My dad owns his own towing business, and my dad used to tow Hulk Hogan’s cars back and forth from Clearwater to different shops and stuff. And they had a relationship where when the cars would get done getting fixed, he’d pick it back up and take it back to Hulk Hogan’s house.
AI does not keep me up at night. Almost no one is working on conscious machines. Deep learning algorithms, or Google search, or Facebook personalization, or Siri or self driving cars or Watson, those have the same relationship to conscious machines as a toaster does to a chess-playing computer.
My favorite affirmation when I feel stuck or out of sorts is: Whatever I need is already here, and it is all for my highest good. Jot this down and post it conspicuously throughout your home, on the dashboard of your car, at your office, on your microwave oven, and even in front of your toilets!
I would say that if there is one thing we could have done better in the last 10 years under my watch, is when we launched what we called ‘the new car.’ It is now called the Gen-5. We just didn’t get the collaboration we needed to get from the industry, the owners, the drivers, the engineers and car manufacturers.
Megaupload was a dual-use technology. You can use it for good things, and you can use it for bad things. If someone sends something illegal in an envelope through your postal service, you don’t shut down the post office. If someone speeds with the car he just bought, you don’t go to the car manufacturer and say, ‘Hey, we’re shutting you down.’
Perhaps future space probes will be plastered in commercial logos, just as Formula One cars are now. Perhaps Robot Wars in space will be a lucrative spectator sport. If humans venture back to the moon, and even beyond, they may carry commercial insignia rather than national flags.
Once the subject matter of rock n’ roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, ‘Oh, that’s what they’re doing. That’s kind of – that’s art.’
I wanted a song my 6-year-old niece could listen to in the car. ‘Everyday is Christmas’ sounds like a sweet sentiment, but in reality if every day were actually Christmas it would be a candy cane-riddled hellscape from which the human race could never awaken. So we’re lucky it is just a lighthearted Christmas tune.
The appeal of the Golden Age heroes for me is their simplicity, even their naivety – they represent the fundamental building blocks of the whole superhero genre, whether it’s a ‘super’ man able to lift cars, or a vigilante who terrorises criminals at night like Batman.
When I grew up in the early ‘90s, the new World Wide Web felt like a gimmick, and I had no idea of the changes in store. In the summers, I’d backpack through Europe, follow the Grateful Dead. I had a car and a tent and traveled around the Great Lakes and out West. Jack Kerouac was my guiding light, his ‘On the Road’ a sacred text.
From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain’s standard of living was supported by oil from Iran. British cars, trucks, and buses ran on cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, powered its ships with Iranian oil.
One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, ‘The Age of Despair,’ and then some other ‘Ages’ – Innocence, God, Reason, Hope – and I wrote this as well: ‘Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.’
As a singer, you can’t hear what’s coming out of your throat; you’re only hearing it from the inside, so you need a trusted person who knows how your voice works. It’s like a car. You take it to the same mechanic because they know it inside out, and every time you get it back, it works fantastic.
Yes, I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools. My parents went through a back-to-the-land phase. Most of our vegetables and fruits came from our own garden.
I’d been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called ‘Not Sculpture Park,’ because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.
Oh yes, my best birthday gift was when my dad gifted me my first car in college. It was a Maruti Swift. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. It was so much fun, as I could completely show it off to my friends that I have my own car now and not my dad’s car.
I’m not a big fan of self-driving cars where there’s no steering wheel or brake pedal. Knowing what I know about computer vision and AI, I’d be pretty uncomfortable with that. But I am a fan of a combined system – one that can brake for you if you fall asleep at the wheel, for example.
The reason I keep talking about a wife and saying the word ‘wife’ on stage is because it seems a funny word to me. The more you say it, the more it seems to detach from that person and become this sort of abstract thing: that you would set out to find a wife, that it would be an objective like buying a new car.
I rolled the second car that I ever owned, a Toyota 4 Runner. This was winter in Colorado, two weeks before the 2002 Olympic trials. I was driving in the outside lane, and my rear tire caught some black ice, and we totally turned sideways to the point where we were heading right toward the median.
HBOS had robbed me of my marriage, my family, my businesses, my longstanding friend and business partner, my income, my investments, my self-respect, my reputation, my privacy, my physical and mental health. It cost me my security, my image rights, my collection of classic cars – and very nearly my life.
Product investment, quality management, and all the things that are key for a car company – great, there has been no compromise in those aspects. But I feel there’s a lot we could do on communication, particularly from a Chinese perspective.
What we’re looking at is a future where cars will be comfortable and safe and offer the luxuries of both home and office. That means lots of sensors and software, as well as the critical safety systems to protect the car’s information from hackers.
My first experience in a movie theater was Dick Tracy. There was a scene with a guy with a Tommy gun and a wall of fire behind him. I panicked, screamed, and jumped out of my seat. And I ran six New York city blocks, running into the street and almost got hit by a bunch of cars and had my mom chasing after a panic-stricken four-year-old.
I have mixed feelings about ‘Car 54, Where Are You?’ Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the musical numbers out of ‘The Wizard Of Oz’; it wouldn’t be that interesting.
The prevailing – and foolish – attitude is that a good manager can be a good manager anywhere, with no special knowledge of the production process he’s managing. A man with a financial background may know nothing about manufacturing shoes or cars, but he’s put in charge anyway.
