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A conversation about cars, trucks, tugs and other machines of transport that flows like an ADHD fever dream, hosted by Hoonigan co-founder and 321 Action Action director Brian Scotto. Enjoy, it’s gonna be a bizarre ride.
And we're back with another episode of Very Vehicular. As always, I'm your host Brian Scotto, and today we have a guest who I have known for probably 20 plus years, but I haven't really caught up with them in over a decade. That's right, we have mr. Johnny Lieberman. You see, Johnny and I met in our early days of journalism, he was at Jalopnik. I was doing zero to 60. He then went on to do auto blog, and then eventually ended up at Motor Trend, which was a weird move for me, honestly. But we'll get into that. And then he's done a ton of different stuff since then. But you may know him best for just kicking shit over on Instagram. Yeah, he's a little bit of an instigator. Today, me and him get into it. We talk about the value of hypercars. We talk about whether or not EVs really are ever going to work. We talk about a lot of different things, but one of the things we get into, and I really enjoy this conversation, is the importance of Jalopnik and the early blog days, and how that really just hit a reset button and changed the entire media world of automotive. And I think, in many ways, led to the world we live in today with YouTube and everything else. It's a great conversation. Enjoy it. Johnny Lieberman. Hey, welcome to the show. What's
up, Brian?
How you been? I'm
really tired. You mean the last eight days? Yeah, I'm really tired too. This will
be a tired show. Yeah. So, and we still don't have air conditioning. Yeah, an ongoing motif. I wore I
wore pants instead of shorts. Yeah, I wouldn't have recommended that. Yeah, should have asked. Should have asked. Um, yeah, no, I've I'm overall very well. I um, I went last Monday. I went to Germany, and then on Thursday I flew from Germany straight to Pebble, and then did Pebble, and then did Audi New Valari drive the day after Pebble. Definitely going to want to talk about that. I then drove back to LA yesterday, so I'm I'm fucked. Yeah,
yeah. All right. Before we even get into that, though, I kind of want to rewind because I was thinking about this as I was spending a little bit of time thinking about the show today, and I realized, like you and I, came up in the same swamp.
Yeah, but then
went like two very different ways. Like I haven't been on a press trip in a decade. I have no idea what the cold chicken tastes like these days. What? But
yeah.
But you and I did like very much the same thing. You were at Jalopnik. I was at zero 60. But like there was this weird sort of behind the scenes thing between Jalopnik and Zero to 60.
There was, but I I also remember like getting Zero to 60 and being so jealous because like a Jalopnik at the time. This is be like two. This is we're old by the way, folks. Yeah, this is like 2005, 2006. Yeah, like we didn't go on press trips. We were just we just sat at home and wrote in our underwear, you know what I mean for real, and and but making
Husker do references.
That was hey R. I. P. Davy. But I remember opening zero to 60, and for some reason you photoshopped your face really weird, but you were in like a like an s6 Avant in like in like Germany somewhere, and I was just so jealous. I was like, "Oh my God, he's driving the cars! Like, that's all I really want to do. I just really wanted to drive the cars.
That was in an era where if your stories were not printed on paper, no one cared.
Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
you were considered not viable to any of the press if you wrote for a blog. Oh my god! What's a blog? Who reads the internet?
So probably like my fifth press trip, something like that. I was in. It was two. It was 2007. So it was when I must have just been started an auto blog, something like that. But it was a Ford launch. It was sorry, the Mustang launch, the new Mustang, which was a big deal. Yeah, it was. It wasn't even independent yet. It was just the new Mustang,
right?
And I remember I didn't know anybody. I go to Detroit, and you know it's a cattle call. It's 200 journalists, just like the you know a Mustang launch is a big launch, and I'm having breakfast, and and I don't know anybody, so I just sit at a table with all these old timers, and and by the way, they're probably younger than I am right now, but they have those really fucking old, yeah, and they're like, but that's like how
that's how like George Costanzo like 30 somehow looked 50. Yeah, just that generation just looked old early.
