Lettermans

First things first, thanks for taking the time to take the call… I know you’re super busy.
‍Not a problem at all.

Before we get into it, where are you right now?
‍I’m at The LINE Hotel, in Los Angeles. 

Is this for the Typing.Network project you have going on?
‍Yeah, but that was just for Friday night. Now I’m just chilling with some friends, taking meetings, and things like that. I’ve been traveling a decent amount, but I don’t think too much more than normal. Just the typical circuit of New York, here, and Chicago. Montréal in a month too, I think.

One thing I noticed is that you reply to emails and texts with like, lightning speed. I think you replied to some of my emails in under 60 seconds. Is that something that just comes with the territory? As in, you just have to be that expedient to make all of your projects happen?
‍Ha! I mean, some people would say that I respond quickly, some people would say that I don’t. For this one, it’s about us doing this interview, and I don’t like leaving people hanging because I know what that felt like. I still know what that feels like! 

I know some people will have ‘x’ amount of unread texts or whatever... I just can’t do that. And it’s not like an OCD thing. If I don’t wanna respond to a text, I just don’t. I know that sounds rude, but I just wanna keep things organized. Know what I mean?

Yeah, so are you like one of those “inbox zero” people?
‍Not quite, but definitely close.

Nice.
‍I treat my inbox like a “read later” type thing, so I’ll email myself articles, but I try to keep it under 15 unread messages... I’m looking at it right now and I have a lot of tax forms that came in for this year, but I’m leaving them there until I send everything to my accountant. But yeah, I almost never have over 20 unread emails.

It’s super funny you say you email yourself articles – I didn’t know anyone else that did that but me for the longest time.
‍It’s actually an old-school thing! It started from the early days of the Internet. And now people are like “There’s apps and stuff”, but nah…

Ha, I was actually just about to try and put you on. One of my friends put me onto this app called Instapaper – I know it sounds corny, like Instagram and paper – but have you heard of it?
‍Yeah, I actually tried to use it.

I think it’s pretty good.
‍I mean I’m a pretty big RSS guy, so I just try and consume everything in my RSS feed in the morning and in the evening. It just works for me.

On the note of RSS, and just early Internet technologies in general, I wanted to ask you about some of your earliest experiences online. You grew up in Winnetka, right?
‍No! No no no. I’ve never even really been there.

Great start.
‍I grew up in Park Forest, which is pretty much equidistant to the south. Not at all like Winnetka. It’s a south suburb of Chicago. The Winnetka thing, when I did that shirt, was a really interesting thing though. Just to clear it up, it’s a play on the classic Raf Simons “Nebraska” shirt, and you know Virgil did the “Nebraska” shirt too, etc.

Sure.
‍But Winnetka is a very obscure suburb outside of Chicago, and it’s just incredibly wealthy. I would go on Sunday drives from my apartment downtown to up there and back, kind of just to go for a drive... I just think it’s so peaceful to the point where it’s almost fake, so I thought it’d be fun to make a shirt out of it. But after I did, I would get a lot of “Wow, I didn’t know you were so rich!”, and I’m like “Well, I’m not!”

Ha! So Park Forest was where you first taught yourself how to program?
‍Yep.

I remember you mentioned in a different interview how you built the CMS for The Brilliance!, which I thought was hilarious. But how old were you when you started, and what prompted you?
‍So, I got a book at the Park Forest public library called “Introduction to QBasic”, which was like an early instruction code that pretty much anyone could start with. When you had a Windows computer – the first one with a graphical interface – it came just on there. So, instead of typing “Windows,” you could prompt the computer by just typing “Basic”, and then you could start programming. The book had a ton of tutorials but I remember it being very thin. I’d love to find it... I’m thinking about going back and seeing if they still have it.

But yeah, the library was the internet back then. You know, this was the early 90s. I spent a lot of time at the library looking at books about space shuttles and just the type of stuff you look at when you’re young. Computers became really interesting to me around the same time I was really into LEGOs, specifically the Technic LEGOs.

