Chief Magazine: Tell me about the big picture.
Grant Lyons: For what we do, if you look at everything in its simplest form, it is a country like ours, an affluent country of 300 million people whose cost of living is going up and up and up and up. So in order to make profit, companies have to sell things cheaper. You start outsourcing, so the emerging nations are making everything for us. And what happens when you don’t need the people who are working here, because I can do it at a quarter of the price and make double the profit by outsourcing. Because we outsource at such a rapid rate, and the cheaper things became ... we just wanted more. If the washing machine broke, we’d get a new one because it’s cheaper to get a new one.
No one does repair anything anymore.
Where does it go?
It turns to waste.
Times a billion. Times three hundred thousand. So we have to learn to operate at a human level. If you get married and you go through your registry like I’ve had to do in my time, you see the plates here and the plates in Europe, the plates here are physically bigger. The dinner plate is bigger.
And the food is faster.
The beds are bigger. It’s an alternate society.
Rather than making things smaller or more reasonable, if you couldn’t afford something large, you can just buy it the same size but cheaper and less sturdy. It’ll just be smaller, more disposable.
It’s so easy to bash outsourcing and “Globalization is the end of the world” and all that stuff. It’s not good.
I know. It’s bad.
Anonymous Quibbler: I think it’s very beneficial to people in foreign countries.
What, globalization?
Outsourcing. It creates jobs for people in India and China.
Sure, no, it’s definitely ... poverty, I think, is a much bigger problem than globalization.
Oh good. We’re in agreement.
You can’t just look at globalization...some communities benefit, some don’t, it’s different. I think that there should be a common policy worldwide that people should be able to earn a living and own their own land, etc., etc., but with everything there has to be a balance. Something happened here where too much was getting made, where even the conditions where people are working overseas in factories are diabolical...
Conditions used to be like that in the United States, too.
They did, but there really isn’t a sense that there’s anything being done about it. We had unions here and the unions in the beginning were very good and they protected the worker.
It’ll all happen eventually overseas, as the competition for labor increases, and [unintelligible] goes up.
Well, that’s on the human level. On a consumption and a transport and an emissions level, that’s another side of the agreement, and what we try to do is bring balance, and at the moment there’s an imbalance. The manufacturing of goods and the disposal of waste in China is out of control, so we aren’t seeing any improvements or any kind of calculated approach to a solution of manufacturing, cleaner manufacturing, of cleaner waste disposal, and the only way to push that agenda is to threaten, to say, “We’re not gonna do it anymore.”
Couldn’t you just tax waste?
You have the real world and you have what happens in Policyland. The real world is that people are dying in China because they’re standing there with a battery taking the lead, with a flame underneath it and all those toxic fumes are being breathed in and they’re dying at 37 years old. If you’re going to work for the world, you’ve got to work like the world. Your people need to be able to buy a house, to buy food, and the money that you’re earning from Mr. and Mrs. America here must be used to improve conditions.
The wealth is extremely unevenly distributed but I’m sure conditions in China have improved for lots of people.
Yeah, you know it’s just being responsible for a particular policy. No one’s ever happy. There’s never a winner.
There are winners!
In a situation where on the surface it seems great, people are suffering.
I would argue that the winners from globalization so far are corporate America, people who have ownership interests in corporate America. I mean if you look at returns [unintelligible]...they’ve gone way up in the last 20 years.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that it’s not profitable. Clearly, those people are making money. Those are the ones that are running it.
There are two beneficiaries, one is corporate America, the other is skilled and unskilled people in China and India and places like that...
Not if health conditions are causing people to die young.
But they were dying young before this stuff.
But now you’re specifically helping to cause it, so if you’re involved it’s like why shouldn’t there be sanctions, not just fines, but regulations on how things are handled there?
Oh, I think it probably should be regulated. [laughing]
I think that’s the only issue.
I think a lot of people want to cut off globalization more out of, because they wanna protect their jobs, or...
I’m not an isolationist, I wouldn’t...
Rather than because they wanna help...that’s people who are like...
I like people who aren’t from America too.
The whole labor conditions issue is generalized because war used to kind of, stop globalization so there are more jobs for people in America and less jobs for people abroad, rather than...
I don’t think there are less jobs for people abroad...
It’s what takes you into recession from an economic point of view. There’s no real measure of the social impact of the environmental impact.
I think the social impact could be negative in the short term definitely. Just ‘cause you have...
I understand that people need to earn a living.
