Wētā Workshop — Stories from The Lord of the Rings, Four Tenets to Live By, and Untapping Creativity

1. 0:00 – 0:41

   Start.

   1. RTRichard Taylor0:00

      I just pulled this out, right?

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:02

      Yeah.

   3. RTRichard Taylor0:02

      This is Sting from the movie. This is one of my favorite things that we've made in the company, and I keep it next to me, and I pick it up, and it gives you strength, and it gives you a sense of wonder, and it connects you back to a very happy time. And it glows if there are challenging clients in the corridor, so.

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:22

      [laughs]

   5. RTRichard Taylor0:24

      This is an artifact to me.

   6. TFTim Ferriss0:26

      Mm-hmm.

   7. RTRichard Taylor0:27

      'Cause it will carry on and bring joy long after I'm dead. So the sword maker that made that imbued it with creative immortality.

   8. TFTim Ferriss0:38

      Mm-hmm.

   9. RTRichard Taylor0:38

      And to me, that's a good place to be as

2. 0:41 – 2:06

   Albertosaurus vs. bear.

   1. RTRichard Taylor0:41

      a human.

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:42

      So it's been maybe one to two years since we had a bite to eat and some drinks in Wellington, but here we are, and I'm looking at the backgrounds in our respective videos. And I'm accustomed to having a pretty good background. I've got a huge bear behind me. I've got some plants. And I have, without question, lost this background competition, [laughs] if it were a competition, so. [laughs] 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.

   3. GBGreg Broadmore1:14

      That's an Albertosaurus. It was actually a, a ... Richard bought it as a prop for Kong, and the idea was it was a, it was 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, and that is one of the leftovers. And, um, it re- Richard very kindly gifted it to me. I had it painted up and put on a stand. It is really my-

   4. TFTim Ferriss1:33

      It's gorgeous

   5. GBGreg Broadmore1:33

      ... proudest possession. I freaking love it.

   6. TFTim Ferriss1:35

      And you have a wall of guitars in addition.

   7. GBGreg Broadmore1:37

      Yeah, yeah. And, oh, actually, and I should add, th- that is a, that's a dinosaur egg.

   8. TFTim Ferriss1:42

      [laughs] All right, dinosaur egg.

   9. GBGreg Broadmore1:44

      A real one.

   10. RTRichard Taylor1:45

       The story behind that dinosaur egg we don't have time to go into, but we, we sh- we've got one each. And it is one of the most bonkers stories of our lives, just how we acquired those dinosaur eggs.

   11. GBGreg Broadmore1:59

       [laughs]

   12. RTRichard Taylor1:59

       But we won't go there today.

   13. TFTim Ferriss2:00

       Well, we ... [laughs] That might be a round two.

   14. RTRichard Taylor2:02

       There for a beer and a visit back to Wellington.

   15. TFTim Ferriss2:05

       All right. Deal.

3. 2:06 – 4:31

   The Richard Taylor office tour.

   1. TFTim Ferriss2:06

      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?

   2. RTRichard Taylor2:18

      I'm a big collector of garage kits. You know, people that make beautiful sculptures in their bedrooms, cast them in their garages, package them up, and send them off to people like me. And I've been collecting for maybe going on 40 years now. I'd give you a quick tour of, of the office. Like, I've got a Thunderbird II up there. And if I go around the office, you can see that there is just a near infinite-

   3. TFTim Ferriss2:52

      You must have hundreds.

   4. RTRichard Taylor2:54

      Yeah. This is the whiteboard where we do all our brainstorming at Wētā for new creative projects. And behind me is just even more. There's my wonderful colleague, Rhi, who'll give you a wave. And then just, it carries on and on and on. In fact, there's some-

   5. TFTim Ferriss3:12

      [laughs]

   6. RTRichard Taylor3:13

      ... of Greg's work hanging. How do I show you? There. Those things hanging from the roof, those are Greg's designs that I've turned into, into some collectibles. Awesome sculptures. They're not collectibles yet, but I, I love them, so I thought I'd make them as 3D sculptures. You just can't have enough cool stuff around you. My favorite possession in my life, which my wife gave to me, so I'll stop that rocking, is this beautiful sculpture here, which is by a guy called Gilbert Bay, who was part of an art movement during the Victorian era. So this sits here as inspiration. And next to me is the Gremlins from Gremlins 2. I painted it up, but Steve Wang was the original painter of that. So just gotta be surrounded by things that inspire you, I always think.

   7. TFTim Ferriss4:08

      Let's actually double-click on the inspiration. We could talk about, I guess it's Harry and the Hendersons. I believe you have [laughs] something like that also in your office, if memory serves me.

   8. RTRichard Taylor4:18

      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 created for a movie, so yeah, you gotta have lots of Harry

4. 4:31 – 8:02

   How Richard was inspired to begin sculpting.

   1. RTRichard Taylor4:31

      around you.

   2. TFTim Ferriss4:32

      If we look at inspiration, if we go way back, we're gonna rewind the clock a little bit with you first, Richard. In terms of inspiration, how were you inspired to sculpt in the first place? I read somewhere, and you can't believe everything you read on the internet, but that there was a wonderful book on Chinese sculpture that perhaps played a role. But how did, how did the very early stages get moving for you with respect to sculpture?

   3. RTRichard Taylor4:59

      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 really weren't focused on that type of thing. So I had the great fortune of going to a closing down sale at my mother's teacher's training college, and I was able to buy two things, one of them being The Triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. This is in my early teens possibly. And that was my first realization that running in parallel to our world is this visual fantasy world. Obviously, I was reading fantasy books, but I had not really comprehended. And because of the triptych, you go from Earth to Heaven and to Hell, so this concept of running in parallel. But I also ... This came into my possession, and-

   4. TFTim Ferriss5:58

      What is the title of that right there?

   5. RTRichard Taylor6:00

      Well, this is in another language.

   6. TFTim Ferriss6:02

      That's Spanish, I guess.

   7. RTRichard Taylor6:03

      Yeah. Right? I've got multiple copies of it now because I've been collecting them, and friends in China have gifted me other copies. But it was a book of an unknown sculptor in an unknown land. It inspired me to start digging clay out of the creek on the back of the farm. I, I taught myself to sculpt. I started Wētā with my wife, Tania. I used this book as inspiration to other sculptors, hung pictures around the walls, taught people out of the book, copied the sculptures in the book, so pretty influential. By coincidence, then jump forward 40 years, and Greg Ree and I are in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, raising money for the Sichuan Earthquake Relief Fund. And at random, we, we'd been out doing a, hopefully, inspiration to a university that had lost people in the earthquake. And running late back to have a meeting with the governor, pulled over to the side of the road. I think we ran across a four-lane road to a random art studio. Went in, met the artist who owned the studio. He was sculpting a figure. He ran off, got his wife, brought back his portfolio. Turned out to be the person that did the art in the book.

   8. TFTim Ferriss7:25

      [laughs] Wow.

   9. RTRichard Taylor7:28

      Crazy. So hugely inspirational to me. There's obviously other inspirations. Ray Harryhausen's work was very inspiring to me as I got into my later teens, discovering... I didn't really discover the physical effects industry till I was in my teens. Unlike most people that do what I do that discovered it early in their lives, I just didn't have access to cinema to enough of a degree. So that's a very quick potted overview of those two bits of inspiration.

5. 8:02 – 10:35

   Stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen.

   1. TFTim Ferriss8:02

      So the name Ray Harryhausen, that is a stop-motion master. Am I getting that right?

   2. RTRichard Taylor8:08

      Yeah. I'm gonna run away from my desk one more time, and I'll speak loud so you can hear me.

   3. TFTim Ferriss8:14

      [laughs] This is pretty signature Richard.

   4. RTRichard Taylor8:18

      Of course, I have a tribute sculpture to Ray Harryhausen in the form of... So that's Ray.

   5. TFTim Ferriss8:26

      Uh-huh. [laughs]

   6. RTRichard Taylor8:26

      And that's one of his characters.

   7. TFTim Ferriss8:30

      Mm-hmm.

   8. RTRichard Taylor8:30

      He's got a library of extraordinary characters that he's done on an amazing array of movies. Sinbad is probably his better known. Yeah, he was a stop animator. When we were very fortunate to collect the Oscars for our colleagues back home, I wanted to give them a present. Now, when we were 25, my wife and I, we went on our big OE to England and Europe.

   9. TFTim Ferriss8:56

      What does OE stand for?

   10. RTRichard Taylor8:58

       Big overseas experience.

   11. TFTim Ferriss9:00

       There we go.

   12. RTRichard Taylor9:01

       We got a combi van, like everyone did, and we drove it for 10,000 miles around Europe. But I pre-wrote to Ray, and he didn't know me, and I didn't know him, and I wrote to him and asked him if he would please allow us to come and say hello. We bought a bunch of flowers. We arrived an hour early. I gave the flowers to the housekeeper, thinking it was his wife. He forgot we were coming.

   13. TFTim Ferriss9:28

       [laughs]

   14. RTRichard Taylor9:28

       So he came down in his pajamas with his comb-over, hanging off this... But we ended up having this extraordinary day with him and Diana, his wife, and it lasted into the early evening, and we just hit it off together. So once again, jump forward 10, 15 years. We've now made Lord of the Rings. We're very fortunate to win our first Oscars, and I wanted to give a lovely present to our crew. And, you know, you can throw a party or buy them all leather jackets, but I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if they could get to meet someone that's a hero to them that they, that they would normally never get to meet?" So I wrote to Ray and Diane, and they came to New Zealand for two weeks and hung out in our workshop every day and just spent the two weeks with our team, learning what they're doing, telling stories. Ray put on a five-hour talk on the last night. His wife fell asleep on my shoulder as it went into the early hours of the morning.

   15. TFTim Ferriss10:30

       [laughs]

   16. RTRichard Taylor10:31

       So riveting was he, and so inspiring.

6. 10:35 – 11:51

   Connecting with Dick Smith, the ‘grandfather’ of makeup effects.

   1. RTRichard Taylor10:36

      When we were fortunate to win our second Oscars, I, I wrote to Dick Smith, the grandfather of makeup effects. And Dick Smith I met via letter writing in my late teens, where I wrote to him and told him that I was sculpting in margarine. The first 300 commercial sculptures I did in the film industry were sculpted in margarine. So he forevermore used to call me the margarine guy.

   2. TFTim Ferriss11:06

      [laughs]

   3. RTRichard Taylor11:08

      Sadly, Dick has now passed on, but he was one of the most inspiring, beautiful humans you could ever hope to meet, and through his educational program, it has inspired and educated a very large number of the world's makeup effects people. And that, that concept of passing it on is something I've held firmly to as a company. No secrets. Share everything that you're asked of. And we still get kids ring up in the evenings asking how to make blood. And [laughs]

   4. TFTim Ferriss11:43

      [laughs]

   5. RTRichard Taylor11:43

      ... and I'm happy to tell them, so yeah.

   6. TFTim Ferriss11:46

      [laughs]

   7. RTRichard Taylor11:46

      Fake blood. Fake blood. I should have said that. Fake blood.

   8. TFTim Ferriss11:49

      Fake blood, not breeding

7. 11:51 – 16:47

   Sculpting in margarine and breaking into the industry.

   1. TFTim Ferriss11:51

      vampires. I was going to ask you about margarine. Now-

   2. RTRichard Taylor11:54

      Of course you are

   3. TFTim Ferriss11:56

      ... if it's what I'm thinking it is, is this the butter substitute? Maybe you can tell me if that is one and the same, but could you also just tell the story of landing the job on- on public eye. Maybe this will-

   4. RTRichard Taylor12:10

      Yeah

   5. TFTim Ferriss12:10

      ... paint a picture for people. And then why, why margarine?

   6. RTRichard Taylor12:13

      Okay, so it's very simple answer to that story. I was unaware of plasticine. Obviously, I played around with plasticine at school, and I was using crude clay that I had mushed in my hands, but it was not possible to do the type of sculpting I was needing to do in those two mediums, 'cause you couldn't buy plasticine in large quantities, et cetera. My wife got a job working as a hotel duty manager at the Tas Hotel in Upper Willis Street, Wellington, and in the evenings she used to invite me in 'cause she became friends with the chef, this guy called Alec, and the chef was doing margarine sculptures. He was doing swans and ponies and things like that. And so I used to just hang out with him, this crazy, wonderful Scottish chef, and I started doing monsters and creatures and dragons and superhero sculptures and things like that for the, 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. We got wind that the production company that I was doing art directing, art department for on very low television commercials and documentaries, I got the wind that they wanted to make a New Zealand version of Spitting Image, and I desperately wanted to be the sculptor on this. So I actually snuck into the office late at night and I actually borrowed a couple of photographs of the boss, went home and sculpted in margarine, and then Tania and I cast it and made a puppet of it. I put it on his desk in a black plastic bag, a rubbish bag with my card on the top. I put it there at midnight. I got a phone call the next morning.