What I always say is that as you graduate away from that, computer programming just feels like having unlimited LEGO pieces. You don’t need to buy anything more. LEGOs were expensive, but you could just spend all day on your computer and you could learn something new, or make something new. It was like having unlimited resources, for free.

So were your parents pushing you to spend more time at the library and do this stuff? Or were you always just very self-directed?
‍Eh, I mean I never got in trouble as a kid. I think the things I got in trouble for were like talking too much in class, or not paying attention. I did get held back a grade, though. I wasn’t very good at school. But I think the whole programming thing was pretty self-prompted. I really don’t know! 

Like my mother was a cleaning lady and she went to night school to become a teacher. She graduated college when I graduated junior high. My father was a contractor and a carpenter. They’re both entrepreneurial, but as for the technical side of things, I just don’t know where it came from. I think it was just a really fun time to be around computers, back then. They were very interesting, and just very new in the early 90s. It was just very zeitgeist-y.

So was your first computer experience at home? Is that what prompted you to figure out all that stuff at the library?
‍I think my first computer experience might’ve been at school… I can’t remember exactly where I was.

That’s also super interesting you said your dad was a carpenter. My dad was basically the same, and I spent a ton of weekends helping him build stuff with my hands. Like we would build a gazebo, or do electrical work, or sometimes plumbing. I thought it was pretty formative in terms of getting me into building. Was it the same for you?
‍Yeah, it very much was. Basically, the general rule of humanity is that you think your parents are the best thing in the world until you’re like, 12, and then they’re not cool until you’re 20. That’s when you can look back on how much they really informed you. Like I was just talking with my good friend Jon Buscemi last night, and his son’s like 13, and thinks his dad is corny. I just wanna grab that kid and be like, “Just wait til you’re 20, my guy!”

Ha! 
But I think that’s just what we do. Like looking at the Object Company… Programming to me was like the antithesis of what my father did. It was not working with my hands; it was creating in an ethereal, computer world. But the Object Company has tons of tilt into doing drywall, or doing tile work with my father… It’s really built on understanding how to make something from nothing. I don’t think a lot of young people aspire to do things like that as much anymore, but I do think it’s starting to happen again. 

You’ve made it pretty clear how you got into building things, but there’s a difference between your run-of-the-mill programmer, and what’s become a bit more common nowadays, especially in San Francisco. It’s this new type of person who is, like, “into tech”, but also identifies as a “tasteful person”. I think you know what I’m getting at. I guess my question is, when did you get into stuff that was traditionally defined as cool?
‍Ha, probably almost certainly skateboarding. You were about to say something about that moment for yourself?

Yeah, like for me, I grew up playing the cello. I remember listening to Late Registration in 2005 and hearing an actual orchestral arrangement on a rap song. Like the string arrangements at the end of “Gone”, towards the end of the album – that shit blew my mind.
‍Yeah, it’s a pretty incredible album.

So, as a kid that played the cello but was also into rap music, I thought it was cool, but not in a performative way. I just genuinely thought it was awesome music.
‍Yeah I think what you were just saying is pretty important though, because you were talking about contrast. You know, programming and skateboarding, at the time, weren’t similar. Going back to what you were saying, it probably wasn’t cool to be a cello player; it was maybe cooler to play the electric guitar, or whatever.

And I don’t know what happened, but what’s cool now is to be a generalist. When I grew up it was what music you listened to, it was how you dressed, how you walked and talked. But now, everyone listens to everything, wears every style, and can present themselves in lots of different ways.

For me, I didn’t realize there was a juxtaposition between skateboarding and programming, except that none of my other skateboarding friends programmed... but I think skateboarding is very informative for so many people. I deeply believe that it’s informed almost every fashion movement. I mean, almost all of them have roots going back to skateboarding, hip-hop music, and rock and punk music. They all kinda tie together. They’re almost inseparable, and skateboarding seems to be at the middle of a lot of that. That may be really hyperbolic, but you get what I’m saying.

