Will Welch: Editor-in-Chief of GQ - Fashion, Journalism, Hype, Creative Leadership, Virality, & the Evolution of GQ.

0:00Well, Will Welsh, editor-in-chief of GQ. thank you so much for being here on the Shtaguy Podcast it's my pleasure well I'm honored to be wearing all brown given the last time I saw you we were with Jeremy Strong while he wore all brown and I think maybe you were too I think I was wearing dark green but also lower piano how could I forget and now of course you're sitting on a lower piano couch in front of a lower piano cashmere wall I can't quite reach that one but I believe you at the Casa Cipriani presidential suite. Seems very fitting to be sitting with Will Welsh in such an environment. Feels very fitting to be sitting with you here.

0:41Yeah, this is all you're doing. So it's nice. I appreciate that. It's plush. It's comfy. I like that plush. Yeah, plush. I was wondering, like, maybe for our American viewers, we could do a lesson in how to say shtad. You know, I'm so happy you asked that. You're the first person to ask that. I think I just said it right. You said it perfectly. Can you confirm? Stad. Stad is perfect. Stad guy. Stad is perfect. Some locals in Stad say Stad. Stad. But they're like super Swiss German. Yeah. So there's a very slight K before it. Like a little K before the K. Stad. Stad. Never G-Stad. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no.

1:28Oh my God. None of that. please and never stad some people think that because you don't pronounce the guh you just jump yes you skip the whole thing not that either it's more like a ch yeah maybe gch i think you put the spelling completely out of your mind and just say stad yeah i like that thank you so much well i i feel this is a service to some of the yanks who are i think that is a service for people beyond the yank community most of our european viewers probably know how to say stade but i don't know you'd be surprised from atlanta i don't know if like the homies growing up would know what to do with likely not likely not yeah but i appreciate that i think we're off to a good start off we go around the world with your host the stade guy we welcome you back to the Stad Guy podcast, sharing stories of excellence with those in the know for those who just know.

2:28Again, thank you so much for being here. I was very excited about this episode. Likewise. Likely because we share height. Yes, that's right. True eye to eye. Eye to eye. Shoulder to shoulder, mano a mano. People don't get that rare bond, but I really do feel like when someone walks in and we're at similar height, we get each other. yeah it's like i see you um i don't know if you get this a lot i'm all i'm often employed well there's one the obvious thing is draft services where i just reach high things for people yep which i call draft services but then also often one of my best party tricks is people will be like can you find my wife and i'm like yeah she's over there because you just look into the crowd just you can see everybody that's great i know who's bald yeah i know where your wife is that's true and I'm happy to provide these services.

3:20I love that. Are you also the luggage guy when the flight lands? Oh, yeah, yeah. You help everybody around you with the luggage, all the ladies. Good. And I don't know about you, but I constantly concuss myself on various things, like this lighting rig. One time, hilariously, I was getting off the New York subway and I don't know if I just like my gate like lifted right at the wrong moment and I bonged my head and I you know when you're like seeing stars and sometimes there's some like rage that follows with the stars like right behind it and I heard these guys laughing and I was like rah and like turned to them like how could you laugh at my concussive misfortune and they were both extremely short guys who were laughing and I was like you know what that's funny that was funny yeah and then i got off the train and went about my day so um yeah i have a terrible memory and i think it's from all of the concussions i hit my head very hard the day after i saw you in shanghai you did it's not built for for my height yeah definitely not no but hey here we are thank you so much for being here again uh i am sure that most of the audience know the publication that you run, GQ, of course.

4:43And I think many know you personally as well and know your incredible work. I'm a big fan of GQ. My introduction to GQ was probably on YouTube growing up with a lot of the short-form YouTube stuff, which I love and still love. Digging into that more, I found that GQ in many ways tailors and tell stories to a similar audience that I love to study but also just observe out of interest and that's a connoisseur who loves all things expert and mastery in all domains from food to clothes to things as rare as uni fishing. Yeah, yeah. And I love the art of mastery. watches sea urchins all the classic obsessions of gq magazine you know i wouldn't say they're the classic obsessions fruits of the abyss these are the things that we love exactly i mean i mean i think people who love the amount of money we have made over the years by just going deep on sea urchin is indescribable this is like the really this is the foundation of our business i wish it was that'd be really cool it would it would be cool that'd be very cool unfortunately not the case but not yet not yet when i get back to the office today we're going in going in on the oceans just gonna be like directing the team yeah that'd be great i mean watches fashion design yeah uh but all within those categories mastery and excellence yeah all through i think all through great journalism whether it's lifestyle journalism or long-form reporting we try to like have deep, rich storytelling, like real journalism, no matter, you know, I think sometimes these, some of these like more lifestyle or luxury or crafts are thought of as shallow.

