 Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. I had an awesome chat with one of my best buddies, Dr. Lee Boffkin, and we've known each other for coming up to 25 years, and we've had some serious life chats, and a lot of fun. We ran festivals together, done a lot of cool stuff, and it's great to see one of your mates doing something that they love, and so yeah, we talked about his business, which is global street art. They do hand-painted advertising, amongst other things, and it's interesting to hear how he found out what he loves and how he made it into a business, and had the courage to follow that. So, really interesting, and I hope you enjoy it. Hey, it's Lewis. Welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Boom. And we're live. Is that your new catchphrase? Yeah, we finally made it, man. I go on the podcast. It's lovely to be here. Great to have you, great to have you. We've been chatting about crap and business and life and life. How have you been doing business? 25 years? It's been so long. Two festivals together. When we were at Howell, that was 2009. First one was 2009. Before we hit 30. Three festivals, Secret Garden Party. Yeah, we did that too. Yeah, it's great. It's great. It's wonderful. All that times. So, let's chat about your business, graffiti, street art, all that good stuff. Do all of that. But first, what is the difference between graffiti and street art? So, well, I mean, there's a lot of definitions. So, graffiti and street art are both forms of action that happen in public space that may or may not be authorised. When you talk about street art or graffiti, you're talking about an art form, a crime, and a subculture. So, both of them can be separate art forms. Graffiti is more letter-based writing as its history. Roots, 40, 50 years ago, writing on the subway system outside the subway system for Philadelphia. It's in the New York transit system. Street art came later as an artistic culture. And it's a whole hodgepodge of visual influences put together. So, it started in the U.S.? It started in the U.S. The roots of modern graffiti did. But they have their histories. People have been writing on walls. Obviously, everyone gives the Roman examples, et cetera. But writing outside, public space, public art, mural movements, all of these things have got... They come and go in cycles. So, the cycles are basically mark-making, making art in public space. And they happen in every culture. The Egyptians painted their houses, all of those kinds of things. One definition that happens that's quite common is street art is that stuff that happens outside that's not graffiti. So, there's a visually distinct identity. Street art tends to be more figurative. For example? Well, so, graffiti is one definition of it. It's a working definition. This is me saying it. You ask 10 people, you get 10 different definitions. But it's writing your name, your letters, your chosen letters, again and again, to get up, to be outside, to be seen. And it's about doing that ritualized process over and over again. It's not... There's getting graffiti, which is about territory, which is a completely different thing. And then there's artistic graffiti or writing, which is being going as far and wide as you can to get up, to get your name known, to basically get fame in that subculture. And street art is something a little bit different. But it also has a kind of illegal background. But all of these things have developed, evolved, they've churned over, and there's a modern mural movement and street art festivals that happen all over the world that most of them didn't exist 10 years ago and certainly not 20 years ago. So, it's constantly in flux and art movements. They're usually defined in retrospect. What's going on today? And at the time, you've got people that came from a street art background that are doing... a graffiti background that are doing more street art and it's all kind of churned together. Yeah, but if you're a graffiti artist, you want to do it as a career and make money, then you make the transition to street art. No, not necessarily. I mean, you know, if you want to make a career out of a form of urban art, be it street art or graffiti or urban art, there's an aesthetic that goes with that. There's ways of doing it. A lot of people evolve and say graphic design and just painting murals, just painting outside. There's people that do that. You know, just paint outside, big walls, murals, offices, interiors, advertising, all of those things. You know, that's just... it's often easier to think of it as painting and it depends on the purposes of the conversation. Yeah, what's the public perception now? Public perception is mixed. It depends on country to country, but it's a lot more open than it used to be. So graffiti has had a big impact. Most of the street art that all graffiti that people see today is not really on the street, but it comes through their Instagram feed, Facebook feed, whatever social media. So it's just kind of a shared visual thing and because people share the stuff they like more, the stuff that people tend to like more gets to be seen more. Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of over the last 20 years, it's converted, 15 years, it's converted more fans. So more people have become fans of graffiti but the movement's grown up and the fans have grown up. The fans are now in property companies working high up in councils in regeneration, in redevelopment, all of those things. And so there's become more of an acceptance of those kind of aesthetics and so there's more of a place for them, a role for them in making public spaces, placemaking. Yeah, yeah. And is the public perception different in different parts of the world? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it really depends. You know, when I broke it down before and said, I'm really angry to climb an art form or a subculture. There's certainly wide differences in how graffiti is treated and punished the illegal stuff is thought of in terms of the law. So if you, you know, there's well-known examples of graffiti writers who've painted trains in this country having long, long jail sentences that seem totally crazy. And when you compare that to different countries in Europe, the UK seems more punitive. So what's a typical jail sentence? I've had friends who've been sentenced for a couple years. Really? Yeah. Crazy. Feel like painting inside of a train. Yeah. Well, repeatedly. It's typically not a one-off thing. But you know, there's also, but then there's also kinds of graffiti where it's just viewed as like a, almost like littering and just get a fine if you're caught and on the spot sort of fine. So it kind of depends if you're, you know, where you're doing it. And from a legal point of view, the key differentiator is usually permission. Fine. And so you started Global Street Art. And one of the co-founders of Global Street Art. One of the co-founders. Yeah. Fine, fine. What is it? Global Street Art is an organization that exists to live in painted cities. So we're mission driven. That's what mission is to live in painted cities. And we achieve that in three different ways. So we've got an online platform, globalstreetart.com with all the associated social media. We've got roughly half a million fans on social media. I'll just sign up to our platform, share their photos with us, and we in turn share it with our audience. And that promotes street art and street artists online. The second part of what we do is we just support art and artists. It's non-commercial. And it's when artists are looking for places to paint, we basically match them with spaces, just fine spaces for people to paint legally. Yeah. And increasingly as we grow and we're able to help provide materials and sort of support in different ways. Nice. So you started out. And the third thing... Go on, go on. Sorry. I really forgot too. We have an agency. So globalstreetart.agency is where that's online. And that looks for commercial opportunities for basically monetizing paintings. So that includes things like campaign advertising, working with brands, sort of content and partnerships, working with property developers, that placemaking I alluded to before. And then other small bits and pieces like licensing, interiors, et cetera, et cetera. And so in terms of how you got into it, it's interesting because every month I was calling, I was like, Lee, where are you? He's like, ah, man, I'm in like, Sao Paulo taking photos of graffiti. Yeah. I'm in like Sydney. Yeah. So it started out as an interest. Yeah. Well, it started out as an accident, really. So I mean, street art and graffiti, I used to break dance or b-boy to give it its own name. I used to break dance for the UK back in around 2005. I had an injury. I was in a competition. I did some sort of land badly. I hurt my knee. I had to sort of stop dancing overnight. That felt terrible at the time. But in retrospect, it was really good luck. It just didn't seem that way because it led me down a different path. So because I had all of that energy, I had to do something with it. I started photographing street art and graffiti when I was traveling, when I was going anywhere. And that became my obsession when you hobby, just threw all the time into it that I could. And then on my sort of academic career side, I was a scientist. You know, my PhD is in maths and evolution. I was a biologist basically until I was about 25. And when I left that, because there was a maths element to it, I was lucky I got off of the job in LA. So sure, I'll come out there working in finance and if I'm perfectly frank, it was terrible. I really loved learning, but I wasn't so good at the spreadsheets and that sort of thing at the time. I just didn't have the experience in business to really be so useful in that position. But it taught me a lot about companies, business, corporate finance, accounting, that sort of stuff. But because I was in LA and I was working with this company that would every four months give me a new job, send me to different offices. I traveled a lot and kept taking photographs of street art and graffiti. It was a lot more graffiti at the time. Street art was just graffiti in like under bridges and in parts of town that you wouldn't usually go to and I really enjoyed that exploration. And then I was going into like the city centres where you tend to get more of the street art. And that was only possible because my business partner, co-founder Conrad, we met at that finance company. He basically thought there was something in this and it was his idea, I can't take credit for it. And he's been still a mentor, immensely supportive over the years, helped give us that runway to figure out what we could do to become sustainable over time. Nice, because a lot of people want to do or make a business out of a hobby but find it very difficult to do so. And actually quite scared. It's quite hard to quit a well-paying job, make a move from science to finance to how I'm going to just go and take photos. I was no good at it so I was lucky. Well, to be honest, when I left finance in 2007 there was the credit crunch. So there just weren't jobs to go into so I was forced out of the industry which again felt pretty rough at times. Just didn't know what to do. I joined a good friend of mine, Adrian for a really crazy start-up that was somewhere in insurance and living in Spain and then it became a tech company and it wasn't something