But what they said was, they're like, man, I can't wait till this internet trend is over so we can get back to like big glossy photos and magazines. And I remember having this thought, like, well, you guys are just dead. Like, it ain't coming back, like in any major way. It'll you know it'll come back like vinyls coming back, but um and yeah it was it was just different. But I mean even when I got to Motor Trend, I mean I remember people there was there was a dude on staff who wanted me fired because I was quote a fucking blogger, and I got in a fight with another guy on staff, and he ended up by saying, "Well, you're just a fucking blogger.
Yeah, there was like. Real beef, and that's kind of what I wanted to bring up because I think it's a time that's forgotten, and I think you're starting to see it now between like the journalist and the influencer creator. Like that's like the new version of the tribes, sure. But when we started, and I lived in this weird world because yes, I was a print magazine, but I hung out with you guys. Yeah, so it was like tarred by the same stick, kind of situation. Sure, it was like, oh, you also write for Jalop, and you guys also have this blog thing, and you make videos, and like, why are you doing that, right? But I was like, I look back though, and I, I have this like romantic memory of that era because I felt like there was the beginning of just no rules, and we were taking the no rules that was sort of happening on things like Jalopnik, where you and Davy would get into like a DAF versus FAF, you know, blog out. Where and by the way, for those who don't know, can you just explain what DAF versus FAF is?
Okay, so I spent a lot of time. Boy, we're going back. I spent a lot of time at Jalopnik trying. Like I don't even ask. But when I was a kid, okay, back it up. Okay, so kids out there listening, imagine you wanted to look at pornography. So what we had to do was share one magazine amongst three friends, and you'd bury it in somebody's backyard. It was that was it. That's how you did it. It was kind of like that with car magazines because there was only four. One of them, Motor Trend, totally fucking sucked. Automobile was new, and the when I'm old enough that a lot of the photos were black and white. So if I wanted to see a Countach once a year, one of the magazines might do a Countach on the cover, and then like two or three black and white photos inside the magazine. That was my car porn, so I would get books. My my grandmother would go to England. I get these like car encyclopedias from England, and it was all just obscure European stuff. And I would just memorize them because I had one book, you know. And so I knew about stuff like Daft, which was this Dutch automobile, whatever the F stood for, but it was a Dutch company that had an early CVT. Anyway, so that's that's the why I knew about that. So I wrote something about the Daf Daffodil, I think it was called, and Davy found there was I don't even remember what it was. It was some like Citro off rotor that was manufactured in Africa called a FAF or something like that. So he was like, forget DAF, it's all about FAF. And then I then I was like, I'm gonna do some research and find. And there's all this crazy like Dutch military vehicle. Don't even ask nonsense
from an outsider's view. And obviously, when I say outsider, I mean I was talking to both of them on on America Online. Yeah, yeah. AOL's aim.
Aim. Yeah. Theory.
You know, ferociously talking about Daff versus FAF because you guys got into this argument at like 4p.m. New York time and posted through the night. Yeah, like posted till like one or two in the morning. It
went on for weeks, which just makes no sense. And people
followed it for weeks, and it became like this was the beginning to me of automotive journalism with no rules because like that would never have existed before,
and I agree. And what I what I would would say, and I mentioned, you know, sadly, Davy passed away back in I think 19, and his the people that buried him, shall we say, they did something really shitty, which they had the funeral on a Monday morning, so like nobody went, but it was like few of us were there, and I just wanted to say something, and like, how do you summarize this guy? So I just said, look, what's so you read
out one of his faff articles, which is how he would have appreciated. Yeah,
no, no, no, that's a good point. No, what I what I said was like before Davy, there was this unwritten agreement that if you're going to write about what's cool, the coolest was Steve McQueen, Carroll Shelby, and another Paul Newman, and that's it. And Corvettes and Cobras, nothing's cooler. That that's the ultimate cool. And and no one questioned it. No one, you know. And Davy just didn't give a fuck, and was like, no, like you know, the mantra. What was those like weird with the fox tail racing the nerve? Yeah,
yeah, yeah. Like
that's the coolest. Like he just didn't care. He didn't care about Steve McQueen. He didn't care about Paul Newman. Yeah, you know. And well, because he was
so punk rock, so punk rock. Anything that was mainstream wasn't cool.
