#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

0:00 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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 the cathletes 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 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's 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.

1:01 You will know some of them, including The Lord of the 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. 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 Broadmore.

1:49 Greg is an artist and writer who has been part of the team at Witter Workshop for more than 20 years. His design and special effects credits include District Nine. King Kong, Godzilla, The Adventures of Tintin and Avatar, and he is the creator of the satirical retro sci-fi world. Doctor Groardbort's Featuring a myriad of collectibles, a world touring art exhibition, four books, and a game for Weda's pioneering spatiform. Most recently, Greg built Weda's video game division and directed multiple Doc G video games for Magic Leap. He's 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

2:31 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 we'll

2:55 Sound. quite hyperactive and I suppose that is Totally appropriate. Given

3:03 Hey. Nature of what we're discussing. So I'll leave it at that. You can find Weta Workshop at weta nz.com slash US. That's WedaNZ. dot com, of course, and on Instagram at WetaWorkshop. You can find Greg at Greg Broadmore. That's B-R-O-A-D-M-O-R-E. Gregbroadmore.com and on Instagram at Greg underscore broadmore.

3:28 So we're gonna 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 non stick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals, PFAS. In other words, spelled P F A S into your food, your home, and then ultimately

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8:25 Code. twenty five Tip. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then also you put some questions. Now it is time.

8:39 a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endocrine. No So it's been maybe one to two years since we had a bite to eat. And some drinks in Wellington.

8:59 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. So Greg 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, Greg? We'll start there. That's an Albertosaurus. It was actually a Uh, Richard bought it as a prop for Kong. The idea was it's a pit scene in Kong, and then 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.

9:36 Richard very kindly gifted it to me. I had it painted up and put on a stand. It's my really my proudest position. I freaking love it. And you have a wall of guitars in addition to that. Yeah, yeah. Oh actually That's a dinosaur egg. Ha The story behind that dinosaur egg we don't have time to go into, but we've got one each. And It is one of the most bonkers.

9:59 stories of our lives, just how we acquired those dinosaur eggs, but we won't go there today. Well we that might be around two. For a beer and a visit back to Wellington. 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.

10:21 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

10:36 Near going on forty years now, I'd give you a quick tour of uh The office. I I've got a Thunderbird Two up there. And if I go around the office, you can see that there is just a Yeah. So you have hundreds.

10:50 You have hundreds yeah, seemingly hundreds of Yeah, this is the whiteboard where we do all our brainstorming at weather. But new Creative projects. And uh behind me is just even more

11:03 Is my wonderful Colleague Ree, who give you a wave and they just it carries on and on and on. But 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.

11:20 Some collectibles. Or some sculptures. They're not collectibles yet, but I I love them, so I thought I'd make them as three D sculptures. You just can't have enough Cool stuff around you might favorite position in my life which my

11:34 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

11:52 Gremland from Greenlands two. I painted it up, but uh Steve Wang was the original painter. of that. So just gotta be surrounded by things that inspire you, I always think. Let's actually double click on the inspiration. We could talk about I guess it's Harry and the Henderson's, I believe you have Something like that also in your office if memory serves me.

12:13 I've got a 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 uh Yeah, you've got to have lots of Harry around you. If we look at inspiration, if we go way back. We're gonna rewind the clock a little bit.

12:31 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.

12:47 The very early stages get moving for you with respect to sculpture. I grew up in rural New Zealand. My father was an aircraft engineer and 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

13:05 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 teachers training college and I was able to buy two things, one of them being the Triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hononymus 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 fancy books, but

13:36 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. What is the title of that right there?

13:50 Well, this isn't another language. It's called the Ring. Spanish, I guess. Yeah, right. I've got multiple copies of it now because I've been collecting them and uh 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.

14:12 I taught myself to sculpt. I started without with my wife Tania. I use this book as inspiration to other sculptors, hung pictures around the walls, taught people out of the book. Copied the sculptures in the books, so pretty influential. By coincidence, then jump forward forty years and Greg, Rhee, and I are in Chengdu raising in the Sichuan province raising money for the Sichuan Earthquake Relief Fund.

14:39 And At random we we've been out doing a hopefully inspiration to a university that 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.

14:58 Winnin' met the artist who owned the studio, he was sculpting a figure. He ran off, got his wife, brought back her his portfolio, turned out to be the person that did the art and the book. Crazy. Wow. 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

15:22 I didn't really discover the Physical effects industry to I was in my tens. 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.

15:37 So that's a very quick potted Overview of those two bits of inspiration. So the name Ray Harry has and That is a stop motion master. Am I getting that right? Yeah, I'm gonna run away from uh my desk one more time and I'll speak loud.

15:54 Hear me. This is Pretty a tribute sculpture to Ray Harryhausen in the form of So that's Ray.

16:06 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.

16:21 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 twenty five, my wife and I made a We went on our big OE. To England and Europe, we got a combi like overseas experience. There we go.

16:42 We got a combi van. Like everyone did and not and we drove it. For ten thousand miles round. 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

16:56 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, think 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.

17:18 And we just hit it off together so Once again jump forward. ten, fifteen 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.

17:34 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.

17:53 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.

18:08 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 three hundred commercial sculptures I did in the film industry were sculpted in margarine.

18:32 So he for evermore used to call me the margerine guy. Sadly But he was one of the most inspiring, beautiful humans you could ever hope to meet. And through his educational programme it has inspired and educated A very large number of the world's makeup affects people, and that concept of passing it on is something I've held firmly to.

18:59 as a company, no secret, 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. Fake blood. Fake blood. Yeah, fake blood. I should have said that. Fake blood. Not breeding vampires. I was going to ask you about

19:19 margarine. Now if it's what I'm thinking it is is 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? Okay, so it's very simple. answer to that story.

19:41 I was unaware of Plasticine. Obviously I played around with Plascine at school. And I was using crude clay. That I had mushed in my hands, but it was not.

19:54 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 Taz Hotel in Upper Willow 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.

20:26 And so I used to just hang out with them, 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 they

20:52 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 a 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

21:21 in Margarine and then Tanya and I cast it and made a puppet of it. I put it on his desk. In a blank. plastic bag with a rubbish bag with my card on the top. I put it there at midnight. How did you get in?

21:36 Did you cat burglar your way in? No, we were working in the building, so I had keys. I had the ability to go in and out because we're doing art department. So often working at midnight. So He phoned he said, Found your puppet. Great, but you needn't have bothered with the effort of making a puppet of me. No one else has applied for the job, but I think it sort of

22:00 The individual that I am, actually. Um, 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.

22:21 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 seventy two puppets over those two years. It was ferocious time frames. But because I could sculpt a margerine.

22:39 A margarine's a bit of a misnomer. The true term is emulsified vegetable pastry fat. It's actually margarine before you whip in the water and the food colouring. 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

23:00 A four B pencil sculpting in clay as like a two B pencil. And sculpting and plaster scene is like a four H pencil, let's say so to give The the people that understand uh illustration.

23:15 Terms. That's how I started to use Margarine and uh I ultimately As I said, did over three hundred sculptures, all of heavenly creatures were sculpted in margarine. In fact, we made sculpting tools as big as shovels.

23:30 Because The idea is that the little sculptures that the girls had done in their childhood out of plastic from school, that green classing 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.

23:48 and other bits of equipment, lumps of wood that would give the gestural appearance as if the girl's fingers had sculpted them. Well, I remember also taking a tour. Last time I was in Wellington. at Wetter 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.

24:16 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 a tiger head. And it was Shocking to me.

