Cruise Control

31:28And I think it's because we created a whole set of stories and platforms and events that were resonant. One quick question on the UK. And since you've been there for a while or you were there for a while. I've been spending more time there being in Paris and going over there and I worked for heaven. Yeah, it's amazing. And I worked for a UK based publication for 10 years and lived in London for a couple years. So like over the last 20 years, I've spent a lot of time there. I can really feel the effects of Brexit in Europe post COVID. And then also the war, the multiple wars are just really really felt in London because of the fact that a lot of the real estate is owned by people who are affected by these wars so I'm just curious like as you were leaving how did what was going on on the macro level affect your coverage or just how did you feel about london as as you got up and moved to to became a resident as you said of of new york city what years were you there like around what time my god i'm way older than you adam um i lived there from 05 i lived there from 04 to 06 and then i um i worked for a uk company from basically 2013 to 2023 well okay so my first stint in the uk was pretty much the year of 2012 and i think that was an olympic year and yeah my takeaway was like oh my god this the city of london in particular was like drunk on itself it was so optimistic fashion felt very lent in there was money swirling around uh and i i was like oh my god it's the greatest place in the world this is the global capital this is so tremendous and i remember feeling so energized and then so flat when i had to move back to australia um and then coming back in 2021 like this is how 2021 it was when my wife and i landed at heathrow we had to do a hotel quarantine to be allowed into the country that's how covidy it was yeah and um when the country and the city eventually opened back up i don't it just did not resemble the place that i experienced a decade earlier there was no doubt in my mind that brexit was just an incredibly consequential mistake that maybe the country won't recover from this generation i don't know but something has been lost for sure what hasn't changed and what you know i loved living there we really loved living there i was so sad to leave we had a great house great neighborhood it was awesome but what keeps me bullish is that that country and london especially it has a habit of producing some of the world's greatest creatives and if you look at like how and why hollywood productions are moving to the UK or the caliber of designers or fashion critics or any other kind of creative stylists that come out of the big schools there.

34:48It is a machine for producing some of the world's most talented and impactful creatives. And I think that they can win through culture. Obviously, you do note, yeah, a lot of the GCC folks who would probably fly in and spend a bunch of money especially in the summers like i think that's slowed down a lot i think that retail needs a big injection in the arm but you know we got a new we worked very close with caroline rush who was the head of the bfc for a long time it was fantastic and um you know myself and now marie clark our new editor of british gq will continue working very closely with laura weir to make sure that we can keep you know gq needs to play a part in making sure that retail sector and the designer space is stimulated and supported.

35:30Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's an interesting situation there. And it feels like walking back 30 years in some ways, but then, you know, all these amazing things came out of, have been coming out of that country long before it was a part of the European Union. So we'll see. Will you go to Fashion Week this month? Yes. Yeah, I'll go to a few shows. I didn't for a long time because a business of fashion, it didn't make sense for me to go. I would mostly go to Paris. But yeah, I'll go for a couple of days and see. But yeah, the last time I was there for more than like a day, I really felt that there had been a change.

36:17but I do think that London has become the best eating city in the world. And I hope that that doesn't, but it, it has, obviously it had a reputation in the nineties in particular, but it's the food there is amazing. Like the town. Oh my gosh. Yeah, of course. Um, okay. Oh my gosh. Sorry. You got me hungry. I still haven't eaten today. Rochelle the Canteen, River Cafe. It's all amazing. It's so good. The cafe is where we went to celebrate on the 17th of February. It's like no better place. That's amazing. Was that the day you got married or the day you were announced? Day of coffee shop. As editor of G.

36:57I know you recently got married also. I did. I did. That was great. That's fun. I mean, where else to celebrate but the River Cafe? That's amazing. Beautiful place. That's cool. Ruthie Rogers coming on the podcast soon. Sneak peek. The goat. Yeah, I'm excited. Okay. Okay, so you're there for a while. Will gets this rando job, just kidding, this job with Pharrell, which makes sense. Very excited for him. Me too. And you were immediately like, because you were in the mix, I don't know if you actually interviewed for Vanity Fair, but like that was your name popped up for that. People were big fans of yours that I talked to a lot.

37:45when the opportunity came up and you realized like it could be yours, what did you, like why did you want to do it? Why did you want to move to New York? Why did you want to try to make it work? First of all, I think it's like a tremendously huge honor and I feel very lucky and privileged to have a job like this. But I can see what you're getting at. It's like why go through all this? And frankly for me, it's like I told you about an odyssey that I started in Melbourne, Australia. I think I would have regretted it my whole life if I didn't put my hand up, put my best foot forward and give it a shot.