Yeah, but he he still understood everything about Shell. He he wasn't ignorant. He knew every. He was encyclopedic about his knowledge of of all any everything hot rod. I mean that. I mean, I don't know if you ever heard the story of how I met Davy, but here's how old I really am. Was remember Friendster?
Of course,
before MySpace. I think
we're probably the same age.
I'm 51.
Okay, you're older than me.
Yeah, I know. I thought you were young. No,
you know what? You have less gray in the air. I'm going
gray, but yeah. So my friend Deirdre goes. I met this guy on Friendster, he's coming down from Oakland, and he we're gonna go to this Jumbos Clown Room, which is a strip club in Hollywood. We're gonna have our first date there. He seems really cool, but he's bringing a girl for you, and I just want you to go there in case he's weird. Like you know, do something. I'm like, all right. So I meet Davy. We instantly go. Outside and start smoking, and for four hours we talk about punk rock and hot rods, nothing but. And then we just you know ignore the the two girls they're left in watching the show, and then friends just shut down. That was the last I ever heard of Davy, and then like God, four years later I wrote something about the third thing I ever wrote online. Davy republishes it on Jalopnik, and literally says, "I met Johnny Liberman at a strip club in Hollywood, California, called Jumbo's Clown Room. You know, and but yeah, he so he knew all that stuff. Is my point. He just didn't care about it. He wasn't he wasn't orthodox. You know what I mean? Like it, it just didn't it didn't matter that you had to agree to this unwritten thing that no one ever asked you your opinion of. Yeah, he just wasn't into it, you know.
I, I, I think this is, and I'm happy we're having this conversation because I don't feel like enough people give Davy the flowers he deserves because he did. I mean, because you think Autoblog was happening at the same time, and I loved all the guys over at Autoblog Damian and all the guys, but like Davy was just like he was-he knew his audience. He spoke directly to them. He would decide to write an entire article that was an ode to Jawbreaker, right? Or like you know, or whatever it was, right? Or the Minuteman or something like that. And he he tied his love for music and like weird alt culture and and the more insider, the better. And
no apologies for it. No apologies for it at all,
and I and I love that. I love that about it, and I have to say it it sort of helped us develop a bit of how we took our tone with zero to 60. We had this mentality of, you know, typically in the magazine world, and you know this, you write to a certain reading level.
Yes, right.
So it's like second grade is what you write to, which is crazy when people hear that. But like even the New York Times, I think, is only fourth grade or something. Right, yeah, it's like junior
high. I think, and we have made this
rule of like we're gonna write to whatever level we want to. We'll use you know dime words where nickels will do, just because we enjoy using big words. But we'll also speak to people as if they're the same enthusiasts as we are, with the intention that like catch up,
right?