I’m saying the social impact could be very negative, I’m not arguing your point. Just ‘cause in the U.S. you have all these people displaced in places like Ohio and Michigan who used to have jobs in manufacturing and now don’t have jobs, and then in China and India you have this huge dichotomy of wealth that didn’t use to exist, so you have all this crime and stuff, and all these people feeling left out.
It sounds like an imbalance.
It’s kind of like a social disaster in the short term, but in the long term...
We’ll see. It’s all about opinions. That’s why I do what I do. You’ve gotta try and make things simpler and more fun and more creative, because it’s bland, the landscape’s bland. It seems bizarre when you tell people, “I want to use the Internet to fight global warming.” You have to explain it, which is obviously understandable but it’s a positive thing. It’s about encouraging, using the Internet at its highest level and not its lowest common denominator, which is TV shows and magazines and newspapers and websites; everything is 800x600; break the mold, take it further. What do you mean advertisers won’t go for it? Advertisers go for space on the internet and pay thousands of dollars for it and it’s that big, you know.
And no one clicks on it.
Yeah. So you offer a full page. It’s interactive. And somebody’s telling you “Hmm, I think advertisers will be skeptical.”
It’s just because they haven’t seen it proven 100% in front of them before, and there’s a lack of imagination. What you gotta do in instances like this is you sell the ad, you say “Hey, we’re gonna do an online magazine. This is the pixel width and height. Give us this ad.” They’ll say, “Wow, that’s a really big ad.” And you’ll say, “Exactly.” And you put it on there with the interactivity into it and say, “There’s your ad, check it out.” And then they’re like “Oh!” You sneak it past them somehow, you can’t propose the magic. You have to show them.
As you said, I can send a full page ad. I have an [unintelligible], this is for the bigger magazines, people making their own mags, social network of...you’ll be able to make your own magazine online.
Using the application?
Right, we’re giving it away. It’s a smaller version but it corresponds to basically 8 ½ x 11. The whole community is that while I’m talking to ad agencies now to get advertisers to pre-give us a pool of interactive ads. People make their own.
For a template.
Well, no, it adds that already, so you’re making your magazine, or your photo-essay, whatever you want.
You just plug them in.
Yeah.
And then get paid.
Yeah. Well, that’s proper thinking. We can’t be fucking around with everything that’s out there.
Page splits here
You’re bringing it together. You’re getting creative individuals who want to make the magazine and you’re providing them with the resources, both the application and then financial backing. The advertisers win—
If you get a thousand hits, maybe you’ll get twenty bucks, who knows. If you get a million hits...whatever it’s worth, it’s worth. Full page ads, magazine format, everybody knows the magazine format, everybody loves the magazine format, everyone’s trying to fucking run away from the magazine format.
Advertisers are getting what they pay for anyway.
It’s all a full page ad. We don’t offer anything else. Full page ads are part of the magazine experience. Now clever advertisers are gonna understand that for the same money, you can try harder. And it becomes like an interactive game. Or an online forum, or a store.
Any way you’d like to use that space.
A video blog, it could be anything.
There are things like outside of the box, like subservientchicken.com, the Burger King thing. People were talking about that forever and spending thirty minutes on that site making a chicken do stuff. It’s an ad, and it’s brilliant. You don’t mind because it’s interactive.
You want me, entertain me.
I’m not gonna sit there and watch your commercial. It has to be something I can fuck with and that’ll fuck with me back. That’s what it is: if it’ll fuck with me back, then you got me.
That’s interactive.
It’s not just me affecting it; if it’ll affect me back with its weirdness, that’s something.
Or just something fun, even if it’s stupid, that’s how things move around, but I’d like to do them a little smarter. But the subservient chicken was perfect. It’s a difficult thing to do, if you’re Burger King first of all because you’re this big target, and they appeal to...
They did a fine job. I like the way a lot of their advertising has been lately. The big king head really does it for me. I think it’s delightful. They made video games that they gave away with Happy Meals. They’re taking chances. It’s strange.
They aren’t fucking around. That’s war out there, the burger wars.
That’s deadly serious.
That’s just life and death. They go for the jugular.
Those Jack-in-the-Box commercials are hysterical. Their mascot is a sonofabitch. Nobody else has done it. He’s just a sonofabitch. He’s got this big stupid clown face and he’s constantly getting into fist fights, I think he snatched a purse and he just ran and was tackled and beaten up. He’s just a sonofabitch. That’s just darling. You’ve got me. It’s fine. It’s nice. A little change. But what year was it that you started the magazine, the project?
