Garage Style Magazine (GSM)

• Discuss the founding of GSM – Let’s also explore Don Weberg “the petrol-head” – Car Family, Automotive Journalism, time at Motortrend
• What led to publishing your own magazine? Why Garage Style Magazine? What kinds of articles/topics would a new reader to GSM find between the pages?
• Tell me about the GSM (Monterey) Garage Tours? What are some of the most famous or fabulous garages that have been reviewed in GSM?
• GSM has featured a lot of live car auctions. What’s your thought on the sudden wave of online auctions?
• How has the publication changed over its 15+ year run? 
• What are some upcoming changes to GSM? What do the next 5-10 years look like? Is the magazine going full digital?
  
  
• How does someone subscribe to GSM? Or Pickup a Copy? (Free or a subscription fee?)
• What does the garage of the future look like? What are your thoughts on the EV-olution?

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motor sports.

A publication devoted entirely to garages and collections covering collectibles such as automobile, ilia, petro, neon, and more, bringing you innovative ideas that make a garage work, such as tools, cabinets, storage solutions, car covers, and lifts, as they work in a few lifestyle bits as well, like electronics and other entertainment must haves plus some luxury products like watches, briefcases, handbags, and personal items because after all, what doesn’t belong in your garage.

For over 15 years, the team of Garage Style Magazine has been devoted to bringing car enthusiasts, what’s been missing from their garages and embracing the garage lifestyle. And joining us tonight on Break Fix is Don Weiberg, founder, editor, and publisher of Garage Style Magazine to explain why you need to add some style to your garage.

Welcome to Break Fix, Don. Thanks. Thanks very much, Eric. Thanks for having me today. Like every [00:01:00] good story there is an origin. So let’s discuss the founding of Garage Style Magazine. The who? The what, the where, how did it all get started? I was a, uh, freelance writer for various magazines. I think I was doing 30 or 40 different publications.

You know how that works. They would send you out to different collectors and say, we want a, an article on this guy, such and such car. We want an article on that guy, such and such car. So I’d be going all over Southern California getting different cars and every single one of these guys had an interesting garage.

And it was one of those things where you kind of start bubbling in your head. You think there’s something here, there’s something to this. So you’re just not quite sure what it is. And one of the guys that I interviewed, very smart guy back in the valley where I come from back in Los Angeles, we’re doing his 4 27 Corvette.

He starts asking me all these questions about putting together a magazine and publishing and distributing and editing and on and on it goes. And I realize I’m answering his questions without lying to him, which makes me think, wow, I actually really do know some of this stuff. [00:02:00] And he says, you know what I think they should do?

And I said, what’s that? He said, I, I think they ought to do a, a publication about garage. And I thought, There it is. That’s exactly what I was thinking. I just wasn’t able to say it like he was. Because another thing I noticed about a lot of guys in particular, for the most part, they’re kind of shy about things, and their garage is their sanctuary.

They made it, it’s for them. So you have one of two types of guys that run around here. One of ’em is, oh, no, no, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s just my garage. Don’t worry about it. Yeah. And the guy opens it up and it’s a 40,000 square foot warehouse with all the neon you could dream of. And you’re like, dude, th this is more than a garage.

Well, you know, it’s just my little place. Okay. , then he got the other guy. More like the Jay Leno. Very outgoing, very happy to share, wants you to see it, wants you to come in here and, and look at it. Do you remember being a little boy and your friend comes over for the first time? What’s the first thing outta your mouth?

You wanna see my room? Do you wanna see my room? Because that’s your little slice of the world, you know, that’s what you made. That’s what your mom and dad gave you, and [00:03:00] that’s what you got right there. So you wanna show it off Garage guys go both ways. They’re either very private about it or they’re that little boy.

He wanna see my garage, wanna see my garage and yeah, I wanna see your garage. That, that’s why we started the magazine. Let’s go see the garage. And then there’s a third guy and, and they’re usually the the worst ones because they’re like you or me, they’re normal guy. If they don’t have 40,000 square foot warehouses, they have a two car garage or a three car garage and that’s it.

And they’ve decked it out as well as they can. Those are actually the guys that are hardest to get because, and I’ve heard this a thousand times. I can’t compete with the Jay Lenos of the world, and I’ve gotta remind them this is not a competition. This is a brotherhood. A guy like Jay Leno, or Jay Leno himself, anybody on that level should be able to walk into your two car or three car garage that you’ve done for yourself.

and appreciate it, and I think they do. We do a garage tour up in Monterey during Car Week every year. We haven’t done it for the last couple of years cause of the Covid situation, but it is really, really [00:04:00] amazing to watch these subscribers come together and go with us from garage to garage to garage along the Monterey Peninsula during Car Week.

It is fabulous because literally some of those subscribers are some of the wealthiest guys you’ll meet on the planet and some of them are not. They’re just regular guys with regular jobs. They happen to love their X, y, Z car and they bring it and we tour all over, but they have a ball. I mean, it is absolutely phenomenal to watch the guy who just graduated college who has an S 2000 Honda really striking up a great conversation with the LA Ferrari.

And the La Ferrari guy. Yeah, he just closed a deal buying some country somewhere. I don’t know, . But it, it, it’s really fun to watch that camaraderie come together. I long said, it’s a one place where a Lamborghini guy and a Ferrari guy, a Camaro guy and a Mustang guy can all get along and put down their competition swords and they just enjoy the garage.

You see that magic you really do You see the Ferrari guy talking to the [00:05:00] Lamborghini guy Civil. They’re having a nice conversation. In fact, they might even ask questions of, Hey, I’ve always been curious, why does the Lamborghini do blah, blah, blah? You see it with the Camaro Mustang guys, why does the Mustang do blah, blah, blah?

And you have these nice con conversations going on. You’ll talk to musicians and they’ll tell you about the brotherhood through music and, and that’s there too. Very, very much so. I see it through cars. You know, I’m a car guy. I’ve been a car guy since day one. And I mean, literally my mother, my father, both of them were car people.

They were drag racers. They built hot rods. They raced up at the salt flats, they raced in the El Mirage, on and on. And I came along and it was sort of like, God, help us. Because my second word in life was supposedly Camaro. And yet, and yet disappointing to my father. I can’t turn a wrench to save my. You want me to change a tire?

I’m gonna call aaa. I, I don’t know how to do it. That’s kind of the reader’s digest of how it all came to be, and we put together our first issue. It came out in May of 2008, but yeah, it started out, I just knew a lot of [00:06:00] guys with a lot of garages and they knew a lot of other guys with garages and. I came along with this crazy thought of, let’s put it in a magazine and show everybody else.

You started talking about your history as a petrolhead, so it starts at a very early age. But let’s also explore how did you get into automotive journalism and if you wanna name drop some of the magazines you work for. I think our audience is probably dying to know how do we go from , don and diapers to dawn, the journalist, you know, I can’t do math.

That was learned early on, literally four plus four or 16. I, I just, I have no idea how to do math, but I was editing my teachers in the third grade. We all knew then, okay, this, this guy loves to write. He loves the engineering of language, if you will. I really do love doing that. So we kind of knew early on I was gonna do something with writing something with language.

I wanted to be a. That was what I was really stepping out to become was a lawyer and I was in community college studying some pre-law stuff on the other side of the campus. I was studying [00:07:00] writing. I realized, not real quickly, but I realized over time the law professors are all very miserable. They’re very serious.

They just don’t seem to be having a good day any day. And then you go over to the other side of campus and there’s all these professors with creative writing, with journalism, with English, with whatever, and they do seem to be having a good time and they are having a good day, especially in some of the English lit classes.

When you start to dissect, let’s just say Shakespeare, cuz everybody knows Shakespeare. When you start to dissect his work and try to find the interpretation of, what did he mean when he said such and such? It was always interesting to me that you could literally round table your desks with the. Toss ideas back and forth as to what you perceived that meaning to be.

Usually we all had a consensus, but every now and then you’d have something that was way off the wall and you think, whoa, I never saw that, that, that’s really interesting. Now take that to back to the other side of campus to law. Well, what is law? How did you interpret what you read? [00:08:00] Oh, wait a minute. We need to re-engineer that language so that you interpret it the way I want you to interpret it.

You see what I’m saying? But the lawyers don’t wanna hear about. They really don’t, the law professors, they want to hear that I wrote this, and by golly, that’s what I meant. And you are dumb for not interpreting it the way I wrote it. So yeah, who needs that? You know, really? Who needs that? I was doing more and more and more with the journalism side and less and less and less with the law side.

And the next thing you know, I was a full communications major. I took an internship class TV show back in the day called Hard Copy, and that was a lot of fun. That got me into the Hollywood side of things. And then I took another internship that I had to go get myself by literally writing a letter, sending samples to the editor, and that was to MotorTrend.

