← The Tim Ferriss Show
The Tim Ferriss Show
#799: Richard Taylor and Greg Broadmore, Wētā Workshop — Untapping Creativity, Stories from The Lord of the Rings, The Magic of New Zealand, Four Tenets to Live By, and The Only Sentence of Self-Help You Need
02:23:16
Loading summary
Transcript275 lines
- [00:00]
Tim Ferriss
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers, to tease out how they do what they do so you can take their frameworks, their tools, their inspirations and apply them to your own lives. Today I am interviewing two people I would consider decathletes of creativity. The first is Richard Taylor. He is co founder and creative lead at WETA Workshop, which he runs with his wife and co founder Tanya Roger. WETA Workshop is a concept design, design studio and manufacturing facility that services the world's creative and entertainment industries. And what you'll see is just how much they do. Believe it or not, it started by them assembling things and making things on top of their bed. We'll get to that. They've been recognized with five Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, three THEA Awards and more than 30 other national and international accolades. Their practical and special effects have helped define the visual identities of some of the most recognizable franchises in film and television. You will know some of them, including the Lord of the Rings, Rings, Planet of the Apes, Superman, Mad Max, Thor, Megan and Love, Death and Robots. If you haven't seen Love, Death and Robots, check it out. There are some amazing, amazing shorts. In addition to that, they do a few other things. Get ready for this. What a workshop offers tourism and retail experiences, consumer products, an interactive studio, public sculptures and private commissions. They've also done augmented reality and video games and all sorts of things. Richard now focuses much of his time on their immersive experiences with which I've had the chance to experience firsthand. I recommend them very highly, such as the Thea Award winning Gallipoli, the Scale of Our War, Weta Workshop Unleashed and the giant atrium installation Aura Forest at Edge of the Sky. Next we have Greg Broadmoor. Greg is an artist and writer who has been part of the team at WETA Workshop for more than 20 years. His design and special effects credits include District 9, King Kong, Godzilla, the adventures of Tintin and Avatar. And he is the creator of the satirical retro sci fi of Dr. Grordbortz. Featuring a myriad of collectibles, a world touring art exhibition, four books and a game for Weta's pioneering spatial computing platform. Most recently, Greg built Weta's video game division and directed multiple Dr. G video games for Magic Leap. He is currently working on the graphic novel series One Path set in a brutal prehistoric world where dinosaurs and cave women are locked in a grim battle for supremacy. So These two guys have their hands in a lot. They apply creativity to more things than I can count, and they do it with incredible endurance. So how do they do it? That's what we're going to explore. And as you listen to this or as you watch it, you're going to hear a lot of moving around as they pull things from their offices, from their workshops, from around where they're sitting. So it will sound quite hyperactive. And I suppose that is totally appropriate given the nature of what we're discussing. So I'll leave it at that. You can find Weta workshop@wetanz.com us that's wetanz.com of course. And on Instagramta Workshop you can find Greg at GregBrodmore, that's B R O A D M o r e gregbrodmore.com and on Instagram, Regroup. So we're going to get right into the conversation and lessons learned, things you can apply. But first, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible. In the last handful of years, I've become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding microplastics and many other commonly found compounds all over the place. One place I looked is in the kitchen. Many people don't realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be. A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals. Pfas, in other words, spelled PFAS into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends up in your body. Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using. So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor and the first thing I did was look at the reviews of their products and said, send me one. And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro. And the claim is that it's the first nonstick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that'll last forever. I was very skeptical. I was very busy. So I said, you know what? I want to test this thing quickly. It's supposed to be nonstick. It's supposed to be durable. I'm going to test it with two things. I'm going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning, because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn't nonstick with the toxic coating. And then I'm going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see how much it retains heat. And it worked perfectly in both cases. And I was frankly astonished how well it worked. The Titanium always Pan Pro has become my go to pan in the kitchen. It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine and the design is really clever. It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron and nonstick into one product. And now our place is expanding this first of its kind technology to their Titanium Pro cookware sets which are made in limited quantities. So if you're looking for non tox long lasting pots and pans that outperform everything else in your kitchen, just head to fromourplace.com tim and use code TIM for 10% off of your order. You can enjoy a 100 day risk free trial, free shipping and free returns. Check it out fromourplace.com Tim I have been fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype. I've tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems. Now things are starting to change and that includes this episode's sponsor, Seeds DS01 Daily Symbiotic now it turns out that this product, Seeds DS01, was recommended to me many months ago by a PhD microbiologist. So I started using it well before their team ever reached out to me about sponsorship. Which is kind of ideal because I used it unbidden, so to speak. Came in fresh. Since then it has become a daily staple and one of the few supplements I travel with. I have it in a suitcase literally about 10ft from me right now. It goes with me. I've always been very skeptical of most probiotics due to the lack of science behind them and the fact that many do not survive digestion to begin with. Many of them are shipped dead DOA. But after incorporating two capsules of seeds DSO1 into my morning routine, I have noticed improved digestion and improved overall health seem to be a bunch of different cascading effects. Based on some reports. I'm hoping it will also have an effect on my lipid profile, but that is definitely TBD. So why is seeds DSO1 so effective? What makes it different? For one, it is a 2 in 1 probiotic and prebiotic formulated with 24 clinically and scientifically studied strains that have systemic benefits in and beyond the gut. That's all well and good, but if the probiotic strains don't make it to the right place, in other words your colon, they are not as effective. So Seed developed a proprietary capsule and capsule delivery system that survives digestion and delivers a precision release of the live and viable Probiotics to the colon, which is exactly where you want them to go to do the work. I've been impressed with seeds, dedication to science backed engineering with completed gold standard trials that have been subjected to peer review and published in leading scientific journals. A standard you very rarely see from companies who develop supplements. If you've ever thought about probiotics but haven't known where to start, this is my current vote for great gut health. You can start here. It costs less than two doll. That is the DSO one. And now you can get 25% off your first month with code 25 TIM. And that is 25% off of your first month of seeds. DS01@seed.com TIM using code 25 TIM all put together. That's seed.com TIM and if you forget it, you will see the coupon code on that page one more time. Seed.comtim Code 25 Tim. At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?
- [08:36]
Greg Broadmoor
Now it is the inappropriate time.
- [08:38]
Tim Ferriss
What if I did the alpha?
- [08:39]
Richard Taylor
I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over.
- [08:42]
Tim Ferriss
A metal endoskeleton.
- [08:45]
Greg Broadmoor
Ferrous show.
- [08:52]
Tim Ferriss
So it's been maybe one to two years since we had a bite to eat and some drinks in Wellington. But here we are and I'm looking at the backgrounds in our respective videos. And I'm accustomed to having a pretty good background. I've got a huge bear behind me, I've got some plants. And I have without question lost this background competition. If it were a competition. Craig said, but you have a bear. And I said yeah, but you have a Tyrannosaurus. But it's not a Tyrannosaurus. What do you have behind you? Gre. Start there.
- [09:23]
Greg Broadmoor
That's an Albertosaurus. It was actually. Richard bought it as a prop for Kong. The idea was as a pit scene in Kong. And we were supposed to put a bunch of bones in there like it's a predator trap. And so we. Richard bought all these bones. And that is one of the leftovers. Richard very kindly gifted it to me. I had it painted up and put on a stand. It's really my proudest possession. I freaking love it.
- [09:43]
Tim Ferriss
And you have a wall of guitars in addition.
- [09:45]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, yeah. And oh, actually that's a dinosaur egg. A real one.
- [09:50]
Richard Taylor
The story behind that dinosaur egg, we don't have time but we've got one each. And it is one of the most bonkers stories of our lives. Just how we acquired those dinosaur eggs. But we won't go there today.
- [10:05]
Tim Ferriss
Well, that might be around too, for.
- [10:07]
Richard Taylor
A beer and a visit back to Wellington.
- [10:09]
Tim Ferriss
All right, deal. So, Richard, I've been in your office briefly. I can see what's in frame right now. But could you describe for folks and maybe show folks what you have around you?
- [10:22]
Richard Taylor
I'm a big collector of garage kits. You know, people that make beautiful sculptures in their bedrooms, cast them in their garages, package them up and send them off to people like me. And I've been collecting for maybe going on 40 years now. I'd give you a quick tour of the office. I've got a Thunderbird 2 up there, and if I go around the office, you can see that there is just a.
- [10:49]
Tim Ferriss
You have hundreds, seemingly hundreds of.
- [10:53]
Richard Taylor
Yeah, this is the whiteboard where we do all our brainstorming at WETA for new creative projects. And behind me is just even more. There's my wonderful colleague Ri, who will give you a wave. And they just carries on and on and on. There's some of Greg's work hanging up. How do I show you there? Those things hanging from the roof, Those are Greg's designs that I've turned into some collectibles or some sculptures. They're not collectibles yet, but I love them, so I thought I'd make them as 3D sculptures. You just can't have enough cool stuff around you. My favorite possession in my life, which my wife gave to me, so I stopped that rocking, is this beautiful sculpture here, which is by a guy called Gilbert Bay, who was part of an art movement during the Victorian era. So this sits here as inspiration. And next to me is the Gremlin from Gremlins 2. I painted it up, but Steve Wang was the original painter of that. So just gotta be surrounded by things that inspire you.
- [12:02]
Tim Ferriss
I always think, let's actually double click on the inspiration. We could talk about. I guess it's Harry and the Hendersons. I believe you have something like that also in your office. If memory serves me, I've got a.
- [12:14]
Richard Taylor
Harry above my head just up here. And I've got another great Harry over there. Rick Baker's Harry is still my favorite animatronic character creator for a movie. So, yeah, you gotta have lots of Harry around you.
- [12:27]
Tim Ferriss
If we look at inspiration, if we go way back, we're gonna rewind the clock a little bit with you first, Richard, in terms of inspiration, how were you inspired to sculpt in the first place? I read somewhere, and you can't believe everything you read on the Internet, but that there Was a wonderful book on Chinese sculpture that perhaps played a role. But how did the very early stages get moving for you with respect to sculpture?
- [12:53]
Richard Taylor
I grew up in rural New Zealand. My father was an aircraft engineer, my mother a science teacher. That's inspiration enough right there. I feel very lucky. But I wanted to do art right. And my mum and dad really weren't focused on that type of thing. So I had the great fortune of going to a closing down sale at my mother's teacher's training college. And I was able to buy two things. One of them being the triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. This is in my early teens possibly. And that was my first realization that running in parallel to our world is this visual fantasy world. Obviously I was reading fantasy books, but I had not really comprehended. And because of the triptych, you go from earth to heaven and to hell. So this concept of running in parallel, this came into my possession.
- [13:48]
Tim Ferriss
What is the title of that right there?
- [13:50]
Richard Taylor
Well, this is in another language.
- [13:52]
Tim Ferriss
It's called the Spanish, I guess.
- [13:54]
Richard Taylor
Courtyard. Right. I've got multiple copies of it now because I've been collecting them and friends in China have gifted me other copies. It was a book of an unknown sculptor in an unknown land. It inspired me to start digging clay out of the creek on the back of the farm. I taught myself to sculpt. I started Weta with my wife Tanya. I used this book as inspiration to other sculptors, hung pictures around the walls, taught people out of the book, copied the sculptures in the book. So pretty influential. By coincidence then jump forward 40 years and Greg Rhee and I are in Chengdu raising in the Sichuan province, raising money for the Sichuan Earthquake Relief Fund. And at random we've been out doing a hopefully inspiration to a university that had lost people in the earthquake. Running late back to have a meeting with the governor. Pulled over to the side of the road, I think we ran across a four lane road to a random art studio. Went in, met the artist who owned the studio. He was sculpting a figure, he ran off, got his wife, brought back his portfolio, turned out to be the person that did the art in the book.
- [15:10]
Greg Broadmoor
Crazy wow.
- [15:12]
Richard Taylor
So hugely inspirational to me. There's obviously other inspirations. Ray Harryhausen's work was very inspiring to me as I got into my later teens discovering I didn't really discover the physical effects industry till I was in my teens. Unlike most people that do what I do that discovered it early in their lives. I just didn't have access to cinema to enough of a degree. So that's a very quick potted overview of those two bits of inspiration.
- [15:43]
Tim Ferriss
So the name Ray Harryhausen, that is a stop motion master. Am I getting that right?
- [15:49]
Richard Taylor
Yeah. I'm going to run away from my desk one more time and I'll speak loud. You can hear me.
- [15:57]
Tim Ferriss
This is pretty.
- [15:59]
Richard Taylor
Of course, a tribute sculpture to Ray Harryhausen in the form of. So that's Ray and that's one of his characters. He's got a library of extraordinary characters that he's done on an amazing array of movies. Sinbad is probably his better known. But yeah, he was a stop animator. When we were very fortunate to collect the Oscars for our colleagues back home, I wanted to give them a present. Now when we were 25, my wife and I made a. We went on our big OE to England and Europe. We got a combi van.
- [16:37]
Tim Ferriss
What does OE stand for?
- [16:39]
Richard Taylor
Our big overseas experience.
- [16:41]
Tim Ferriss
There we go.
- [16:42]
Richard Taylor
We got a combi van like everyone did and we drove it for 10,000 miles around Europe. But I pre wrote to Ray. He didn't know me and I didn't know him. And I wrote to him and asked him if he would please allow us to come and say hello. We bought a bunch of flowers. We arrived an hour early. I gave the flowers to the housekeeper, thinking it was his wife. He forgot we were coming, so he came down in his pajamas with his comb over. But we ended up having this extraordinary day with him and Diana, his wife. It lasted into the early evening and we just hit it off together. So once again, jump forward 10, 15 years. We've now made Lord of the Rings. We're very fortunate to win our first Oscars and I wanted to give a lovely present to our crew. You know, you can throw a party or buy them all leather jackets, but I thought wouldn't be great if they could get to meet someone that's a hero to them that they would normally never get to meet. So I wrote to Ray and Diane and they came to New Zealand for two weeks and hung out in our workshop every day and just spent the two weeks with our team learning what they're doing, telling stories. Ray put on a five hour talk on the last night. His wife fell asleep on my shoulder as it went into the early hours of the morning. So riveting was he and so inspiring. When we were fortunate to win our second Oscars, I wrote to Dick Smith, the grandfather of makeup effects and Dick Smith I met via letter writing in my late teens where I wrote to him and told him that I was sculpting in Margarine. The first 300 commercial sculptures I did in the film industry were sculpted in margarine. So he forevermore used to call me the margarine guy. Sadly, Dick has now passed on. But he was one of the most inspiring, beautiful humans you could ever hope to meet. And through his educational program, has inspired and educated a very large number of the world's makeup effects people. And that concept of passing it on is something I've held firmly to as a company. No secrets. Share everything that you're asked of. And we still get kids ring up in the evenings asking how to make blood. And I'm happy to tell them. So.