6:40But the truth is that like the stories are deep and you apply the principles of great storytelling and great journalism, whether you're telling like a crime caper or doing a politics story or talking about watches or talking about uni you know yeah yeah what was your introduction to the world of gq because i know you've been there for a very long time yeah i guess gq wasn't really one of the magazines that i read in high school and college yeah um i guess i would look at it occasionally just like up at the newsstand but it wasn't like my thing the way the the music magazines were um graduated from college ended up working at this music magazine the fader for four and a half years and then I knew a guy that worked at GQ socially and he liked my work at the Fader and one day, I remember I was in New York, it was a Friday and I was apartment hunting because I was moving apartments and he called me and he said, hey, we've got this opening at GQ and I think you should interview for it and I said, and I quote, what the fuck do I know about GQ?

7:44And he was like, well, anyway, just think about it And I was like, all right, cool. And over the weekend, I realized that like I was in the minor leagues and the big leagues had called and I needed to like get over whatever downtown rock and roll conception I had of myself and like step up to the big leagues. So I called him back and I said, OK, sorry about that. A little like brain blip. I get it now. I want this job. What do I what I have to do to get it? And that was April 2007. So that was 18 years ago. Wow. Yeah. And at the time, what was your perception of GQ? And what was your perception of yourself and the group that you thought you were a part of?

8:23Yes. Okay. You're putting your finger on it. My perception of GQ, because I didn't, I wasn't like a deep reader of it, was that it was just like a fashion magazine. Okay. And very slick. And I thought of myself as like cool downtown rap rock and roll guy. but really it was more of like that downtown conception which especially this is 2007 was like kind of like a scruffier wilder thing and i thought of gq as this like very slick polished kind of pro um thing and just very fashion and we understand fat like fashion has become since then fashion has become part of pop culture yeah at the time fashion was not part of pop culture like the people i hung out with were not wearing european fashion houses like period end of story people i didn't go to parties and see people wearing gucci or laura piana or you know it was just like we wore vintage clothes um and so it just felt like a foreign world to me but the guy who called me his name is is adam was incredibly smart very cool um we had we had become friends Like we really understood each other.

9:42And in a way he was like introducing me to like cool restaurants in New York and things that I was really interested in. So I just had to like, like get over myself a little bit. My own like sort of erroneous, very young. This is all is like the attitudes of a young, clueless, naive man. And just like be more open. and then once I got to GQ I found that it was this like incredible temple of like amazing journalism at the time I was really into photography writing photography design like all the things that make a great magazine and GQ was just like um I mean the people who worked I mean Fred Woodward like one of the one of the great American magazine designers period Jim Nelson one of the great magazine editors period.