So, there was skateboarding, and then eventually The Brilliance. Feeding your curiosity on the Internet, looking at things, and then choosing to write about them helps you hone your taste. I mean if you go back to our early posts, there’s more humor than there is taste, or maybe there’s just more weirdness in there, but as we grew that thing and learned more about interesting people, the “taste” thing started happening. I don’t know – It’s tough to talk about taste without sounding pretentious. 

Yeah I totally get it… I think someone needs to invent a more appropriate word than “taste”. The word “palette” is maybe worse?
‍That’s not too bad.

Ha, I’ve actually been thinking about skateboarding a lot as of late though. I never really skated but all of my friends did, so I was always around it. Like right now, I live in the Mission District in San Francisco, and it’s pretty much the only part of the city where, regardless of what’s happened in the last 10-20 years, you can still go outside and see kids skateboarding. It’s still happening, and people aren’t really resisting it. I thought it was just a really endearing aspect of the neighborhood… But thinking about it more, and I don’t wanna state the obvious here, but skate culture is just so deliberately built on the simple concept of breaking rules… I know that just sounds corny, especially in SF with all this “disruption” stuff…
‍Ha! Sure.

Yeah, I mean it’s kind of a “galaxy brain” take, but I feel like skate culture is just rebellious. Like everything is tongue-in-cheek and nothing is too serious to joke about. Do you think it’s that rule-breaking element that you see making its way into fashion?
‍Well, the fashion movements all fetishize it in the same way that they fetishize black music. You know what I mean? Like, there’s an irony to how you can’t go into a Louis store with a skateboard… I think you see where I’m going. They fetishize the people they don’t wanna let into their own stores. Or let into their own fashion shows. Or people who could never afford their clothes. 

I think it’s kind of a human thing. For people who didn’t grow up in those cultures, they look at it as… it’s like you can’t look away from a car accident. Skateboarding is also a highly independent sport. It is not a team sport. It can be done solo, by oneself. It’s self-expression. There’s no standardized rules; there’s just cultural rules to it, and each scene has a different set of cultural rules… 

But anyways, there’s been so many people who tried to incorporate skateboarding, and some have done an OK job. I think Marc Jacobs did a pretty decent job. I don’t know if he ever skateboarded or not, but he was always tasteful with it. And I mean, it’s hard for me not to talk about Virgil. He was the first one that was like “I’m giving you the new Louis shoes, and go ruin them skateboarding.” He was the first to make that an actual campaign.

Dude, I saw that Lucien Clarke absolutely destroyed a pair.
‍Yeah, he’s done a really good job of making that honest, and I very much appreciate watching that happen.

So on the note of Virgil and skating, I wanted to ask about how you guys first got in touch. I know you’ve shared the story about him reaching out to you and Chuck. He had reached out after wrapping up his Master's program, and at first you guys rejected him but you guys still stayed in touch. Later, you were trying to do some renovations to your bathroom and had the idea of hitting that Architect kid who’d been emailing you. The rest is history, but do you have any other details surrounding that connection?
‍Ha! Yeah that was it. We can’t find the initial email he had sent us, I really wish we could but I think it might’ve been deleted. It was a very cool email, though.

Was it in some early Internet UI? That would be pretty on-brand.
‍Ha, yeah I think it would’ve had to be early Microsoft Outlook.

Oh and on the note of architecture... I wanted to ask you about something really interesting you said once, which was that certain disciplines are more self-teachable than others. That’s something I agree with, but I can’t put my finger on why. I studied Computer Science in college, and agree that most of it could be self-taught. There’s other disciplines where I felt like the value was in the group discussions. But basically, I think you alluded to architecture being one of the fields that’s not quite as self-teachable.
‍Yeah, and I’ve probably quoted two different things on that that don’t agree with each other. It’s like, I don’t want a self-taught dentist or brain surgeon. But on the other side, I don’t believe Mies van der Rohe was an accredited architect, at least not in New York. He had to relocate to Chicago for a few projects, like that one with Philip Johnson… It's like his most famous one... I’m blanking on the name. 