C Van Toon was, uh, the editor’s name back then called him. Van called him. We had an interview on a Friday, which if you’ve ever been around a magazine on a Friday, it’s a ghost town. There’s nobody there. So it was literally just him, me and the cleaning lady on the eighth floor went in, had a great interview with [00:09:00] him, and he put me on his freelance payroll.

I was just here for a free internship and now he’s putting me on the payroll. So that was really kind of the kickoff. And then he and a couple of the other guys at MotorTrend, Matt Stone was one of ’em. Mark William got, Mead was one of ’em. There were a whole bunch of guys who were really kind of looking out for me.

They were introducing me all over that building. So I was working for Hot Rod, I was working for a car craft. I was working for, you know, the whole Peterson family, so to say. Yeah. The next thing you know, I mean, before I was even out of that semester, I was already working for something like 15 titles, doing different freelance work, and then it just kept going from there.

Being a car guy, I knew where a lot of cars were to Los Angeles, so there all right. A lot of cars out there to write about. So I would just start pitching them to editors and the next thing you know, yeah, we want that car. No, we don’t want that car, but can you find us this kind of car here? No problem.

That was kind of how it happened. Being in the magazine business. Mm-hmm. , do you find yourself picking up other magazine, enjoying them? If so, [00:10:00] what are your favorite magazines? Yes, I still really enjoy magazines. I love them. Admittedly, I do get a little bit jealous when I see them having better luck with advertisers than I do.

But there’s a flip side, which is you’re actually glad to see it because that means there’s still business for print. A very good friend of mine who actually helps produce the magazine from time to time, his name is Rick Rader. Rick once had a great one, which is when Mac World stops going into print, I’ll hang up my type.

And I thought, yeah, that makes sense because Mac World is all about computers. Why is it in print? The irony of a magazine all about digital and computers. There’s huge irony in there. It’s actually a little mind blowing when you look at it. And yeah, he had a point when they quit. We’ll, quit. Because they know something that we don’t know and we better just follow that leader because we do know technology is gonna take over.

But you know, some of my favorite titles back in the day, MotorTrend was always a great one. Car and Driver I fell in love with. I’ve been reading Car and Driver since day one. [00:11:00] Roden Track is a really good one. Rob Report has always captured my heart. In fact, Rob Report and Architectural Digest, believe it or not, are just off the cuff.

I’d say those are probably my two very favorite magazines. And if you look at Garage Style, you’ll notice a lot of design similarities between the two of them, especially older Architectural Digest. Today’s Architectural Digest is really in your face and very design heavy and I, I just don’t like it.

It’s just not me. Those are some of the ones that were inspirational. And then you go back in the day, you’ve got Sunset, which is a California magazine. There’s a whole bunch of ’em. And uh, you know, we just moved from California to Texas. In doing so, we found a whole lot of magazines in boxes that I had been hoarding.

because I liked them. Yeah. We had to send ’em the recycler. We, we couldn’t take them with us. But it was amazing going through there thinking, oh my gosh, I remember this exact issue and this is why I kept it because on page 47 they did a, a review on, you know, it was crazy to me what I remembered about each one of those magazines.

It was really kind of scary. [00:12:00] So I guess those would be the inspirers, if you can call it that. As part of your career as an automotive journalist, you got to go see different cars and go to different places and, and locations and whatnot. Normally we would ask people, you know, what’s the sexiest car of all time?

In this case, I think, which vehicle that you wrote about is the most memorable or left the biggest impression, or was the biggest wow factor for you having seen so many different vehicles over the years? I mean, the first car I ever wrote about professionally, if you will, still sticks in my mind. It was a car built by the Messian brothers hard name, but it’s Messian Brothers.

They’re outta Los Angeles. Huge collectors. They, they’ve got a great body shop. They had a 66 Mustang Fastback. I have always been a Mustang guy. Fastbacks especially. Theirs was Viper Red with white lamone stripes, very mildly built 3 0 2 under the hood. It, it was nowhere near what Dearborn had in mind.

That car still sticks to my head, is that is still pretty cool right next [00:13:00] to it. Probably the second car I wrote about it was a two 40 Z that had a ZZZ four crate engine under the hood. The traffic was completely done, the suspension was completely done. It really was just a vicious, vicious little car.

It was spectacular. It was raspberry color. Black interior had these beautiful HR wheels on it. That car still sticks to my head. I worked with a collector named Bruce Meyer back in the day. He had a spectacular 1956 Mercedes 300 FC that was owned by Clark Gable. That car really, really was something. It was tobacco Brown with a cognac, interior, cognac top stunning, stunning car.

That one sticks to my head quite a bit. I, I, I mean the, off the cuff, I, I’d say those are the ones that kind of got me. For somebody picking up Garage Style Magazine for the first time, what kinds of articles and topics would a new reader find between the pages? It really is an Architectural Digest spin because when you open that magazine, you’re gonna see a bunch of articles about different [00:14:00] garages, different collections, what other people have done to their garage, to their collection.

You’re gonna see some great columnists in there. We have guys, like I mentioned before, we have Rick Rader, we do have Matt Stone, who kind of a twist of things, you know, he was my boss back at MotorTrend and then he retired outta MotorTrend, went freelance, and I called him and said, Hey, you know, would you mind writing for us?

I’d love to have your name as part of the publication. And he was happy to do so. We have Phil Berg, who I’ve always considered the, uh, godfather of the Garage movement because he wrote, uh, ultimate Garages, ultimate Garage of two ultimate garages. Three, we’ve got him on board, and then a host of of other great people, Lance Lambert of the Vintage Vehicle Show.

Rodney Kimmer, just great columnists who have different stories to tell, a lot of variety. It’s not gonna be a lot of tricky reading. Uh, I can’t stand tricky journalists who use these big long word, you know, I guess that’s the lawyer in me, in front of a jury. You never use a $10 word when a $1 word will suffice.

And I, I think writing should be very much the same way. It’s not that people are stupid, [00:15:00] it’s just why make them keep running back and forth to the dictionary. But I think the meat and potatoes are always going to be the garages. Everyone I’ve ever talked to who is a subscriber, and believe me in the last year, I’ve talked to a lot of ’em because they wonder where is the magazine.

It always comes down to, you know, one of the warmest things I’ve ever heard is because of your magazine, it made it okay. A lot of people made fun of me because I had this crazy collection of cars, or this crazy collection of signs, or this beautiful garage that’s much better than my house. , but your magazine proved to me that it was okay that there are other guys out there who are doing the same thing and then some to their spaces and, and it’s okay to be all about, you know, making your space look like this.

And I think that’s the big inspirer for me to keep going is I hear from these people all the time and they’re always telling me their stories. We have that I know of, there’s probably 10 people that keep in touch with me and they’ve been building their garage over the last five years. I keep telling ’em, let’s photograph it, let’s put it in the magazine.

Let’s do this. And [00:16:00] they don’t want to. It’s not done yet. They don’t want to. It’s not done yet. And I’m like, it’s never gonna be done. You know, it’s like restoring a car, man. You get done with that restoration. Ah, there’s no such thing that’s done with the restoration because that car is gonna keep needing something or you’re gonna see something you want to do to it and you know it, it’s never gonna be done.

You just have to jump in the pool and do it. So what are they gonna see? They’re gonna see a lot of great garages. They’re gonna see a lot of inspiration. They’re gonna get a lot of inspiration from those columnists I mentioned. Our advertisers are fabulous because they have products that maybe don’t really fit into car and driver, or they don’t fit into classic motorsport or they don’t fit into any of these A-list magazines that we all love.

But if it’s in garage style, and it’s not that we’re not an A-list. We’re not because we’re not popular thanks to Carrie, our designer. We have the design. She has laid this thing out, incredibly beautiful, beautiful publication. The way she’s laid it out, the paper is fantastic. When we had [00:17:00] paper, now we’re going digital, so we’re gonna have to do an annual yearbook thing, but we’ve hit the nail on the head by just bringing you a lot of different garages.

You know, when we first started, it was funny. We all kind of wondered, are we gonna run outta garages? Seriously? Are we gonna run outta garage? No. I, I, I gotta tell you, no, it was crazy because, you know, we had our little sphere of people that we knew with garages. Well, the one guy, he knows five more guys.

And this guy knows five more guys. So there’s 10 guys, right? There’s like that old perk commercial, you know? It just keeps going and going and going. We ended up having way too many garages to photograph. We still have them. We still have a lot of garages that we haven’t published because we ran out a room and it, and it’s all inspiring.

People see things differently and I think they see what appeals to them. You know, we had one gentleman, he actually got the cover. This was years ago. He sold that property, but Fantastic Garage. What was funny was, He always knew he wanted to build a garage. He just wasn’t [00:18:00] sure where to start, how to do it, da da da da da.

Reading garage style. He was a subscriber for three years and in reading all those three years of, which is only six issues, but in reading those six issues, he figured out what he wanted in his garage. He figured out the look he wanted into the garage. And boy, you talk about meticulous, he brought stuff to my attention that I had never even thought of before.