10:34Jim Moore was the creative director and ran the fashion department. He, uh, was the creative director of GQ for 37 years. He's like a legend. He knows every, I mean, he taught me everything I know about fashion. So once I got there, I was like, Oh man, I was in heaven, you know? And then I also brought that same spirit of like being the unpaid intern who was like writing stories on spec and getting them published at the fader. I remember my first story ideas meeting at GQ I got hired to like write about like style and lifestyle okay and on the way into my first story ideas meeting I stopped another editor who was just like the older guy whose office was near mine and I said am I allowed to pitch like music stories in this meeting he was like yeah you can pitch whatever you want and so in my first story ideas meeting I pitched a music story and got it assigned so it's that same thing of just being like a little bit fearless um it's like as long as this is an open environment where this is encouraged then I'm gonna like raise my hand and share my ideas and do you think that the reception to your ideas was also rooted on the team that was already at GQ's desire to maybe move a little bit from uptown perception to downtown through people like you i think they were very open to that like they saw that i had poise and confidence and an understanding of what the project was and then that i brought a not like a massively different perspective but just a slightly different perspective and that was very encouraged and so one of like now in my current role one of the responsibilities that i take the most seriously is to maintain an environment that feels that open that like may the best idea win and that if it comes a little bit from like left of center of what we're already up to then that's even more interesting rather than like something that should be blocked or looked down upon and you know i think i probably do that imperfectly but um it is it feels like my highest calling because that is the thing that incredible environment is the thing that allowed me to flourish and frankly it's the only or at least the main reason i've been there for 18 years i love just a place where like creativity flourishes best idea wins um all voices matter equally as long as the idea is strong like that is i can wake up in the morning every day for 18 years and excited to go to work if that is the environment that's waiting for me absolutely for sure yeah i'd love to know more about what the entire industry looked like at that point in time yeah and how gq was compared to it um i've been thinking about this a lot because um graden carter just published his memoir and the title is when the going was good uh which implies two things one the going used to be good and now it's in the past tense so now the going is no longer good so um i i would say i know what he means and i'll explain um but i just don't agree that the going is no longer good but the going is definitely different at the time uh money was falling from the sky the town cars rolled on cobblestones made of gold and um idea like the opportunities were endless to do whatever you could dream of so magazine gq and vanifair and other magazines at that time we had the best writers in the world working on stories all over the world um not all of them would get published only the ones that like uh not only worked out but like worked at the highest level would make it into the magazine um i often joke that you could have a horse and a helicopter for every photo shoot you know like the production budgets were limitless turns out that being able to have a horse in a helicopter in every photo shoot like doesn't necessarily make for great pictures which is like um uh part of why i think the going is still good it's like you don't need limitless resources to do great creative work and in fact sometimes a lack of limitations can be stifling creatively it was it was a very interesting environment to come into from the fader which was like this very scrappy independent magazine six people like blood sweat and tears kind of vibe to uh like a big girl magazine like gq where everything was professional the staff was large um budgets resources um all very substantial um but i do remember thinking like um a lot of this is not necessary you know and i do i've always had this belief that like sometimes really hardcore restrictions lead to more creativity more innovation better storytelling more exciting photography like the example i always think of is the white stripes which i think um the brilliance of the i'm not i'm not like the hugest white stripes fans but i'm obsessed with with what they represent which was jack white had very clear ideas he was like husband wife guitar drums three colors for all the aesthetics and like you know three chords for all the songs and then how far can you take that creatively he like he falsely constructed a tiny box and forced himself and meg white to work from within that and um sometimes i think when anything is possible it's like it's less interesting and when you're really like trapped in a corner like fighting your way out of the corner that's when it gets exciting and so i think that is the spirit of today and you know for somebody like grayden who came up in a different era and is like um those are the conditions under which i enjoy this work and if i can't have those conditions i'm gonna ride off into the sunset or go start something else i i totally understand that i just don't share that i think the um evolution of media which some people would say it has been like a de-evolution i would argue that the evolution has played to my strengths over time so I love this chaotic environment um I think the going is also good now basically okay yeah I'd love to hear that yeah I'd love to before jumping into the new media I'd love to get a deeper understanding of who the GQ reader was and has become and also what those white stripes were and have been for GQ.

17:56Yeah. Now more than ever, we communicate with our audience every day. You know this very well through the Shtagai feed. Like you are in dialogue with your audience. And that is an amazing evolution because I think magazines like, or just media outlets in general, it all happened in one direction. You were just publishing outward. and like people could write a letter to the editor and like mail it in i guess but there wasn't this always on dialogue um through comment sections through dms like there's so many different ways that you know we can like uh go on instagram stories and put up a poll or do ask me anything like there's so many ways to and you just get the feedback of like how many likes did this get how many likes did that get um so yeah it's a two-way it's a real conversation now um and that is really exciting but at the same time i think um and i'd be curious actually if if you find this with your feed um if you start like focusing too much on who is the audience what do they like did they like this better or that better and then you're like so they liked a better than z so we're going to do way more of a and we're going to stop doing z i think that can be a trap for sure you could absolutely lose your point of view you can lose you can like almost lose yourself in that um and so i guess i try not to obsess too much over what the audience likes or what the audience wants especially a magazine like gq we're supposed to be leading the audience to places that they haven't been before and if all if if if you're too data focused data is necessarily backwards looking like data is purely backwards looking so i try to like pay attention to the data allow it to inform my decision making or pay attention to the like the audience comments and the dms and all that but not let it uh drive the train like we have to stay in the driver's seat especially GQ's whole brand positioning is cutting edge, progressive.