   7. TFTim Ferriss14:17

      How did you get in? [laughs] Did you cat burglar your way in?

   8. RTRichard Taylor14:20

      No, we were working in the building, so I had keys. I had the ability to go in and out-

   9. TFTim Ferriss14:25

      [laughs]

   10. RTRichard Taylor14:25

       ... 'cause we were doing art department, so often working at midnight. So he phoned and he said, "Found your puppet. Great, but you needn't have bothered with the efforts of making a puppet of me. No one else has applied for the job." But I think-

   11. TFTim Ferriss14:41

       [laughs]

   12. RTRichard Taylor14:41

       ... that sort of speaks to the individual that I am actually, that you always gotta go that nth degree. And that started two amazing years working for Gibson Group, making satirical puppets, one every couple of days. We had a third person working with us, a friend of ours called Clive, who did all the eye mechanisms. We built those out of roll-on deodorant balls and the spring wire that you hang frilly curtains off in, in your grandma's kitchen. And we built 72 puppets over those two years. It was ferocious time frames, but because I could sculpt in margarine... And margarine's a bit of a misnomer, Tim. The true term is emulsified vegetable pastry fat. It's actually margarine-

   13. TFTim Ferriss15:36

       Yum

   14. RTRichard Taylor15:36

       ... before you whip in the water and the food coloring, so-

   15. TFTim Ferriss15:40

       I see

   16. RTRichard Taylor15:40

       ... it has a greater solidity. So I used to actually microwave it to get it... I describe sculpting in margarine as like using a 4B pencil. Sculpting in clay is like a 2B pencil, and sculpting in plasticine is like a 4H pencil, let's say, so to give the, the people that understand illustration terms. That's how I started to use margarine, and I ultimately, as I said, did over 300 sculptures. All of Heavenly Creatures was sculpted in margarine. In fact, we made sculpting tools as big as shovels because the idea is that the little sculptures that the girls had done in their childhood out of plasticine from school, that green plasticine that all New Zealand schools used to get, they come alive, and so they're really big. So we made sculpting tools out of shovels and other bits of equipment, lumps of wood that would give the gestural appearance as if the girls' fingers had sculpted them.

   17. TFTim Ferriss16:46

       Well,

8. 16:47 – 21:02

   Tinfoil sculpting and teaching creativity to kids.

   1. TFTim Ferriss16:47

      I remember also taking a tour last time I was in Wellington at Wētā Workshop, and there was a hands-on opportunity to sculpt with tinfoil, which I had never experienced before, sculpting with tinfoil with a spoon, and I was shocked how much detail you could coax from that material if you knew how to apply the spoon properly. I made a hummingbird first time out. I made a tiger head, and it was shocking to me and really encouraging how you could take this cheap, readily available, often wasted material and use it to create things that could sit on your desk and remain there as long as you wanted to keep them there.

   2. RTRichard Taylor17:35

      Well, it's lovely that you remember it fondly. The tinfoil, I guess, is allegorous to what we are trying to do as a company, what my wife and I try and do as individuals, Tania, my wife, my business partner as well, is, you know... I say the thing we love to make today is other makers, right? We've had a lovely and amazing career, and we're continuing to do fun and wonderful things every day, but it's an imperative, and I actually feel that it's beholden on us to try and introduce as many people as possible, specifically children, into the love of making and creating, because it is slipping out of our fingers. And at one level some may say, "Well, so what? It's been replaced by other things." But I- fundamentally believe that our connection as humans to the creative arts, crafts, 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 based in craft, whether it's architecture, clothing, totems of religious or spiritual belief, et cetera, the things that remain across history invariably craft-based objects of importance. So the reason tinfoil, right, and Warren Beaton, affectionately known as Wozzy, Woz came to us on Lord of the Rings as the chemist that mixed up all the gloop for the birthing sacks and so on. He's an extraordinary technician, makeup artist, animatronic engineer in his own right. But for the last five or six years, he's dedicated every day of his life to being on stage trying to inspire people, specifically children, to get off their iPhones for a moment and think about what these 10 digits can do at the ends of your hands. And the reason we use tinfoil is that no matter what the socioeconomic level of a family's life is, tinfoil invariably always exists in a family's kitchen. You can buy it extremely cheaply if it doesn't, and everyone owns a teaspoon. So we've made a sculpting curriculum out of the most accessible material you can get and a teaspoon.

   3. GBGreg Broadmore20:07

      [laughs]

   4. RTRichard Taylor20:07

      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 a few months after we opened our Unleashed experience in Auckland, where we do a very deep dive on tinfoil sculpting. Because kids wanted to go home and make things out of tinfoil.

   5. GBGreg Broadmore20:40

      Do you own tinfoil stocks, Richard?

   6. RTRichard Taylor20:42

      I don't, unfortunately.

   7. GBGreg Broadmore20:43

      [laughs]

   8. RTRichard Taylor20:44

      I've tried very hard to get our team to package Wētā specific tinfoil to sell in the Wētā Cave with a teaspoon.

   9. GBGreg Broadmore20:53

      You realize you should've been in the market from the start.

   10. TFTim Ferriss20:56

       I know. Maybe he's been paid off by big tinfoil.

   11. RTRichard Taylor20:58

       Yeah, I wish. We'll all get Alzheimer's, that's the problem.

   12. TFTim Ferriss21:01

       [laughs]

9. 21:02 – 28:12

   Wētā’s evolution from a small team to a 400-person creative hub.

   1. TFTim Ferriss21:03

      So I have a lot of questions for Greg. I want to ask just, uh, two more. It's actually a combo question for you, Richard, just to paint a picture for folks. So could you paint a picture of Wētā looked like in the very beginning in terms of the organization, and then let's just, just say at peak, you can pick, peak Lord of the Rings or post Lord of the Rings, what it looked like, just to paint a before and after picture.

   2. RTRichard Taylor21:27

      My wife and I have run our company together for 37 years. We started off the business in the back room of our flat. It was actually our bedroom. We used to have a sheet of MDF, we call it custom board, that we would flip onto the top of the bed, and we would make things on that board. Peter Jackson was in- interviewed once, and he says, and I misquote, "I remember coming into Richard and Tania's bedroom, and it stunk of the same rubber and fiberglass smells of my own bedroom," right?

   3. GBGreg Broadmore22:04

      [laughs]

   4. RTRichard Taylor22:04

      'Cause he was also making everything in the early years in his bedroom. So that's where we began. We moved workshops nine times. Our first collaborator, employee, contractor, collaborator, came about two years in, in the form of the gentleman Clive I mentioned, to do eyeballs. And today we have about 400 people operating across seven business centers. We have design and manufacturing for the world's creative industries, which is about 170 of our team. We also make digital games. We do merchandising, collectibles. We've done hundreds of collectibles over the last 27 years. We also have a location-based experience division, and we work on some of the world's largest museums, immersive experiences. We've done the largest pavilion for the Dubai Expo, which remains open as a museum. We've done the largest traditional Chinese medicine museum in China, which actually saw us design the building, 37,000 square meters, et cetera, et cetera. We have a creative media division where we are servicing people like Jay Chou, Asia's largest recording artist, a great Chinese musician, and we're doing work for him, and he's actually Taiwanese, where you're going on holiday. We also run two retail stores. We operate three tourism offerings, including our significant location-based experience called Wētā Workshop Unleashed in Auckland. We have a robotics division developing and building very high performance humanoid robots, which we're trying to commercialize at the moment. Greg, help me here. What else have I forgotten?

   5. GBGreg Broadmore24:12

      No, that's a bunch of it.

   6. RTRichard Taylor24:13

      And everything in between, right? We do a lot of service providing to, to private and public commissions, a lot of very unique work for people's homes. We're just about to deliver Two crazy objects that we've bu- or, or installations that we've built for someone's private home. These have taken each a year to build, so you can imagine how complex and how significant they are. So that's where we've got to today, a multifaceted design, manu- manufacturing, and entertainment company, and that's a desire to try and give creative careers to as many New Zealanders as possible, basically.

   7. GBGreg Broadmore24:57

      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, and, uh, maybe 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.

   8. RTRichard Taylor25:11

      Oh, yeah.

   9. GBGreg Broadmore25:11

      Concrete floor, lots of band saws, and-

   10. RTRichard Taylor25:13

       Saw the sword makers. [laughs]

   11. GBGreg Broadmore25:15

       ... right machinery and, a- 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, was the first person in the world that I saw around me that was bringing in 3D printing and 3D milling and 3D tools, you know, 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, you know, your love and fascination with physical, tactile things. It's like, how do we solve the problem creatively? It's just mesmerizing how many new technologies and new approaches turn up all the time.

   12. RTRichard Taylor25:57

       And it's interesting. Just yesterday someone said to me, the perception is that you must run the company from a boardroom through executives, et cetera, et cetera, and that couldn't be further from the truth. As you saw, Tim, when you came, my wife and I are an integrated part of every component of our business. I'm on the workshop floor every day doing the work that we do when, when I'm not traveling with Rii around the world chasing work and, you know, delivering jobs, et cetera. We have an extraordinary group of senior management people that have grown up primarily in the building. A lot of our team have been with us over 25 years. Over half the company have been with us over 15 years. So those people, it's just a second... Well, there's no need for a second language because they just know as deeply as I do what's required for each division and to get through each day. The diversity is our great benefit because if we had just remained as a manufacturing and design studio, we would be a small bureau in New Zealand. But the beauty of the diversity means that if one division drops off, which invariably is happening pretty much every year, the other divisions all come together to support that division, and it fluctuates and flows. Luckily, to this point, we haven't stumbled too heavily, but due to the cleverness of the team and the, 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, uh, where film used to make 70% of our work, it now probably makes 30 to 40% of our work.

   13. GBGreg Broadmore28:11

       Hmm.

10. 28:12 – 34:23

    99 Dodgy Slips and 99 Deadly Sleds.

    1. RTRichard Taylor28:12

       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 wanna 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.

    2. GBGreg Broadmore28:30

       [laughs]

    3. RTRichard Taylor28:31

       I remember you and I were exchanging [laughs] messages when I was inspired after my trip actually to attempt to learn digital painting.

    4. GBGreg Broadmore28:41

       Oh, really?

    5. RTRichard Taylor28:42

       Again, using Procreate, and I was curious about some of your practice habits and so on, and I can't remember exactly what prompted [laughs] you to send this to me, but it was a process capture of you creating many, many... I don't- I wanna say 50, 60. Who knows?

    6. GBGreg Broadmore29:02

       99.

    7. RTRichard Taylor29:03

       99. 99. 99.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore29:05

       99 dodgy slips.

    9. RTRichard Taylor29:07

       Dodgy slips.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore29:09

        Yeah.

    11. RTRichard Taylor29:09

        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?

    12. GBGreg Broadmore29:17

        [laughs] Yes. So do, do you remember the DS? The... It was... What was the DS stand for? It was a Nintendo DS. It was a little flip open.

    13. RTRichard Taylor29:25

        Uh-huh.

    14. GBGreg Broadmore29:25

        But the cool thing that Nintendo added was a, a touch screen. 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, you know, they just, they just didn't include that feature. But I, I was playing that a lot and found that someone had made an app, a mod for it, that made it into a little art app and actually utilized the pressure sensitivity, and that was the first handheld. Like now they're everywhere, these little, you know, phones and so on with Procreate on your iPad and so on. But back then, little game console that you could actually draw pictures on it. And then this guy, he's a Swedish guy, Jens... I can't remember his surname. But he made a little program for it, utilized the pressure sensitivity, and I just started drawing on it, and actually it happened because it would've been Christmas time in New Zealand, and while my partner Kate was going out shopping for Christmas presents and going into every store, I sat outside bored to tears. I would just flip open my DS and start drawing.

    15. RTRichard Taylor30:16

        [laughs]

    16. GBGreg Broadmore30:16

        And for some reason, I like drawing figures. I like drawing people, and I don't like drawing from life very much. I like drawing from my imagination. I just started drawing women falling o- over [laughs] on banana peels. It's a very 1950s comic book kind of idea of slipping on the banana peel and breaking your neck. And every single one of them provides a new opportunity to sort of creatively explore the human body doing interesting things. I like the stupidity of it, like sort of sexualized but, but making fun of it, right?

    17. TFTim Ferriss30:43

        Yeah. [laughs]

    18. GBGreg Broadmore30:43

        Because it's like, you can't be that sexy when you're falling over and hurting yourself.

    19. TFTim Ferriss30:47

        [laughs]

    20. GBGreg Broadmore30:47

        I, I, I don't know something about that clash that is interesting to me. Banana peel flying in the air. But I drew them, and actually I hit 99, and we made an exhibition called 99 DS with my friend Christian Pearce that Richard and Tania were the patron of. And we put on an exhibition in town. But it was called 99 because I hit 99 drawings.

    21. TFTim Ferriss31:06

        Mm-hmm.