The design of the garage, for example, looking at the outside, you have your garage doors. I think there were five of them, and then there’s a second floor with the eaves that come out on the windows. You know, it looks like a house. Well, there’s three of those. So you have three and five. Okay. I didn’t think a thing.

Until he pointed out to me, if you do four or six, it’s gonna be out of balance. And I said, well how’s it out of balance when you have two on one side or three on one side? He says, well, you out of balance, because there’s no center. If you have five, you have the center, you have this one in the middle, and you still have the two on the other side.

[00:19:00] So you got two and then one. And if you look at nature, look at a tree branch. It usually has three or five or seven little branches coming off of it, not eight or six or four. I never thought about that. So then he starts pointing out in previous magazine, yeah, I saw this guy here and he did it in, you know, threes.

And then this guy here, he did it in fours and I didn’t like and I thought, oh my gosh. So people see what they want to see. I just hope it really inspires ’em. Cuz that was kind of the whole. So let’s take this in the other direction. You mentioned as we began the conversation about the Monterey Garage tours, and you kind of think about that and maybe go is this Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous , you know, as presented in their garages.

Right. So, let’s talk about those tours. What are some of the most famous or maybe fabulous garages that you’ve reviewed as a result of that? I mean, the, the Garage Tour started out as you know, that was just one of those things where, again, I have an idea, let’s try this. And it worked. You know, [00:20:00] I don’t know if you like the movie Wayne’s World or um, where the Line actually came from, but if you build it, they will come.

We started putting together this garage tour. We had all the connections up in Monterey. We had the restaurant, we had the people, we had the garages, and we thought, you know, Come, you know, I’ll put it together if you guys will come. Holy cow. Our first tour, I think we had, it was a little over a hundred people that showed up for our first tour.

Second tour was pretty much the same. The third tour dropped off to about 70 people and, and you talk about herding cats, I mean, you’re literally telling people, okay, we’re gonna meet at this restaurant. And we’re gonna have a little breakfast. You’re gonna get a map, and you’re gonna use your own car to go run around the Monterey Peninsula.

And most of these guys have never been to Monterey, or they’ve never seen Monterey outside of downtown. They’ve never gone exploring. So most of us don’t know where we are, which turned out to be really fun. You know, here I am, Fred, being nervous about, oh my God, they’re gonna get lost. What are we gonna do?

No, no, no, no, no. It was a good thing that some of them did get lost because they came out with [00:21:00] their own stories. We found the coolest road over there, and there’s an old barn and there’s a dog and that, you know, they, they were just having a vault. There’s a lot of garages that I’ve seen that are magnificent.

A lot of ’em up in Monterey, a ton of them down in Los Angeles. There’s a lot right here in Texas. One that comes to mind as mind blowing. I mean, absolutely over the top. Yeah. Jay Leno. His garage is unbelievable. There’s one here in Texas. You can look it up online, you can Google it. It’s called the Hemi Hideout.

It’s insanity. It is absolute insanity. The man built this garage. I forget how big it is, but it, it’s got a cap, you know, that rises all the way up to the top. It has a pure barbecue, not just the barbecue pit, but I mean, literally you’ve gotta hire barbecue pit masters to come run this thing. That’s how big it is.

I, I don’t know how many Hemi Cudas they built, but this guy’s gotta have a third of them. . I mean, it’s just incre. Yeah. And then it goes on from there. He’s got Hemi Coronets and Hemi Chargers and [00:22:00] Hemi, I mean, anything from the Mopar family back in that late sixties, early seventies kind of genre. He’s all over it.

And the neon, oh my God. They literally had to start building posts that don’t hold any weight. They’re not structural posts. They were strictly because we needed something to bolt the neon to. I mean that that’s how much neon these guys are buying it. It, it’s just absolutely incredible what this man has built.

That’s probably the one that stands out the most is the Hemi Hideout. Normally we would ask a pit stop question, like, if you had a three car garage, what three cars would you put in it? If money was no object, things like that. Let’s flip it around a little bit and say, you know, not of the big celebrity ones, but maybe of more the regular guy kind of garages.

What’s your favorite three car garage that you’ve come? Ooh, that’s a loaded question. There’s a lot of great three car garages out there. You know, people don’t realize what they can do to a three car garage. They see the Jay Leno garages, they see the Bruce Meyer [00:23:00] garages, they see the Hemi hide out of the world, and they get a three car and they think, well, not much I can do here, but it’s not true.

We let’s you take Jay Leno for example, if you’ve ever seen his garage. He has these posters. What are they, eight, 12 feet tall? They’re huge. Okay, that’s not gonna work in my garage. But if you look at his posters, they are original art, usually advertising art. That he has blown up and sometimes he’s had the custom painted, so the car, the color matches what his car is.

So that’s pretty cool. We can’t do that. Regular guys can’t do that. We don’t have that kind of garage. I’ve got a few out 1 24 that’s been, I mean, that’s like a marriage. 28 years that’s been with me. I have so many original advertisements from magazines, you know, they’re eight and a half by 11, but I can frame that and hang it on the wall.

I can plaster my wall with 60 or 70 of those little ads, or I can blow ’em up. Make ’em a little bit bigger and then I can have three or four, [00:24:00] kind of like Jay Leno does. They’re bigger, they’re more impressive. Of all the garages you came across, which held the best secret, it was totally unassuming from the outside.

You opened it up and you were like, holy smokes. . I hate to say this to all the people who’ve been in the magazine. My apologies. This garage has never been in the magazine. It is owned by a 93 year old man. He is fantastic. He’s a former designer for Ford. He worked on the Thunderbird project. He worked on the Lincoln Mark two project.

He worked on the Mustang briefly. It’s incredible the stories this guy will tell, and when you look at him, you really don’t think much about him. He just looks like a little old man with an old mobile to Coronado. His garage is in South Pasadena, and it is by far my favorite garage. It is sixties James Bond style.

He’s very sixties oriented, so he is very into that modern architecture. The colder James Bond style. What he’s got is an office building that’s like a shoebox. It’s just a long rectangle, but it’s [00:25:00] suspended and below it, that’s where you park. So back when it was an office building back in the sixties, you know it’s California Real estate’s really expensive.

So you gotta be creative as to how you’re gonna do this building. So what they do is just lift the building up. Make everybody park underneath it and you’re fine. Well, he, I don’t know how else to say it except for, here’s the length of the building. He cutted at about the three quarter mark. So that three quarters is his home.

Below it is his garage. This one quarter he rents out his office space, and below that is their parking space suspended. So you have flow air going through, well, you can’t have that when you got collector cars. So he put glass walls up and then he planted a whole lot of Ivy and Chery and he put some nice landscape lighting in there.

So when you’re in the garage and that landscape lighting is lit, you don’t see the glass. All you see are the plants, the foliage and the lights. And then of course the cars. And of course the lighting he’s got on the ceiling, which is the floor to his house, you know, cuz you’re under it now. [00:26:00] It, it’s all very sixties style.

It’s all very spot, it’s all very, you know, you, it’s all concrete. Everything in there is concrete. There’s nothing, you know, there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about that garage. It’s very cold. It’s very calculated. It is spectacular. And every time I talk to him, you know, when are we gonna do your garage? When are we gonna do your garage?

Well, you know, I need to move this car or I gotta move that car, right? And I’m like, what do you need? You need guys to help. I can get guys, trust me, good guys who won’t talk, they’ll do their job and you know, that’s it. Well, we can do it that way. It’s incredible working with this guy because you talk about smarts, it, it’s incredible where he’s been.

But, but yeah, he would, he would probably be the one I I like the most now, his house, oddly enough, we featured his house. Not his garage, but the house. Yeah, it’s incredible. The house. He must have two, 3000 die cast toy cars in his house. All in displays. They’re absolutely meticulous. You know, above his mantle.

Above his fireplace. Where most people have a [00:27:00] nice, beautiful work of art or something. No, no. He has a big Mercedes grill. That’s what he’s got yet. He’s got an Eames chair, he’s got the, the boomerang table. He, I mean, it is spectacular, if you like modern furniture. My wife, she’s not a big fan of modern furniture, so she sees this place and she thinks, eh, throw it to the junkyard.

And I’m like, , outside of all the magazine and the tours and all this. Garage Out Magazine has also featured live car auctions, so I wanted to talk about that a little bit and also get your thought on all the sudden wave of online auctions and the craziness that’s been going on over at Bri, A trailer.

Let’s start with the classics. We’ll start with what Mecu, Eric Jackson start with. You know the guy who’ve been there, done that for years and years and years, and I don’t think they’re going anywhere. When Covid started, that was big trouble for auctions. Huge trouble because all of a sudden we can’t have an auction.

And I’ll tell you, there was one company out there, it was rm I think that I remember they had an auction coming up and it was something [00:28:00] like the government shut everything down and four days later, RM had this auction starting. So you talk about, oh my dad, how do you hit the brakes on this and turn everything around?