Like learn. Like if you can't figure this out, like you need to learn instead of trying to dumb it down for everybody. Exactly. And I think that was what worked for Jalopnik for me. And sometimes you're like, I don't get it. It's inside, but like it made you want to learn the inside. Because trust me, as much as I was a huge fan of punk and every and I grew up around it, there was a lot of West Coast stuff I didn't know that I learned from Davey. Sure, I'd be like, "What is he? And I had to like go Google it and be like, "What is he referencing? And again,
like when people ask me, like, "Give me examples of, because he comes up in conversation from time to time, and like people are like, "Give me examples of why so brilliant. So the Minutemen had like again, you can't even explain it, but like the Minutemen had a a saying, "We jam Icano, and it just meant we drive our own van. We don't spend money on hotels. We just do everything real cheap. And Davy found it was the first time I ever saw him. You know the the famous YouTube videos of the Ichrano plans, those crazy Soviet ground effects things. So he writes, we jam Ichrano as like the throwaway little like like deck, you know. And I I remember like opening my laptop and just peeing on myself because it was so brilliant, and like and but like again, that's like two super obscure like
yeah, of course,
but to look at a Soviet experimental attack vehicle and get a Minutemen reference out of it,
but I love it because it's like it's that layered Easter egging that I think is so good, and I love Easter egging. If you watch the Jim Khanna films, there's always Easter eggs. I hide stuff in the background all the time. Yeah, and I actually read this really great comment. We're gonna dive right into into AI shit. I don't know about your feeling about AI, but if you love it, I might ask you to leave. But but the Kane Parsons, who did backrooms, they asked him about his opinion on AI, and he had a very, very good response. And his his response was, "The minute I know that you're using AI to build your background, I stop looking for nuance. I stop looking for Easter eggs because I realize that nothing you're doing is intentional, and everything is just sort of there, right? Like it's it's it's not if it's if it's something I see, it's accidental. It wasn't intended. Where when a team builds everything in a film, there's these little things you you sneak in, you hide. I mean, my art director, shout out to Matthew Holt, he hides so much in the back of the Joan Kona films, right? Little nods to previous things, little nods to people on set, and it's like it's just a big part of the creative piece. And I agree. Like the minute you remove that, all of a sudden it's like, yeah, it's just arbitrarily there, right? And I think that's like a really good reason why, like it's a huge difference in generative creative versus whatever.
Yeah, and Jobnik was was a real experiment in like, and I still think this is the best way to do things. But like, make the magazine, for lack of a better term, that that you want to read. You know what I mean? And that's what you're saying about writing to the level that you want to communicate in. Just like, what do I actually want to read? And and I think like, you know, I've been associated with Motor Trend now for 16 years, and. Like yeah, it's one of the problems we have is we get so caught up with like oh we got to do another like you know three row SUV comparison test and like you can have fun with it but that takes extra effort and thought you know and so it just gets a little cookie cutter and I don't you know I don't really want to read three row comparison tests that often I want to read like fun supercar stuff, but even even if you just do the same thing or whatever, you know it can all get boring. So you know, I I think that's important. the The problem is the the finances don't always follow like Jalopnik.
I know
in that era was like not not doing great, and I
mean Autoblog was cutting it straighter and had bigger viewership, right? Yeah,
I mean I went first of all, like I went to Autoblog and like so Jalopnik was like it was it was Spinelli like just trying to keep Nick Denton from like doing illegal things against employees. Like the the funniest thing that's ever happened in the history of work was he sends out an all hands email to all of Gawker, and it's like I looked at all the sites today. They all suck. They're all boring. You're all terrible. I don't know what it's going to take. Get drunk. Do some drugs. Get creative. And Merylly Martin, Phil Greeden replies all to the whole company. Can we expense the drugs? Which, by the way, is a perfect Merly like response because he's like, "I'll do some drugs. My boss told me to. Yeah. So like, so Spinelli was just he he was so uninvolved with like what we published. Like, like if something was late, he was he's like, you know, hey, I remember one of the best lessons of my life. Every week means every week. You know, and as no one had ever told me that. I'd never been thought I'd be a journalist or anything. But that was that was like that helped my career more than any other single piece of advice was like prioritize shit. Spinelli
was great, which is which is why I stole him and brought him to zero.
Yeah, he was the greatest, the funniest guy ever. Yeah, and then you had me, Davy, Merly, and Bumbeck.
Bumbeck was also fantastic. He made me love starions.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just talked to him the other day. Oh, how's he doing?
Oh, he's he's okay. He's good. He's good. He's getting like to retirement age, so it's kind of he was at he was at
Hemings for a while. Still
at Hemings, yeah, he's in Vermont, but he's good. And we're doing our thing, and then this guy-I don't want to mention his fucking name-but this piece of shit showed up, and he just made everything so unfun for everybody. Just he's just a bag of shit, and then just really. That's how you really feel.