- [19:11]
Greg Broadmoor
Fake blood.
- [19:12]
Richard Taylor
Fake blood, yeah, fake blood.
- [19:15]
Tim Ferriss
I should have said that.
- [19:16]
Richard Taylor
Fake blood.
- [19:16]
Tim Ferriss
Not breeding vampires. I was going to ask you about margarine now, if it's what I'm thinking it is. Is this the butter substitute? Maybe you can tell me if that is one and the same. But could you just tell the story of landing the job on Public Eye? Maybe this will paint a picture for people and then why margarine?
- [19:37]
Richard Taylor
Okay, so it's very simple answer to that story. I was unaware of Plasticine, obviously. I played around with plasticine at school, and I was using crude clay that I had mushed in my hands. But it was not possible to do the type of sculpting I was needing to do in those two mediums. Cause you couldn't buy plasticine in large quantities, et cetera. My wife got a job working as a hotel duty manager at the TAS Hotel in Upper Willis Street, Wellington. And in the evenings, she used to invite me in. Cause she became friends with the chef, this guy called Alec. And the chef was doing margarine sculptures. He was doing swans and ponies and things like that. And so I used to just hang out with him, this crazy, wonderful Scottish chef. And I started doing monsters and creatures and dragons and superhero sculptures and things like that for the tourists that would come in for dinner. So when I started working, I realized this medium, I had an affinity with it, and I could work in it very quickly. So we got wind that the production company that I was doing art directing, art department for on very low television commercials and documentaries, I got the win that they wanted to make a New Zealand version of Spitting Image. And I desperately wanted to be the sculptor on this. So I actually snuck into the office late at night and I actually borrowed a couple of photographs of the boss, went home and sculpted in margarine. And then Tanya and I cast it and made a puppet of it. I put it on his desk in a black plastic bag with a rubbish bag with my card on the top. I put it there at midnight.
- [21:35]
Tim Ferriss
How did you get in? Did you cap earlier your way in?
- [21:38]
Richard Taylor
No, we were working in the building, so I had keys. I had the ability to go in and out because we were doing art department so often working at midnight. So he phoned and he said, found your puppet. Great, but you needn't have bothered with the efforts of making a puppet of me. No one else has applied for the job, but I think that sort of speaks to the individual that I am actually, that you always gotta go that nth degree. And that started two amazing years working for Gibson Group, making satirical puppets. One every couple of days. We had a third person working with us, friend of ours called Clive who did all the eye mechanisms. We built those out of roll on deodorant balls and the spring wire that you hang frilly curtains off in your grandma's kitchen. We built 72 puppets over those two years. It was ferocious timeframes. But because I could sculpt in margarine, and margarine's a bit of a misnomer term. The true term is emulsified vegetable pastry fil fat. It's actually margarine. Before you whip in the water and the food coloring, I see it has a greater solidity. So I used to actually microwave it to get it. I describe sculpting a margarine as like using a 4B pencil. Sculpting in clay is like a 2B pencil. And sculpting in plasticine is like a 4H pencil, let's say. So to give the. The people that understand illustration terms, that's how I started to use margarine. And I ultimately, as I said, did over 300 sculptures. All of Heavenly Creatures were sculpted in margarine. In fact, we made sculpting tools as big as shovels. Because the idea is that the little sculptures that the girls had done in their childhood out of plasticine from school that green that all New Zealand schools used to get, they come alive and so they're really big. So we made sculpting tools out of shovels and other bits of equipment, lumps of wood that would give the gestural appearance as if the girl's fingers had sculpted them.
- [23:57]
Tim Ferriss
Well, I remember also taking a tour last time I was in Wellington at Weta workshop and there was a hands on opportunity to sculpt with tinfoil. Which I had never experienced before, sculpting with tinfoil with a spoon. And I was shocked how much detail you could coax from that material if you knew how to apply the spoon properly. I made a hummingbird first time out. I made a tiger head. And it was shocking to me and really encouraging how you could take this cheap, readily available, often wasted material and use it to create things that could sit on your desk and remain there as long as you wanted to keep them there.
- [24:44]
Richard Taylor
Well, it's lovely that you remember it fondly. The tinfoil, I guess, is allegory to what we are trying to do as a company. What my wife and I try and do as individuals, Tanya, my wife, my business partner as well, is I say the thing we love to make today is other makers, right? We've had a lovely and amazing career and we're continuing to do fun and wonderful things every day. But it's an imperative. And I actually feel that it's beholden on us to try and introduce as many people as possible, specifically children, into the love of making and creating because it is slipping out of our fingers. And at one level, some may say, well, so what? It's been replaced by other things. But I fundamentally believe that our connection as humans to the creative arts crafts are an imperative on the planet. I would even go as far as to say that the road markers that designate a specific culture's journey through history are based in craft. Whether it's architecture, clothing, totems of religious or spiritual belief, et cetera, the things that remain across history are invariably craft based objects of importance. So the reason tinfoil, right, and Warren Beaton, affectionately known as Wazi, was, came to us on Lord of the Rings as the chemist that mixed up all the gloop for the birthing sacks and so on. He's an extraordinary technician, makeup artist, animatronic engineer in his own right. But for the last five or six years, he's dedicated every day of his life to being on stage, trying to inspire people, specifically children, to get off their iPhones for a moment and think about what these 10 digits can do at the ends of your hands. And the reason we use tinfoil is that no matter what the socioeconomic level of a family's life is, tinfoil invariably always exists in the family's kitchen. You can buy it extremely cheaply if it doesn't. And everyone owns a teaspoon. So we've made a sculpting curriculum out of the most accessible material you can get and a teaspoon, the most accessible tool you can get. And one of our great reasons to celebrate, I think one of the highest reasons above other accolades is that we heard that the central Auckland supermarket sold out a tinfoil a few months after we opened our unleashed experience in Auckland where we do a very deep dive on tinfoil sculpting because kids wanted to go home and make things out of tinfoil.
- [27:40]
Greg Broadmoor
Do you own tinfoil stocks, Richard?
- [27:42]
Richard Taylor
I don't, unfortunately. I've tried very hard to get our team to package wetter specific tinfoil to sell in the wetter cake.
- [27:52]
Greg Broadmoor
You realize you should have been in the market from the start.
- [27:54]
Tim Ferriss
I know. Maybe he's been paid off by big tinfoil.
- [27:57]
Richard Taylor
Yeah, I wish. We'll all get Alzheimer's. That's the problem.
- [28:01]
Tim Ferriss
So I have a lot of questions for Greg. I want to ask a combo question for you, Richard, just to paint a picture for folks. So could you paint a picture of what WYTA looked like in the very beginning in terms of the organization? And then let's just say it, you can pick peak Lord of the Rings or post Lord of the Rings, what it looked like just to paint a before and after picture.
- [28:24]
Richard Taylor
So my wife and I have run our company together for 37 years. We started off the business in the back room of our flat. It was actually our bedroom. We used to have a sheet of mdf, we call it custom board that we would flip onto the top of the bed and we would make things on that board. Peter Jackson was interviewed once and he says, and I misquote, I remember coming into Richard and Tania's bedroom and it stunk of the same rubber and fiberglass smells of my own bedroom. Right. Because he was also making everything in the early years in his bedroom. So that's where we began. We moved workshops nine times. Our first collaborator, employee contractor collaborator, came about two years in in the form of the gentleman Clive I mentioned to do eyeballs. And today we have about 400 people operating across seven business centers. We have design and manufacturing for the world's creative industries, which is about 170 of our team. We also make digital games. We do merchandising, collectibles. We've done hundreds of collectibles over the last 27 years. We also have a location based experience division and we work on some of the world's largest museums, immersive experiences. We've done the largest pavilion for the Dubai Expo which remains open as a museum. We've done the largest traditional Chinese medicine museum in China which, which actually saw us design the building 37,000 square meters, et cetera, et cetera. We have a creative media division where we are servicing people like Jay Chow, Asia's largest recording artist, a great Chinese musician and we're doing work for him. He's actually Taiwanese. We all going on holiday. We also run two retail stores, we operate three tourism offerings including our significant location based experience called Weta Workshop Unleashed in Auckland. We have a robotics division developing and building very high performance humanoid robots which we're trying to commercialize at the moment. Greg, help me here. What else have I forgotten? No, that's a bunch of it and everything in between, right? We do a lot of service providing to private and public commissions, a lot of very unique work for people's homes. We're just about to deliver two crazy objects or installations that we've built for someone's private home. These have taken each a year to build, so you can imagine how complex and how significant they are. So that's where we've got to today, a multifaceted design, manufacturing and entertainment company. And that's a desire to try and give creative careers to as many New Zealanders as possible, basically.
- [31:42]
Tim Ferriss
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics and whole food source nutrients In a single scoop. AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut and immune system. So take advantage of this exclusive offer for you, my dear podcast listeners, a free one year supply of liquid vitamin D plus five travel packs with your subscription. Simply go to drinkag1.com Tim that's the number one drink ag drink ag1.com Tim For a free one year supply of liquid Vitamin D plus five travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Learn more at drinkag1.com Tim.
- [32:47]
Greg Broadmoor
I would say, by the way, maybe you mentioned public sculpture in there, but we've done some amazing public sculptures as well. Huge works. You mentioned that. But one of the things that I think characterizes the workshop is that it is a workshop you went through Tim. It is a workshop, concrete floor, lots.
- [33:01]
Tim Ferriss
Of bandsaws and the sword makers.
- [33:03]
Greg Broadmoor
Right? Machinery and everything. It's a very tactile physical place. But Richard has created an environment where new technology, new interesting ways of approaching things is always welcome. So as Richard says, we now do video games, we do location based experiences. Richard, as far as I knew, was the first person in the world that I saw around me that was bringing in 3D printing and 3D milling and 3D tools into this very physical place. I don't think you're afraid of any technology and you're very interested in all of it, regardless of your love and fascination with physical, tactile things. It's like, how do we solve the problem creatively? It's just mesmerizing how many new technologies and new approaches turn up all the time.
- [33:43]
Richard Taylor
And it's interesting. Just yesterday someone said to me, the perception is that you must run the company from a boardroom, through executives, et cetera, et cetera. And that couldn't be further from the truth. As you saw Tim when you came. My wife and I are an integrated part of every component of our business. I'm on the workshop floor every day doing the work that we do when I'm not traveling with Ree around the world, chasing work and delivering jobs, et cetera. We have an extraordinary group of senior management people that have grown up primarily in the building. A lot of our team have been with us over 25 years. Over half the company have been with us over 15 years. People, there's no need for a second language because they just know as deeply as I do what's required for each division and to get through each day. The diversity is our great benefit because if we had just remained as a manufacturing and design studio, we would be a small bureau in New Zealand. But the beauty of the diversity means that if one division drops off, which invariably is happening pretty much every year, the other divisions all come together to support that division and it fluctuates and flows. Luckily, to this point, we haven't stumbled too heavily, but due to the cleverness of the team and the symbiotic collaboration of the teams to keep each division propped up when times are hard. But it is a reality that the world is changing, the creative environment is changing, and most critically, the film industry, specifically the Hollywood film industry, is dramatically changing. So where film used to make 70% of our work, it now probably makes 30 to 40% of our work.
- [35:45]
Tim Ferriss
So we'll come back to that because I do find the sort of diversified, not perfectly correlated nature of the company to be very, very interesting. And I do want to ask you about Hollywood changes But first, Greg, I want to come to you with a very important question related to naked ladies slipping on banana peels. I remember you and I were exchanging messages when I was inspired after my trip actually to attempt to learn digital painting and using Procreate. And I was curious about some of your practice habits and so on. And I can't remember exactly what prompted you to send this to me, but it was a, a process capture of you creating many, many, I want to say 50, 60, who knows? 99, 99, 99, 99, 99.
- [36:39]
Richard Taylor
Dodgy slips.
- [36:40]
Tim Ferriss
Dodgy slips. Okay, so Greg, can you explain, and this will go somewhere, can you explain how that came to be? What the hell are we talking about?
- [36:50]
Richard Taylor
Yes.
- [36:51]
Greg Broadmoor
So do you remember the ds? What was the DS stand for? It was a Nintendo ds. It was a little flip over game console, right? It was made for video games but the cool thing that Nintendo added was a touchscreen. It was just hand. Oh, actually it had a stylus I think. That's right. What they didn't tell anyone was that it actually had pressure sensitivity. I guess they just didn't include that feature. But I was playing that a lot and found that someone had made an app, a mod for it that made it into a little art app and actually utilized the pressure sensitivity. And that was the first handheld. Like now they're everywhere, these little phones and so on with Procreate on your iPad and so on. But back then, little game console, you could actually draw pictures on it. And then this guy is a Swedish guy, Jens, I can't remember his surname but he made a little program for it, utilized the pressure sensitivity and I just started drawing on it and actually it happened. Would have been Christmas time in New Zealand. While my partner Kate was going out shopping for Christmas presents and going into every store, I sat outside bored to tears. I would just flip open my DS and start drawing. And I like drawing figures, I like drawing people. And I don't like drawing from life very much. I like drawing from my imagination. I just started drawing women falling over on banana peels. It's a very 1950s comic book kind of idea of slipping on the banana peel and breaking your neck. And every single one of them provides a new opportunity to sort of creatively explore the human body doing interesting things. I like the stupidity of it, like sort of sexualized but making fun of it, right? Because it's like you can't be that sexy when you're falling over and hurting yourself. I don't know, something about that clash is interesting to me. Banana peel flying in the air. But I drew them and actually I hit 99. And we made an exhibition called 99ds with my friend Christian Pierce that Richard Itani was a patron of. And we put on an exhibition in town, but it was called 99 because I hit 99 drawings. And that was when Jen's operating system, in his game, in his program that allowed you to draw. That's when it hit the file limit. So it's like, well, I've done 99. I would have gone to 500. And so I hit 99 and I thought, well, that's that. And so my friend. So 99 dodgy slips from 99Ds. And my friend Christian, he did 99. What did he do? He did deadly sleds. These really cool, super creative hot rods in all different ways. Anyway, that's where that came from. And I, for some reason, that ludicrous idea, Richard decided, yeah, it's a great idea for an exhibition. I'll put it on in town. So. Thank you, Richard.