24:30 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. Well it's lovely that you remember it fondly. The Tim Foyle

24:48 I guess as allegrat 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

25:13 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

25:39 uh 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 Uh based in craft. Whether it's architecture, clothing totems of religious or spiritual belief, et cetera.

25:59 The things that remain across history are invariably craft based. objects of importance. So The reason tin foil Right, and

26:10 Warren Beaton, affectionally known as Waszy. 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, make up artist, animatronic engineer in his own right, but For the last five or six years he's dedicated every day of his life

26:31 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

26:46 No matter what the socio economic level of a family's life is Timfoil invariably always exists in the family's kitchen. You can buy an ex extremely cheaply if it doesn't and everyone owns a teaspoon. So we've made a sculpting curriculum

27:05 out of the most accessible material you can get. And a teaspoon, right? 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 of tinfoil.

27:27 A few months after we opened our unleashed. in Auckland where we do a very deep dive on Tim Foyle sculpting. 'Cause kids wanted to go home and make things out of tinfoil. Do you own um tin foil stocks, Richard? I don't, unfortunately. I've tried very hard to get our team to package wetter specificum foil to sell in the weather case. You realize you should have been in the market from the start.

27:54 I know, maybe he's been paid off by big tinfoil. Yeah, I wish. We'll all get Alzheimer's, that's the problem. 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 Way to look 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.

28:18 or post Lord of the Rings what it looked like just to paint a before and after picture. So my wife and I Have run our company together for thirty seven 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.

28:38 that we would flip onto the top of the bed and we would make things on that board. Peter Jackson interviewed once and he says And I misquote. I remember coming into Richard and Tanya's bedroom and it stunk of the same rubber and fibre glass smells that of my own bedroom, right? Because he was also making everything in the early years in his bedroom.

29:03 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

29:16 The gentleman Clive I mentioned. To do eyeballs. And today we have About four hundred people operating across seven business centers. We have design and manufacturing for the world's creative industries, which is about a hundred and seventy of our team.

29:35 We also make digital games we do Merchandising collectibles. We've done hundreds of collectibles over the last twenty seven 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

30:02 the largest traditional Chinese medicine museum in China, which actually saw us design the building thirty seven thousand square meters. Ex 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

30:22 Musician. And We're doing work for him. He's actually Taiwanese.

30:29 where you're going on holiday. We also run two retail stores. We operate three tourism offerings, including our significant location based experience called where to workshop unleashed in Auckland. We have a robotics division developing and building very high performance humanoid robots. which we're trying to commercialise at the moment.

30:53 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.

31:17 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

31:35 careers to as many New Zealanders as possible, basically. Okay. 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. And 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 AG One? AG One is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take advantage of this exclusive offer.

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32:47 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's it is a workshop. Concrete floor, lots of bandsaws and the sword makers. Right, machinery and i and everything. It's a very tactile physical place. But Richard has created a 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, as the first person in the world that I saw around me that was bringing in three D printing and three D milling and three D 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

33:33 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. 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.

34:00 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 travelling 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

34:21 primarily in the building. lot of our team have been with us over twenty five years, over half of the company have been with us over fifteen years. So those 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.

34:41 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 means that if one division drops off, which invariably is happening

35:00 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

35:17 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

35:40 Seventy percent of our work, it now probably makes thirty to forty percent of our work. 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 wanna come to you with a very important question related to naked ladies slipping on banana peels. I remember you and I were exchanging messages

36:08 When I was inspired after my trip actually to attempt to learn digital painting. And we are using Procreate. And I was curious about Some of your practice habits.

36:20 And so on. And I can't remember exactly what prompted you to send this to me, but it was a Process capture. Of you. Creating Many, many. I don't I wanna say fifty, sixty, who knows? Ninety nine ninety nine. Ninety nine, ninety nine. Ninety nine dodgy slips.

36:40 Dodgy slips. Okay. So Greg, could you explain and this will go somewhere. Can you explain? How that came to be. What the hell are we talking about? Yes.

36:51 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 a touch screen. 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 I was playing that a lot and found that um someone had made an app, a mod for it.

37:15 Yeah. 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 you know 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, Yens, I can't remember his surname. But he made a little program for it, utilized the pressure sensitivity.

37:36 And I just started drawing on it and actually it happened. When it been Christmas time in New Zealand. Well, my partner Kate was going out shopping for Christmas presents and going into every store. I sat outside forward 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

37:57 Woman falling over on banana peels. It's a very nineteen fifties 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 that's like you can't be that sexy when you're falling over and hurting yourself. I don't know what's the thing about that clash is interesting to me. Banana peel flying in the air. But I drew them and actually I hit ninety nine and we made an exhibition called Ninety Nine DS with my friend Christian Pierce that Richard Itani were the patron of. And um we put on an exhibition in town. But

38:33 It was called ninety nine because I hit ninety nine drawings. And that was when the uh Jen's operating system his in his game and his program that mate allowed you to draw, that's when Hit the file limit. So it's like, well I've done ninety nine, I would have gone to five hundred. Yeah. So I hit ninety nine and I thought, well, that's that. And so are my friend uh so ninety nine dodgy slips from ninety nine DS.

38:54 And my friend Christian, he did ninety nine what did he do? He did Deadly Sleds. Deadly Sleds, these really cool uh super creative pot rods in all different ways. Anyway, that's where that came from. And I had 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. Yeah, we put it on a site. We got two shipping containers, painted them white, put a massive graphic of DS ninety nine on the side of them. And then I had our engineers cut a hole through the insides of the shipping maintainers 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

39:33 L E D strip lighting and so on. And then we printed every image of Greg and Christians 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 container was Deadly slides. Three.

39:54 Oh 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 Yeah, there's a bit of nudity. And um 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 I don't know what to say without getting you in trouble on YouTube. Oh, you're not gonna get in trouble. So Greg, I do want to while we're awaiting the arrival of Mars. Uh show it to you quickly. So Yeah, yeah. This this is Christian's work, not Greg's work. So

40:43 So you see there's the graphic. Ninety nine deadly sleds and there's a lovely thing that Christian's written to Tanya that's faded. But you can see the the level at which they can be illustrated on this tiny little That's wild. That is just incredible. Yeah. Yeah, the guy that did it did an amazing job.

41:02 Amazing job that you could make this little Nintendo make a beautiful little art app, right? It was incredible. In fact, other people may 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, I again I can't remember his surname, but He was so lovely. I wrote to him to say, you know Oh, 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 pin stroke parts.

41:32 And then he made us a little thing that did a process animation of it, like showed each brush stroke going down because that was recorded as well. And that is the video. That's what happened to video. Yeah. Amazing. So now You have an amazing bio, Greg. And I want to get to the two week trial.

41:49 That started this whole th I'm still we can track it off. Yeah. So we're gonna get to that. Now, if you could just refresh my memory, I th I believe that you learned your skills through Private Tutors given to you by your aristocratic parents, and then uh art finishing school at the finish institutions. Am I r remembering correctly? How did you learn your trade?

42:09 That is a good question. Yeah, I did try and do art school. Richard, did you try and do art school? Yeah, I went through politic. You did go through politics. I I tried to go to New Zealand's most prestigious art school And um 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.

42:46 Tortured. scenes of people and I was happy and I thought well this is what school is uh this is great just gonna do all these paintings And then very quickly they got me back again and found out what they wanted to do with with me, which was make me learn all the traditional things you're supposed to do in art and and so on. And I was a young Punk rocker, I don't want anyone to tell me what to do and 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 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 your uh you don't really know how to do it. You just throw yourself into it and and do your best. And I love that process. Sort of finding out the shortcuts I find the least interesting. I feel like I feel like I don't learn out of that.