38:22And I think in those moments you have to just go for it. And it was, I mean, I had an incredibly inconvenient start to the year. I've been back and forth to New York from London so many times before I got to move here. I had to get a visa. My wife had to get a visa. We had to get married. Thank God we're already engaged. that the other company's like, it would be easier if you were married. Like, okay. You know, it's like it was a pain in the butt, but what else could I have possibly done? This is absolutely what I'm meant to be doing. So tell me what your big pitch to them was. My vision and my strategy was really built around three things.

39:03Number one, I felt strongly that GQ should be a magazine for and about men, even though like a heap of other people will read it and love it or contribute to it or be featured in it i think you should have the perspective of immense publication number two i felt no one can deny that gq was incredible for the past decade at fashion and at celebrity and in fact i really think that one of will's great gifts to gq was to like electrify our reputation in paris and in Milan and in Hollywood and in Atlanta and like all the big cultural hubs like that was well however like we've been so good at fashion and celebrity I wanted GQ to not just be the flagship of men's fashion I wanted GQ to be the flagship of what it means to be a guy and so for me that meant widening the aperture keeping fashion and celebrity super strong but adding in everything else a guy might care about so money and wellness and love and sex and some politics or whatever else it might be and doing those things in an incredibly sophisticated way in the hopes of giving many many more men a pathway into the GQ universe and part of one of the mottos I kind of lay down to the team has been big tent high taste so we're not going mass to like water everything down and be dull we need to maintain the tastes and the cool and all those things but we have to be more appealing to more people and third and finally i felt strongly that gq needs to have its strongest storytelling everywhere you take zach baron for example like if you're a zach baron super fan over the years the most you could have hoped for in an average year from zach was to read maybe one or two big print cover stories maybe get an ad hoc video here or there but effectively you had one of your biggest and brightest talents kind of kept on the bench until he was required.

41:02And one of the things that was pitched to me when I first arrived was, oh, hey, like, we'll do this special five episode series of Zach sitting down with masters of their craft. I'm like, yeah, but why is it five episodes? I think we should hear from Zach every week. I think people should build a parasocial relationship with Zach and GQ. Yeah, they already have one with him via his wife. Exactly. And, but they should be coming to GQ habitually and they should love Zach so much or get Zach so much that it's kind of irrelevant who his guest might be on any given week. They're like, I'm listening for Zach.

41:38And that to me is like the first step in building a habit with our audience that is not reliant on like the paradigms of the past of like random referral traffic or Facebook traffic. Like this is how you build a habit in the year 2026. You could argue we're like way late but better late than never okay so want to go back to your second point about making it i understand that like broaden the the diversify the topics yeah essentially but keep the like the vibe the vibe the same across all of it the thing that i would argue is that we live in a fragmented culture where the reason Wills GQ worked was because it was for fashion enthusiasts.

42:26The reason that niche magazines work versus the broader magazines is because they are pretty narrow in their scope. Why do you think when you look at something like the Condé portfolio, like a Glamour self or whatever, those magazines, some basically don't exist anymore because they were so broad. So how do you think in an age when we do have such a fragmented culture, how can you be broad, but still address that fact? This is it. This is the core tension because we've been told over and over again, and you'll heard this a million times like we're living in the sub the world of subcultures everyone's on their own algorithm you gotta go deep not broad um and i completely i've heard that advice over and over again however like even if i were to take i just think you can get niche to the point of shrinking yourself of like letting your shoulders round here's the thing gq is older than espn gq's older than cnn no one like not many people know this last year we had four billion global video views and so for me i'm like why are we limiting ourselves or why are we pretending we're this uniquely downtown prospect when in fact we're this incredibly influential title now in 21 different territories that can do things that others simply cannot and even when i follow your newsletter and look at the launches we've had recently like there is no shortage of big thick glossy pretty sexy polished biannuals quarterlies that go deep into the world of fashion and all those exist and they exist in a paradigm of like communicating to a very small circle of people um and they thrive and maybe some of them are pipelines to landing big commercial projects or maybe some of them are like collaborations between photographers and stylists but you know We're a ginormous worldwide business with a huge audience.

44:34And I feel compelled to, like, I feel cramped. And I like the idea of us stretching our legs out a little bit and challenging ourselves to be GQ everywhere. Not to be vague, not to be plain. Some people might have seen last week we published one of our first forays back into capital P politics with a midterms package. but we really did it in the high, low, cheeky, but well-reported spirit that people might've remembered from GQ's past, from maybe R. Coopers or Jim Nelsons. And I don't know, I think we can play them. Maybe you and I will do three more podcasts and in two years time, I'll be like, ah, nah, didn't really resonate, I don't know.