that I was really aligned to but I really loved the people I was working with and I was in Spain so every weekend I could go to a different city, photograph four or five hundred pieces of graffiti in Spain. It's really well-painted and I really, really love that. And then at the end of a few months in Spain working with Adrian, I just had a sort of revelation and thought this has been so much more fun. I'd love to do this. I wonder if people will take a chance on me to travel and just do this for a summer. Conrad was fine with it with Business Partner. Adrian said, look if this is your passion, go and pursue it. If after a few months you want to come back it's still there. So people really made it easy for me and that's just luck. I can't pretend that I would have had the guts to do that had I not been in that really lucky situation. And then after we had 60,000 photos I classified that database from 25 countries like a scientist's word so you could look up smoking monkeys or pieces painted on vans and all sorts of cross-referencing. We thought that maybe we could try and be the getty images of street art and you could license images. It turned out we were opening a big door to a small cupboard and that wasn't really a business there and what we learned by trying to do that was the rights who owned the rights and photos were complicated and you should always have and work with artists to that end and it just felt complicated. So we started, went full-time really without a business model at all but with enough support to try different things and keep pivoting until something worked. So you had enough cash and runway to just classify the photos and then just experience and see what comes up. Well I was classifying the photos and I was doing other things so I'm still working on that. If you're going to build up something from a hobby or passion it's quite the challenge to just cut ties with whatever you were doing take no salary and then move into it. It felt safer to me and I think probably a lot of people to build something up on the side so essentially you're working kind of two jobs for a while and then eventually when you've got enough of a signal that you think there's something there that's when you take the job. When did you start to formalize the business model? Social impact, profit, looking after the artists. Yeah I mean it took a two to three years I'd say so we thought about making iPad apps people were paying for those at the time but the partners that we found worked quite right they really wanted the rights in the images that we couldn't give them. Then we tried book publishing and we brought out a book but of course it made no money at all. Still available? I think maybe like it's called Concrete Canvas it came out I think 2014 I think you can kind of get second hand copies of Amazon there's not many copies out there it feels like a history book now when I look at it it's still out there somewhere. Then we tried gallery shows but I realized we didn't the artists that we were working with at the time who've careers have moved on a lot now at the time their work wasn't necessarily selling for as much as it is now it wasn't as popular they were earlier in their careers and we just didn't know people that would buy it but we tried it the gallery model is quite difficult because unless you know people that you can place the art with you're putting all of the effort into making the show incurring all of the costs and then you try and sell the art and maybe recoup and hopefully profit it's a difficult way around to do it with the model that we have if you contract a client for a project and you lock that in you know what you're going to get paid you can work out hopefully some of your margins you know how to pitch for that business then you've just got to go out and do it so your reputation and your execution becomes really important but at least you know that you can make some money upfront so the money now is the hand-painted advertising that's part of it so hand-painted advertising is a bit more than half but it's by no means what we do completely the partnerships with brands which is really like making content stuff that goes online working with artists that way that's another part of it and then a smaller section of business is working with property developers working on big murals you know there's different reasons why different parts of that work at different times and then the social the social impact is you've met all these artists struggling to make money or want to try monetised they're separate right so the social stuff that we do since 2012 we've organised helped organise about 2,000 legal street art murals that's just because that's part of our mission now, you know, organising 2,000 murals takes a lot of effort nowhere near as much effort as the artists put in because we're just saying here's the space, here's what you need to know here's, you know, go have fun and now we can film it if it's during the week you supply the paint and like that increasingly we do that we certainly try and contribute to it pretty much every time and whatever else but when we started it was just about helping artists find places to paint and that's about reducing the administrative burden what I mean by that is let's say you're busy, you're working a 9-5 you're working 5 days a week you've got a family, you want to paint on the weekend not in the same places but in some new places you don't know where but you haven't got the time to look for them or as an artist who comes from another country you're looking for a place to paint but you don't know the law you don't know where you can paint and actually a friend points you to us it's a beautiful thing when someone comes