    22. GBGreg Broadmore31:06

        And that was when the, uh, Jens' operating system in his game, in his program that make- allowed you to draw, that's when it hit the file limit. So it's like, well, I've done 99.

    23. TFTim Ferriss31:15

        [laughs]

    24. GBGreg Broadmore31:15

        I would've gone to 500. And, um, so I hit 99 and I thought, "Well, that's that." 99 dodgy slips, uh, from 99 DS. And my friend Christian, he did 99... What did he do?

    25. TFTim Ferriss31:26

        Deadly sleds.

    26. GBGreg Broadmore31:27

        Deadly sleds, these really cool-

    27. TFTim Ferriss31:29

        [laughs]

    28. GBGreg Broadmore31:30

        ... super creative hot rods in all different ways. Yeah. Anyway, that's where that came from. And I, for some reason, that ludicrous idea, Richard decided, "Yeah, it's a great idea for an exhibition. I'll put it on in town." So thank you, Richard.

    29. TFTim Ferriss31:41

        [laughs] Yeah, we put it on in site. We got two shipping containers, painted them white, put a massive graphic of DS 99 on the side of them. And then I had our engineers cut a hole through the insides of the shipping containers so you could walk from one to the other, and then line them in white Meltika so they looked like a medical laboratory, and put LED strip lighting and so on. And then we printed every image of Greg's and, and Christian's off about this big, and we hung them along the wall like this, and they looked so amazing. And one container was dodgy slips and the other container was deadly sleds. Rhi, Rhi, would you mind just going to Tania'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-

    30. GBGreg Broadmore32:41

        Yeah, please
11. 34:23 – 39:02

    Greg’s artistic education and unique process.

    1. TFTim Ferriss34:23

       So now you have an amazing bio, Greg, and I want to get to the two-week trial [laughs] that started this whole dynamic duo.

    2. GBGreg Broadmore34:32

       I'm still on two-week trial, I think.

    3. TFTim Ferriss34:34

       So we're gonna get to that. But now if you could just refresh my memory, I, I believe that you learned your skills through private tutors given to you by your aristocratic parents-

    4. GBGreg Broadmore34:43

       [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss34:43

       ... and then art finishing school at the finest institutions.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore34:47

       [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss34:47

       Am I remembering correctly? How did, how did you learn your trade?

    8. GBGreg Broadmore34:50

       [laughs] That is a good question. I did try and do art school. Richard, did you try and do art school, art school?

    9. TFTim Ferriss34:58

       Yeah, I went through Polytech.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore35:00

        You did go through Polytech.

    11. TFTim Ferriss35:01

        Yeah.

    12. GBGreg Broadmore35:02

        I tried to go to New Zealand's most prestigious art school, and they turned me down. So I tried another one, and they turned me down. In the end, I went to an art college in a small town in New Zealand, but it didn't last very long. I think for a little while they didn't know what to do with me, so they put me off campus in a little room, and I was happy.

    13. TFTim Ferriss35:20

        [laughs]

    14. GBGreg Broadmore35:20

        I bought bed sheets and acrylic paint and would just paint these weird Salvador Dali tortured scenes of people, and I was happy and I thought, "Well, this is, this is what school is. I, I, this is great."

    15. TFTim Ferriss35:31

        [laughs]

    16. GBGreg Broadmore35:31

        "I'm just gonna do all these paintings." And then very quickly they got me back again and found out what they wanted to do w- 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, and so I didn't, I didn't want anyone to tell me what to do. And so I was immediately out of my element and thought, "This is not for me. I, you know, I, I don't wanna 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.

    17. TFTim Ferriss36:03

        Mm-hmm.

    18. GBGreg Broadmore36:04

        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 really know how to do it, and you just throw yourself into it and do your best. I love that process. So sort of finding out the shortcuts I f- I find the least interesting, if you like. I feel like I don't learn out of that.

    19. TFTim Ferriss36:20

        Mm-hmm.

    20. GBGreg Broadmore36:20

        I learn just by constant failing towards success, if you like. Building up.

    21. TFTim Ferriss36:24

        Mm-hmm.

    22. GBGreg Broadmore36:24

        The failures stack up and lu- luckily you end up seeing, you know, the horizon from there.

    23. TFTim Ferriss36:29

        Can I just say he's not being self-effacing there. That's literally how he works. [laughs] I know it might seem to people listening that, "Oh, you must never fail. You did all these incredible films, and your body of work is so amazing," but-

    24. RTRichard Taylor36:43

        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 there's, there's certain briefs that I will give Greg. I give briefs to Greg almost daily, and there's things that I assume entirely that Greg will be able to do.

    25. TFTim Ferriss37:10

        When you say brief, is that a project description?

    26. RTRichard Taylor37:13

        Yeah, a project description, right? Like, here's a great example right next to me.

    27. TFTim Ferriss37:19

        [laughs]

    28. RTRichard Taylor37:19

        Like, I needed a set of lockers designed for our Unleashed locker where you lock up your bags when you go to Unleashed.

    29. TFTim Ferriss37:28

        Oh.

    30. RTRichard Taylor37:28

        And Greg, there's the wall, there's a photograph of the lockers, and Greg has designed a set of characters, right?
12. 39:02 – 40:44

    The art must flow! But how does Greg make it happen?

    1. RTRichard Taylor39:02

       general public.

    2. GBGreg Broadmore39:03

       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 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 60 meters long by six meters high, doing it in Photoshop, but in pencils. It feels like at the end is when I woke up, and then that, the image was done. Even though this actually took weeks and weeks.

    3. TFTim Ferriss39:26

       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?

    4. GBGreg Broadmore39:39

       I'm 53 this year.

    5. TFTim Ferriss39:41

       Mm-hmm.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore39:42

       And I still don't know. I would ask you that. Like, I remember this artist, Josh Homme, he's a guitarist for Queens of the Stone Age.

    7. TFTim Ferriss39:49

       Right.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore39:49

       An amazing guy, and he just, he actually just says, "You've just gotta work." He thinks of it as the muse, and the muse is out there. The muse is the universe, right? And it's hopefully gonna offer you creativity. [laughs] There's a robot butt.

    9. RTRichard Taylor40:01

       These are characters out of the mural, right? I just want to reinforce the total absurdity-

    10. TFTim Ferriss40:06

        Oh, wow. Yeah. [laughs]

    11. RTRichard Taylor40:07

        ... of the way Greg's brain works. [laughs]

    12. GBGreg Broadmore40:11

        Josh says 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, 'cause that's what it feels like when it's, when it comes to you.

    13. TFTim Ferriss40:22

        Mm-hmm.

    14. GBGreg Broadmore40:23

        When it comes to you in a powerful way. The only way is just to make yourself available to it, which is work, right? It's just turning up. That's why we turn up every day and we work all day, right? And you, you just do the work, and then hopefully it turns up. Is there a magic trick to make it happen more? No. You... I think anything that works that, that removes yourself somehow-

    15. TFTim Ferriss40:42

        Mm-hmm

    16. GBGreg Broadmore40:43

        ... it makes you fall away.

13. 40:44 – 41:33

    The Auckland mural: when flow goes too far and Lemmy has to be replaced.

    1. GBGreg Broadmore40:44

       Like I said, when I did the mural, the best parts of it were where I felt like I woke up at the end and it was done.

    2. TFTim Ferriss40:49

       Mm-hmm.

    3. GBGreg Broadmore40:49

       And that was actually where Richard was pointing out where all the problems came from. Because I wasn't conscious during half of it, if you like-

    4. TFTim Ferriss40:55

       [laughs]

    5. GBGreg Broadmore40:56

       ... there were things in there that were problematic. I'd broken IP. I put Lemmy from Motörhead in it 'cause I love Lemmy, and I just wasn't thinking.

    6. TFTim Ferriss41:02

       [laughs]

    7. GBGreg Broadmore41:02

       And Richard said at the end, "You know, well, we don't, we don't own Lemmy," right?

    8. TFTim Ferriss41:06

       [laughs]

    9. GBGreg Broadmore41:06

       So I ended up chopping Lemmy's head off. That's a horrible thing to say. He would-

    10. RTRichard Taylor41:09

        And what did you do in, in its place?

    11. GBGreg Broadmore41:11

        And I put Richard's head on. [laughs] Richard said, "Why don't you put your head on?" I'm like, "No, I'm putting Richard's head on."

    12. RTRichard Taylor41:18

        [laughs]

    13. GBGreg Broadmore41:18

        Anyway, but it's full of those kind of problems that Richard had to, had to point out to me that were like, "Hey, hey, you've done this and you've done this," and I'm like, "Oh, really? Have I? God, I, I didn't realize." 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.

14. 41:33 – 44:22

    How Greg boarded the Wētā Workshop train after years on the dole.

    1. TFTim Ferriss41:33

       So how did this start off? How did the two-week trial happen?

    2. GBGreg Broadmore41:37

       I started during the post-production of Lord of the Rings, so I think most of the actual creative work that I could've been involved with was actually already done. But Richard was about to start on King Kong. I think Peter had brought up King Kong. And also Evangelion. Remember that? Never happened. It was a live action movie of Evangelion proposed. And I sent in a folio with dinosaurs and robots in it. And Richard saw it. And I actually, I did a comic book as well that had both of those things.

    3. RTRichard Taylor42:05

       Ah. [laughs]

    4. GBGreg Broadmore42:06

       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 con- almost continuously on the dole.

    5. TFTim Ferriss42:17

       Hmm.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore42:17

       Which is not, not something I recommend. And so I had no idea about working professionally or doing anything like that. I'm just a sort of creative lost soul, actually. I saw the first Lord of the Rings film come out, and it was like, you know, I was a fan of Peter Jackson's work and everything, but my mind was utterly blown. I was not prepared for the, for the scale and how good it really was and how it transported me. But then I realized there's this place in Wellington, and I'm living here, and it's got these crazy creative people. Surely I c- maybe, please, maybe I could work there. So the timing was perfect, having that folio with some, with some of the things that piqued Richard's interest. And Richard was so generous. He brought me in a couple of weeks after seeing my folio and showed me around, and, and I just said, "So when do I start?" And Richard [laughs] was very gracious and said, "Well, you can, you know, you can come on in next week or whatever." I think I got a two-week contract after a while. I think I'm still on that two-week contract, Richard. [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss43:12

       [laughs]

    8. GBGreg Broadmore43:14

       It's just kept on going.

    9. TFTim Ferriss43:15

       You have to renew your vows every-

    10. GBGreg Broadmore43:17

        Yeah, yeah, yeah

    11. TFTim Ferriss43:17

        ... two weeks. [laughs]

    12. GBGreg Broadmore43:18

        So I constantly think I'm two, two weeks away from being out of a job, but I like that.

    13. TFTim Ferriss43:22

        So I'm very curious, Greg, as Richard was mentioning earlier, sometimes you'll get a brief and you'll say, "Sorry, no can do." [laughs] "This is not something I can deliver." And then other times, something that Richard would think to be very complex gets turned around in two hours. And what I'm curious about in the former category, how do you know when something just is not in your wheelhouse, or how do you decide to respond with that type of answer where you're like, "Can't do it. Can't deliver this one"?

    14. GBGreg Broadmore43:53

        I don't know. I think I'd have to probably see an example 'cause I can't remember actually saying no. Here's what it is. If Richard or anyone asks me for something, if my brow really starts furrowing and won't unfurrow-

    15. TFTim Ferriss44:06

        Yeah

    16. GBGreg Broadmore44:06

        ... [laughs] then I know [laughs] this isn't gonna work.

    17. TFTim Ferriss44:10

        There's a problem. [laughs]

    18. RTRichard Taylor44:11

        I used to describe Greg as getting pinwheels in his eyes, right?

    19. TFTim Ferriss44:16

        [laughs]

    20. RTRichard Taylor44:16

        His eyes would just pinwheel like this, and I'd go, "This one's not for Greg." [laughs]

15. 44:22 – 46:09

    The David Deutsch influence: curiosity, fun, and learning.

    1. TFTim Ferriss44:22

       [laughs]

    2. GBGreg Broadmore44:22

       When I started listening to your podcast, the first one I listened to... Or actually I listened to one years ago, and I, and I absolutely loved it, but then I came back and I, I listened to one of David Deutsch and Naval Ravikant.

    3. TFTim Ferriss44:33

       Sure.

    4. GBGreg Broadmore44:33

       Right?

    5. TFTim Ferriss44:34

       Oh, yep.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore44:34

       And the David Deutsch one just blew my mind. I'm reading his books at the moment. I've become absolutely-

    7. TFTim Ferriss44:38

       Yeah

    8. GBGreg Broadmore44:38

       ... obsessed with him. There's something in his philosophy and his science that I totally resonate with. It's not like I've changed my opinion. It's, like, amplified my opinion.