I don’t even know. The last six years have been First Drive-related stuff, it actually started with the cars to you know... I just thought I needed to create something for people in big cities that just order a car. It had to obviously be fuel-efficient and then it had to be safe and of course it became safe [unintelligible] ... next year, we think it’s next year, there’ll be an online catalog of like eight models of cars, probably four hybrids and four cars that get more than 35 mpg. They’re preconfigured and prepackaged and you just order them. Two months later it’s ready with your paperwork. It’s fair-priced. I have my dealers for the tri-state distribution ready. But what I really want to do with that is kind of position it and sell it to a Starbucks so that they can roll it up from you know, big cities where they are, advertise on the cups, and any money that’s made on the deal, and at the moment it’s just $100 commission, we’d donate to the green/environmental fund of whoever orders the car, they can choose where it goes. The only people I can see doing something like that is a Virgin or a Starbucks, they wouldn’t have to spend much marketing.
Starbucks would be really great.
It’s good for them, and we can get paid and go build another green initiative, which is another thing we do.
So you were just sitting at home six years ago, thinking “I wanna start this green initiative thing, and cars seem like the way to go.” What was the impetus?
My wife’s family is in cars, they were in cars, they had dealerships in South Africa and London and in America. And I got to understand what the process was really like and I thought, “For people like me, it could be a lot simpler.” I think I spoke to them at length about it, about what if I did this and would you be okay with it? Would it be okay if I packaged a car with you and somebody ordered it online and I gave you the order? And the customer was really happy with you because you didn’t have to negotiate? The price you’re getting is the price you’ve pre-negotiated, would you be okay if someone ordered it online through me? And I would get $100 which I wanna give away? “Yeah, sure! That’s a great idea.” And if you know anything about pitching an idea to family, it’s great. But they thought that was a good idea, so I kind of moved ahead.
What were you doing at the time though?
At the time, Ron, one of my business partners, he used to be my boss at a start-up and I jumped ship from that place and said “Look, I think this is bullshit. Let’s go do something together.” So we started up a design and technology firm, and that still goes and plans all the initiatives that we’re doing now, so we’re still an interactive group. We kind of moving that into becoming a first-rate interactive group where we just think about good ideas that benefit the planet, people, and make profit, because we do want to make profit. But we think the more profit we can make, the more we can put it into other businesses. And this isn’t like the bandwagon green businesses like, “This is organic cotton made in Istanbul,” that kind of bullshit, and Wal-Mart’s organic produce section that comes in from Thailand and China that they’ve shipped over.
So let’s talk positive solutions.
Page splits here
Your wife and her family are involved, so how does that... walk us through the evolution of FirstRide if you could.
I liked hybrids. I thought that they versus what I was reading about—ethanol versus the hybrid technology—was the way to go. I always thought: What would I want if I was going to buy a car? So I actually went through the whole process. I found my brother-in-law and I said I wanted a Honda Civic hybrid, I wanted it with the nav system in it, and I wanted it in white. I said “Would you take an order for a car like this?” He said of course. I said how about I just... I’d like some better forum for my site for people who want to order this car just how I’ve configured it. Because you’re just gonna order it.
And it wasn’t a thing.
So I spoke to Toyota and Nissan and every dealer I spoke to said of course.
I guess it was easy for you because you’d done the research and you’re aware of it, and you were following technology.
Yeah, but just as a consumer, not as a specialist or an analyst.
As an educated consumer.
Yes, I was educating myself on the process of selection.
The service that you’re doing is not for someone who’s just like “Gimme a hybrid!”
It’s for absolute non-car people like me.
Like a total novice. “I want a white hybrid with a navigation system.”
I sprayed it
avocado.
Sprayed it avocado?
I did. It’s beautiful.
I’ve seen it.
It’s nice. It’s so beautiful you could throw up. You could say “Oh my god, I love this car.”
That’s a nice line.
People either love it or hate it, but when I drive in, like everybody looks. You just feel it. Everybody looks. So I’m kinda driving the car around to bring the attention to greener driving, when I’m driving at least I’m driving a hybrid, at least I’m bringing attention to it. I don’t have any plans to make money from the use of it. I have plans to make money from the idea. And that’s what we did as an interactive group of people. That’s what’s exciting. We can go into any industry. We’re in publishing and we’re in cars and we’re on the Internet. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks either, because we pay for everything.
And it’s funded by your interactive design firm which was a start-up from years ago.
