Steve Schmidt Quotes

We live in the Age of the Next New Thing; we're assaulted day and night by tastemakers telling us what the next hit will be, the next style, the next cool.

California starts a lot of trends.

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.

My goal is to spread ideas. Trends always start at the top.

We don't want to do what everyone else does. We want to create trends. We like to think outside of the box.

There is a theory that sooner or later anything in America that is any fun at all will be ruined by people from California.

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

The mainstream usually follows trends, it seldom sets them except for a few films.

California ... is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.

Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.

Gene Roddenbury felt that television was being wasted. That it had the potential for enlightenment and even inspiration.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, products and tastes developed in America have increasingly influenced lifestyles in Europe, whereas in previous centuries, it was generally the other way around.

The best merchants in the world aren't the ones predicting what's cool next; we're the ones dictating what's cool next.

Artists are blessed to travel all over the world. They see the trends before they even come out.

G.O.O.D. Music is on top because G.O.O.D. Music is the culture. When you think of, you know, just every aspect from music, influence, fashion, art level. If it's not G.O.O.D Music, then it's somebody who was influenced heavily by G.O.O.D. Music.

Contrary to what most people believe, fads are made, not born.

The '60s is such an explosive period. It was very interesting for me because I grew up in Canada, and obviously, I know some American history because I've lived here for many years, and even in Canada, that does permeate.

I don't go looking for new fads.

You can never tell what's going to be popular.

I didn't start going to concerts until I moved to California.

Fads get hot in California. A good idea can come from Des Moines, but it's not going to be anything there. Then it'll hit Venice Beach or Westwood and go all around the country, back to Des Moines.

I like to see what future generations are thinking about.

Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it."

One might say that the American trend of education is to reduce the senses almost to nil.

I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.