    9. TFTim Ferriss44:49

       Mm-hmm.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore44:50

        And he talks about really finding the fun, chasing the fun, you know.

    11. TFTim Ferriss44:56

        Mm-hmm.

    12. GBGreg Broadmore44:56

        It's about finding really what inspires you, what interests you, and then when that feeling happens, you know you're gonna be able to solve that problem, or you have a chance of-

    13. TFTim Ferriss45:05

        Mm-hmm

    14. GBGreg Broadmore45:06

        ... solving that problem because you're motivated, you're interested. And finding that state of fun and creativity is the perfect way to learn 'cause you're motivated to learn and you'll overcome the challenges.

    15. TFTim Ferriss45:16

        Mm-hmm.

    16. GBGreg Broadmore45:16

        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 and again. And I get very bored very easily, so the things that I've already done before, I'm like, "Why do that? Let AI do that," you know? AI's already been-

    17. TFTim Ferriss45:30

        Mm-hmm

    18. GBGreg Broadmore45:30

        ... trained on that. That's, that's fine. It can do that. 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 90% of them in, in my opinion. I hope so, Richard. [laughs] I get excited. My brain ignites, and then I go like, "I wanna solve on that." And maybe, and I can't think of a good example... There's hopefully very few states where I just go, "I don't know why that would work." But I would also try and say why I think it doesn't work or why I can't solve it, and maybe, maybe even suggest why it shouldn't be solved and could be solved a different way. I always try and be constructive.

    19. RTRichard Taylor46:04

        Greg will always philosophize with me around

16. 46:09 – 47:50

    Philosophizing around art and creative problem-solving.

    1. RTRichard Taylor46:09

       art, right?

    2. TFTim Ferriss46:09

       Mm-hmm.

    3. RTRichard Taylor46:09

       It's one of the great benefits of our friendship, irrelevant of our working relationship, in that trying to find the purity of an idea requires a level of philosophical exploration.

    4. TFTim Ferriss46:26

       Hmm.

    5. RTRichard Taylor46:27

       Doesn't have to be highbrow by any means. I don't think me and Greg are capable of highbrow.

    6. TFTim Ferriss46:33

       [laughs]

    7. RTRichard Taylor46:34

       But it does require you looking inside yourself, and it does require a deep observational, inquisitive sort of journey through an idea together, and we do that amongst a small group of senior creatives within the building. It's actually, to me, one of the most joyful parts of my career, is that those conversations through relationship around creativity and what comes out of the end of them, right, which is really great.

    8. TFTim Ferriss47:06

       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?"

    9. RTRichard Taylor47:23

       I'd do a real meta example of it. So we know that we want to own and operate our own location-based experience because we're building them for other people. We don't really have an inkling to try and make a movie, but we know that we want to do something that's our own IP of our own experience. So how does the seed of the idea come to be?

17. 47:50 – 52:23

    How Wētā’s Gallipoli exhibition makes WWI relevant to modern museumgoers.

    1. RTRichard Taylor47:50

       And we've built an exhibition in downtown Wellington in our national museum called Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War.

    2. TFTim Ferriss47:58

       I saw it. Walked through it, yeah.

    3. RTRichard Taylor47:59

       Great. It tells the story of a First World War campaign fought by New Zealanders, relatively what would appear to a foreign visitor, relatively modest moment in history, but to New Zealand, a, 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, 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, myself and my colleague Rick came up with the grand idea in the first- Three hours that we sat together because we philosophized around what Gallipoli meant to the people in New Zealand, what the men must have felt, what the, you know, the realities of the situation. The next exhibition that we did for the same client, which they said, "We want to build an exhibition around bugs."

    4. TFTim Ferriss49:10

       Richard, could I pause you for one second? What was the great idea for Gallipoli? Like, what, what did you land on?

    5. RTRichard Taylor49:16

       The great idea is the realization that most people only think of a past military conquest as visualized and quickly fading memories through sepia-colored photographs of a time long past of people that no longer matter. That's sadly fact, right? And most museum exhibitions of military campaigns are told through statistics, told through the army, told through a meta-like view down on the war. Our grand idea, if you can call it that, is make pillars of the men of our past and present them in a hyperrealistic, larger-than-life scale in bell jars to give people the opportunity to learn the story of the whole campaign through the intimacy of the connection to eight people, seven soldiers and one nurse, and that was the grand idea and the technique of achieving that. Going back to Unleashed, the LBE that we've built in Auckland, the location-based experience in Auckland, we oscillated around the idea for a year. Sorry, I should have finished off Bug Lab was a five-month deadline as opposed to the eight months that we had to do Gallipoli. Three months in to Bug Lab, we still didn't have the grand idea. So we won't start until we have the grand idea, right? So it's very, very perilous and puts you on the very edge of potential failure because you are trying to find that grand idea. But without it, the work is a waste of time because it doesn't congeal around a central conceit. And with Unleashed, it took us a year of exploratory ideation and philosophical discussion till we landed on the incredibly obvious, but the thing that we really, really wanted to do and the story we wanted to tell. So that's a good example at a large scale, but that stuff is happening most days of the week-

    6. TFTim Ferriss51:42

       Mm-hmm

    7. RTRichard Taylor51:42

       ... as well on micro decision-making.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore51:45

       Can I just add some color to that? Because you, you brushed over it really quickly, that they're huge sculptures. Most exhibitions of war, as Richard says, or even history in general-

    9. TFTim Ferriss51:55

       This is for Gallipoli

    10. GBGreg Broadmore51:56

        ... yeah, they're either dioramas, small or recreations of soldiers at real scale and lots of photos and lots of documentation, right? And then you're kind of supposed to pore through the documentation. Sometimes they have a little bit of audio and, and video, but this is these huge people, hyperrealistic down to the pores.

    11. TFTim Ferriss52:14

        I remember looking at the pores when I first walked in, the sweat and the pores and the hair and the eyebrows.

    12. GBGreg Broadmore52:21

        Right, the sweat pouring down their brow.

18. 52:23 – 56:53

    Clothing giants and hitting deadlines.

    1. TFTim Ferriss52:23

       How large are these figures, would you say?

    2. RTRichard Taylor52:25

       Two and a half times life size.

    3. GBGreg Broadmore52:27

       Massive.

    4. RTRichard Taylor52:27

       The biggest that we've built at hyperrealism is eight times life size, so that's a 16-meter-tall figure if they were to stand, right? One and a half kilometers f- of fabric in their garments.

    5. GBGreg Broadmore52:40

       Even the fabric is scaled up, right?

    6. RTRichard Taylor52:42

       Right. Yeah.

    7. GBGreg Broadmore52:42

       Everything is scaled up.

    8. RTRichard Taylor52:44

       People are complimentary about the heads and the hands because they can rationalize that to their own skin and how we've scaled it up. The challenges of making the heads and the hands pales compared to making the different fabrics and components within the costuming.

    9. TFTim Ferriss53:03

       Yeah.

    10. RTRichard Taylor53:03

        Because to make a larger costume, you have to find a sheep with a two and a half times larger denier of hair density-

    11. TFTim Ferriss53:13

        Yeah

    12. RTRichard Taylor53:13

        ... to what was used for the real costume, and then you've got to loom it and then weave it, and then build it into costume. 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, that seems either obsessive or a waste of money and time." We take it to that degree because you are trying to pay a depth of respect to the memory of the people-

    13. TFTim Ferriss53:43

        Mm-hmm

    14. RTRichard Taylor53:43

        ... 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.

    15. TFTim Ferriss53:54

        Mm-hmm.

    16. RTRichard Taylor53:54

        So what is it to us to make that extra 10% to try and, you know, get it as good as we can possibly get it? A lovely thing with Gallipoli is over 4 million people have been through it now. Now, that may not seem a great number to people listening, but that's in a population of only 5 million people.

    17. TFTim Ferriss54:17

        [chuckles]

    18. RTRichard Taylor54:18

        So 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.

    19. GBGreg Broadmore54:26

        And Tim, you experienced it, but when you stand there under the people, it's very, very different. I don't think I've seen anything like that before. I didn't make it, so I, I can kind of hype it a little bit, I think.

    20. RTRichard Taylor54:36

        [laughs]

    21. GBGreg Broadmore54:36

        But I just got to wonder it as well and sit there and beneath these giant men characters, because they're hyperreal and the beautiful way it's all presented and lit, you feel a magnitude, right? Literally-

    22. TFTim Ferriss54:48

        Yeah

    23. GBGreg Broadmore54:48

        ... but emotionally. That's a very unusual approach. I think that idea on paper, hey, we'll make giant versions of these figures, it, it almost seems kind of weird and surreal, but it has an emotional impact that makes you feel the situation profoundly.

    24. TFTim Ferriss55:01

        Richard, did I hear you correctly? You said the deadline was eight months on that

    25. RTRichard Taylor55:04

        Yeah, we had eight months from first meeting with the board to delivery.

    26. TFTim Ferriss55:09

        That's nuts. I did not know that. Wow.

    27. RTRichard Taylor55:13

        Very few things we do has the luxury of time. So it could be argued if someone took an in-depth look in our company that it does not make good business and financial sense to carry the level of infrastructure that we do at a manufacturing level. We have 11 different divisions doing 17 different disciplines under the one roof, and so you've got experts that poised and ready to go. The reason-

    28. TFTim Ferriss55:47

        Mm-hmm

    29. RTRichard Taylor55:47

        ... for that, other than the fact we just love, you know, having that type of expertise and creativity along for the ride, is that we simply could not do many of the jobs that we do because the inability to turn on a dime, to react that quickly.

    30. TFTim Ferriss56:08

        Mm-hmm.
19. 56:53 – 1:04:47

    How Wētā attacked the massive scale of the Lord of the Rings project with a can-do attitude.

    1. RTRichard Taylor56:53

       basically. Yeah.

    2. TFTim Ferriss56:53

       Mm-hmm. Let me ask a question about process, and 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. First of all, kind of how that came to be, Richard, and then what some of the most crucial decisions were with respect to taking on a project of that scope. Because for a lot of companies, I could see that being the hug of death, where you suddenly go from reasonably moderately contained and small to sprawling, taking on so much responsibility, and many companies would implode. I've seen it happen many, many times. So how did, how did that come to be, and what were some of the most important decisions made that allowed you to grow the company and take that on?

    3. RTRichard Taylor57:50

       That's a really big q- question. I'll try and answer it in a very condensed way.

    4. TFTim Ferriss57:55

       We have time. [laughs]

    5. RTRichard Taylor57:57

       I just pulled this out, right?

    6. TFTim Ferriss57:59

       Yeah.

    7. RTRichard Taylor57:59

       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 very happy time, and everything, and it, and it glows if there are challenging clients in the corridor, so.

    8. TFTim Ferriss58:22

       [laughs] For people who can't see that, that is a sword. [laughs]

    9. RTRichard Taylor58:26

       Sorry, those that can't see it, here I'm showing all these visual aids, [laughs] 'cause that's how I think, in visual aids.

    10. TFTim Ferriss58:33

        Oh, it's okay. I'll drive people to the video, but just so they, they get the idea.

    11. RTRichard Taylor58:37

        I just held up the 1.48 times larger than life size Sting that's carried by Elijah Wood at his scale. I likened it to teetering towards the edge of a precipice. There's probably a much better visual metaphor than this, but... And you do this, you know, frequently in one's life. The decision to start a family, the decision to buy your first home or the home that you'll spend the rest of your life in, like my wife and I bought way back on Meet the Feebles, right? The decision to X, Y, and Z. But Peter Jackson offers this opportunity, and when he offered it, Tania 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, just as the human animal that we are, you've got a decision. You either step back from the edge and let others take up the slack and do it for you, and you follow, or you choose to leap, and you either will then slam into the bottom of the cliff and, uh, and make a mess with your guts and your brains everywhere, or you will actually arrest your fall through a number of different mechanisms. Self-belief being the most important one, right? I have four very simple tenets that I operate by and four tenets 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 gonna expect anyone else following you to see your virtues, right? So love, love of oneself is the first of those four tenets. And there is, mixed with that, as corny as it sounds, ignorance being your greatest ally.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:00:58

        [laughs]

    13. RTRichard Taylor1:00:59

        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, uh, "Work is more fun than fun."

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:01:15

        [chuckles]

    15. RTRichard Taylor1:01:16

        And people that don't understand that struggle. Even if you're in a low-level position that you're not really enjoying, you can still make the people that you work with really fun, right? I used to clean toilets on international airplanes, but man, the people I worked with, right? 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. [laughs]

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:01:47

        [laughs]

    17. RTRichard Taylor1:01:47

        Right? You can turn anything into fun.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:01:49

        [laughs]

    19. RTRichard Taylor1:01:51

        We needed 158 crew working for seven and a half years on 48,000 separate things to deliver those five divisions to the trilogy of movies. Our work's in 98 to 99% 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 a inexperienced crew. You're highly inexperienced yourself. We'd done Hercules and Xena at the time, and we'd had a career of about eight to 10 years doing Peter's films. Peter, of course, is a inspiration in his own right, and highly knowledgeable, so he's helping as well. But 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." Right? 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, 12 and a half million links over three and a half years.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:03:05

        [laughs]

    21. RTRichard Taylor1:03:06

        And chain mail is only as good as how well you glue the top link on your shoulder, and whether 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 didn't require... 'Cause 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. So there is this intense can-do attitude-

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:03:47

        Mm.