45:15But right now I feel like GQ needs to be big. Well, one thing I would say when you, when the job was, when you were going for the job, when that was happening, I do feel that there is a, I mean, there's obviously anti-woke sentiment, but there's just a desire with a lot of consumers to be a little more center of either side. Yes. And so, and I think that's in everything. And so this idea of moving, it's not about moving MAGA. It's more about just like acknowledging that things are not so binary. And I was curious, like Malik had this thing about J.D. Vance in the piece. and you were going to try to shout out to Malik, try to get him to write an essay, which I think is interesting if you could have pulled it off.

46:11But I'm curious, like, maybe you don't want to talk about that specifically, but like, how do you think you can address these things? Because your reader isn't just a Mom Donnie supporter, even though I'm sure many of those exist. But like, what was the thinking behind trying to have J.D. Vance do something? Well, you know, I actually think that it's a huge risk for a publication now. Like, look at the success. I'm not blowing smoke up your ass. Look at the success of your newsletter. You could say Puck got this$250 million-ish valuation and that maybe there are only a handful of gemstones that are really driving that.

46:58And you're one of them. you have a very clear and distinct voice and you're opinionated and you're sometimes divisive and sometimes people passionately disagree with you but you say hey you're subscribing for me this is what i think if you don't like it that's cool you can keep it moving but around here we're gonna we're gonna have a point of view and maybe part of this is about an editor making a magazine or a media brand to their own taste. But I just, I feel kind of like ill and unmoved when I see a polite, pretty magazine. I think cheeky should kind of get in the arena and do it with cheek and charm and humor and a whole lot of reporting.

47:45And I think people will respect that and respond to it. It's kind of like, do I want a polite cover or do I want a cover that gets people talking and isn't that a metric of success these days like i would be horrified if i just pumped out something pretty and with the best look from prada and i was just like you know the self-improvement issue like no fucking no yeah i mean you have a good point and i think um it kind of also speaks to i'm curious to know more about what your plans are from like a staffing perspective because you mentioned zach who has this big video series now he's one of the only people left that i know who from the will era like a lot of them left right before you or were on their way out already obviously dan riley who is a big editor type who's been back and forth um left and then obviously there were some columns that you canceled which we don't need to get into that oh lauren bless you but to have a friend like you to have a friend like you know what i maybe you know that if i thought he was shit i would say it that's true um or i just wouldn't i wouldn't say anything but no but the point being like i know what i wrote about that and we're talking about our my friend chris black who who also went for adam's job and had a column and no longer has one but um i i totally and i think he understood that too that like why it makes sense you want to make changes but like how are you like staffing up to reflect this broader and and and also i mean i'm sure there are people who left who you didn't want that want to leave like that's a lot of i got you know i got headhunted the other day for your executive editor job.

49:42That's cool. I was like, I was like, I'm not available, but it's a great job and I'll try to find someone for it. Wow, we strike again. Well, Lauren, real recognizes real. So I'm obviously, obviously a big believer that mental health and physical health go hand in hand. But it's also very easy to put off taking care of your mental health when finding an in-network therapist feels like a full-time job. I don't know. Do they exist? It's hard to tell. You wouldn't pay out of pocket for an emergency room visit if you had insurance. Mental health care should work the same way. Rula solves this problem by working directly with more than 100 insurance providers nationwide.

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52:52Seriously, though, on like staffing stuff, how are you thinking about it? Like what kinds of people and like you can see if you look at your colleague, Mark, like what he has done in terms of he hired a bunch of columnists. He hired a lot of really young columnists who who are are still kind of green. Obviously, some he's moved around some of the longtime staffers there and given them new gigs, like made editors, writers, things like that. How are you thinking about staffing and what do you think you need to reflect this new point of view? Well, part of it is unfortunately deeply unsexy moving of the chess pieces.

53:40So, for instance, GQ has never had a weekly video show, a weekly video interview show. It has never existed. And operationally, like, oh shit, like, okay, we need someone booking that. We need a producer. are we need far more editing muscle than we'd have in an ordinary week like you have to reorganize a video team around that and bring in new people that's step one step two for me is okay we've been really dialed in on fashion and celebrity what does the features budget look like what does kat stoffel's kind of arsenal look like for her to deploy because she's like i want to commission john ronson to go to the white house and cover the mma thing and just hang out for a week and And I want Chris Heath to go to Jupiter, Florida to report on Tiger Woods.