- [39:12]
Richard Taylor
Yeah, we put it on inside we got two shipping containers, painted them white, put a massive graphic of DS99 on the side of them. And then I had our engineers cut a hole through the insides of the shipping containers so you could walk from one to the other and then line them in white Maltica so they look like a medical laboratory. And put LED strip lighting and so on. And then we printed every image of Greg's and Christian's off about this big. And we hung them along the wall like this and they looked so amazing. And one container was dodgy slips and the other contain was deadly sleds. Ri, would you mind just going to Tanya's wall and behind the door is a poster of deadly sleds. Just take it off if you can. I'll just show you what they actually are. I unfortunately can't hang Greg's dodgy slips on the wall of our office. They are hung in the design room in a lovely collection.
- [40:15]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, there's a bit of nudity and none of the girls are well groomed, if that's the right way to put it. And so people did query me about that. It's not the modern way to leave. I don't know what to say without getting you in trouble on YouTube.
- [40:30]
Tim Ferriss
You're not gonna get in trouble. So, Greg, I do want to. While we're awaiting the arrival of.
- [40:35]
Richard Taylor
Here it is. I'll show it to you quickly. So, yeah, yeah. This is Christian's work, not Greg's work. So. So you see there's the graphic 99 deadly sleds. And there's a lovely thing that Christian's written to Tanyaye that's faded, but you can see the level at which they can be illustrated on this tiny little.
- [40:56]
Tim Ferriss
That's wild. That is just incredible.
- [40:59]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, yeah. The guy that did it did an amazing job. Amazing job that you could make this little Nintendo, make a beautiful little art app. Right. It was incredible. In fact, other people made all kinds of things for animation, stop motion animation apps and so on, which I played with and made little animations. And that guy, Jens, again, I can't remember his surname, but he was so lovely. I wrote to him to say, you know, actually I wanted to export the images larger because they came out at this tiny little file size, tiny little resolution. And so he made an image to a little program to upscale the images because it actually records all the pinstroke paths. And then he made us a little thing that did a process animation of it, like showed each brushstroke going down because that was recorded as well.
- [41:39]
Tim Ferriss
And that is the video.
- [41:40]
Greg Broadmoor
That's what happened. Yeah.
- [41:42]
Tim Ferriss
Amazing. So now you have an amazing bio, Greg and I want to get to the two week trial that started this whole.
- [41:52]
Greg Broadmoor
I'm still on two week trial. Yeah.
- [41:54]
Tim Ferriss
So we're going to get to that. Now if you could just refresh my memory. I believe that you learned your skills through private tutors given to you by your aristocratic parents, and then art finishing school at the finest institutions. Am I remembering correctly? How did you learn your trade?
- [42:14]
Greg Broadmoor
That is a good question. Yeah, I did try and do art school. Richard, did you try and do art school?
- [42:19]
Richard Taylor
Yeah, I went through Polytech.
- [42:21]
Greg Broadmoor
You did go through Polytech? I tried to go to New Zealand's most prestigious art school and they turned me down. So I tried another one and they turned me down. In the end. I went to an art college in a small town in New Zealand, but it didn't last very long. I think for a little while they didn't know what to do with me. So they put me off campus in a little room and I just. I was happy. I was like. I made. I bought bed sheets and acrylic paint and would just paint these weird Salvador Dali tortured scenes of people. And I was happy and I thought, well, this is what school is. This is great. I'm just gonna do all these paintings. And then very quickly they got me back again and found out what they wanted to do with me, which was make me learn all the traditional things. You're supposed to do in art and so on. And I was a young punk rocker. I didn't want anyone to tell me what to do and I still don't. So I was immediately out of my element and thought, this is not for me. I don't want to learn perspective and blah, blah, blah. Actually now in retrospect, I wish I had learned perspective and all these fundamentals, but I just wanted to learn myself. And I find that I love learning by doing. It's the only way. The act of illustrating or being creative in general, I find most interesting when you don't actually know where you're going exactly and you don't know what you're. You don't really know how to do it. You just throw yourself into it and do your best. And I love that process, process. Sort of finding out the shortcuts I find the least interesting, if you like. I feel like I don't learn out of that. I learn just by constant failing towards success. If you like building up, the failures stack up and luckily you end up seeing the horizon from that.
- [43:49]
Richard Taylor
Can I just say, he's not been self effacing there. That's literally how he works. I know it might seem to people listening that, oh, you must never fail. You did all these incredible films and your body of work is so amazing. But. But it's extraordinary watching Greg work because he almost massages the object out of the canvas, right? By playing with it, by adjusting it and shifting it. Very, very different way to what a lot of people do. And I give briefs to Greg almost daily. And there's things that I assume entirely that Greg will be able to do.
- [44:26]
Tim Ferriss
When you say brief, is that a project description?
- [44:29]
Richard Taylor
Yeah, a project description. Like here's a great example right next to me, like I needed a set of lockers designed for our Unleashed locker where you lock up your bags. When you go through Unleashed and Greg, there's the wall, there's a photograph of the lockers and Greg has designed a set of characters right on the lockers. So you don't remember a locker number. You remember the character that you got and then he's made the sign for the top of the lockers. Right. That's a great example I just happen to have next to me because that's a discussion we're having today. But there's things I totally assume that Greg's just going to knock out of the park and he'll just say, no, I won't be able to do that. I wouldn't be able to get A result for you, because the way I organically work and think can't yield something. So he's very honest with me. So we don't waste money and time. Other things that seem so challenging. Two hours later, he'll fire back a sketch and he's nailed it. Absolutely. And it's very rare that I will go back to Greg and say, could you please do X, Y and Z? I might scale things. I might ask for a bit more absurdity in the picture. I gave him a brief. Imagine an alien vomiting creativity across the walls of Auckland. That was the brief that's ended up being one of the world's largest murals, consisting of dozens of crazy characters rolling through brain vomit of creativity. Right. And Greg nailed it in the first illustration. It did take me 10 weeks to then censor it so it could be seen by the general public.
- [46:12]
Greg Broadmoor
I was in a total flow state with that, by the way, which is what I love to do. You know, you like to fall into the image and not even think about it, just create it. And it sort of just happens. And so you're trying to find this flow state state. And so I was just doing this illustration. It's 60 meters long by 6 meters high and doing it in Photoshop, but in pencils. And I'm doing it and it feels like at the end is when I woke up and then the image was done. Even though this actually took weeks and.
- [46:37]
Tim Ferriss
Weeks, how do you set the conditions such that that flow state is more likely to happen? What do you have? Do you have any rituals? Are there any patterns that you can spot in retrospect that seem to contribute to that? That.
- [46:50]
Greg Broadmoor
I'm 53 this year and I still don't know. I would ask you that. Like, I remember this artist, Josh Homme. He's a guitarist for Queens of the Stone Age, an amazing guy. And he actually just says, you've just got to work. He thinks of it as the muse. And the muse is out there. The muse is the universe. Right. And it's hopefully going to offer you creativity.
- [47:10]
Tim Ferriss
Richard is dangling.
- [47:13]
Richard Taylor
These are characters out of the mural. Right. I just want to reinforce the total obstacle of the way Greg's brain works.
- [47:24]
Greg Broadmoor
But Josh says that that thing out there, the flow state, the muse, the magic of creativity, whatever it is, is out there. And it's good to think of it as external to yourself, because that's what it feels like when it comes to you. When it comes to you in a powerful way. The only way is just to make yourself available to it, which is work Right. It's just turning up. That's why we turn up every day and we work all day, right? And you just do the work and then hopefully it turns up. Is there a madness magic trick to make it happen more? I think anything that works, that removes yourself somehow, it makes you fall away. Like I said, when I did the mural, the best parts of it were where I felt like I woke up at the end and it was done. And that was actually where Richard was pointing out where all the problems came from because I. Because I wasn't conscious during half of it, if you like. There are things in there that were problematic. I'd broken ip. I put Lemmy from Motorhead in it because I love Lemmy and I just wasn't thinking. And Richard said at the end, you know, we don't own Lemmy, right? So I ended up chopping Lemmy's head off.
- [48:18]
Richard Taylor
And what did you do in its place?
- [48:21]
Greg Broadmoor
And I put Richard's head on. Richard said, why don't you put your head on? I'm like, no, I'm putting Richard's head on anyway. But it's full of those kind of problems that Richard had to point out to me that were like, hey, you've done this and you've done this. And I'm like, oh, really? Have I? God, I didn't realize. But that's the flow state. That's the muse. That's like the fact that it really didn't feel like it was me doing it. It just happened.
- [48:42]
Tim Ferriss
So how did this start off? How did the two week trial happen?
- [48:46]
Greg Broadmoor
I started during the post production of Lord of the Rings. So I think most of the actual creative work that I could have been involved with was actually already done. But Richard was about to start on King Kong. I think Peter had brought up King Kong and also Evangelion. Remember, that never happened. It was a live action movie of Evangelion proposed. And I sent in a folio with dinosaurs and robots in it, and Richard saw it. And I actually did a comic book as well that had both of those things. And so Richard must have gone like, oh, that person looks like they can do something. But I had never worked before. I'd been unemployed for like seven or eight years before that, almost continuously on the dole, which is not something I recommend. And so I had no idea about working professionally or doing anything like that. I'm just a sort of creative lost soul, actually. But when I saw that there was a place that I saw the first Lord of the Rings film come out and it was like I was a fan of Peter Jackson's work and everything, but my mind was utterly blown. I was not prepared for the scale, how good it really was and how it transported me. But then I realized, oh, there's this place in Wellington and I'm living here and it's got these crazy creative people. Maybe, please, maybe I could work there. So the timing was perfect. Having that folio with some of the things that piqued Richard's interest. And Richard was so generous. He brought me in a couple weeks after seeing my folio and showed me around and I just said, so when do I start? And Richard was very gracious and said, well, you can come on in next week or whatever. And I sort of thought I was on a. I think I got a two week contract after a while and I think I'm still on that two week contract.
- [50:20]
Tim Ferriss
You have to renew your vows every two weeks.
- [50:23]
Greg Broadmoor
So I constantly think I'm two weeks away from being out of a job. And I like that. It.
- [50:29]
Tim Ferriss
So I'm very curious, Greg, as Richard was mentioning earlier, sometimes you'll get a brief and you'll say, sorry, no can do. This is not something I can deliver. And then other times, something that Richard would think to be very complex gets turned around in two hours. And what I'm curious about in the former category, how do you know when something just is not in your wheelhouse? Or how do you decide to respond with that type of answer? Or you're like, like, can't do it, can't deliver this one.
- [51:00]
Greg Broadmoor
I don't know. I'd have to probably see an example because I can't remember actually saying no. I always sit there furrowing, I guess. Here's what it is. If Richard or anyone asked me for something, if my brow really starts furrowing and won't unfurrow, then I know this isn't a problem.
- [51:18]
Richard Taylor
I used to describe Greg as getting pinwheels in his eyes, right? His eyes would just pinwheel like this. And I go, this one's not for Greg.
- [51:29]
Greg Broadmoor
Tim, when I started listening to your podcast, the first one I listened to, or actually I listened to one years ago, and I absolutely loved it. But then I came back, I listened to one of David Deutsch in Navalant, and the David Deutsch one just blew my mind. I'm reading his books at the moment. I've become absolutely obsessed with him. There's something in his philosophy and his science that I totally resonate with. It's not like I've changed My opinion, it's amplified my opinion. And he talks about really finding the fun, chasing the fun. It's about finding really what inspires you, what interests you. And then when that feeling happens, you know you're going to be able to solve that problem, or you have a chance of solving that problem because you're motivated, you're interested in finding that state of fun. In creativity is the perfect way to learn. You're motivated to learn and you'll overcome the challenges. Maybe when things are a little bit, but too hard, they're not fun. Where they're too easy, you've already done it before, there's no point doing that again. And I get very bored very easily. So the things that I've already done before, I'd be like, why do that? Let AI do that. AI's already been trained on that, that's fine. It can solve that problem. I want to solve the problem where it's fun. And so there's the things that Richard will suggest, and this is 90% of them, in my opinion. I hope so, Richard. I get excited, my brain ignites, and then I go like, I want to solve on that. And maybe. And I can't think of an example. There's the chance, hopefully very few states where I go, like, I just go, I don't know why that would work, but I would also try and say why I think it doesn't work or why I can't solve it and maybe even suggest why it shouldn't be solved and could be solved a different way. I always try and be constructive.
- [53:05]
Richard Taylor
Greg will always philosophize with me around art. Right. It's one of the great benefits of our friendship. Irrelevant of our working relationship in that trying to find the purity of an idea requires a level of philosophical exploration. Doesn't have to be high brow by any means. I don't think me and Greg are capable of high brow. But it does require you looking inside yourself and it does require a deep, observational, inquisitive journey through an idea together. And we do that amongst a small group of senior creatives within the building. It's actually, to me, one of the most joyful parts of my career is that those conversations through relationship around creativity and what comes out of the end of them, which is really great.
- [54:03]
Tim Ferriss
Richard, could you give an example that comes to mind, any example of what that looks like in practice, what it looks like coming in and then what it looks like at the end of such a conversation for people listening, I'm sure, like, that sounds awesome, but what does it look like? How could I try it?