You don't have to. I don't
want to give maritime. Like, fuck that guy. Like, literally contributed nothing to to to any. Like, again, like like Spinelli said this. I'm just gonna repeat it. But he said he said Jalopnik was like back then was like the Velvet Underground. Nobody read us, but everyone who did is now a professional automotive journalist. Right. And the Lou Reed quote is nobody listened, but everyone did is now a rock. Yeah,
yeah, yeah.
Except for this, all he wanted to do was wreck it. Everything your favorite band's
favorite band.
Yeah, exactly. But all he wanted to do was like take this great thing and make it worse to the point where all the readers revolted after every one of the original people quit, and he had to write this. What did he call it? The Awesomeness Manifesto, where I he mentioned me by name, even though like you know when I quit, they're like, "Why are you quitting? I'm like, "That motherfucker. I told the guy, and he's like, "You know, we had a feeling this is
manifestos are like not a good thing to have your name attached to. You're either like a tech douche or school shooter, but it
just means you're you're you've you've taken something beloved and just ruined it. Then you're trying to like okay. Anyways, you know, I'm still obviously very angry about this.
I can tell. Yeah. Oh yeah. He fucking
took something I really loved and was. I have a similar
feeling with how things went through and again. So I know. Yeah. I know the vibe.
And just yeah. And just just. But like I can't. Like like when Spinelli quit again. I don't want to mention the guy's name, but he told the guy like, "Hey, I'm quitting, and he said, "I broke his heart because he had concocted this master plan to stab me in the back, and he never got to carry it out because I quit first.
Yeah, man, that's that's kind of sweet. Yeah,
yeah, and so so fuck that guy. But anyways, yeah, Jalopnik was it was I I I miss it. It's it's hard. Like
I think it was an extremely influential moment. There's probably two or three years of
it. Yeah,
where it really is over by
'07 for sure.
And you know, and I think inspired a lot of people, right? Me, myself included. And I think just a and look, look at how many people were either not even just writers there, but commenters there. Oh, who like then went to like build entire businesses around.
Merely Martin was a commenter, and I left for four and a half days. Went to Edmunds, and when I left, Spinelli was like, "Hey, I got it. I need to replace you. Like, what do you what do you think of this guy, Merely Martin? I'm like, "He's brilliant. Hire him. And then now he's still working as an automotive journalist. You know,
I don't know if we could talk about what he also used to write because yeah. Oh, I didn't know if he he used to keep it kind of quiet.
Oh, he used to he wrote one. Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, I think yeah. Oh, it was it was a really how do I put this unusable porn novel because I read it. Unusable porn novel. Yeah, is three.
Words I've never heard. You know what I'm saying?
But it's it's called a torture ink, and it's a brilliant idea. But it's about how like um in in like the '90s in the heart of Orange County, you have this underground like like S and M dungeon where there's like an animatronic Nixon sex doll. I was just about
to say this better have a Nixon angle to it, and it does.
Yeah, but the best part is it was it was for or for excuse me, it was for a British audience. So American porn, we want to hear like you know the plumbing angles and all that. British porn, what they want is apparently is like is clothespins on nipples, and then like your school teacher paddling you. That's very sexy to the British, so that's why he did the whole S and M thing because they just want that kind of thing. But because he wrote it with this real Southern California slang, and it should just be on a T-shirt, but he had to do a glossary for like ganja, like like La Migra. It's the greatest thing, and it's for a British audience.
It's so good, but no, he he
loved talking about it because well, in the early days, it was
kind of quiet because he was, I guess, but what happened
was it never sold, and then when you start talking about on Jalopnik, suddenly it starts selling in like the dozens. Oh, that's amazing! He'd get a residual or something. So yeah, torture torture ink. It's really bad in terms of it's really fascinating the non-sex parts, but the sex parts are just really like unusual. It's not, yeah. It's it's whips. I don't, not for me. My
goodness.