43:40 I learn just by Constant failing towards success if you like building up the failures stack up and luckily you end up seeing, you know, the horizon from there. Can I but say he's not been self-empasing there. That's literally how he works. I know it might seem to people listening. That are you must never fail. You did all these incredible films and your body of work is so amazing. But

44:02 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 can briefs to Greg almost daily and

44:22 There's things that I assume entirely that Greg will be able to do. When you say brief, is that a project description? Yeah, 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.

44:43 There's the wall, there's a photograph of the lockers, and Greg has designed a set of characters. Right. On the lookers. 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 happened to have next to me, because that's a discussion we're having today. But

45:05 There's things I totally assume that Greg's just gonna knock out of the puck 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.

45:23 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.

45:54 Consisting of Dozens of crazy characters. rolling through a brain vomit of creativity, right? And Greg nailed it in the first illustration. It did take me ten weeks to then censor it, so it could be seen by the general public.

46:12 I was in a Total flow state with that, by the way, which is what I love to do. You know, you you like to fall into the image and not even think about it, just m create it and it sort of just happens. And so you're trying to find this flow state. And so I was just doing this illustration. It's sixty meters long by six meters high. I'm doing it on in Photoshop and but in pencils. And I'm doing it and it's only it feels like at the end is when I woke up. And then the the image was done. Even though this actually took weeks and weeks.

46:37 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. I'm fifty three this year. And I

46:53 Still don't know. I would ask you that. Like I remember this artist, Josh Homie, he's a guitarist for um 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 Richard is dead. These are characters out of the mural, right? J I just want to reinforce the total absurdity. Of the way Greg's brain works. But um

47:24 Josh is that you know 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? Is just turning up. That's why we turn up every day and we work all day, right? And you you just do the work and then hopefully it turns up. Is there a 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

47:57 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,'cause I because I wasn't conscious during half of it, if you like, there are things in there that were problematic. I'd broke an IP, I'd put Lemmy from Motorhead in it,'cause I love Lemmy and I just wasn't thinking. And Richard said at the end, you know, we don't own Lemmy, right? So So I I end up chopping Lemmy's head off. And what did you do in in its place? And I put Richard's head on. Richard's head, why don't you put your head on? And I'm like no, I'm putting it on. Anyway, but it's full of those kind of problems that Richard had to 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 I didn't realise. But that's the flow state, that's the muse, that's like the fact that it it really didn't feel like it was me doing it. It just happened.

48:42 So how did this start off? How did the two week trial happen? 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 Evan Gelion proposed. And I sent in a folio

49:06 With dinosaurs and robots in it. And Richard saw it. And I actually I 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 doll. Which is not something I recommend.

49:25 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 m was m I saw the first Lord of the Rings film come out and it was like You know, I was a fan of Peter Jacks work and everything, but my mind was utterly blown. I was not prepared for the for the scale, uh 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.

49:54 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 of weeks after uh seeing my folio and showed me around And I just said So when do I start? And uh Richard was very gracious and said, Well, you can you know, you can come on in next week or whatever.

50:12 And I sort of thought I was on a I I think I got a two week contract after a while, and I don't I think I'm still on that two week contract. Just to renew your vows. Every two weeks. So I constantly think I'm two weeks away from being out of a job. And I like that. Yeah. So I'm very curious, Greg, as Richard was mentioning earlier, sometimes you'll get a brief and you'll say

50:35 Sorry. No can do. This is not something I deliver. And then other times. Something that Richard would think to be very complex. gets turned around in two hours.

50:46 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 where you're like Can't do it.

50:58 Can't deliver this one. I don't know. I I'd have to probably see an example'cause I can't remember actually saying no. I always sit there for I guess it you here is what it is. If Richard or anyone asked me. For something. I'm

51:12 Brow really starts furrowing and won't unfurrow. Yeah. This isn't 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. Tim, when I started listening to your podcast, the first one I listened to

51:32 Well 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 Naval Cant. Oh yeah. Right. And the David Deutsch one just blew my mind. I'm reading his books at the moment. I've become absolutely obsessed with them. There's something in his philosophy and his science that I totally resonate with. It's not like I've Change my opinion. It's like amplified my opinion. And He talks about

51:57 Really finding the fun, chasing the fun. You know, 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 and creativity. is the perfect way to learn. You're motivated to learn and you're overcome the challenges. Maybe when things are a little bit too hard, they're not fun, you know, when they're too easy, you know, you've already done it before, there's no point doing that in again.

52:27 And I get very bored very easily. So the things that I've already done before, I'd like, why do that? Let AI do that, you know. AI's already been trained on that. Oh, that's fine. It can solve that problem. I wanna solve the problem where it's fun. And so There's the things that Richard will suggest, and this is ninety percent of them in in my opinion. I hope so, Richard. I get excited. My brain ignites and then I go, like I wanna solve on that. And maybe, and I can't think of an example, there's the chant hopefully very few. States where um I go like I just go I don't know why that would work. But I would also

52:56 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. Greg will always Philosophize with me. Around art, right? It's one of the great benefits of our friendship, irrelevant of our working relationship.

53:16 In that Trying to find the purity of an idea. requires a level of philosophical exploration. Doesn't have to be uh highbrow by any means. I don't think me and Greg are capable of highbrow. Uh But it does require you looking inside yourself and it does require a deep

53:37 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

53:54 those conversations through relationship around creativity. And what comes out of the end of them, which is really great. 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. And for people listening, I'm sure they're like, That sounds awesome, but what does it look like? How could I try it?

54:18 I'd do a real meter 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.

54:38 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. I saw it. Great. Tells the story of a first world war campaign fought by New Zealanders

55:00 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. And It's through that level of philosophical Exploration that you come up with the seed of the idea.

55:21 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 because we philosophed around what Gallipoli meant to the people in New Zealand, what the men must have felt, what the realities of the situation. The next exhibit that we did for the same client. Which they said we want to build an exhibition around bugs. What was the great idea?

56:02 for Gallipoli. Like what did you land on? The great idea is the realization that most people Only think of a past military conquest As

56:16 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 mitter like

56:37 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 Belgias

56:53 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 that was the grand idea and the technique of achieving that. Going back to Unleashed

57:11 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.

57:27 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

57:44 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.

58:00 of exploratory ideation and philosophical discussion till we landed On The Incredibly obvious, but

58:11 the thing that we really, really wanted to do in the story we wanted to tell. That's a good example at a metal you know, at a large scale, but that stuff is happening Most days of the week. As well on micro decision making. Can I just add some colour to that'cause you brushed over it really quickly that

58:30 They're huge sculptures. M most exhibitions of war, as Richard says, or even history in general. This is for Gallipoli. Yeah, are really they're either Diaramas 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 and video, but this is these huge people. hyper realistic is it down to the pause, like every I remember looking at the pores when I first swipe down the brown and the pores and the hair and the eyebrows. A man picking up food How large are these figures? Uh two and a half times life size. Massive. The biggest that we've built at hyperrealism is eight times life size, so that's a sixteen meter tall figure. If they were to stand, right? One and a half kilometers f of fabric in their garments.

59:21 Even the fabric is scaled up, right? Everything is scaled up. People a 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 head and the hands pales compared to making The different

59:40 fabrics and components within the costuming. 'Cause to make a larger costume you have to find A sheet. With a two and a half times larger denier of

59:53 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's just seems either obsessive or

1:00:17 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 Get it as good as we can possibly get it. A lovely thing with Gallipoli is over four million people have been through it now.