Yes. But the great thing about—one of the things we did was because our existing clients just didn’t push us enough and we wanted to get better work, we became our own clients for four years. And by working something so consistently over four years, we’ve evolved so well that we can launch companies on our own without anybody and then just have people come in with the cash to say “Oh, we’ll take that,” and now we’re gonna market that. That’s why we don’t actually share anything we’re doing beyond like 300 people, and those are all people whose opinions we value and consider friends and colleagues over the years and they move it out, but our businesses are coming up with ideas and trying to sell those ideas, and those ideas have to be good for everybody consuming.
Profitable ideas, but not necessarily green ideas.
Your brand can also profit. FirstRide Cars is like a brand builder. So Starbucks will come into that space and say “Responsible.” All the money we make goes back into building this better and anything over and above that is going to charities that we all know and love. You decide. And that is where mainstream production can be really good.
So then you sort of package it for ‘em, make a proposal, make a meeting, pitch the idea, pitch the business, essentially, and they say, “This is worth this much.”
And I’ll say, “Well, what if you could attract sponsors within this space and sell full page ads to them? And let that money go to paying your maintenance of it and your profit could go to any charity you decide?” There’s always a deeper level you can take the platform.
So ultimately it goes beyond a numbers game and turns into some sort of sharing of ethics or morals, I guess.
Yeah it is, to a point. If you build a good business with good values then you should be able to make money, and people who are supporting you will support you because they know not only do you always try to do good by everybody but you’re up front with them about when you make money and how you make money and that you want to make money, but you’re always gonna try to make it better for them. And for yourself.
There’s no reason that business has to be inherently evil, and being profitable doesn’t immediately demand that you destroy the Earth and fuck over everyone. Clearly you’re providing alternatives: profitable but also guilt-free.
Idealism is front and center absolutely, which for me it’s like, be idealistic. It hurts to be an idealist, it hurts because you’re constantly gonna get fucked, but you have to continue to be an idealist. So you have to take the values of an environmentalist but the skepticism of someone on Wall Street who’s always watching their line... who really wants to help you. The same issues you had when you were ten you have when you’re forty, and in any business it always comes down to who’s willing to take a chance to help you and themselves, and who’s not. People tend to be more comfortable doing the wrong thing.
Is there a risk involved in this? If all these ideas and businesses are so interrelated and there’s this core of 300 colleagues and everyone shares this responsible nature and everybody shares this desire to make money—
But not everybody does. It’s like having a TV show that a few people get invited to watch. Not everybody believes in the work we’re doing; only we do. But there’s an element of goodness to this and there’s a definite element of trying to be more creative about everything that we do. We’re appealing to advertisers who get it and we’re appealing to clients who want to build their space. It doesn’t have to be a magazine; it’s an interactive space made of pages. It’s all about the pages. So—you actually said it once, and I thought it was interesting because that’s what the undercurrent of our greener mags environment is—it’s an alternative way to blog. That’s what we need. In their simplicity, the things we do are just very nice, good ideas, but the creativity behind those ideas from an advertising perspective and from a community of people who make pages and spreads that they can share with each other is intense because it’s definitely an alternative to blogging. You control the interface. With your blog you don’t.
A blog is one page, essentially. To give people multiple pages... people can mess with their interface as much as they want, but if this is actually provided to the people, it’ll be the death of blogs.
I don’t want to kill blogs.
But you’ll transform them into something else. It’ll be a rebirth of the feeling people got when they first started making zines, and that’s the beautiful thing.
Which are long forgotten by mainstream people.
Outside of small punk clusters of people that do it.
We’ve let ourselves go.
It’s the death of print media. You can only print so many and you have to mail or hand over the shit, but with Myspace and Facebook and the internet in general, you send out a mass e-mail and everybody clicks your link and they get your zine. Except they don’t get the zine now, just the Myspace and Facebook and blog, and to be honest all of those, no matter how tweaked out they are, look like shit. It doesn’t matter how many applications or alterations, it’s still garbage.
Which is actually why we’re building Greener Mags as a Facebook app as well. Their platform needs to evolve, so we’ll just go full speed.
I’m watching it now, and Facebook is gonna supernova.
I’ve finished two weeks of research on it and it’s just fucking crazy.
It’s gonna supernova. It’s pulling a little Myspace for itself. It’s gonna destroy Myspace. I’m thrilled. Fucking do it. Do it because it’s done and it’s great. I’ve got both, I maintain both, but they’re horrible. Facebook was beautiful to me because it was a departure from Myspace, and now I’m watching it become the same thing in a two-week span. I’ve been a member for two weeks and I feel like I’ve been touched in a dirty place with how fast this thing’s changed.