RM was brilliant. They simply turned to digital. They turned the entire auction digital in four days. Incredible. But I think in doing that, they showed everybody else in the auction community, we don’t have to stop, we just have to change how we’re doing business. And I think the ones who moved faster, they were able to follow that flow and they got smarter from it.

You know, you look at Mecu for example, they’ve always had the online and the phone bidding. As well as the in-person bidding. This just made them focus more heavily on their digital side. You know, they got a beautiful magazine too. They took it all digital. They got rid of all their print to save money because now they’re not making the kind of money they used to.

Well, then over the hill, they realize we’re actually making more money. Because we don’t have the overhead anymore. We’re not traveling anymore, we’re not going here, we’re not going there. We’re not renting these spaces, [00:29:00] renting these tents, hiring all these people, flying the people. No, no, no. It’s all online.

And then they started realizing we’re making money by saving money. And I think that made them much, much smarter in the long run. Bring a trailer was just incredible. You know, here you got a couple of guys who were messing around online. My understanding is they were passing, you know, look at this car for sale and look at this car for sale.

They’re just passing cars back and forth. They made a platform where they could do that with each other, and the next thing you know, they’re spinning it off into a world famous, bring a trailer. You know, it’s incredible what those guys built and it inspired other companies to pop up. As you know, even the big gorilla in the printing room, hemming.

You know when Hemmings started their auction, it was, it was an obvious sign of, okay, there’s plenty of work for everybody. There’s plenty of cars and you’re gonna go to the platform you like. You know, it seems like the younger guys seem to appreciate bring a trailer. I think that’s just a younger, hipper group that runs that crowd.

Now you got the older guys too, who are looking [00:30:00] at Hemmings saying, well, thank God Hemmings came along, cuz there’s somebody I can talk. You know, and, and they can, they can go enjoy that. I don’t think they’re going anywhere either. There’s another platform out there called Shift Gate. Have you heard of that one?

They’re coming out of the woodwork and I don’t think they’re gonna go anywhere. I think this is the new wave, whether or not the wave will kind of plateau. Plateau, yeah. I don’t know. I, I think it will just like any business, it’s just a question of who are the survivors gonna be? Who’s gonna merge with who?

I know the big guys have it. I know Bear Jackson does it. I know Mecu does it. Uh, you know, rm, a lot of these guys do the automobile Ilia auctions and yeah, we’re all about cars, and cars are what bring us together, but the automobile, that’s the jewelry on the beautiful person you’re looking at. That’s the little eccentricities that we need to have in our garage.

I wish we could come up with a dedicated platform for automobile auctions, and they do have them. I mean, there’s automobile.com, which is three or four auctions a year as pure automobile. [00:31:00] Nobody knows about it. I mean, literally, I, I’ve been in rooms with guys who do nothing but collect automobile. They have no idea who automobile.com is.

No clue. Nothing, none. You’ve got guys like rockabilly auction. I think they do a once a year situation and it, it’s fabulous. The stuff that they bring to market, there’s a lot of ’em out there that are a little bit under the radar, and I wish they weren’t. They are really the automobile people. And if you look at it, automobile just keeps going up.

Don’t tell my wife. But I have signs that I bought when I was in high school, just getting on my car, going down to the Pomona, swap me. I see a sign that catches my eye, and I tell you how much of that sign. The guy says, oh, 40 bucks. I said, holy cow. 40 bucks for high school. So that, that’s, that’s too much money, you know?

So you go and you, you run the whole gamut and you come back and that sign is still there six hours later. So you go to the old man, you say, there’s what I got. I got $27 and 50 cents. It’s all yours. I just want that sign. What do you say? Ah, yeah, sure kid. Get it outta here. I don’t wanna haul it home [00:32:00] Anyway.

Perfect. Okay, great. So I got my $27 sign today. That sign is now worth about 10 grand. Where did that come from? The damn thing is just hanging on my wall doing nothing but collecting dust and making me happy cuz I get to look at it and I remember the little story of the old man who sold it to me, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

So I attribute some of that to the popularity of shows like American Pickers. And a lot of people may not realize that, you know, they go, oh, it’s History Channel. Uh, I don’t wanna watch that’s for old people. But what they may not realize is both the Wolf Brothers, they are very much Petrolheads. That show actually caters to our community and they go after Petroleo and automobile, Ilia and even cars sometimes.

And I find that show fascinating. But I also, to your point, I look at the prices that they throw out there and, and you know, it’s always kind of funny when they show you the markup too and you’re like, really? Okay? But I get it. You know, some of those signs that he finds. And he, and he’s got it all in his head, cataloged.

I dunno how he keeps track of all this stuff, but he is like, this is a $10,000 sign. [00:33:00] Granted it needs $4,000 worth of restoration or, or whatever have you. Mm-hmm. by proxy, they have exposed a larger audience of folks to that world. And maybe that’s why they go, Hey, well if he has that sign, I got a Sinclair sign too.

So maybe it is, it is worth 10 grand. Then suddenly all the prices go up. Yeah. I, I think the shows have a lot to do with it. And you know, it ricochets too. It, it’s not just in the sign and petroleum. It’s not just in the gas and oil. Look at the cars. Quick little story. I promise I’m in my favorite place in the world.

The gas station gashing up my car and I hear, you know, an older V8 pulling in. I, I gotta look, you know. Well, what is that? Well, it’s one of my favorite cars and you’re gonna laugh cause I don’t think too many people like these cars. But it was, it was a 70 Chevy Nova, a little coop. It just perfect jet black, black interior white wall tires 3 54 barrel automatic console.

Sh I mean, just mind boggling. This car. It was so well done. I thought it had been restored and they put the console in and they put, you know, they made it [00:34:00] look like this. The guy driving the car was about my age. The car was his father’s car, still his father’s car. His father bought it brand new right there in Fullerton where we lived.

The father couldn’t drive anymore. So the son comes over and he exercises the cars and you know, takes them out. Original paint, original upholstery, original console. Everything in that car was stock originally. I said, holy cow. I said, you gotta, does he want to sell? I mean, it doesn’t seem like he wants to sell.

He said, well, I, I don’t think so, but gimme your phone number and I’ll, you know, I’ll take it to him. Okay, great. So I give him my card, all my info on it. About a week goes by and I get a call. It’s the son. And he said, you know, we think we do want to sell. And I’m thinking, oh my God, he actually wants to sell that thing.

How much do you want for it? And I’m, I’m cheap, I admit it, but I’m thinking in the back of my head, you. Five to 8,000 bucks. That’s what I’m thinking, you know? Wow. He says, we want 75,007 70 what? 75,000? He says, well, we just got through watching the, uh, Barrett Jackson auction, and we saw a black Nova go [00:35:00] through and, and it went for 200,000.

So we’re thinking, and I said, yeah, let me guess that Black Nova had a stripe down the side, and on the back it said, yank. Yes, yes. You know that car? I said, yes, I know that car. Believe me, you don’t have a yako and I’m not trying to downplay your car. I want that car. Trust me, it’s no yako. Yako is something very, very different in the Chevy world, in any world, you know?

Well, that’s what we want. We want 75,000. So good luck with that. You know, as far as I know, they still have the car. So it, Rick Ricochets, you know, they watch these auctions, they watch these TV shows, like American Pickers. They watch whatever. And you know, they come up with these crazy numbers and, and I don’t know where they’re getting ’em from.

I really don’t. But it’s funny. I look at my sign and I think, would I sell it? Well, I don’t know. If somebody came up with the money, yeah, I’d probably let it go. I think I’d be foolish not to. But what am I gonna get? Let’s say I do get 10 grand for that sign. The investment potential is fantastic. I had to wait 30 years for it to hit that number.

So I don’t know how investors would see that. For me [00:36:00] to just get 10,000 bucks for something that’s just hanging on the wall. That’s pretty good. , but what do I do now? Where am I gonna find another sign? What am I gonna do? Am I, you know, you see what I’m saying there? There’s, there’s a moment where it just all stops.

I think the underlying point here is that because our cultural dynamic has changed, thanks to the proliferation of social media and internet access and all this kind of stuff, the audiences have become larger and to your point, it becomes tit for tat. I mean, that’s why I refer to the craziness that over at Bring a Trailer where you see cars going for astronomical amounts.

It’s like, where did you come up with this number? It’s insane. Yeah. Also, in the 15 years that Garage Town Magazine has been around, you’ve also seen a big change, and so how have you seen the market shift and how do you see it continue to change garages and the magazine itself as we kind of look forward?

It definitely has changed. You know, like I say, back in the day when we first started, and that was 2000. [00:37:00] Eight when our first magazine came out. So not that long ago, but long enough to have seen the market go a little crazy. I, I don’t think the prices are gonna come down on automobile. I, I really don’t. I, I don’t see how it’s gonna happen.