1:00:53 Now that may not seem a great number to people listening, but that's in a population of only five 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. And Tim, when you you experienced it, but when you stand there under the people, it is a different

1:01:12 It's very, very different. I don't think I've seen anything like that before. I didn't make it, so I I I can um 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 hyper real and the beautiful way it's all presented and lit, you you feel a magnitude, right? Literally, but emotionally. That's a very unusual approach. If you 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 profoundly. Yeah. Richard, did I hear you correctly? You said the deadline was eight months on that?

1:01:48 Yeah, we had eight months from the board to look for that. Wow. Very few things we do has the luxury of time. So It could be

1:02:00 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 Eleven different divisions doing seventeen different disciplines. Under the one roof. And so you've got experts that are

1:02:23 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.

1:02:34 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. Has more than eight weeks, you said? More than eight weeks, yeah. We'll deliver We've literally just done a job over Christmas that saw us deliver

1:03:03 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 uh process. Obviously, all the other things. Passion, enthusiasm, tenacity. Everything that comes along with a great crew of people, but

1:03:26 Being able to innovate new methodologies every year to be able to stay ahead of the deadline, basically. Yeah. So let me ask a question about process and uh then we're gonna come back to you, Greg. But first I do wanna 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.

1:03:54 Kind of how that came to be. Richard and then What some of the most crucial decisions were. With respect. to

1:04:02 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.

1:04:20 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 uh you to grow the company and take that on. Yeah. That's uh really

1:04:36 Big question I'll try and answer it in a very condensed way. We have time. I just pulled this out, right?

1:04:43 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 uh Very happy time. And it glows if there are challenging clients in the corridor. For people who can't see that, that is a sword.

1:05:08 Yeah. Oh sorry, those that can't see it, here I'm showing all these visual aids because that's how I think visual aids. I'll dri I'll drive people to the video, but just I just held up I just held up the one Point four eight times larger than life size. Sting that's carried by Elijah Wood. At his scale. I likened it to

1:05:29 teetering towards the edge of a precipice. There's probably a much better Visual metaphor than this, but And You do the sp You know, frequently in one's life, the decision to start a family, the decision to buy your f first home, or the home that you'll spend the rest of your life in, like the home that my wife and I bought

1:05:50 way back on meet the feebles, right? the decision to X, Y, and Z. Both. Peter Jackson offers this opportunity. And

1:06:00 When he offered a 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 a five divisions, a very, very large body of work. And you teeter to the edge of the precipice, and as a human, uh, just as the human animal that we are, you've got

1:06:29 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 four.

1:06:51 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?

1:07:20 to see your virtues, right? So love of oneself is the first of those four tenants. And There is mixed with that. As corny as it sounds. Ignorance being your greatest ally.

1:07:34 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

1:07:49 Them fun. And people that don't understand that. Struggle. Even if you're in a low level position that you're not really enjoying.

1:08:01 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 a cricket ball through the window of the international terminal because we were playing cricket out on the tarmac under the planes. You can turn anything into fun. So I had once again a very corny and I I couldn't think of something better at the time. But

1:08:30 We needed a hundred and fifty eight crew working for seven and a half years on forty eight thousand separate things to deliver those five divisions to the trilogy of movies. Our work's in ninety eight to ninety nine percent of it of the films,'cause our work's in almost every image shot other than mountains with no one in it or et cetera. And you've got

1:08:55 A inexperienced crew, you're it you're highly inexperienced yourself, right? We'd done Hercules and Xena at the time and we'd had a career of about eight to ten years. Doing Peter's films. Peter, of course, is a inspiration in his own right and highly knowledgeable. So he's helping as well.

1:09:15 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 threadbare. What I'm talking about that's 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 chain mail, twelve and a half million links over three and a half years.

1:09:44 And chain mail is only as good as how well you glue the top link on your shoulder. Um whether the the chain mail's gonna fall off you. So Trying to get Us collectively, myself and my wife and our team to believe that we could do it.

1:10:01 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'cause 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.

1:10:21 So there is this intense can do attitude. That still exists today, thankfully. We hire people that come with 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.

1:10:45 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

1:11:06 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 U

1:11:18 Bishou. Part of that experience. Work is more fun than fun. What are the other tenants? You mentioned four. Love of oneself.

1:11:28 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 tenants, obviously the first one love of yourself.

1:11:52 Love of what you do. You've got to love being a parent. You've got to love being A lover, a a husband, a wife, a Partner. You have to Love the people that you do it for.

1:12:04 It is so easy to become cynical about your audience or your fans or your family. o The person working Above you, right? But that's who you're trying to capture up in your passion for what you do, and you know, the other ones

1:12:22 very obvious. So that's how I think of things very simply. And that's after City. plus years of working that 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

1:12:39 Forceable and try not to be a dickhead. Is the it may be the fifth. Right. You read y there are um 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.

1:12:59 On self help. And at some point 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.

1:13:16 And no doubt. I fall foul of that invariably M 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. Yeah. Yeah. Trying. Always. Trying. Have I answered your question well enough? I've sort of been a bit fringed around the outsides of a No you did. I will 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, right? And the resourcefulness that that

1:13:52 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?

1:14:06 Then when I'm talking I'm talking about we're the workshop we were a small component of the overarching endeavour of making Lord of the Rings, right? 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 groups department, the directing department, et cetera, et cetera. The miniatures Yeah, there was phenomenal number of people.

1:14:32 Mm. 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

1:14:55 the phenomenal number of people that Peter and his producer drew into the collaboration of making Lord of the Rings. I mean the government, the military, right, I mean the whole country was buying. I think everyone felt You would have to have been pretty cynical at the time to have not felt a certain level of pride in what Peter was trying to do in our country. and get behind it, and a lot of people benefited because of it. The

1:15:25 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 uh 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

1:15:54 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.

1:16:10 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 five hundredth 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

1:16:33 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.

1:16:46 His self belief and his Just sheer Drive. I've never ever seen Hey D

1:16:54 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 You know.

1:17:09 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 uh mentality of that very much in our country, you just gotta knuckle down and do it, right? Grit is a important component In the

1:17:32 Journey. Not the accolades at the end. It's the task of getting there that is seen as equal in accomplishment as winning ball balls. Quick follow up on Never seeing.

1:17:45 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?

1:17:59 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? It's a hot question because

1:18:20 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 leads things possibly in a Challenging way. I'm not actually speaking to the outcome as much as the

1:18:40 sense of self belief and confidence that He's got it, but he knows What's right for him and he knows where to go with it. And Maybe others have seen him, but I've

1:18:56 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 I own colleagues here at the workshop I'll go Guys uh

1:19:10 You know, with this one I'm 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 Yeah, visualize it.

1:19:25 I know what I want to do with it, but I don't know what it's gonna 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

1:19:47 most of the ways film is made If he had a thousand years, he could have made Lord of the Rings himself. So Yeah. My system re is just trying to catch my eye to let me know. No problem. Do you have to exit stage left? I got a bug out very quickly, sorry. Yeah. No problem. No problem at all. Do we have time for sixty seconds? One last quick question. Okay. Yeah, of course.

1:20:10 So Richard You mentioned creating creators, making makers, and uh also inspiring kids. And I'm curious for people listening, If they want it to be more creative. To Lay their ten digits.

1:20:24 into making something. Are there any resources, books Exercise is anything you'd suggest they start with? 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 why I'm sculpting I just have I

1:20:43 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 I'm being inspired by that. But in answer to your question To me, the core attribut of creativity. is to be inquisitive.

1:21:06 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.

1:21:23 And if you find it in yourself to start Finding Extraordinary lessons and beauty and inspiration. Um most, if not everything around you, specifically the simplest things.

