(upbeat music)
- When I get into the car, my face is constantly hurting,
because I'm smiling ear to ear.
If you pop up on three wheels,
it's like being on a roller coaster, even better.
I work my ass off.
Being able to step into my car, it's just a huge joy.
I'll put my three year old niece in there
and just hit the switch once,
and she's holding on to the steering wheel
and just screaming.
That brings that out in grown ass men.
So my '63 Impala SS, aka the T1000,
I always wanted to build a low rider based on the T1000
from the Terminator.
Since I was a kid, the '63 tail lights
always reminded me of the T1000
with the red eyes and the fish scale,
the holographic look of it.
I'm super stoked.
It's finally finished.
Had the trunk done, got some great sounds,
just did a basic set up in it.
Two pumps, Marzocchi 11 gear box to the front,
eight batteries and something good enough
to be able to roll around and hit some switches
and have some fun.
That's what it's all about.
Ultimately, I had a lot of fun making that build,
but it all built up to my holy grail,
which is my '64 Impala SS, Black Sabbath.
Always wanted to theme a car
out of Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osborn.
It just seems like that color way, everything about it
was just evil and just bad ass.
It's a 327 turbo fire engine, four speed, really bad ass.
I've never driven a four speed,
but I always wanted one in an Impala,
so it just kinda all worked out.
So the only thing that I've changed
on this car is the wheels.
So it's a 72 spoke, 13s.
They're 90s iron casted Daytons with the skinny spokes
and the baby nipples.
You got the dog ear knock offs and the 24 carat gold plated.
As a kid, you just see them and you're like,
"Yeah, that's what's up."
The deeds, the Daytons, you throw those on there,
you hear them in music,
and they're just classic, the wire wheels.
The fact that this thing is OG,
and it's just so bad ass, I've been contemplating,
"Should I cut it or not?"
I have the '63 that's got juice in it,
but I kind of just have to, every single time I'm driving it
it drives so smooth, but I put my hand down there
ready to hit some switches, and it's just like,
"Ah, I have to do it."
But I'm enjoying it for now.
Every time that I look through it, I find something new.
If you know what you're looking for,
you can kind of identify that.
It's a unicorn.
This thing is rare.
You see the kick panels in there.
You see the mileage.
There's so many different things that are really cool
about it that you'll never see.
It came with its dealer book.
Say you go to the dealer,
and you're going through the whole sales process.
They open it up.
You can see the car.
You pick the Impala.
You go to the fabric, and they're like, "What do you want?
"The aqua blue?"
It kind of throws you back in time,
because it puts you through the process
of what somebody went when they bought the car in '64.
So I grew up in Reno, Nevada.
It's a beautiful place.
You're close to the rivers, to Lake Tahoe
and all those things, but it's also a place
that's really small.
It's a place where you gotta grow up really quickly.
You're exposed to all sorts of stuff.
I mean you walk into a 7-11,
I'm used to seeing slot machines and people chain smoking
as soon as you walk in trying to get a Slurpee.
I come from a family that had very limited resources.
We didn't have a lot of money,
and getting school supplies and even school clothes
was a completely different experience for me.
I remember going to Salvation Army or where ever it was
with a bag and be like, "Okay, go get your school clothes."
My family's from Guatemala.
My dad's from Mexico.
My grandparents are French Guatemalans,
so we got a really cool mix.
But growing up here, my mom didn't know English.
I taught my mom how to speak English
when I was a little kid.
While I was still in grade school learning,
I was in the welfare line with my mom translating for her.
Like, "Oh, what are they saying?"
I'm like, "Oh, we can only get this much bags of food
"per household, because of this."
And she'd say, "How do you say this?"
That's something that I think as a young age,
being there for my mom, there was always a sense
of responsibility from day one.
And I just always knew that I had to be there
to help my mom.
That's one of my most proudest things
is that I taught my mom how to speak English
as a child, (laughing) so I'm proud of that.
Having limited resources and not having some of those things
available to us as a minority family, Latino family,
it just naturally builds this drive in you
that you just want better for yourself.