I think it’s gonna keep evolving. You know, there was a time when we all ran out there and we bought little hood ornaments or radiator mascots and you know, that was where we collected. Well, the next thing you know, those are suddenly becoming very, very expensive. So you think, okay, well what do I collect now?

Oh, I’m gonna go collect steering wheels. Okay, so you go start buying all these steering wheels. The next thing you know, every other guy on the planet also started collecting steering wheel. We we’re very predictable people. We all kind of follow those same patterns. Yeah. Somehow the signs started going crazy.

They just started going nuts. There is a question I wanna ask you, Don, the petrol head, which goes right in line with things evolving, which is. What does the Garage of the future look like and what are your thoughts on the evolution? Ah, the [00:38:00] evolution. I like that. Yeah. All cards on the table here. I have evolved.

I used to hate the, the Prius. I used to hate all these hybrids and whatever. Now I love ’em. I really do. I’ve driven enough of ’em to realize, wow. I mean, yeah. Okay. You’re getting 50, 60 miles of the gallon. Now, granted, you can argue back. Yeah, but my 85 Civic did that too. It did and, and it did it just fine.

Would you rather be in a modern Honda Civic hybrid when you get hit by A G M C Denali or your 85 Civic? I’d rather be in the modern one cuz it knows how to handle a hit much better than that 85 Civic ever did. The only reason the 85 Civic does so well is it weighs nothing. That was the magic. And of course the aerodynamic.

And I’m just, I’m not trying to pick on Honda or anything. I’m just saying I, I like him, you know, I’m a Mustang guy. I told you that early on. I do like the Maee get used to it cuz that’s where it’s going. I like the fact that you didn’t call it by its full name. And I, I hope that’s for the same reasons the rest of us don’t call it that way.[00:39:00]

The Mustang Mak. Yeah. . Yeah. A lot of people. Yeah. You know, it’s funny, I get that all the time. It’s not a Mustang, it’s not a Mustang. I, I think it is. I I really do. It doesn’t look like a Mustang, but it’s what’s gonna save the brand. If you look at the, not that I want to take this down that road, but if you look at what sales have been doing with Mustangs, slowly, very slowly, they have been going down.

They still have a great young demographic buying those cars, and that’s what you need. But for the most part, you’re still looking at a $45,000 car. Not many young guys can afford a 45, or young people can afford a 45,000 car. And when they look at 45,000, they think, would I want a Mustang or do I just wanna slip over to the BMW dealer and see what they’ve got?

You know, there’s a lot of really nice cars in that market. I, I think with Ford doing what they’re doing is very smart. They’ve given the car five doors, they’ve made it very versatile. It is actually a pretty quick car. It does handle very nicely. It is a smart little car. I, I think it’s where we need to go.

I really do. Uh, I [00:40:00] like Tesla. I didn’t like it when they first came out. I, I thought, uh, you gotta be kidding. As a vacuum cleaner with a leather seat, you know, today, if a different story I’ve written in enough of ’em, I’ve driven a couple of ’em. I think, ho ho, wait, wait, what have I been missing here? You know, you can always say, okay, zero to 60, and what does the plaid do?

I think it’s like 2.2 seconds or something. It’s psychotic. How quick that stupid car is, when’s it gonna be to a point to where. You’re at your destination before you left. I mean, there’s a physics thing going on here. Scotty’s gotta figure that out still, you know, he’s working on Yeah, it’s, it’s not gonna work.

But, you know, I like ’em. I, I really do. I, I and I, and I think, I’m not sure, but I think these are the kind of cars that are going to keep your dobos and your classic Mustangs and your classic whatever’s kind of on the road. But I do think it’s gonna make gas 12 $15 a gallon. Because there’s just not as many people needing that fuel as there used to be.

So the prices are gonna go up, you know, we gotta be prepared for that as car people. Uh, but you [00:41:00] know, my thought is if you’re a car guy, you’re a car guy, and this car just happens to be battery operated or it uses both the engine and the battery, you know, but when you got Ferrari and Corvette, Lamborghini looking at straight down the eye saying, we’re gonna do a hybrid, you know, mind blowing.

And Mustang is right up there in the front doing it already. It, it’s where we’re going. And I, I think it’s a way to engage with younger people, not that they’re any cheaper. You know, these, these hybrids, these Mustang Tesla, forget about, those are very expensive cars. The automobile, when it first started was a very expensive car.

It took years to figure out how to make it cheaper. And a, you know, a couple of guys like Henry Ford who figured out, you know, if I used the crates that the engines came in, I can use the floorboard. You know, he was ingenious. That way. He would use different pieces to make the car cheaper, cheaper, cheaper.

Next thing you know, we’re all on the road. We’re all enjoying it. way back then, that technology was very, very expensive. It was reserved for the wealthy few, and that’s what we’re watching right now. We’re watching the Teslas and we’re watching here goes [00:42:00] for, again, they’re making it less expensive. You got a $50,000 car that can do almost everything a regular Tesla will do, not a plaid.

It’s where we’re going and I think we need to not resist it. I think we need to embrace it. You know, look at me. I was resisting going digital with the magazine until I was literally run off the road by the price. I couldn’t afford it anymore. Now look at me now I’m embracing the digital cuz I have to, and I’m starting to really enjoy it.

I’m starting to love it. You see what I’m saying? So there is that evolution. There is something going on there. The garage of the future. A lot of people talk about that. You know, there are a lot of people wonder, are we gonna have chargers in our garage? Or what’s the future? Behold, we don’t know. You know, we really, really don’t know.

Our gas station’s still gonna be around, where are we going? I think the most innovative thing I’ve, I’ve seen came from Rolls Royce, and it was a long time ago. It was, uh, a plate. It was very interesting. I don’t know how many they built. I know they built one and they showed it to a lot of their different customers [00:43:00] around the world.

So they flew this car all over the world to show people, I believe it was a full electric Rolls Royce. Now the technology, the future Rolls Royce really knocked it island apart. They had a. It’s literally a flat plate. It lays on your garage floor. You pull the rolls right over the top of it, and you turn it off.

You walk away. Bam. That plate is now charging the card battery. When I first heard about this, I thought, this is crazy. How are they doing it? Well, do you have a little pad that you can put your cell phone on and it charged it? It’s the same exact technology. It’s just a lot more powerful. It’s plugged right into the hard wire of the house.

It’s right there. So all the Rolls Royce customers, nobody wanted it. Nobody was interested in it. So Rolls Royce shelved it. They said, nah, we’re not gonna do this in the background. You watch all the high lux makers. That’s what they’re working on. They’re working on technology that is very similar to that Rolls Royce technology.

You don’t have to think about, oh, I gotta plug in my car now. You pull your car [00:44:00] in, you walk away, you’re done. Your car is. That’s it. It doesn’t have to stay in the garage. What’s the big problem right now? You know, a lot of the car guys I talk to, I tell them I want a Tesla. Well, you can’t even drive to Vegas from la Well, no you can’t.

But there’s Chargers along the way and supercharges. Yeah, but it takes so long to charge it. Yeah, it does. But you know, you have yourself a Coke and get some Cheetos and talk to some people and you’ll be fine. You know, I don’t really worry about, yeah, it takes me five minutes to fill up my car with gas versus an hour to charge up the Tesla.

I don’t think about that because it’s gonna get faster. I mean, let me ask you this. In the golden days, how long did it take to fill up a car? Where were all the gas stations? Oh, you didn’t have many of them. You had to go place to place to place. In fact, I remember a story. One of the garage owners, his father was a young man in 1934 ish, somewhere in there.

And he was a car guy, loved his cars. And a guy in the neighborhood, well a guy in the town bought a V 16 [00:45:00] Cadillac. And oh, he was just blown away by this thing. That engine was, you know, a football field long, and it was just incredible. The engineering behind that car. The gentleman hired him to just take care of the car, you know, keep it clean, keep it polished, whatever.

He was thrilled to be taking care of a big V 16 Cadillac. You know, the hilarity of that car was because there was no gas station in town. You had to drive 30 miles to the next gas station. Hello. It’s a V 16 Cadillac. It’s not gonna get there and back on one tank and be able to go anywhere else. So the funny thing was they had a little model T pickup that they had barrels and they’d go 30 miles out and they’d fill these barrels up with gas for the Cadillac to feed the ca.

I mean, but you see what I’m getting at? We have Teslas that can’t make it to Vegas yet. What about the technology, the sell technology? Can you charge a car from space? Can you use satellite technology? Are they working on that? We don’t know. I haven’t read anything about, [00:46:00] I mean, that was, that was the original Nicola Tesla idea was to send electricity without wires, right?

So we may, and he proved that it did work. There was a town in out in the southwest or something that he had set up, or Colorado or something like that. And it does work, but it’s never been replicated ever since. For reasons unknown, probably because we all glow in the dark or something afterwards, or who knows.

But yeah, who knows? But why couldn’t you put that on municipalities? I’m gonna park my car right here on this street. I gotta pop into that store right over there. Okay. Now your quarter is no longer a quarter, you gotta pay a dollar, but under your car is one of those plates and it’s charging your car. So that’s what you’re paying for.