For things like Engineering, there is merit to learning in a structured way so that you can learn the mathematics of specific materials and construction techniques that have been aggregated over the last thousand years. That stuff is distilled in a way that you can learn efficiently in school.

But, I think there are some things that can be self-taught. When I was younger, there wasn’t any school that you could go to for Computer Science that was teaching the most current version of what was happening on the web. And when you’re young, you’re kinda snotty, and I was maybe being snotty in thinking that college in general would’ve been a waste then. I don’t believe that anymore. I think if you really are excited about something, then absolutely go and learn that in a traditional setting. But, if you’re really excited, you’re gonna learn about it in a non-traditional setting concurrently as well.

It’s when you think that school is going to find a path for you that I think you’re going to waste your money. You need to do a self-examination first and figure out whatever makes you excited in the morning when you wake up, and then find an education that wraps around that. I don’t know if that answers your question.

No, it absolutely does! I know that in most other parts of the world it’s common for people to take 1-2 years off after high school, just to figure out what direction they’re trying to go in.
‍Yeah it would be great if we could all do something like that.

So, what was your immediate plan then around the time you graduated high school? I know you worked on some music-related venture around the same time, right?
‍I was actually hired by a small startup as a developer during my senior year of high school, so I moved to Michigan two weeks after. That’s what brought me to Michigan. I left like, immediately after high school and was working full-time. That was one of my last “real jobs”. I had two normal W2 jobs after high school for like 5 years, until I was 23.

And that time, did you ever have any of these Steve Jobs-ian visions of the direction you were trying to take your career?
‍Uhh… I mean the Steve Jobs thing is so sacred, I don’t want to say that that’s me! But, no. I think that stuff kicked in later. The entrepreneurial thing was always there, like I was always staying up late designing something... Or after 5, going home and making some dinner, going to sleep for a little bit, and then going back to freelancing until like 1am.

My influence back then was driven by Jay Z. I wanted to be successful, but I didn’t even know what that meant. I was too young to fully understand it. The most common form of success that people bring up is just money. So at that time, I was like “Cool, I’ll just try and earn a lot of money.” What I later found out was that I wasn’t just a “money guy” who wanted to make as much as possible. Once I started making money, I started enjoying the fruits of it, like the freedom that comes with it, the things you can buy, the ways you can express yourself, and places you can travel to… 

But it wasn’t until my first entrepreneurial pursuit that I really started to dig into the godfathers of this computer world… Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Can you imagine that time? The personal computer was just coming into the home… What an incredible opportunity. What an intersection of the human condition. And now, being able to speak with anyone else or make anything in the world via these computers. And so I started to really appreciate and respect what they were doing. So, no, the entrepreneurial thing didn’t really kick in in a formed way until I was around 24, 25 years old. And again, I was always kinda doing stuff when I was a kid, but that aspect of really looking at it, and looking at the people who were good at it – people like Jay Z or Steve Jobs – and thinking “I wanna do something like that one day”... That was later, yeah.

