I got back on that troll ways bus I took that bus out west landed in Los Angeles nineteen
eighty six Union Station four AM in the morning you know I've watched all those TV shows but I found myself being awakened on a park bench at six in the morning by LAPD guy who told me you can't sleep here also a little bit disappointed soon all the shows in and around LA but where all the beautiful people world the rock stars and movie stars that
wasn't happening in downtown LA but quickly I found a way to Hollywood and %HESITATION over the next couple years you know I sort of did a few odd jobs but there was one pivotal moment that happened within three days of being in Los Angeles found myself at this YMCA hotel right off Hollywood Boulevard when shopping on Hollywood Boulevard nestled these great PVC the %HESITATION alligator print
pants are on sale for nine ninety nine so I bought myself a pair but they don't really fix good so went back to the youth hostel board a sewing kit and so am inside out another so I'm gonna go to the store or a street that everyone was talking about cold Melrose so had it going down there to Melrose and walked into the shop that was
called retail slut was a punk rock show up and was a guy working there that was in a band called faster Pussycat his name was taming pivotal part to Astoria tame says to me %HESITATION and realized I was from England struck up a conversation said what you get those pants from I said Hey you know are a gun from England I had to think quick come
my fiance I said why you want to bother him just sorta joking when he said sure yeah how much Charlie so this point I hadn't thought about selling these pants but I said first number that came to mind twenty five Bucks he said okay I'll take a piss around right up to Hollywood Boulevard four eight pairs of pants went back down sold them to him fifteen
dollars profit per pan I realized in that one out transaction I'd made more straight away in what it literally within bin I for three days and I've made a whole week working construction in England Southall maybe always a place for me seems pretty easy who speak English a lot of rock and roll it was guns and roses motley Crue it was a great time over the
next few years fast forward to nineteen eighty nine I'm selling secondhand clothing on the boardwalk in Venice going to yard sales buying old levis cowboy boots western shirts I'm in the clothing industry there Venice beach but there was a major tourist attraction lot of European people coming through a little by little this grew into a business which became known as serious clothing and we ended up
outfitting everyone from Alice Cooper to Madonna and everyone in between we started wholesaling a small chain called hot topic but when hot topic had five schools and would grow to over five hundred schools so we sort of went from making a little amount of clothing to making thousands of P. the clothing well in nineteen ninety four realize being in Venice wasn't so easy for a clothing
company we move down town and rented a aloft in a warehouse for the next six years series clover men started doing a lot of music videos and also a lot of %HESITATION outfits for magazines and stylus recall in all the time serious clothing had its own unique style we took fabrics that one might not necessarily garment fabrics for you some coffee fabrics and made him into
jackets and things like that non conventional materials thinking outside the box and basically doing what we like to wear well by two thousand we realize we pay to people's mortgages and we needed Hey let's by our own building so we ended up a finding this building all that was me back then we got a little picture so that was me pre bid that sorta circa nineteen
ninety four serious was one of the top ten clothing companies to watch so I know I two thousand my wife Karen found this building in the Austin street you said you crazy no one wants to be the former desolate industrial era well long story short we took another leap of faith it felt good and I got feeling why we find to be a pain to people's
mortgages one we could own our own building so we pull that building about a year later right after nine eleven in two thousand one there's an article in the LA times about love gentrification we got a phone call would we be interested in renting the building for a music video buying before you know it we're in the film location business well Hey we've been following since
night us since two thousand one over a hundred days here during things from low budget still shoes to big budget movies and over a a dozen reality shows like America's next top model so we met a lot of interesting people but we didn't plan to build a phone location we were building out dream live work house where we lift up stairs and operated a clothing company
out of downstairs so with accidentally fallen into another somewhat lucrative business this is LA it's a movie town we've met quite a lot of interesting people they always say how'd you get here we'll tell we followed I got feeling so I'm a little story to ten year old when I fell in love with Portia so fall in love with Portia is a ten year old I
don't buy my first push until nineteen ninety two serious clothing to become quite successful in from ninety two thousand always racing around in quite a lot of speeding tickets two thousand and one I took my aggressive street driving to the track and join the Porsche owners club I went through that program learn learn how to do Cup racing instructing him for the next five years was
doing fifty trite days a year turn around to probably two thousand and eight two thousand and nine but spends a lot of money racing and decided okay my next passion I love these because when I try and restore a few of them well I don't have no mechanical background but I had passion often talk about passion goes a long long way you know if you've got
the will and the desire and put the motivation in a focused things tend to happen also a little bit of luck and a leap of faith really helps out as well blast a lot of questions and I started to restoring the couplet because so I got a little bit of interest in European car magazines and I started this blog online well is a thread on this
book Porsche form called pelican parts I call my blog Porsche collection out of control hoping new sort of like a catch all of what I was doing so this was sort of going to become a pivotal point but it was like something I really really enjoyed to do I don't start restoring these because well about two years ago a pivotal moment and now life happened again
since about these every ten years these pivotal moments that seem to happen by accident or they just naturally evolving we never had this five ten year plan business model always go back to follow you gotta do what you love to do so I'm a bit in the film industry we got quite a lot of people interested in making little TV shows and stuff like that but
we weren't quite ready for the exposure or the kumbha compatibility wasn't quite right or he just didn't click so I got a call from this Canadian cold to me Moscovici well he'd seen a couple of articles and it was a film director also a Porsche guy and he was looking for something edgy for Israel he was sorta sick of doing bud light commercials and figured Hey
maybe there's more minuses story than meets the eye so I got a couple conversations and %HESITATION to mere ended up flying down a well a a little over two years ago on his frequent flyer miles complete leap of faith his original idea was to make a short YouTube documentary well our goal was what's worse it could happen here we're gonna drive around race around my favorite
pushes for four days and maybe get some good footage out of it well what turned out to be a thirty two minute %HESITATION document she was shot over four days so we shot I think in favor of twenty twelve and we released a trailer in June of twenty twelve the first they wouldn't know what would happen with the trail but somehow it got picked up by
top gear in within the first day go up over fifty thousand views and all of a sudden I just found this thing called Facebook I figure maybe I should get on the I don't really know much about it so I got on Facebook and this time I don't even have an iPhone so I'm not really internet savvy but all of a sudden I keep in all