    23. RTRichard Taylor1:03:47

        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, 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-

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:04:20

        Mm.

    25. RTRichard Taylor1:04:20

        Was really important to us. To meet Peter Jackson's vision was really important, and to make sure that we had really good fun. That didn't mean that it wasn't brutally challenging. It was. But at no point in the seven and a half years did I ever think that I didn't want to be doing it, and that was really special part of that experience. Yeah, work is more fun than fun.

20. 1:04:47 – 1:07:00

    Richard’s four tenets (plus one bonus tenet).

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:04:47

       What are the other tenets? You mentioned four.

    2. RTRichard Taylor1:04:49

       Love of oneself, love of what you do, love of who you do it with, and love of who you do it for. And that, as a father of a family, as a husband or partner to a loved one, a father or mother to a family, a president of a country, a CEO of a business, if you can't find those four tenets, obviously the first one, love of yourself, love of what you do. You've gotta love being a parent. You've gotta love being a lover, a husband, a wife, a partner. You have to love the people that you do it for. It is so easy to become cynical about your audience or your fans or your family or the person working above you, right? But that's who you're trying to keep captured up in your passion for what you do. And the other one's very obvious. So yeah, that's how I think of things very simply, and that's after 30-plus years of working, it started to congeal that that's thinking about all these things that you might think about, that's the things that drive you forward. I think I've settled on those four simple... And try not to be a dickhead.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:06:05

       [laughs]

    4. RTRichard Taylor1:06:07

       Is maybe the fifth. There are thousands of self-help books. I've actually only read one of them. I can't remember the title even.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:06:16

       [laughs]

    6. RTRichard Taylor1:06:17

       But someone said to me once, "You only need a one-page book on self-help, and there's only one line, and it just says, 'Just don't be a dickhead.'" Right?

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:06:27

       [laughs]

    8. RTRichard Taylor1:06:27

       And if you put that against almost anything in life, it's actually correct if we understand collectively what being a dickhead means. And no doubt I fall foul of that, and invariably sometimes. You know, we all are. It's very hard to not be.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:06:45

       [laughs]

    10. RTRichard Taylor1:06:46

        But you try really hard not to be. Eh, Greg?

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:06:49

        Yeah. Trying, always. [laughs]

    12. RTRichard Taylor1:06:53

        Trying. Have I answered your question well enough? I've sort of been a bit fringed around the outsides of it a little bit.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:06:59

        You did.

21. 1:07:00 – 1:10:08

    The unique advantages of operating in New Zealand.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:07:00

       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 in genders. 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?

    2. RTRichard Taylor1:07:27

       Yeah. And please, Tim, when I'm talking, I'm talking about Wētā Workshop. We were a small component of the overarching endeavor of making Lord of the Rings, right?

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:07:41

       Sure.

    4. RTRichard Taylor1:07:41

       We're very proud of the piece we played, and we did a lot on it. But the art department, the costuming department, the props department, the camera department, the grips department, the directing department, et cetera, et cetera, the miniatures. There was phenomenal number of people all focused on the same mission. And I've actually said in the past, Lord of the Rings wasn't made by a director. It wasn't made by a film studio, and it 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-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:08:15

       Sure

    6. RTRichard Taylor1:08:15

       ... in New Zealand for the world.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:08:16

       Mm-hmm.

    8. RTRichard Taylor1:08:16

       That speaks to the phenomenal number of people that Peter and his producer drew into the collaboration of making Lord of the Rings.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:08:26

       The government, the military, right? I mean, the whole country was behind it.

    10. RTRichard Taylor1:08:29

        The government, the military, our tourism department. You would have to have been pretty cynical at the time to have not have felt a certain level of pride in what Peter was trying to do in our country and get behind it, right? And a lot of people benefited because of it. The driving desire to that term punch above your weight, I don't specifically like that term, but that's a well-used one that speaks to it. New Zealanders do have a burning desire to try and achieve great things regardless of where we may come from and the scale of our country. That should not restrict you at all, and you only need to look at our sports teams to see that. But whether it's our, our national ballet orchestra, contemporary dance, poets, writers, painters, artists in general, never mind the film industry or the creative industries. We have technology companies in New Zealand that are competing with the best in the world, Rocket Lab comes to mind, that are doing astounding things on a fraction of the budget. You know, the robots that we're building in our workshop right now probably at a 500th to a 1000th of the investment cost of some of the robots that we're seeing online, but we're pulling it off. We're getting there. Slowly, but getting there with five people and, you know, the money that we can save from projects we're doing. It's that attitude I think that plays a big part of

22. 1:10:08 – 1:13:48

    The unwavering self-belief of Peter Jackson’s leadership style.

    1. RTRichard Taylor1:10:08

       it. Peter Jackson mustn't be missed in this equation too. His self-belief and his just sheer drive. I've never, ever seen Peter quiver in uncertainty, to fluctuate in a sense of uncertainty that he isn't sure of what he's doing. That is an amazing thing to work around.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:10:35

       Hmm.

    3. RTRichard Taylor1:10:36

       Because if your leader's confident, then, you know. 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," right? And I think there is a mentality of that very much in our country. You just gotta knuckle down and do it, right? Grit is a important component in the journey, not the accolades at the end. It's the task of getting there that is seen as equal an accomplishment as winning baubles.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:11:16

       Quick follow-up on never seeing Peter fluctuate in uncertainty. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. Is it because in your perception he's very clear on the right thing to do and/or is he also very good at identifying things that can be fixed later? In other words, he moves very quickly and values fast decision-making with incomplete information over trying to get complete information. I don't know if that's a coherent question, but could you expand a bit on why you think he's able to do that?

    5. RTRichard Taylor1:11:54

       It's a hard question because not to be disingenuous in any way to Peter because he is an extraordinary human being, a filmmaker, et cetera. But of course he's, he makes mistakes. He leads things possibly in a, in a challenging way. I'm not actually speaking to the outcome as much as the sense of self-belief and confidence that he's got it.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:12:28

       Mm-hmm.

    7. RTRichard Taylor1:12:28

       He knows what's right for him, and he knows where to go with it. And maybe others have seen him, but as close as I've had the pleasure of working with him at times through my career, I've not walked into a meeting, which I do in front of my own colleagues here at the workshop. I'll go, "Guys, you know, with this one I'm not completely sure where we should go with this. Could we talk it through? Could we philosophize on it? Could we..." Peter doesn't need to do that, right? He'll come to us and say, "I, I can't yet visualize it. 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 most of the ways film is made. If he had 1,000 years, he could have made Lord of the Rings himself, so [laughs]

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:13:32

       [laughs]

    9. RTRichard Taylor1:13:33

       My assistant Ree is just trying to catch my eye to let me know.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:13:37

        Yep. Do you have to exit stage left?

    11. RTRichard Taylor1:13:40

        I gotta bug out very quickly. Sorry. Yeah.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:13:42

        Okay. No problem. No problem at all. Do we have time for 60 seconds?

    13. RTRichard Taylor1:13:45

        Yes.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:13:45

        One last quick question?

    15. RTRichard Taylor1:13:47

        Of course. Of course.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:13:47

        Okay.

    17. RTRichard Taylor1:13:47

        Yeah, of course.

23. 1:13:48 – 1:16:48

    Richard’s advice for anyone seeking to cultivate their own creativity.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:13:48

       So you mentioned creating creators, making makers, and also inspiring kids, and I'm curious, for people listening, if they wanted to be more creative, to lay their 10 digits into making something, are there any resources, books, exercises, anything you'd suggest they start with?

    2. RTRichard Taylor1:14:08

       Obviously today with the internet, there's a near infinite source of extraordinary training videos. I'm doing some sculpting of my own at home at the moment, and while I'm sculpting, I just have a video playing, not that I can watch the video because I'm sculpting, but just listen to a guy that's talking through doing his own sculpture.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:14:28

       Hmm.

    4. RTRichard Taylor1:14:29

       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 attribute of creativity is to be inquisitive, right?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:14:45

       Hmm.

    6. RTRichard Taylor1:14:45

       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.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:14:56

       Hmm.

    8. RTRichard Taylor1:14:56

       They don't find beauty and curiosity in the simplest of things. If you find it in yourself to start finding extraordinary lessons and beauty and inspiration in most, if not everything around you, specifically the simplest things, like ... What's a good example? There was that great American movie that came out with Annette Bening with the dancing plastic bag that was caught in the wind.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:15:30

       Hmm. Oh, is that American Beauty maybe?

    10. GBGreg Broadmore1:15:32

        That's right. Yeah, yeah.

    11. RTRichard Taylor1:15:33

        American Beauty, right? We've all seen bits of plastic caught in the eddies of a wafting wind in the corner of a building or in a rubbish bin or whatever, but that director remembered it, captured it, and shared it because his inquisitive mind loved it, and it became ... Like, my mind has instantly gone to that image when I've been trying to visualize how to answer your question because it resounded so fundamentally with me. And then there's only one thing that you can do, is just start making.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:16:09

        Mm-hmm.

    13. RTRichard Taylor1:16:09

        It doesn't matter what the medium is. We have people turn up to interview with me, and you can see that they're slightly bashful. And I say, "Well, what do you do?" And they will go, "Well, I do macrame," or as you guys call it macrame I think.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:16:27

        [laughs] Yeah.

    15. RTRichard Taylor1:16:28

        Well, macrame is about hand skills, dexterity, eye-to-hand coordination, pattern, weaving, color combinations, strength, engineering, et cetera, et cetera. All these things add up. That person is possibly exactly someone [laughs] that we'd want to hire. And it doesn't matter

24. 1:16:48 – 1:18:04

    Artistic immortality: leaving a creative legacy.

    1. RTRichard Taylor1:16:48

       what the craft is, just start making something. Leave something behind, right? You know, if you think about who are the true immortals in the world, they're teachers and parents, people that pass information to others to carry on into the next generation. But I do think about artists as craftspeople as being creatively immortal. Like, this is not a prop. This is an artifact to me.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:17:16

       Mm-hmm.

    3. RTRichard Taylor1:17:17

       'Cause it will carry on and bring joy long after I'm dead. So the sword maker that made that imbued it with creative immortality.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:17:28

       Hmm.

    5. RTRichard Taylor1:17:28

       And to me, that's a good place to be as a human. Ree is losing her wig as she [laughs]

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:17:35

       Yeah. [laughs]

    7. GBGreg Broadmore1:17:36

       [laughs]

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:17:36

       Thank you, Ree. Thank you, Ree.

    9. GBGreg Broadmore1:17:38

       Thank you, Ree. Nice to see you.

    10. RTRichard Taylor1:17:39

        I, I, I showed her action of telling me to hurry up.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:17:41

        [laughs]

    12. GBGreg Broadmore1:17:44

        [laughs]

    13. RTRichard Taylor1:17:45

        She's getting a little bit ...

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:17:46

        All right, Greg, you and I have lots, lots left to talk about, but, uh, Richard-

    15. RTRichard Taylor1:17:49

        Well, I'll leave you with Greg now. It'll give Greg a chance to get a word in after I blabbed for most of this.

    16. GBGreg Broadmore1:17:55

        No, I, I'm learning. I'm sitting here. I, I love it actually.

    17. RTRichard Taylor1:17:58

        And bye.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:17:58

        [laughs]

    19. RTRichard Taylor1:17:58

        Thank you, Tim. Good night.

    20. GBGreg Broadmore1:18:01

        Bye.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:18:02

        Thank you, Richard.

25. 1:18:04 – 1:22:48

    Greg explains the retro sci-fi angle behind his Dr. Grordbort’s and ray gun projects.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:18:04

       So Greg, finally, alone at last.

    2. GBGreg Broadmore1:18:07

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:18:10

       Let's talk about some of your projects that are, I suppose, Greg projects as much as anything else, and how you chose them, why you chose them.

    4. GBGreg Broadmore1:18:22

       Mm-hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:18:23

       And let's begin with vintage inspired ray guns in 2006. Where did that lead? And then I certainly have questions about more recent projects, but let's start there.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore1:18:37

       Yeah, the ray guns. Well, that's a childhood inspiration. I was born in 1972. I'm 53, I think. Is that right? Done the math?