1:21:39 Like there was that great American movie that came out. With the n Been with the dancing plastic bag. That was caught in the wind. Oh, is that American beauty, maybe? That's right, yeah. Right. We've all seen bits of plastic caught in the eddies of a a lufting wind in the corner of a building or in a rubbish bin or whatever.

1:22:02 But that director. Remember that. 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've been trying to visualise how to answer your question.

1:22:19 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. to interview with me

1:22:33 And you can see that they're slightly bashful and I say, Well what do you do? And they will go, Well, I So Macrame, or as you guys call it, Macrame, I think. Well, McRame is about hand skills, dexterity, eye to hand coordination, pattern. Weaving.

1:22:53 colour combinations, strength. engineering, et cetera, et cetera, all these things add up. That person is possibly exactly someone that we'd want to hire. And it doesn't matter what the crafters Just start making something, leave something behind, right?

1:23:11 If you think about who are the truer mortals 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.

1:23:33 To me. 'Cause it will carry on and bring joy long after I'm dead. The sword maker that made that imbued with creative immortality. And to me

1:23:45 That's a good place to be as a human. Ray is losing her weight. Thank you, Ray. Thank you, Ray. Thank you, Richard. All right, Greg. You and I have lots left to talk about. Well, I'll leave you with Greg now. We'll give Greg a chance to get a word in after I blab for most of this. No, I I'm learning. I'm sitting here. I I love it, actually. So Greg.

1:24:14 Let's talk about some of your projects. that are supposed Greg projects as much as anything else. And How you chose them, why you chose them. And let's begin With

1:24:29 Vintage inspired ray guns. In two thousand six, where did that lead? And then I certainly have uh questions about more recent projects, but let's start there. Yeah, the Ray guns. Well that's a childhood inspiration. I'm uh fifty I was born in nineteen seventy two. I'm fifty three.

1:24:46 I think. Is that right? And the myths. Yeah. Sounds about right. 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 so those things are seared into my like four, five, six year old mind. And so when you know, when Star Wars came along it

1:25:03 It was like all that stuff and technicolor and high definition and the sound and the music and everything. So 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 It's actually very clear clear for people who know about science and know about technology and then speculate on what could happen. culturally or s you know, narratively with those things. Doctor Groudborts and the Ray Guns was not really about that, actually. It's the veneer of

1:25:32 science fiction, right? Technology and weapons and spaceships. Yeah. 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 wrong. How did you decide to do that? And I I want you to tell people more about it, but how did you decide to do that, right? We all have finite time and people listening when they're listening to you and Richard like

1:25:57 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. So

1:26:17 The first thing you just alluded to, and I said it before, that it really is just that that I found that so exciting. I thought about the ray guns and um I started painting them and I found it so intriguing. I thought I could draw a thousand ray guns. I can 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 But creative potential in that just caught me and I would have done it. And and I did do it. I did these nine, they're up on my wallet here, these nine illustrations. But really the decision to keep going is Richard. I was very, very lucky. So what happened like how did you tip over that domino of the ray guns? Like what was the germ? Because you alluded to it, right? But yeah, it's always interesting to me when you end up with like an immersive world, where did it start?

1:27:04 Right. So Maybe you could tell that story. That's Richard fanning the flames. I had done these um nine paintings just for myself, because I love ray guns. Ray guns, yeah. Nineteen thirties style classic ray guns. There's something beautiful and arcane about them that I very really love and silly at the same time. But Richard, it was just was 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. So you know. Sure. So Richard wanted to do our own IP. So he put the word out actually the entire workshop. Said, um, we we'd love to has anyone got any creative ideas for collectibles, you know? And I was doing those recounts. So it was perfect timing. I was like,

1:27:56 Richard, we should make these grey guns. Look at that. And luckily for me, he got the idea straight away. He saw it and real, and we almost said the same thing at the same time. We should make these as real. They'll be mental. They've got glass, right? They'll be in a case. Right, we'll just pretend they're real. They they will be real as far as we're concerned. I have this vision that like um

1:28:15 We'd even put Cover them in dust and put moths in there. Right. 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 um your loft or whatever, so that you can pull them out and say, look, this was granddad's Ray Gun. He fought in the Martian wars right back in the day. And 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 It's real collectibles.

1:28:41 And then the next step was provocation from Richard. I 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. So it went from ray guns to Inventor.

1:28:58 Of the Ray Guns. And then what came after that? 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.

1:29:11 And that just ignites your information. But then if you've created the all these sort of why questions. To start coming from it. So if you've got these Regans, 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?

1:29:28 This is a whole big metaphysical thing I think about a lot. About the 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 kinda know where you're gonna go, you know the ending. Mm-hmm. And the other way, which I've discovered I do. More often than not is

1:29:46 I am 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 you know, we made games from it, made dozens of different collectibles and books and all sorts of things, all from that process of just chasing the right thing. And having

1:30:25 Richard being the one going like do more, do more, do more. 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

1:30:44 These two stylistic Options. Right. Or creative approaches. And I think can't recall exactly the terms he used, but it's something like the improviser and the architect. Right. 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 gonna end up. Which is such a fun and liberating.

1:31:18 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. I was gonna 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? Well, you know, now that I think about it out and um thinking it through out loud, I would say that When I'm in

1:31:43 The second phase of my work. That's true. And what I mean by that is My books are actually too Broad. buckets. The first bucket is research and experimentation. And when I'm doing the research and the experimentation, there is a lot of

1:32:02 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.

1:32:23 More or less. Then I decide how I'm going to pick and choose and massage and Create uh Sort of interwoven. Puzzle, so to speak. Maybe that's not the right metaphor, but you kinda get the idea.

1:32:38 Like an advent calendar, maybe, for the reader to experience as they go from one page in one chapter to the next and to the next. So I would say that in the beginning it's exploration improvising. And It gives me the Dopamine hit and the rush of energy.

1:32:55 necessary so that when I end up having to do the blueprinting and the bricklay, which I intrinsically find less enjoyable, then I have gas in the tank to push me through that second phase. There's probably not a hard distinction between either. And in fact, you're probably oscillating back and forwards between both approaches all the time. to some degree. It's just some people naturally veer more towards Yeah.

1:33:19 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 it had a character in it. And um they wanted the character to resolve a certain way, right? 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, you know, I hope that happens.

1:33:40 And that was the realization for me that I wasn't doing it in the way that they were thinking, because I was really I was thinking, Well, actually I Really? I don't know. I don't know who's gonna win, you know. I don't know w where it's gonna go. I'm 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, right? And so not knowing where it's gonna 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.

1:34:12 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

1:34:31 Quite a lot of self doubt when it came to Taking something from beginning to end. idea to Final product without a blue. And that's part of the reason why I've in the last few years and moving forward, I want to do many more

1:34:49 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.

1:35:02 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. 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 or the reality, you need to have the wolf at your back. To some degree. Right. You can if you're completely creatively open and just gonna find your way, but there's no deadline, there's no pressure on you.

1:35:28 You can kinda wander anywhere. There is something about like making a commitment to someone else. However you do that. to a publisher to whatever, or you know, taking money on to do the project and knowing that you have to pay it back or whatever. Right.

1:35:41 that wolf at your back is so important. Even if you don't know where you're gonna go. Because now you you have to go somewhere. You have to beat the wolf. So uh You gotta 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 you you now you know you can just kind of freely float along and explore. Maybe you find something, maybe you don't. But when you know that like it failure is an option, you go, Well, I can't, I have to, I have to keep on going. I have to solve this. Yeah, for sure. So the new book.