- [54:18]
Richard Taylor
I'd do a real meta example of it. So we know that we want to own and operate our own location based experience because we're building them for other people. We don't really have an inkling to try and make a movie, but we know that we want to do something that's our own IP of our own experience. So how does the seed of the idea come to be? We've built an exhibition in downtown Wellington in our national museum called Gallipoli. The scale of our war.
- [54:53]
Tim Ferriss
I saw it great.
- [54:54]
Richard Taylor
It tells the story of a first World war campaign fought by New Zealanders, relatively what would appear to a foreign visitor, relatively modest moment in history, but to New Zealand, a phenomenally important moment in the journey of our country, et cetera.
- [55:13]
Greg Broadmoor
And.
- [55:13]
Richard Taylor
And it's through that level of philosophical exploration that you come up with the seed of the idea. And I call it the grand idea. If you can't come up with the grand idea, then you're almost certainly not going to be able to achieve something that will engage the audience. It's like trying to make a movie before the script's written. With Gallipoli we came. Myself and my colleague Rick came up with the grand idea in the first three hours that we sat together. Cause we philosophized around what Gallipoli meant to the people in New Zealand. What the men must have felt, what the realities of the situation. The next exhibition that we did for the same client, which they said we want to build an exhibition around bugs.
- [56:01]
Tim Ferriss
What was the great idea for Gallipoli like? What did you land on?
- [56:05]
Richard Taylor
The great idea is the realization that most people only think of a past military conquest as visualized and quickly fading memories through sepia colored photographs of a time long past of people that no longer matter. That's sadly fact. Right. And most museum exhibitions of military campaigns are told through statistics, told through the army, told through a meta like view down on the war. Our grand idea, if you can call it that, is make pillars of the men of our past and present them in a hyper realistic, larger than life scale in bell jars to give people the opportunity to learn the story of the whole campaign through the intimacy of the connection to eight people, seven soldiers and one nurse. And that was the grand idea and the technique of achieving that. Going back to unleashed the LBE that we've built in Auckland. The location based experience in Auckland. We oscillated around the idea for a year. Sorry, I should have finished off. Bug Lab was a five month Deadline, as opposed to the eight months that we had to do Gallipoli. Three months in to Bug Lab, we still didn't have the grand idea. So we won't start until we have the grand idea. Right. So it's very, very perilous and puts you on the very edge of potential failure because you are trying to find that grand idea. But without it, the work is a waste of time because it doesn't congeal around a central conceit. And with Unleashed, it took us a year of exploratory ideation and philosophical discussion till we landed on the incredibly obvious. But the thing that we really, really wanted to do and the story we wanted to tell, that's a good example at a large scale. But that stuff is happening most days of the week as well on micro decision making.
- [58:26]
Greg Broadmoor
Can I just add some color to that? Because you brushed over it really quickly that they're huge sculptures. Most exhibitions of war, as Richard says, or even history in general.
- [58:36]
Tim Ferriss
This is for Gallipoli.
- [58:37]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah. They're either dioramas, small, or recreations of soldiers at real scale. And lots of photos and lots of documentation. Right. And then you're kind of supposed to pour through the documentation. Sometimes they have a little bit of audio and video, but this is the. These huge people. Hyper realistic down to the pores. Like every.
- [58:56]
Tim Ferriss
I remember looking at the pores when I first walked in. Pouring down their brow and the pores and the hair and the eyebrows.
- [59:03]
Greg Broadmoor
A man picking up food.
- [59:04]
Tim Ferriss
How large are these figures?
- [59:06]
Richard Taylor
Two and a half times life size.
- [59:08]
Greg Broadmoor
Massive.
- [59:09]
Richard Taylor
The biggest that we've built at hyperrealism is eight times life size. So that's a 16 meter tall figure. If they were to stand, right, one and a half kilometers of fabric in their garments. Garments.
- [59:21]
Greg Broadmoor
Even the fabric is scaled up. Right. Everything's scaled up.
- [59:25]
Richard Taylor
People are complimentary about the heads and the hands because they can rationalize that to their own skin. And how we've scaled it up. The challenges of making the heads and the hands pales compared to making the different fabrics and components within the costuming. Because to make a larger costume, you have to find a sheep with a 2 1/2 times larger denier of hair density to what was used for the real costume. And then you've got to weave it. You've got to loom it and then weave it and then build it into costume. Then the. You can't just use a sewing machine because the stitching won't be big enough. And on and on and on it goes. So we want to tackle it at that level, some listening may go, oh, God. That just seems either obsessive or a waste of money and time. We take it to that degree because you are trying to pay a depth of respect to the memory of the people. And if you shortchange the effort, you've shortchanged the respect to those people. These are veterans, right. They're returned servicemen or men that lost their lives in service to our country. So what is it to us to make that extra 10% to try and. And get it as good as we can possibly get it? A lovely thing with Gallipoli is over 4 million people have been through it. Now, that may not seem a great number to people listening, but that's in a population of only 5 million people. We're very proud of Gallipoli. It's just been extended by a few more years, so means more people can get to see it.
- [61:08]
Greg Broadmoor
And Tim, when you experienced it, but when you stand there under the people, it is a different. It's very, very different. I don't think I've seen anything like that before. I didn't make it, so I can kind of hype it a little bit. I think I just got to wonder it as well. And sit there beneath these giant men and characters and you feel because they're hyperreal and the beautiful way it's all presented and lit, you feel a magnitude. Right. Literally. But emotionally, that's a very unusual approach. I think that idea on paper, hey, we'll make giant versions of these figures. It almost seems kind of weird and surreal, but it has an emotional impact that makes you feel the situation profound.
- [61:44]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Richard, did I hear you correctly? You said the deadline was eight months on that?
- [61:49]
Richard Taylor
Yeah, we had eight months from first.
- [61:51]
Tim Ferriss
That's meeting with the board to. I did not know that.
- [61:54]
Greg Broadmoor
Wow.
- [61:55]
Richard Taylor
Very few things we do has the luxury of time. So it could be argued, if someone took an in depth look in our company, that it does not make good business and financial sense to carry the level of infrastructure that we do at a manufacturing level. We have 11 different divisions doing 17 different disciplines under the one roof. And so you've got experts that are poised and ready to go. The reason for that, other than the fact we just love, you know, having that type of expertise and creativity along for the ride, is that we simply could not simply do many of the jobs that we do because the inability to turn on a dime, to react that quickly, it's very rare that we will do a film job that has more than eight weeks. Very rare.
- [62:53]
Tim Ferriss
Has more than eight Weeks.
- [62:55]
Richard Taylor
You said more than eight weeks. Yeah, we'll deliver. We've literally just done a job over Christmas that saw us deliver hundreds of, I think over a thousand weapons and hundreds of suits of armor in less than eight weeks. So that comes down to innovating new methodology and having process, obviously, all the other things, passion, enthusiasm, tenacity, everything that comes along with a great crew of people. But being able to innovate new methodologies every year to be able to stay ahead of the deadline, Basically, yeah.
- [63:34]
Tim Ferriss
So let me ask a question about process and then we're going to come back to you, Greg. But first, I do want to talk about. Because this certainly is so iconic and it's in the minds of probably most people listening, which is Lord of the Rings. And I'd like to understand what some of the most. First of all, kind of how that came to be. Richard. And then what some of the most crucial decisions were with respect to taking on a project of that scope. Because for a lot of companies, I could see that being the hug of death, where you suddenly go from reasonably moderately contained and small to sprawling, taking on so much responsibility. And many companies would implode. I've seen it happen many, many times. So how did that come to be? And what were some of the most important decisions made that allowed you to grow the company and take that on?
- [64:34]
Richard Taylor
Yeah, that's really big question. I'll try and answer it in a very condensed way.
- [64:40]
Tim Ferriss
We have time.
- [64:42]
Richard Taylor
I just pulled this out, right. This is Sting from the movie. This is one of my favorite things that we've made in the company. And I keep it next to me and I pick it up and it gives you strength and it gives you a sense of wonder and it connects you back to a very happy time. And it glows if there are challenging clients in the corridor.
- [65:06]
Tim Ferriss
For people who can't see that, that is a sword.
- [65:08]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah.
- [65:09]
Richard Taylor
Oh, sorry. Those that can't see it here, I'm showing all these visual aids because that's.
- [65:14]
Tim Ferriss
How I think I'll drive people to the video.
- [65:18]
Richard Taylor
I just held up the 1.48 times larger than life size Sting that's carried by Elijah Wood at his scale. I likened it to teetering towards the edge of a precipice. There's probably a much better visual metaphor than this. And you do this frequently in one's life. The decision to start a family, the decision to buy your first home or the home that you'll spend the rest of your life in, like the home that my wife and I Bought way back on Meet the Feebles, right? The decision to X, Y and Z. But Peter Jackson offers this opportunity. And when he offered it, my wife and I, Tanya and I discussed with Peter and we ultimately settled on doing the design for and the manufacturing of the armor, weapons, creatures, miniatures, special makeup, effects and prosthetics. Like five divisions, a very, very large body of work, and you teeter to the edge of the precipice. And as a human, just as the human animal that we are, you've got a decision. You either step back from the edge and let others take up the slack and do it for you and you follow, or you choose to leap. And you either will then slam into the bottom of the cliff and make a mess with your guts and your brains everywhere, or you will actually arrest your fall. Through a number of different mechanisms, self belief being the most important one. I have four very simple tenants that I operate by and four tenants that I try and operate our company by. And the first one is love of oneself. That doesn't mean that you're egotistical or believe that you're better than you are. But if you can't see in yourself your virtues, how the hell are you going to expect anyone else following you to see your virtues? Right? So love of oneself is the first of those four tenets. And there is mixed with that, as corny as it sounds, ignorance being your greatest ally. I think all of us operate to some degree where we are blinded by the love of what we do. Like Bertram Russell, if I've got the right person, has a lovely quote. Work is more fun than fun. And people that don't understand that struggle. Even if you're in a low level position that you're not really enjoying, you can still make the people that you work with really fun, right? I used to clean toilets on international airplanes. But man, the people I worked with. I put a cricket ball through the window of the international terminal because we were playing cricket out on the tarmac under the plains. You can turn anything into fun. So I had once again a very corny. And I couldn't think of something better at the time. But we needed 158 crew working for seven and a half years on 48,000 separate things to deliver those five divisions to the trilogy of movies. Our works are 98 to 99% of the films because our work's in almost every image shot other than mountains with no one in it or et cetera. And you've got a inexperienced crew, you're highly inexperienced yourself, right? We'd done Hercules and Xena at the time, and we'd have a career of about eight to 10 years doing Peter's films. Peter, of course, is a inspiration in his own right and highly knowledgeable, so he's helping as well. I used to say, no matter how fine and how pale the thread that I give you, if you don't weave it with care into the tapestry, the tapestry will be in some way thread bare. What I'm talking about, that's sort of more of a silly, poetic way to say you're only as good as your weakest link. And in our case, we literally were linking right, handmade chainmail, 12 and a half million links over three and a half years. And chainmail is only as good as how well you glue the top link on your shoulder and whether the chainmail is going to fall off you. So trying to get us collectively, myself and my wife and our team to believe that we could do it, it didn't require. Because there is a. I'm sure it exists in other countries, but it is a fundamental part of New Zealand. I think it's because we're a young nation. We're at the back quarters of the world, a long way from marketplaces where you can buy components to fix your tractor. So there is this intense can do attitude that still exists today. Thankfully, we hire people that come with that, that beautiful can do attitude, and we were able to benefit and bottle that so significantly on those three films. And the overjoyed nature of knowing that you're trying to prove something, prove that New Zealand could do it, that we could stamp our mark on the world stage, that was really important to us. To do justice to Tolkien's writing was really important to us. To meet Peter Jackson's vision was really important. And to make sure that we had really good fun. That didn't mean that it wasn't brutally challenging. It was. But at no point in the seven and a half years did I ever think that I didn't want to be doing it. That was really a special part of that experience. Work is more fun than fun.
- [71:24]
Tim Ferriss
What are the other tenets you mentioned? 4.
- [71:27]
Richard Taylor
Love of oneself, love of what you do, love of who you do it with, and love of who you do it for. That is, as a father of a family, well, as a husband or partner to a loved one, a father or mother to a family, a president of a country, a CEO of a business. If you can't find those four tenets, obviously the first one, love of yourself, love of what you do You've got to love being a parent. You've got to love being a lover, a husband, a wife, a partner. You have to love the people that you do it for. It is so easy to become cynical about your audience or your fans or your family or the person working above you. Right. But that's who you're trying to capture it up in, your passion for what you do. And you know, the other one's very obvious. So that's how I think of things, very simply. And that's. After 30 plus years of working, it started to congeal. That that's thinking about all these things that you might think about. That's the things that drive you forward. I think I've settled on those four symbol and Try not to be a Dickhead is maybe the fifth. There are thousands of self help books. I've actually only read one of them. I can't remember the title even. But someone said to me once, you only need one page, a one page book on self help. And it's simply. And there's only one line and it just says, just don't be a dickhead. Right. And if you put that against almost anything in life, it's actually correct if we understand collectively what being a dickhead means. And no doubt I fall foul of that and invariably am sometimes, you know, we all are. We can't. It's very hard to not be. But you try really hard not to be. Hey, Greg.
- [73:30]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, Trying, always trying.
- [73:34]
Richard Taylor
Have I answered your question well enough? I've sort of been a bit fringed around the outsides of it all.
- [73:39]
Tim Ferriss
No, you did. I'll have probably just one or two follow ups related to that. But before I get to that, you mentioned the can do attitude of a fairly remote country and the resourcefulness that that engenders. And I'm wondering if there are any other advantages that you can think of of doing this. Whether it's the workshop or Lord of the Rings or the combination of the two in New Zealand. Are there advantages that you can think of?
- [74:07]
Richard Taylor
Tim, when I'm talking, I'm talking about we're the workshop. We were a small component of the overarching endeavor of making Lord of the Rings. Right.
- [74:18]
Tim Ferriss
Sure.