54:23I'm like, okay, these are really expensive things. We haven't been allocating things this way. So I won't lie. A lot of it has been shuffling around pieces that we have or hiring at the mid to mid senior level, not a director level. There's been a lot of that and a reallocation of resources. Elsewhere, like another thing I could credit you all with and that I definitely respect very much about what David Haskell does is like, we have to be much more platform agnostic. Like, Conde, for all of its incredible power, cultural pull, all of that, sometimes the publications here fall into a kind of old school paradigms.

55:02Like, okay, everything is built around print production schedules. That's when the reporting has to be done. That's when it has to be filed. And I don't know, like, you have to imagine, and this goes back to my time at the New York Times, like there is a healthier, more platform agnostic way to build this thing. Rambling answer. But the point is a lot of the changes that we've been making have been at a mid-level and a mid-senior level. And it's also about reshaping and organizing the team. I think often about the voices we commissioned and you'll see them start to come through. I touched on John, I touched on the reporting we did in Florida.

55:38You'll see more and more of that come through and in addition to all of that like my aspiration is that this time next year when once again Lauren we get to do our follow-up podcast I hope because we're such good pals there'll be multiple shows like Saks there'll be a mini universe of shows so we've got a lot to do and also we're just kind of getting started you know I told the team yesterday in the past four weeks we've launched two issues a print redesign a social redesign our first ever weekly video show And this morning with Tom, our biggest global cover ever in 20 markets simultaneously. Like, there's a lot happening.

56:16Okay, two more questions and then I will set you free. On the global cover thing, and this kind of runs into the second question because you have to be a business person also, which you obviously are. Like the way you're talking, we love journalists who are business people at Puck. Bless you. It's important. I understand the desire for a global cover. And I think I also understand that you understand that how to make money in different countries, that China is a big audience for you guys, and you have to figure all that stuff out. I'm not going to ask you about that today, because I haven't done any reporting on in a long time.

56:56But like all these different regions are very specific. The thing that I see happening, and you were a regional head, And I know that the Middle Eastern one wasn't owned by Condé. It was a license or whatever one you were. But still, yes, which, yes, we don't have to get into that either. It's that stuff's for an actual business person. But the point being, like, what I see happening at some of them is that it feels like they don't have their own personality. the regional editions. And maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe it is like eventually it all kind of becomes one big thing and maybe there are niche regional things to satisfy the advertisers.

57:46But I think that something is lost in that. And how do you, when you have this like big Tom Cruise cover and Tom Cruise is probably a bigger star or a less controversial star outside of the U.S. Sure. So great to use that to your vantage. I think he's beloved worldwide. He is beloved. He's on a short list of like 10 people that might make like complete sense to every territory. Exactly. So how do you balance that and what kind of advice are you giving to not just Martin, like all the regional heads? Because I know Anna spends a lot of time with them on the Vogue side especially. but like it it's complicated i see it especially living in paris now and and being closer to their worlds like how hard it is for them to sort of balance the local advertising market and the local consumer market with what headquarters wants and since you've done both like how are you approaching that at gq um as you say like i feel uniquely equipped to understand the tension on both sides of the equation.

59:03Middle East is maybe the most specific market we could possibly have at GQ, maybe alongside Japan and China. Something that not everyone knew about my role as world's deputy was that I was the direct manager of each of the editors around the world. So I would have weekly one-to-ones with everyone from Taipei to Mexico City, Milan, Paris, all of it. And I got to understand not only the businesses there, but also the visions of our editors. And one thing I would really push back against is the notion that these titles are watered down or without a vision. I think when you pick up GQ Japan and you see the vision of Jun Ishida, she comes from a really like art, design and architecture heavy background.

59:44And it's so heavily reflected on the pages of her GQ. I think she has one of the highest taste publications on planet Earth. And Japan is a market that is disproportionately run by consumer revenue. So their magazine, like their new stand sales are massively important and they crush it there. It's one of our best businesses in the world. Or if you look at what someone like Federico Sarica has been doing in Milan for the past few years, like he just published a banger Kimi Antonelli cover. The guy who's leading the Formula One leaderboard this year is 19 years old. It's crazy. And Fede's Kimi shoot was so good that a bunch of markets around the world syndicated it from Milan.

1:00:23I put it in American GQ it was so good and it was such a fascinating profile and when you go to a Fede party in Milan you're like holy shit like these are the coolest best dressed sexiest people in the city and so they actually do have so much local specificity and flavor what I will agree with you on is that we might have been a bit heavy-handed at the start of the global operation and been like okay tell you what we'll all do the same cover but everyone customized the inside of the magazine and in fact maybe one of the things we learned over the years is a truly global cover makes sense every so often and we've been blessed this year if you think about what we did with the cast of the odyssey or bts and now with tom it's like those are the kind of subjects that might make sense in most of your territories but actually an average issue of gq it might make the most sense for a local editor to say i'm going to put a whole bunch of my budget into an epic cover and then run a mixture of global and local storytelling inside?