into our studio and says and we can say like here's a place to paint here's the paint you need to do it welcome to London you know there aren't public facilities that really cater for artists in that way and there's a few people around London that really try and help artists find places to paint is this a key like new trend that's developed over the last few years I mean there's definitely increasing organisation around street art and there's more organisers and that happens all over the world I think more people have been involved in that and the more folks have tried to turn that into a business in one way or another or had a business and decided to do that stuff on the side I'd say that's a trend I think it's definitely a global trend but it's still very small you know I think when we're talking about sort of street art and where it could go and what painted cities might look like you know in London less than 1% of walls are painted I think so when you think of the construction side it's very few of painted when you think of plaster, render walls, gable ends not that many are painted as you go around London it really varies neighbourhood by neighbourhood if you're around Shoreditch maybe Candon and parts of south London around Brixton maybe there's more there's more walls painted but it's still not an overriding amount I think there's still a long long way to go not just in the UK but globally as well fine and how do you think the industry has changed since you've started well I guess I think you have to be careful when you use the word industry what is the industry are we talking about the brand related side are we talking about the raw advertising side are we talking about the gallery side and the print production side the short answer is it's all changed a lot of that's been fueled by social media generally I'd say it's increased but with that there's also increased competition you know I think some brands dip in and out of it some clients dip in and out of it and it waxes and wanes as if it's fashion that trend is sort of on top of an underlying trend that our cities are being painted more generally there aren't so many competitors that we have out there that I'd even say that we can in the UK really call it an industry yeah I'd say it's more of a proto-industry you know we're I think by far I think we're the biggest proof of sort of commercial painters out there in the UK by a country mile you know but I've seen more people be involved and do things over time it just is what it is and you see those trends happening around the world as well on the advertising side, hand-painted advertising is how all advertising is done vinyl printing, printing post of 48 sheet billboards those were that kind of scale of outdoor advertising is kind of 60, 70, I don't know however many years old and that movement back to some of it being painted is really just finding those traditional techniques working again with sign writers you know that's an old industry that's found a new lease of life and do you think that's driven from technology you mentioned social media, Instagram, Twitter yeah it's a good question so there's a bunch of trends I think at the same time as social media helping show the craftsmanship that happens in painted advertising or helped artists sell their work online by giving them direct connection and access to their audience and bypassing the gallery system there's a heap of other trends as well like the idea of a return to craft return to craftsmanship so in a very digital, cold technological age where we feel more alienated by social media people I'm not quite right to say want something more real but something tangible something that's done by hand something that feels like effort has been put in instead of being mass produced and manufactured so that happens at the same time as well I think within the commercial realm and the brands, they're talking storytelling is a thing and you did a storytelling course yeah yeah we did so that kind of narrative people don't like to have products shoved down their throat if there's a reason that something is relevant to them, it's a story that goes with that if it reaches more people so all of these things and those are just some of it if I'm honest murals are a relatively inexpensive way to change the way a neighborhood looks if you want to change the way that people feel about being in the neighborhood change the way that the neighborhood looks and painting it relatively a lot cheaper than knocking a building down and starting again and other interventions there's some murals being painted there me the annoying thing is when a graffiti artist graffiti's over it that's the most annoying thing man I think there's something beautiful about that as well you can't control what happens in the public realm true true that churn that graffiti is what keeps things fresh and incentivizes people to repaint stuff of course I've been frustrated when things like that happen but I think it would be desperately sad if we lived in a city that didn't have any graffiti no you're right so you know it's when you know people that write graffiti and you know their name and you go around a city and you don't see a tag as the same thing I know that guy even if you don't know the people if you start recognizing it it can make a really cold city feel a bit more familiar but at the same time everyone's had work destroyed and it got painted yesterday and then it was ruined today I think that's frustrating of course but then you do that you repeat that whole process over years and you just become kind of ideally a bit zen about it what would be interesting to see is if in our public spaces if more are open to be painted whether less people are