I’m one of the keynote speakers at this year’s MBA Media and Entertainment Conference, along with old pals like the president of Viacom and the president of the New York Times.

I’m one of the keynote speakers at this year’s MBA Media and Entertainment Conference, along with old pals like the president of Viacom and the president of the New York Times.

Actually, they’re on another panel. I’ll be sitting at a table with Bob Guccione and discussing the “Entrepreneurial State of Mind,” which is basically answering questions from the moderator and eventually a bunch of MBA degree students.

I’m going to impart crucial lessons like work hard, settle on the price before you do the job, get shit in writing, answer your phone, don’t fuck people over, um … don’t say shit like, “If I could get some money for this, it would be awesome because my bike got stolen and I’m broke and I’m probably going to have to move back in with my parents.”

Shit, I don’t know what I’m talking about. What if I fuck this up? It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve done a few of these things. Here are some highlights:

THE BONN BIENALLE – 2004

I was flown to the most boring town in Germany to discuss “What is cool?” No joke. The guy who ran the event told me that because of Hitler, Germany could no longer have any pride in their culture and had to start from scratch. This meant having lots of culture festivals where people from all over the world come by and tell them how to live.

When I got there, I discovered my talk was not in the gigantic main hall where everyone else was but actually at a tiny bar next door. I was with some German magazine publisher and the majority of the questions were in his language, so I just pretended they were accusing me of having no air conditioning in our office, which is a patently false accusation.

Somehow, the whole thing became pretentious German students giving me shit about George Bush and asking me where America gets off thinking it can police the world. Do they think the population of America is 32? I got all defensive and told them they need to get over Hitler because all this multicultural shit is enabling the Turks to walk all over them.

After it was done, the guy who set up the whole thing took me aside and I got in trouble the way you do in high school.
—

PRATT – THE NEW BROOKLYN TALK – 2006

This conference wasn’t about defining cool but defining why Brooklyn was getting cooler. I think Pratt was trying to discourage people from going to Parson’s by pretending Manhattan sucks.

The panel included Russel Simmon’s brother and some rapper named Chocalicious, or something like that. They kept saying stuff like, “I’m just here for the check and the fancy dinner” and I kept saying it was hard to pretend that Fort Green was more fun than the Lower East Side.

By the time the Q&A happened at the end, the whole thing had totally gone off course and it was a complete free-for-all. Some kid came up and said this whole discussion left a bad taste in his mouth and I zinged him with, “That’s probably cum.” Then some crazy guy went on a tangent about “hipsters and hip hop and bebop and blipsters and pop and trip hop” like he was a slam poet and I told him to go back on his medication even if he’s positive he no longer needs it.

Anyway, I found out a few weeks later, these series of talks had been canceled. I assumed it was the cum joke or something like that, but it wasn’t. It was some random part at the beginning where I pretended to be worried people would think I was gay for having a big mustache and stood up yelling, “I’M NOT GAY! I’M NOT!” Apparently the Dean thought this statement “harbored a climate for homophobia” or something and canceled the talks permanently.
—

WRK PLY – CAREER TALK – 2008

This talk was to tell people how to “make it” in New York and find a career that suits you. They had the owner of Brooklyn Brewery, who said he got rich watching Scarface every day, and Izza Kizza, who told people to kill themselves. Seriously. He goes, “Who here works in a cubicle?” About two thirds of the audience — all of whom paid $100 to be there — put up their hand and Izza goes, “Man, I’d kill myself.”

I had a much more benevolent angle: I told all the women there to get the fuck out of Dodge because New York City is an Elephant’s Graveyard for ovaries and they are never going to find a man here. About ten women walked out after that, so I guess it worked. Then I went into the audience and touched people’s heads like a clairvoyant and told them what they should be doing with their lives. “You need to move to Portand and work for Adidas,” I told one guy. “You have a lot of charisma,” I told another. “You should move to Colorado and get involved with PR for Sundance.” Then I went up to this guy who doesn’t let me touch him and says he doesn’t want to hear my fucking advice because who am I to tell him how to live? This makes me pissed so I grab his bag of cheesies and go, “Who am I? Who am I? I’m someone who can do this!” Then I ate a cheesy and pulled it out of my ear. He wasn’t impressed and pointed out I only pretended to eat it and palmed it for the ear part. This made me enraged so I got up on stage, ate another cheesy, pulled out my dick, pulled back my foreskin and revealed a cheesy sitting on the head of my dick (there’s a video of this somewhere but I can’t find it right now).

I think it went pretty well. The company that organized the event, Happy Corp., went bankrupt soon after. I asked them if it was my fault and they said, “We hope not.”

PS: If you ever want to do that trick yourself, you have to use a reliable plant who can act (I chose John Carney) and you have to put the cheesy under your foreskin way before the beginning of the talk. It’s very uncomfortable.

See you Friday!

WHERE:Kimmel Center at Columbia UniversityNYU

WHEN: 2:15PM to 3:30 PM

TIX: $55 to $85

-GAVIN McINNES

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