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:18:44

       Sounds about right.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore1:18:45

       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 s- those things are seared into my, like, four, five, six-year-old mind. And so when Star Wars came along, it was like all that stuff in Technicolor and high definition and-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:19:01

       Mm-hmm

    10. GBGreg Broadmore1:19:01

        ... the sound and the music and everything. But there's always been this kind of love for retro science fiction in there, and so the ray guns came from that love really of Flash Gordon. But in a way it's not really science fiction. Science fiction I like to think of as, it's actually very cle- 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. Dr. Grordbort's and the ray guns was not really about that actually. It's a veneer of science fiction, right? Technology and-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:19:31

        Mm-hmm

    12. GBGreg Broadmore1:19:31

        ... weapons and spaceships, but it's actually a satire making fun of our current culture and that culture and that world, and also making fun of how science fiction and science in general gets things wrong.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:19:42

        How did you decide to do that? And I want you to tell people more about it, but how did you decide to do that, right? We all have finite time, and people listening when they're [laughs] listening to you and Richard, they're like, "Good God." I mean, they can't keep track of the number of, of projects and so on.

    14. GBGreg Broadmore1:19:59

        Yeah.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:19:59

        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-

    16. GBGreg Broadmore1:20:06

        Yeah

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:20:06

        ... necessarily decide on the destinations. But how did you decide to go after that saga specifically and create that?

    18. GBGreg Broadmore1:20:15

        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 I started painting them, and I found it so intriguing I thought I could draw a thousand ray guns. I could just keep on drawing them. Just drawing a ray gun. By the way, a whole world came out of it with characters and everything, but I could just draw a thousand ray guns. Like there's infinite variations. And so the creative potential in that just caught me. I did these nine, they're up on my wall over here, these nine illustrations. But really the decision to keep going is Richard.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:20:47

        How did you tip over that domino of the ray guns? Like what was the germ? Because you alluded to it, right? But-

    20. GBGreg Broadmore1:20:52

        Yeah

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:20:53

        ... it's always interesting to me when you end up with like an immersive world, where did it start?

    22. GBGreg Broadmore1:20:57

        Mm-hmm.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:20:57

        Right? So maybe you could tell that story.

    24. GBGreg Broadmore1:21:00

        That's Richard fanning the flames. I had done these nine paintings just for myself because I love ray guns-

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:21:05

        Ray guns

    26. GBGreg Broadmore1:21:05

        ... and I put them on the wall. Ray guns, yeah. 1930s style classic ray guns. There's something beautiful and arcane about them that I really love, and silly at the same time. But just as King Kong was finishing, one of the businesses we have is collectibles, but we don't own any of the IP that we make collectibles from generally. 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.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:21:35

        Sure.

    28. GBGreg Broadmore1:21:35

        So Richard wanted to do our own IP. So he put the word out out to the entire workshop and said, "Has anyone got any creative ideas for collectibles?" You know? And I was doing those ray guns so it was perfect timing. I was like, "Richard, we should make these ray guns. Look at that." Right? And luckily for me, he got the idea straight away. He saw it and we almost said the same thing at the same time. "We should make these as real. They'll be metal. 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 had this vision that like we'd even cover them in dust and put moths in there, [laughs] right?

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:22:08

        [laughs]

    30. GBGreg Broadmore1:22:08

        And they are all stained and aged. We didn't go as far as putting the moths and the dust on. But you make them dusty and old and then you put them in your loft or whatever so that you can pull them out and say, "Look, this was Granddad's ray gun. He fought in the Martian Wars right back in the day."
26. 1:22:48 – 1:30:17

    The metaphysics of creative direction.

    1. GBGreg Broadmore1:22:48

       naivety.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:22:49

       So it went from ray guns to inventor of the ray guns.

    3. GBGreg Broadmore1:22:53

       Yeah.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:22:54

       And then what came after that?

    5. GBGreg Broadmore1:22:56

       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-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:23:03

       Mm

    7. GBGreg Broadmore1:23:03

       ... that you've picked up along the way and that just ignites your information. But then if you've created it, the, all these sort of why questions-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:23:09

       Mm-hmm

    9. GBGreg Broadmore1:23:09

       ... start coming from it. So if you've got these ray guns, who, who made them? Why did they make them?

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:23:14

        Mm-hmm.

    11. GBGreg Broadmore1:23:14

        What are they for? Right? And your imagination starts presenting answers to that. I think about this a lot, why, why choose any creative direction? And 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 kind of know where you're gonna go, you know the ending.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:23:36

        Mm-hmm.

    13. GBGreg Broadmore1:23:36

        And the other way, which I've discovered I do more often than not, is I am just chasing these why questions-

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:23:44

        Mm-hmm

    15. GBGreg Broadmore1:23:44

        ... getting your imagination to giving you answers back, and you following with the one that is most profound to you, that makes you feel the most.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:23:52

        Mm-hmm.

    17. GBGreg Broadmore1:23:53

        It must make sense logically to you but it also must ma- 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, "Well that must be the way." And so you're taking all these choices as they pop up and present themselves to you.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:24:08

        Yeah.

    19. GBGreg Broadmore1:24:08

        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 kinds of things all from that process of just chasing the right thing and having Richard being the one going like, "Do more, do more, do more." [laughs]

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:24:26

        So I was actually just having a conversation a few weeks ago in Utah with the fiction mostly fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson-

    21. GBGreg Broadmore1:24:35

        Mm

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:24:35

        ... and he was discussing exactly in different terms but these two stylistic options-

    23. GBGreg Broadmore1:24:45

        Yeah

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:24:45

        ... right? Or creative approaches and I think, can't recall exactly the terms he used but it was something like the improviser and the architect, right?

    25. GBGreg Broadmore1:24:53

        Mm-hmm.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:24:53

        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.

    27. GBGreg Broadmore1:25:10

        Mm-hmm.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:25:10

        They start with that germ of an idea and then-

    29. GBGreg Broadmore1:25:13

        Yeah

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:25:13

        ... they see where the tree branches but they don't know where they're gonna end up-
27. 1:30:17 – 1:34:20

    How Greg’s new book, One Path, came about.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:30:17

       for sure.

    2. GBGreg Broadmore1:30:17

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:30:18

       So the new book.

    4. GBGreg Broadmore1:30:19

       Yeah.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:30:19

       Tell us about the new book and how, how you ended up deciding on this as a project to put your energies into.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore1:30:25

       Yeah, that's One Path. [chuckles]

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:30:28

       There it is. Pretty. It's my first time seeing it. It's my first time seeing it in this form.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore1:30:32

       Yeah, it came out good. This is a soft cover.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:30:36

       I saw the early digital way back, but that is gorgeous.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore1:30:40

        It came out really, really good. I'm very, very happy with it. I've wo- gone with a publisher called Mad Cave, who I didn't know before, but they've been fantastic. So I started our game studio. I was one of the few people at Wētā Workshop that had a real keen interest in games, and I wanted to make our own games. And really luckily for us, we partnered up. This guy, Rony Abovitz, came along into our lives, who started Magic Leap, a company that make 3D goggles, AR goggles. They call them spatial computing. And we started a studio through them, and he was massively supportive of me. And 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 really proud of them. They were great. They're very pioneering and very challenging and but sadly for us, not that many people saw them. Magic Leap only got to a certain level and needed more funding, and then COVID came along. And luckily, Magic Leap managed to limp its way through and is now continuing on, which is great for them, and hopefully they continue to grow and get back to strength. But they were massively punched in the guts and it, my whole team was gone almost overnight.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:31:51

        Yeah.

    12. GBGreg Broadmore1:31:52

        It was crushing. You know, all the speculative money, as you'd know, sucked up at that moment and went into the safe things.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:31:58

        Yeah.

    14. GBGreg Broadmore1:31:58

        Which is totally understandable. It went into traditional games and it went into food and, you know, all the basics that we actually need when we're in a crisis. But it disappeared from Magic Leap's endeavor at that time. And so I actually had games halfway through production, some almost entirely finished.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:32:12

        Brutal.

    16. GBGreg Broadmore1:32:13

        Yeah, dude. And so it was a real emotional punch in the guts for me. And so we all went home, and I actually sat here thinking about, "Well, what next?" And so I handed over reins of the game studio. I didn't really wanna make traditional games. I was so in love with making the kind of wild and crazy technological things that Magic Leap was aspiring to do that I kinda went back to basics. I thought, I, I need to go back and do something that I can do on my own. I also discovered about myself that maybe I should take a break from running a big team. It's an amazing thing that someone like Richard can do, to have so many people, 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, a lover of dinosaurs. I grew up in a very dinosaur-y kind of place in the bush, and so this world of cave women and dinosaurs has been in my head for years, and it kinda 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, you know, I had these very primal thoughts of this, 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 that 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, you know?

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:33:38

        Mm-hmm.

    18. GBGreg Broadmore1:33:39

        That said, I have two other writers, Andy Lane and Nick Boscia, who co-authored it with me, and they really helped me to sort of shape it and put a lot more depth into it.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:33:48

        But to your point, you knew that it couldn't be taken away, right? In a sense.

    20. GBGreg Broadmore1:33:52

        And I thought, "I can do this. I don't need to hire 20 people to do this. I can do this all on my own." And emotionally, it became a story about technology and about collapse and about, you know, being back to basics. I think going from such a technological world, working with Magic Leap who are doing the most highfalutin, crazy stuff, and thinking about that every day, about what the future of computing could be, to like, "No, I'm gonna work on dinosaurs and blood [laughs] and gore and people living at the edge of survival," that's what really motivated it. And so,

28. 1:34:20 – 1:36:18

    Tools Greg used for conceptualizing One Path.

    1. GBGreg Broadmore1:34:20

       yeah.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:34:20

       What was the set of tools that you used and when you were originally concepting this and working on layout and so on? Were you doing the majority of it in Photoshop? What did the, the set of tools look like?

    3. GBGreg Broadmore1:34:34

       So I tend to draw first, mainly in pencil, and then go into Photoshop from there if it's interesting. But the first thing was really conversations. I would be having conversations with my co-authors just bouncing back, and it was really just percolating my ideas in the broadest possible sense of everything that could happen, why the world-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:34:51

       Mm

    5. GBGreg Broadmore1:34:51

       ... would be the way it was and everything and all the ingredients. And then some idea, you know, really catches your mind and I can see a spark of it, see a little vision, and then it's like, "Okay, I'm gonna draw that. I'm gonna draw that moment." And then I started drawing a bunch of those moments, that some of them went on to become key plot points in the story. And other things are more matter of fact of like, well, I, I know there's a character. It's named One Path, after this character called One Path, and so I needed to see her and it... You know, your mind's kinda searching around for who, who she really is, so that's an exercise unto itself. I need to draw her. Normally in a film, that would be conceptual design. You might draw 100 versions of her. But for me, luckily-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:35:31

       Mm

    7. GBGreg Broadmore1:35:31

       ... because I'm creating it, I just like draw one drawing and I know that's her, you know?

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:35:35

       Yeah.

    9. GBGreg Broadmore1:35:36

       And in 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, 'cause in a film, you know, you need to design every single thing and every single place because it's gonna go on and someone's gonna actually have to build it.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:35:54

        Mm-hmm.

    11. GBGreg Broadmore1:35:54

        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 the 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? Do you wanna move further into it? Do you wanna explore

29. 1:36:18 – 1:37:42

    Where the curious can see more of Greg’s work.

    1. GBGreg Broadmore1:36:18

       more?

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:36:18

       What are the best places for people to visit? Or maybe a better way to phrase the question is, how can people get a taste of your artwork and storytelling? That certainly includes One Path, so you can give people an idea of where and when they will be able to get that. But also if they wanna get a taste for the many flavors Greg Broadmore [laughs] ... I don't know. Wording's a little awkward, but you get the idea.

    3. GBGreg Broadmore1:36:43

       Yeah.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:36:44

       Where should they go?

    5. GBGreg Broadmore1:36:45

       I've just actually released a new website at long, long last, gregbroadmore.com. My partner made it for me. I've always just relied on Blogspot and Instagram and all that kinda stuff, never actually had done a decent website. So finally I've got a good website and it's got a bunch of content up there actually. And I'm also on Instagram. But yeah, it's probably not comprehensive, but it's got a ton of my work.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:37:06

       And then One Path, what's the timeline and how are people going to be able to get it?

    7. GBGreg Broadmore1:37:12

       One Path. Yeah, so One Path comes out April the 8th. That's like a month from now.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:37:16

       That is very soon.

    9. GBGreg Broadmore1:37:17

       I don't know when you release this-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:37:18

        Yeah

    11. GBGreg Broadmore1:37:18

        ... but, yeah, hopefully very soon for your audience.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:37:20

        Within a few weeks of recording this.

    13. GBGreg Broadmore1:37:22

        Yeah.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:37:22

        Mm-hmm.

    15. GBGreg Broadmore1:37:22

        And it's a 200-page book, but there's actually three more books all together. There'll be four books in total, each about the same size.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:37:28

        Mm-hmm.

    17. GBGreg Broadmore1:37:29

        I've already been doing it for like... When was the pandemic? When did that start? I've lost track of time already.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:37:33

        Boy, 2020. Yeah.

