Good Life Project - David Yarrow | One of the World’s Best-Selling Fine Art Photographers

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

David Yarrow is one of the world’s best-selling fine art photographers. He has spent the past decade documenting the natural world from new perspectives, and his distinctive, evocative and immersive photography of life on earth has earned him an ever-growing following amongst art collectors as a relevant artist of his generation. His limited edition works regularly fetch record bids of over $100,000 at auction houses such as Sotheby’s. He is also a passionate philanthropist and conservationist, and holds multiple ambassadorships including those for WildArk, Nikon, Land Rover and UBS and has donated millions to wildlife and sustainability causes. But, here’s the thing, this almost never happened. David’s career had a bit of a false start when, on break from university, he talked his way into a world cup soccer match and captures a legendary image of iconic soccer star, Maradonna. But, instead of embracing a career in photojournalism, he went into finance where he was building a big reputation. For decades. Until a series of experiences led him to walk away from it all and step back into the world of photography but in a very different way.You can find David at:Website : https://davidyarrow.photography/In Focus Podcast : https://www.davidyarrowpodcast.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/davidyarrow/If you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Mark Mann: https://tinyurl.com/GLPmannYou’ll also love the conversations we had with the artist, Peter Tunney: https://tinyurl.com/GLPtunney-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, so my guest today, David Yarrow, is one of the world's best-selling fine art photographers. He spent the last decade documenting the natural world from really different perspectives, and his distinctive, evocative, and absolutely immersive photography of life on earth, it's earned him a massive following amongst art collectors as a relevant artist of his generation. His limited edition works regularly fetch record bids at auction houses like Sotheby's. He's also a passionate philanthropist and conservationist, holds multiple ambassadorships, including those for Wild Ark, Nikon, Land Rover, and UBS, and has donated millions to wildlife and sustainability causes. But here's the thing. This almost never happened. None of it. David's career

had a bit of a false start when on a break from university at a pretty young age, he talked his way into a World Cup soccer match and captured this now legendary image of the iconic soccer star Maradona. That could have launched a tremendous career, but instead of embracing a career in photojournalism, he went back into finance, where he ended up spending decades building a big business, a big career, a big reputation, until a series of experiences led him to just shut it all down and walk away from it all and step back into this love of photography and image making and storytelling that just never left him, but doing it in a profoundly different way than he had ever thought about doing it earlier in his life.

So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be funny. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So I'm excited to dive in with you. I want to take a little bit of a step back in time because you had this fascinating history sort of moving between photography from the earliest days and finance back to photography. And I kind of want to close the loop later in our conversation because there's some really fascinating intersections between those two worlds happening right now. But back in the day, coming up in Glasgow, dad, I guess the whole dad's whole side of the family, industrial shipbuilding. And I was actually curious because, you know, it's the type of thing where very often the assumption is the kids are going into the family business.

But looking at your family business, it also seems like the company was nationalized when you were 10, 11, 12 years old, effectively taking it out of the family's ownership. And I'm curious, was there an expectation when you were younger that this would be your future? And did that shift around that time? I think nepotism is dangerous. I think you have to be doubly good to succeed or go into a family business because it begs so many questions from other people that don't have a blood link. I think that possibility was really removed because shipbuilding was dying.

Shipbuilding in the Clyde, there used to be the shipbuilding center of the world. But because of Far Eastern competition in particular, it was South Korea, and to an extent, better union practices in places like Bremen in Germany, that the Clyde, which once had 65 shipyards, around the time of the, probably just after the Second World War, merchant shipbuilding was declining very quickly because they just couldn't compete from a labor cost side with South Korea. The Yarrow business was all about building military ships so working with the royal navy and that and i guess because it was a military yard there was a degree of intellectual property that allowed it to transcend merchant shipbuilding you weren't going to get the british navy

having their ships built in in west germany or south kore Korea. So the relationship with the Admiralty always fostered some longevity. But notwithstanding that, the government, the British government, nationalized all shipyards in 1977 and didn't differentiate between profitable naval yards and unprofitable merchant yards. It was during the days of what was called the Red Clyde, i.e. quite a socialist Clyde. And it was done primarily to protect the workforce. And they always used to say in Glasgow that for one person employed on the river,

there were three people employed servicing the river. So 100,000 people working on the river rapidly became total employment of 400,000. So I look back now, with my children being 18 and 20. And I don't think when I was 10 to 15, you're not your emotional intelligence is not strong enough to say, dad, your job must be shit. But I think his job was shit because you had a very aggressive trade unions. And in Glasgow also, Glasgow is a city a bit like Belfast and Liverpool, where it's 50% Protestant, 50% Catholic. And the unions prevented any Catholics from working in the yard

in the very same way that the unions in the mines prevented any Protestants working in the mines. It sounds so anachronistic now, but that's the way that Glasgow was and still is. It is a very sectarian place. So you had another layer of issues over and above lack of orders, rising wage costs, militant trade unions. But the Yarra's yard still survives. And it's one of, I think, two shipyards left on the Clyde. So it's something I'm very proud of.