graffiti illegally and then using like these public graffiti spaces people are always going to do that but I think it's very easy to dismiss people that paint graffiti illegally they're going to paint in different ways some people are just you know at the hardcore level just illegal illegal illegal you know there are going to be people that just want to paint in that way but there's a crossover as well and what you can definitely say is if you give people no legal opportunities to paint all you can do is the illegal stuff and you have a city that ends up looking a bit like Paris which some people like to look of but you know a lot of people that don't know graffiti really have an objection to that and if you've got more spaces to paint and a culture that fosters artistic expression you get a different outcome yeah that's true back to social media so you've hit Instagram hard I think in the last look you've had 250,000 followers or something like that 235,000 10% have you gone about it and have you taken a benefit to the business it's a good question you know we've been posting for years and street art is really shareable content it's all organic growth, there's no paid for promoted growth, there's no bots, there's none of that stuff it's just sharing good art with people that want to see it and they like it and then it grows from there our group isn't necessarily the fastest there's accounts that post really for one of the best way like virally stuff are related stuff well they call themselves street art related that's a way to grow an account as well we chose not to do that has it really benefited the business I wouldn't say we get many inquiries from it really I think it's something that helps people understand that we're serious about promoting it and so maybe it gives us a gravitas it's part of that whole wanting to support street art and artists that mission of wanting to live in 1870s but I wouldn't say much business culture interesting so why did you spend so much time doing it it's one of those things that you kind of started it's just like an ego thing it's like it builds an audience and it's one of the ways that supports the mission right so if you want people to believe well there's three audiences right you know there might be the client audience but I don't think they necessarily respond so much to that but then there's definitely artists and for the artists we want to be promoting them so it matters to us to promote them and it makes a difference to what they do so you know clearly there's a value in doing that and then you know fans want to see it as well and the more fans that you make the more people see how good just painting outside can be and the impact that that can have on a space and have people really believe that then you know it gets you one step closer to your mission changing people's views yeah that's true and so you're sharing photos on your database artists that have contributed to work we share a few things so a lot of the content that we share is things that artists have uploaded to globalstreethouse.com then we also share a lot of things that we've helped to organise as well and do artists just upload because they've had a view and do you encourage people to upload their own stuff? we don't do much promotion for a while it's actually pretty old and clunky we're looking at that excited to say that there will be a new website out in the next few months yay don't copy ours you should have I'll try not to but it serves a function so if you've seen things in our social media and you're an artist and you want to be promoted as well a natural thing to do would be to upload your stuff there to globalstreethouse artists also use globalstreethouse as a portfolio page because they can store their other social links it's amazing that for example Indonesia is one of the bigger countries for artists on globalstreethouse.com and that's amazing have you done any promotion? no not at all I think probably a few influential artists picked it up and they're like oh this is cool then maybe someone got shared and then there's word of mouth one thing that's really beautiful for us globalstreethouse.com is like the far reaches of our relationships and artists that maybe uploaded their pictures a few years ago and we promoted online eventually come to London and they say hey I'm coming to London if you've got any spaces to paint hey we'd love to see you drop into the studio and we make real friends that way and that's happened a lot over the years it's another reason to keep that up and it's a free service for artists never charge an artist to find a space for them so they can upload their portfolio on the website I can't see why we would ever charge for that I think it's about support and I think if you can engineer a way you've got to think about where the money is and where it could come from and if that is better off coming from the brands and you can do that you get to do the other things further your mission on the side and then you're happy and you're using Twitter much we do use Twitter obviously it's an older audience we've got about 45,000 followers on Twitter we've got older audiences at age wise I think so, I don't know many young people that jump on Twitter these days there's new social media apps all the time obviously it was about Snapchat there's a new one out that's called Tiktok I don't know if you've heard of that but that's really popular really young users there will be other social media platforms that grow and change over time as well so you use Instagram and Twitter there Instagram and Twitter and Facebook we've got 145,000 fans on Tumblr we've got about 35,000 10,000 fans on Pinterest and you catch me on the street calling and shouting hitting