We’re entering the world as the Facebook developers now. Greener Mags is an idea we’re actually raising money for, I really believe that that’s the future of this kind of communication. I thought “Do I go to National Geographic or Virgin and say 'Here’s something that’s great for you'?" But this is mine. This is totally ours so I wanna raise the money for it and fucking just—
I think that’s the way to do it. With how big of an idea that this could be, to have any kind of corporate identity from the front, anything other than the actual name—it would be diminished. It’d be a terrible thing. No one would take it seriously. It’d be seen as a form of advertising from the start and brushed off.
The great thing is that if you don’t want to include ads, you don’t have to.
But it’d still be “Virgin presents: the magazine.”
Yeah, they would totally want that. You’re always kind of in a battle of “What do you do to bring money in to fund something?”, as you know. How far do you take it? What’s acceptable and what’s not?
Page splits here
A lot less is acceptable if it’s your baby. If it’s a project you’re working on, a project is a project. A business venture that you think from the start as a business venture, you can sell that to death because it’s about setting that free. If you have something that’s actually your baby, that you came up with and are proud of, and you can see everywhere it can go, all the potential that’s out there—to see someone else so casually swipe it, because you let in the devil. It’s bad. You hold onto things like that.
That’s why I think there’s something wrong with me sometimes.
You hold onto too much?
I hold it out there. I’m sharing my idea. You wanna race me to build it? Go ahead, cause I’ll fucking do it. You can’t do it.
That’s just balls. You have big balls.
But it’s like, do I file the patent on my interface? No.
Can you?
You can. You can file for a long time and it’ll cost you a lot of money. You’ve got GoogleMaps that functions in a similar manner, the whole click-and-drag, multiple pages behind this one, and the iPhone—
The fluidity of it.
Yeah. It seems intuitive to me as a designer and that’s why we wanted to create this space. But me in particular, as someone who loves magazines, the fucking blogs are killing design. They destroyed design. You gotta look at how you think; before as an artist or as a designer you could approach the media and it was very tangible and if you wanted to make a painting of this table, you fucking use this table. But with the monitor, they said “These are your restrictions.” So you’ve got the most powerful form of media in the world, not thinking literally outside of that monitor size, and outside of your computer and whatever aspect ratio it is. That’s it. Is it just me?
Maybe. [Laughs]
That’s what it feels like. Because I talk to people and as I show them they’re like, “Wow.”
The other thing that blows my mind is when, from the Gutenberg press until now... We’re talking with designers, designing the print magazine...
I was just talking about this three days ago, you just freaked me out!
It’s all right; I’m just reading your mind. But we’re talking with designers, asking what can we do that hasn’t been done within the constraints of a magazine that has pages, that has so many images or words, that has a front and back cover, that we can do fold-outs, posters, different things, but it’s like, to a certain extent so much has been done so you really gotta learn everything, then forget it all, and then try and do it. But now, the time frame, the press to now, it’s been—the most pessimistic point of view is that it’s all been done. But then you think about the birth of the Internet, and even sooner, the blog is just a few years old. What I’m saying is maybe now is the time shit will supernova and now people...
They’re talking about this as being a kind of renaissance.
The dot-com came and went financially with the boom, but it may happen again on a totally different level. Like blogs are free, that was a revolution.
That’s the whole 1.0, 2.0 kind of thing.
Exactly.
There’ll be a dot-com bomb 2.0. Because it’s another start-up at the moment. There are 5,000 developers on Facebook that are building applications—the huge battle between Slide and Rockstar Games, or whatever—but it’s war. This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the new communications tools that people are going to adopt. As much as I love Facebook—and we’re going to be developing on Facebook—there have to be some groups of people that are coming in and fighting for creativity again and fighting for people who actually like design. Because online there’s gonna be no Dwell (?) where you can go, “Oh Dwell, beautiful house...” You can’t get that. If I allow the publishing industry to just go, “pdf”, we’re all fucked. It’s like saying the world is flat. And every day I’m confronted with people who think the world is fucking flat.
So what do you do, say “Thanks for your time, see ya later”?
No, I don’t sell ‘em anything, ever. I just sit back and say “I wanna talk to you about what you’re doing. I don’t give a fuck about what I’m doing, I wanna know what you’re doing, and if what you’re doing is interesting then I’m interested. And then I’ll tell you about what I’m doing.”