But the family connection is long since gone. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of interesting to have the lens from both the inside out and the outside in, in the context of history, sort of looking at all of that. Photography touches down in your life fairly early. It sounds like you end up in Burgu. And I guess it was while you were still in university in 86, where, you know, there's this sort of a moment where you touch down in Mexico and take this shot, which becomes an iconic shot of Maradona. When you were doing that, do I have the timing right that you were actually still in school when that was happening? Yeah, still at university. Our exams finished early. And the day that my I did my final business studies exam I I flew to to Mexico City that that evening and uh most of my friends were getting drunk and doing things

that you do when your university or college finals finish and the next day I was in Mexico. I didn't have a clue. And my accreditation was from a magazine that was so marginal. But it allowed me the chance of a meeting with FIFA in Mexico City to see if I could get accreditation. I could never have done that now. But in 1986, you could get, you could win it. And I just couldn't believe that they were accrediting me, which meant that I could get any camera I wanted from Nikon or Canon, who were sponsoring the World Cup, and also sit on the touchline of any game I wanted to go to. I was a student though, so I was staying in

a hotel that cost about $5 a night and traveling to these games on buses with, you know, that probably cost a dollar with live chicken in the back of the bus. And I'm not being self-deprecating and I've said it before that I really struggled in the games. I struggled because I wasn't experienced enough, maybe a bit overawed. It was in the days before cameras allowed you to do autofocus. So if you had a player, an athlete running towards you, you had to move the focusing on the camera, a thing called follow focus,

to try and keep the player in focus. Not easy and it's something that I wasn't very good at. Also, because a lot of the games were shot for European TV, it meant that the games were shot during the middle of the day. And if you've got a high sun, it's not easy to photograph, particularly if you're photographing an African team or a South American team, to get the detail in the faces. And I got one or two decent shots. And the other thing was when I was watching Scotland, I was really just a fan with

a camera. I was sort of cheering on every moment rather than taking pictures, but Scotland are crap. So we got sent home fairly early. And there was my stroke of luck because if you were working for a Scottish newspaper, you went home with the team. There was no way the Scottish photographers on a salary and expenses were going to be able to be kept on. The Scottish newspapers would just get their photographs from syndicated photographs and fifa had this rule that if you had an affiliation from one of the countries that had qualified for the tournament you were allowed one of those were allowed on the pitch at the final and i was the only scott left so i i couldn't quite believe it when i was given a pitch a pitch pass for the world cup final and And I remember turning up at the Aztec at six in the morning because I couldn't really sleep and the game was at 12 o'clock. And I bribed a Mexican

guard with some whiskey. And he allowed me to go from one end of the pitch to the other. You could hear a pin drop. It's a massive stadium, 120,000 people people and i can see my footprints in the dew and the grass behind me and i had i guess it was a an epiphany in a way that i thought this is going to be a big day in my life and um i got lucky i got lucky twice in the final um i think still then i was too young to recognize uh that i got a big picture um you know the lens the lens that i used for that picture was probably cost me about 50 dollars um there was a story it's a great story that in the quarterfinal that um uh it was the hand of god where Maradona punched the ball into the net. And the only person that got that moment where the ball was touching Maradona's hand was a Mexican photographer who had an even crappier camera than me. I think it was one of these ones where you clicked and you winded it on.

And an agency, I think the next day, negotiated terms that mexican photographer to buy that image off him i think the i think i believe the number was 30 or 40 thousand dollars which was for them in 86 especially it's a big ticket yeah um but yeah i live back at it now and uh when he died ironically i was in in mexico when he died and um my picture again came up everywhere and um yeah it's a special moment and you can look at it for a long time and i was lucky i just got i was more nimble than i am now and i managed to get very close to him and he got on the shoulder of a teammate and his eyes looked right at me. And the whole thing is, there's a sort of biblical symmetry to the whole thing. Yeah. I mean, it's incredibly powerful. You brought up two kind of fascinating notions though, when you were sharing the story, which is the,

the notion of focus, you know, because especially then, like you were saying, you're sitting there with a ring trying to dial in the focus the whole time when someone's moving. And so to capture that one shot, it's like you have one chance and we're talking film also. So you can't just hit a button and rattle off a whole bunch of digits into an SD card. You know, you've got a limited amount of capacity in this thing you're holding in your hand so it's just an entirely different constraint you know creatively oh i think working with changing films because even then the motor drives were were able to do i think five or six frames a second so that meant that if you had your finger down you would have to change your film you conceivably have to stick seconds um which you can't do in the in the melee of you know one

of the great moments in sport you have to because if you have to change your film in that sort of chaotic situation you're done so there were tricks of the trade now that, sorry, then, that people that are now in the younger ages of their photographic career, they have it much, much easier. We had to, it was a tactical game in terms of knowing if you have 36 images, you better use them. Yeah, I mean, I wonder what the effect is, even if it's subconscious, on the way that you train your eye and the way that you choose, you know, on how intentional you are when you actually put your finger on the trigger.