1:01:23Great answer. Sorry, I'm not worrying you, am I? No, it's, I mean, it's the right answer. I think my last question for you is, and then if there's anything I missed or you would like to address after I have attacked you for the last six months, but on the business side. The thing that I've been thinking, I had a conversation about Anna and Vogue today with someone. It was an on-background combo. And the challenge with these businesses is these brands are huge. They're some of the biggest fashion brands in the world. I always say that Vogue is as big as Chanel or like the second biggest fashion brand in the world.

1:02:05GQ is also a very big brand. It's globally known, all of that stuff. For many, many years, and anyone who reads Michael Grimbaud's book can see this, is that they were not supposed, they didn't need to be revenue-wise extremely giant and definitely not profitable, but also just not that big. It's like these fashion brands that make two million dollars a year in revenue and everybody thinks there you know, would be a billion dollar business. It was kind of like that. Like they were great$250 million. Like that's not that much money. And it didn't matter because they weren't, they didn't need to be, be big.

1:02:48The world has changed and it feels like there is ambition to make these brands bigger from a revenue perspective. What do you think? Like, what are you trying to do i think honestly like the platform the the stuff you talked about with platforms and and doing more more video shows more all that's that all makes sense to me what else do you think is possible because like having gq restaurants isn't going to make this a it could be part of it but it's not going to make it a like billion dollar company necessarily i mean we all and And please, profits, you know the margins on restaurants are like 3 % to 6%.

1:03:31It's completely insane even with alcohol. You do it for the love. Yes. But how do you think it's possible to make it a bigger brand from a business perspective, not just from a cultural perspective? Well, there's been a lot of hand-wringing in the media industry. And if I'm like, oh, this is so existential, we're all screwed. but what i love about the times for instance is that you know they could have sat in that paradigm and watch those classified pages shrink and shrink like well you know it's still our bread and butter and people will subscribe to the satellite and but i think there are enough data points now that show when you deliver consumers something that they find compelling and worth exchanging money for good things happen happen to you happen to the times if i go downstairs and talk to Remnick, having it at the New Yorker.

1:04:26I don't think there's much excuse to be like, well, it's just too hard to figure out. And frankly, my aspiration here is like, I want to be able to go to the C-suite and be like, I want 10 more headcount. I want a bigger content budget. I want this. I want that. I want a podcast studio. And I fully intend on doing that, but I have to prove my thesis out first and I will. So I think we've seen huge success with our events in the uk i told i told you a little bit of the men of the year but i actually ended up tripling the revenue on that event by the time i left which is unfathomable when i arrived especially around the time of the hazing on the way in um so i think if you if you can like round out the gq universe scratch the obvious itches like duh we should have multiple video podcasts duh we should be addressing a wider more diverse group of men who might be curious about gq or being a man or fashion, whatever it might be, I think will be well set up.

1:05:21And if I leave this position, having the business been in the standstill the whole time I was here, I will not have done my job, even if the creativity is wonderful. Did you commission chicken chop date for GQ? Chicken chop date for GQ? Did I ask Amelia to be our red carpet host? Yes. yeah i that was pretty good yeah it was just i was just thinking because she um just announced she's not gonna um do it anymore or something and the way i found out about her is because she was she was doing stuff during covert for gq or like right after covet yeah she so she became a red carpet host for the the rebooted men of the year and i asked her and she became a great collaborator and a great friend.

1:06:12And I will tell you this, by the end of our kind of collaborations on Men of the Year, we were hitting 100 million video views in a week on a British event, 100 people at dinner in London. And only a fool, only a fool would underestimate Amelia de Moldenberg and whatever she's going to do next. I now understand why you got the job, Adam. Oh, bless you. Oh my gosh. Did we get there? Are we? We did. This was great. Thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. And you better come back here in a year or six months. I can't wait. Challenge thrown down to every other editor at Condé Nast.

1:06:48Thank you. This was awesome. Thank you so much. It was really great. I appreciate it. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate you being a good sport and understanding what I'm trying to do and all that stuff. I appreciate it. Thanks, Adam. We'll talk soon. Fashion People is a presentation of Odyssey in partnership with Puck The show is produced and edited by Molly Nugent Special thanks to Puck co-founder John Kelly Executive editor Ben Landy Producer Maya Tribbett and director of editorial operations Gobby Grossman An additional thanks to the team at Odyssey Kelly Turner and Bob Tabador I was in Iraq, I need a check I was in a wreck.

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