a heart so have you seen the cities changing for street art is it difficult? like the cities welcoming street art again it varies city by city I'd say generally globally yes cities are more open to different forms of street art and they're not all the same the walls that anyone can paint at any time legal walls they go up and down I'm not sure if there's an overall trend for those and in London I think it's probably gone down slightly over time really? of the formal official 24-7 ones that anyone can go and paint at any time for what reason? there weren't a huge number of spaces some of them have kind of been redeveloped over time and actually I think development has probably been two of these spaces were like old states or ball courts tunnels Leak Street by Waterloo and that's got a BGEN program going on now and that's changing quite a bit too I think it will last for a long time but I think development is a neutral word it can be good or bad regeneration and gentrification of two sides of the same process it depends how the local community fares after that process happens and those legal walls tended to be not last so long at the same time there's been an increased number of people helping artists find places to paint and then there's probably been an increase in the number of tolerated spaces where it's probably not completely formally permitted but which does currently risk for artists but generally people historically have been okay for painting these spaces and then there's an increased number of managed spaces where it's the curators not really curators but facilitators so someone owns some land someone comes to us and says here here here there's also been an increase in the number of big mural spaces because of various projects so that's typically what sign of a building sign of a building, two, three, four stories high something that requires scaffolding or lift equipment, one of that sort of stuff there's been certainly an increase in the last five years in those spaces but in the 1980s for example and before London had a really rich community mural scene and most of those murals were lost again when development knocked the walls down so again it comes and goes in cycles we tend to be pretty mild, pretty short-sighted looking on murals and street art in a very short time frame but you can look at mural movements over 20, 30, 40 years easily and see those cycles coming and going again so the environment's constantly changing for artists the environment the streetscape is constantly changing full stop, cities neighbourhoods in popularity, they wax, they wane London is obviously an increasing increasing population people still moving to London you look at the old feathers the traffic on the M25 lucky London's a busier, bigger expanding city and so it changes from a development point of view a traffic planning point of view from lampposts that came in the 50s post-war lampposts and manhole covers of things the more you look at street art and you're tuned to what's going on in public space you start to pay attention to other things as well there's a road building programme for London in the 1960s that never really happened but it was on the cards for quite a while and a few buildings were constructed with the expectation that there would be this road building programme that never happened and you can still see the scars on the landscape so if you would like planning our new towns and future of our towns and cities how would you integrate street art into them? I think it's part of a broader question architects and master planners city planners I think typically create spaces a view, have a vision of spaces that they impose in sort of a top-down way there are efforts and they are somewhat changing that there should be an allowance for that process not just what do people want in terms of how would people change the space how would the flow of people change the space how do people want to interact with that space and how do you build for that or design space for that to then be accommodated after the buildings it's hard to do that though it is sending something like London where we've got hundreds of years of history and stuff is built on and built on and built on and that will keep happening and the buildings from today will be torn down at some point in the future as well as well a lot of the skyscrapers that we've built huge buildings I think it's quite doubtful whether they'll be there in 50 years time quite a lot of them will be pulled down a lot of the Brutalis buildings from the 1960s most of those have come now so how would you get our inter-public spaces like right now I think you have to speak with the right people the first thing is you have to make a case for the van for me there's a community value in not just making a space brighter but encouraging people to slow down to stop to rest a while and only when people if you're running through a space you never meet anyone if you're stopping to have your lunch be that chess benches or better places to sit etc and that's called architecture you can encourage people to speak with each other by facilitating that those accidental meetings might happen and communities build and form that way if you add up those interactions people make friendships over time so you have to design a thing you call it a centric point of view it's probably beyond the way that I think my current core it's beyond what I know but is anywhere you've been doing it well like Singapore have these connected gardens that you can walk through around Singapore is there anywhere taken up your motto of painting making every city a painted city it's so difficult and it's so conflated with other factors so I think if you step back street art or