I think whether it be subconsciously or not, I take far less pictures than other people when I'm in the field. And sometimes I don't really do wildlife photography so much these days, but you would sometimes go to the migration of crossing a river in Kenya or Tanzania, and you'd hear these guys with their finger on the motor drive, and they're probably taking 1,000 pictures. And I, I've never done that. And I'm not, I'm not suggesting it's the wrong thing to do, but in the same way that brevity is the soul of wit in writing,

I think in photography, choose your moment to press the trigger. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, right? Because if you can hold your finger down and grab a thousand images in a remarkably short amount of time, and then pick the one or two that look really stunning, is that, how do you define that in terms of craft, in terms of art versus

more the way you do it or more the way that, you know, it was done more often with film? Like, is it, it's simply about like, what does that final one or two image look like? And do you judge everything based on that? Or is it more about the craft and the process? I think it's important for me never to be dictatorial as to what the right thing to do is for other people, because that is presumptuous. It is what suits that individual. What suits me is that less is more. And remember that a camera is just a conduit. It's a piece of metal between your eye and what's in front of your eye. And if you have the shutter down for one minute, that relationship is lost almost by definition.

I remember going to Africa not too long ago on a trip, and I came back and I'd taken 15 photographs the whole time because there wasn't anything to photograph. And there's a well-known american photographer i think you work for nat geo called jim richardson and he said if you want to be a better photographer put more interesting stuff in front of the camera and it's such a kind of platitude but it's so on the money and right and it is important not to feel the need to photograph if you go to a restaurant and the restaurant is an expensive restaurant and they give you as they tend to in america give you an enormous bowl

of pasta for your main course and they're going to charge you 39.99 you shouldn't feel the need to finish it you can you could have as much of that pasta as you want but don't finish it if you don't if you're not hungry in the same way i only tend to press the trigger when there's a reason to do it because sometimes if you're if your default position is just to go on and on you're going to miss the one moment. And I've got a few examples of that over my time, where sometimes it's just a question of waiting and looking, removing the camera from your eye and just watching. And I guess part of that might well be from the days of film where you had to be economic and selective. Yeah. I mean, I wonder if sometimes we have those imprints and they just kind of stay with us,

even though the actual physical constraint is no longer there. You know, it's like the age old story of, you know, the person who puts the roast in the oven and always cuts the two ends off before they put it in. And finally, like the kid asked him, why do you do that? It's because, you know, like that person's mother, you know, like back in the day, couldn't afford a large enough oven. So they'd have to cut the two ends off to fit it in. And yet that just becomes the tradition that carries on. Um, you know, and it's never really questioned. The Apple watch series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the

thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

You've an interesting moment because, you know, you're down in Mexico. You catch this early image. You clearly have the bug. You come back. And then when you decide, I'm going to step out into the world, you know, and figure out how to make my bones, you have a choice to make, you know, the choice is effectively between the world of finance, um, which, you know, becomes one opportunity for you and the world of image making and you choose finance, but it doesn't seem like it was a clean choice. No, it wasn't. Uh, I think you have to go back to 1988 when I made that decision. I'd done the Olympics.

I'd covered the Olympics, the Winter Olympics in Calgary. And I did that for what is now called Getty Images. And I was so excited to be there. But there were a lot of photographers there. And the Blue Ribbon event was the men's downhill course and i wasn't strong enough to be given the pitch on the course i was down where the skiers came in they they spun around and they looked at their time and the big skiers in those days were all swiss there was a guy called perman su Zubringan and Peter Muller. They were the big stars of the men's downhill.

And I had a fantastic time. But I was looking around for happy people in the press corps with the cameras. People that could be role models for me, maybe, and who, 20 years older than me, seemed to have got a life that I aspired to have. And I met some very nice people, some of whom are great friends now. But I didn't necessarily aspire to want to have the life that they were having. And it struck me that their jobs were very much Fleet Street, being at the right place at the right time recording the moment

and their ability to get work that other people hadn't got even then the cameras have improved an awful lot was was marginal so I was slightly disillusioned with that um that I didn't see they were all much better than me but I didn't see anyone that I said, I think it's good to have heroes. I didn't see many people that said, you're 45, you Oliver Stone's film Wall Street, where it seemed to me that Bud Fox, Gordon Gekko were making a lot of money. And that was the era where everyone wanted to be Michael Lewis and play Lars poker on the floor of Salomon Brothers or whatever. And because I got an economics degree and working with people at Edinburgh that were also doing that, everyone was joining Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Salomon Brothers. So it seemed a bit of an outlaw for me to go and do something that was so left field.

There was a bit of parental pressure as well, I guess. But I think that's unfair on maybe on my dad, who's passed. It was largely my decision, because all my friends were doing it. And it seemed like this sort of preordained path. And I don't regret it. I don't regret that decision at all. I met some extraordinary people. And I remember going into a dealing room with 500 people in London. And you go to ground zero very quickly. You're taught humility. You work hard. You learn from the ground up. And you surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. I didn't put my cameras away. And of course, I had nothing to really talk about in investment banking because I didn't know what I was doing. So I'd continue to share everyone my picture of Maradona. But I did let the cameras gather dust because a bit like clearly the topic du jour in investment banking is this survey of first years at Goldman Sachs that are working 95 hours a week. I wasn't quite working 95 hours a week, but I was working hard enough that you're really any hobbies are thrown out the door fairly early on.