    19. GBGreg Broadmore1:37:35

        2020. It's been five years. I feel like I've 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.

30. 1:37:42 – 1:39:11

    How many destinations does Greg imagine One Path will reach?

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:37:42

       Yeah. That's wild. 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?

    2. GBGreg Broadmore1:37:54

       I've really pushed that stuff away actually. I work, as you know, in the world of film and video games and so on, so everyone would ask me, "You're making a new IP. Is it gonna be a game? Is it gonna be merchandise? Is it gonna be film?" And so on. And actually, I was completely uninterested in that, and I don't know why. I'm not being dismissive of those things 'cause I've made them-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:38:13

       Mm-hmm

    4. GBGreg Broadmore1:38:13

       ... and helped make some of those sorts of things. But I realize 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. I would just, you know, run the simulation in your head. There's gonna be nudity in this book, right?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:38:28

       Yeah. Mm.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore1:38:29

       If I think this creative world has to solve these other paradigms, film, games, whatever-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:38:34

       Mm-hmm

    8. GBGreg Broadmore1:38:34

       ... then I know I have to curtail some of the decisions.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:38:37

       You'll start censoring.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore1:38:38

        Yeah, yeah.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:38:39

        Or you'll start editing.

    12. GBGreg Broadmore1:38:41

        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 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 gonna think about those things at all. In fact, if I'm honest, I was almost a little disdainful. I was like, "No, this is a comic book. This is, like, pure, baby," you know? [laughs]

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:39:07

        [laughs]

    14. GBGreg Broadmore1:39:08

        I should say graphic novel. That's the grown-up word for it, but I still call them comics.

31. 1:39:11 – 1:44:50

    Why working on District 9 was often frustrating, but ultimately rewarding.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:39:11

       Yeah, graphic novel. The tuxedo.

    2. GBGreg Broadmore1:39:13

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:39:13

       The sort of black tie version of the comic book.

    4. GBGreg Broadmore1:39:16

       Yeah.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:39:16

       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 Wētā Workshop, can you think of an example of something that was particularly hard to pull off that you ended up being very proud of? I'm just deeply-

    6. GBGreg Broadmore1:39:39

       Mm

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:39:39

       ... interested in following you through that journey, having you tell a story of any project that comes to mind.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore1:39:45

       The one that resonates for me is District 9. I got to work on District 9, which was Neill Blomkamp's debut film. I'll tell you the whole arc of that and jump into a couple moments from it, but I know other people had this experience. It started as Halo, and actually we started working on Halo, sort of a feature film adaptation of the video game, amazing video game. It started there with no director. And so Richard just said, "You know, we might be working on this. Peter's trying to produce it. He's gonna try and find someone. Let's just go." And we don't have a script. We don't have anything. We just have the game.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:40:18

       Mm-hmm.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore1:40:18

        And so we actually spent a long time creatively exploring that, and then we met Neill Blomkamp. That was a revelation. I had my doubts about that as a film 'cause I thought, "It's a great game, but, you know, how can this be a film?" I wasn't even quite sure. But then when Neill 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 gonna be amazing." But then all of a sudden one day that whole film fell over.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:40:47

        Now at the time, just for context, at the time, what had you been brought on to do exactly?

    12. GBGreg Broadmore1:40:53

        I was doing concept design. What Workshop would've done, I don't know, but the aspiration would've been to make many of the props and vehicles. In fact, we were making a Warthog.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:41:00

        Mm-hmm.

    14. GBGreg Broadmore1:41:00

        Yeah, we were making many, many elements of the physical aspects of the film. But the whole thing fell over. I poured my heart into that film. I had worked so hard and loved the work that I'd done, and none of it will ever be seen. It's all locked away.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:41:13

        Ugh.

    16. GBGreg Broadmore1:41:14

        I'd done hundreds of drawings and my friends had 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.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:41:22

        Mm.

    18. GBGreg Broadmore1:41:23

        And then one day you're depressed, and then the next day you're just like, "Well, gotta keep on going," right? You get up and move on to the next thing. And then all of a sudden the idea of District 9 came along and we'd seen Alive in Joburg as short. That was the basis for that. And that was like, "This is even more exciting," right? No disrespect to Halo, but 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 Neill has a crazy imagination, so this is gonna be fun. And it was. But Neill, 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 is happy to change course immediately if he feels like that's not working, right? 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 exo-suit robot and we designed a full organic alien that I really loved. It was like it was 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. But I had my own little doubts about parts of it but I really liked it. And we even went so far as to build a huge prop and ship it to South Africa and they shot scenes with Sharlto Copley in the thing. So I'm like, "This is cool." And then all of a sudden Neill just changes his mind, right? 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 at the end of Halo of being like, "Ugh," right? My design that I poured months into that my friends built is just, that's nothing. That's just air now. Goodbye. And then you have to like snap yourself out of it. You cannot be depressed. You can't be bummed. You just gotta be like, "Okay, now I've got this new problem to solve. I've gotta figure out what this next version is." And I think I probably did like 30 designs in the course of a week, right?

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:43:25

        [laughs]

    20. GBGreg Broadmore1:43:25

        Just working my ass off to 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.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:43:33

        Mm-hmm.

    22. GBGreg Broadmore1:43:33

        It's the wolf at your back. And the thing that came out of it was even better, right? Neill was absolutely right.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:43:39

        Mm.

    24. GBGreg Broadmore1:43:40

        He got the thing that solved the creative problem that was this threatening, scary, but also super power for Sharlto to wield. And by the way, for someone else's experience, the guy who designed the aliens is a friend of mine, David Meng, amazing sculptor. He had a similar experience where he worked for months on an alien design and we made it as prosthetics. It was all gonna be prosthetics. You put guys in suits and then they walk around wearing these alien prosthetics. He sculpted this beautiful design- Beautiful prosthetic. They painted it, sent it South Africa, and then Neil went like, "Doesn't work." [laughs]

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:44:11

        Did Neil give reasons, or was it just a very simple, "Doesn't work. We need something else"?

    26. GBGreg Broadmore1:44:17

        I can't remember. In my mind, it's just, "Doesn't work."

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:44:19

        [laughs]

    28. GBGreg Broadmore1:44:20

        Neil doesn't have a lot of fluff. He may have given more, I can't remember. But anyway, I saw in Dave what I felt, right, which is this like, "Ugh."

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:44:27

        Oh, yeah. [laughs]

    30. GBGreg Broadmore1:44:29

        He had made a Fabergé egg of astonishing detail-
32. 1:44:50 – 1:51:47

    How can an artist maintain a healthy detachment from their own work?

    1. GBGreg Broadmore1:44:50

       so.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:44:50

       So I wanna hear more about this. I wanna dig into this psychological resilience piece a little bit, because I've spent time with a lot of artists. You certainly have spent time with more artists. But it's easy for an artist, whether that person is a visual artist or a writer or otherwise, to get attached to their darlings.

    3. GBGreg Broadmore1:45:10

       Yeah.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:45:10

       Right? To get very attached.

    5. GBGreg Broadmore1:45:11

       Mm-hmm.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:45:12

       It's incredibly understandable. And then I recall distinctly, this is a few years ago, I think maybe it was t- uh, two years ago, and I did my first creative sprint, coming back to what I wanna do more of, with a number of concept artists who'd done a lot of work for Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering. Really incredible with fantasy concept art, but also really fully fleshed out covers of, you name it, any iconic player's handbook, et cetera, from D&D or otherwise. Like, they'd just created these masterpieces. But what struck me most was not their capabilities. It was two aspects. They were both good at quality, but exceptionally good at speed. So number one, it was just the speed-

    7. GBGreg Broadmore1:46:01

       Mm-hmm

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:46:01

       ... 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.

    9. GBGreg Broadmore1:46:09

       Mm-hmm.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:46:09

        And then smashing out ideas. But the characteristic that stuck out to me most, and I don't know if this is born or built, so that's what I wanna ask you about, is how unattached they were.

    11. GBGreg Broadmore1:46:22

        Huh.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:46:22

        They would produce so much work. And I was working with, let's just say, a project manager. We were all in person, like, shacked up in the middle of the countryside at this hotel just to do this work-

    13. GBGreg Broadmore1:46:33

        Yeah

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:46:33

        ... on this fantasy world that [laughs] has been kinda renamed. Initially it was The Legend of Cockpunch. [laughs]

    15. GBGreg Broadmore1:46:40

        [laughs]

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:46:40

        Long story, but later, Legends of Varlata, and could actually be modified very easily to be a serious, viable, full-blown fantasy world-

    17. GBGreg Broadmore1:46:51

        Yeah

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:46:51

        ... which might be something I explore. But the reason I bring it up is I would have a decent idea of what I wanted to do, 'cause I also grew up collecting comics, wanted to be a comic book penciler, so I think very visually. But they were accustomed to having 70-plus percent of their stuff X'd out by-

    19. GBGreg Broadmore1:47:13

        Mm

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:47:13

        ... IP holders.

    21. GBGreg Broadmore1:47:14

        Mm-hmm.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:47:14

        Right? And starting over, and they were so unfazed by it. It stuck with me ever since my first day watching them be so unattached. And I brought up the project manager because he's done, uh ... Actually, I have his new book here.

    23. GBGreg Broadmore1:47:28

        Love to see it.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:47:28

        So one of them was Adam Lee, and you can see here, this is-

    25. GBGreg Broadmore1:47:34

        Oh, yeah

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:47:34

        ... Worlds and Realms.

    27. GBGreg Broadmore1:47:36

        Classic.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:47:37

        Dungeons & Dragons. It runs through basically 50 years of gameplay and different worlds within the D&D ecosystem. But he and his writing partner both said to me, they're like, "Be super blunt. You don't have to wear kid gloves [laughs] and dance around it." They're like, "If you don't like something, just say you don't like it."

    29. GBGreg Broadmore1:47:55

        Yeah.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:47:55

        And it was very, very hard to do because I get so attached-
33. 1:51:47 – 2:00:28

    Greg’s inspirations.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:51:47

       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? Now, that could be the aesthetic. 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-

    2. GBGreg Broadmore1:52:15

       Yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:52:16

       ... influences or inspirations, whether past tense or current.

    4. GBGreg Broadmore1:52:20

       Yeah, yeah. I tell you, I'm not really very influenced by technical. I'm not very interested in the technical a lot of the time, like how something is done. I find it interesting, but it doesn't really motivate me. But there are artists, and it doesn't really matter how they do their work, that have absolutely inspired me. Salvador Dali was one of those ones. I love realistic-looking stuff or quasi-realistic-looking stuff, and then someone who twisted reality in such a way, it was just, like, mesmerizing. But I've actually got a book here of the artist that really blew my mind as a teenager. I grew up reading 2000 AD, Judge Dredd, British series of comics.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:52:53

       Oh, fantastic. Unreal.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore1:52:55

       The best, right?

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:52:56

       Oh, yeah. Might've been how I was introduced to Simon Bisley for the first time. Slaying the Horned God.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore1:53:02

       Right?

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:53:03

       Oh my God, look at that.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore1:53:05

        This is the book.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:53:06

        Right there.

    12. GBGreg Broadmore1:53:07

        I was 15 and reading 2000 AD, and I was getting better at drawing. I wanted to be a comic artist. I really wanted to work for 2000 AD. And so I started to get to a level where I'm thinking, "I think I'm okay. I think I could send in a folio. I think I could do this," right? Then this came out.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:53:23

        Oh, man.

    14. GBGreg Broadmore1:53:24

        Actually, the book before this came out was ABC Warriors, which he did in black and white. It's all penmanship. But that work, his work, just freaking blew the lid off my mind.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:53:33

        Oh my God, it's so nuts.

    16. GBGreg Broadmore1:53:36

        It's still unparalleled. It's Frank Frazetta and Corben and all of that dialed to a totally unique level, and I don't know how he does it. I know he's just a magician. He's on another planet. He summoned true magic here. I'm interested in how he done it, but I, but I don't know.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:53:52

        Can I just have a super nerd fest with you for a second?

    18. GBGreg Broadmore1:53:55

        Yeah.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:53:56

        So for people who don't have any idea what the hell we're talking about, you can look him up, but...

    20. GBGreg Broadmore1:54:02

        Oh, yeah, yeah. I have that book.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:54:04

        This is Simon Bisley, yeah, The Art of Simon Bisley. Heavy Metal, man, what a great magazine that was too.

    22. GBGreg Broadmore1:54:10

        Yeah. I think they've just re-released it, by the way, the French version, Metal Hurlant or however you say that.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:54:15

        Oh, amazing. I can't remember exactly how I chanced upon it, but I remember picking up Slaying the Horned God-

    24. GBGreg Broadmore1:54:21

        Mm-hmm

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:54:21

        ... and just thinking to myself, "What in the fuck is this?"

    26. GBGreg Broadmore1:54:27

        Yeah. How is it even possible?