1:36:11 Tell us about the new book. And how you ended up deciding on this as a project to put your energies into. Yeah, that's one path. Yeah. It is. Ah, pretty.

1:36:22 I have it's my first time seeing it. It's my first time seeing it in this form. I saw the the the early the early digital Way back. Yeah, it it came out really, really good. I'm very, very happy with it. I've gone gone with a publisher called Mad Cave. who I didn't know before, but they've been fantastic. And so I started our game studio. I was one of the few people in at Witter Workshop that was had a real keen interest in games and I wanted to make our own games. And really luckily for us, we partnered up

1:36:49 This guy Roni Ebervitz came along into our lives who started Magic Leap, a company that makes it Three D goggles, like um AR goggles, but 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 very

1:37:19 pioneering and very challenging, but sadly for us, not that many people saw that magically 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. Um 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.

1:37:49 It went in traditional games and it went into food and, you know, base 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. Brutal.

1:38:03 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 uh so I handed over reigns of the game studio. I didn't really want to make traditional games. I was so

1:38:15 in love with making the kind of wild and crazy technological things that Magic Leap was aspiring to do. that I kinda went back to basics. I thought I need to go back and do something that I can do on my own. I I 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, you know, 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.

1:38:45 And so this world of Cavewoman. And dinosaurs, it's 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

1:39:02 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 Boshier, who um co-authored it with me. And they really helped me to sort of shape it and put a lot more depth into it. But to your point, you knew that it couldn't be taken away, in a sense.

1:39:33 And I thought I I can do this. I don't need to hire twenty 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, you know, being back to basics. I think going from such a technological world working with Magic Leap who doing the most highfalutin crazy stuff. And thinking about that every day about what the future of computing could be. to like, no, I'm gonna work on dinosaurs and blood and core and people living at the edge of survival.

1:40:00 Yeah, that's what really motivated it. 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?

1:40:15 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 on 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.

1:40:43 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 effect of like, well, I I know there's a character It's named One Path after this character called One Path. And So I needed to see her, you know, and your mind's kinda searching around for who who she really is. So that's an exercise into itself. I need to

1:41:04 draw her. Normally in a film that would be conceptual design, you might draw a hundred versions of her, but for me, luckily, because I'm creating it, I just like draw one drawing and I know that's her, you know. Yeah. 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 know, you need to design every single thing in every single place because it's going to go on. And someone's gonna actually have to build it.

1:41:33 But in this case, I know I'm gonna 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, you know? 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, you know? What are the best

1:41:57 Yeah. Or maybe a better way to phrase the question is how can people get a taste of your artwork and storytelling. That certainly includes one path 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

1:42:14 a taste for the many flavors of Greg Broadborn. I don't know, wording's a little awkward, but you get the idea. Where should they go? I've just actually released a new website at Long Long Last, Craigbroadmore dot 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 out there, actually. And I'm also on Instagram. But yeah, it's probably not comprehensive, but it's got a ton of my work. Beautiful. And then one path. What's the timeline and how are people going to be able to get it?

1:42:47 So one path comes out. April the eighth. That's like a month from now. That's very soon. I don't know when they release this, but yeah, hopefully uh very soon for your audience. Within a few weeks of recording this. Mm-hmm.

1:42:57 It's a two hundred page book, but there's three more books all together. There'll be four books in total, each about the same size. Sorry. I've already been doing it for like a When was the pandemic? When did that start? I've lost track of time already. Boy, twenty twenty. Yeah. Twenty twenty it's been five years.

1:43:12 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. 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? Yeah. I really pushed that stuff away actually.

1:43:35 I work in the as you know in the world of film and video games and so on. So everyone would ask me, I'm just gonna you're making a new IP, is it gonna be a game, is it gonna be merchandise, is it gonna be film and so on. And actually that's 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 to make some of those sorts of things. I realise it's'cause 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.

1:44:02 That I knew, let's say I would just you know run the simulation in your head. There's gonna be nudity in this book, right? 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 or you'll start censoring. Or you're starting to. Editing Censoring in 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 a purely a comic book and I'm gonna 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 as like this is a comic book.

1:44:41 This is like pure, baby. I should say graphic novel. That's a grown up word for it, but I still can't. Yeah, graphic novel. Yeah, no, the tuxedo. The sort of black tie version of the comic book. And let me and I'll point people to One path certainly in the show notes and link to the website as well. When you reflect back on your work and time with What a workshop.

1:45:09 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.

1:45:24 Of any project. That comes to mind. The one That resonates for me is district nine. I got to work on district nine, which was

1:45:32 Neil Blomkamp's debut film. I'll tell you the whole arc of that and jump into a couple of moments from it, but I know other people had this experience. It started as halo and actually We started working on Halo. A feature film adaptation of the

1:45:46 Video game. Amazing video game. It started the With no director. And so Richard just said, you know. We might be working on this, Peter's trying to produce it, it's gonna 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

1:46:04 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. 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.

1:46:25 But then all of a sudden one day that whole film fell over. Now at the time, just for context, at the time, what had you been brought on to do exactly? 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're making many, many elements of the ph physical aspects of the film. But the whole thing fell over.

1:46:48 I poured my heart into that film. I had worked so hard. And love the work that I'd done. And none of it will ever be seen. It's all off the way. It's all open, right? I've done hundreds of drawings and my friends have done hundreds and thousands of drawings and illustrations. It's just astonishing amount of work. And then one day it was just gone. Film's done.

1:47:07 Yeah. And then one day you're depressed. And then the next day just like Well, Gotta keep on going, right? You get up and and move on to the next thing. And then all of a sudden Neil's making the idea of district nine came along. And we'd seen uh alive in Joburg.

1:47:21 Assured. That was the basis for that. And that was like This is even more exciting, right? 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, right? And Neil has a crazy imagination. So this is gonna be fun. And it was. But Neil is

1:47:40 Like many directors. He knows what he wants. He has complete confidence and faith in himself. Knows when he doesn't like something, right? But it's

1:47:50 Happy. to change course immediately if he feels like that's not working. And so the story I would say of like challenging thing overcoming it. This happened to me, but it happened to other artists as well. I 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

1:48:09 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. And 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 it. And we've even went so far as to build a huge prop and ship it to South Africa. And they shot scenes with Shaltow Copley. In the thing. So I'm like, this is cool. And then all of a sudden Neil just changes his mind.

1:48:37 Like no, it's not gonna work. That thing doesn't quite work. I want something bigger, scarier. Heavier. Right. And so again I had that same moment of the end of Halo of being like

1:48:48 Mm-hmm. Right. My design that I poured months into that my friends built. It's just There's nothing. That's just in that's just A now. Goodbye.

1:48:58 And then you have to let go. Snap yourself out of it. You cannot be depressed. You can't be bummed. You're just gonna be like, okay, now I've got this new problem to solve. I've got to figure out what this next version is. And I think I probably did like thirty designs in the course of a a week. Right. Just just working my ass off to carry create as many options as possible. Part of it's competition. It's like I wanted to make sure I got my design in there.

1:49:21 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. So and by the way, just someone else's experience, the guy who designed the aliens is a friend of mine, David Ming, amazing sculptor. He had a summer 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 with these alien prosthetics. He sculpted this beautiful design.

1:49:53 Beautiful prosthetic. They painted it, sent it South Africa, and then Neil went like done work. Did Neil give reasons or was it just a very simple doesn't work? We need to I can't remember. In my mind it's just doesn't work. Nels doesn't have a lot of fluff. It's just like

1:50:09 But he may have given more, I can't remember. I saw in Dave what I felt, right? Which is the slip. I he had made a Faberger egg. Oh, of astonishing detail, right? This beautiful thing, and then good goodbye, it's dust. That the experience is just so common in in making film. But but anyway, the the the the alien that he made out of that, he 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 the other design. 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

1:50:47 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.