So you then get on the hamster wheel. And once you're on that hamster wheel, it's very difficult to get off it. So I would go to sport events as a spectator and I'd wave at my old mates on the pitch that were photographing it. And they'd laugh at me. There was the expression in the UK in the 80s,

the acronym Yuppie, which meant, you know, you're a city banker and they'd go, there's that effing Yuppie up in the, up in the stand. So, um, yeah, I went from being on the pitch to watching from the stands. Yeah. I mean, that story actually, I think resonates strongly with me. I was the artist as a kid and then entrepreneur as an artist, and I ended up in law school. And then I ended up at the SEC. And then I ended up in one of the giant firms in New York in securities law. And it gets really sexy really quickly, the money that's being thrown at you and the sense of power and prestige and status, and everyone else around you is doing it, it's very hard to say no to that. And then finally extract yourself is a whole different proposition.

Yeah, well, you're even worse than me then. You went from an artist to be a whistleblower. I went from being an artist to a trader and a thief. You went to be a whistleblower. But then I flipped sides and I was representing the people doing the deal. So I had a full spectrum experience. You know, you end up staying in the game for a pretty decent amount of time.

I think you're at NatWest for eight years, 95-ish. You launch your own fund. You know, what's happening in the background. You're building a life and you're building a family around the assumption that this is going to be, you know, like what things look like. 9-11 happens and you are observant, maybe prescient in a way that so many others weren't, maybe just at a particular spot at a particular moment in time. And you make a call that changes a lot of things for you. Yeah, I mean, I look back on it. And I think I was lucky because I focused on European equities and UK equities. And the time the first plane went in, of course, the American market hadn't opened. But it was lunchtime in London.

I was in America. And the markets were weekend away because the autumn's never a good time for stock markets. Never was in those days. And so I was always, I lived under the dictum, if you're going to panic, panic early. I think that was a Warren Buffett saying. And when the first plane went in, I was watching CNBC. Like, of course, so many people, Mark Holmes was the anchorman.

And I remember when you saw the hole, when they first got the chance to look at the hole. And I've looked back when Mark Holmes, when he passed, they played his commentary, which was very good in those 20 minutes. And I just decided that from a risk perspective, let's just sell everything. And I made that decision. It wasn't like it was a big committee thing to do. I had one other partner. And I forget what the trading firm was, whether it be Morgan Stanley or UBS. But we were able to exit. I'd like to make it very clear that we didn't profiteer from it. We just removed the possibility of our clients

losing money from it. And so when the second plane went in, of course, we all knew what was going on. And then the world markets fell, what, 25%. And during that time, we had no exposure. And then I think it was the following Friday, so 10 days afterwards, we thought we'd just gently nibble back in. And yeah, I'd be the first to say. I think I'd give myself a 6.5, 7 out of 10 as a hedge fund manager. It wouldn't be any harder than that. I think I was conservative. I was steady.

I was ethical. I worked hard. I cared for the investors. And I always worried about not making sure we didn't lose the money. So we ended up making 6% in that month. And then, of course, the whole TMT bubble unwound fairly aggressively. And we were the right side of that. I knew my accounting and I didn't like some of the fairly aggressive accounting that was going on. So we went from being a small firm to not quite such a small firm and employing an awful lot of people. And it took its toll. It was not

something that I ever thought would happen, that we would be running, going from running money for your friends and family to the government of Singapore and teachers in Ontario and farming in Montreal and these massive funds around the world. I was too young. I wasn't really well equipped for it. And people looked to me and thought, well, David's having a good time. I wasn't. I was, it was incredibly stressful. And I was also aware of the fact that you really are only as good as your last month's trading and you can go from being a hero to zero very quickly. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a bit of a brutal business from the outside looking in. I think a lot of folks say, well, that is, he hit it. You know, it's the ultimate aspiration.

You know, like everyone wants to build this giant business with a ton of money under management. And yet the stress, and I think some people are wired in a way where somehow they can kind of wake up in the morning and be okay with that and roll with it. But a lot of people are not. And I think if you're the type of person also who genuinely feels beholden to doing right to others, and you kind of start to get the sense that you're way less in control than you think you are, even if you're doing all the right things, it can be a brutal, just psychological burden to sort of be holding on a daily basis.

Yeah, I think that's right. And those were the days where what was my skill set? If I had a skill set, it was that there were still the opportunities to arbitrage information. So you could leverage the gap between perception and reality if you knew your companies well. Those days have gone. What effectively I was doing is now illegal because I would, and that's the whole irony of the premise of being a stockbroker or a fund manager now in equities, is people say, what is your unique selling point? But if they reply information, they go, well, go straight to prison. If that is your unique selling point is information, that's the wrong answer.