20:09We help our readers see around corners. So you don't want to be caught looking back or caught trying to give the audience what it wants. So yeah, you have to be strong, maintain your point of view, be super directional. The thing that I do obsess over more is what I would call our community. So these are the writers, the photographers, the stylists, the chefs whose restaurants I eat at, the cool fitness trainers in New York who we know and they come to our events and we go to their stuff. Like that whole community, I really care what they think and I really care what they're responding to versus what they're like, yeah, that wasn't, that didn't really hit.

21:02Like that means a lot to me. And I really think I've tried to build, and I think this applies to any modern brand, no matter what you're doing. I really think of GQ as a community platform. So this is like the thing that I told my team in my very first meeting as editor-in-chief. I was like, we're no longer thinking of GQ as a magazine, which is that one direction. It's a community platform. Like it was founded in 1957. We're all lucky to have inherited this audience that's been built over. What is that? Like almost 70 years. We are standing on the platform ourselves, addressing this audience.

21:42And then we invite other people onto our platform to address our audience. And once we've invited people to do that, then they're part of our community. And the most important thing is to be building and growing a community because as we've learned through social media and everything about the modern landscape, it's like influence radiates outwards, right? So you have to have this crowd of people who love what you're doing, who feel like a part of it, and then that will spread, you know, through like concentric circles to more and more people. So it's a little bit less of like hyper focus on the broad audience and more of like what do we care about as a team and then is our community reacting well to that?

22:27Fine. But can you tell me about your version of that through Shtodgah? This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights from backyard jams to sold out arenas. There's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org. Jack Daniels and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey 40 % alcohol by volume Jack Daniel Distillery Lynchburg Tennessee I think to a much smaller degree and to a less sophisticated degree I try to have similar rules I am hyper focused on one type of audience which is someone who is a connoisseur or has the desire to be a connoisseur and i define a connoisseur as someone who is obsessed in the detail and obsessed in their consumption in many ways yeah they're very mindful about how they consume and they're very picky about the things they consume from media to shopping to eating to traveling everything in between and it's very rare for that type of person to let a new thing in and to let a new friend in.

23:42And they're very much stuck in their ways, ways either inherited through family, through the society they find themselves a part of, or just something they're very passionate and love. Right. And usually within those passions comes this often absurd request and desire for excellence. What I mean by that is a connoisseur will, for example, be a Porsche fanatic, a lower piano fanatic, a Audemars Piguet lover, and really into ski, for example. And they'll have one brand of skis they love, and they'll have one brand of car they love. The routine is more often than not fairly simple. Right. They go to the grocery store, come back home, pick up their kids from school.

24:34But they love cars so much that they're getting the best Porsche in the market. They're getting the Turbo S way beyond their desires because of passion. And they're getting the skis that are way beyond their needs because of the love for the sport, even though they're just cruising down to lunch. You know what I mean? So there's often this absurd level of consumption where it's lots of bark and little bite in terms of actually putting those goods to use. And I think there's comedy there. You know, there's like, there's absurdity there because they know better than anyone that's absurd. When someone goes into an Apple store and gets a MacBook Pro fully specced out to check their emails, it's not because they'll check their emails better because it satisfies the ego and satisfies that connoisseur twinkle, right?