I can definitely see the Steve Jobs parallels, but I’m curious about your connections to Jay Z. Why was he someone you looked up to?
‍I mean, we probably don’t have enough time to go into all the little nuances of that, but I think… The song “Hard Knock Life”, when that came out, the topic of the song aside, it sounded very different. It sounded very new. Now you hear it, and it’s almost like everyone knows the song even if they don’t know it. That song, at the time, was incredible. And again, I love contrast. So he’s taking this sampled Annie voice and rapping over it, and it was just unbelievable to me. I’d heard his music before, I believe this was ‘96 or ‘97, but I just couldn’t get enough of that song…

I started digging into his music more and learning more about him, and I learned that he was trying to get signed but couldn’t. He was trying to exit the world of crime, and was clearly entrepreneurial, but was always selling drugs because in the context that he grew up in that was the best solution to, and the best escape from the problem that he had. So he did that, and had the self-realization that it was probably not a good long-term thing and that he should start making money somewhere else. He started rapping and saw that he was clearly very talented at it, but again, he couldn’t get signed so he started his own record label. And it was so over-the-top calling it “Rocafella Records”. Like think about that! He’s referencing the Rockefellers! And completely owning the whole thing… It's just incredible.

Ha! On the note of the Rockefellers – I’m from West Virginia, and one of our senators was literally a Rockefeller. Jay Rockefeller, to be exact. So yeah, I completely get how ostentatious of a move that was.
‍I mean yeah, Jay is the epitome of the American dream. I have no qualms in saying that he is literally the American dream, walking.

So, it seems like it was more his personal narrative that you aspired to, right?
‍Absolutely.

This is actually super timely, because Drake just dropped those two new songs literally last night. Have you seen the video?
‍Yeah, I just watched it last night.

So, obviously that first track was an homage to “Song Cry”, right?
‍Yes it is.

I mean he was in front of Marcy Projects and everything. It’s crazy though because I felt like none of the kids my age caught the reference. Kids in their early 20s didn’t catch the reference!!!
‍Yeah, I mean it is pretty far back.

I get that it dropped in 2001, but The Blueprint is The Blueprint! It’s a classic album. Basically a required listening. I think the bigger issue is that it wasn’t on streaming until Jay’s most recent birthday, so a lot of kids just blanked on it. It almost feels like there’s been an element of erasure in terms of Jay Z’s role in history… It’s horrible stuff.
‍I would agree.

This actually reminds me of something I wanted to ask you about, because there are very few other people that are as in-the-loop with both architecture and music. Basically, in college I wrote an article where I argued that Yeezus was deliberately designed with Bauhaus design principles. Like, if you look at the album cover, the music, the tour, and obviously people like Virgil being involved, it becomes a pretty compelling argument. Since you’re someone who’s obviously close to those circles, but also clearly passionate about architecture, I’d love to get your thoughts on not just Yeezus, but maybe the relationship between music and architecture in general.
‍Hmmm. I wasn’t into all the Bauhaus stuff at the time that the album came out, and I didn’t sit in on those meetings, but Virgil’s hand was so involved in all of those things that were going on that it’s impossible to separate, in my opinion, Virgil and Kanye at that time. It’s highly likely, that yes, what you just told me is likely the case, especially with the Le Corbusier influence and all that stuff.

In terms of how it affects music today, I think it goes back to what I said about people being generalists. It’s like, before, if you were a musician, people would generally be shocked that you had a personal interest in architecture. They would assume that you hired a great architect, like the most expensive one you could get to make the most expensive house you could get. But people are genuinely taking interest in this! I mean Kanye, his home was designed by the Family crew – which is Oana and Dong-Ping – and he has all the Pierre Jeanneret stuff in there… He is just very for real about it. He has surrounded himself with some incredible people. He’s an exception, but we’re seeing it bleed over into other areas. We’re seeing people take everything that they do, and have some sort of consideration about it. 

Like for architecture, I started to really deep dive into it when I was working with Nøtre on redesigning their store. We selected to bring in Norman Kelly, an architecture firm based in Chicago, and I was able to sit with an architect basically every day for like 6 months and ask questions. I always thought architecture was very structural and specifically about building, which is such a silly way to think about it, especially as I say it out loud. The more you read about the greats, you realize they look at it as more of an all-encompassing “thing”... like it extends to the way your voice sounds in the room, the way your feet feel while walking around, all of those kinds of things are also architecture.