Whereas in 1998, it was the right answer. It just shows how much has changed in 25 years. My strength was I'd get to know company management very well, take them out for dinner, find out how business was, give them a bottle of wine, um hopefully charm them into at the margin even if it was just body language having a better feel of how their year was progressing versus the market whether that be good or bad you can't do that now that's illegal yeah i mean it's as you're building all of this in the background um and the world is changing, the market is changing. And as you said, you were really struggling. This was something where it was taking a toll on you, on your life, on your relationships, on your well-being. Then I guess it was 2008 where I think Madoff happens. Yeah, yeah. where I think Madoff happens. It's interesting, right? Because you weren't him. And a lot of

people in the markets know this, that the same core group of investors tend to spread money across a whole bunch of different people they perceive at sort of like a similar level, a similar way. So when that happens, it sounds like so many people became skittish about where they had money that they just started redeeming. And it sounds like in the blink of an eye, you went from managing a very large amount of money to a fraction of that because everyone was just like, can I have my money back, please? Yeah, I was the proverbial ATM. Because when I set the fund up up there weren't many of these funds

knocking around so i wrote in the prospectus if you want your money back you can have it back in a week because the people that are giving me money were my mom people like that so um and i never changed it i was never one for changing the rules so i don't i't really, I knew who some of the feeder funds for Madoff were, like Fairfield Greenwich and stuff like that. But yeah, it's funny because when Lehman went down

on that Monday, I was very cautious on the Scottish banks that had somehow or other 300 years of a culture of prudence had regressed into a culture of sales almost in a year or two. And their balance sheets were way overextended. So we were short that whole area.

But coming into December, we'd only lost 3% or 4% of people's money. And by the way, I thought we could have done better than that, given how bearish we were on the banks. But the tail of our portfolio hurt us in the final two or three weeks of the year. And of course, if you get a wave of redemptions, you have to sell to pay for the waves of redemptions. And so it really kind of, whilst we recovered and managed to have some good years after that, it was the moment in time where I said to myself, you know, I was at that stage, I was 40, 41, 42 years old. And my life had blown up. My marriage had blown up.

My business had blown up. And I didn't think I'd done an awful lot wrong, really. But, and I don't want to play the victim at all, because I must have done some things wrong. But I felt that it was now time to try and take control of my life and try and do things where I'm not going to be so hostage to exogenous variables, don't be hostage to things beyond your control. Of course, saying that is so stupid in 2021 after a year of the pandemic where we've all been hostage to things beyond our control. But I think that's more of a complete one-off. Whereas what happened with the banking crisis and Lehman and subprime, not everyone was exposed to it. There were ways where you didn't necessarily need to be exposed

to it. So, I mean, you hit this moment where it's almost like everything, all the structures, all the pillars in your life kind of fall apart simultaneously. I'm curious, you know, so you reach this moment of reckoning where it's sort of like, okay, so what now? Where do I go from here? I'm a 40 something year old guy who has, you know, done a lot of really interesting, cool, good things, but also has like a little bit of a trail of ashes behind me right now. But I have a lot of years left ahead of me. How do you make the decision that says, okay, whatever song costs I have, whatever experience I have, whatever relationships I have from a couple of decades in this particular world now, I'm going to step back into that thing

that lit me up in my late teens and early twenties and see what happens there? Or was that even the thing? Or was that more of like a retreat and a coping mechanism during that particular window? After 2008, there was a lot of hate directed towards bankers, understandably. And when I left banking, and I look back now at some of my friends, a lot of friends within the industry, it is an industry, I think, that is peopled on the investment banking side by a collective that has a lot of common sense and plurality of skill sets, work ethic, manners in a lot of cases. But of course, as a collective, it's been vilified.

One of the central things about investment banking is that most people that have done well in it have done a lot of research. Most people start off as analysts researching an industry. In the same way that people are writing 500-page notes on cryptocurrency now, and that's an important job, I would be writing 200 page notes on some parts of the retail industry. So it wasn't such a big gap to bridge from looking at certain sectors in the market. I used to specialize a little bit in oil and gas services, to starting off with a blank sheet of paper and saying, I'm going to become a scholar on the history of photography, on the history of commercial photography. And that's effectively

what I did. I came home in the evenings fairly miserable because if your fund's not doing well, what are you going to do in the evening? Clients don't want to see you. Future clients certainly don't want to see you. You're going to look at your stocks that are not performing for you again. That's going to make you fairly miserable. So I started to work every night on where I thought there was a gap in the commercial photography market. And I wrote a paper, which didn't make me very popular in some parts of the photography industry. It was a bit like, you know, remember in Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise writes his piece about how sports management agents should look after, you know, less sports stars and give them more personal attention.

It was his think piece. And he put it, you remember, he put it in everyone's cubbyhole and then he got fired 48 hours later in the restaurant. I kind of did the same, except everyone read Tom Cruise's piece, whereas no one really read mine, other than a few people that wondered what I was up to.