That’s interesting, you don’t even bring it up?
Never.
So you’re just opening the door and letting people explain. They’re starting with the fact the world is flat. You basically ask them “What’s the world?” and let them say “Flat”, and you can just walk back out.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a normal guy. I live in Connecticut; I have a kid; I’m having another baby in December. Life is exciting but it’s scary as all hell. I’m just a normal guy. It’s not me saying I’m Galileo. This is absolutely just the reality that I’m confronted with. Most people do think it’s kind of flat, and they’ve accepted that because they’re never gonna go to the edge anyway.
You were mentioning with iPhone slide and GoogleMaps and that kind of thinking that you’re working with, expanded boundaries. I was reading Grant Morrison, who says that in the field of creativity there’s this thing called mind weather where there are things that just permeate, and there are people at different places around the world that are all having the same thought at once. You can see it, it’s not just like bullshit like with film where all of a sudden there are a lot of Dracula films. That’s control. That’s them deciding what’s gonna be hot this summer. It’s more than that—at an actual creative level, you’re seeing things happen in the same direction. Do you think it was just that people were all at the same time fed up with the actual monitor box? Because this is all in the last year.
Advertising brainwashes in cycles, and policy does the same thing. The fact that GM, Chrysler, and Ford all got into trouble at the same time—all ran out of ideas at the same time—is because they thought of the same business plan, which is “Okay, we’re after all of these apples, let’s all of us go in there.” The Japanese car makers came and said “We’ll just make a smaller car and make it simple and get better at engineering,” and all of a sudden, we know what happened. That being the case, Toyota and Hyundai and Nissan will run into trouble in a hundred years as well, unless they shake the thinking again.
PreviewI don’t think it’s a hundred years anymore.
Yeah, it’s probably forty maximum.
I kinda blew my mind thinking of cars in a hundred years, like “Wow, are we still gonna do that?”
Cars are only 1908. Now we’re just kind of evolving from the internal combustion engine.
That sorta shit blows my mind too. I’ll just touch on this, but sometimes I’m smoking a joint and I’m thinking “Really? Nobody’s come up with something better yet?” I get the fear that it’s like, not only has someone come up with something better, or already has done it, but most likely they’ve been killed.
The electric car, you saw that?
It’s like Tesla—someone who’s an actual genius coming up with higher-level thinking, creating things that might be a change in evolution.
It doesn’t work long-term. Or are we just another batch of people who tried to bring up ideas that overthrow inertia? Are we just part of this group that gets crushed in five years time and you hear from them in another thirty years?
We would be, to be honest, you would be, if you weren’t at all concerned with a profit, with making that thing that’s better and not going out on your own and saying...
Profit protects me and these ideas. It allows me to do more.
Not only does it allow you to do more, but it allows you to work within a larger whole, and that is not seen as a threat. Anytime that you’re gonna take that idea as “my idea, I’ll never share it,” you’re dead.
I love that. People ask me that.
That’s what it is. That allows it to not be that small voiceless crowd that’s getting destroyed constantly. It’s like, this is something I can give to this ugly giant and it’s less destructive. I was going to ask you, do you have any thought or fear of these things you’re working on, is there a wrong answer involved? Is there a way that your applications, your creations could be used in a negative light? It doesn’t seem like it.
If somebody takes something from something that we do, it’s probably a positive thing in the first place. If somebody created [unintelligible]...who cares. There are enough people in the world. I think we’ll do it in a different way. I also think that people who would adopt the ideas and who would do evil with it and it’s obvious—if they tried to do it large-scale they’ll be found out. We’ve established enough of a presence at a high enough level that these ideas are out there and we were obviously first, just from an integrity point of view, the people who I reach out to won’t leave me for that competition, for the same reason that a Mac user won’t go and buy a PC if they invent another product, which they did. After 25 years, you come out on top, and I don’t mind waiting 25 years because I know that I’ll always push myself before somebody makes a phone call to say “Hey, you should do that.” I’m already on it. And working like we do—keeping things very lenient, leaving the city after 10 years, deciding that Brooklyn was the place for us to start again—was the best thing we ever did.
That was not
even a year ago.
We were working on 19th Street—we have a studio there—and we just said
“We’re not really practicing what we preach. Let’s go undercover and disappear.
Reinvent our thinking.” Some people go to college and do an MBA.
What did you study?
I studied art, fine art. That’s another conversation.
Website