25:21It's like, yeah, you want the horsepower even if you can't really let them run. Exactly. And for the real expert connoisseurs who have unlimited budgets, sometimes the car doesn't even leave the garage yeah right so it becomes just nice to know it's there nice to know it's there nice to know i can yeah you know and it's it's philosophically i think about it as this kind of i can but i don't it's like being in great shape but not taking your shirt off yeah you know what i mean and it's it's having all these cars but barely even driving them and it just satisfies this perception of self and self-worth right and i try to focus on the comedy there yeah and sometimes also focus on the the goods themselves and the stories around those goods themselves so there's a light touch of like comedic journalism involved yeah um and i'd say about 70 to 80 percent of my stories are focused on existing desires and existing norms and rules that i've observed with this type of person and then the last 30 is me trying to lead the group in a certain direction yeah you know and trying to say actually there's this new thing you may have not heard of but i know it's aligned with your values and interests so you might like it like you said if i was purely data focused then those new things wouldn't get as much engagement your audience would be your audience would get bored so let me ask you a question if if do you call them stories like your skits yeah stories or videos videos okay i appreciate them if if one video let's say it does time and a half better than the video a gets 50 better engagement than video b yeah but video b is like funnier to you and feels like the new shit this is like where you're going yeah what do you do with that information i'll likely do both yeah i am generally cautious about things that go very viral yeah and i try to use them as a reward i think a great example of that is the airmas birkin at a store level right airmas could easily just sell the birkin yeah but what would happen in two years right yeah the birkin would be less cool yeah and i think of that with my content if I have videos that go 50 % better sometimes 2, 3, even 10x better and I only do those things I silo myself into the guy known for that thing and that thing will always 10 times out of 10 eventually not become interesting anymore everything always gets old when too many people have seen it too many times so short answer is I'll use it as a reward occasionally to spark up the engagement and to also use it as an opportunity to get things I'm more passionate about in there.

28:21Kind of like a great cover for a magazine. You know the celebrity is going to sell the actual product. And then within all the things you're trying to bake in, you can get the benefits. Plus, for better or for worse, you can't engineer virality. I actually said in a meeting to my team yesterday, I was like, here's what I think. but if I could predict virality, I would be a very, very wealthy man, which I'm not, you know? And it's like, that also is like, if you're like, well, you know, this one went pretty viral last time, maybe we should like re-engineer it that way. It never works. The internet is a mercurial bastard.

29:05That's true. It's like very difficult to predict. I mean, the thing is with the internet is I know fairly immediately how something is doing. Yeah. do you have that same feedback loop with your publications yeah yeah we know right away and man it sucks when you've like um especially with like a print cover like of all the of all the things we make across all of our platforms the two that are the heaviest in terms of all resources money time number of staff members that touch it all of that stuff are video and print covers and when we launch a print cover or if we're piloting a new video series and we launch it you find out like within six minutes if it's really going to hit or not like sometimes things will surprise you over the long term but you know right away and it can be like either incredibly exciting or just brutal because you're just so aware of everything you poured into it and And sometimes things just fall flat.

30:11Yeah. And in algorithm world, things have become so much less predictable too. And sometimes I think like we launched this big, amazing project, but we launched it. We just happened to catch the wrong morning for whatever was happening algorithmically. And you can really get flatlined. And I think it's those experiences that are actually good overall because they like, for me, redouble my awareness that ultimately we got to do the things that we believe in and if we're living and dying by likes and engagement and uh you know unique unique users on on gq.com and page views and all that stuff like you're gonna torture yourself you're gonna get depressed you're gonna start chasing your own tail you're gonna be too focused on backwards looking data and so ultimately when something i'm really proud of like doesn't hit the way i want it to hit it just reminds me that i have to keep doing things i'm proud of because the other thing is out of my control you know yeah absolutely i love that the way media is consumed is undoubtedly changed and my friends who are gq fanatics of course still consume gq just in different ways every couple of years there's new social channels they follow there's new ways they consume but one thing that has never really changed in my time at least in my lifetime at least is the respect for a cover yeah and culturally there's this obsession over being on the cover of a magazine yeah can you elaborate on that and why you think that is yeah sure it's there's just something even in the mega digital era all digital everything yeah um you know from the las vegas sphere on down you know there is a romance and a prestige to the tangible which in my world is print so right now we have Ben Affleck on the cover that is a story that we were chasing a cover that we were chasing that I know a lot of other magazines were chasing that we we ultimately got he I can't remember I think it had been something like eight years since he had done a magazine cover I don't know that could that could be imprecise, but it had been a long time.