And my conclusion to the piece was that the only way really to make money from photography on the longer term scale was if you could elevate your photography in the marketplace where your brand integrity was strong enough that it would be self-propagating and people would pay high prices for your art and i wrote that paper about i probably started off writing about 10, 11 years ago, the central premise of it. And I tweaked it and used a lot of examples. I became kind of encyclopedic on the last 30, 40 years of photography. And I worried because I've got a lot of mates who are sports photographers. And you look at, just look at Sports Illustrated now as a magazine and compare it to 25 years ago.

It's probably three times as thick 25 years ago. And the editorial staff was probably three times bigger then than it is now. And that's, of course, a combination of our proliferation of TV channels, streaming, our thirst for immediacy. Why would you want to buy a magazine four days after a big event? You can get everything you need the following morning. And I sympathized a lot with the extraordinary talented people within that industry and in Fleet Street. But I couldn't see it in an era where there was already too much content as to how that was going to change, how it was going to get better. And Getty Images, which is probably the biggest provider of stock photographs in the

world, it very nearly went bust, partly because it was saddled with too much private equity debt. But I think the family eventually had to take it over from Carlisle Partners, I think, in Philly. And it's not a criticism of them at all. It's an insight into the world where the price per contents fallen and fallen. But writing a paper about how to achieve this and doing it are two totally separate things. It wasn't a prescription for my career path. It was a suggestion as to how someone could do it. The notion that I could do it was always a far bigger challenge than writing the paper itself. I don't think the paper really said anything that was too contentious to me.

And it was whether I had the ability, which then I didn't, to be able to take that roadmap. And from 2012-13 to now, there's been some big blockades on the road and there will be many more I'm sure going forward but it's funny when I think I could tell you a story it's just quite a funny story a week ago I was she won't mind this I was up in a place called the Yellowstone Club where you get an awful lot of these multi-billionaires and I was having a conversation sitting at the table discussing with Paris Hilton how I was going to work with her in the following week and I'd never met her before she um she was very mannered charming charming, polite, wearing heavy glasses. Perhaps people couldn't recognize her.

And all around the table, there were her fiancé and then very famous people that would be in the Wall Street Journal on a regular basis. And of course, people out of manners were very reluctant to come up and say hello. And then someone about 20 minutes into our meeting came over to our table and i thought oh here we go and then looked at me and said you're david yarrow and i thought i can't believe that's happened you're like i didn't think i was going to be the one people that's funny but that's been a long road. And it's not, I've got a lot to do. I'm still, I think, early in the journey and my best pictures are ahead of me, but we've got to a position where it is self-propagating because rightly or wrongly, we have a distribution model with our galleries around the world or the galleries that represent us to be able to work with very strong people because we can raise a lot of money for charity with them or in collaboration with them. And so things come easier for us now than, of course, than they did in the beginning where it was very tough.

Yeah. display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to

previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. I mean, what's fascinating to me also is that when you write that paper and you finish it,

like you said, you'd become pretty encyclopedic on the history and also said, okay, this is my theory of how somebody would succeed in this world in a sustainable way. And as you shared, you also knew that you weren't that person at that moment in time. But clearly something inside of you said, but I think I might be able to be. You know, enough to effectively say, I'm going all in on this to see what I can make happen. There is no doubt in my mind that the most important factor in being able to have built the business is not my talent. That would be incredibly arrogant to say that. There are so many talented photographers around. I think I know what I'm doing and I've made enough mistakes that by learning how to fail, you learn how to get it right. The biggest factor, and this might surprise

you, is actually out of my pain of my marriage not working, I decided I wasn't going to get remarried. And I've got my kids, I'm full of admiration of people that can turn a complicated life into an even more complicated life by getting married again and having more children and different you know this modern family I wasn't strong enough emotionally to be able to do that and that with my kids away at school or university now allowed me not to necessarily be be selfish but single-minded because in 2019 I think I took 235 flights in 2019 if I was married she'd have gone there's no way anyone's going to put up with that and yes you do get husband and wife relationships where they go together as a team but I would imagine that tests even the best relationships so the fact that I was able to just say this is what I'm my road to redemption was one of being on the road a lot of people that I speak to a photography

should be very collegiate I talked to a lot of photographers and they they say David I don't compete against anyone you it's not about competition the first question I asked someone who wants to embark on what I've done is it's not about cameras I asked them tell me about home tell me about your home home life tell me about home. Tell me about your home, home life. Tell me about your family. Because if you're going to do this, you're going to be on the road. Yeah. I mean, it's part of the bargain, at least to shoot the way that you chose to shoot. And part of my curiosity is like, clearly you were running towards something. You saw this thing out there saying, this is what I'm working to try and make happen. Did you have any sense that you were simultaneously running from something? Just before I answer that, you're on the road for two reasons. You're on the road to capture new content. And then equally important, you're on the road to