Yeah, that's great. Where do we go from here? Well,
no, I wanted to set the stage because one of the things we do a lot on the show is we we you know we wax poetic about how it used to be, and I think that that was just this amazing little moment on the internet that you know probably not a a lot of people saw it, but not a ton of people saw it. Yeah, for sure. But you're right; it's like everyone's favorite band, right? It's like it's like Joy Division now. Everyone knows it, but Joy Division created most of the bands in the early 2000s that exploded. Interpol, things like that, right? It's like that. I think in a lot of ways, Jalopnik was that and had this like really cool. We can do anything. There are no rules, which in a lot of ways then paved the way for YouTube. Yeah, right. Because like I think there's like no rules on YouTube. You can make whatever you want. Like there's an audience that'll find you. Right. And that was this interesting. Like you don't have to sell a cover. You don't have to do this. Like, there's an audience that will eventually show up, and then, and I think this is something that you guys got really well. I think that, like, you know, a lot of other people who've grown out, you know, from that era know well. It's like insider inside jokes is what makes a community.
Yes, like it is. It is the
currency of fandom,
right? Yeah, 100,000% and like,
and Jalopnik was so inside. There's
nothing but like, if
you showed up to like read the review of the new Blue Devil Corvette, you wouldn't even wouldn't even make sense to you because you couldn't translate, right? Watch what
they never let us review a car. But you know, I remember what I was going to say was when I left Jalopnik and went to Autoblog. It was like I was just I was so impressed. It was such a machine, and specifically the way they they attended and covered car shows. Yeah, like there would be I don't know maybe 10 of us, maybe a dozen of us, like at Geneva, and and we and I don't know why they wouldn't take manufacturer trips, so they'd fly us to Geneva. Yeah,
it's like the journalist idea, right? Yeah, but they well, but the same way.
But well, yeah, but they said one guy. They said 10. They'd fly us coach. We'd have to stay 90 minutes away in like some like really bad part of France or something, and then like literally 430 a.m. Catch the train to get to Geneva by six. But and this was without the John Neff ran at the time. He never said to do this, but there was this unspoken competition: like, who can post the most shit today? And like, we were we were making 12 posts a day, which is a lot. You know, if you think you think you have to like you know set up your laptop, you have to go find something worthwhile, learn something about it, photograph it, get back, write something that's doesn't have typo, not that not that many typos, and then hit post, and then go do it again, and like 12 times a day, like at an auto show, and we would do this for two or three days straight, and that it just felt it was like being in I don't say army because there was nothing, you know, there was no valor involved, but like it was. I mean, you weren't you
weren't in the trenches. I wasn't in the ship, man. Eating chicken salad, waiting to see the new Ferrari. No, we weren't even eating chicken salad. That's the thing.
Like once I started going with manufacturers, like yeah, I was eating good, but yeah, I was not eating well. Like we did, our per diem was like $8. Fuck you
are in the trenches.
Yeah, the only the only saving grace was at Paris. You could you could smoke in the. This was remember Davy told me about that. You could smoke in the press room, like a real journalist. Yeah, so I would sit there chain smoking because why not, you know? And everyone else was like coughing at me except for the French journalists. They were smoking, but so yeah, it was you know like you said, you could have done anything, Jalobnik. Just went that way, kind of by like lack of oversight, because Spinelli was just like, I don't even know what he was doing. You can ask him. We were just left to play, you know. And then, but other than like the auto blog was just like military unit, just in terms of like, God, they took it seriously, you know. And and and auto blog was massive back in the day. They were. I
mean, it was the place to go when there was an auto show. Yeah, you knew you were gonna probably hear it from from Autobots. Yeah, it was
it was impressive. It wasn't that fun, you know. I, you know, and and there there would be weird things like all they wanted, all they wanted out of life, was a very good static front three quarter photo of a car, right? So I remember when I knew I was quitting, but when I the day I decided, you know, I'm going to tell him I'm quitting. It was a Cadillac CTS Coupe launch, a second gen CTS, and I turned in 2000 words without a typo, and they didn't do a single edit because I they I read it, and I had a black coupe. I was with Dan Neal, and and our time to shoot it was noon in in in Wine Country in July, so you imagine what those photos looked like. And I said, and I said, just use the press photos. It's fine. And they're like, nope, has to be an original front three quarter static shot. And I'm like, sorry. By the way, I turned in 2000 words. You didn't do a single edit on. Like, don't you care about that? Like, nope. And so, I'm
sure it had some SEO the way that image search was going at the time
could have been that. I think just that's the way Neff liked it. Honestly, I think that's just that was his preference. Yeah, which is his site, so it's fine. But you know, just wasn't very creative, and it was weird that I had to like leave AutoBlow to go to Motor Trend to like be able to like write creatively again. I
feel bad asking this, but is Audubon still a thing?