32:36Um, you know, he's a huge star. He's had a lot going on in his personal life. He's had a lot going on in his career. Um, and he, there's no way he would have done it if it were like a digital cover. There's just no way. And I think it's about romance and prestige. It's not about anything financial. It's not about anything practical it's just about like what really matters and all the time i think about um talent that we're pursuing for some project and sometimes it'll be a digital project that to me has all the romance and prestige of print and they won't see it that way and they'll demand print and then i'm like i wonder if they ever even saw the print magazine that they demanded but it almost doesn't matter they just want to know that it was there um i also think sometimes that it means you can send it to your mom and like yeah mom needs to see print my own grandfather when i was working at the fader yeah he was like what is this magazine there's all this cussing in it like he really didn't appreciate it and then one time i brought him a new issue and there was a Mercedes ad on the back cover and he was like if Mercedes Benz is giving this magazine money to align itself with it then it must be a value I just don't get it yeah it like he suddenly thought I like had a job before he thought I was a joke when he saw the Mercedes ad he was like my grandson has a job I mean I believe him a hundred and that's the same thing for I think most influencers and content creators the parents think they're just unemployed and lying until they get one check through the mail they're like admit it you're dealing drugs exactly there's no way exactly i remember so real on my side my parents were supportive in quotes yeah but they're like take your day job more seriously this is just a fun thing on the side that's okay but yeah know where your heart should be yeah until i got one strong check in the mail and look at you now mom Look at me now, Mom.

34:48I appreciate it. The presidential suite, the Laura Piano. The Laura Piano couch. Exactly. I mean, when you spoke earlier about leaving Fader, joining GQ and proposing those articles at the big table, now the roles are reversed. You're the editor-in-chief. You have people proposing stories to you that are in line with your vision and sometimes out of line with your vision, of course. Where do you draw the parameters of what it means for a story or a category to fit within the GQ universe? Yeah. Well, I know the thing that like you are super interested is like passion connoisseurship. And I think it's so important to recognize that in other people.

35:34So I have my passions and all the things in which I consider myself a connoisseur. and honestly those are the things that guide my version of GQ I think you can like every job like this has to be personal you know this idea of like oh I'm not really a GQ guy but I'm gonna like put on the GQ editor hat and go in and do a great job is BS that doesn't work so I do think that the extent to which GQ has been successful is related to the fact that I have like been confident enough to remake it in my own image and like say that feels a little weird but ultimately that's the only way you can do it you like because it takes passion yeah um but then you have to be ready because i can't make gq by myself i would never want to i'm a very collaborative person i love that like you know uh a table full of really smart people like kicking ideas around is like the highlight of my job sometimes the highlight of my life you know it's it's just so exciting and so part of what you honestly get to do is empower other people to be like this isn't your shit but this is my shit and i'm going to tell you why and when i hear that passion when i hear that like connoisseurship so to to make this um a little more real when um So it's too complicated to explain, but for a little while, as I was evolving in my career at GQ, I ran a spinoff magazine that we started.

37:09I was the editor in chief called GQ Style. And we had a very small team. There were at the beginning, there were three of us. And people would ask me, why is there so much skating, like skateboarding in GQ Style? And the answer was because one of my three editors grew up. His name is Noah Johnson. He grew up in Troy, New York as a skater. He knows a ton about skateboarding. And so I don't, I'm six, six. I don't get on like more height, less balance, bad idea. I will break a femur, you know, but Noah is a skater and brings all this expertise and passion about skateboarding and skateboarding is like a cultural, like a micro epicenter of culture.

37:48Like so much culture is fed through the lens of skating. And I'm smart enough to recognize that and also recognize my ignorance about all the details of that world. but to empower this other person who knows everything about it to like get his stories off and GQ style. And it was like one of my favorite things about this magazine, because by empowering him, I actually learned a lot about, I still don't skate, but I have, I know a bunch of like, I'm friends with some of the best skaters in the world because of Noah's passion and because of that open environment for him to share it. So while there does have to be a like, a self-driven piece of it it's even more rewarding um to empower that same thing in other people yeah i love that a good magazine staff is just like it's a group of connoisseurs yeah and you like organize them and empower them and then feed it all into the magazine and if you are super passionate about something uni i guarantee reddit proves this every day there are like millions of people who share that seemingly obscure passion for sure this is what the internet has proven like if your passion is you know uh the the the undercarriage of tugboats if you start a reddit group on tugboat undercarriage you will find hundreds of thousands of people who are bored with their day jobs and want to sit online chatting about it i mean it's crazy what the internet has shown i'm incredibly curious about people who obsess about one thing or one category and the art of obsession and expertise in one in one craft and you're incredibly exposed to many people in many different worlds yeah what do those people have in common when their interests are so different what does it take for someone to be obsessed in their passion yeah um well Well, you know, it's like a sickness that so many of us share, you know.