sell that new content. I'm in Dallas right now, where in a normal year, we'd have 1000 people come to the opening, I have to be there, I have to go and work that market. So you put your cameras away. In a year, I will spend more time marketing than I will taking pictures. A bit more. uh was i was i on the road um i think i'm my own biggest critic i think that i got to a stage where i didn't like myself very much and if you're gonna go for it you've got to attack. I think you have to give it absolutely everything. An observation I'd make is that a lot of photographers have got a better balance in their life than I have. And I take my hat off to the fact that they've prioritized other things. I wish, perhaps, that I'd had a better balance in my life,

but I'm happy where I am now. And my kids are, love them to bits. And I've got a lovely partner in my life. And sometimes you've got to be a fatalist and it's just, it's just kind of the way things have worked out. Yeah. The, over that, this intervening time, this last decade or so, And it's just kind of the way things have worked out. Yeah. Over this intervening time, this last decade or so, like you said, you have built both the craft, you've put in the time and the work and built the scaffolding, the structure, the people, the systems to be able to actually create fantastic art and also a strong, sustainable living out of this. And not that it's set in, forget it.

Like you just said, you're in a hotel in Dallas right now because you have to be consistently out there, both shooting and simultaneously marketing and selling. And you have also in your work, extraordinary images that maybe you're not going to use this language, but that I would call iconic images, images like mankind, where you're in South Sudan in a dink of cattle camp, high on a ladder, taking a shot that you would then bring back and effectively really change not just the trajectory of your career, but that image is so extraordinary. You can look at that image and just stand in front of it, I feel, for an indefinite amount of time and keep seeing more and more and more. And there's something that it does to you. When you think of the lengths that you have gone to, that you do go to, and that you will go to, to capture images like that, what are the costs that you weigh when making those decisions to do that? And are you

always comfortable with those decisions and those costs? My hero is Steven Spielberg. And I've got a couple of them underneath him, but all my heroes are filmmakers, Scorsese and Ridley Scott. Spielberg, probably my, and clearly that's not a particularly contentious hero, it's a kind of mainstream hero to have. Spielberg was interviewed about a few years ago, and he said his biggest fear, and this is a man that came to our attention through Jaws, and then Close Encounters, and E.T., Indiana Jones, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Jurassic Park,

the world goes on and on and on. He said his biggest fear was boring people. I mean, if there's anyone that's earned the right not to have that fear is Steven Spielberg. I have that fear. My biggest fear is being mundane because we are the most content-spot generation ever to have lived. So it is very easy to take a lame photograph. So I spend an awful lot of time, we as a team spend a lot of time, analyzing two things. Number one, is it authentic? Is it creative? And I was with a good mentor the other day

who built up Victoria's Secret into, until obviously they struggled with the culture we have now. His saying was, it's not creative if it doesn't sell. And I think that's very true. Creativity has to be coupled with commerciality. So we have two filters. We have a filter of authenticity, creativity, and then we have a filter with commerciality. So we have two filters. We have a filter of authenticity, creativity, and then we have a filter of commerciality.

So if you throw 100 ideas into a pot, I think that the creativity side and the ability to be authentic is going to knock out 90% of those ideas. You then got 10 ideas left. I think the commerciality one will knock out a lot of those 10 remaining ideas. Let me give you an example. I could turn around and say, you know, I'm sure in the sewers of Dallas right now, there's some very big rats.

So I could go and photograph the rats in the sewers of Dallas. And people say, well, that's very plausible because no one's done that before, and it's going to be, from a technical perspective, it's going to be very challenging. But who wants to put a picture of a rat in a sewer on their wall? So what's the point? We have our database,

and I was showing this to someone the other day, and he was laughing. And he said, David, because I get stick. I know people, when they want to give me heat, there's a few bits and pieces. They say, well, you know, he's a businessman. He's not a photographer. He looks at the return on capital employed of his projects. You're dead right I do. You're dead right I'm going to look at the return on capital employed,

because in the very same way that Netflix do exactly the same thing. That doesn't not mean that they're very good producers of original content. But if we're going to spend a year to date, we spent a million dollars filming, a million dollars on, I think, 11 different projects. Every morning, I'll get a sheet in descending order of the return on capital employed so far of those projects to somewhere we've not made a penny so far, because obviously, people haven't seen the content. So I do look at it from a perspective of what does it cost both financially and emotionally tomorrow i start on my way going

up to the bering straits between russia and alaska i've got to fly on four planes and i end up in an island in the middle of nowhere with 100 people living in a cabin with um uh inuit community um miles from anywhere it'll take me about two days to get there and then i've got one guide and then we're out in minus 30 degrees would i rather spend two or three days on the beach in california maybe maybe but you know i've kind of i've my bed, so I've got to sleep on it. I wanted to dip into, as we start to come full circle in our conversation, what I see as sort of a convergence of the different domains you've played in over the last 30 years, finance, technology, and photography in the form of these things called NFTs. For those listening that are not deep into this, I'm sure you've seen it popping up all over the place, non-fungible tokens, which are effectively

really complicated things, but they're effectively ways for somebody to create, to give ownership to a digital piece of art and have it authenticated, but also for the original creator, in your case, a photographer to say, I am also going to keep a continuing interest. So if this thing gets sold today for X dollars, you know, and it gets sold a hundred times over the next 10 years, every time it's resold, if it appreciates in value, you know, I can get 10% of whatever that upside is. It's this rapidly emerging world. I think there's a lot of confusion around it. Some people are extraordinarily excited about it, especially on the creator side. And some people are mad haters. I'm curious, and this really, it ties together, you know, like your background in

finance and analyzing what's really happening here and your focus on the fact that this is both a craft and a business. What's your take? It's early days for me in terms of my place on the learning curve. I've got, it's funny, the reason I'm going to Los Angeles in a couple of hours time is all day tomorrow is to have meetings on it. And we've had over the last three weeks, we've had a lot of inquiries.