painting is one aspect that makes a city potentially friendlier, warmer more welcoming makes you want to slow down and stop because it's a shared good enriches the space, it's public art it's things that everyone can enjoy there's other things that are needed and culture other things from a spatial point of view and street furniture affects how people move through but culture is really important to community forming as well is there an expectation that we stop and speak with each other we do those kind of things art for me is about fostering that kind of spirit as well that sort of community spirit and then where is doing it really well the happiest people on the planet are the Danes isn't it like Bhutan one of the happiest places I don't know I think Bhutan Bhutanese people spend less time on their mobile phone I don't have anything, chill out mountains, relax often I feel like I could spend longer outside of the city the interesting thing is to measure if you have a different response to art if you see it on the wall compared to art if you see it on your mobile phone or 100% I think although we're constantly on our phones taking selfies and taking photos outside for me I don't take many photos on my phone because I find that being outside and taking things in is a mobile phone ruins the experience for me I'm not so interested in photographing a lot of walls because I think it takes something away from being there for sure it's better to see something in person than it is but most people are seeing life through their mobile now but also if it encourages you to go and be somewhere and go and see something it can work another way around your technology is neither good nor bad really it's really about how you use it it's very powerful stuff obviously there's billions of pounds of dollars that have been invested in the attention economy in making you want to look at your mobile phone and a mobile phone is really good at that awesome, so phone, clock, alarm clock watch there's a bunch of art installations a few years ago which was strapped together with a luggage strap everything that your mobile phone has taken over so alarm clock, radio, camera, TV, all of those things all at one I think you posted a photo of the alien scene of the alien encapsulating your face sucked, you know that alien film on your face, the arms behind sucking up the face and that's your mobile phone it's interesting so it sounds like your focus is UK not necessarily but you're organizing stuff in other countries so we've got a project going on out there we've got a couple of projects coming up in Rome in the next couple of months we do work all over the world the majority of what we do is in the UK but we're Global Street Art we certainly promote artists from all over the world we've got friends in lots of different countries and that gives us a capacity to do things in other countries as well it really depends on what clients are asking for and what you hope to achieve with Global Street Art ultimately the big question a permanent bricks and mortar museum dedicated to preserving a visual record of Street Art in graffiti, a community and with that make it a community hub it's like a club or whatever where people can come and pay and share experiences I've got a floor plan and there's multiple things in there there's lots of different things to have that in the same building I don't want to give too much of that away yet but more than our office and studio currently I like that you're bringing it into the physical world I think it has to but also we organised helped organise a few years ago the Broccoli Street Art Festival that was a rewarding experience it's a street art festival in Broccoli South London we had an idea for an article I've never been I've never been very good at filling in forms we tried to get Arts Council funding years ago for a street art festival but I couldn't fill it to save my life but my phone went by the postcode it's not one of my strengths it's filling in forms so we tried to buy for Arts Council funding for Street Art Festival and we flopped we just didn't do it the Arts Council could maybe fund us that was one of the last times we saw because it's just not something I've got the skill set to apply and we haven't thought about bringing that on but we spoke with the Londonists it's a really cool website and they were supportive the idea for an article was nominate your neighbourhood for a street art festival so we ran the article put a few friends up to it but in the end we were like we want to have a street art festival seven neighbourhoods came forward in total broccoli won a public vote with about I think 900 out of 3,500 votes and so we went down to broccoli and said right we're going to have a street art festival we're all full of really interested people that wanted to see it happen was it outside or? yeah it was about 25 year olds in broccoli and around broccoli in south London three or four years ago and that's now run independently a street art festival since then but we'd love to see a London mural festival we've been thinking about doing that how to fund that what that looks like and access to spaces it's really complicated it's really complicated it's doable though I think one of the things about knowing so many talented artists who paint outside is that you can reimagine a city as a gallery one of the programs that we're most proud of is called art for estates we've worked in four or five different housing estates we're active in three housing estates this is all in London or? all in London the three active ones are all in the borough of Camden Camden's been really helpful super supportive over the years and we're figuring out a process that at no cost to the