39:58And the exciting thing about my position at GQ is just getting to like channel that. And that platform thing I mentioned where we're inviting other people up to share their passion. It's like we get to sort of amplify the stories and the passions of other people. Not just ourselves, not just the team sitting around that table, but all the people that all the stories that they're identifying out there and bringing those people in. And I don't know. I mean, I guess it's something about the human brain, but I think it's so important because this is how you get innovation, right? This is how you get like technological advancement.

40:36This is, I mean, I was joking, looking, you know, looking out onto the sound here about tugboats, but this is how you get like all this technical innovation is because like people are freaks, you know? um and i i guess i just feel lucky and one of the things i love most about my line of work is just getting to spotlight other people's passion and i think me like you i don't need to share your passion to want to learn about it you know just because i like read a 6 000 word incredibly reported piece about some micro niche doesn't mean I then am like throwing myself into that niche going forward it's just like it's such a joy to experience it for a limited time I mean I guess that's the idea of this podcast right every episode I watch I'm not gonna then become passionate about that but for the hour or whatever it is I'm like learning about it and I like take a little of that and like put it in my pocket and and walk on for sure I find that people who are very passionate about something have a respect and curiosity for anyone who's very passionate about something else yeah it's it's like freak recognized freak exactly 100 i mean when people read gq they're often looking for this compass of what's cool right i have a definition of cool that i like to remind myself of what is it it's authenticity okay like if i gotta say more though because authenticity has become a buzzword.

42:13It is a buzzword. So what does it mean for you? For me, it means someone who owns the things they like and the things that make them who they are unapologetically. So sitting with someone who's like, this is me. I'm not changing the way I speak or act when I sit with you. I'm not changing the way I dress or the things I like to be impressed by you. I am me and this is me. And that's, I think, the coolest thing. So I think the high school cool kids are the least cool. Yeah. And I realized that after I... That become, I mean, it just is so true. Thank God. Thank God. You know, I actually have...

42:52The nerds shall inherit the earth. They're the coolest. Yeah, always. And the drama kids. Yeah. You know, the nerds got some respect for having the good grades. Yeah. I think one corner of high schools that never really got the same recognition was the drama kids. Yeah. Because they really, like, even though on stage they didn't own who they were. Yeah. But the group of drama kids, like, in the hallways were so unique to themselves. And their grades were never great. And their social, like, hierarchy never got much respect. Yeah. But they're very authentic. They're very cool. Yeah, they had their own world.

43:25Had their own thing going, you know? Yeah. Sorry, I digress. I'd love to know your definition and what you think of my definition of authenticity. Oh, yeah. No, I think you nailed it. I think because you know that's the thing with buzzwords is sometimes they become hollow and people throw them out and they can't really back up what what it's actually about um but yeah I mean I think I think that's the name of the game and that's what's driving everything now because we're all dealing with this incredibly noisy busy environment and everybody um almost no matter what line of work you're in is looking to break through and so how do you do that you do that with authenticity and it's like okay but what does that actually mean um and yeah i don't know you're living it you're doing it i appreciate that doing it by not doing it by being inauthentically a fictional character yeah

44:23true but i appreciate it you are authentically lying i'm authentically inauthentic my mom always used to say to me be yourself honey you'll do great and it remains like the best advice yeah um one time i um had it through a random series of of circumstances um i was talking to jay-z and he had just like met with um some politicians in new york and then come to this dinner that i was at and I was like how do you move like nobody moves between as many worlds effortlessly as Jay Z and he had he was literally doing it that night so I said how do you move so fluidly through all these different worlds and he was like I walk into every room as myself and I was like damn that's a bar you know I took it put it in my pocket and at the time I had no idea I was young I was I don't I was probably 30 or something.

45:28And at the time I just didn't know how to do that. I had more of like, I think I was good at being like chameleonic. I could kind of like put forward a facet of myself in all these different situations and be really agreeable in all these different situations that would allow me to like exist in an okay way in all these different worlds. but what he was saying is like that's not the answer that isn't going to bring you true success or that true like effortless fluidity it was like you have to show up as the same person like values that's the other piece of authenticity that i think is so important it's like bro what are your values and do you carry them into every room the same way all day every day until the day you fall over and die i love that you brought that up i'm definitely still on that journey and I haven't mastered the art of fully being myself.

