I've come up through art school through painting through graphic design through advertising through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books built billboards matchbooks corporate identities. I continuously paint I've done conceptual art pictures.

Of course I did lots of what would be called graphic design now what used to be called commercial art.

I was in college and very disappointed. I majored in commercial art and interior design for three or four years. At that time it seemed the thing I really wanted to do production design just wasn't available in the U.K. so I turned to music.

Over the past 20 years I have noticed that the most flexible dynamic inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which like it or not is modern reality.

The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians she had never eaten properly prepared meat only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh.

My dad had a commercial film company so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s.

When I first started acting I was about nine years old. I had never been to audition in my life and my agent sent me out. It was just a commercial for 'Harry Potter.' That was the first thing I ever went out for and I got the 'Harry Potter' commercial which was really cool but I didn't play Harry Potter.

I think some people record songs and make records a certain way to cater to radio. If you're born to make commercial music that's cool. But if you're born to not make commercial records maybe you're meant to cater to another market.

I was asked to do a test commercial shoot for an Apple product which didn't mean much to me at the time. Some music player that holds all your songs. Sounded cool to me and I never gave up an opportunity to work especially with the possibility of it turning into a national commercial. Coolest job I did in that time.

The truth is we have this idea that late night is about creativity and being cool but that's not our job. Our job is to get as many people watching the commercials in between our show. That's the reality of it.