You’re not paying for the space right now. We’re paying for what? Why do we pay parking meters? I don’t wanna get into it, but now I see a value to it. You know, if I’ve got an electric car that needs a buzz, okay, I’ll pull over to the, you know, the local coffee shop and I’ll grab a cup of coffee while my target’s a little buzzed.

You know, no big deal. Why couldn’t we do that? That could be all over the place. I think the fear factor that I’ve got [00:47:00] when it comes to the electric cars, and I don’t wanna make this all political, but we have a lot of government push telling us, Hey, by 2030 we’re all electric. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

The governor back in California, I think it was Governor Brown, said, we’re not gonna build any more power grids. We’re done. We’re not building power grids. And, and, and you know, back then California’s population was still on an upswing. Now it’s on a downswing here nor there. If you’re gonna force everybody to have an electric car, yet, gotta back up the infrastructure.

Otherwise, we’re gonna be living in the dark age. It doesn’t matter. I have an electric car. I can’t go anywhere and I can’t charge it. I can’t even watch who’s the boss on my TV because I have no electricity, because we’re in a full blackout state. That’s my fear factor. It it’s the government thing, you know?

Let it take its course. We’re getting there. The manufacturers are getting there. I don’t think the governments need to push the button any harder than they already are. Yeah. I, I really don’t. Uh, and I get it. Everybody’s worried about greenhouse gases and global warming, et cetera, and that’s [00:48:00] fine. We do need to be concerned with that to a degree, but I don’t think we need to be forcing it down people’s throats.

Everybody go electric. Everybody, if it’s trendy, it’s gonna bite you in the butt. But if it’s doing it gradually over time, that’s when you’re gonna have success in the market. And because everything has a chance to come together and support all the different inner workings of it, you have a chance to put the plates in the ground.

But before you put the plates in the ground, let’s build a couple more grids, you know, to make sure there’s plenty of power being generated. And let’s not get into how the grids operate. You know, cuz that’ll just confuse the issue. But, so the future of garages, I think it’s gonna come unless there’s something.

Out there that will make money and prevent us from doing it. I think we’re going to have technology like that plate. I think we’re gonna be able to come home, charge your car right there. You know, Disney, ge, way back in the fifties and sixties, they had the House of the Future and basically it was an electric stove.

Yeah. I mean that was what it boiled down to. The house was fully [00:49:00] electrified and the, if you’ve been to the c e s show, the Consumer Electronics Show, oh my God. Now they call them smart houses. I gotta tell you, this thing has a PhD from Harvard. It’s so smart, you know, it knows when to turn on the lights or off the lights.

I, I don’t remember who it was, but they had this beautiful display of a house at Las Vegas in the c e s show. This thing knew when the grid was getting weak, so it would reduce itself and it would move over to solar or wind. It would find the power source it needed. To keep going. Okay. Why can’t a car find the source?

It needs to keep going. If we’ve got these plates in the ground, why do I have to park? I’m driving along over the ground, those plates could be there. Posting my car, just keeping me going. Becomes like a slot car at that point. Right, exactly. It’s just constantly posting your car and you’ve gotta, in the future, you know, will we have these plates in our garages?

Yeah. I think it’s very possible that we, that we will [00:50:00] Honestly, though, I, I think the garage is one of the most classically protected situations you can have because what can you do to it? What’s it for? Parking your car in there. Let’s say we get into a situation that a lot of people have been talking about, ah, We don’t need cars.

We’re gonna have automated driving. You know, we’re gonna have cars that come and get you when you need a car. Think of Uber without the driver. They called it Johnny Cab in total recall. Exactly, exactly right. Thank you for writing Johnny Cab. That’s exactly right. You’ve got a Johnny Cab situation, a society running on Johnny Cab.

Do we need the garage anymore? I mean, I guess Johnny Cab needs to be serviced too. That’s up to the company to have their little garage and service all the Johnny Cabs, not you and me. We won’t need it anymore because we have the village bicycle to get around. So, yeah. What is the future? I I, I think it’s classically protected for a while.

You know, the signage, et cetera. I don’t think that’s gonna go away. I don’t think it’s gonna slip, but I think the dynamics are gonna shift. Have you [00:51:00] ever seen a guy’s garage with a Tesla sign? I haven’t, but I want one. Why? It’s a car sign. Why wouldn’t I want it? You know, we have Shell Oil, we have Chevron, we have the mobile Pegasus hanging on our wall.

Now, who are gonna be providing the electricities for those cars later on? Are we gonna have their signs on our wall? Are they gonna be sharing space with Chevron shell, et cetera? I’m surprised all the big oil companies are still okay. They haven’t done anything. Yeah, here we are forcing electrified cars down people’s throats.

The gas companies are okay with it. I haven’t seen one retort from the gas company. I don’t know why. It’s kinda shocking to me because you gotta think these are the same people who, oh wait, no, they didn’t do it. I can’t say that, but you know, we had the red line in Los Angeles way back in the day. One day there.

Everybody’s got transportation. One day gone. They were just gone. Why was it? Well, everybody ran out and blamed the oil companies, which, yeah, okay. Maybe that was part of it. The real scuttlebutt though, was not the oil companies, it was the rubber [00:52:00] companies, because you’re not burning up your tires the way you should.

We gotta sell tires. And if you’re running around on that red line, you’re not gonna burn up your tires as sa as fast as we need you to burn up those tires. So we’re just gonna make sure that goes away. And there it goes. Yeah, you gotta plate in your garage. How long is that gonna last? Because we don’t want you to cause a brown out.

You know, I, I don’t know where the future’s gonna go. And I’m, I’m sorry if I’m taking this to kind of the negative. It is very Johnny Cab. It is very total recall. It is very, we don’t know what the future actually holds. So Hollywood makes movies about it to, Ooh, look at that. I guess we have to just wait and see, right?

I think so. Yeah. I, I mean, I’m, I’m sorry to sound so vague about it, but you know, the, like I say, the most sophisticated thing I’ve seen so far is that plate from Earls Royce. I, I think that was absolutely fantastic what they did. Let’s put a positive spin on this though, Don. What can people do now to affect car culture and keep it alive and vibrant?

That’s a really broad [00:53:00] question. , you know, there’s a lot of things that you can do, and I think we’re doing it, we just don’t even know we’re doing it. You know, the car culture, like we were talking way early in the conversation about the garage tour. We’ve got the Lamborghini guys talking with the Honda guys, who are talking with the Mustang guys, who are, you know, they’re all interacting, you know, money has no object.

We don’t, you know, yeah, we’re all impressed by the big Ferrari sitting outside. The guy with the Ferrari is equally impressed with the Honda for whatever reason, and right there, okay, that’s economics. But you’ve got a guy with a Honda who maybe feels a little bit better, not that he should feel bad, but maybe feels a little better about himself, his car, et cetera, because a big Ferrari guy just said, wow, that’s a really impressive.

You see what I’m saying? It happens with the younger people too. I mean, I, I won’t drop any names here, but when I first got started buying cars gravitated to a certain brand and I, I really, I still like those cars. Can’t stand the people behind them. I just can’t stand them. I don’t [00:54:00] want anything to do with those people.

I have a car right now in my driveway that most of the people I’ve met their dogs can’t stand ’em. Flip side, I’ve met a lot of gem. In both those communities too. That’s what keeps me going. Although gems, my point is, I think had I not been a died in the wool car guy, that first experience with those first cars would’ve burned me out real quick.

I would’ve been running for the hills and started collecting stamps or something. Wow, car guys suck. You know, I, who wants to be around that all the time? Bring the young people in. And I, and I’m not saying that older people are excluding them, but sometimes, especially when you’re younger. You get into a situation where you wanna ask a question, but you don’t even know what to ask.

So the best thing to do, I think, is start engaging. Just start talking. Just start babbling about the car and they’ll start to pick up on things. And they’ll ask you about that. They’ll wonder about that. They’ll wanna know something. And I think that’s really, really important because, you know, why do I love Audi so much?

Oh, cause my uncle [00:55:00] introduced me to them. You know, so I, I really have a thing for Audi, you know, when it comes to how do we keep it going, let the young people engage and try to help them. I have a little fear factor of, you know, we talked about the prices going up on this side and the other, are they gonna be able to keep it going?

You know, are they gonna be able to afford these things? Are are the price, you know, if they’re gonna be a market correction where everything suddenly becomes a lot more affordable, honestly, I’m okay with that. I think most normal people would be, I think it’s the guys who are buying to invest that are gonna be, you know, a little bit not happy about that idea.

But I think if you want to keep it going, you do have to have a market correction. So Don, we talked about the future of garages and the future of Petrolheads in general, but what about the future of Garage Style Magazine? What do you envision for the next five, 10 years out? We’re pretty traditional around here, which is why we kind of slid sideways back a year ago.