46:28I have that definitely adapt to who I'm sitting with, of course. But I was sitting with a dear friend a couple of years ago. Her name is Mimi Icon, so shout out Mimi. Shout out Mimi. Shout out Mimi. And she was asking me, you know, what do you look for in a girl? I was like, you know, someone who's value aligned. She's like, what does that mean? I was like, you know, good values that are aligned with mine. And she's like, yeah, but what are they? And then I paused for a second and I thought about this for weeks. And I was like, all this time I was thinking, just be yourself and be true to your values.

47:07But I never sat down and actually tried to define who the best version of me is and who my favorite version of me is. And how far I want to go with sticking to those values. and I think that chameleonic tendency that we all have is something we either acknowledge or don't acknowledge but like my favorite version of myself is I'm traveling to a new place and I see nobody I know I feel like that's my kindest version of self it's my most open-minded version of self and I thought about like let's assume he's like another person what defines him and how is he different to the version of myself I don't like which is around people like i tend to actually love the most where i'm like slightly more irritable yeah you know it's like you know how it is so i tried to define those values and work towards them and i found that like being myself is actually just trying my best to be a version of myself that i love the most and i don't know if jay-z does that maybe he owns it and he has more confidence that did work for me you're like there there are certain contextual contextual situations that bring the best out of me and what if I um almost like set the context aside and truly understand what makes up that best version and make sure that that's what's leading no matter what the context is I do think that's what that's that's a different way of conceptualizing or thinking about what Jay-Z was yeah saying he does you know yeah and I also think it's really funny to like it's so true sometimes we're our worst selves around like our family yeah we usually are now that there's this growing ability to be a generalist and i say growing ability because of the resources available to us we can be generalists more easily instead of being specialists and i think i'm a living example of that i am a jeweler but also a content creator but also an actor and have a rosé business and advertise for other businesses.

49:16And it sounds crazy when I put it like that, but if you define it as like, oh, I'm just another influencer who's doing all these different things. And thanks to the tools available online and available in our world today, being a generalist is incentivized because you can de-risk and try different things and be five different people. It's pretty cool. but I think that so much of the beauty of life also comes from experts yeah so this idea of like generalist versus expert and the push and pull of the two makes me very curious about where culture could go and where culture lies yeah and I think that historically just observing culture has usually been led by experts in certain subcultures yeah but now that being a generalist is sort of leading a lot of the pack yeah i'm curious to know what you think being so close to this world about that change yeah yeah i mean i i agree with you completely and i think it's a sophisticated point that people don't fully recognize but i think this is the era of the multi-hyphenate like to me the person who embodied um the shift was Virgil Abloh absolutely he was um the guy behind Kanye West he was the guy following Kanye West around with a laptop for years that's that's how I met Virgil is he was you know people say Kanye's creative director I don't know if it was that well defined he was just like the guy who worked with Kanye to make it all happen um and And as the internet came to dominate culture and as social media came to dominate the internet and thus broader culture, we started becoming more interested in the behind the scenes.

51:10It's like everybody already knows who Kanye West is, but do you know Virgil? That became more exciting. and Virgil was able to take that energy and like feed it in um to all these different projects because by um being the right hand of this person who is ranging between so many things he made all these contexts and learn about all these different worlds and it was a real paradigm shift. I also think he redefined or he was culture. I think as Virgil himself would say, culture happens in waves and there's no one person that creates the wave. You're just either at the beginning of the wave or you're at the wave as it's like tipping over.

51:59Um, and he was just somebody who was, who was at the beginning of, of these waves. He also, to me, redefined aspiration because it went from being about like money, cars, watches, whatever, to being this person who was a multi-hyphenate, like whipping the winds of all this different energy, doing everything not from like the corner office, but from the WhatsApp in the airport lounge or in the back of the Mercedes that just picked you up from the airport, being in a different city every night. That was not what was cool or aspirational or even reasonable 20 years ago. But all that changed. And like I said, he didn't create that, but he did embody it.

52:42He like represented the paradigm shift. And like you, I feel like more of, I mean, it's the definition of my job. You're an editor. You're not an expert in one thing. You're able to discern between all these different things that come through your transom of which ones are either most interesting or at least which ones belong as part of the GQ point of view. But underneath, it's a spectrum, though, because I also have areas of expertise. But I think if you, if I had to define myself as either generalist or specialist, I'm definitely jack of all trades master of not that many that are important.