I don't think that there's any such thing as a sure thing. And that's my financial background telling me that. I was too much of a disciple of Warren Buffett to believe in the sure thing. The one-way bet. There's no downside. So what would be wrong with me doing five of these in conjunction with some very creative people,

potentially pocketing a couple of hundred thousand dollars? And that would be something you didn't expect a few days ago. The risk to me is that people that have invested in my art, and I don't like the expression invest, people that have collected my art, because I don't think art should be about investing. You should buy work that you like, not with a view to ringing up Sotheby's

in three or four years' time. Because auction houses, as you know, they're one of the biggest, highest margin game gigs in the world. And it might be fine if you've got a Banksy or a basket. But with my work, they're going to have to go up an awful lot for them to change your life after Sotheby's have taken their 31% from the bar and the seller. I just worry that, and I don't know the answer, but if this is a bubble and it bursts and someone's ended up losing 90% of their value in something that has my name attached to it, I can do without that because we haven't had that so far. So do I need to take that risk? The only thing I'd say against that

is that Bitcoin, I believe, has credibility. And as each week goes by, it has more credibility because of some of the parties that have afforded it credibility, whether that be Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs have been more responsible for the rise of Bitcoin than I think people recognize. And then you get very famous American investors, like really credible people that you would hang on their every word, like Paul Tudor Jones, advocating that people should have 5% of their net worth in cryptocurrency. I would never play poker against Paul Tudor Jones. I would never really play anything against him because he's far brighter than me by a long way. I might be marginally better with a camera. I don't know. But he's

far brighter than me. And those people that have supported Bitcoin and made a lot of money, factions of them will be supportive of this trend in the art world. And therefore, I don't think it's going to burst imminently. But that still doesn't mean that I necessarily want to get involved. What I'm fascinated by is the creative process. Some creative guys have taken some of my pictures and turned it into a multimedia digital product. And I'm blown away by their creativity.

So as a platform where people can show how talented they are, here's another platform. But I'm Scottish. There's a rumor that Scots people are tight. We're not. We're the most generous people in the world, provided we win at something. But I think we're prudent. And I'm not going to jump in there,

but I'm watching it like you are, and I'm fascinated. And the first thing you said is the idea that the artist can continue to benefit. That's an interesting proposition. I think we'll watch this space, but I'm not going to be doing anything tomorrow. Yeah. No, I think we probably have a similar take on it. And the most interesting part of this to me is the potential for artists to have a continuing upside in perpetuity in their work. I think there are a lot of fascinating conversations and opportunities that might grow out of that. But yeah, watch this space, I think is where a lot of us are right now. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well.

So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life follow your passion be kind try as much as possible to never be the smartest guy in the room always surround yourself with people that are smarter than you be interested rather than interesting i want to i'm really so bored of myself i really want to speak to people i i had the fortune of uh spending some time with the dallas cowboy quarterback the other night and uh i'm so much more interested in his life but boringly he wants to know a little bit about my life as well but i i love

meeting fascinating people and talented people and i'm a great believer that my heroes there's very few of them that don't work hard and every job your job my, has heavy lifting. There's no job that doesn't have some heavy lifting involved. Look at another quarterback, someone that I've worked with and collaborated with, Tom Brady. Look at what an extraordinary achievement in January this year. That didn't come without hard work. People can talk about his beautiful homes and his beautiful family. Well, he's still in the gym four hours a day. Thank you. Hey, I hope you enjoyed that.

So before you leave, if you loved this episode, safe bet you will also really love the conversations that we had with Mark Mann, who is this tremendous photographer who has captured so many icons of film, stage, business, performance, and life in these stunning, hyper close-up, hyper vivid images. And his backstory is really funny and really tremendous and similar to David Yarrow. They're also both from Glasgow. The other person I think you would really enjoy is a conversation that we

had with artist Peter Tunney, who actually started his career in the world of biotech and similar to Yarrow, ended up dropping into this world of art and then one day waking up and saying, I am an artist. And from that point forward, devoting himself wholeheartedly to it and building a stunning career in almost every form of media. His work kind of defies categorization. If you want to listen to either or both of those conversations, you can just click on the link in the show notes now and be sure to download those episodes so they're ready to click and play when you're on the go. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you never miss an episode.

And then share Good Life Project with friends. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the

thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.