But yeah, we are gonna be going digital. A lot of magazines have gone that way because unless you’ve got [00:56:00] a lot of money behind you, print is really, really very difficult to keep on the road. If that’s not enough, the distribution system is really, really difficult. How has it changed it? Honestly, not much.

I mean, if you just look at the mechanics of it, Hey, we’re gonna put together a magazine. Okay, no problem. You. Lay it out, find the stories, write the stories, print it, distribute it. The classic way of doing it still works. It’s still there. You just gotta have the money to back it up. That’s where it’s starting to slide sideways.

Essentially. It’s getting to a point to where anyone who can lay anything out can have their own magazine. It really takes something special to create something, because you don’t need paper, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t need a bookstore. You just need to know how to operate in the realm of the digital plex and you’ll be fine.

It’s created a good and a bad, in my opinion. You’ve got people like me who have been magazine people since day one. We know how to put a magazine together. The people around me know how to put a magazine together. [00:57:00] I hate calling myself a professional. That is what we are. We can do this. We know which side of the magazine should have the even number, which one should have the odd number.

I mean, that’s one way you can always tell who really put the magazine together. Was it a pro or was it just a hobbyist trying to put his word out there? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There will be a difference. Where we’re making our bread and butter now, believe it or not, is putting together other people’s magazines.

When we suspended our print operations, we started leaning very, very heavily on our digital newsletter, which honestly, when we first started it, I thought it was a joke. I really did. I, I thought this is flash in the pants. We have a magazine. We have a beautiful magazine that goes to concourses all over the world.

We, we don’t need this digital thing. The digital thing came about because an advertiser twisted my arm. He said, get a digital thing going, or, I’m not gonna advertise with you anymore. Okay, so we’ll get a digital thing going. And he funded it. So it worked. Once it got going, I realized something very interesting.

It was a lot of fun of it. . It was [00:58:00] a lot more fun than putting together the magazine. It was a lot more lenient. It was a lot more dynamic. Yeah, dynamic. And it was fast. My God, you put that thing out there and boom, within two seconds you’ve got people writing you back, asking about whatever article or whatever ad, or complaining about their subscription, or complaining about, you know, whatever.

But at least now you have a face-to-face with that subscriber and that’s something the magazine. Can’t do it, can’t you? Got your letter to the editor, but not many people want to sit down and, you know, write a letter to the editor, but to hit reply, Ooh, now it’s on. You know, now we can talk. And we have, and it’s been great.

Even, even guys who’ve come at me with, you know, legitimate anger issues of their subscription. Okay, we get through that. Then I want to ask ’em the murderously perfect question, what’s in your garage? And then they realize, oh, oh, you know, so next thing you know, this guy’s my best friend. Again, there’s that camaraderie that you and I were talking about so long [00:59:00] ago.

Yeah. This guy came at me gangbusters. He was really mad about something. Okay, we got through that. Now let’s talk about happy stuff. That’s what we start doing. That is one way where I have learned, okay, this, this is why print is, I hate to say taking a back. But it is definitely taking a backseat, not necessarily a bad thing, because when we started telling people we were going to go digital, there was a lot of disappointment.

I was disappointed. But if we were in 1985, we’d be dead. We would be dead. We would have no options at all. We would be done, there would be no garage style magazine. But because we are in 2022, 2021, 2020, whatever. Oh no, no, no, no. We had the digital option much cheaper, much faster, as you say, much more dynamic.

It, it was just, there’s a way to do this. So the magazine becomes the luxury product, and that’s what we’re doing now. We’re gonna put out a digital magazine plus our newsletter, and at [01:00:00] the end of the year, we’re gonna be offering what’s called the yearbook. And in the yearbook it will be printed and in the yearbook we’ll have every article, every feature, every column from the magazine.

And it will also have all of the newsletters that we produce for one year. Everyone that I’ve spoken to has been so excited about this new format. That is the goal right now is just put together the digital format, start working our way, not back to print, but to be able to offer that print component to compliment the new way we’re doing business.

On top of that, you mentioned it earlier in the show and yeah, we are kind of living that way. Robin Leach and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and everyone loves to hear about the garages. I grew up with that guy. Yeah, that guy. He’s in my head all the time. I feel like a crazy man because of that guy.

But I always wanted that show. And then of course, later on, MTV had cribs doing the same thing basically, except for they were just showing the house of some popular [01:01:00] personality. The end game for Garage style has always been a television show. It had always been a television component. Like I said earlier on, I had that hard copy internship back when I was in high school.

I worked at Universal Studios up on the park side. You know, they have the theme park up there. I worked there When my shift was over, I would just accidentally meander down to the studio. and find anybody in a studio working on something that I could work with. You know, how can I help you? Happy to do what I wanna learn in this industry.

I, I always love television, always, always love television. Always love magazines. So now because of the dynamic of the internet, the dynamic of technology, digital, et cetera, we can do this. We can take the little cell phone here, we can make a TV show. We can even edit it right there on the cell phone. I gotta learn how, but we can make it right there on the cell phone.

You know, it’s fascinating. So this new magazine that we’re doing is gonna shift because yes, it will still be the classically styled Garage Job magazine, but we [01:02:00] are hoping to bring in some video production, some interviews with owners, A little bit of video of, you know, hey, let’s take a look at Bob’s garage over here.

And, you know, here he is with his emberg Bob, tell us about the emberg. And then I get to wear your shoes for a while and interview people. Live. Very cool. So that also opens you up to a couple other interesting things. Number one, for those of us that are learning about garage style for the first time, going to the new website, to the digital version of the magazine, hopefully there’s an archive where we can go back and revisit some more of the classic articles, maybe some of the more famous garages that you guys have reviewed over the years.

So that’ll be cool to have that retrospective approach. But I think it also opened you up to a plethora of new writers and people that might be interested in joining the team because there’s like yourself, they, there’s plenty of people out there that are freelance bloggers that might be reviewing stuff that can contribute to this.

And so if you wanted to get engaged with Garage style at that level, what are those [01:03:00] opportunities like? Let’s just hit the nail right on the head and remind everybody. We have no money . So if you, I mean, I’m sorry, I hate to say it like that, but you know, you’ve got a day job. I’ve got a day job, and. Like I said before, now what’s supporting garage style are our clients who we’re producing magazines for, et cetera, but I love to have the help, the passion.

Not a lot of those guys come and go. Some of them have stayed and it’s worked out really, really well. So now, Honestly, I know I need help learning how to do the editing and do the shooting and do this, that, and the other. I’ve got a gentleman here in Texas that I knew him years, years ago. He was on the cover of the magazine.

As it turned out. He is selling his, uh, I couldn’t believe it. I finally get to Texas. I’m looking forward to meeting this guy. I’ve never met him in person before. I wanted to see who he got a big Corvette collection. All I wanted to see the Cove collection am Micka. Mochen calls me and asks me if we could do a, a story on this great Corvette collection in Texas that’s coming to, to the Glendale Arizona sale next [01:04:00] month.

I thought, you’ve gotta be kidding me. He’s selling it. He said, yeah, you know the guy? Oh yeah, I know the guy. I mean, he was on the cover of a magazine. Silly. I’m on the email with this guy. I gotta see this place before Mecu breaks it up. But my point is, and I always have long stories, I’m sorry about that.

It’s gotta be the Irish d n a, you know, I’ll be seeing him tomorrow and he is a television personality out here. I’m hoping maybe he can, even if he doesn’t help hands on, maybe he can just give me some pointers from afar of, you know, do this, do this, do this, and start filming. You know, that’s been the lesson that I’ve really been getting from a lot of people who have been doing this vlogging, et cetera, is don, just do it.

Just jump in the pool and swim. If you start to drown, you’re not gonna die. You’re just gonna learn a different way of what not to. How to tread water. That’s what you’re gonna learn how to do. Yeah. Yeah. We wanna do some of what you’re doing, this kind of stuff where we’re interviewing people and don’t worry, I don’t wanna be competition.

Every once in a while we’d love to get somebody on the show [01:05:00] who brings something different to it. And again, we couldn’t really do that if we were strictly in print. I mean, we could, we have, we used to do interviews all the time, but there’s, and you’ll know this better than anybody right now, there’s something different when you have somebody in front of you on a camera and or just talking over the phone into some microphone.

I don’t know how it’s done, but, so yes, there are opportunities for people. I just need them to understand, look, we suspended print operation because there was no money. And it just got to a point to where I was throwing my hands up and I was like, you know, Forget it. People want more and more for less and less.

Frankly, the distribution model is so screwed up that trying to put a magazine out there. Good luck. Yeah, I mean it’s just, you’re losing money left, right, and center. It got to a point I just wanted to stop and like I said earlier, the newsletter is what kept me going. And I realized we don’t need all that paper.