They are, but I think I know I know the guy that's kind of running it now. I think what happened was they they fired everybody like two years ago. I think they literally had AI bots replace them because like everyone got fired, that news went out, and then the next day they had like 10 new writers, but like we're googling the names and like nothing except for the auto blog. So either they were in, and and they were all like you know like Pakistani or Indian names, you know. So it was either that like they just never posted on the internet before, or they didn't exist the day before. Now they sort of have some people, but I know the guy that's running it, and he was telling me like his monthly freelance budget got chopped from like you know what it got chopped by two thirds, whatever it was, and it wasn't very much.
And Jalobzig now just plays the game of how many steps can we remove this from cars and still make it related to cars. Which
it's so I don't even like like at some point a friend of mine was running it, and he said, "Hey, would you? It's a 20th anniversary. Would you contribute something? And I was like, sure. Then he was like, Yeah, we're not even gonna do anything because nobody fucking cares. You know, that's the worst feeling. Yeah, I have I have
one last Davy thing because yeah, I think I've told this before, but you know, Davy has a lot to do with the name Hoonigan because because Davy was just obsessed with the word hoon.
Hoon.
He loved the word hoon, and me and him at like 2o'clock in the morning one night on you know instant messenger, we're talking back and forth, and he's like, we need to take this word and make it a word that Americans know,
right? Because he's Australian, right? Yeah.
So we started to. He's like, I'm gonna, we're gonna start like using it in Gelop. Okay, here's the first headline that has ever used the word "hoon" in it, right? And then eventually you guys have like Hoon of the Day, right? Oh yeah. And then I was like, "I'm gonna one up you. I'm gonna put Hoon on the cover of a magazine. So it was like I think it was like hooning like STI or something like that when I drove a car up to you know. And then Ken heard the name was like I kind of love the word Hoon yeah and that is how and then we get when he did Jungkana one zero to 60 gave him Hoon of the Year as like a fake award for the first film and he loved it so much he put it on a t shirt that T shirt did really well and then that eventually became you know the yeah the portmanteau that is you know, Hoon and Hooligan to Hoonigan, yeah. So like Davy has always had like I I don't get to talk about it much, and again I want to give him that credit for it because his like weird penchant for pushing that word into our lexicon made a brand name.
Can I give you a funny counterpoint? I don't know if you were there. I know Farrah was there for certain, but remember, good old Amel, yeah, party in Amel's house in Venice, and Spinelli and I are standing there, and I can't remember who the guy is. But this guy walks up to us, and he's like, "Yeah, he's like, "You know, I used to really like Jalobnik before it got tainted by Hoonage, and then Spinelli and I were like, "Ah, the taint of Hoonage. I'm like that. That's your biography. Taint of Hoonage is great, and by the way, Hoonage is a
Descendants reference because it's bikage, right? And Mary, and like all their songs had the ag Coolidge. This guy just
literally said, "You've been tainted. It's been tainted by Hoonage, and I was like, "That's a great name. Yeah, that's a great. I mean, then Hoonigan went
to go do that to the entire industry. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The hoon, the taint of hoons. And again, you're right
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