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:54:29

        How is it even possible?

    28. GBGreg Broadmore1:54:30

        Yeah.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:54:31

        And then his work on Lobo, I remember that very distinctly as well.

    30. GBGreg Broadmore1:54:34

        Mm-hmm.
34. 2:00:28 – 2:03:07

    What’s Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) up to these days?

    1. GBGreg Broadmore2:00:28

       that mesmerizing.

    2. TFTim Ferriss2:00:28

       Yeah.

    3. GBGreg Broadmore2:00:29

       I'll tell you something. I just wanna throw another name out there. Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes.

    4. TFTim Ferriss2:00:33

       Oh, 100%.

    5. GBGreg Broadmore2:00:35

       When you say Rockwell, my mind jumps to Bill Watterson, like absolutely mind-boggling illustrations. I know they're comic books, right? Little cartoons-

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:00:45

       Mm-hmm

    7. GBGreg Broadmore2:00:45

       ... in a newspaper. But every now and then he got to play with his illustration and take it to another level.

    8. TFTim Ferriss2:00:50

       Yeah.

    9. GBGreg Broadmore2:00:51

       And you would really see that he was a true master, right?

    10. TFTim Ferriss2:00:54

        Yeah.

    11. GBGreg Broadmore2:00:54

        Unbelievable.

    12. TFTim Ferriss2:00:55

        I still remember to this day, I own just about every companion of Calvin and Hobbes, but for whatever reason sticks in my mind are his color paintings of Calvin and Hobbes outside during the fall-

    13. GBGreg Broadmore2:01:11

        Yeah

    14. TFTim Ferriss2:01:11

        ... with the leaves changing color-

    15. GBGreg Broadmore2:01:13

        Yeah

    16. TFTim Ferriss2:01:14

        ... with the birch or aspens, probably birch, and other trees, and just the kaleidoscopic autumnal colors.

    17. GBGreg Broadmore2:01:24

        Yeah.

    18. TFTim Ferriss2:01:24

        That foliage is partially what I remember. And also, as a side note, now this could be apocryphal, I don't know if it's a true story, but I like the story, which is Bill Watterson, to my knowledge, kind of like you with One Path, was quite a purist-

    19. GBGreg Broadmore2:01:40

        Yeah

    20. TFTim Ferriss2:01:40

        ... with his characters and with Calvin and Hobbes. And [laughs] I recall at one point, I think it was one of his partners or maybe it was a, a pitch for licensing to create a Hobbes plush toy that was really large, and so the story goes, I believe he took a pair of scissors and just attacked it and ripped it to shreds. [laughs]

    21. GBGreg Broadmore2:02:03

        Really? [laughs]

    22. TFTim Ferriss2:02:04

        As his way of saying, "Fuck no. Over my dead body."

    23. GBGreg Broadmore2:02:07

        Never.

    24. TFTim Ferriss2:02:07

        "I'm not gonna do it."

    25. GBGreg Broadmore2:02:08

        No. [laughs]

    26. TFTim Ferriss2:02:09

        Which I found so endearing. I mean, I, I like to believe it's true. Yeah. [laughs]

    27. GBGreg Broadmore2:02:13

        Is he still going, do you know?

    28. TFTim Ferriss2:02:15

        I don't know what he's up to. He's very, as I understand it, you know, very reclusive-

    29. GBGreg Broadmore2:02:20

        Yeah

    30. TFTim Ferriss2:02:20

        ... for years. Since I started the podcast, he's been on kind of my top 10 list.
35. 2:03:07 – 2:04:26

    What is art really about for Greg?

    1. GBGreg Broadmore2:03:07

       you doing it?

    2. TFTim Ferriss2:03:07

       Yeah.

    3. GBGreg Broadmore2:03:08

       What is art about? It is more than just drawing pictures and making stories.

    4. TFTim Ferriss2:03:12

       Mm.

    5. GBGreg Broadmore2:03:13

       It is finding truth. Maybe he found some real profound truth, and he found that he's expressed it, and that anything else was actually a watering down of that truth, perhaps. I'm just guessing.

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:03:21

       Mm-hmm.

    7. GBGreg Broadmore2:03:22

       'Cause I feel that art and the act of creativity broadly and generally... Well, 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 d- very different at all. I just think that, like the way I was describing with the way I create, your imagination is throwing up explanations, ideas, theories, possibilities, and then you are the instrumentation.

    8. TFTim Ferriss2:03:54

       Mm.

    9. GBGreg Broadmore2:03:54

       If it's a scientific analogy, you are the instrument. Your emotions are the instrument.

    10. TFTim Ferriss2:03:59

        Mm.

    11. GBGreg Broadmore2:03:59

        Some part of you throws up conjecture, and then your, your body tells you, "That feels right."

    12. TFTim Ferriss2:04:05

        Mm-hmm.

    13. GBGreg Broadmore2:04:05

        Right? And that's the scientific instrument confirming or giving you the measurement, [laughs] right?

    14. TFTim Ferriss2:04:10

        Yeah.

    15. GBGreg Broadmore2:04:10

        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, there's something in that, and that, to me, man, it's one of the most liberating

36. 2:04:26 – 2:07:26

    How Aaron Stupple changed Greg’s life.

    1. GBGreg Broadmore2:04:26

       ways of creating.

    2. TFTim Ferriss2:04:27

       Can you think of a project that fundamentally, maybe that's too big a word, but changed you in some way, right? So you before the project and you after the project are different. That could be a skill set. It could be a set of beliefs, could be anything. But do any projects come to mind where you before and you after are quite different in some respect?

    3. GBGreg Broadmore2:04:56

       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 having a child, I was talking about Aaron Stupple before, but it's having a child. I was not prepared, not that a child is a project, right? I guess in a way.

    4. TFTim Ferriss2:05:10

       [laughs]

    5. GBGreg Broadmore2:05:13

       Having a child, when my boy came out, it is like instant. Whoa, I just snapped and you, you moved your head at the same point.

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:05:21

       [laughs]

    7. GBGreg Broadmore2:05:22

       That was cool. It's like I'm in control.

    8. TFTim Ferriss2:05:24

       I've been brainwashed. [laughs] I'm like The Manchurian Candidate. All your work bearing fruit. Yeah.

    9. GBGreg Broadmore2:05:30

       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, maybe it takes you a few minutes, maybe it takes you a week, maybe it takes you a month, maybe it takes you your rest of your life. But you internalize it, and then you figure out a new thing from it. But weirdly enough, having a child was instantaneous. I felt like I was a different person. I had a different realization. All my priorities just got reshuffled in a split second. I felt like a profound connection to that person, and I realized all these things like, "Holy hell, he's gonna discover that there are elephants." You know? Like, what? You know? It's like-

    10. TFTim Ferriss2:06:07

        [laughs]

    11. GBGreg Broadmore2:06:08

        ... there's this whole world of possibility for him. And then also you start thinking, this is maybe one of the profound things that I think most parents get, is you instead of thinking of your own life, you start thinking beyond your life. You start thinking multi-generationally.

    12. TFTim Ferriss2:06:20

        Mm-hmm.

    13. GBGreg Broadmore2:06:20

        Without even wanting to. You just can't help it. You start thinking that way, 'cause you start thinking, "Oh my God, I've gotta make sure things are good for them in the future. I've gotta give them the best possible chance."

    14. TFTim Ferriss2:06:28

        Mm-hmm.

    15. GBGreg Broadmore2:06:28

        So you start thinking your horizon goes way out into the distance, which is a beautiful thing. And then there is the mirror of a child-

    16. TFTim Ferriss2:06:37

        Mm-hmm

    17. GBGreg Broadmore2:06:37

        ... in that everything you do is gonna be reflected back at you, so you can see the good and the bad, right?

    18. TFTim Ferriss2:06:45

        [laughs]

    19. GBGreg Broadmore2:06:46

        And selfishly, it's a chance to learn because 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..." Right? You can immediately know. You feel it, and it's like, oh boy, you know? You want self-help? [laughs] Be a parent. [laughs]

    20. TFTim Ferriss2:07:03

        [laughs]

    21. GBGreg Broadmore2:07:03

        It will teach you what you're doing wrong very quickly. I'm not saying you have the solutions, right? But you know when you're getting it wrong, so it gives you this opportunity to improve 'cause you, you see where you've done something that didn't quite work. You see it really clearly.

    22. TFTim Ferriss2:07:15

        Well, that's hopefully my next big adventure. I gotta work on some prereqs, but that's definitely the, the orientation at this point. So-

    23. GBGreg Broadmore2:07:22

        Do it, man. Do it. You won't regret it.

    24. TFTim Ferriss2:07:24

        I'm excited about it. Really excited

37. 2:07:26 – 2:09:54

    Bestiaries, folios, and fondly remembered library books.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:07:26

       about it. And Greg, we've covered a lot of ground here. You know what work of yours has stuck in my mind selfishly because at some point I'd still like to do a collaboration of some type?

    2. GBGreg Broadmore2:07:36

       Oh, I'd love that.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:07:37

       It's the bestiary that you created with the scaling for human size. Do you know what I'm talking about?

    4. GBGreg Broadmore2:07:44

       Oh, yeah. [laughs] Yeah, for the Dr. Grordbort's world.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:07:47

       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-

    6. GBGreg Broadmore2:07:57

       Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:07:57

       ... and these various hardcover books from Dungeons & Dragons.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore2:08:00

       Mm-hmm.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:08:00

       But what they did not have, which you put in, were the sizing for the human figures.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore2:08:06

        Yeah.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:08:06

        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.

    12. GBGreg Broadmore2:08:14

        I love, like, National Geographic and creatures in general, a- animals and so on. Rendering the body of something like that is just really, really fun and mesmerizing. You kinda lose yourself in it. But I had this book as a kid. Yes, Dungeons & Dragons and the Fiend Folio, those kind of things, I loved all of that with all the stats, and if you read the Grordbort books, I'm kind of riffing on that and making fun of that. It's kind of like someone who's-

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:08:36

        Sure

    14. GBGreg Broadmore2:08:36

        ... clearly not a scientist writing this information. Maybe they've heard it thirdhand, and they really don't know what they're talking about. [laughs] It's kind of taking the piss out of itself. The other thing was a book, forgotten the name of it now, but it was a, a book from the... It would've been the late '60s, early '70s, and I found it in the public library as a kid On alien worlds. Man, I'm forgetting the name. Yeah, I'll end that story because I don't remember the name, and it's terrible not to remember the name. Maybe you can flash it up. But there was this 1970s book, I wanna say MacDougal or Dougal or something like that was the artist.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:09:06

        Mm-hmm.

    16. GBGreg Broadmore2:09:06

        He had invented an entire alien world, much like Wayne Barlowe has done before, invented an-

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:09:13

        Mm

    18. GBGreg Broadmore2:09:13

        ... entire alien world and drawn every creature in it and written about everything as if they were real. And I saw that book at probably seven or eight years old, and something about that, creating something out of your imagination, but utterly being convinced that it is real and pretending that it's real [laughs] to the point, right, that you summarize all of it. I love that. I don't know why I love that so much, but it's super fun. [laughs]

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:09:35

        Grandpop's ray gun. Take it out of the case-

    20. GBGreg Broadmore2:09:37

        Yeah, yeah

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:09:37

        ... dust it off.

    22. GBGreg Broadmore2:09:39

        Yeah, exactly.

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:09:39

        [laughs] Clean off the moths.

    24. GBGreg Broadmore2:09:40

        Maybe they'll need them for when we land on Mars. Gotta take some ray guns with us.

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:09:43

        We may need them. We may need them, yeah. I mean, I'm sure we'll need something like that, so. [laughs] Greg, let's land the plane. We've been going for two and a half hours here.

    26. GBGreg Broadmore2:09:52

        Oh, great. Yeah.

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:09:53

        And

38. 2:09:54 – 2:11:21

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:09:54

       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?

    2. GBGreg Broadmore2:10:03

       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. If you like blood and gore, there's also a lot of that. It is a graphic novel. And yeah, I hope you really dig it. Come and check it out.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:10:19

       Would the best place to look be your website, or would it be somewhere else?

    4. GBGreg Broadmore2:10:24

       I think so. Probably come to gregbroadmore.com, and you can be directed from there.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:10:27

       All right. Perfect. Well, we will drive people there. Greg, so nice to see you, man.

    6. GBGreg Broadmore2:10:32

       Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:10:32

       We'll need to share a drink and scheme up some wild ideas in person, hopefully, in the not too distant future.

    8. GBGreg Broadmore2:10:39

       I would love that.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:10:40

       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.

    10. GBGreg Broadmore2:10:49

        [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:10:50

        Uh, but [laughs] for people listening, gonna include everything we mentioned in the show notes, as per usual. Tim.blog/podcast is where you'll be able to find that. Just search Greg's name or Richard's name, or I guess Wētā 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.

Episode duration: 2:11:32