So, when you talk about music and architecture, a true architecture fan will tell you that there’s no separation in anything. Architecture permeates absolutely every medium of expression: music, dance, food, love, all of it. So… that’s a very broad answer to it, but again, we’re seeing this thing where people are becoming generalists and excited about multiple things, so musicians are definitely being informed by more and more things around them. You can hear it in Kanye’s music, even in his Sunday Service you can see it. It’s a very architectural presentation of an idea, in terms of its structure. I hate to be so broad, but it just permeates everything and everyone is excited about it right now. I guess the corny thing to say is that Architecture is having “a moment”.

Ha, I might’ve read something you said earlier about chairs having “a moment” too, and I agree.
‍They are! They are very much having a moment, and I’m not sure what’s going on.

Yeah like literally right now, I’m in my room, and I’m sitting in a replica of a Marcel Breuer “Cesca” chair. I couldn’t afford the original… But anyways, you said something really interesting about how architecture kind of bleeds into all of the senses. It reminds me of something one of my architecture professors said, which was that the experience of navigating a building has a cinematic-like quality about it. Like, there is a natural sequence to moving through the rooms and various passages presented by the building. I thought it was cool how she connected that to film.
‍Yeah, exactly. I would completely agree with that.

Another comment you made was about this relationship between generalists and architecture, as a discipline… I’m trying to find the right way to word this… Is it just like “the” creative discipline for generalists? The ideal outlet for anyone who’s trying to build something that affects all the senses?
‍Hmmm… I mean, it’s certainly starting to feel that way a little bit more. I think if you're an architect, you kind of need to be a generalist. How could you make a building that humans could spend time in without being somewhat interested in music, art, food, or culture, you know what I mean? Like you would design a robot building that no one would enjoy. And there are plenty of those. I remember looking at some of Mies’s buildings growing up and thinking “Why would you care about this thing? It’s so boring!”, but as you get older, you realize that it was designed for longevity and all sorts of interesting efficiencies in mind.

When you’re a kid, you would design a building that has 9,000 different colors and a bunch of slides all over the place, because that’s your context. But as you get older, you realize some of the best buildings are the ones that are the most human, and the human condition is not made up of just one thing. It’s made up of everything that we do. So, to be a great architect you certainly need to be a generalist. And, it’s funny for me to give any sort of opinion on that, because I’m not an expert on it by any means. I’m looking over the fence and learning about it. 

So how do you exactly go about learning? Like you’ve spoken about learning in traditional vs non-traditional settings, and also about how you just talk to experts in a given field, but I’d love to learn more about your approach.
‍So, I started at the library, and now of course we have Google. For internet learning, my go-to is YouTube. You can effectively learn how anything is made on YouTube.

Another funny thing is, the more success you find in life, the cooler the people are who you get to meet with. So, on The Brilliance, we were reaching out to people to interview them. Really, those were people we wanted to get to know or grab coffee with, but they didn’t know who we were, so we would ask to interview them and they would do it in that context. So, we would ask them the questions we would ask in an interview, basically what we’re doing right now. Like last night I was at this event here in LA, and all these people who I looked up to were there. Now I’m finally in that peer group, so I can ask them questions or just text them, share ideas, whatever. That’s the ultimate way to learn. So, the more you accomplish and the more you do, the more you find yourself surrounded by people who will be able to help you as well. 
‍
Dude, yes. Like this, right now, is basically that. The Brilliance was literally my reference point for what Lettermans should be. Even the design, to a certain degree. At the beginning, was The Brilliance more about accelerating your own learning? Because now, I think a lot of kids my age look at the site as more of an archive of sorts. Was it more about documenting things or just learning? Like what was the initial intention?
‍Yeah it’s very much an archive right now. But when we got started, Chuck and I were just sharing emails back and forth that were just such a variety of topics. The blog “thing” was just starting to happen so we were just jumping on that wave. But we jumped into this narrative that I don’t think anybody really understood. There were things like Hypebeast, Highsnobiety, and plenty of other ones. We were in that narrative and just starting to find a community in all of that. 