- [74:18]
Richard Taylor
We're very proud of the piece we played and we did a lot on it. But the art department, the costuming department, the props department, the camera department, the grips department, the directing department, et cetera, et cetera, the miniatures, there was phenomenal number of people all focused on the same mission. And I've actually said in the past Lord of the Rings wasn't made by a director, it wasn't made by a film studio and wasn't made by a film crew. It was made by a nation of people coming together in that moment to try and make Lord of the Rings in New Zealand for the world. That speaks to the phenomenal number of people that Peter and his producer drew into the collaboration of making Lord of the Rings.
- [75:04]
Tim Ferriss
I mean, the government, the military, I mean, the whole country was bombing.
- [75:07]
Richard Taylor
Our military, our tourism department. I think everyone felt you would have to have been pretty cynical at the time to have not felt a certain level of pride and what Peter was trying to do in our country and get behind it, and a lot of people benefited because of it. The driving desire to that term punch above your weight, I don't specifically like that term, but that's a well used one that speaks to it. New Zealanders do have a burning desire to try and achieve great things, regardless of where we may come from and the scale of our country. That should not restrict you at all. And you only need to look at our sports teams to see that, whether it's our National Ballet, Orchestra, contemporary dance, poets, writers, painters, artists in general, never mind the film industry or the creative industries. We have technology companies in New Zealand that are competing with the best in the world. Rocket Lab comes to mind that are doing astounding things on a fraction of the budget. You know, the robots that we're building in our workshop right now, probably at a 500th to a thousandth of the investment cost of some of the robots that we're seeing online, but we're pulling it off. We're getting there slowly, but getting there with five people and, you know, the money that we can save from projects we're doing. It's that attitude, I think, that plays a big part of it. Peter Jackson mustn't be missed in this equation too. His self belief and his just sheer drive. I've never ever seen Peter quiver in uncertainty, to fluctuate in a sense of uncertainty that he isn't sure of what he's doing. That is an amazing thing to work around because if your leader's confident, then. And there's a lovely quote, the emperor will not remember you for your medals or your diplomas. He will only remember you for your scars. And I think there is a mentality of that very much in our country. You just got to knuckle down and do it right. Grit is a important component in the journey, not the accolades at the end. It's the task of Getting there, that is seen as equal, an accomplishment, as winning baubles.
- [77:42]
Tim Ferriss
Quick follow up on never seeing Peter fluctuate in uncertainty. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. Is it because in your perception he's very clear on the right thing to do and or is he also very good at identifying things that can be fixed later? In other words, he moves very quickly and values fast decision making with incomplete information over trying to get complete information. I don't know if that's a coherent question, but could you expand a bit on why you think he's able to do that?
- [78:18]
Richard Taylor
It's a hard question because not to be disingenuous in any way to Peter because he is an extraordinary human being, a filmmaker, et cetera. But of course he makes mistakes. He. He leads things possibly in a challenging way. I'm not actually speaking to the outcome as much as the sense of self belief and confidence that he's got it, that he knows what's right for him and he knows where to go with it. Maybe others have seen him, but I've as close as I've had the pleasure of working with them at times during my career, I've not walked into a meeting, which I do in front of my own colleagues here at the workshop. I'll go guys, with this one. I'm not completely sure where we should go with this. Could we talk it through? Could we philosophize on it? Could we. Peter doesn't need to do that. He'll come to us and say, I can't yet visualize it. I know what I want to do with it, but I don't know what it's going to look like yet. Could you do some concept art around it? But the conviction of how he's going to actually make the images on the screen is so certain. I think a lot of that is his self education and what he has taught himself about most of of the way film is made. If he had 1,000 years, he could have made Lord of the Rings himself. So my assistant Ri is just trying to catch my eye to let me know.
- [80:00]
Tim Ferriss
No problem. Do you have to exit stage left?
- [80:02]
Richard Taylor
I got to bug out very quickly. Sorry.
- [80:04]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, no problem. No problem at all. Do we have time for 60 seconds? One last quick question. Okay.
- [80:10]
Richard Taylor
Yeah, of course.
- [80:11]
Tim Ferriss
So, Richard, you mentioned creating creators, making makers and also inspiring kids. And I'm curious for people listening if they wanted to be more creative to lay their 10 digits into making something, are there any resources, books, exercises, anything you'd suggest they start with?
- [80:31]
Richard Taylor
Obviously Today, with the Internet, there's a near infinite source of extraordinary training videos. I'm doing some sculpting of my own at home at the moment. And while I'm sculpting, I just have a video playing. Not that I can watch the video because I'm sculpting, but just listen to a guy that's talking through, doing his own sculpture, right? Cause I just love to think that maybe there's a sculptor standing next to me. And so I've been inspired by that. But in answer to your question, to me, the core attribute of creativity is to be inquisitive, to be curious. And I do see that a lot of people choose to journey through life looking at the world but not studying the world. They don't find beauty and curiosity in the simplest of things. And if you find it in yourself, to start finding extraordinary lessons and beauty and inspiration in most, if not everything around you. Specifically the simplest things. Things like there was that great American movie that came out with the net bending with the dancing plastic bag that was caught in the wind.
- [81:50]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, is that American Beauty?
- [81:52]
Greg Broadmoor
Maybe that's right. Yeah. Right.
- [81:53]
Richard Taylor
We've all seen bits of plastic caught in the eddies of a lifting wind in the corner of a building or in a rubbish bin or whatever. But that director remembered it, captured it, and shared it because his inquisitive mind loved it. And it became like, my mind has instantly gone to that image when I'd been trying to visualize how to answer your question, because it resounded so fundamentally with me. And then there's only one thing that you can do is just start making. It doesn't matter what the medium is. We have people turn up, up to interview with me, and you can see that they're slightly bashful. And I say, well, what do you do? And they will go, well, I do macrame. Or as you guys call it, macrame. I think, well, macrame is about hand skills, dexterity, eye to hand coordination, pattern weaving, color combinations, strength, engineering, et cetera, et cetera. All these things add up, up. That person is possibly exactly someone that we'd want to hire. And it doesn't matter what the craft is. Just start making something, leave something behind, right? If you think about who are the true immortals in the world, they're teachers and parents, people that pass information to others to carry on into the next generation. But I do think about artists as craftspeople, as being creatively immortal. Like, this is not a prop. This is an artifact to me, because it will Carry on and bring joy long after I'm dead. The sword maker that made that imbued it with creative immortality. And to me, that's a good place to be as a human. Ri is losing her wig.
- [83:52]
Tim Ferriss
Thank you. Thank you, Ri. Thank you, Richard.
- [83:55]
Richard Taylor
I show her action of telling me to hurry up.
- [84:01]
Tim Ferriss
All right, Greg, you and I have lots left to talk about.
- [84:04]
Richard Taylor
Well, I'll leave you with Greg now. It'll give Greg a chance to get a word in after I blabbed for most of this.
- [84:09]
Greg Broadmoor
No, I'm learning. I'm sitting here. I love it, actually.
- [84:13]
Tim Ferriss
So, Greg, let's talk about some of your projects that are, I suppose, Greg, projects as much as anything else, and how you chose them, why you chose them. And let's begin with vintage inspired ray guns in 2006. Where did that lead? And then I certainly have questions about more recent projects, but let's start there.
- [84:39]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, the ray guns. Well, that's a childhood inspiration. I was born in 1972. I'm 53, I think. Is that right? Done the maths?
- [84:48]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, sounds about right.
- [84:50]
Greg Broadmoor
And I'm a child of Star wars, but before Star Wars, I remember really fondly the black and white serials of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and those things. And those things are seared into my four, five, six, year old mind. And so when Star wars came along, it was like all that stuff in Technicolor and high definition and the sound and the music and everything. But there's always been this kind of love for retro science fiction in there. And so the ray guns came from that love, really, of Flash Gordon. But in a way, it's not really science fiction. Science fiction I like to think of as. Because it's actually very clever people who know about science and know about technology and then speculate on what could happen culturally or narratively with those things. Dr. Graudbort's and the Ray Guns was not really about that, actually. It's a veneer of science fiction technology and weapons and spaceships, but it's actually a satire, making fun of our current culture and that culture and that world, and also making fun of how science fiction and science in general gets things right.
- [85:46]
Tim Ferriss
How did you decide to do that? And I want you to tell people more about it. But how did you decide to do that? We all have finite time and people listening. When they're listening to you and Richard, they're like, good God. I mean, they can't keep track of the number of projects and so on. Certainly the energy is a big piece of that. Right. So you find the things that excite you and you focus on that. So you have the fuel in the tank before you necessarily decide on the destinations. But how did you decide to go after that saga specifically and create that?
- [86:17]
Greg Broadmoor
So the first thing you just alluded to, and I said it before, that it really is just that I found that so exciting. I thought about the ray guns and I started painting them and I found it so intriguing. I thought I could draw a thousand ray guns. I could just keep on drawing them, just drawing a ray gun. By the way, a whole world came out of it with characters and everything, but I could just draw a thousand ray guns. Like there's infinite variations. And so I could. But creative potential in that just caught me. And I would have done it. And I did do it. I did these nine. They're up on my wall. I'd hear these nine illustrations. But really the decision to keep going as Richard, I was very, very lucky.
- [86:53]
Tim Ferriss
So what happened? How did you tip over that domino of the ray guns? What was the germ? Because you alluded to it, right? But it's always interesting to me when you end up with an immersive world. Where did it start?
- [87:04]
Richard Taylor
Right.
- [87:04]
Tim Ferriss
So maybe you could tell that story.
- [87:07]
Greg Broadmoor
That's Richard fanning the flames. I had done these nine paintings just for myself because I love ray guns.
- [87:12]
Tim Ferriss
Ray gu.
- [87:12]
Greg Broadmoor
Put them on the wall. Ray guns? Yeah, 1930s style classic Ray guns. There's something beautiful and arcane about them that I really love and silly at the same time. But Richard, just as King Kong was finishing and Richard. One of the businesses we have is collectibles, but we don't own any of the IP that we make collectibles from generally. And so Richard had this aspiration like, and when you don't own the ip, right, you don't really control it. You don't get to do the exciting things you'd really want to do with it. You've got to go through the filtering process of whoever owns the IP or whoever manages it. And you don't necessarily make the lion's share of the money.
- [87:45]
Tim Ferriss
Sure.
- [87:46]
Greg Broadmoor
So Richard wanted to do our own ip, so he put the word out. Actually, the entire workshop said, we'd love to. Has anyone got any creative ideas for collectibles? And I was doing those ray guns, so it was perfect timing. I was like, richard, we should make these ray guns. Look at that. And luckily for me, he got the idea straight away. He saw it and we almost said the same thing at the same time. We should make these as real. They'll be met metal, they've got glass, they'll be in a case, we'll just pretend they're real. They will be real as far as we're concerned. I had this vision that we'd even cover them in dust and put moths in there. And they are all stained in age. We didn't go as far as putting the moths and the dust on you make them dusty and old and then you put them in your loft or whatever so that you can pull them out and say, look, this was granddad's Reagan. He fought in the Martian wars back in the day. So it was just this philosophy of doing that. And luckily, because Richard got it before I even knew it, we were away and making them, really making them as real collectibles. And then the next step was provocation from Richard. I love comic books and have made them my whole life. And he said, well, what's this world about? I know you've got these beautiful ray guns, but who made them? And so I'm like, I think I know who made them. And I just started making the books from there.
- [88:55]
Tim Ferriss
So it went from ray guns to inventor of the ray guns. And then what came after that?
- [89:02]
Greg Broadmoor
I think that to me there's something in that creativity, the first spark. You don't really know where it comes from. Maybe it comes from your childhood or something random that you've picked up along the way and that just ignites your information. But then if you've created all these sort of why questions to start coming from it. So if you've got these Reagan's who made them? Why did they make them? What are they for? And your imagination starts presenting answers to that, right? And then you just. I think about this a lot. Why choose any creative direction? This is a whole big metaphysical thing. I think about a lot about. There's actually two different ways, I think, two distinct directions in which people create stories and narratives and worlds. And one way is directed where you kind of know where you're going to go, you know, the ending. And the other way, which I've discovered I do more often than not, is I'm just chasing these why questions. Getting your imagination, giving you answers back and you following with the one that is most profound to you, that makes you feel the most. It must make sense logically to you, but it also must excite you. And then also, I guess it feels the most powerful. But you can possibly see more branches coming out from there. And as soon as you see the more branches, you're like that Must be the way. And so you're taking all these choices as they pop up and present themselves to you. That world of starting off with a series of nine paintings of ray guns ended up being a whole universe. And we made games from it, made dozens of different collectibles and books and all kinds of things, all from that process of just chasing the right thing and having Richard being the one going, do more, do more, do more.
- [90:29]
Tim Ferriss
So I was actually just having a conversation a few weeks ago in Utah with the fiction, mostly fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson. And he was discussing exactly in different terms, but these two stylistic options or creative approaches. And I think can't recall exactly the terms used, but it was something like the improviser and the architect. Some people like to have the blueprint, the outline they execute to outline, and that produces what they expected. Other people, let's just say in the realm of fiction writing, might start with two characters or one character in an interesting situation, and then they just run with it right from there. They start with that germ of an idea and then they see where the tree branches, but they don't know where they're going to end up, which is such a fun and liberating approach, which I've only explored in a little bit of fiction that I've done. But most of the time I'm architecting in terms of non fiction.
- [91:26]
Greg Broadmoor
I was going to ask. So you're more on that architect side. You can kind of see an endpoint potentially, or see the thing you're trying to say. And then it's about like, okay, how do I plan to get there?
- [91:36]
Tim Ferriss
Well, now that I think about it and thinking it through out loud, I would say that when I'm in the second phase of my work. That's true. And what I mean by that is my books are actually two broad buckets. The first bucket is research and experimentation. And when I'm doing the research and the experimentation, there is a lot of groping in the darkness and finding my way from one interesting thing to the next. So I can't really predict. Otherwise it would be very boring. Where the experimentation is going to lead. For any of the books, which almost always include experimentation, especially the first three and the one that I'm working on right now. And then once I have all of the material, more or less, then I decide how I'm going to pick and choose and massage and create a sort of interwoven puzzle, so to speak. Maybe that's not the right metaphor, but you kind of get the idea like an advent Calendar, maybe for the reader to experience as they go from one page in one page chapter to the next and to the next. So I would say in the beginning it's exploration, improvising and it gives me the dopamine hit and the rush of energy necessary. So that when I end up having to do the blueprinting and the bricklaying, which I intrinsically find less enjoyable, then I have gas in the tank to push me through that second phase.