We don’t need the headaches of distribution, we don’t need the headaches of the big brick and mortar [01:06:00] bookstore telling us, Hey, by the way, you’re gonna send us 5,000 copies of your magazine. Oh, and you’re gonna spend a dollar each so that we put ’em on the shelves and they don’t end up in the garbage.

What? Literally that, that, that is not just one conversation. I’ve had that conversation a couple of times with different distributors and you just think, this is the mafia. No offense to the mafia, you know, we all have our job to do. That’s what we’re dealing with and I’m not equipped to deal with that, so, eh, yeah.

Next. So anyway, enough a negativity, but, you know, but that actually leads into a great question, which is the subscription model. And I understand that the print subscription model is, is no longer a thing, but what does the subscription model for Garage Style magazine look like if somebody is interested in signing up?

Okay, we have a, a little, what’s it called? Email address and it’s nl, which is Newsletter nl. Garage style magazine.com. If you go to the website right now, it looks like, oh, they’re out of business. Which, eh, we’re, we’re not outta business yet. We’re, we’re [01:07:00] not dead yet. We’re not dead yet. You know, we’re just limping along.

That’s all. It’s just a flesh wound, just a flesh wound. No big deal, you know? No big deal. But no, we’re, we’re not dead yet. We’re still plugging along, but the website has a certain darkness to it. But if you just use that email, literally all we need. You to write to us and say, hi, I want a subscription to the newsletter and the magazine.

Use this email address and we’ll sign you up. There’s no fee. There’s no nothing. Once again, the miracles of digital. We can drop our advertising rate to a much more palatable fee for our advertisers, and yet we will be able to support everything that we’re doing. Heaven forbid we make money at this thing, you know, but we might actually start doing it because everything is so much cheaper.

You know, I’ve always said, you’re gonna sell more Fords than Ferraris, and I’ve always tried to do that, but with a cost of paper, cost of distribution, cost, I mean cost, cost, cost, cost, cost. I was never actually able to deliver. anything but a Ferrari. Even though I wanted to give people a Ford [01:08:00] price, it just wasn’t gonna happen.

Lower your paper quality. Yeah, that’s not gonna go over very well because we’ve already set that bar. You know, if you come out as Mercedes-Benz and you say, eh, we’re gonna start building Pintos , that’s not gonna work with your client base, but you might extend your sales. There is a reason they have the C-class and the E-class.

They’re cheaper. You can have a broader market than the S-class and the CLS and all that stuff. There is some psychology to it, but if we’re going digital, just give people a chance to have their free magazine. Just give it to ’em. And then like I say, at the end of the year, we’re gonna be printing these yearbooks and that’s not gonna be free.

That’s obviously gonna cost money cuz we gotta print. But those won’t be distributed. Those will literally, I, I think I’m working with a new printer on this now. I think she’s doing print on demand. So it will be a situation where if I understood her correctly, she wants us to open the door and say, okay, you have from this date to this, To get your orders in and your payments.

We’re [01:09:00] closing the door here and whatever we’ve got, that’s what we’re printing and that’ll be the end of it. And I think that’s how she wants to run it. But, uh, there you go. So Don, I think this is actually really exciting. I know that changes can be scary and a little daunting, but like you said, once the wall is pushed over and you just, as we say in our world, send it, there’s no looking back.

And, and it’s true of all, of all things in life. So I think we’re really excited to see where the next five and 10 years for garage style magazine go, especially in the digital world. I think there’s a lot of things you can do with this and you can probably get even more creative and more dynamic than you were with the magazine cuz you’re not held to the same deadlines and you’re not held to the same schedule.

So I think that’s awesome. So Don, as we wrap things up here, any shout outs, promotions, any, any thank yous? Anything else you’d like to. Thanks to all the subscribers and all the people who have supported Garage Job Magazine this whole time. And then I thank you for having me on the show. I think the automobile, I think the car culture is alive and well and thriving.

I really do, [01:10:00] uh, because of my daughter, I, you know, get exposed to a lot of younger people because of the magazine. I get exposed to a lot of younger people, and I gotta tell you though, the, uh, the pulse is, The people still love cars. I, I don’t know what that tells you if anything, but the younger generation is there.

We just have to stop telling them, oh, you don’t want that car. Look, in high school, junior high school, I had a friend, her mom had a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, 77 Porsche nine 11 s. Not the most desirable car. In 1991, it was a 77 9 11 s. It was rust brown. It had a beautiful camel colored interior. I was in love with this car.

I thought it was incredible. So I started talking to guys I knew, who knew Porsche. Oh, you don’t want that car. You don’t want that car. It’s a 77. That’s, that’s like one of the worst genres you can get. No, no, no. You wanna get like a 70 to a 72, somewhere in there. Maybe a 73 or just step up and get yourself an 83, you know, nine 11 sc or get an 85 Carrera.

[01:11:00] Okay, guys, I can’t afford any of those cars. At the 77 because nobody wants them. I can afford that car. I was young. These guys were older. They knew more than me. So I didn’t buy my friend’s mother’s nine 11. I didn’t buy it, even though I could have, let’s fast forward to today. Have you priced a 77 9 11 s?

Good luck, buddy. I’m not gonna be able to buy one of those cars. There’s no way. There’s just no way. So I, I think what I’m spewing about here is to us old farts to perpetuate the community. Don’t poo poo the car that the young guy comes to you and says, I’m thinking about buying the XYZ car. Bite your tongue if you know you don’t like that car, cuz that guy in front of you likes that car and he’s looking for your approval.

Cuz you’re the old fart who’s been around. So you need to encourage him as to why. Yeah. That that’s a good car to get. So when I meet these kids who I want a, A Vega. Yeah, I know a lot about Vega. I really do. I know a lot of their pitfalls. They’re actually really good cars. They just have problems that need to be [01:12:00] corrected.

Once they’re corrected, you’re fine if you wanna put the money into correcting them. There’s just not a big community supporting Vega. Not yet. Not yet. But maybe these are the guys who are gonna bring it around. And I’m not just picking on Vega, I’m saying could be anything, you know, perpetuating the community.

We need to support the younger guys who are looking at the oddball cars that maybe we don’t understand why they like them, but they do. Look, you go on Facebook and I belong to a lot of automotive communities on Facebook. I’m blown away. You know these guys in their twenties, an 85 Buick Electra Buick, Las Saber, whatever that car was to you and me, it was dad’s car to get back and forth to work.

It was the most boring thing on four wheels. But you gotta admit, when you find one today in mint condition, whoa, that’s pretty cool. It’s an 85 dealer. Who cares? But there it is, mint condition in all its glory. And there is nothing on the road like it. Nothing. That’s what makes it stand out, you know, to you and me.

We grew up with those cars. These younger guys [01:13:00] didn’t, so to them, they’re the classic cars, but there’s tons of younger guys on Facebook who like cars. Like, I can’t tell you how many Tauruses I’ve seen pop up. Dude, I found this Taurus. It’s only got 30,000 miles on. I’m thinking the first off, that’s really cool.

Where did you find a Taurus with 30,000 miles on the second off? Is it the v6 or which V6 is it? You know, on and on the question go, the kid bought this car, 5,000 bucks, 3000 bucks, whatever it was, and I’m thinking to myself, You could have really gotten a fun car for that kind of money, but you bought a Taurus.

What’s your story? Tell me why. What, what was it about the Taurus you like, oh dude, these cars are timeless. You look at it, it looks like, remember the Audis back in the day, this car looked like a poor man’s Audi. And I thought, yes, they did. They really did. And they shaved Ford and they’ll always have my respect for that.

So you look like Ferris Bueller’s dad on a budget. You know, what else about this car? Dude, you never see these things. I never see these cars. And when I do, they’re all [01:14:00] beat up. They’re, what did he say? Toasted? They’re toasted. And I thought, okay, yeah, that, that, that makes sense. They’re all beat up. That makes sense.

You know what I have in my driveway? I have a 79 Caprice classic mint conditioned. Why I am that kid. It’s just the car is. Because I grew up with that Caprice. He grew up as a boy. With that Taurus, it’s the same thing. It’s just a different set of wheels. And I think with the younger people, we need to encourage them to go out there and buy that Taurus.

Go out there and buy whatever it is that turns you on and go experience it. Have fun. So on that note, since 2007, garage Style Magazine has been the definitive source for car collect. Continually delivering information about Autobi Petrolia events and more. The quarterly publication is distributed through subscription newsstand and events and is now moving to full digital.

And you can learn more about the publication at www.garagestylemagazine.com or [01:15:00] follow them on social at Garage Style Magazine. And with that, Don, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show and letting us explore your corner of the vehicle enthusiast world with us and you know, getting to know Garage Style Magazine.

We’re really looking forward to what the future holds for you guys and wish you the best of luck. Thank you. Now I’m glad to be on the show. There’s a lot of fun. Thanks for having.

If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org. You can also find us on Instagram at Grand Tour Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call our Texas at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief gt motorsports.org.

We’d love to hear. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM [01:16:00] remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and GTM swag.

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