council or residents helps get more art into housing estates in London normalises it so kids grow up around art it makes spaces a little bit brighter and at the margins I think it's a good thing it has some antisocial behaviour problems some kind of glittering is one thing that comes down doesn't solve everything at all but it's a good thing to do and we'd love to do that more and more and more so you're giving a lot of artists lots of opportunities and platforms to paint are you? you've got to be really careful about the language and I'm really careful about the language because when I think about especially our community or social programs I think of what we do as an important one percent so we're helping artists find the place to paint and just making the administration a little bit easier that's the one percent a person that then goes on to make it look amazing and put their time left in is the artist artists have a big duty to society they're painting stuff and I feel like a lot of artists would agree anyone that's operating outside has got the duty you need to be aware of the environment you're painting and the effect that it's going to have on the people around you I think the only reason that I object before letting you finish the sentence and my apologies for that is I also think society has a duty to support and foster artistic practice it works both ways around but you have no control over what these people are painting so if they want to promote a political view so it depends in the Art for Estates program it's not a commission you're a helping artist if you come and paint in shortage maybe a piece will last a week, two weeks, three weeks if you paint in a housing estate where it can have more such an impact you have a different experience on a better structure of wall it's a fresh space where it's valued and appreciated by the folks it's just a different experience it's a different meaning in London and I think a wholesome grounding beautiful thing that can happen I've forgotten your question too many of them so basically artists paint things for different reasons so it's like in Art for Estates we're not telling artists what to paint if we're telling artists what to paint as far as I can tell that's a commission you're paid for it, it's commercial work if we're facilitating an artist and the request comes from an artist then we're doing what we can to help and support the artist that's different from us telling someone to paint here, now, this, that, the other that's a commercial thing but what we do say is especially in the housing estate we won't tell you what to paint tell you to be sensitive shouldn't be racist shouldn't be sexist it doesn't happen when you trust that kind of problem over the years when you're trusting artists to do what they want to do most people want to say something meaningful or do something that's not that aggressive but that said artists should be able to paint political stuff it's difficult if you're standing between a property developer who's got a building site hoarding and an artist and you want to make an argument about housing or Trump or something like that and it might bring a council complaint and you find yourself in a situation and you try and navigate that and from time to time we've supported some writing political works and they haven't all gone well so what the person who's built it was I've had council a complex from the internet once or twice there's a Trump on the wall and some of that stuff and some of that stuff is like you know you're just a bit zen with it and it just makes it really funny we've had some projects where some of the things that have gone wrong or some of the things that have happened and just seem bizarre and you're like how is this my job and at the end of the day the fact that you get those stories if you're thinking about it in the right way you leave with a deep sense of gratitude because we're doing something with the people around us the global street art, the core team the crew if you will we're able to do something full time and just pay our bills doing something that's freaking amazing of all the things that I've done in the past sciencey stuff, working in finance there was some cool stuff and I learnt a lot but I was doing HIV research at one point when I was a scientist I never thought then about social impact doing that as I think we can have now and that's because you're painting outside it affects people if something great goes up people pass it on the bus if it makes the people on the top deck of the bus journey half a percent better for a week until they're bored of the mural and they maybe want to move on whatever that is you've really done something and that's worth doing it's a great place to end man are we done? I think we're done unless there's anything else you want to chat about no I really enjoyed it it's great to hear enjoying it and people doing things that they enjoy I can't see myself doing anything else I'm one of those people that you speak to that guy and he's a lifer he's going to be doing that for as long as he can life's a long time exactly who knows but of all the things I've done I've never enjoyed it as much as this we get that far and we get the building and all of that stuff works and we're able to support artists in more ways that's really cool I'm going to be in my 80s and 90s shuffling around late at night clearing the bins you'll be giving me a job behind the bar my job title for the years was CEO and janitor I spend a lot of time sort of emptying the bins because still an entrepreneur, still a young company that's still what you've got to do definitely, it's awesome cool man, keep up the good work drop off a piece of art whenever you want boom see ya