- [93:08]
Greg Broadmoor
There's probably not a hard distinction between either and in fact you're probably oscillating back and forwards between both, both approaches all the time to some degree. It's just some people naturally veer more towards exploring and some wanting to know a place. I discovered it a little bit when I was showing the early stage of my current book to a friend and had a character in it and they wanted the character to resolve a certain way and they said, I hope you have this character beat that character. I'm being really reductive, so I'm not being specific about anything. But they're saying I hope that happens. And that was the realization for me that I wasn't doing it in the way that they were thinking. Because I was thinking, well, actually, really, I don't know who's going to win. I don't know where it's going to go. I'm just following it and seeing where it goes. Part of that might just be a choice of that feels more fun, that is riding the wave, that's being on the skateboard not knowing whether you'll fall off or not. If you can keep it fun, then you keep on going. And so not knowing where it's going to go is good. But you know that your imagination will present you these options and that if it feels powerful, then you know you've hit somewhere good.
- [94:12]
Tim Ferriss
I think you touched on a key component there, at least for me, which is effectively, if you have confidence in your imagination, in the muse, also to present you with discoveries along the way. Having that confidence seems to be a prerequisite. And I think I've always had quite a lot of self doubt when it came to taking something from beginning to end idea to final product without a blueprint. And that's part of the reason why I've in the last few years and moving forward, I want to do many more creative sprints, short deadlines with really capable people where I don't know exactly where the end product is going to end up and to play around with honing that confidence in more of an improv jazz way, as opposed to a orchestral piece where you have everything figured out in advance and executed to spec.
- [95:11]
Greg Broadmoor
I wanted to catch on one thing you said there, though. But there is a missing ingredient in that. You do need to have the deadline, right, or the reality. You need to have the wolf at your back to some degree. If you're completely creatively open and just going to find your way, but there's no deadline, there's no pressure on you, you can kind of wander anywhere. There is something about making a commitment to someone else, however, you do that to a publisher, to whatever, or taking money on to do the project and knowing that you have to pay it back or whatever. That wolf at your back is so important, even if you don't know where you're going to go, because now you have to go somewhere and you have to beat the wolf. So you've got to be careful not to take that away from yourself. I think that can be maybe something I'm speculating, but maybe if you get too successful, that can be dangerous because now you know, you can just kind of free, freely float along and explore. Maybe you find something, maybe you don't. But when you know that failure is an option, you go, I can't. I have to. I have to keep on going. I have to solve this.
- [96:09]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, for sure. So the new book, tell us about the new book and how you ended up deciding on this as a project to put your energies into.
- [96:17]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, that's one part.
- [96:20]
Tim Ferriss
There it is.
- [96:21]
Greg Broadmoor
Oh, pretty, dude.
- [96:23]
Tim Ferriss
It's my first time seeing it. It's my first time seeing it in the form. I saw the early digital way back, but that is gorgeous.
- [96:32]
Greg Broadmoor
It came out really, really good. I'm very, very happy with it. I've gone with a publisher called Mad Cave, who I didn't know before, but they've been fantastic. So I started our game studio. I was one of the few people at Widow, had a real keen interest in games and I wanted to make our own games. And really luckily for us, we partnered up. This guy, Rony Abovitz, came along into our lives who started Magic Leap, a company that make 3D goggles like AR goggles, they call them spatial computing. And we started a studio through them and he was massively supportive of me, even though I'd never made video games before. I had a vision of how to do that, of what I wanted to see and I understood what he was trying to do. And so we were very lucky that we formed a relationship with him and then made the game studio and I made a series of games and I'm really proud of them. They were great. They're very pioneering and very challenging, but sadly for us, not that many people saw them. Magic Leap only got to a certain level and needed more funding. And then Covid came along and luckily Magic Leap managed to limp its way through and is now continuing on, which is great for them, and hopefully they continue to grow and get back to strength. But they were massively punched in the guts and my whole team was gone almost overnight. It was crushing. You know, all the speculative money, as you'd know, sucked up at that moment and went into the safe things, which is totally understandable. It went in traditional games and it went into food and, you know, bas all the basics that we actually need when we're in a crisis. But it disappeared from Magic Leap's endeavour at that time. And so I actually had games halfway through production, some almost entirely finished.
- [98:02]
Tim Ferriss
Brutal.
- [98:03]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, dude. Emotional punch in the guts for me. And so we all went home and I actually sat here thinking about, well, what next? And so I handed over reins of the game studio. I didn't really want to make traditional games. I was so in love with making the kind of wild and crazy technological things that Magic Leap was aspiring to do that I kind of went back to basics. I thought I need to go back and do something that I can do on my own. I also discovered about myself that maybe I should take a break from running a big team. It's an amazing thing that someone like Richard can do to have so many people doing these things. It's an art unto itself. But I realized I needed to get back to basics and I'm a lover of dinosaurs. I grew up in a very dinosaur y kind of place in the bush. And so this world of cave women and dinosaurs has been in my head for years. And it kind of crystallized. It started to crystallize. And sitting here looking out my window at the bush, back at home, away from civilization, as civilization seemed to be falling down a little bit, I had these very primal thoughts of this kind of world. And the story started to form around those ideas. And it is very much a cave thing. I felt like I was going back into my cave like a weird little shaman and gonna concoct something new, something I knew I could do more or less on my own as well. A comic book is a beautiful thing because you can do the entire thing yourself. That said, I have two other writers, Andy Lanning and Nick Bossier, who co authored it with me, and they really helped me to sort of shape it and put a lot more depth into it.
- [99:30]
Tim Ferriss
But to your point, you knew that it couldn't be taken away, in a sense.
- [99:34]
Greg Broadmoor
And I thought, I can do this. I don't need to hire 20 people to do this. I can do this all on my own. And emotionally, it became a story about technology and about collapse and about being back to basics. I think going from such a technological world, working with Magic Leap, who are doing the most highfalutin crazy stuff and thinking about that every day, about what the future of computing could be to. No, I'm going to work on dinosaurs and blood and gore and people living at the edge of survival. Yeah, that's what really motivated it.
- [100:03]
Tim Ferriss
What was the set of tools that you used when you were originally concepting this and working on layout and so on? Were you doing the majority of it in Photoshop? What do the set of tools look like?
- [100:15]
Greg Broadmoor
I tend to draw first mainly in pencil and then go into Photoshop from there if it's interesting. But the first thing was really conversations. I would be having conversations with my co authors, just bouncing back, and it was really just percolating my ideas in the broadest possible sense of everything that could happen, why the world would be the way it was and everything and all the ingredients. And then some idea, you know, really catches your mind, and I can see a spark of it, see a little vision. And then it's like, okay, I'm gonna draw that. I'm gonna draw that moment. And then I started drawing a bunch of those moments that some of them went on to become key plot points in the story. And other things are more matter of fact of like, well, I know there's a character, it's named One Path after this character called OnePath. And so I needed to see her. You know, your mind's kind of searching around for who. Who she really is. So that's an exercise unto itself. I need to. To draw her. Normally in a film, that would be conceptual design. You might draw 100 versions of her. But for me, luckily, because I'm creating it, I just draw one drawing and I know that's her. And then doing that for all of the elements of the story, doing that for all the dinosaurs, the places, the characters. So I essentially concepted it all out. I don't need to be as methodical and full as you would with a film, because in a film, you need to design every single thing in every single place, because it's going to go on and someone's going to actually have to build it. But in this case, I know I'm going to be drawing all the comic panels, so there's a lot I can fill in in the future that I'll solve when I get to it. But I wanted to draw a high level of it and see it in front of me and get that feeling of like, is this a place? Is this actually a thing? That drawing it all and spending the time with it gives you a chance to live in it and feel, does it make sense? And do you want to move further into it? Do you want to explore more?
- [101:56]
Tim Ferriss
What are the best places for people to visit? Or maybe a better way to phrase. The question is, how can people get a taste of your artwork and storytelling? That certainly includes OnePath. So you can give people an idea of where and when they will be able to get that, but also if they want to get a taste for the many flavors of Greg Broadmoor. I don't know, wording's a little awkward, but you get the idea. Where should they go?
- [102:22]
Greg Broadmoor
I've just actually released a new website at long, long last craigbroadmore.com my partner made it for me. I've always just relied on Blogspot and Instagram and all that kind of stuff. Never actually done a decent website. So finally I've got a good website and it's got a bunch of content up there actually. And I'm also on Instagram, but yeah, it's probably not comprehensive, but it's got a ton of my work.
- [102:41]
Tim Ferriss
Beautiful. And then OnePath, what's the timeline and how are people going to be able to get it?
- [102:47]
Greg Broadmoor
So OnePath comes out April 8th. That's like a month from now.
- [102:51]
Tim Ferriss
That is very soon.
- [102:52]
Greg Broadmoor
I don't know when you release this, but yeah, hopefully very soon for your audience.
- [102:55]
Tim Ferriss
Within a few weeks of recording this.
- [102:57]
Greg Broadmoor
It's a 200 page book, but there's three more books altogether. There'll be four books in total, each about the same size. So I've already been doing it for. When was the pandemic? When did that start? I've lost track of time already.
- [103:09]
Tim Ferriss
Boy, 20. 20.
- [103:10]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, 2020 has been five years. I feel like I just started it, but I've already been making it for five years and I'll probably be doing it for another two years yet.
- [103:17]
Tim Ferriss
So, yeah, that's wild. Now, do you foresee. Do you have any aspirations to see it expand beyond comic books? Have those ideas started percolating or have you put those on a leash so that you can focus on getting the work done? That's at hand.
- [103:32]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, I really pushed that stuff away, actually. I work as, you know, in the world of film and video games and so on. So everyone would ask me, you're making a new ip, is it going to be a game, is it going to be merchandise, is it going to to be film? And so on. And actually I was completely uninterested in that. And I don't know why I'm not being dismissive of those things because I've made them and helped make some of those sorts of things. I realized it's because I wanted to keep the thing as pure to itself as possible. There's a bunch of weird and possibly challenging ideas in one path that I knew. Let's say I would just run the simulation in your head. There's going to be nudity in this book. If I think this creative world has to solve these other paradigms, film games, whatever, then I know I have to curtail some of the decisions.
- [104:15]
Tim Ferriss
Or you'll start censoring or you'll start editing.
- [104:19]
Greg Broadmoor
Censoring at the worst, but editing in ways that sort of take all the edges off and make it less unique. So I thought, no, it's a comic book, it's purely a comic book. And I'm going to do the things that I can do there. And then if I'm so lucky down the line that the opportunity arises for it to be other things, then great, we can adjust it there. But I'm not going to think about those things at all. In fact, if I'm honest, I was almost a little disdainful. I was like, this is a comic book. This is like pure baby. I should say graphic novel. That's a grown up word for it. But I still.
- [104:50]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, graphic novel, yeah. No, the tuxedo, the sort of black tie version of the comic book. And I'll point people to OnePath, certainly in the show notes and link to the website as well. When you reflect back on your work and time with with Weta Workshop, can you think of an example of something that was particularly hard to pull off, that you ended up being very proud of? I'm just deeply interested in following you through that journey, having you tell a story of any project that comes to mind.
- [105:27]
Greg Broadmoor
The one that resonates for me is District 9. I got to work on District 9, which was Neill Blomkamp's debut film. I'll tell you the whole arc of that and jump into a couple moments from it. But I know other people had this experience. It started as Halo and actually we Started working on Halo, the feature film adaptation of the video game. Amazing video game. It started there with no director. And so Richard just said, we might be working on this. Peter's trying to produce it. He's going to try and find someone. Let's just go. We don't have a script. We don't have anything. We just have the game. And so we actually spent a long time creatively exploring that. And then we met Neil Blomkamp, and it was like. That was a revelation. I had my doubts about that as a film because I thought, it's a great game, but how can this be a film? I wasn't even quite sure. But then when Neil turned up and he'd never made a film before, I'd seen his little shorts. I was like, holy hell. Okay, now I get it. This guy has got a style and a vision and it's completely unlike anything else. Now I can see the film. This is going to be amazing. But then all of a sudden, one day, that whole film fell over.
- [106:29]
Tim Ferriss
Now, at the time, just for context, at the time, what had you been brought on to do? Do exactly?
- [106:35]
Greg Broadmoor
I was doing concept design. What workshop would have done, I don't know. But the aspiration would have been to make many of the props and vehicles. In fact, we were making a Warthog and we were making. Yeah, we were making many, many elements of the physical aspects of the film. But the whole thing fell over. I'd poured my heart into that film. I had worked so hard and loved the work that I'd done. And none of it will ever be seen. It's all locked away. It's all locked right. I'd done hundreds of drawings, and my friends had done hundreds and thousands of drawings and illustrated. It's just astonishing amount of work. And then one day it was just gone. Film's done, and then one day you're depressed, and then the next day you're just like, well, got to keep on going, get up and move on to the next thing. And then all of a sudden, Neil's making. The idea of District 9 came along, and we'd seen Live in Joburg as short. That was the basis for that. And that was like, this is even more exciting. No disrespect to Halo, but now we get to create. If this can happen, we get to create a science fiction world from the ground up. It can be whatever we dream up. And Neil has a crazy imagination, so this is going to be fun. And it was. But Neil is like many directors, he knows what he Wants. He has complete confidence and faith in himself. Knows when he doesn't like something, but is happy to change course immediately if he feels like that's not working. And so the story, I would say, of challenging thing, overcoming it, this happened to me, but it happened to other artists as well. Designed many aspects of the film, mainly the robotics and the weapons and spaceships and stuff like that. And I was working on the exosuit robot, and we designed a full organic alien that I really loved. It was like, it was not a grown robot, as if it had, like, skin. And, you know, it was actually manufactured using organic techniques. So I thought it was a really interesting idea. It had hair and it looked robotic, but it also looked really different. And I thought it looked cool. You know, I had my own little doubts about parts of it, but I really liked, liked it. And we even went so far as to build a huge prop and ship it to South Africa. And they shot scenes with Sholto Copley in the thing. So I'm like, this is cool. And then all of a sudden, Neil just changes his mind, like, no, it's not going to work. That thing doesn't quite work. I want something bigger, scarier, heavier. Again. I had that same moment at the end of Halo of being like, ugh. My design that I poured months into, that my friends built, built. That's nothing. That's just air now. Goodbye. And then you have to go snap yourself out of it. You cannot be depressed. You can't be bummed. You just gotta be like, okay, now I've got this new problem to solve. I gotta figure out what this next version is. And I think I probably did, like, 30 designs in the course of a week, right? Just working my ass off to create as many options as possible. Part of its competition. It's like, I wanted to make sure I got my design in there. It's the wolf at your back. And the thing that came out of it was even better. Neil was absolutely right. He got the thing that solved the creative problem. That was this threatening, scary, but also superpower for Shalto to wield. And, by the way, just someone else's experience. The guy who designed the aliens is a friend of mine, David Meng. Amazing sculptor. He had a similar experience where he worked for months on an alien design. And we made it as prosthetics. It was all going to be prosthetics. You put guys in suits and then they walk around wearing these Aileen prosthetics. He sculpted this beautiful design, beautiful prosthetic. They painted it, sent it South Africa. And then Neil went. Done work.