1:51:02 And then I recalled distinctly, this is a few years ago. maybe it was two years ago. And I did my first Creative Sprint. Coming back to what I want to do more of the

1:51:14 with a number of concept artists who'd done a lot of work. for Dungeons and Dragons. Magic the Gathering. Really incredible with fantasy concept art, but also really fully fleshed out covers of

1:51:29 You name it. Any iconic player's handbook, et cetera, from D or otherwise. Like they just created these masterpieces. 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 Be it.

1:51:47 And their ability to hear an idea, sit down for an hour with a pot of coffee and like start with silhouetting a lot of the times and then Smashing out. But the characteristic that stuck out to me most, and I don't know if this is

1:52:03 Born or built, that's what I want to ask you about. is how unattached they were. In meaning. Like 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

1:52:20 This fantasy world. That has been kinda renamed. The legend of Cock Punch. Long story. But later Legends of Varlata and Could actually be modified very easily to be a serious, viable

1:52:34 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 want to do.'Cause I also grew up collecting comics, wanted to be a comic book pencil, so I think very visually. But

1:52:49 They were accustomed to having seventy plus percent of their stuff. Xed out. Five. IP holders. And starting over.

1:52:59 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 uh actually I have his new book here. I'll just give him a quick shout out. Hold on one sec. So one of them It was

1:53:15 Adam Lee. And you can see here this is Worlds and realms. Dungeons and Dragons, it runs through basically fifty years of gameplay. And different worlds.

1:53:26 within the D ecosystem. But he and his 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.

1:53:44 to my own little middling attempts at artwork. So how do you develop that? Is it just brute force repetition where you've built up so much scar tissue over time that you get better at handling it. Maybe those guys sound very, very good at handling that. I would probably be a more emotionally fragile even than that, because I do get protective. But I did Realized early on.

1:54:07 Working at Wetter Workshop. 'Cause I had never done professional work before. Especially not at the speed. I love the speed, by the way. I and I think speed gives a work a quality of its own, which I think is What I 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 is a great camaraderie, but it's still a competition.

1:54:28 Yeah. And you're all bouncing ideas off each other. And most of your ideas will be rejected. And you kinda know this because if you're doing a hundred versions of a character and your team's doing, you know, a hundred more each. It's only gotta 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 gonna be thrown away. But it does hurt when it is thrown away, especially an idea that you're passionate about. And so you realise very early on that you have to become

1:54:52 Unattached. You do need to care about the work deeply, right? 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.

1:55:05 And you have to be able to let go of it. Those two things are really in opposition because you're 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 m did something great there. Well now I have an opportunity to do something great again. Or try.

1:55:35 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 that. At least you're trying to get there. That's easier said than done because you still care about it going on and g becoming a part of the movie. So there's a competitive part of you that wants to win. That doesn't go away.

1:55:55 Yeah, I feel like you need that though, right? And that's 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

1:56:08 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. Like that strikes me.

1:56:23 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.

1:56:38 I mean ridiculously precious. But with the writing, it's like, hey, look. It doesn't matter how cute. 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 this. Yeah. Yeah. Well they've given you a even not 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. Yeah, yeah. That's something in the art, right? Your artists probably realise 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.

1:57:13 They can't argue you into saying why it is. You felt it and it's true. Right. And so the way to solve that problem is to go back and do it again. And do I 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 like 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 don't make any sense. 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

1:57:53 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 mention any of your Mm.

1:58:06 Influences or inspirations, whether past tense or Current. I'm not really very influenced by the 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

1:58:31 twisted reality in such a way it was like mismerising I've actually got a book here. I should The artist that really blew my mind as a teenager. I grew up Reading two thousand A D. Judge Dreads. Oh, right?

1:58:46 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 Strain the Horn God, oh my this God, look at that. This is the book so my care. I was fifteen. and reading 200 AD and I was getting better at drawing. I wanted to be a comic artist. I really wanted to work for 2000 AD. I started to get to a level I'm thinking

1:59:08 I think I'm okay. I think I could send in a folio. I I think I could do this, right? And then Then this came out. Actually the the book before this came out, yeah, it was ABC Warriors, it which he did in black and white. It's all penmanship. But that work, his work, just frickin' blew the little to my mind. So nuts. It's still unparalleled. It's Frank Frazetta and Corbyn 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.

1:59:38 He summoned true magic here, and I I'm interested now he done it. Can I just have a super nerd fest 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'em up. But uh

1:59:55 This is Oh yeah. Yeah. So this is Simon Bisley, yeah, the art of Simon Bisley. Heavy metal, man. What a great magazine that was, too. Yeah.

2:00:04 I think they've just re released it, by the way, the French version. Middle Heland, I don't know whether you say that. I can't remember exactly how I chanced upon it, but I remember picking up Slain the Horn God. And just thinking to myself, what in the fuck? Is this even possible? How is it even possible? And then his work on Lobo, I remember that very distinctly as well. Just an incredible, incredible artist. Okay.

2:00:29 Now are you inspired or deflated? Both. To nerd on him for one more second though, did you ever buy the Bible, his Bible? He did work from the Bible, mainly from the Oh no. From both Bibles. Old and New Testament.

2:00:42 Dude, go out and buy it now. I don't know if you can still they're still in print, but they're There's two volumes of it and they're absolutely incredible. Wow. Yeah. Really roar, but just The beautiful. But you to your point, it was both

2:00:54 Deflation like That rug pulled out from under you. Like I thought I was may be good enough. And then you realise no no, this the level is up here somewhere. 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 I just need to get better. And I did something actually

2:01:20 that I s weirdly still feel a slight shame for. Cause I never draw from r 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 I could just like

2:01:33 figure out like how he does his line work or something like that. It was useless. It was a waste of my time, but I but I did it for a little while. 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 gonna do it justice, but Viking like character with the kilt with the polar bears pulling the chariot and his mastery of

2:02:03 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 the artwork is just it's hard to describe, but he was such a genre breaker in so many ways. You mentioned another name that I didn't recognize, Corbin. Yeah, Richard Corbyn. 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 the Slain being the king of kings. And in the background of the shot, there's Slain being throned as the the king of the Celts or whatever. And um behind them. Is

2:02:47 Din, I think, is the character from Richard Corbyn? 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.

2:03:01 But in the front is Swain in the style of Bisley. And behind that is Den in the style of Corbyn. 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. Yeah. Talking about this very specific way of lighting his characters. And it's um 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 said that. looking at his work and find his work, you'll absolutely love it. He does big, powerful, masculine

2:03:29 figures as well as bucksome beautiful strong women that blow your mind. Yeah, you'll love it. You'll love it. Okay, cool. I'll check it out. I um saw, believe it or not, not far from where I'm sitting. Here in Austin, Texas. I saw my first original Frank Frazetta piece.

2:03:46 Which is owned by Robert Rodriguez, who's a famous film director. He did you know Sin City, he's worked with James Cameron on Alita Battle Angel. He's done tons and tons of movies. And he collects Objects kinda like you and Richard also. He's just got the best toys And he has a frassetta 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 uh it's just It's amazing work.

2:04:18 There was a museum somewhere in New York. of Frazetta's work, but I think there was some family issue. So I don't know what s state it's in now. But I had the chance once of um 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 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 N C Wyf had a studio. Do you know NC Wyath's work?