The interviews though, yes, they were very selfish. We knew exactly what we were doing. We were putting ourselves in the context of those people that we really looked up to by interviewing them and asking them questions.

Same, fair enough.
‍It was like a learning tool. It was a total hack.

It sounds like you didn’t foresee it becoming what it did.
‍No.

But at what point did you realize that it morphed into something different than what it started as?
‍Hmmm… Maybe only after. It’s pretty funny, like Boxed Water is a fairly ubiquitous company now, like we’re in pretty much every state and sell millions and millions of units now every year, which is kind of insane. But I still get asked about The Brilliance more!

Like I was in Paris recently talking to DJ Benji B. We have lots of mutual friends but don’t really know each other that well. We were just chatting, and he was like “Dude I see you everywhere! I know you’re close with Virgil – what’s your connection here? Etc.” So I told him about how I started The Brilliance, and it was like a record stopped. Like, I look up to Benji B, and it was a big deal to him. And it’s funny because it’s such a midwestern thing of us. Me, Chuck, and Virgil are all midwestern to various degrees, and there’s something about us where we thought that nobody would ever really care too much about what we were doing. That’s maybe why we left the typos in there. It’s very real. 

One of the words that’s been coming up for me a lot, especially to describe things that I dislike in music or popular media, has been “performative”. I think what drew me towards The Brilliance was that it wasn’t performative at all! It was just a very genuine, pure expression of interest, and it was separated from any movement of people that just wanted to be “cool”.
‍Yeah, and you know, humor is a big part of Chuck and I’s lives. Irony is a big part too. Like if you go to Virgil’s early posts, his first post was about post-it notes. He put up post-it notes all over his wall to figure out what his first post would be. Those are the quotation marks of Off-White. It is literally the same framework of thinking. It’s the same self-referential irony he’s using today. He was doing that in ‘06, so we all had this weird sense of humor to it. That genuineness we had in leaving the typos permeates through. Like it’s ok to make mistakes! It’s ok to show the process a little bit! That’s where the genuineness comes from though, it was just us.

I remember Bobby Hundreds emailing us really early on, and The Hundreds was pretty new. We were pretty new. He said he loved the blog because it felt like real people were writing it, like there were real people behind it. There’s clearly no editing, and Chuck and I would always text each other after a post like “Dude, there’s 80 typos in this thing. Can we at least bring it down to 10?” It was just a very funny thing, we were always correcting each other’s posts, but there were no real rules to it.

I know we literally have 1 minute left, but the last thing I’ll say is… One thing my friends and I talk about a lot is the difference between people who are into music and people who are into being cool.
‍Ha!

Yeah, like there’s people who are into music, people who are into architecture, people who are into cars, clothes, whatever. And then there’s people who are just into being cool. To me, just hitting the nail on the head, I feel like The Brilliance was people who were just genuinely into the things that they were talking about, the things that they were writing about, the people who they were talking to, etc. So yeah, thanks again for your time.
‍I really appreciate that. That means a lot that you reached out to interview and all of that. That means a lot that The Brilliance… If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?

I’m 24.
‍I’m 38. It means a lot that it’s still lasting, or that it’s still providing something for someone. I’m gonna start blogging again personally this year at some point, maybe not on The Brilliance. I’m just ready to start writing again. But it’s pretty cool that I participated in it, and all the things that have come from it are cool. I’m happy that you’re doing the same thing, because the hack of reaching out to people and asking to interview them still works, and probably will continue to in perpetuity.

Ha! I mean Lettermans wouldn’t exist without The Brilliance, and I say that definitively. That’s why you’re the second interview. The first was Lil B.
‍Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Yeah, you’re in good company. I’ll go ahead and let you go on your way. Thanks for your time.
‍Alright, thank you man.