- [109:58]
Tim Ferriss
Did Neil give reasons or was it just a very simple. Doesn't work. We need to.
- [110:03]
Greg Broadmoor
I can't remember. In my mind, it just doesn't work. Neil's doesn't have a lot of fluff. It's just like. But he may have given more. I can't remember. I saw in Dave what I felt, which is the slip. He had made a Faberge egg of astonishing detail. Right. This beautiful thing. And then goodbye. It's dust that the experience is just so common in making film. But anyway, the alien that he made out of that, he just went. He collapsed to the floor and then he pulled himself back up. And the next day he was sculpting the new thing. And what finally made it to the film was even better than the other designs.
- [110:40]
Tim Ferriss
So I want to hear more about this. I want to dig into this psychological resilience piece a little bit because I've spent time with a lot of artists. You certainly have spent time with more artists. But it's easy for an artist, whether that person is a visual artist or a writer or otherwise, to get attached to their darlings, to get very attached. It's incredibly understandable. And then I recall distinctly, this is a few years ago, maybe it was two years ago, and. And I did my first creative sprint, coming back to what I want to do more of with a number of concept artists who'd done a lot of work for Dungeons and Dragons. The gathering, really incredible with fantasy concept art, but also really fully fleshed out covers of, you name it, any iconic player's handbook, et cetera, from D and D or otherwise. They just created these masterpieces cases. But what struck me most was not their capabilities, it was two aspects. I mean, they were both good at quality, but exceptionally good at speed. So number one, it was just the speed and their ability to hear an idea, sit down for an hour with a pot of coffee and start with silhouetting a lot of the times and then smashing out ideas. But the characteristic that stuck out to me most, and I don't know if this is born or built, that's what I want to ask you about, is how unattached they were, meaning they would produce so much work. And I was working with, let's just say, a project manager. We were all in person, shacked up in the middle of the countryside at this hotel, just to do this work on this fantasy world that has been kind of renamed. Initially it was the Legend of Cockpunch. Long story. But later Legends of Varlata and. And could actually be modified very easily to be a serious, viable, full blown fantasy world. Which might be something I explore. But the reason I bring it up is I would have a decent idea of what I wanted to do because I also grew up collecting comics, wanted to be a comic book penciler. So I think very visually. But they were accustomed to having 70 plus percent of their stuff X'd out by IP holders and starting over. And they were so unfazed by it. It stuck with me ever since my first day watching them be so unattached. And I brought up the project manager because he's done. Actually, I have this new book here. I'll just give him a quick shout out. Hold on one sec. So one of them was Adam Lee. And you can see here, this is Worlds and Realms, Dungeons and Dragons. It runs through basically 50 years of gameplay play and different worlds within the D and D ecosystem. But Tianis and his writing partner both said to me, they're like, be super blunt. You don't have to wear kid gloves. Dance around it. They're like, if you don't like something, just say you don't like it. And it was very, very hard to do because I get so attached to my own little middling attempts at artwork. So how do you develop that? Is it just, just brute force repetition where you've built up so much scar tissue over time that you get better at handling it?
- [113:57]
Greg Broadmoor
Maybe. Those guys sound very, very good at handling that. I would probably be more emotionally fragile even than that because I do get protective. But I did realize early on working at WETA Workshop because I'd never done professional work before, especially not at the speed. I love the speed, by the way. I think speed gives a worker quality of it's own, which I think is what I love and chase after. But I realized you have to generate a ton of work whether you like it or not. You're in competition with your other artists, which is a great camaraderie, but it's still a competition and you're all bouncing ideas off each other and most of your ideas will be rejected. And you kind of know this because if you're doing 100 versions of a character and your team's doing 100 more each, it's only going to be one of them. You kind of know whether you're thinking or not that whether you're aware of it or not, that a lot of that stuff's going to be thrown away. But it does hurt when it is thrown away, especially an idea that you're passionate about. And so you realize very early on that you have to become unattached. You do need to care about the work deeply. It is your baby. You have to care about it. And if you don't care about it, the work won't be any good. So you cannot become cynical to the work. You have to love it, and you have to be able to let go of it. Those two things are really in opposition because you're fighting with yourself. It's so hard to just let go when you care so deeply. But that's what you have to learn. And those guys obviously mastered it. They knew that they could be in the state of loving the work and enjoying it and then just be like, whatever will happen will happen. And know that the joy is not actually in what happens next with that. It's actually in the doing of the work itself. As long as you did something great there. Now I have an opportunity to do something great again or try. I think they obviously had mastered that. And that's what I tried to chase after was like, well, I love the work. The process of doing it. I want to enjoy that process. And whatever will be, will be after. After that, at least you're trying to get there. That's easier said than done because you still care about it going on and becoming a part of the movie. So there's a competitive part of you that wants to win that doesn't go away.
- [115:55]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I feel like you need that, though. Right. And that strikes me as the crux of the challenge. It's easy to. I shouldn't say it's easy. It's not easy, but it's easier to either care a ton or not care at all. But it's really hard to care a lot and then also have the what will be, will be attitude with the work. That strikes me as a combination that is super tricky, but it's really, really important. I think I've become better at it with writing. I'm still very precious about anything that I paint or draw. I mean, ridiculously precious. But with the writing, it's like, hey, look, it doesn't matter how cute and clever you think that page or that chapter or that character is. If your test readers say it's fucking boring or it's confusing, you gotta kill it.
- [116:56]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, well, they've given you even. It's subjective to them. It's an objective fact and. Right. It's not like you could argue with them. No. This is why it's good. That's something in the art. Right. Your artists probably realize this. If it didn't make sense to you, if it didn't solve the problem, if that's not the character you were after, they can't argue into saying why it is. You felt it and it's true. And so the way to solve that problem is to go back and do it again and do it, have another go at it. Because that's how you would actually solve the problem and actually come up with the right answer. You won't solve it by some meta analysis of. This is why. Look, here's my study. Here's all my diagrams of why this drawing is just the one you should want. That'll make it any sense.
- [117:36]
Tim Ferriss
Are there any particular. And I suppose they would need to have work that people can see. They don't have to be concept artists or concept designers. But are there any particular artists who have really inspired and informed how you do what you do? That could be the aesthetic, but it could also be. I mean, you mentioned Salvador Dali earlier, right? It could be process, it could be philosophy, it could be anything. I'm just wondering if you could sort of of mention any of your influences or inspirations, whether past tense or current.
- [118:11]
Greg Broadmoor
I'm not really very influenced by technical. I'm not very interested in the technical a lot of the time, like how something is done. I find it interesting, but it doesn't really motivate me. But there are artists, and it doesn't really matter how they do their work that have absolutely inspired me. Salvador Dali was one of those ones where it's like, I love realistic looking stuff or quasi realistic looking stuff. And then someone who twisted reality in such a way, it was just like mesmerizing. I've actually got a book here I should the artist that really blew my mind as a teenager. I grew up reading 2000 A.D. judge Dredd.
- [118:43]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, British series of comics. Unrealistic, right? Oh, yeah. I think that's how I was introduced to. Might have been how I was introduced to Simon Bisley for the first time. Oh, Slain the horned God. Oh my God. Look at that.
- [118:57]
Greg Broadmoor
This is the book. So my. I was 15 and reading 2000 AD and I was getting better at drawing. I wanted to be a comic artist. I really wanted to work for 2000 A.D. i started to get to a level. I'm thinking, I think I'm okay. I think I could send in a folio. I think I could do this right. And then this came out. Actually, the book before this came out was ABC warriors, which he did in black and white. It's all penmanship, but that work, his work just fricking blew the lid off my mind.
- [119:25]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, my God, it's so nuts.
- [119:27]
Greg Broadmoor
It's still unparalleled. It's Frank Frazetta and Corbin and all of that dialed to a totally unique level. And I don't know how he does it. I know he's just a magician. He's on another planet. He summoned true magic here, and I'm interested in how he does it.
- [119:42]
Tim Ferriss
Can I just have a super nerdfest with you for a second? So hold on for one second. All right, so for people who don't have any idea what the hell we're talking about, you can look him up, but this is.
- [119:56]
Greg Broadmoor
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [119:58]
Tim Ferriss
Simon Bisley. Yeah, the art of Simon Bisley. Heavy Metal Man. What a great magazine that was, too.
- [120:04]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, I think they just re released it. By the way, the French version, Metal Helland, or however you say that.
- [120:09]
Tim Ferriss
I can't remember exactly how I chanced upon it, but I remember picking up Slaying the horned God and just thinking to myself, what in the fuck is this?
- [120:20]
Greg Broadmoor
How is it even possible?
- [120:21]
Tim Ferriss
How is it even possible? And then his work on Lobo, I remember that very distinctly as well. Just an incredible, incredible artist. Okay, now, are you inspired or deflated?
- [120:32]
Greg Broadmoor
Both. To nerd on him for one more second, though. Did you ever buy the Bible? His Bible? He did works from the Bible, mainly from the. Oh, no, no. From both Bibles, old and New Testament. Dude, go out and buy it now. I don't know if you can still. They're still in print, but there's two volumes of it, and they're absolutely incredible. Incredible. Wow. Yeah. Really raw, but just beautiful. But to your point, it was both. Deflation. Like that rug pulled out from under you. Like, I thought I was maybe good enough. And then you realized. No, no, this. The level is up here somewhere. You know, the ceiling just went way up, and the ceiling was already very high, so. And so it was. This was a great thing to happen. Really, it was. It was depressing. I was actually really, like, punched in the guts by that as well. But then you have to. You know, you're like, well, I just need to get better. And I did something, actually that I weirdly still feel a slight shame for, because I never draw from life or from anyone else's drawings. I always draw from my own imagination. But I started copying some of his drawings for a while, thinking that if I could just figure out how he does his line work or something like that, it was useless. It was a waste of my time, but I did it for a little while.
- [121:41]
Tim Ferriss
You mentioned two other names, so. Frazetta, Frank Frazetta. And for people who don't know Frank Frazetta, I mean, go look at everything you can find. I remember being so enthralled by this. Not going to do it justice. But Viking, like, character with the kilt with the polar bears pulling the chariot, and his mastery of not just the male figure, but also his women are just like. I mean, come on. Unbelievable. Like that woman coming out of the water. Slash Merc with the snake wrapped around her with that huge creature in the background. The artwork is just. It's hard to describe, but he was such a genre break in so many ways. You mentioned another name that I didn't recognize. Corbin.
- [122:27]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, Richard Corbin. I don't know where he's from. I think he was an American artist, but he was in a lot of heavy metal. And in fact, there's an homage. One of my favorite moments in Slain is I won't find the page, but there's a homage. They talk about Slane being the king of kings, and in the background of the shot, there's Slane being throned as the king of the Celts or whatever. And behind him is Den, I think is the character from Richard Corbin and Conan. And they're both. In the back of one tiny panel are these two masterful paintings of Conan in the style of Frazetta. But in the front is Slain in the style of Bisley. And behind that is Den in the style of Corbin. And he had a very specific way of painting. In fact, he's lit a bit like you are now, blue light on the side. Right. Corbin had this very specific way of lighting his characters, and it's. Anyway. But he did a heavy metal series. I actually don't even know what the story is about. I don't think I even read them. I just looked at them. I just sat there looking at his work and find his work. You'll absolutely love it. He does big, powerful, masculine figures as well as buxom, beautiful, strong women that blow your mind. Yeah, you'll love it. You'll love it.
- [123:35]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, cool. I'll check it out. I saw, believe it or not, not far from where I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas. I saw my first original Frank Frazetta piece, which is owned by Robert Rodriguez, who's a famous film director. Young. He did Sin City. He's worked with James Cameron on Alita Battle Angel. He's done tons and tons of Movies. And he collects objects kind of like you and Richard also. He's just got the best toys. And he has a Frazetta piece when you walk into his house, and it's lit as if it's in a dungeon of sorts with this very dramatic lighting. And it's just. It's amazing work.
- [124:18]
Greg Broadmoor
There was a museum somewhere in New York of Frazetta's work, but I think there was some family issues. So I don't know what state it's in now. But I had the chance once of I was in New York, and me and my partner, we could either go to the Frazetta Museum or that's what I wanted to do. But I actually didn't know how to get there. I didn't know where it was. And to be honest, if I'd gone there, I don't think I would have found it. But the other choice was to go and to mention one more artist was to go down to Delaware to where NC Wyeth had a studio. Do you know NC Wyeth work?
- [124:45]
Tim Ferriss
Ah. You know, I was going to try to. Bullshit. I don't know.
- [124:48]
Greg Broadmoor
He's an illustrator. An illustrator from the turn of the last century. He did, like, famous book illustrations of, like, pirates, I was going to say.
- [124:57]
Tim Ferriss
Was he kind of like Leyendecker's Vintage in that era?
- [125:00]
Greg Broadmoor
Maybe a little free Rockwell.