My mom has been a huge part of my success,
my motivation, just being able to support our dreams
and to be there to kick our butt too.
It was something that she played both roles
for our whole lives basically.
And something that was really important for me
is to have her support.
She was there for everything,
for the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it.
I owe everything to my family and the people around me.
For me, when I was 12 years old,
I was skating and jumping fences, drinking 40s,
smoking blunts, hanging out at the swap meet,
going to the bands, where we're like,
"Hey where can we get pocket knives?"
And things like that.
We were just, kids are like that.
Maybe that's just what it's like growing up in Reno.
We were around things like drugs and drinking and partying
at a super young age.
And I think a big part of what made me react
and some of my friends were like,
"How do we escape from this?"
I think being around such negativity really just drove
a natural recipe for destruction.
And for me, just being able to get out of that
was all I wanted, and I didn't even know that.
I didn't realize that as a young age,
I was self destructing.
I don't think any 12 year old kid should deal with that.
In Reno, Nevada, where I grew up, one of the biggest things
that anybody that grows up there
is going to Hot August Nights.
I mean, I remember seeing the ads on the freeway.
It's like, "Win this '57 Chevy Bel Air!"
Or, "Win this Impala!"
And that's when I really fell in love with the cars,
because it's a town where everybody
has a classic car in their garage,
whether it's working or not, you see them
and you're just stoked on them.
Kids, the biggest thing that we had was our imagination.
When we saw cars at the car show, that was free.
That was something that we could go and enjoy as a family
and not have to spend money.
We can just visually look at that and be inspired by it
and it was really bad ass.
Something that was cool was when I started investigating
in the car and inspecting it,
I mean I looked at the license plates,
"1998 Reno Gazette Journal, Hot August Nights,"
I'm like, "Dude this car was meant for me.
"Like I swear it was just waiting for me in this garage."
And I just knew I had to have it.
Somewhere where we always looked up to was Los Angeles.
The culture just spoke to us,
the low riding scene or the skate boarding scene.
You'd see the skate videos and you're like,
"I want to go to that spot in LA and hit that rail
"or do this trick there."
And you were just amused by it,
and you were just impressed by it,
and you just wanted to live that life.
Wanting to get to LA to skate the spots,
to see the cars, to see the underground shows,
that was the dream.
And since then, I've always just pushed myself
to get out of there.
And I think so many things that had happened to me
at a young age that it was just,
I'm happy it happened then.
Because I went through my trials and tribulations
as a young child, whether it was through violence
or through just getting in trouble with the law
at a young age, in and out of doing these things
that were just self destructive.
And I realized, "I gotta get out of here."
And I ended up moving.
I felt like it was a breath of fresh air.
I was like, "Nobody knows me here."
And from there I kind of just really just wanted
to focus on positivity,
trying to focus on making an honest living,
whatever that was, find somewhere to make money
to continue to help my family and to help myself
do something that I wanted to do in a business.
When I was looking at that diary today,
it was kind of crazy because the year, it was 2008,
and I'm looking at it, and I'm reading it,
and I could see the frustration even in my handwriting.
It looks like I'm just, the pen is just grinding
to the paper like, "You gotta change, Josh,
"and the only way to do this," I said this to myself.
I wrote it down.
I said, "The only way that I'm gonna be happy
"is if I start a business, and I work for myself,"
along those lines, I knew it.
I had to, I was driven to such pain
that I had to write it down.
And I started looking through the pages,
and I'm just like, "Wow."
Seeing all these different parts of my life
that just I knew that I had to move away from.
I didn't even have a car,
but I would always be looking and the little classifieds.
It's like, "What classic cars are in there?"
I didn't even want a real car.
I wanted a low rider or a Karmann Ghia,
or I wanted a Bel Air.
And that was something that I always wanted to push to get.
And how was I gonna do that?
And the only way to do that is to just work hard
and in my mind, create a business,
something that I could control.
I could control my own destiny and manifest that.
All my friends were getting a lot better at skating
then I was, and I just wanted to document it.