2:04:44 Ah you know I was gonna try to bullshit. I don't know. An illustrator from the turn of the last century He did like famous book illustrations of like pirates. I was gonna say was he kinda like Lion Decker's Vintage who is in that era, maybe a little Rockwell. That's why I do think I've come across the name. I wasn't totally bullshitting. There was like a flicker of recognition. 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. N C Y Yeah, the letter N C Yf.

2:05:20 Oh, there he is. Yeah, yeah. And um see why. But Absolutely mind boggling and religious experience. Wow. standing in front of those paintings, I'd recommend if you're in that part of the world going there. I I it might still be there. In fact, it's where his studio is.

2:05:34 This stuff's incredible. Yeah. Super mesmerizing. But he is a great painter on the calibre of 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. This was true for a lot of those artists in that generation. Maybe maybe it's just because it was commercialized. I mean, Norman Rockwell dealt with a lot of this as well. Yeah, of course.

2:06:01 But you know, Liondecker when he was creating sort of iconic male figures for selling Button up shirts and suits or whatever. I mean the as works of art, they're spectacular. They take you there, right? You 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 tell you something, I just want to throw another name out there. Bill Waddison, Calvin and Hobbs. Oh one hundred percent. When you say um Rockwell, my mind jumps to

2:06:29 Bill Waterson, like absolutely mind-boggling illustrations. I know they're comic books, right? Little cartoons in a newspaper, but when every now and then he got to play with his illustration and take it to another level, and he would really see that he was a true master. Yeah. Unbelievable. I still remember to this day I mean I l I have I own just about every companion of

2:06:51 Calvin and Hobbes, but for whatever reason sticks in my mind. are his color paintings of Calvin and Hobbs outside during the fall. Yeah. Leaves changing colour.

2:07:04 With the birch or aspens. Probably birch and other trees and just the kaleidoscopic Autumn 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

2:07:26 one path was quite a purist with his characters and with Calvin and Hobbes. And I recall at one point. I think it was one of his partners or maybe his uh pitch. for licensing to create a Hobbes plush toy that was

2:07:42 really large. And so the story goes, I believe he took a pair of scissors and just attacked it and ripped it to shirt. Really? As his way of saying, fuck no over my body. We're not we're not gonna do it. Which I found so endearing. I mean I I like to believe it's true. Yeah. Is he still going? Do you know I don't know what he's up to. He's very, as I understand it, you know, very reclusive for years since I started the podcast. He's been on kind of my top ten list. I was like, you know, if he would ever play ball.

2:08:14 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. Man. I would love to say 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 commercialise it in those other ways. Why? Yeah. I would find that really interesting because I'd totally understand. I'm maybe not as adverse to that as he sounds like he was, but I think

2:08:49 all the time about the reasoning for making art. Why are you doing it? What is that about? It is more than just drawing pictures and making stories. It is finding truth. Maybe he found some real profound truth and he found that he's expressed it and then anything else was actually watering down to that truth, perhaps. I'm just guessing. Cause I feel that Uh.

2:09:08 And the act of creativity Broadly and generally, or actually no, to 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 di very different and all. I just think that um

2:09:26 Like the way I was describing with the way I create. Y your imagination is throwing up explanations, ideas. Theories. possibilities. And then you are the instrumentation.

2:09:37 If it's a scientific 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.

2:09:48 Right. And that's the scientific instrument confirming or giving you the measurement. Right. Yeah. 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's why you go down that path of of chasing that thing. And I'm not saying that means that it's gonna be true for everyone, but you know it's true for yourself. And so, you know, that there's something in that then that to be m is one of the most liberating ways of m of creating. Can you think of a project That Fundamentally

2:10:16 Mm, maybe that's too big a word, but changed you in some way. Right. So you before the project and you after the 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.

2:10:36 Are quite different in some respect. It's not a project. I'm gonna cheap out in a way, but also talk about something very meaningful. And I know it's something you think about. That's having having a child, I I was talking about Er and stoppable before, but it's having a child. I was not prepared, not that a child is a project, right? I guess in a way.

2:10:55 But Having My boy. Came out. It is like

2:11:01 Instant. Whoa, I just snapped and you you moved your head at the same point. It's like I'm in control. I've been well trans. I'm like the Manchurian candidate, all your work. 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 have you feel something about it. You have to sit there, internalize it. It might take you a

2:11:25 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 as a different person. I had a different realization. More 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 gonna discover that there are elephants, you know? Like what? Like Or This this whole world of possibility for him.

2:11:57 And then also you start thinking This is maybe one of them. profound things that I think most parents get is you 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. Cause 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 thing. And then there is the mirror.

2:12:23 Of a child. And that Everything you do. It's gonna be reflected back at you. So you can see the good and the bad.

2:12:31 Right. 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're right. You can immediately know you feel it and it's like oh boy, it's a self you want self help? 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 you see where

2:12:57 you've done something that didn't quite work. You see it really clearly. Well That's hopefully my next big adventure. I gotta work on some prereqs, but that's definitely the uh the orientation at at this point. So do it. Yeah, we're great at it. Yeah. I'm excited about it. Really excited about it. And Greg, we've covered a lot of ground here. You know, we didn't even you know what work of yours has stuck in my mind.

2:13:19 Selfishly because at some point I'd still like to do a collaboration of some type. But It's the uh Beastiary. that you created with the scaling for human size you're talking about? Yeah, for the Dr. Grotebots world. Exactly. And I just remember flipping through that and it gave me 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

2:13:49 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. I love national geographic and creatures in general, an animals and so on just to um

2:14:08 rendering the the body or 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 Fiendfolio, those kind of things. I loved all of that with all the stats. And if you read the Groudes books I'm kind of roofing 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 third hand and they really don't know whether they're talking about it. So this this sort of it's kind of taking the piss out of itself. But uh The other thing was a book and I've forgotten the name of it now, but it was a a book from the s what it been the Late sixties, early seventies, and I found it in the public library as a kid.

2:14:44 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 could flash it up. But there was this 1970s book, I want to say McDougal or Dougle 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 r saw that book at probably seven or eight years old.

2:15:11 And That something about that. Creating something you're 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 loved it so much, but it's super fun.

2:15:25 Grandpop's ray gun. Take it out of the case, dust it off. Clean pot. Maybe you'll need them for when we uh when we land on Mars. Gotta take some regards. 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? My new book, One Path, is coming out very soon, April the 8th. So yeah, please come and check it out. I hope you like it. If you like dinosaurs, you're gonna enjoy it. There's a lot of dinosaurs in there.

2:16:02 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. I'm gonna check it out. Would the best place to look be your website or would it be somewhere else? I think so. Probably come to Gregbroadmore dot com and you can be directed from there.

2:16:17 Perfect. Well, we will drive people there. Greg, so nice to see you, man. We'll need to uh share a drink and scheme up some wild ideas in person, hopefully. in the not too distant future. I would love that. And we do share a penchant for heavy music as well, which we didn't have a chance to get into. Maybe some juvenile delinquency also. But for people listening. Include everything we mentioned in the show notes.

2:16:43 As per usual, Timot blog slash 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 at Gregbroadmore.com and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Until next time, folks, as always, be 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 one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

2:17:30 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've 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 gizmas 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 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 slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

2:18:19 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 DSO1 Daily Symbiotic. Now it turns out that this product, Seeds DSO1, 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 unbitten, 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 10 feet for me. Right now.

2:19:07 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 DS01 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 CEED's DSO1 so effective? What makes it different? For one, it is a two-in-one 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're not as effective. So Seed developed a proprietary capsule and capsule delivery system that survives digestion and delivers a precision release of alive and viable probiotics to the colon.

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