- [125:02]
Tim Ferriss
That's why I do think I've come across the name. I wasn't totally bullshitting. It was like a flicker of recognition.
- [125:07]
Greg Broadmoor
Howard Pyle was another great American illustrator, and he was one of his students or compatriots. Anyway, his work is astonishing. I went to see that, and that was semi religious. Standing in front of his paintings. They were huge.
- [125:17]
Tim Ferriss
N.C. wyeth.
- [125:19]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, the letter N.C. wyeth.
- [125:21]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, there he is.
- [125:22]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, yeah. And that. Absolutely. Mindboggling and religious experience.
- [125:27]
Tim Ferriss
Wow.
- [125:28]
Greg Broadmoor
Standing in front of those paintings, I'd recommend, if you're in that part of the world, going there, it might still be there. In fact, it's where his studio is.
- [125:34]
Tim Ferriss
This stuff's incredible. Yeah, yeah.
- [125:37]
Greg Broadmoor
Super mesmerizing. But he is a great painter on the caliber of the. The great painters of Europe and that illustrious history of great paintings. He's up there, but yet he'd be called an illustrator, which is like a word that trivializes really what he does.
- [125:52]
Tim Ferriss
This was true for a lot of those artists in that generation. Maybe it's just because it was commercialized. I mean, Norman Rockwell dealt with a lot of this as well, of course. But Leyendecker when he was creating sort of iconic male figures for selling button up shirts and suits or whatever. I mean, as works of art, they're spectacular.
- [126:12]
Greg Broadmoor
They take you there, right? You feel them. You fall into those images and you feel like you're there in a way that even a photo sometimes can't achieve. I find that mesmerizing. I'll tell you something, I just want to throw another name out there. Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes.
- [126:25]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, 100%.
- [126:26]
Greg Broadmoor
When you say Rockwell, my mind jumps to Bill Watterson. Like absolutely mind boggling illustrations. I know they're comic books, right? Little cartoons in a newspaper. But every now and then he got to play with his illustration and it to another level and you could really see that he was a true master. Unbelievable.
- [126:45]
Tim Ferriss
I still remember to this day I own just about every compendium of Calvin and Hobbes. But for whatever reason sticks in my mind are his color paintings of Calvin and Hobbes outside during the fall with the leaves changing color with the birch or aspen, probably birch and other trees and just the kaleidoscopic autumnal colors. That foliage is partially what I remember. And also as a side note, now this could be apocryphal. I don't know if it's a true story, but I like the story, which is Bill Watterson, to my knowledge, kind of like you with one path, was quite a purist with his characters and with Calvin and Hobbs. And I recall at one point, I think it was one of his partners, or maybe it was a pitch for licensing to create a Hobbs plush toy that was really large. And so the story goes, I believe he took a pair of scissors and just attacked it and ripped it to shirts as his way of saying, fuck no over my body. We're not going to do it. Which I found so endearing. I mean, I like to believe it's true. Yeah.
- [128:00]
Greg Broadmoor
Is he still going? Do you know?
- [128:03]
Tim Ferriss
I don't know what he's up to. He's very, as I understand it, very reclusive. For years, since I started the podcast, he's been on kind of my top 10 list. I was like, you know, if he would ever play ball, that's the key ingredient. But if Bill Watterson would ever really sit down and just have a really open conversation where we could just shoot the shit, have a cup of tea or a drink, who knows, whatever his preference is and talk like this. This man.
- [128:29]
Greg Broadmoor
The you could get what you've just intimated there and talked about, you know, why that emotional reaction to that merchandise, even if that's not specifically true, it's true that he didn't really want to commercialize it in those other ways. Why I would find that really interesting because I totally understand. I'm maybe not as adverse to that as he sounds like he was, but I think all the time about the reasoning for making art. Why are you doing it? What is art about? It is more than just drawing pictures and making stories. Stories. It is finding truth. Maybe he found some real profound truth and he found that he's expressed it and that anything else was actually watering down to that truth. Perhaps I'm just guessing because I feel that art and the act of creativity broadly and generally. Well, actually, no, come back to me specifically, making art as comic books and stories is this quest to find truth or to point towards truth. It is like science. I don't think science and engineering and art are very different at all. I just think that, like the way I was describing, with the way I create. Your imagination is throwing up explanations, ideas, theories, possibilities. And then you are the instrumentation. If it's a scientific analogy, you are the instrument. Your emotions are the instrument. Some part of you throws up conjecture and then your body tells you that feels right. And that's the scientific instrument confirming or giving you the measurement. It's a little bit different than science in this way, but you know when it's true, you know when it's right. And that. That's why you go down that path of chasing that thing. And I'm not saying that means that it's going to be true for everyone, but you know it's true for yourself. And so there's something in that. And that to me is one of the most liberating ways of creating.
- [130:10]
Tim Ferriss
Can you think of a project that fundamentally, maybe that's too big a word, but changed you in some way? Right. So you before the project and you after the project. Project are different. That could be a skill set, it could be a set of beliefs, could be anything. But do any projects come to mind where you before and you after are quite different in some respect?
- [130:39]
Greg Broadmoor
It's not a project I'm going to cheap out in a way, but also talk about something very meaningful. And I know it's something you think about. That's having a child. I was talking about Aaron Stupple before, but it's having a child. I was not prepared. Not that a child is a pretty project, right? I guess, in a way, but having a child. When my boy came out, it was like instant whoa. I just snapped and you moved your head at the same point. That was cool. It's like I'm in control, trained.
- [131:08]
Tim Ferriss
I've been well trained. I'm like the Manchurian Candidate. All your work bearing fruit.
- [131:14]
Greg Broadmoor
I cannot tell you there's most changes in your life. You're working on a project, something goes right, something goes wrong. You have to internalize it. You feel something about it. You, you have to sit there, internalize it. It might take you, maybe it takes you a few minutes, maybe it takes you a week, maybe it takes you a month, maybe it takes you the rest of your life, but you internalize it and then you figure out a new thing from it. But weirdly enough, having a child was instantaneous. I felt like I was a different person. I had a different realization. All my priorities just got reshuffled in a split second. I felt like a profound connection to that person. And I realized all these things like, holy hell, he's going to discover that there are elephants, like what? Or there's just this whole world of possibility for him. And then also you start thinking, this is maybe one of the profound things that I think most parents get is instead of thinking of your own life, you start thinking beyond your life. You start thinking multi generationally without even wanting to. You just can't help it. You start thinking that way because you start thinking, oh my God, I've got to make sure things are good for them in the future. I've got to give them the best possible chance. So you start thinking, your horizon goes way out into the distance, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And then there is the mirror of a child in that everything you do is going to be reflected back at you. So you can see the good and the bad. And selfishly, it's a chance to learn because you go, you realize when you're doing something and this is a bad choice. I shouldn't have talked to him that way. I shouldn't have pushed him to do that. I shouldn't have. You can immediately know, you feel it and it's like, oh boy, you want self help? Be a parent. It will teach you what you're doing wrong very quickly. I'm not saying you have the solutions, but you know when you're getting it wrong. So it gives you this opportunity to improve because you see where you've done something that didn't quite work. You see it really clearly.
- [133:01]
Tim Ferriss
Well, that's hopefully my next big adventure. I got to work on some prereqs, but that's definitely the orientation at this point. Do It.
- [133:09]
Greg Broadmoor
Regret it.
- [133:10]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I'm excited about it. Really excited about it. And. And Greg, we've covered a lot of ground here. We didn't even. You know, what work of yours has stuck in my mind selfishly, because at some point I'd still like to do a collaboration of some type. But it's the bestiary that you created with the scaling for human size. You know what I'm talking about?
- [133:33]
Greg Broadmoor
Yeah, for the Dr. Grobot's world.
- [133:35]
Tim Ferriss
Exactly. And I just remember flipping through that and it gave me scale. Such a nostalgic dopamine hit. Because I was thinking of the Fiend Folio and these various hardcover books from Dungeons and Dragons. But what they did not have, which you put in, were the sizing for the human figures so people could envision the proportions and so on, which for whatever reason, just got locked in my brain. I mean, from start to finish.
- [134:02]
Greg Broadmoor
I love National Geographic and creatures in general, animals and so on. Just rendering the body of something like that is just really, really fun and mesmerizing. You kind of lose yourself in it. But I had this book as a kid, I think, so, yes. Dungeons and Dragons and the Fiend Folio, those kind of things. I loved all of that with all the stats. And if you read the Graud Boots books, I'm kind of riffing on that and making fun of that. It's kind of like someone who's clearly not a scientist writing this information. Maybe they've heard it thirdhand and they really don't know where they're talking about it. So it's kind of taking the piss out of itself. But the other thing was a book, and I've forgotten the name of it now, but it was a book from this would have been the late 60s, early 70s. And I found it in the public library as a kid on alien worlds. Man, I'm forgetting the name. I'll end that story because I don't remember the name. And it's terrible not to remember the name. Maybe you can flash it up. But there was this 1970s book, I want to say McDougal or Dougal or something like that, was the artist. He had invented an entire alien world, much like Wayne Barlow has done before. Invented an entire alien world and drawn every creature in it and written about everything as if they were real. And I saw that book at probably 7 or 8 years old. And that something about that creating something out of your imagination, but utterly being convinced that it is real and pretending that it's real to the point that you summarize all of it. I love that. I don't know why I love that so much, but it's super fun.
- [135:25]
Tim Ferriss
Grandpop's ray gun. Take it out of the case, dust it off.
- [135:31]
Greg Broadmoor
Maybe they'll need them when we land on Mars. Got to take some regards.
- [135:35]
Tim Ferriss
We may need them. We may need them. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure we'll need something like that. So, Greg, let's land the plane. We've been going for two and a half hours here and is there anything else you would like to say to my audience? Request of my audience. Point them to anything at all that you'd like to say before we wind to a close.
- [135:54]
Greg Broadmoor
My new book, One Path is coming out very soon, April 8th, so yeah, please come and check it out. I hope you like it. If you like dinosaurs, you're going to enjoy it. There's a lot of dinosaurs. If you like blood and gore, there's also a lot of that. It is a graphic novel and yeah, I hope you really dug it. Come and check it out.
- [136:09]
Tim Ferriss
Would the best place to look be your website or would it be somewhere else?
- [136:13]
Greg Broadmoor
I think so. Probably come to GregBroadmore.com and you can be directed from there.
- [136:17]
Tim Ferriss
Perfect. Well, we will drive people there. Greg, so nice to see you man. We'll need to share a drink and scheme up some wild ideas in person, hopefully in the not too distant future.
- [136:28]
Greg Broadmoor
I would love that.
- [136:29]
Tim Ferriss
And we do share a pin shell for heavy music as well. We didn't have a chance to get into maybe some juvenile delinquency also. But for people listening, I'm going to include everything we mentioned in the show notes as per usual. Tim Blog podcast is where you'll be able to find that. Just search Greg's name or Richard's name or I guess Weta is probably the easiest W E T A and you'll be able to find everything Greg can be found@gregbrodmore.com, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Until next time, folks. As always, be gentle. Just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool Things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange so esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun. Again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday, Type that into your browser Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I have been fascinated, fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype. I've tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems. Now things are starting to change and that includes this episode's sponsor, Seeds DS01 Daily Symbiotic. Now it turns out that this product, Seeds DSO1, was recommended to me by many months ago by a PhD microbiologist. So I started using it well before their team ever reached out to me about sponsorship, which is kind of ideal because I used it unbidden, so to speak. Came in fresh. Since then it has become a daily staple and one of the few supplements I travel with. I have it in a suitcase literally about 10ft from me right now. It goes with me. I've always been very skeptical of most probiotics due to to the lack of science behind them and the fact that many do not survive digestion to begin with. Many of them are shipped dead DOA. But after incorporating two capsules of seeds DSO1 into my morning routine, I have noticed improved digestion and improved overall health seem to be a bunch of different cascading effects. Based on some reports, I'm hoping it will also have an effect on my lipid profile, but that is definitely TBD. So why is seeds DSO1 so effective? What makes it different? For one, it is a 2 in 1 probiotic and prebiotic formulated with 24 clinically and scientifically studied strains that have systemic benefits in and beyond the gut. That's all well and good, but if the probiotic strains don't make it to the right place, in other words your colon, they are not as effective. So Seed developed a proprietary capsule and capsule delivery system that survives digestion and delivers a precision release of the lymphatic live and viable probiotics to the colon, which is exactly where you want them to go to do the work. I've been impressed with seeds, dedication to science backed engineering with completed gold standard trials that have been subjected to peer review and published in leading scientific journals. A standard you very rarely see from companies who develop supplements. If you've ever thought about probiotics but haven't known where to start, this is my current vote for Great Gut Health. You can start here. It costs less than than $2 a day. That is the DSO one and now you can get 25% off your first month with code 25 TIM and that is 25% off of your first month of seeds DS01@seed.com TIM using code 25 TIM all put together. That's seed.com TIM and if you forget it, you will see the coupon code on that page one more time. Seed.com code 2510 in the last handful of years I've become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding microplastics and many other commonly found compounds all over the place. One place I looked is in the kitchen. Many people don't realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be. A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful, helpful forever chemicals. PFAS in other words, spelled PFAS into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends up in your body. Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using. So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor and the first thing I did was look at the reviews of their products and said send me one. And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro. And the claim is that it's the first non stick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that'll last forever. I was very skeptical, I was very busy. So I said, you know what, I want to test this thing quickly. It's supposed to be non stick, it's supposed to be durable. I'm going to test it with two things. I'm going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn't nonstick Stick with the toxic coating and then I'm going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see how much it retains heat. And it worked perfectly in both cases. And I was frankly astonished how well it worked. The titanium always Pan Pro has become my go to pan in the kitchen. It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine. And the design is really clever. It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron and nonstick into one product. And now our place is expanding this first of its kind technology to their Titanium Pro cookware sets which are made in limited quantities. So if you're looking for non toxic, long lasting pots and pans that outperform everything else in your kitchen, just head to fromourplace.com tim and use code TIM for 10% off of your order. You can enjoy a 100 day risk free trial, free shipping and free returns. Check it out fromourplace.com Tim.