And I had always had cameras in my hand.
I wanted to film them and just see those hammers go down.
When they landed a trick, I felt like I landed it.
But, I wanted to make full-length films.
And what was cool about that is it really kind of drove me
to make that final move to LA.
I was just filming all these local kids,
but they were so talented, and they inspired me.
And luckily I had met a really great friend of mine to date.
We're family now.
His name's Tosh Townend.
He's an old-school skateboarder from back in the day,
and I met him at Do Tour.
And him and I were just chatting up.
He's like, "You gotta come to Orange County, come skate."
He's like, "You can stay with me."
I had sold my Jeep to my little brother
just to cover my plane ticket to get to California.
So fast forward, I'm living with Tosh Townend on his couch.
He just had a baby.
His wife's like,
"Who's this dude that's living with us now?"
All these things happened so fast.
I had met a really great friend of mine, Mike Sinclair.
He was running the Toy Machine Team in Tum Yeto,
had met Euan Bowen at Thrasher.
And long story short, we just kind of all got a long,
and they gave me an opportunity to go on King of the Road
in 2012 and that's the holy grail as a skateboarder,
whether you're filming it or you're skateboarding in it.
It's like the Superbowl.
You go on King of the Road, you've achieved all.
And I was just so happy to go on it.
It changed my life, because after that,
I just realized that I wanted to get more
into different types of technology and media.
I was so inspired by that, I started filming commercials
and things like this.
So naturally, we're gonna get into new technology,
like virtual reality.
So, when we were doing a lot of really innovative VR work,
we did something with CBS graffiti artist,
turned fine artist, Greg Craola Simkins.
And six months after,
we had done this really cool piece together,
he reached out to us.
He's like, "Hey, I have a five year old niece.
"She was doing a back bend in her living room.
"She had a spinal stroke and became paralyzed
"from the belly button down.
"Is there anything you can do for her?"
And Jess and I just quickly went into,
we'd been exploring this vertical for some time,
and we don't know, but we'd love to learn about it
and see what we can do.
So we flew out to Kentucky
and stayed there for about 30 days,
learning about her paralysis.
How can we help her?
And the pull-away from that was
we were doing an assisted crawling exercise
where she has to pull, and it's painful for her.
She cries.
She doesn't like doing it.
What five year old wants to do two hours of PT
before school every day?
And we had put our headset on her,
and it was nothing medical.
It was actually a VR experience that we shot
at Christian Estoys skateboarding in a swimming pool,
and she just instantly tried to take his board away,
and she was smiling.
And we're like, "Cool, she's not throwing up.
"She's not dizzy, that's awesome."
They pulled us to the side and said,
"Here's the real analytical result of what just happened."
Her perception of pain was almost completely diminished.
She was willing to exert herself for a longer period of time
with more intensity, and her overall mental state
and engagement was just through the roof.
So we're like, "Holy cow!"
We wanted to create experiences to help her
through her rehabilitation and just quickly realized
that it was so much bigger than her and bigger than us.
And that's how we started Mieron VR.
And we create technology
that helps spinal cord injury patients through recovery.
And for me to do something that is my business
that is my everyday thing now,
and you're helping people around the world.
I mean, I couldn't ask for anything more.
It's changed my life, and we're gonna continue
to commit to create better technology, to keep it going.
Once you hit rock bottom, it's only up.
My whole life, whether it was the things
that I went through that were just negative,
at the end of the day, they're all positive,
because the silver lining is,
you're gonna learn something from that.
And I think something that I would tell the younger self
or anybody growing up is, "Believe in your dreams.
"And whether something really bad happens to you,
"just try to find the positivity in it.
"I know it's hard, but what can you learn form that mistake
"or from that incident?"
Against all odds, I've been able to elevate myself
to a place in my life where I can help other people
where I can help my family, from my skate family,
to my low rider family, to my music family,
to the people in the tech world.
My name is Josh Dubon.
I'm a tech entrepreneur, and I'm a Low Rider Roll Model.